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Robert
Lederman (2)
Freedom of
expression has little meaning if it is not fully exercised. Without
meaning, it is, well, meaningless.
Robert Lederman
has always made clear in words exactly why he has taken the positions
he has taken.
His essays
exemplify the exercise of free speech.
injusticebusters
salute him and ask those seeking redress for injustices to approach
their work with thought and intelligence.
As elected
officials have cut back resources for education in the liberal
arts and, indeed, in general, we have been living through an
anti-intellectual backlash.
The internet
provides those who were fortunate enough to be taught to read
an opportunity to read the work of thoughtful activist/advocates
for social change. Ther following essays by Lederman would be
as good a place as any to start. Lederman p. 1
Why
NYC Hates Street Artists by Robert Lederman
[A little background about MOMA, Rockefeller,
Mike Bloomberg, the First Precinct and street artists]
NYC officials always claim
the reason they have spent so much time, money and effort to
get rid of street artists has something to do with sidewalk congestion
and public safety. From the beginning of our struggle in 1993
the A.R.T.I.S.T. group's literature has depicted them as having
a completely different agenda.
We believe that the City's
effort is focused on eliminating street artists specifically
because we have full First Amendment freedom and are not subservient
to corporate interests or the so-called official art world, a
politically-compromised arts community whose survival is based
on government and corporate welfare.
Most street artists are preoccupied
with the immediate issue of their vending spot, sales and whether
the NYPD will harass them or not but there is a lot more to this
issue than those concerns. Once you understand that you are seen
as a huge threat by the people who actually run NYC: the BID's
(Business Improvement Districts), the Central Park Conservancy
and David Rockefeller, you will feel empowered to fight even
harder for your rights.
Those who think the official
art world supports street artists are unfamiliar with the real
history of this issue.
MOMA (The Museum of Modern
Art) is one of our biggest enemies. They fully supported City
Council Member Kathryn Freed and Mayor Giuliani efforts to get
us off the streets as letters from the museum director to Freed
and their petition to Giuliani's Street Vendor Review Panel prove.
Before SoHo became well-known, Fifty-Third Street was the Mecca
of NYC street art. MOMA's fake art gift shop on 53rd Street believes
they lose tens of millions in sales to street artists each year.
Before we filed our successful
appeal in 1995 in the first street artist case [Lederman et al
v City of NY/Bery et al v City of NY] I picketed MOMA for a week
straight and hand delivered a leaflet to every single employee
titled, "Why Doesn't MOMA Care about Street Artists Being
Arrested?" Glen Lowry, MOMA's director had refused to issue
a simple one sentence statement on our behalf and the NYPD routinely
told me MOMA was asking them to arrest artists. As a result of
the internal controversy the leaflet generated among the museum
staff, MOMA begrudgingly joined in filing an amicus brief on
our behalf.
The Whitney Museum also refused
to issue any statement on our behalf. I distributed a similar
leaflet at the 1995 Whitney Biennial after which the Whitney
also relented and joined in the amicus brief with MOMA.
The Guggenheim was also very
much against street artists and refused to join in the amicus
brief. The Metropolitan Museum of Art initially agreed to sign
the amicus brief then asked that their name be removed at the
last minute. Our second lawsuit, Lederman et al v Giuliani, focused
on the area in front of the Met. SoHo's Prince Street, where
the Guggenheim Museum had their annex, was restricted to street
artists in 2000 largely as a result of the Guggenheim's years
of unjustified complaints to the police about us. That will eventually
become grounds for another lawsuit.
MOMA is owned by David Rockefeller
and was founded by his mother Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. David
Rockefeller's bank, JP Morgan-Chase, also finances the Manhattan
Institute, a CIA front with direct ties to racism, eugenics and
Nazi Germany from which both Giuliani and GW Bush proudly claim
to get all their ideas [see http://baltech.org/lederman/ for
detailed mainstream media evidence on this subject].
To give you an idea of how
David Rockefeller manipulates things to confuse anyone who tries
to understand his position consider this. As explained above,
in 1995 Rockefeller's MOMA filed an amicus brief in support of
street artists' First Amendment rights. At the exact same time
The Alliance for Downtown NY BID, another David Rockefeller front,
joined with the SoHo Alliance and three midtown BIDs to file
an amicus brief in the same lawsuit against street artists having
First Amendment rights.
One brief said visual art was
not worthy of being considered expression, the other defended
it as the height of expression. The idea is to support opposite
sides against the middle so as to keep one's true position unknown
and to be able to claim you took whatever position the person
you are speaking to wants to hear.
Here's an excerpt from the
30 page brief signed in 1995 by The Alliance For Downtown NY,
The Fifth Avenue Association, The Madison Ave. BID, The Grand
Central Partnership and The SoHo Alliance: "The sale of
artwork does not involve communication of thoughts or ideas....the
dangers of allowing visual art full First Amendment protection...An
artists' freedom of expression is not compromised by regulating
his ability to merchandise his artwork...the sale of paintings
and other artwork does not reach this high level of expression
(guaranteeing First Amendment protection)..." Note that
the area of NYC which these groups control is home to 95% of
the City's art galleries and art museums.
The Alliance for Downtown NY
was founded by so-called art patron David Rockefeller to enhance
his Chase Bank building and was the City's first BID. It dominates
the NYPD's First Precinct and the first City Council district
which includes SoHo, as documented by years of articles in the
NY Times and elsewhere. The reason the First Precinct is always
far more preoccupied with harassing legal street artists than
the areas' hundreds of illegal unlicensed vendors is this hidden
connection between the local police, David Rockefeller and SoHo's
City Council representative.
Complaints from the SoHo Alliance
are a cover story to obscure the real source of the complaints
against street artists. The First Precinct admits they know most
of those SoHo Alliance complaints are false and are called in
by the same handful of people. Then why would they spend so much
time and so many resources responding to phony complaints? The
SoHo Alliance is what is called a useful idiot.
David Rockefeller wants us
all off the street and SoHo's new City Council representative
Alan Gerson cannot do much to help us even if he wanted to. Gerson's
district includes the entire area controlled by Rockefeller's
Alliance for Downtown NY BID including Wall Street, the WTC area,
City Hall and Battery Park. That BID has more power and money
that most countries let alone most U.S. cities or States.
What Alan Gerson will most
likely come to us with as his "plan to help street artists"
will be a recycled idea from the previous Council Member to make
us submit to a certification committee. Then we will be under
the same selective screening process as in galleries and museums
- exactly the opposite of what we have now under the full protection
of the First Amendment as applied to a public forum.
All of this will be presented
as "advancing culture, protecting the arts and preserving
the unique nature of SoHo". Artists will be told they will
no longer have so much competition for space from vendors or
so much police harassment. Street artists who have a minimal
understanding of the background to this struggle will think someone
is doing them a favor instead of trying to eliminate us all.
Eventually if allowed to proceed, the whole plan will be very
clear but then it will be too late.
Like MOMA's "help"
City Council Member for SoHo Alan Gerson's "help" will
always be part of a plan to take away our rights, even if he
personally likes street artists and believes in our having First
Amendment protection. Gerson may seem like a decent guy but he
cannot oppose these people and have a political future. His involvement
in planning the unprecedented attack on street artists in SoHo
on 4/5/2002 involving the use of garbage trucks signaled what
is to come.
Actually, we already have the
fullest protection possible under U.S. law, the First Amendment.
No City Council Member, Mayor or other elected official could
possibly give you better protection than that. Just remember
what those on the right often use as their motto, the price of
freedom is eternal vigilance. It's true for us all.
If you think the police harass
artists now, be assured they have worse things in mind. Privatizing
the NYPD is one of David Rockefeller's hopes for the future.
The Alliance for Downtown NY paid millions of dollars to have
their private BID police work out of the same facility as many
First Precinct cops.
No wonder BID police, who are
nothing more than minimum wage unarmed security guards, act like
they are the real police. Most BID security in NYC is run by
high-ranking former NYPD officials, many of who were formerly
members of the NYPD Peddler Task Force, created in the 1980's
to go after street artists in the Fifth Avenue Association's
midtown BID. See: "Wall St. Plans to Pay for a New Police
Substation There" N.Y. Times 2/16/98 and "Precinct
to House Private, City Cops" Daily News 2/16/98
Here's an excerpt from a Giuliani
press release on this: Archives of the Mayor's Press Office FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: Tuesday, March 16, 1999 Release #094-99
Contact: Colleen Roche/Curt Ritter (212) 788-2958 MAYOR GIULIANI
AND POLICE COMMISSIONER SAFIR PRESIDE OVER CEREMONY FOR NYPD
DOWNTOWN CENTER "New Downtown Manhattan Police Facility
Will House Officers From Three Separate NYPD Units. Mayor Rudolph
W. Giuliani and New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir
today joined Alliance for Downtown New York Chairman Robert Douglas
in announcing the opening of the new police facility in Lower
Manhattan. The new site, known as The NYPD Downtown Center, will
house officers from the Scooter Task force, the Citywide Homeless
Outreach Unit and the Movie and T.V. Unit...The new facility
will provide much needed space for a police force that has expanded
by 45.5% since 1998. In addition to the officers from the three
NYPD units, the site will also be the new headquarters for the
Downtown Alliance security force...Police Commissioner Safir
said, "The NYPD is proud to have played a part in restoring
New York City by achieving historic low levels of crime. It's
important that the police and the private sector work together
for the betterment of all concerned, and today's grand opening
is a fine example of how effective these partnerships can be."...The
Alliance for Downtown New York, Inc. manages the Downtown Lower
Manhattan Business Improvement District."
A lot of street artists imagined
we'd get better treatment from the new Mayor, Mike Bloomberg.
Unfortunately Mike Bloomberg's "independence" is as
much of a media-created fantasy as Giuliani's was. He's just
another Rockefeller stooge. His Bloomberg News managed to avoid
covering eight years of news on our lawsuits and demonstrations
which were covered in detail by every other NYC media outlet.
Jokes sometimes reveal more
than any serious comment. Bloomberg recently gave the world a
hint of who he works for: Daily News 4/11/2002 Mayor Says Bloom
Is on 1st 100 Days "As the mayor addressed the New York
City Partnership, a group of business leaders to which his company,
Bloomberg L.P., belongs, he seemed relaxed. At one point, he
joked with audience member David Rockefeller that "everybody
in this room is expecting you and I to balance the budget together."
The reason Giuliani had me
arrested so many times was that for eight years I was exposing
the Giuliani-David Rockefeller-CIA-Nazi connection. That's what
all those Giuliani-as-Hitler paintings and signs were about and
exactly why he took them so seriously, although he frequently
pretended they were about the NYPD instead of about him. That's
why he's in Federal court fighting a subpeona my lawyers recently
served on him to appear for depositions about having me falsely
arrested.
At the same time Giuliani was
cutting funding to schools, cultural programs and the arts he
was giving his mega-billionaire boss David Rockefeller hundreds
of millions in tax dollars so MOMA could make a temporary move
to Queens while renovating their 53rd Street location. See: Newsday
4/22/2002 Museum on the Move 4/22/2002
NY TIMES 4/24/98 MOMA to Get
$65 Million for Expansion "Mayor Rudolph W. Guiliani pledged
Thursday that the city would contribute $65 million over the
next three years to help pay for a major expansion project at
the Museum of Modern Art...Facing its huge price tag, trustees
from the museum's expansion committee, including David Rockefeller,
the real estate developer Jerry Speyer and Donald Marron, the
chairman of PaineWebber Inc., approached City Hall. Mr. Rockefeller,
whose mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was a founder of the
Modern, said the city money was "the financial cornerstone"
of the expansion. Of the remaining $585 million the museum must
raise, he said that about $200 million had been pledged by "the
family and trustees." Then he quickly added a qualifier:
"When I say family, I mean the museum family, not my family."
Rockefeller's Chase Bank was
intimately tied to the Nazis before and throughout WWII as you
can see by the evidence on my website. Rockefeller was 1/2 owner
of IG Farben, the Nazi company that built Auschwitz and forty
other Nazi slave labor death camps.
President Roosevelt intended
to try Nelson Rockefeller as a war criminal after WWII, but he
died in office. President Truman held congressional investigations
of Rockefeller when Truman was a Senator and considered him a
traitor. When Giuliani sprayed pesticide nerve gas on NYC from
1999-2001 - supposedly to fight West Nile Virus - he used chemicals
that were developed at IG Farben. West Nile Virus was "discovered"
by Rockefeller University scientists in Uganda in 1937. Rockefeller
labs in NYC were experimenting with West Nile Virus for decades
before the alleged 1999 "epidemic". Extensive evidence
for everything claimed here is on my website. This Nazi influence
is everywhere around us today.
"During the war, Rockefeller
foreshadowed the anticommunist policies of the Cold War by cozying
up to dictatorial regimes in Latin America. Niccolà Tucci,
head of the State Department's Bureau of Latin American Research,
resigned and asked Secretary of State Cordell Hull to abolish
his bureau. "My bureau was supposed to undo the Nazi and
fascist propaganda in South America and Rockefeller was inviting
the worst fascists and Nazis to Washington." (Peter Collier
and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty. Holt,
Rine-hart & Winston, 1976, p. 236).
There is a lot of published
material in books and on the internet about MOMAs CIA roots.
Most of it's early directors were CIA personnel and many early
CIA officials were themselves former Nazis brought to the US
after the war. For decades MOMA has fought in Federal court to
keep art stolen from murdered Jews by the Nazis.
For a full history on MOMA's
CIA connection see: THE CULTURAL COLD WAR: The CIA and the World
of Arts and Letters, By Frances Stonor Saunders. For a very detailed
history of the Rockefeller-CIA Nazi connection see The Secret
War Against the Jews by former U.S. Dept. of Justice Nazi War
Crimes investigator, John Loftus.
I know this may seem bizarre
to my fellow artists who are unfamiliar with this history but
MOMA and the early SoHo art dealers tied to MOMA had an agenda
behind promoting abstract expressionism which had nothing to
do with art. The reason for making abstract expressionism the
"new" American art form was to sideline and eclipse
the millions of artists who were using figurative painting to
do political art which attacked powerful corporations, corrupt
politicians and social injustice. Figurative art was often used
to motivate people to join unions, hold protests and otherwise
resist the growing police state.
The World Bank, IMF and related
protests are about this exact same issue of corporate domination.
The puppets and art you see in them are the kind of figurative
art Rockefeller wanted to make unpopular and outdated. I like
abstract art as much as the next artist but you can't rally people
to a protest or inform them about government evils with a Jackson
Pollack painting...and that's exactly why that kind of art was
so aggressively promoted in schools and in the media by the CIA,
MOMA and the early SoHo art dealers.
This effort to sanitize and
de-politicize art began when David Rockefeller's brother, Nelson
Rockefeller, destroyed Diego Rivera's famous mural in Rockefeller
Center. The Rockefellers, like the Bushes, were avid supporters
of Hitler. In Nazi Germany, Hitler was targeting artists who
exposed the evils of the Nazi regime and of German society at
the same time Rockefeller was destroying Rivera's mural.
My website is filled with verifiable
documentation proving what these enemies of freedom have been
up to for the past seventy years. The Bush families extensive
Nazi connection is finally breaking into the mainstream media.
Just last week both the NY Post and MSNBC had stories on it,
which are included on my website http://baltech.org/lederman/
Bloomberg was hand-picked by
David Rockefeller to become mayor and has decades of close ties
to him, so don't expect any better treatment from the new Mayor
than we got from Giuliani. Crushing art in a garbage truck, their
newest policy, gives a good idea of what they have in mind for
street artists in 2002.
When you use your art to defend
free speech you are illustrating the real essence of this issue.
Even a little cardboard sign on your display, "Stop Harassing
Artists" is a big threat to them and is conversely a very
big means of defense for you. Don't be fooled by those who advise
you not to show those signs. Those signs do more to stop the
police from harassing you than any court ruling.
The mainstream "arts community"
pretends that they care about free speech, but look closer. Virtually
every instance in which they become involved in defending free
speech is really about protecting government funding for art,
not about artists' free speech. These art institutions get their
money from our corrupt government and from the same exact corporations
like Chase Bank, Exxon, Phillip Morris, Ford, Enron etc. which
own our government and use art and culture as a cover for their
massive crimes.
Any art they support usually
is part of the government's Rockefeller-controlled agenda of
destroying the family, religion and other institutions. The reason
many Americans don't support free speech or art nowadays is exactly
because of the kinds of art that these government programs funded.
Using the same Madison Avenue
mind-control techniques used to sell us defective cars, illiterate
Presidential candidates and toxic cigarettes they created a link
in the public mind between free speech and depravity of every
imaginable kind. I believe that was the plan all along, to support
taxpayer funding for the most distasteful art imaginable as a
means of getting a justifiably angered public to stop supporting
free speech. I'm not suggesting that the artists who get this
funding are a conscious part of the plan. They want the money,
and no questions are asked or they don't get any. It's a classic
deal with the devil.
No one was trying to stop these
same artists from showing their work in a private gallery. It
was always the public funding that sparked the controversy. These
same "free speech" advocates never supported the rights
of street artists and in many instances have been among our severest
critics.
Independent street artists
who use the public forum rather than tax dollars to communicate
with the public are the real frontline in the war for free speech.
Most street artists still have no idea of how important they
are in this struggle. Getting rid of unlicensed vendors, which
many street artists are now being encouraged to clamor for, will
not help us one bit. We are and will remain the real target.
The key to fighting successfully
against such powerful people is to EXPOSE them everyday in everyway
and to never be co-opted by them. They hate to be exposed that's
why you will almost never see David Rockefeller mentioned in
the newspaper despite him being by far the most powerful person
in the U.S. Make your work as political as possible. Feature
these enemies of free expression in it. Set up your display where
it will cause the most controversy, not just where you will make
the most sales.
Quietly working with our opponents
to get a few crumbs of benefit is exactly what they hope we will
do. The latest effort to scare street artists off the streets
- crushing our displays in a garbage truck - was no accident
or misunderstanding by the First Precinct and the City Council
Member. It's perfectly consistent with everything they have done
in our regard for the past eight years. If anything, it may have
been done to soften us up so that we will be more willing to
agree to their new "plan". Expecting them to help us
with this problem is like expecting the fox to protect the hen
house.
In our current lawsuit, Lederman
et al v Giuliani the Central Park Conservancy (CPC) is a named
defendant. In a deposition given in 1998 the Parks Department
legal counsel, Thomas Rozinski, admitted that the CPC had undisclosed
representatives in meeting between Parks Department officials
and me as early as 1995. When I and other artists were illegally
arrested at the 65 day long 1998 Met Museum demo we were often
put into NYPD vans with the CPC logo on them.
CPC is now headed by Rudy Giuliani's
first wife and cousin, Regina Peruggi. I believe we should include
Mike Bloomberg, David Rockefeller, the Downtown Alliance, the
SoHo Alliance and the City Council member for SoHo as named defendants
in our next lawsuit.
Don't let our enemies depict
street artists as "art hawkers" "art hustlers"
or any of the other derogatory terms they use in their attacks.
Be even more resistant to them trying to include you in the "arts
community". You are a street artist. You are not a welcome
part of that community and are in fact anathema to it. By selling
your own art you make art dealers, critics, curators and the
like appear to be what they are: useless obstacles who keep the
public and artists separate from each other.
When they talk about how your
little art display set up for a few hours a week "congests"
sidewalks, point to the thousands of concrete planters the BIDs
installed all over NYC streets which seriously congest sidewalks
24 hours a day, seven days a week and which are a genuine safety
issue. All over SoHo the same SoHo Alliance fools and art dealers
who call the police all day claiming we obstructed their sidewalk
are installing huge illegal planters in the same spots where
they don't want street artists.
I noticed that the Grand Central
BID recently attached sharp metal spikes to their planters to
keep people from sitting on them. One such spiked concrete planter
presents more danger to the public than all the sidewalk art
displays in NYC combined.
It seems clear that no matter
how many lawsuits we win the City will never stop harassing us.
In a way that's a tribute to how important they think we are.
Our independent political activism and your part in it remains
essential in the struggle to protect street artists' First Amendment
rights.
More than ever I can say I'm
proud to be a NYC street artist. I hope that you are too. -----------------------------------------
>From Encyclopedia Britannica .com "During the height
of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency did a remarkable
thing: It bankrolled the American avant-garde...The championing
of American abstract expressionism represented one of the most
dramatic campaigns, exemplified in the paintings of Jackson Pollock."
"Moma has even been outed
as a front for the CIA in the 50s, when its international touring
shows of American art were supposedly little more than Cold War
propaganda exercises." UK Guardianunlimited 8/29/2000
also see: http://past.thenation.com/cgibin/framizer.cgi?url=http://past.thenation.com/
issue/000612/0612rogin.shtml When the CIA Was the NEA
>From The Cultural Cold
War by Frances Stonor Saunders, New Press [pg 132] "The
fund raising arm of the Free Europe Committee [a CIA front] was
The Crusade for Freedom for which a young actor named Ronald
Reagan was a leading spokeman and publicist. The Crusade for
Freedom was used to launder money to support a programme run
by Bill Casey, the future CIA director [and founder of The Manhattan
Institute], called the International Refugee Committee in New
York [aka International Rescue Committee], which allegedly coordinated
the exfiltration of Nazis from Germany to the United States where
they were expected to assist the government in fighting Communism...[pg
142]...The Ford Foundation gave $500,000 to Bill Casey's International
Rescue Committee and substantial grants to another CIA front,
the World Assembly of Youth...the convergence between the Rockefeller
billions and the U.S. government exceeded even that of the Ford
Foundation ."
NY Post 4/16/2002 PAGE SIX
By RICHARD JOHNSON with PAULA FROELICH and CHRIS Bush granddad's
Nazi 'link' "...Dubya's granddad, Prescott Bush, managed
the Union Banking Corp., whose portfolio included the Silesian
American Corp. The article cites a 1942 newspaper story linking
Bush to Nazi-funding German industrialist Fritz Thyssen. In 1943,
Bush resigned from the bank and later chaired the National War
Fund. Clamor claims that in 1951, Bush used the $1.5 million
he made from UBC stock to set up his son, former President George
Bush, in business. The next year, Prescott Bush won election
as U.S. senator from Connecticut. He died of cancer in 1972.
Best-selling author Kitty Kelley - who has done stinging bios
on Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor - is said to be rehashing
the charges in her upcoming tome about the Bush dynasty."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/740127.asp?pne=msntv
MSNBC and SLATE 4/17/2002 The Bush Family and the Jews "The
charges against Sen. Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the current
president, went beyond the disdain for Jews and discriminatory
practices that were characteristic of New England WASP culture
in his day. Prescott Bush was a director of a New York bank where
rich Germans who supported the Nazis stashed millions in personal
wealth. He was still a director at the bank, Union Banking Corp.,
when its assets were frozen under the Trading With the Enemy
Act in 1941 - a fact that has provided endless fodder for leftists
and conspiracy theorists since it came to light in the 1990s."
Robert Lederman, President
of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net http://baltech.org/lederman/
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
Giuliani Seeks Order of Protection
3/21/2002
The NYC Corporation Counsel
(the 700 NYC lawyers who at taxpayer expense apparently still
represent Mr. Giuliani despite him no longer being Mayor) has
sought an order of protection from the Federal Court for Giuliani,
his associates and his former administration officials to prevent
them from being forced to give depositions in my ongoing Federal
lawsuit, Lederman et al v Giuliani 98 CIV. 2024 (LMM).
I'd like to speak to you about
the developments in this lawsuit, what these depositions are
about and why Giuliani (who may be running for President) wants
to avoid them.
In seeking a protective order
the corporation counsel, Robin Binder, claimed in a letter to
Federal Judge McKenna dated 3/20/2002 that there is no support
for the allegation that Giuliani targeted me for arrest because
of the thousands of portraits I painted of him as Hitler.
As you'll recall, those portraits
were shown on every television network and in every newspaper
numerous times over a period of years and the Mayor made hundreds
of statements denouncing them (see selected quotes below). He
ordered me arrested numerous times as a result of these paintings
and the very real connection to fascism they exposed.
He also had hundreds of the
original portraits confiscated by the NYPD. After more than 40
arrests I was never convicted on any of the varied charges which
included inciting a riot, defacing property, resisting arresting,
disorderly conduct, failure to comply and obstructing governmental
administration.
While displaying these protest
paintings outside City Hall, many of his associates and staff
personally commented to me about the portraits.
Federal judge Lawrence M. McKenna
ruled in favor of myself and the other street artists in this
case on August 17, 2001 overturning the artist permit but discovery
(depositions, turning over documents etc.) was delayed due to
the WTC attack on 9/11.
In his ruling banning the City
from enforcing the Parks Department artist permit, Judge McKenna
stated:
"Lederman, having alleged
that he was improperly arrested as a result of being "targeted"
by the Giuliani Administration (Am. Compl. P 198), should have
an opportunity to seek discovery on this matter."
Giuliani and numerous of his
associates were served with subpoenas on 3/1/2002. For full details
on this lawsuit see http://baltech.org/lederman/ AND http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
CONTACT #'s: Robert Lederman
(201) 896-1686 robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net http://baltech.org/lederman/
Corporation Counsel: Robin
Binder 718 222-5191 rbinder@nyc.law.gov
GIULIANI ON BEING PAINTED AS
HITLER [Note: All of the portraits and text signs from the Diallo,
Taxi, vendor, artist, community garden, homeless and other protests
("Adolf Giuliani", "Arrest Giuliani", "Impeach
Giuliani", "Giuliani = Police State" etc.) which
the former Mayor refers to in these quotes were painted by me.
They can be viewed at my website.)
Newsweek 4/5/99 Rudy on the
Record Question: "Are you personally stung by those signs
at the demonstrations that say 'Adolf Giuliani'?" Mayor
Giuliani: "Five years ago I might have cried over it. And
now I just feel that this is a crazy exaggeration that we've
allowed, and that our media coverage is selective... You cover
Susan Sarandon. But [the police and the rest of the city] see
the Adolf Hitler signs, the comparisons to the president of Yugoslavia.
These [demonstrators] are getting arrested, some knowingly, some
unknowingly, under that banner."
"Robert Lederman, 49,
a street artist who has protested for years against Mayor Giuliani's
policies, often arrives with dozens of placards caricaturing
the mayor as Hitler, complete with the Fuhrer's mustache".
-NY Times 4/8/2000 Demonstrators of Old Spread Their Message
in a New Era of Protest
"I take a different view
of someone comparing me to Adolf Hitler than when someone calls
me a jerk." Mayor Giuliani, N.Y. Daily News 10/25/1998
"We'll say it simply:
Just because people don't like Rudy Giuliani doesn't give them
license to compare him to Adolf Hitler. The Hitler analogy is
something that seems to amuse many people in this city. Cutesy
stories have been written and published in the past week about
an art installation on Madison Avenue called No York in which
the mayor is depicted with a Hitler moustache. This image was
first bandied about by an obnoxious twerp who claims to represent
a group called A.R.T.I.S.T. - but which really ought to be called
M.O.R.O.N. - who is outraged that the mayor attempted to enforce
plainly written statutes regarding sidewalk clutter in front
of the Metropolitan Museum. For this, the twerp (whose name we
shall never again use because he deserves no more public mention)
imagines that Rudy Giuliani deserves comparison with the personification
of evil in this century...As the New York Times' gleeful seizure
of the "bunker" story indicates, you don't have to
be a cabbie, a vendor or a M.O.R.O.N. to issue forth such repulsive
opinions. -NY Post Editorial 6/16/98
"I don't regard associations
of my people that support me as fascists as a light matter ....But
it's ultimately the results that matter."Giuliani -NY TIMES
6/24/98
"But the Mayor repeated
his anger over signs and chants at the post-Diallo protests that
liken him to Adolf Hitler. "The comparisons to Hitler, Adolf
Hitler, and fascism have to stop, because they're sick, perverted,
and they do affect some people," he said. "Invocations
of Adolf Hitler are despicable no matter who it is. Nobody should
participate in it, and nobody should do it." -NY Times Sunday
March 28, 1999 "After Meeting Mayor Vows Major Changes for
Police"
"The Mayor, for his part,
sought to balance his remarks on the protests by expressing his
sympathy for the Diallo family, his support for the Police Department
and his anger at the personal attacks against him. He complained
that several protesters held aloft signs that compared him to
Adolf Hitler and the Police Department to the Ku Klux Klan. "As
the Police Department has made substantial changes in the way
in which it behaves, not only in the last month or two but over
the last five years," Mayor Giuliani said, "I'd ask
people to acknowledge that and then to make the similar kinds
of changes in their behavior. Not stand with people who try to
pretend that the Police Department is the KKK, not engage in
general bashing of the Police Department, stop the invocations
of Hitler and Nazism and fascism, all this exaggerated hate rhetoric.
It has an impact." -NY Times 3/30/99 "Indictments of
4 Officers in the Diallo Killing Are Due Tuesday"
"The so-called artists
who have been demonstrating outside the Metropolitan Museum of
Art believe that their daubings and scratchings should be treated
in the same way books are. Fair enough. But they also want an
unlimited right to sell their product outside the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, on a plaza that belongs to the Parks Department...when
the Parks Department extended this reasonable system to the Metropolitan
plaza earlier this year, a bunch of artist-activists who call
themselves "Artists' Response to Illegal State Tactics"
(yes, the acronym is ARTIST) went beserk. They held noisy demonstrations,
displayed drawings of the mayor as Adolf Hitler, and made other
ludicrous and offensive comparisons - including likening themselves
to the democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. Then they defied
the permit system and were accordingly arrested". -NY POST
5/17/98 THE ARTIST HUSTLE
N.Y. Post 8/20/98 EDITORIAL
FREE SPEECH - OR FREE EXHIBITION SPACE? "Thanks to Mayor
Giuliani's quality-of-life program, New Yorkers no longer have
to step over quite so many vagrants in order to enjoy the greenery
of New York's parks or the aesthetic stimulation of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Unfortunately, thanks to Manhattan Criminal Court
Judge Lucy Billings, they might now find themselves navigating
their way around hordes of self-described "artists"
who think it's appropriate to liken politicians they oppose to
Hitler."
Newsday 2/11/95 Not a Loyal
Nazi, Miller Quits Police Spokesman Job Saying he wouldn't be
"a loyal Nazi," John Miller quit yesterday as Police
Commissioner William Bratton's top spokesman, refusing to comply
with what he said was Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's edict to purge
his staff of loose-lipped cops."
"In reference to the protests
outside Police Headquarters in Manhattan and the Bronx courthouse,
the Mayor continued: "And it's about time to stop carrying
signs pretending that they are racist. It's about time to stop
carrying signs equating them to the K.K.K., and it's about time
to stop invocations of Adolf Hitler about our Police Department."
-4/1/99 New York Times "The Mayor: In Honoring an Officer,
an Impassioned Plea"
"His voice choking with
emotion and his fists clenched for emphasis, Mayor Giuliani yesterday
demanded "respect and understanding" for his cops in
the fiercest speech he has delivered since the killing of Amadou
Diallo...Giuliani urged protesters to lay down their "racist
signs" and begged New Yorkers to stop second-guessing the
NYPD. "It's about time to stop carrying signs pretending
police officers are racists," the mayor told 175 cheering
cops. "It's about time to stop carrying signs equating them
to the KKK. And it's about time to stop carrying signs that invoke
Adolf Hitler about our police." As he stood at the red-brick
stationhouse, Giuliani attacked police "bashers" as
"the worst elements in society." -Daily News 4/1/99
"The Mayor Rails Vs. Cop Bashers"
"Former Mayor David Dinkins
went on national television this week. In the context of Hillary
Clinton's putative Senate campaign, he assessed his successor
for NBC's Andrea Mitchell: "Some argue that [Mayor Giuliani]
delivers services. I say, yes, but during World War II the trains
ran on time in Italy and there was no street crime in Nazi Germany."
Said Giuliani's office in response: "He's going to have
to explain why he resorts to that kind of language. We certainly
can't." -NY Post 7/9/99
"He also blasted the anti-cop
and anti-mayor sentiment. "I think the negative part is
that many of the signs ... are highly offensive and racist in
nature ... There was a sign that had the New York Police Department
shield with a Nazi swastika superimposed over it. There were
signs using rather broadly the term racist and invocations to
Hitler, to some of the things that are going on in the Balkans
..." Giuliani complained. -POST 4/16/99 -10,000 RALLY FOR
'JUSTICE'
"On his weekly WABC radio
show, Giuliani blasted the demonstrators who marched across the
Brooklyn Bridge carrying signs comparing him to Adolf Hitler,
and the NYPD to the Ku Klux Klan. The mayor also blasted the
media for not asking "how could people participate in a
march like this, how could people speak to a group like this,
that carried signs like that? "Unfortunately, no one is
being held to account for joining in or associating with a march
that had hate signs like that," Giuliani said."-NY
Post 4/17/99 RUDY BLASTS DIALLO MARCHERS WHO COMPARED HIM TO
HITLER
"Seeking out reporters
as he left City Hall about 7:15 p.m., Giuliani suggested that
the controversial advertisements depicting a black youth frightened
by police officers, as well as signs comparing the mayor and
the police force to Nazis, may have backfired. ...The peaceful,
controlled nature of the event stood in marked contrast to the
last rally of a similar size, when Giuliani -- who was not yet
mayor -- joined about 10,000 police officers at City Hall to
protest Dinkins' plans for the Civilian Complaint Review Board
in 1992. That demonstration spun out of control, with officers
damaging cars and storming the Brooklyn Bridge, and many protesters
spewing profanity and racial epithets. NY Times 4/16/99-Diallo
Rally Focuses on Call for Strong Oversight of Police
"During his radio show
Friday, Mayor Giuliani concentrated not on the substance of the
placards carried by the 10 march leaders, but on the slogans
touted by many at the back of the pack. Citing a poster that
showed a swastika across the insignia of the New York Police
Department and others that compared the Mayor to Hitler and the
department to the Ku Klux Klan, Giuliani invoked David Duke to
denounce, again, the tone of the demonstrations. "Just consider
for one moment if David Duke came to New York City, assembled
4,000, 5,000 or 10,000 people, whatever the number you want to
say the march was, and in that march there were 10 people that
had signs with hateful, racist and anti-Semitic language attached
to it," the Mayor said." -NY Times April 17, 1999-"After
the Protests Turning Slogans Into Substance."
5/9/98 Washington Post "An
exhibit of the mayor's photographs opened today at a downtown
Manhattan gallery, displaying 23 of his color and black-and-white
pictures taken over the last two years. Panning the exhibit altogether
were the sidewalk protesters, who are fighting a city requirement
that they need permits to sell artwork in parks and in front
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Since his first day
in office, Giuliani has been waging a war on artists and artists'
rights," said painter and printmaker Robert Lederman. "He's
doing this show purely to change his image, posing as an artist
in the arts capital of the world."
Newsday (12-19-1999) A Thorn
in the Mayor's Side Robert Lederman says he's been arrested 40
times because of his depictions of Giuliani By Merle English.
STAFF WRITER "HE'S BEEN ARRESTED more than 40 times, and
it's all Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's fault, complains Robert Lederman,
a self-described street artist and activist who's made the mayor
his target. Lederman takes great pleasure in painting portraits
of Giuliani, depicting him as Satan or Hitler to protest his
policies, most lately against the homeless...."
Speech Activist 2 Capitol Police
0 by Bill Miller, The Washington Post, March 20, 2000 "Last
week's ruling was hailed by the American Civil Liberties Union,
which took, up Lederman's cause as part of its campaign to preserve
free, speech rights in public places. According to the ACLU,
the Capitol historically has been one of Washington's most restrictive
venues. The Capitol barred demonstrations on its grounds from
1882 until 1972, when that prohibition was struck down by the
U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving a Vietnam War protest...Lederman's
quarrel with Capitol Police was fairly mild compared with his
ongoing spat with New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. He fought
Giulani in the courts over the right of artists to sell their
works on the streets without a license. He won that battle, but
his criticism of Giulani hasn't stopped, and Lederman frequently
has been arrested at protests of the mayor's policies. He has
painted portraits that depict Giulani as Hitler or Satan."
Also see: NY Times 8/11/2001
Judge Bans Permit Requirement for Art Vendors; NY Times 8/17/2001
End Draws Near for Mayor's Artful Adversary; NY Times 6/3/97
SoHo Street Artists Triumph as High Court Rebuffs City; Paint
Misbehavin': An Art Attack, NY Post 7/6/98; Village Voice, 2/24/98
Chronic Offender; Jewish Week, 5/7/99 His Artwork Raises a Feuhrer;
NY Post editorial, 6/16/98 Demonizing Rudy Giuliani; Newsday
12/19/99 A Thorn in the Mayor's Side; Washington Post, 3/20/2000
Speech Activist 2 Capitol Police 0; Penthouse 6/99 Advise and
Dissent: Giuliani's War on Freedom
ROBERT LEDERMAN 201 896-1686
See also Judith
Levine | Darwin | New
York | Previous Lederman page
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell