provided through OPENAIR-MARKET NET
Did you know that the Street Vendor Review Panel has no street artists, no book vendors, no veteran vendors, no food vendors and no general vendors on it? Everyone on the panel is an opponent of vending. Would you trust an African American Review Panel that had no African Americans or a Women's Review Panel that had no women? There's even less reason to trust the Street Vendor Review Panel.
The Street Vendor Review Panel's "hearings" are merely a legal formality, a rubber-stamping of decisions that were already made behind closed doors. The political appointees who sit on this panel, all but one of whom are directly appointed by Rudy "Corporate Police State" Giuliani, are here to eliminate the City's vendors and turn the space now used by vendors over to big corporations. If they dared to objectively "review" any vending issue they'd be immediately fired.
When government officials are engaged in eliminating a race, a class or a group (such as vendors) they often find it useful to disguise the barbarity of their activities behind a bureaucratic front. Historically, the U.S. government created panels of well known officials to oversee the murder and forced relocation of millions of Native Americans. The Nazis had various panels of experts to rationalize and administer the Holocaust. Like the Street Vendor Review Panel, these other panels provided an illusion of legality to the gradual stripping away of human rights, the campaign of police harassment, the forced relocations and the complicity of courts and judges in the process. For vendors, petitioning this panel is like a cockroach petitioning the exterminator before the fumigation starts.
The Street Vendor Review Panel is part of the Department of Business Services, a corrupt N.Y.C. agency that has the job of servicing every demand of Big Business in New York. The corporations, landlords and real estate developers who paid to put Giuliani in office want a profitable return on their investment. Although the City's streets, bridges, water mains, buildings and school system are about to collapse, Giuliani and the Department of Business Services continue to give away billions of dollars in unnecessary tax write-offs to wealthy corporations and developers that helped put Giuliani in office. These corporate interests want vendors eliminated.
In order to appear to be acting in the public interest the Giuliani Administration claims "public safety" and concerns about "sidewalk congestion" justify eliminating vendors. This same corrupt administration spent the past four years arranging the Street Furniture Initiative. This recently signed deal with a French based multi-national corporation, Decaux, involves constructing thousands of concrete advertising kiosks on sidewalks throughout New York City. As part of the deal to sell Decaux a twenty year exclusive right to use N.Y.C.'s public streets for advertising, the Giuliani Administration must eliminate street artists, vendors and newsstands. Permanent concrete and steel advertising kiosks with flashing lights and digital texts will eventually replace your vending stand! Besides earning billions in ad revenue they will create a dramatically new level of permanent congestion, obstructions and safety hazards for pedestrians and motorists.
The bottom line in this issue is greed, not congestion. If street vendors poured as much money into the Mayor's pockets as the real estate lobby does, New York would be the "I Love Vendors" capital of the world. Giuliani would pose next to vending stands and thank us for "saving" New York. While claiming that sidewalk art displays congest N.Y. this anti-congestion Mayor gives a free permit to every film company that wants one, allowing them to obstruct and congest entire residential neighborhoods for weeks at a time while shooting a T.V. series, commercial or feature film.
Like all great cities in history, New York is sometimes congested. City streets that don't have lots of economic activity wither and die. No one visits them, no one opens a business on them and few people want to live there. It's exactly the number, diversity and creativity of the people on its streets, including vendors, that makes this city great. To be against these people is to be against New York itself.
The residents who moved to a crowded commercial street like Broadway and then spend all their time calling the police on vendors should be ignored by the City. They are like people who move across the street from a school and then complain that there are too many noisy children. Instead of ignoring these absurd complaints the Street Vendor Review Panel bases its entire restricted streets policy on them. Ironically, these residents and their foolish complaints are being cleverly exploited by Giuliani and his corporate pals. When today's vendors are replaced by huge concrete advertising kiosks permanently congesting the streets, Rudy "Corporate Police State" Giuliani will be in his next government job.
Mayor Giuliani is a hypocrite. In reverant tones he's talked about the value of art for school children while petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to eliminate First Amendment protection for artists. He's recited platitudes about "including all New York" as an army of police closed off a three block section around City Hall to prevent anyone but Giuliani supporters with invitations from attending his inauguration. Each Veterans Day he delivers a speech about the sacrifices of "our brave men and women in uniform". The other 364 days of the year he orders the police to harass disabled veteran vendors off the streets. While the only protesters at his inauguration were being handcuffed, arrested and dragged away, Giuliani cynically called free speech, "a New York tradition".
We call on all of the City's vendors to work together through protests, lawsuits and non-violent acts of civil disobedience to expose this Mayor, his illegitimate panel and their efforts to destroy our rights. Not one street in N.Y.C. needs to be restricted. The Street Vendor Review Panel must be disolved.
A.R.T.I.S.T. PH: (718) 369-2111 or (212) 561-0877; E-mail <ARTISTpres@aol.com>; Web site http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html; Postal address: 255 13th St. Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215