November 10, 2007 (LPAC)--Kevin Keating's 2005 film, Giuliani Time powerfully conveys the basic story outlined in Wayne Barrett's earlier investigative biography, Rudy!. Village Voice journalist Barrett himself is interviewed, along with former mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins, Giuliani's own police commissioner William Bratton, his own education commissioner Rudy Crews, representatives of the neoconservative Manhattan Institute, the ACLU and advocates for the poor and for the police.

Giuliani Time opens with the former mayor addressing the 2004 Republican national convention, with his business partner and former police commissioner Bernie Kerik at his side. Rudy says that on September 11, 2001 amidst the carnage, he had turned to Kerik and had said, "Thank God George Bush is President."

The opening credits come up with an evocation of Franklin Roosevelt , New York Governor and then President, fighting the poverty and despair of economic collapse, and promising citizens new progressive measures when the war against Hitler will have been won. Then Wayne Barrett comes on as narrator, describing the late-1940s-1950s Brooklyn scene of Giuliani's childhood. We are shown the bar where Rudy's father Harold and other family members ran violent mafia rackets, and the guard towers and barbed wire of Sing Sing prison, where Harold did time for armed robbery.

This disclosure of Rudy's mafia family background is the movie's metaphoric underpinning. Barrett comes back on screen at various points, emphasizing Giuliani's violence against the poor and black people, his economic savagery and deliberate unleashing of police thuggery, his soulless unconcern for suffering. As part of the stunning and disquieting conclusion, Barrett shows that Giuliani did not tell the truth of his family's gangsterism when the FBI interviewed him about his personal background in the screening for his entry to Justice Department posts.

The portrayal of Giuliani's "workfare" program is outstanding. He boasts that he has cut a half million people off the welfare rolls. What happened to them? Manhattan Institute spokesman Myron Magnet tells us that there is no serious poverty in the city or in America, that the people cut off have found places in the underground economy. We see Giuliani publicly professing this blunt Malthusianism. The Institute was Rudy's programmatic guide, and the strange Dickensian-looking Magnet speaks of the "tycoons" who sponsor the Institute, who believe that the poor can themselves become tycoons! Poor immigrants have done it before; we see archive photos of financiers such as Warburgs. [The name "Goldman Sachs" and other financial agencies come on screen as Institute sponsors. The usual rightist foundations are also known to fund them.]

But the discarded citizens appear, and speak directly to us: men put into years of forced labor, denied any actual employment or training, taking the places of paid workers; the children, too hungry to be in school because their family food stamps and home relief are cancelled; the woman who has been denied the power to read or write, pleading for a dignified place in society.

Footage of the frenzied New York Stock Exchange and its chairman Dick Grasso, is accompanied by the information that we are in the greatest speculative orgy ever. Ralph Nader comes on, intoning that Giuliani is the "oligarchs'" mayor, having turned over the city to global plunderers.

- Crime, and Terror. -

Mayor Giuliani brought in William Bratton as Police Commissioner in 1994. Bratton implemented a crackdown on "quality of life" offenses such as subway fare-beating, graffiti and panhandling. The homeless were incarcerated, while housing was cut. The FBI reported a drop in serious crime during the 1990s, all over the U.S.A., but Giuliani boasted that he personally had crushed crime in New York by his tough policing policies. Bratton tells us that Rudy has merely promoted race war by directing police to attack black people. When the media celebrated Bratton as the victor of crime, Rudy fired him.

We see Rudy Giuliani, running for mayor against incumbent David Dinkins by leading a racist police riot.

Former Mayor Ed Koch focuses on Rudy's constant pandering to white racism, calling him a combination of Pinochet and Caligula The title term, "Giuliani time," is a phrase supposedly popular with New York police, meaning the era when brutality buys a decrease in crime.

Rudy Crews, whom Rudy brought in as schools chief because he was black and might get away with cutbacks, refused to go along with the Giuliani-Manhattan Institute vouchers program. On screen, Crews passionately defends the children Giuliani was destroying with his diversion of funds to private schools.

In the end, Giuliani falls apart. He announces he has prostate cancer, that he is having an affair, that he is leaving his wife, and that he is dropping out of the 2000 U.S. Senate race against then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. There had been mass demonstrations against Giuliani's brutality, his approval of police murders. Even the police have turned against him, because of his austerity policy. He is finished as a public figure.

Then -- the terror attacks on the World Trade Center turn him into a worldwide media sensation, a hero puffed by Bush and David Letterman alike. Rudy is reborn to "fight terrorism." Watching this 2005 film now, we are left with the chilling thought that he would do to the world what he did to New York.