Giuliani, The Benevolent Dictator

Rudy has taken another hit in his bid for GOP presidential nominee. A New York Times article on May 14th, 2007 focuses on the health problems of thousands of workers and volunteers at Ground Zero due to the toxic and poor air quality that was cleared as "safe" only one week after the attacks.

An examination of Mr. Giuliani’s handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center’s ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack.

...in the last four months of Mr. Giuliani’s administration, [documents] show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators.

At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers.

“The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns,” said David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group.

Giuliani ruled like a "benevolent dictator" according to one Army Corps official. Although disaster experts from FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers and OSHA were at the scene almost immediately, Rudy kept them on the sidelines while the clean up work was given out to a largely unknown city agency, the Department of Design and Construction. Kenneth Holden, the department’s commissioner until January 2004, said in a deposition in the federal lawsuit against the city that he initially expected FEMA or the Army Corps to try to take over the cleanup operation. Mr. Giuliani never let them.

...Lee Clarke, director of health and safety for District Council 37, the city’s largest public employees’ union, said Mr. Giuliani used “very, very poor judgment” in rushing to reopen the financial district without watching out for the workers who cheered him at ground zero.
Ms. Clarke said that if those workers found themselves in a meeting with Mr. Giuliani today, “a number of them would be standing up, wanting a piece of Rudy.”

The article goes on to state that while Giuliani was attending heroes' funerals, no one ever saw him at a 9/11 hearing on health. In fact, when the city began facing as many as 10,000 liability claims, Giuliani wrote to members of the city’s Congressional delegation urging passage of a bill that capped the city’s liability at $350 million. And two years after Mr. Giuliani left office, FEMA appropriated $1 billion for a special insurance company to defend the city against 9/11 lawsuits.

Couple that with the stories of the remains of 9/11 victims being used for pothole filler, his marital history and his ties to Bernie Kerik, and what you have is another typical GOP candidate.

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