Rudolph Giuilani's New York - 24 March 1995

It's sometime said – and it's nothing but the truth – that the second most powerful executive office in the United States after that of the president is the mayor of New York City. He has overall, to run an economy which is the size of the economy of many a nation. All these social problems that infest any town or region of the country are crowded together and magnified on this peninsular that drops down from the continental mainland and ends in its most famous borough the Island of Manhattan.

It didn't take me long when I first lived here, to discover that the island, falling north, east, south, west, down between two rivers, may give us stunning cross town views at sunset, and as a decorative item for tourists, puffing around on the little day line cruise boats, but it was also a curse on the economy. And by the economy, I mean on the ordinary New Yorkers cost of living, because most of the food – much of it anyway – all vegetables and other necessities – laundry was a notable example – because they had to be ferried in from New Jersey across the Hudson, New Jersey became the happy hunting ground of organised crime, the breeding ground of the most active and prosperous gangsters, their control of the household retail business of Manhattan was so taken for granted in the '20s and early '30s, that few people – only nosy parker foreigners – bothered to find out why food prices were worse, higher here than anywhere.

If you would like to see, and feel painlessly how it worked, hunt down as soon as possible Preston Sturges's incomparably comic and horrifying film 'The Great McGinty', which, in its first half hour or so, shows a well built derelict, hired by the mob, trotting up brown stone steps, tumbling into basement stores and in an hour or so, terrifying a dozen shops and their owners into promising a weekly payment of protection money. "Now," he'd say "You don't want to open up a shipment of cauliflower or corn, do you and find it rotten?" Or to the Chinese laundryman: "We don't want you to come in here some fine morning and see your place gutted from an overnight fire, believe me there are tough guys in this town who are experts at that kind of thing. Now we can see that you never hear from them. Trust me and make it cash." This system was all pervasive, it was run so swiftly and quietly that certainly most New Yorkers didn't know it existed.

In the middle '30s however, New York had a mayor who'd been elected on what was called a fusion ticket, by a populous that was finally disgusted with both parties and with the easygoing corruption of previous mayors. Fiorello LaGuardia, five foot of spunk and defiance, announced the day he entered City Hall that his program was simple: to beat the Democrats ancient party machine, Tammany, and, as he colourfully put it, all other tin horns and punks including – he dared to announce – the mobs who ran the city through the grinder of its protection rackets, which, apart from food and simple services, more profitably organised the loan shark business and the prostitution racket, the Harlem numbers racket and the small drug racket – marijuana mostly – that protected jazz musicians.

Mayor LaGuardia named all the most notorious gangsters, said he was going to get them, and appointed out of the D.A.'s office a special prosecutor of rackets so called. The lawyer – and a baritone – from Michigan named Thomas Edmund Dewey, who began by prosecuting the big chieftain of Tammany Hall, and went on to get the infamous lucky Luciano, the prostitution king. Dewey eventually moved on to become governor of New York State and then had the misfortune to be chosen twice by the Republicans to run against Franklin Roosevelt, then Truman, and was massacred both times. Well LaGuardia and Dewey are another story, and a stirring one, and to old New Yorkers it's a story to sigh over, because it does seem now that no mayor ever took a firmer and more successful reforming grip on the city than LaGuardia, and in the pit of the depression.

Today, our new mayor is in his second year. Rudy Giuliani has been earning golden opinions from many citizens in both parties, which I don't think can be said of any mayor since LaGuardia. Of course there is no recognisable depression, New York's unemployment is as low as any cities in the nation, but Mr Giuliani's problems are crippling, the crime rate is five, six time what it was during the depression. There's the spread of guns throughout society, not least through the schools. In the worst days of the slump, no 11 year old packed a gun, and teenage pregnancy was a nasty little secret in the slummier parts of town, and nothing alarming enough to get into the statistics.

Like practically every other mayor in the country Mr Giuliani finds that down the years, New Yorkers like all Americans have grown so used to social and medical services funded by Washington, everything from food stamps to Medicaid, from money, from mental healthcare, to parking for the disabled, total medical services for rich and poor over 65, day care for infants both stranded and secure, allowances for each succeeding child of an unwed mother, money for school computers – but not for plumbing repairs – for the total removal of all asbestos in all public buildings and private apartments, and so on and so forth.

In LaGuardia's time, none of these services cushioned the life of the poor and dispossessed, and now nobody wants to lose these things, but we've only lately come to recognise that they started 60 years ago and have been purchased through the intervening years with borrowed money. So the Republicans are now saying again that the great villain of the 20th century is John Maynard Keynes, because he was the one – and he was – who sold Roosevelt on deficit financing. A few people point out that it helped America weather just the depression 'till the British and French arms orders came in to start American factories smoking again, and the work list working, and the depression gradually sliding off unlamented in the raw of the war industry. But Keynes said that deficit financing could be a very present help in time of trouble but was not a permanent economic recipe.

Now as you know the Republican's have taken their new found power to declare that the time has come to do something radical about the national deficit. So, since January, they've been going through the list of services to see where economies can be made. For the past 15 years, the voters have been hypnotised by a sing-song slogan first chanted by Ronald Reagan, 'cut taxes', and this was turned into a highly effective bit of mimicry by President Bush – presidential candidate Bush, when he kept mouthing before large audiences in a stage whisper: "Read my lips, no new taxes," to thunderous applause. So the second commandment in the Republicans new decalogue after "Thou shalt balance the budget" is "Thou shalt impose no new taxes." And the third, which follows from the other two, is the things to cut are entitlements, all these services and benefits we've been talking about. There are, all of us are astonished to be told, 350 separate entitlement programs. In LaGuardia's times maybe there were a dozen.

How about paying through taxes? No Democratic leader since Walter Mondale – who ran against Ronald Reagan second time round – none has dared to say that one political necessity was to increase taxes. In the presidential debate with Mr Reagan, Mr Mondale got a little, not much, brave applause from the audience by saying: "We have to raise taxes, I'm saying it now he won't." He didn't and he, Mr Mondale, was slaughtered.

And nowhere, except in a European magazine, have I heard the simple solution expressed in a no-nonsense way, such as were written in early February, and I quote, "The House of Representatives balanced budget constitutional amendment is a foolish piece of legislation made more so by the absence of any serious plans to reduce the prospective deficit and this is a terrible moment to cut taxes in America." Any American politician who said that out loud today would be signing his political suicide note.

Back to poor Mr Giuliani who has a two point seven billion dollar city budget deficit – like the other newly elected republican governors and mayors – he announced a year ago, he was going to strip city services to the buff. But he is the first of the republicans to say, as he did this week, enough is enough. He's going to arrest anymore cuts in Medicaid, which is healthcare for the very poor, and in general welfare allowances. He has not yet declared the only feasible alternative, the unspeakable more taxes for the comfortable. He may have the courage soon to say it. In the meantime, he's enjoying a rare tribute being praised for spending a lot of money for a catastrophe that didn't happen.

After last winter's 17 blizzards, at the city's winter services – which are always very good – but they found themselves at the very end, almost short of snow ploughs and certainly of salt. Well the United States weather bureau last fall confidently predicted an even more ferocious winter for 1994/5. Mayor Giuliani was on the ball at the ready. He was applauded for buying more ploughs, renovating more shelters for the homeless, buying half a million tons of extra salt. Ready boys, steady and ready. Result – which was announced promptly at 9.14 last Monday evening the 20th, when spring arrived – whereas the city last year had 63 inches of snow, this winter it had eight inches in a single storm. Oh yes and this has been the warmest winter in 50 years. Well done Mr Mayor.

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