BLOOMBERG'S SIDEWALK SALE

Always controversial but rarely understood, free speech is the most fundamental yet least-valued of our rights.

Controversial because news stories on free speech usually focus on those with extreme political viewpoints, bizarre art or a need to publicly express their sexual proclivities. Fundamental because the freedom to communicate underlies every human activity. Least-valued because we all take this invisible and insubstantial right for granted-until it's denied to us personally.

Losing this right made me an advocate for free speech. When newly elected Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ordered NYC's street artists arrested en masse in 1994, I led what has since become a decade-long struggle to defend the First Amendment rights of artists on public streets and in parks. Hundreds of protests, thousands of false arrests and four successful federal lawsuits later, NYC street artists now have the strongest constitutional rights of any group of vendors in the U.S.

Unfortunately, that's not our happy ending. Under Mayor Bloomberg, NYC has continued to wage what editorials in the New York Times have called the "Street Art Wars."

Why should anyone care about the outcome of this struggle? At stake is nothing less than your own freedom to communicate on public property.

The administration of Mayor Bloomberg has quietly pursued the fulfillment of an agenda that was dear to the Giuliani administration: the privatization of all public space. In February 2004, after a lot of corporate money was handed out, the City Council quietly passed the Street Furniture Initiative (SFI), a law personally sponsored by media mogul Bloomberg. The SFI awards a single corporation the right to install thousands of new advertising kiosks on NYC streets. But there's more to this than just 4,000 annoying digital ad kiosks complete with audio, cell phone boosters and NYPD surveillance equipment.

In order to boost the value of the advertising, itself a form of First Amendment-protected speech, the city intends to transform the right to free expression into an exclusive commodity that can then be sold to the highest bidder.

How do you transform something freely available to everyone into a limited commodity? By taking away the rights of all New Yorkers to freely express themselves on public property.

Here's where artists come in to the mix. Due to the rulings in our lawsuits, NYC street artists now have the same degree of First Amendment protection as a newspaper publisher or TV network. These rights include exemption from any license, permit or other qualification to work on the street. These rights prevent the city from creating an artificial limit on our numbers or completely banning us from public spaces.

As a prerequisite for passing the SFI, Giuliani spent his entire eight years in office trying to eliminate street artists. He failed to get us off of a single street or out of a single park. In true dictator fashion, Giuliani had myself, as the leader of the street artist movement, falsely arrested more than 40 times. He was eventually found by the courts to have violated numerous local, state and federal laws and his anti-street artist initiative eventually cost the city millions in police costs and legal damages.

Mike Bloomberg wants New Yorkers to think that, unlike his predecessor, he's a free speech advocate and a generous patron of the arts. He's not. One of Bloomberg's first acts as mayor was to propose a new law, Int. No. 160, reinstituting a Giuliani-created artist-permit that seven different state and federal courts had previously overturned as both illegal and unconstitutional.

Why must artists be eliminated? Is our art that bad? Are we really a threat to the city? It's all about controlling the supply and demand of a precious commodity: free speech.

So long as the city's sidewalks and parks are freely available for expression, be it an artist's or a member of the general public, why would SONY or Disney or Nike be willing to pay millions to place their a messages on city sidewalks and in parks? Why not just do it for free?

Bloomberg is asking a giant corporation to pay a billion dollars for a 20-year exclusive franchise on these rights. To justify the asking price, he wants to ban artists, newsstands, leafleting, newspaper vending boxes, protests and advertising by anyone who does not buy into the franchise. Going even further than Giuliani, Bloomberg wants control over the content of the advertising, a feature of the SFI he proudly announced in a recent press release.

Why haven't you read more about this in your daily newspaper? The corporate media, the prime beneficiary of this plan, is only too happy to help Bloomberg keep the public in the dark about what's being done. Most articles on the SFI depict the law as being about bringing much-needed public pay toilets to the city, as if 20 toilets are going to service 8 million residents and millions of tourists. By the time the 4,000-plus ad kiosks are in place, the next mayoral election will be over and the public will awaken to find that Bloomberg sold their rights out from under them.

Right now the SFI is stalled due to a lawsuit by a handful of newsstand operators. Should they lose, all that will be left standing between the public's 226-year tradition of expressive freedom on public property and Bloomberg's corporate pals taking over our streets will be the rights of NYC street artists.

-Robert Lederman