What's Scary This Halloween? An Unfolding Wave of Censorship!

 

You might recognize this an undated version of our post from last Halloween.  Last year, the really scary thing was that WBAI, New York's only truly listener supported public radio station, had been taken off the air by a rogue group of minority insiders.  BUT it was Halloween, so, in the midst of that real scariness we got into the Halloween spirit to provide some fun listening made here available again, several recorded promo-carts that make the point of the value of WBAI as a bulwark to help avoid censorship.  Links to listen to those fun-scary carts carts appear at the end of this post (if you dare listen).

More important, but related is to talk about what is truly scary this Halloween: It's an unfolding wave of censorship.  We are on the eve of an election.  Many are waiting with bated breath fro the results.  But whether Trump assumes the office of president or Biden does, a wave of censorship is unfolding and it seems as if it will continue.

What do we mean?  Democracy was recently restored to Bolvia by an the overwhelming vote (55%) of a national election.  This was after it was finally admitted by most of the media that the previous popularly elected government of the country had been overthrown by a fascist coup that the United States unfortunately had too much to do with.

Restoration of democracy in Bolivia by an overwhelming popular vote; good news- Right?  Then why are Instagram and Facebook censoring those who are now tweeting about it?

That's an example of the latest coming from the internet giants that are involved in "policing" free speech.

Thursday night, October 29th WBAI's Local Station Board Report to the Listeners Michael D. D. White a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries and a member of the WBAI Local station board made these points about the frightening wave of censorship that is unfolding (his remarks are near the beginning of the first hour).  (BTW: You may detect that Mr. White may have had something to do with the Halloween carts linked to at the end of his post.).

Mr White said that WBAI as Free Speech alternative radio needs to be hyper-attuned to the following.

We are experiencing a new wave of increased censorship (while corporate media establishment propaganda narratives are being pushed to the fore).

Recent censorship pushes to be noted include:

    •    Zoom, Facebook and Twitter recently banned a San Francisco State University sponsored web-based conference (what other kinds are there these days?) titled "Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance," because the conference included a Palestinian activist that it labeled as a terrorist.  (Depending on whose narrative it is, the British might have called George Washington a "terrorist.")

    •    The NY York Post’s story about Hunter Biden, which was not factually inaccurate and contained important information about the corruption of Biden and his father the presidential candidate (along with less relevant information tending to very the authenticity if the information) was censored with Twitter not allowing it to be tweeted about. In a related story, Glenn Greenwald resigned from the internet-based Intercept, which he helped found, the day of the WBAI broadcast, because the Intercept was censoring and refusing to publish his story about the Hunter Biden corruption and the way that the media was burying the story.

    •    Google will be involved in the roll out of the Covid vaccines.  Google has announced that YouTube will censor any videos that raise questions about the vaccines being rolled out (with FDA staff excluded from the process).

    •    Google’s YouTube (Google owns YouTube) and Twitter have just started censoring and removed all of the videos of the Last American Vagabond, plus Whitney Webb reports her tweets about Google censorship are being selectively censored.

    •    Maybe Russian bots will be blamed and given as the excuse for censorship?  Or will it be QANON?  QANON is so absurdly ridiculous that everyone has to agree on that point.  (However, without going down a rabbit hole to explain, QANON is probably not what it appears to be or is generally reported to be.) QANON is being used as a perfectly tailored excuse to start labeling as unacceptable “conspiracy theories” and engage in a major round of censoring theories that are critical and/or suspicious of government activity.  

    •    The persecution and prosecution of journalist Julian Assange for publishing factually accurate information about US war crimes is a new level of shut down with incredible implications.

    •    Another level of shutdown is the way that Google search, Facebook, the internet, and corporate media, is shutting down all reporting about the Julian Assange extradition trial.

    •    CodePink- Just tweeted a story about Twitter’s removal of Palestinian Activists- “Blaming Bots.”  ) CodePink has a program on WBAI.  Jeremy Corbyn, the United Kingdom's counterpart to Bernie Sanders,  was suspended by the Labour Party the day of the WBAI program.  Sanders and Corbyn are similarly inclined when it comes to policies and speak admiringly of each other.

Mr. White noted how easy so much of this censorship was to effect through the internet.  That’s one reason that WBAI’s terrestrial radio presence is so important. . . That’s so long as WBAI remains Free Speech alternative radio.

Mr. White admitted that sometimes he listened to shows that WBAI broadcasts via the internet, not through WBAI, and sometimes he even gave money to those shows directly, but he said he gave more money to WBAI because WBAI's terrestrial radios broadcasts are a backstop against more censorship of the internet.

(We hope you'll find this scary fun listening.)

WBAI October 31st Halloween No. 1

WBAI October 31st Halloween No. 2

WBAI October 31st Halloween No. 3

WBAI October 31st Halloween No. 4

You can give to WBAI here: Donate- WBAI Needs Your Help!

 

Bankruptcy of State Governments And Privatization In The Time Of Covid

Remember those mad scientists make tiny shrunken people movies?  Mitch McConnell and friends want to privatize the public's assets and add to the piggy banks of the corporate overlords.

Senate Majority Leader, Republican, Mitch McConnell suggests that it may be better for states to declare bankruptcy than for the federal government to give them access to the federal money they need during the coronavirus crisis.

Library Defenders have seen this before.  It’s the same thing as with libraries.  It’s purpose is to privatize the public assets held by the states.  Here it’s being done the same way as with libraries in New York City: You withhold funds making up a story about what you do and don’t have money for and then use the disaster that your underfunding creates as your cover and excuse for selling off and privatizing the assets that belong to the public.  Citizens Defending Libraries has held forums on privatizing public assets and the playbook for how it works is posted here: Our Public Assets Under Attack- A Calamity of the Commons Unfolding That We Must Act Collectively Against- How best To Express It?

Once privatized, formerly public assets are no longer under democratic control and, in private hands, the private sector takes whatever tithing of profit it feels the market will bear.  When, for example, that means that when healthcare must be delivered to the public through the intermediary of a profit-taking insurance industry, it also follows that healthcare is delivered far less efficiently, far less effectively and at far greater cost.

The coronavirus crisis is being used as an opportunity to besiege other public assets– We are also witnessing an effort to, by selectively withholding funds, take down the United States Post Office.  As is obvious, the coronavirus has created financial need and financial stresses every which way, creating a need for financial support to be deployed almost universally at all levels, but we are witnessing an effort by those in the federal government handing out the dollars to target the Post Office, in particular, for such rescue and maintenance funding to be withheld, even though that office’s vital infrastructure is constitutionally mandated and normally self-supporting on a not-for-profit basis.  As a Bernie Sanders tweet notes, “How in the hell does Carnival, a cruise ship company that pays virtually no federal income taxes, receive a bailout, but the Postal Service, the most popular government agency in America, does not?”

A privatizing dismantling of the Post Office at this time would have certain other effects.  Right now, the Post Office provides one of the only options for private and secure communications in a world where almost everything happens transacted through the private monopoly profit dominated universe of a data-scraping internet.  Because it is secure and run by reliable, trusted employees subject to strict laws, the Postal Service can be used for voting (a remote voting mechanism especially important in a time of covid), whereas the prospect of easily hackable internet voting is a joke.  Or in the future, when Amazon has taken over for FedEx, UPS, and the postal service, will Amazon handle the delivery of our election votes?

Naomi Klein, with her video warning about how we must fend off “Coronavirus Capitalism” (a particular flavor of the “disaster capitalism” she has astutely described for years now) refers to the bad ideas that come out of the woodwork as “ideas that are lying around” and “seemingly impossible” can be implemented in a crisis when the public's disorientation can be exploited.  (She sanguinely counsels the same can happen with good ideas that can be implemented in a catalyzing crisis.)   The idea of dismantling the Post Office has been around for a while: After all, what good excuse was there for Congress in 2006 to pass a hobbling law specially applicable to only the Postal Service requiring the Post Office, in an absurdly short period of time, to pay worker pension and health benefits three quarters of a century in advance?

These privatizing ideas have been, indeed, been lying around. Bankruptcy for states has been lying around as something the power manipulators have been eager to implement for a while.  But its not because state bankruptcy would enable the “red states” through the “ascendancy” of a conservative federal judiciary to impose “priorities upon the budgets of the richer states.”  Like a lot of other things, privatization, is not, and should not be diminished as a red team/blue team issue, the kind of thing that is so constantly used to distract us.  It’s another thing the corporatists want, because the extraction of profit and substitution of private control for democracy are always the end goals of the corporate elites.

Yes, bankruptcy of the states would enable a bleeding and ransacking of the pension funds of public workers.  That would reduce the workers’ pay, change the terms of their employment, maybe even after the fact.  But the pension funds that could be drained along with good working relationships with state workers are just a part of the assets and infrastructure that could be subtracted from democracy and democratic control.  There are also: schools, colleges, school systems, roads, bridges, every building any government occupies, parks, playgrounds, lakes, fire houses, police stations, hospitals, housing, memorials, and (as is a target in Puerto Rico) the electric power delivery system and grid.  When schools go, so do troublesome teachers unions, and what might be a unpredictable proclivity to actually teach children to think critically.  Oh. Are we forgetting to mention “libraries,” because that’s what we started by talking about.

The way that the federal government has been printing and handing out money during a halted economy and how arbitrarily those decisions are made reveals the extent to which money and the assignment of wealth that is somehow measured in dollars is a fiction, something that’s clearly subject to what we decide the rules are today at this moment, rules that may not be the same tomorrow. 

It’s scary that we have stimulus bills crank up the press to print money that’s getting handed out disproportionately to the wealthiest, repeating the 2008 financial crisis mishandling of the economy.  The actions taken by government in 2008 was one of the greatest wealth transfers ever, increasing wealth inequality in America by pumping money into wealthy investment funds, banks, and corporations at exactly the time that asset prices were low and temporarily suppressed, prices for things like the homes of people in the Main Street economy.  Those assets and homes were then bought up by those hedge funds, banks and corporations.  Probably worst: It was paid for with taxpayer money.  The people who lost their homes paid the taxes that financed those tilted economy buy ups that deprived them of ownership.

While it’s scary, that we may be doing that again, it is also instructive, because its clear that where the money goes are just decisions, nothing more than that, just decisions about where we want the money to be, where we want to recognize it as being. When we were dealing with libraries as part of New York City’s budget we were dealing with just the most infinitesimal fraction of the budget when the fiction was being made up that there was no money to fund libraries so that they supposedly needed to be sold.  Now our fictions about where money needs to be sent during a stalled economy has us dealing with trillions of dollars.

If we are not careful, we will consent to recognize an even greater transfer of wealth to the wealthiest than in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.  The bankruptcy of states and the sell off of the Post Office would be just part of the privatization that would go along with it.

Although Gov. Cuomo Halted Most Construction Statewide In Response Coronavirus Crisis, In NYC Where Crisis Is Worst, The Construction Of Tower Replacing Beloved Central Library Continues As “Essential Construction” of “Affordable Housing,” Except It’s NOT- It’s A Luxury Condo Tower

Address: One Clinton Street, Brooklyn
Category: Affordable Housing
All jobs for this BIN are approved

This is interesting– In a time when we are all wearing masks to deal with the Covid-19 crisis, the luxury tower replacing what was one the second biggest library in Brooklyn, the Business, Career, Education, and federal depository Brooklyn Heights library is wearing the mask of “affordable housing” in order to be able to continue construction despite Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s declared halt to most residential and commercial construction.

Apparently the luxury condo tower is calling itself “affordable housing” in order to be considered “essential construction” (see the image above with the site’s classification taken from the “Essential Active Construction Sites” data page.)   Let’s be clear, there is no affordable housing being built on this site.

The luxury housing was able to be built extra tall with more floor area because the developer has agreed to build and complete, ahead of time, affordable housing in Clinton Hill, but this luxury tower is not that affordable housing; there is no affordable housing being built at this site.

Curbed Governor Cuomo suspends construction in March, but "Affordable Housing Still Allowed"

At the end of March Governor Cuomo suspended “most construction statewide in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic sweeping New York, following outcry from workers and lawmakers when the industry was largely unaffected by a shut down of all nonessential businesses.”

Under Cuomo’s directive certain “crucial work, including on infrastructure, hospitals, and affordable housing, along with emergency repairs” was to be permitted.  Ergo, the luxury tower puts on a coronavirus mask and becomes “affordable housing.”

The Department of Buildings Commissioner Melanie E. La Rocca said that to “protect New Yorkers during this pandemic” there will be “stiff enforcement” of the rules (including shutdowns and fines of to $10,000) because “we simply cannot afford to continue business as usual.”  We'll see if this building being built by one of Mayor Bill de Blasio's favored developers, David Kramer, gets subject to that “stiff enforcement.”

Meanwhile, we will note that New York City libraries have been shut down during the crisis.  So libraries are not essential anymore, but that which replaces them is?  The shrink-and-sink deal agreed to by the city when it agreed to sell the central destination library means that a smaller library with far fewer books, pushed more underground is ultimately supposed to be built under the luxury tower.  Arguably that’s the actual public benefit to allowing the construction of the luxury tower to proceed.– We might hope then that, when that much smaller library is finally built, it is actually allowed to open, rather then the public simply being told at that time we have gone so long without libraries and physical books it proves they were never a necessity in the first place; that the only necessity in this world is luxury condos!

Views of David Kramer's Hudson Companies luxury One Clinton condo tower interspersed with the garden and library wall inscription that was lost

POST SCRIPT ADDENDUM: At the April 28, 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Trustees meeting following the original posting of this article, Jordan Barowitz of the Durst real estate organization, the BPL trustee who heads the BPL trustee committee overseeing real estate construction, told the trustees that most BPL library construction projects were halted.  He said that all DDC (New York City "Department of Design and Construction") library projects are halted.  DDC is the city's civil service agency accountable to the mayor from which library officials are working to wrest control, with among other things, the possibility of shifting projects to the Economic Development Corporation, an agency frequently criticized for how it is subject to developer capture.  Mr. Barowitz said that, because of its “affordable housing” component, the Sunset Park project was not halted.  Mr. Barowitz told the trustees that the David Kramer luxury tower Brooklyn Heights library construction was halted, but he added permission had been obtained to start construction again on the Brooklyn Heights project on May 5th.  Mr. Barowitz did not tell the trustees the basis for the grant of that permission unlike with the Sunset Park project.

POST SCRIPT ADDENDUM #2:  On May 7th, one of our Library Defenders reported the following-- They saw a project construction worker at the corner Pierrepont and Clinton, coming from Montague, holding a tall coffee or soda, no mask, ready to use cell phone.  First asking about when the building was to be completed, our Library Defender then curiously inquired: "I thought there was a ban on construction."  The construction worker answered, "This is essential construction."  To which our Library Defender responded asking, "How is it essential?"  The construction worker's answer: "It's affordable housing."  When the Library Defender expressed astonishment and insisted, "But this is a luxury condo!"  the construction workers disputed the point, saying that the building had an affordable connection.  "But that's in another neighborhood," our Library Defenders said.  "No, it's in this condo," the construction worker replied.  Perhaps the construction worker did not know he was wrong about where the "affordable housing" will be located?

As Michael Bloomberg Runs For President It’s Time To Resurrect And Reissue Our “Save New York City Libraries From Bloomberg Developer Destruction” Petition— (To Remind People How Mayor Bloomberg Defunded New York Libraries In Order To Sell Them To Real Estate Developers)

With Michael Bloomberg running for president it’s time to remind people what kind of mayor he was.

In 2013, when Bloomberg was mayor of New York, Citizens Defending Libraries formed immediately issuing our “Save New York City Libraries From Bloomberg Developer Destruction” petition.

We formed Citizens Defending Libraries and issued our petition  to oppose Bloomberg’s program of deliberately defunding New York City libraries at a time of increasing public use, population growth and increased city wealth, shrinking our library system to create real estate deals for wealthy real estate developers.  He launched an unjust and shortsighted plan that was particularly unfair in a time of cutbacks in education and escalating disparities in opportunity.

With Michael Bloomberg now running for president, it looks like it’s time to resurrect and republish our petition.  Actually, it can still be signed. We are still working to oppose the sale and defunding of libraries, the elimination of books and librarians.  We are still sending out periodic emails to the signers of our petition to keep people up to date about defending libraries and the threats they face.  And there is so much for people to know. . .

The plans Bloomberg launched to sell New York City go back until at least 2004 or 2005. In the Summer of 2007 the Mayor Bloomberg and First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris expressed enthusiasm for the NYPL’s plans to sell and redevelop major central destination Manhattan Libraries.  That included the shrink-and-sink sale of the beloved central destination Donnell Library in midtown Manhattan, which was sold in what was essentially a no-bid  deal that shortchanged the public and provided a windfall that enriched Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner with a $30 million windfall.

The first library sold, the 97,000-square foot, five-story central destination Donnell Library on what was documented to be the most valuable block in Manhattan at the time, was sold to net the NYPL less than $25,000 million.  The penthouse in the luxury tower that replaced it in the 50-story luxury tower replacing Donnell went on the market for $60 million.  Another single lower-level condo unit in the luxury building, 43A, sold for $20,110,437.50.  There is also a 114 guest room luxury hotel in the tower.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Chinese investors made that hotel,“the most highly valued hotel in the U.S.” after agreeing to buy it for “more than $230 million. . .  .more than $2 million a room.” . .

. .  In the luxury restaurants in the luxury hotel in the tower that now claims to the once publicly owned site, you can get $1,500 Ice Cream Sundaes and $500 Cocktails while you luxuriate on coyote pelts.


Bloomberg who was to leave office January 31, 2013, made the very expensive consolidating shrinkage Central Library Plan, which involved the sale of the Manhattan libraries, a stated priority to achieve by his term's end.  Similarly, it was his goal to achieve the shrink-and-sink sale of Brooklyn's second biggest library, the Business, Career, Education and federal depository library in downtown Brooklyn on the edge of Brooklyn Heights by the end of his term.  He didn't meet these time frames and his plans were somewhat derailed through work of Citizens Defending Libraries and other activist we teamed up with.  When other, better uses were proposed for the funds to be plowed into vastly expensive Manhattan library sale plans, those plans were unacceptable to Bloomberg.  Scott Sherman says in his book (“Patience and Fortitude- Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library”) on the subject, "It seems that for Bloomberg, it was all or nothing."

It's important to pay attention to who, along with Bloomberg, is selling off NYC libraries.  Bloomberg cared enough about implementing these plans to have many of his administration high-ups on the city's three library boards.  His counsel became the chair of the Brooklyn Public Library board of trustees. Bloomberg's official representative on the New York Public Library board was his very own sister,  Marjorie Tiven.  At the press March 11, 2008 press conference announcing launch of the plans for the consolidating shrinkage of the Manhattan libraries Bloomberg praised his "friend" Stephen A. Schwarzman, one of the main people pushing NYPL libraries in sales out the door to benefit people like Jared Kushner.   Schwarzman is one of Trumps top economic advisors. He's a remarkable piece of work involved in arranging for the wholesale sale and privatization of American Public assets, proud to describe himself as a good friend of  Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MBS”-  You know the dismemberment killing of Jamal Khashoggi and Yemen war). . . . Not surprisingly, Bloomberg also hobnobs with MBS.

People should remember what Bloomberg did when was entrusted with New York City's libraries as Bloomberg now asks to be entrusted with the U.S. presidency. 

Exile of Another Journalist From Corporate Mainstream Media, David Wright Suspended By ABC– This Time It’s Not For Being Anti-war, It’s Just For Being Honest About How Corporate Media News Doesn’t Serve The Public

Here’s a striking news story. ABC has suspended veteran journalist David Wright because of secretly recorded remarks in which we described with frankness his opinion that mainstream corporate media, doesn’t properly serve the public. . .  It means we’ll have to add another journalist to our list of journalists exiled from corporate mainstream media.  (See: List of Journalists Fired or Self-exiled From Mainstream Media Outlets Because They Expressed or Wanted to Express Views (Like Being Critical of U.S. Wars) Unacceptable to the Outlets They Were Working For.)

We’ll also have to note how Wright’s suspension breaks the typical pattern of so many other exiled journalists on our list: Wright was not fired for expressing any antiwar sentiments, only for expressing his misgivings about the overall corporate media news system. And maybe for saying he personally favors a national health insurance, or thinks that there are too many billionaires?

What’s wrong overall with the corporate media news system may explain why the corporate media so often encourages us to go to war, but Wright’s secretly recorded remarks didn’t connect any of those dots.

ABC suspended its veteran correspondent despite David Wright’s history and credentials:

•    Emmy Award-winning ABC News correspondent. 
•    Joined the network nearly 20 years ago.
•    He has covered the White House and was "Nightline's" lead political reporter during the 2016 presidential campaign.

It’s remarkable that Wright was suspended for the remarks he privately shared given what he said.  His remarks, which actually seem wise and perceptive, were:

I feel terrible about it.  I feel that the truth suffers, the voters are poorly informed…

    And so, it's like there's no upside in — or our bosses don't see an upside in — doing the job we're supposed to do, which is to speak truth to power and hold people to account.

* * *
I don’t think we are terribly interested in the voters

* * *

The fake news abounds.  There are problems with the truth these days. 

* * *
The commercial imperative is incompatible with news. …

 It became a profit center, a promotion center. Like now, you can't watch "Good Morning America" without there being a Disney princess or a Marvel Avenger appearing. It's all self-promotion. And promotion of the company and also promotion of individuals within the company. As opposed to, kind of, the dedication to the story and a commitment to stories that we need to tell but that are maybe hard to tell.
           
* * *

I think some of that, at least in the places where I work and the  places like it, is that with Trump, we're interested in three things. We're interested in the outrage of the day, the investigation, and the palace intrigue of who's stabbing who. Beyond that, we don't really cover the guy. …   

We don't hold him to account. We also don't give him credit for what things he does do. …

And we're in this awkward moment where  — and created by this awkward moment — where we have this f**king president. And we can't figure out how to challenge him.

* * *

I'd consider myself a socialist. Like I think there should be national health insurance. I'm totally fine with reining in corporations. I think there are too many billionaires, and I think that there's a wealth gap. That's a problem.

* * *

So you know, real people talk about practical issues, when they’re thinking about a a candidate, “I want to get back n the workforce,” or “I need medical care for whatever.” Those things aren’t TV friendly things.  You know, we want to focus on impeachment, we want to focus on the big sh*t going on, but the things that help people make up their mind are little shit. 


* * *

I think that we don’t have the bandwidth to give everybody a fair shot .  And we should.

**

We are all guilty of the same thing.  I think all these big news organizations- I’m speaking about broadcast television.  That’s all Im speaking about: ABC, CBS, NBC.  And we recognize that we are dinosaurs and we’re in danger of dying.

In the secret recording Wright also exchanges views with his colleague Andy Feis that the media is screwing up in presidential campaign coverage by covering just the "horse race" aspect of things, not giving candidates their due, just wanting to do "flavor of the month, flavor of the week," wanting to emphasize conflict and keep moving on.

The incongruity that Wright was suspended for these remarks constituting news and insight about corporate media news that's probably more important and valuable than much of ABC News' own standard fare, is what is and what should be the main story here, although the story comes with a footnote important to pass along: The secrete recording was made by Project Veritas, typically described as a "far-right activist" group that often unreliably edits what it publishes after setting up entrapments.  It's unclear what Veritas thought it was proving about bias in the media when it recorded Wright and published what he said.  As you can read above, Wright's criticisms include that media doesn't, in his opinion give Trump credit when credit is due; his views are considered, not one-sided.

Here is the Project Veritas video:

‘Socialist’ ABC Reporter Admits Bosses Spike News Important to Voters, 'Don’t Give Trump Credit', February 26, 2020

The story was covered as a headline by Democracy Now, "ABC Suspends David Wright over Remarks Secretly Recorded by Far-Right Group," February 27, 2020, and the Salon coverage with worthwhile, "ABC's David Wright told the truth about network news and Trump — and paid the price," Dan Froomkin, February 27, 2020.

"ABC Suspends David Wright over Remarks Secretly Recorded by Far-Right Group,"

"ABC's David Wright told the truth about network news and Trump — and paid the price,"

Privatization of History: Scary Information About What Is Happening At Our National Archives and Records Administration

"Erasing" history or "privatizing" it?  Churchill, a man whose flaws you may be unfamiliar with said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”-- And he did.

This one hits home for us at Citizens Defending Libraries.  At Citizens Defending Libraries we have paid much attention to how the shutting down, selling and deliberate underfunding of libraries relates to information control, information elimination, and censorship.

On February 6th, Democracy Now had a story about how millions of documents are being expunged from the National Archives.  This was right after the National Archives delivered an altered version of history concerning the 2017 Women’s March by doctoring a photograph of the March that the Archives used as a main feature for a new exhibit, The doctoring removed criticisms of President Trump.  See:  Erasing History: The National Archives Is Destroying Records About Victims of Trump’s ICE Policies.

Our National Archives is a form library intended to be a repository for the protection of our country’s history, as well as a form of watchdog for its protection.  Let’s note again: It’s a form of library.  Matthew Connelly, professor of history at Columbia University and principal investigator at History Lab, interviewed for the Democracy Now story about the expungements said that:

a lot of what’s happening at the National Archives is happening because they are being starved of resources.  They have a smaller budget now than they had back in 2008. That budget has been cut every year for the last three years.

That sounds exactly like our New York City libraries.  And we will remind you that there is no excuse for starving our New York City libraries of resources the way we are being starved, because libraries are an almost infinitesimal portion of our city budget, especially in terms of the benefits they deliver.

Mr. Connelly was on Democracy Now, having written a recent piece for The New York Times on the Archive expungements headlined “Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE.”

While the hook that was used for both the Democracy Now interview and Mr. Connelly’s New York Times op-ed was the destruction of information about the recent and ongoing atrocities being committed by ICE under Trump, the violations of “immigrant rights” involved, and how ICE may be “destroying records from Trump’s first year, including the detainees’ complaints about civil rights violations and shoddy medical care,” Mr. Connally ventured further in his concerns.  He expressed his worries about our government’s “long history of destroying records related to the overthrow of democratically elected governments, mind control experiments and torture,” and he noted how our country has “destroyed all of the records of the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [he didn’t get to finish his sentence].”  He noted that the “Department of the Interior and the National Archives have decided to delete files on endangered species, offshore drilling inspections and the safety of drinking water.”

The Democracy Now headline for its segment with Mr. Connelly refers to “Erasing History,” but is this characterization directly on target?  Isn’t this instead, a likely “privatization” of history?

In his New York Times op-ed Mr. Connelly mentions how now when things go into the National Archives, “Everything must be digital, or the departments and agencies must use their own resources to scan them.”

We are currently in an age when there is unprecedented private storage of data.  Everything is saved.  Data storage is insanely cheap, and keeps getting cheaper.  Much of that data storage is done by companies like Amazon, private companies that have strong ties to the CIA and the military industrial complex.

With private data collection running rampant for every conceivable purpose, is it reasonable to think that any anything that ever exists in digital form, even if that digital existence is brief, is ever truly expunged, that it truly ever vanishes?  Is it reasonable to believe that just because we starve our libraries and public national archive, that the information they made available, however briefly, especially if it was made available digitally, will not continue to exist in private hands?  Probably not.

When information exists digitally, it is easy to suck it out on into private databases a wholesale basis. . .   It is instructive to remember that, before his premature and extremely disheartening death, Aaron Swartz, the young activist  who was, among other things, a fan of libraries and an advocate for democratic empowerment through publicly available information (plus an open internet with net neutrality), was legally persecuted by our government for sucking out digital information on a wholesale basis to do exactly the opposite: He downloaded 4.8 million academic journal articles from a from a private database with the probable intent of making them more publicly accessible.  A number of years before, Swartz downloaded and made more freely available to the public 2.7 million federal court documents (essentially the law) from a federal database, documents which were technically already public, but were somehow not actually readily accessible to the public unless they paid to go through private channels, except through private channels.  Prosecuted for his download of the academic journal articles, Swartz faced a potential 90 years in prison and his father accused the government of hounding him and bringing about his death.
         
It is therefore important to understand that what we are talking about is the privatization of history and information, not its erasure.

The control of history and its narratives has been going on for a long time with those who are powerful thinking a lot about it.  Winston Churchill famously said, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”  Our more liberal friends from the United Kingdom, who are better and more knowledgeably acquainted with Churchill, tell us they have very mixed feelings about “Winnie.”  Their feelings toward him are probably less favorable than ours, as we on this side of the pond, have likely been subjected to more unadulterated myth-making propaganda about the man.  There is much that was simply appalling about Churchill, but the fact that Churchill did, indeed, actually write a lot of the history about himself counteracts much of that.

Interviewed on On The Media, journalist Madhusree Mukerjee explained that after World War II, Churchill:

had complete access to all United Kingdom documents and an entire team of researchers and writers who helped him actually write six volumes or so of his World War II memoirs. And these volumes put Churchill at the center of the war, whereas historians have filled out some of the detail, which is that it was the Soviets who defeated the Nazis and the Americans who defeated the Japanese.

(See: Churchill's Forgotten, Ruthless Past, March 16, 2018)

Mukerjee also notes that “when his political career was in shards after the First World War, he wrote a history then, as well,” and that he wrote several histories, including “something called The History of the English-Speaking Peoples.”

Putting the resources of the British government at Churchill’s disposal to write is one way of letting history be written by those that command the reins of power. . . But pulling back on our public resources to put all of our history in the hands of private corporate monopolies that do not have the best interests of the public assuredly at heart is probably an even more serious surrender of the custodianship of truth and memory.  Global warming anyone?  How about perpetual wars?

. .  Privatizing history is probably far worse than just trying to erase it.

Our last thought on this: You may have already observed for yourself that, whether its studying to understand history or just trying to follow the news, the most vital key to comprehension is most certainly a careful focus on what the powerful don’t want you to know.

PS: (added February 29, 2020)– On February 21, On The Media caught up to run a segment, “The Vanishing National Archives," about  Matthew Connelly, his  New York Times op-ed and the expungements from the National Archives.

It mostly tracked the story above:

by the end of this year, they're [the archive is] going to be able to start destroying records from the first year of the Trump administration when it first began to crack down on undocumented immigration.

* *

[On the chopping block] . .  everything from aviation safety to the takeover of American firms by foreign nationals. All of those records are slated for destruction in the Department of Interior, records related to protection of drinking water, enforcement of laws on endangered species, the management of the mismanagement of native lands, native assets, all that stuff's gonna get deleted, too.

However, it ends using a nice quote from Churchill’s counterpart in the United States, Franklin Roosevelt:

“A nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people.” So to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

Stephen A. Schwarzman Is Specifically Cited By New York Magazine’s Frank Rich As He Asks: What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies?- And Then Rich Compares Schwarzman To The American Industrialists Who Collaborated With Hitler

In New York Magazine NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman is rounded up as part of a rogues gallery of "toadies" compared to the wealthy American's who supported Hitler's fascism in Germany.

New York Magazine doesn’t like Trump.  Like a lot of other blue media these days it runs a lot of articles telling us how bad Trump is.  We don’t think there is huge value to the proliferation of articles nearly everywhere that focus on, describe or intimate that Donald J. Trump is the cause of all our national problems rather than a mere symptom.  We venture to say that incessant focus on Trump personally is a distraction from discussion of issues and problems that are institutionalized and embedded deeply in the political and power infrastructure of our country.

Nevertheless, some of these polemics against Trump also, on occasion, describe those problems that exist institutionally in this country and point out things that are wrong with the political and power infrastructure of our country.  Frank Rich has a new “Intellgencier” article in New York Magazine this week that we think falls into that category:   What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies? Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues, January 7, 2020.

The article is also of particular interest to us as library defenders because the article chooses several times to cite NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman as a particular and prime example of the people in power that Mr. Rich sees as facilitating the rise of fascism in the United States, in much the same way that American businessmen supported Hitler’s fascism in Germany.

And while Schwarzman, much like Trump, may be viewed as a symptom of problems with our country extending to the way that our New York City libraries are run, Schwarzman is also a very visible symbol of those problems.  Just the way that Trump has made himself extra conspicuous by putting his name ubiquitously on so many buildings and projects (even when he had scant involvement in bringing them about), so too has Schwarzman made himself extra conspicuous when it comes to libraries by insisting that his name be plastered with repetitive excessiveness on the NYPL’s 24nd Street Central reference library. . . . Something the NYPL trustees did for Schwarzman because Schwarzman transfered a paltry $100 million to the NYPL on the understanding that the NYPL would initiate the Central Library Plan (and probably Donnell) real estate deal sell-offs of libraries.

People are now, with embarrassment, busy ripping the name of Trump off various edifices.  Maybe, due to similar embarrassment, we'll also soon see the Schwarzman name ripped off the 42nd Street Central Reference Library.

Schwarzman has a knack for being on the wrong side of things.  As Rich argues, that may be because he is amoral and will do anything for money.  So relatively recently, we wrote about Schwarzman again in connection with his hob nobbing praise for Saudi Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (you know . . .  the dismemberment killing of Jamal Khashoggi).  We wrote when the NYPL was going to turn over space to the Crown Prince to teach young people how to enhance their reputations.  See: Stopped!! NYPL's Plan To Turn Over Its 42nd Street Central Reference Library Grand Celeste Bartos Ballroom For Event Honoring The Infamous Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Good Friend of Stephen Schwarzman?)

Schwarzman with Ghislaine Maxwell

That article also talked about Schwarzman’s connection with burning down the Amazon and Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice in his pedophiliac sexual and political blackmail operation.

Soon after, we came back with much more bad news about Schwarzman when he was featured (and on the cover) in a new book about the maneuvers that transferred an extraordinarily vast amount of middle and lower income American wealth, what people had invested in their homes, to people like Schwarzman.  See: New Book “Home Wreckers” Identifies NYPL Trustee (And 42nd Street Library Namesake) Stephen A. Schwarzman As Key Culprit (Along With His Friends and Neighbors) In The Huge Theft That’s Responsible For Depleting Wealth of Other Americans.  

Schwarzman is the man who thinks that taxes on the poor should be raised while the loopholes that cause him, the highest paid CEO, over $1 billion in a single year, to pay far lower taxes than anyone else.

We agree with Matt Taibbi that the American media is far too focused on engendering counterproductive and artificial hatreds.  We agree with Taibbi also cheap that ramping up to histrionic Hitler and Nazi comparisons is rarely constructive and tends to tamp down rational thinking, but Schwarzman himself has indulged in this kind of thing.  It was Schwarzman who, perceiving himself to be involved in a class war, said that, when it come to protecting the preferential tax breaks he receives, the rest of us are like Hitler.

In using Stephen Schwarzman as a key cited example, Frank Rich’s article makes the case that the greedy self interest of such wealthy people as Schwarzman makes them amoral, as if they don’t care whether fascism will triumph.  There is another interpretation others have offered that Rich doesn’t put forth.  That is the argument that, for many of the wealthy looking to preserve their wealth in the run up and time of to World War II, those individuals actually preferred fascism to the possibly alternatives, particularly communism or socialism or any forms of wealth redistributions.

Here is some of what Rich wrote about Schwarzman and Schwarzman’s comrades whom he describes as “Trump toadies.”  Note that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner also gets mentioned and that Schwarzman and Kushner were both involved in the NYPL’s sell-off the beloved Donnell Library, the first major NYC library sale real estate deal.  (Emphasis supplied below)

You don’t have to be a card-carrying fascist to collaborate with fascists and help them seize power; you just have to be morally bankrupt and self-serving. As the authoritative American historian of Vichy France, Robert O. Paxton, has pointed out, it was only “a rather small minority” of France’s wartime collaborators who were motivated by an actual “ideological sympathy with Nazism and Fascism” to go along with the Nazi puppet regime fronted by Marshal Philippe Pétain in Vichy. A more widespread incentive was “personal gain.” Others rationalized their complicity by persuading themselves they were acting in the “national interest.” It would be no surprise if that distribution of motivations persists among Trump collaborators today. Such backers as the financier Stephen Schwarzman and New York real-estate titans like Stephen Ross of Hudson Yards no doubt congratulate themselves on acting in the “national interest” while pocketing personal gains measured in either political influence or on a profit-and-loss statement.

In France, such ostensible moral distinctions among collaborators were rendered moot in the long-delayed and gruesome postwar reckoning.

    * * *

The antecedents for Trumpist enablers from the tycoon sector both within and outside the White House — Cohn, Schwarzman, Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, et al. — can be found in those now-vilified captains of 1930s American industry who were prime movers in various back-channel schemes to appease Hitler. The America First Committee’s members included Henry Ford, an unabashed anti-Semite who was name-checked admiringly in Mein Kampf, and Avery Brundage, an Illinois construction magnate and president of the U.S. Olympic Committee who bent to Hitler’s will by yanking the only two Jewish competitors on an American team in the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin. . . .

These businessmen’s machinations did not bring about peace in their time but did bring financial quid pro quos that fattened their bottom lines.

 . . . Alfred P. Sloan, the longtime GM chairman, explained his philosophy: “An international business operating throughout the world should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs of its management, or the political beliefs of the countries in which it is operating.” Surely Jared Kushner, Mnuchin, and Schwarzman couldn’t have put it any better as they cavorted with Mohammed bin Salman at his investment conference in Riyadh in October, a year after the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi. As with Ford, Brundage, Mooney, and the rest, any loot they accrued in exchange for their pact with the Devil will be unearthed in good time.

Mr. Rich ends, or nearly ends with the observation about all of the Trump “enablers and collaborators” he has singled out for the opprobrium of his article that: “It is too late for them to save their reputations.”

What Rich doesn’t ever bring into the conversation is that the powerful working with Nazi’s didn’t end with World War II, even that war’s conclusion.  After World War II, many Nazi’s were brought into this country, and it wasn’t just the rocket expert Wernher von Braun.  Many escaped anything like a prosecution at Nuremberg.  The name of one major U.S. government classified program to bring Nazis to the United States was “Operation Paperclip.”  With luck, its something you can read about in the libraries if. . .