Citizens Defending Libraries Was At the Climate Strike March on September 20th In New York City.

Citizens Defending Libraries Was At the Climate Strike March on September 20th In New York City.

Here are some pictures.

And we were handing out small (non-paper-intensive) leaflets with links of interest o the subject of climate change and libraries.

As Striking L.A. Teachers Push Back, Analysis That Profit-Seeking Billionaires Are Desperate To Privatize In Order To Lower Expectations And Prove Government Doesn't Work (cf: Fights For Green New Deal and Universal Healthcare)

On Deomcracy Now's report on the Los Angeles teachers strike against privatization: Cecily Myart-Cruz and Eric Blanc

We could write about the teachers strike in Los Angeles with respect to one very direct relationship to defending libraries: They are demanding more librarians, along with their other demands (for smaller class sizes, higher pay, the regulation of charter schools and more nurses, and counselors).  But the more important connection to make is how the teachers fight against privatization is part of a bigger overall fight against privatization of all our institutions, including places like schools and libraries where we go to develop our minds, educate ourselves, and learn about democracy and how to understand power.

It is sobering, how closely the attacks on the Los Angeles public schools involve tactics parallel to those used against New York City public libraries as those launching those attacks attempt to lower the expectations of what the public can expect from government and the benefits that can flow to the public through the public commons.

The Democracy Now coverage of the strike this week is very good: “Public Education Is Not Your Plaything”: L.A. Teachers Strike Against Privatization & Underfunding, January 15, 2019.

In the words of Eric Blanc, a reporter covering the strike for The Guardian and Jacobin: “the question of privatization here in Los Angeles has been put to the fore” as 20,000 people marched through downtown Los Angeles protesting the privatization of Los Angeles public schools.  In The Nation Blanc wrote: “Pro-charter billionaires like Eli Broad and Reed Hastings spent an unprecedented $9.7 million in the spring of 2017 to ensure the election of a pro-privatization majority [to] the school board.”

This resulted in new superintendent, Austin Beutner, taking charge of the system, “who was imposed by billionaires who bought the 2017 elections” and who:

has a plan to downsize the district to push students into charter schools. . .

So, what we see by Beutner is fundamentally a push to really dismantle the institution that he’s nominally supposed to be leading.

Does this sound familiar to ears of library defenders here in New York City?  The following will also sound familiar.  Beutner maintains:

that there’s a financial crisis, that he would love to meet the demands of teachers. But we know that there’s actually a $1.86 billion reserve. And so what’s at stake is, he doesn’t want to use that money to improve the schools, because if he were to do that, it would undermine his mission to basically dismantle and privatize L.A. public schools.

Substantial reserve funds that those running the system won't access when they want to privatize the system's assets?  Yes familiar.

This assessment of strike leader and National Education Association vice president at United Teachers Los Angeles Cecily Myart-Cruz will add still more to what library defenders will find familiar: That there is (as with the policies pushed by Betsy DeVos Trump's U.S. Secretary of Education who is deeply involved in pushing the charter schools she is connected to) a:

systematic underfunding of public education, we’re talking about a privatization model that has swept the country

Of all the things said during the discussion, the analysis of Mr. Blanc’s below is what struck us as the most wise and most critical to think about:

I think the most important thing to keep in mind there is that public education is like the last bastion of the public sector in the United States. They’ve taken away most of everything else we had, and put it into private hands. And so, really, what you’re seeing is working people really concentrating around public education as the last right that we have for all people in this country. And so, at the same time, big business wants to dismantle this, because they know that if they can lower people’s expectations . . that they don’t deserve anything, then it’s going to be much harder to fight for other gains that we need, such as Medicare for all or a Green New Deal. So, really, what we’re seeing is: Is this going to be a country that uses its vast wealth to fund human needs, or is it going to be using this wealth to fund, you know, really big billionaires?

We previously covered in detail the assessment that the success of libraries, by their example are a threat to the privatizers here: Libraries As A Threat To The “Perspective” That Virtually Everything Should Be Dictated And Run By The Forces of Market Capitalism.

That’s right, if the public can be convinced that government can’t do anything successfully, it means there are a lot of things we can never “expect” to get, like medicare for all, or a solutions for our climate chaos crisis and global warming.  (See: If the Government Shutdown Wasn’t About Obamacare (And It Isn’t), Then It Was About?. . . Ready To Be Hot Under The Collar?)

Irony: Manhattan’s Newest “Library Of The Future” Will Be Named The “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library,” But A “Librarian Of The Future,” Personified By Edward G. Robinson In His Last Role Says Niarchos Acted “Miserably”

Edward G. Robinson playing a librarian of the future in his last role had stern and unappreciative things to say about Stavros Niarchos after whom the NYPL will name its newest "Library of the Future"

Perhaps you have picked up on this point already: What was once the Mid-Manhattan Library is undergoing going changes now, and it will be relaunched under a new name the “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library.”  But is this “SNFL” rechristening of the library to name it after the Greek shipping millionaire fortuitous? . . .

The NYPL is promoting the book-eliminating changes at the Mid-Manhattan Library, a consolidating shrinkage that will simultaneously eliminate New York’s biggest science library (which will be turned into a comic book focused “Pop-Culture Museum” by another ship-owning multi-billionaire) as a “Library of the Future.”  There is, however, one thing that may inconveniently haunt that “future”: It’s a “Librarian of the Future” who says the Greek shipping magnate Niarchos “acted very miserably” towards him. 

We are speaking of Edward G. Robinson who played a librarian of the future, a “book,” in the science fiction, future dystopia film “Soylen Green.”  Robinson’s role as a future librarian was famously the last role he ever played shortly before dying: He died January 26, 1973 just 12 days after the filming.  Robinson’s remarks about Niarchos were published in the New York Times shortly before his death, November 5, 1972, in an interview about his life that he gave to promote the film: Little Caesar' Is Still Punching, by Charles Higham.

It’s an interview well worth reading.  You’ll find yourself feeling for the elderly Robinson who had suffered and was feeling the effects of a number of tribulations at the end of his life, including having battling with the House Committee on Un-American Activities when his blacklisting meant he was suddenly deprived of any opportunities to work in the early 1950s.

In the interview Robinson describes the Soylent Green film:

“Soylent Green’ is, I believe, an important picture, a harrowing projection of our existence 50 years from now. It shows very clearly what may well become of us if we don't look out. It is set in Manhattan, a city of 40 million people living miserably and horribly in a depersonalized Orwellian state.

Made in 1972 and released in 1973, the film looked forward to what was then decades away, the year 2022, a year we are now actually about to arrive at.  Whatever people will tell you about when we truly first knew about the dangers of greenhouse emissions and global warming, the film presciently explains that in its version of 2022 “greenhouse effect” has created a stiflingly warm world climate, “A heat wave all year round” where “everything’s burning up.”  The world ecosystems have collapsed and people are starving because food production is minimal.

In this Manhattan of the future, wealth inequality is extremely accentuated, with the wealthy living apart in tall luxury towers protected by extra security.  They treat the common folk of the world as disposable and, with a sort of Harvey Weinstein sort of callousness, apartments come optionally with attractive and usable young women referred to as “furniture.”  The wealthy of this world are more likely than not connected with a few conglomerate mega-corporations, which, if you look behind the scenes, are in control of and virtually indistinguishable from the government that's in charge.  The highest government official wears a military style jacket.  The public is helpless and uninformed.

If you want to know anything, if you want to have any hope of piecing together any part of the big picture to understand matters in context, things that might otherwise never be fully understood or investigated in this world of the future, then books are important . . .

Edward G. Robinson, the future's librarian, a "book"

. . . That’s where the character played by Edward G. Robinson comes in.  He is the one who has access to books and who does critical research to understand the world better.  In the future slang of the movie’s invention he is known as “a book,” but that slang term is essentially the term for the librarians still functioning in that future. The Sol Roth character played by Robinson has his own personal library of books in his shared apartment.  To extend the utility of that small collection he periodically meets with other “books” (other librarians of the future) to exchange books and their knowledge of them as part of a more effectively functioning commons.  A key point plot in terms of learning the landscape of power behind what's unfolding is a banned corporate book that reveals what the powerful corporate elite knew, but weren’t sharing about the escalating waste of the world’s environment.  The frail and elderly Roth is also a touchstone in that he remembers distinctly the once robust natural world of plenty that has vanished.

A key censored book: what the powerful corporate elite knew, but weren’t sharing about the escalating waste of the world’s environment.

Roth, “the book,” lives with and is a symbiotically functioning sidekick assisting the film’s main protagonist, a police detective played by Charlton Heston.

Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson in the film

A major set-piece in the film that sets up the film’s climax is the ceremonially orchestrated death that Robinson’s Sol Roth chooses for himself.  The scene was filmed just days before Edward G. Robinson’s own actual death and, to add the ultimate pathos, Robinson reportedly waited to tell Charlton Heston  (and only Heston) that his doctor had told him he was actually about to die until just before the cameras rolled.  And this reportedly affected Heston’s performance.

Edward G. Robinson’s gripe with Stavros Niarchos, laid out fully in the Times interview, involves how  Robinson lost $3 million worth of paintings in a divorce suit.  Robinson had been an avid art collector.  Then, when he was still financially weakened in the wake of his recent blacklisting, he was forced to sell much of his collection.  He sold to Niarchos who later was unwilling to sell back paintings that Robinson was most personally attached to:

    . . .  in order to comply with the California community property laws in his divorce from the former actress Gladys Lloyd, whom he had married in 1927, he had to sell more than half his superb collection, started in 1933, of masterpieces of art. “It was so brutal—the worst ordeal I ever went through. I went to everyone I could think of—rich men who had an affinity for art—Winthrop Rockefeller, Bobby Lehman, Kirkeby out hereto try to arrange for a loan to pay off the estimated worth of half the paintings, but these men played games with me; they only agreed to help provided I would sell them four or five of the paintings for little or no money. And so I said, ‘No deal.’

    “My wife had been very ill, and it proved impossible to reach any kind of sane agreement with her. I had no real estate, very few stocks, nothing else could sell. I had put my money, my whole life's blood, into paintings. Finally, some dealers took the paintings for over three million on behalf of Niarchos, the Greek shipping millionaire. He acted very miserably in the whole matter. He wouldn't let me buy back what I wanted when I finally got the money. Just a few things he condescended to part with, crumbs from the master's table. It was horrible.

    “The worst blow of all was losing Rouault's ‘The Old Clown.’ It was the king of my collection, I used to call him ‘Everyman’ The symbol of man's inhumanity to man. After that divorce suit, I realized just what the phrase inhumanity to man’ really meant.”

    Robinson's eyes clouded over with tears. “As for the remainder of the pictures, I don't know what I'll do with them. For years selected groups, classes, have come to see them. I have never closed them off from the public. You don't own any painting, you pay for the privilege of being a custodian. But I don't like the idea of them ending up in a museum. It's like putting a beautiful dead man or woman in morgue. Last December, I was in the Prado and I was horrified: the paintings there are badly hung, badly lit, you can't see the details. And it's supposed to be a foremost tourist attraction of Spain. No, I don't want to leave these lovely things to a museum, although I suppose inevitably they will end up there. What will I do with them otherwise? I don't know. I don't know.”

George Rouault's "Le Vieux Clown" or "The Old Clown." 
"The symbol of man's inhumanity to man."  -
"It was horrible. . .  I realized just what the phrase inhumanity to man’ really meant.”

Latest Non-reporting of National News?– Deaths in Puerto Rico

What does the number 4,645 on San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruzhat mean? You'd be unlikely to guess the magnitude of its importance given the lack of reporting in the media and misinformation in these New York Times headlines.

This seems like the latest non-reporting of the news: an update on the (intentional?) mishandling of the crisis in Puerto Rico that has gone largely unreported.  On Wednesday, May 30th the national media should have covering a new report from researchers at Harvard, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, calculating that the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria is probably at least 4,645, and perhaps as many as 5,740, at least 70 times higher than official governmental count of just 64. . . .  A death toll of 4,645 would make Hurricane Maria the second-deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, behind only the Galveston Texas Hurricane in 1900.
                               
. . . What was the media devoting huge time to covering while leaving this national disaster news essentially unreported?: The firing of Roseanne Barr!

Low-balling in the headline in the Times print edition when lower in the web edition- see below.

Meanwhile you have to wonder about some of the reporting on the number of deaths that actually did get published, for instance, The New York Times: While Democracy Now reported that the calculation was that there were at least 4,645 deaths, and perhaps as many as 5,740, the Times print edition headline inaccurately characterized the study with a low-balling “Hurricane’s Death Toll In Puerto Rico May Top 4,600, New Study Says.”  The Times web version of the story low-balled it still further: “Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria Death Toll Could Exceed 4,000, New Study Estimates.” . . .

. . . Obviously, “4,600" is 1,140 less than the 5,740 estimate number that the Times didn’t even mention in its article, and “4,000" is 1,740 less.

The Times reporting also removes context from the photo that San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz tweeted of herself wearing a hat with the number 4,645.

This is an example why we are holding "Where Do You get Your News" forums, the next, our second, this Friday Evening June 1st.  Come join in the discussion.

The Destruction of Climate Change Information We need to Know and Libraries: This April’s Climate and Science Marches

Placard we carried at the April 29th Climate March

This post will be updated.

Saturday, April 29, Citizens Defending Libraries had representatives in Washington D.C. to spread the word, handing out thousands of flyers, that the shrinking and elimination of our libraries also threatens us with the loss of the information we need to know about climate change and how to deal with it.  For instance, the biggest science library in New York City, SIBL, the Science, Industry and Business Library, definitely one place you would hope to go to study climate change, is now being closed down, totally eliminated, the collection of science books it is supposed to house is biting the dust.

NYPL officials provided the New York City Council December 14th with an extremely dubious excuse for elimination of the Science library and its books: that it had abandoned collection of science books, expecting that people can resort to "the internet" to learn about science instead. 

Really? . . .

. . . The headlines in days before the Climate March were helping us make the case how specious this reasoning was.

•         Two days before the Climate March FCC Chair Ajit Pai unveiled a plan to end net neutrality, essentially privatize the internet meaning that private financial interests will will control the rights deciding the availability of information on the internet and how accessible it is:  

In Washington, D.C., the chair of the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday outlined a sweeping plan to dismantle net neutrality rules, which seek to keep the internet open and prevent corporate service providers from blocking access to websites, slowing down content or providing paid fast lanes for internet service.

Not unsurprisingly, it's a plan that's backed by the Koch brothers who want hare fighting for and manipulating our government and country into perpetuating the heavy and continued use of the climate-changing fossil fuels in which they are so heavily invested.  See also this follow-up in the week afterward:  Trump's FCC Chair Declares New War on Net Neutrality After 10-Year Battle for Free & Open Internet, May 09, 2017.

•         The day before the Climate March the Trump administration removed the Evironmental Protections Agency's pages relating to climate change, climate science, the impacts of climate change and what readers can do about climate change, all gone from the site replaced with a banner headline saying "this page is being updated."  See: EPA removes climate change page from website,by Devin Henry, April 28, 2017.

Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Carolyn McIntyre at the Climate March

Citizens Defending Libraries co-founders Carolyn McIntyre and Michael D. D. White at the Climate March

Here are the flyers we distributed thousands of at the March-

Small Flyer distributed at Washington D.C. April 29 Climate March.

Small Flyer distributed at Washington D.C. April 29 Climate March.

Selling and Shrinking Our Libraries,Eliminating Books and Librarians
    (VIA THE TRUMP TEAM’S KUSHNER & SCHWARZMAN) 
Shutting Down The Internet
    (ELIMINATING NET NEUTRALITY)

And Purging Climate Information from Government Websites Destroys the Information We Need To Survive

It Also Attacks Democracy. .
. . .  Reduces equal access and opportunity. . .

(For more see- Noticing New York- Libraries And Climate Change: The Dangerous Destruction of Information We May Need To Know To Survive)

Sign our petition on the web: Citizens Defending Libraries
Take action and inform yourself via
our web pages, Facebook, Twitter & Youtube

Flyer distributed at Washington D.C. April 29 Climate March.

Flyer distributed at Washington D.C. April 29 Climate March.

Eliminating Books, Selling and Shrinking Libraries- is an attack on Democracy, equal access and opportunity. . .. . and our chance for all of us to know about climate change and participate in its solutions?

DID YOU KNOW?:

•    Canada's government has destroyed irreplaceable climate change data in Canadian libraries, collected at taxpayer expense and gathered over more than a hundred years. Canada has the world's longest coastline, traveling up into the Arctic where some of the fastest, most critical climate change is taking place.

•    Records once available respecting New York climate history are no longer to be found at the NYPL's 42nd Street Central Reference Library. Banishing books, the NYPL is also totally eliminating the 34th Street Science Library because science can be fund “on the internet,” but the Trump administration is purging internet climate change information and wants to dispense with “net neutrality” access to information.

•    The reckless bulk destruction of rare and valuable books and information at the San Francisco Public Library meant that books with information about global warming were trashed and sent to landfills as the library bankrupted itself, shrinking into a technologically focused `library of the future'.

•    In the empty shelves of Brooklyn Public Libraries you can’t find Jane Jacobs’ writings suggesting that the answers for humanity’s survival will be developed ground up and that our relationships with nature need to be symbiotic.

(For more see- Noticing New York- Libraries And Climate Change: The Dangerous Destruction

of Information We May Need To Know To Survive)

Are libraries being purged of information with the Orwellian objective of preventing the public from knowing what it needs to know and creating more manageable, easier to control, top-down narratives in sync with the latest Koch brothers press releases?

Will our future news and information have to come from the likes of fracking endorser former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, appointed as United Nations `Climate Change Envoy'? 

Sign our petition on the web: Citizens Defending Libraries
Take action and inform yourself via
our web pages, Facebook, Twitter & Youtube

(You can also sign petitions against the elimination of net neutrality like the one from Mozilla.)