Sermonizing In Brooklyn Heights About Amazon (you know That “book seller”), Technology and Consumerism

Ana Levy-Lyons delivering her sermon on Amazon on November 11, 2018 at First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn

In New York City everybody is talking about Amazon now because of the plans unveiled to locate Amazon offices (with the piling on of huge public subsidies to the already wealthy) in Queens, New York, Long Island City.

Maybe people should also be talking about Amazon because it is the Christmas season and Amazon is raking it in.

November 11th there was a sermon at the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn.  It was in Brooklyn Heights, just around the corner and only a stone’s throw from the location of the second biggest library in Brooklyn, the central destination Business, Career and Education library that was sold off to build a luxury tower. The sermon by Minister Ana Levy-Lyons was about what it means for Amazon to be taking over.  You can find the full text of the sermon as well as listen to it here- Sermon: Technology & Religion: God As Consumer, November 11, 2018.

If you were there listening to the sermon you would have recognized in it some of the themes we have been writing about in Citizens Defending Libraries. In some respects the most up-to-date coverage of concerns about Amazon surfaced here in connection with books and the libraries has to do with the control of information: Amazon’s collection of information about all of its customers; questions about how it accelerated into total dominance of the market so fast while starting with the sale of books—  Nearly half of all books, both print and digital, are now sold by Amazon. . . . 

That statistic does not bode well for ensuring free speech or unfettered public discourse.  That concern amplifies especially when one considers how Amazon, including its ties to the internet, has significant roots in the defense and surveillance industry.  National Notice updated a Citizens Defending Libraries post publishing an article that addresses this: Interesting to Think That it All Began With BOOKS? Except That Amazon and World’s Wealthiest Man (As We Know Jeff Bezos Today) Didn’t Exactly Begin That Way. . . Saturday, November 3, 2018. – That was before the announcement of the plan to bring a complex of subsidized Amazon offices to Queens.       

But there are other concerns about what Amazon represents, concerns that we have also raised about the commercializing privatization of the libraries, turning libraries into consumer- and private enterprise-driven environments.  They are also to be worried about.  These are the kind of concerns about libraries that have been raised in the books about the dangerous transfigurations of libraries written by John E. Buschman and Ed D’Angelo, respectively:  “Dismantling the Public Sphere- Situating and Sustaining Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy,” and “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good.”  *  We've written about these books previously.

Ana Levy-Lyons began her November Amazon sermon vividly referencing Amazons’ ruthless strongarm tactics, but immediately segued to reference Amazon’s allure, dressed up in the notion that Amazon serves an ideal, consumerism, specifically that Amazon’s ruthlessness is permitted, even embraced because it serves:

    . . .  one thing, one shimmering, grand ideal: what the consumer wants. And what does the consumer want? Cheap goods. We want to buy stuff – a lot of stuff – and pay as little as possible. Amazon gets us there. . . .  it is quick, it’s easy, and it gets delivered to our door. What’s not to like?

Low prices: it is hard to object or criticize low prices when about half the population of the United States is so financially on the edge, living paycheck to paycheck, that they are not in a financial position to cover basic expenses if confronted with an emergency like the need for unexpected medical care, and they don’t have enough money to come up with even a $400 emergency expense.  And it is hard to, at the same time, remain conscious enough under these circumstances to factor in how Amazon’s subtractions from the economy are actually contributing to this desperation for those low prices.  (As we were writing this post a New York Times Sunday op-ed was published making exactly this point.)

But in her exceedingly eloquent sermon Ana Levy-Lyons went on to speak of how the reduction that redefines us as just mere consumers in the Amazon world flattens our dimensionality as human beings, so that we thus lack the “larger, fuller expressions of our selfhood,” and are reduced to the part of us that just “takes from the world.”  The sermon delivered in a church and Rev. Levy-Lyons’ diagnosis included her verdict that was a de-spiritualization.*

(* Shades of Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, and his choir, who in all their Hallelujah glory have aided our library fight mightily on many occasions.)

Of the list of illustrative examples she offered, most resonant for library defenders and those steeped in the world of books was that, as “consumers we want to buy books and music as cheaply as possible,” but as full-fledged “spiritual beings having a human experience on this earth . .  what we may really want is for writers and musicians to be able to make a living.”

Levy-Lyons also observed that this lack of human dimensionality is associated with a dementia-ality, a dementia that skews reality, that in a mixed-up way views the raising up the market forces of consumerism as paramount as an expression of freedom, democracy at work, if you will, even as an  expression of our individuality.

In his book, “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library,” Ed D’Dangelo discussed the threat these same ideas pose to the tradition of libraries (p.107) saying the “genius of market populism” is that it is sold “to the public as a form of liberation,” and, because it is supposedly inherently virtuous, the dictates of the market should therefore be allowed to control the managing all society’s choices, including with respect to the delivery of information.  But D’Angelo notes that the market does not necessarily promote democracy at all, and that these shifts of decision making over to the private sector mean that “in a very real sense we have returned to the feudal ages when power was private and the public realm had fallen into decay . .”
                       
One only has to take a step back to remind oneself that, as we witness Amazon quickly making its owner Jeff Bezos the wealthiest man in the world seemingly out of nowhere, plus the accompanying and very fast escalation of wealth inequality during these recent years, the results of unbridled capitalistic forces increasingly deliver more astounding inequality.  The results are far from egalitarian.  If the “freedom” offered in our market-structured consumer economy is to “vote” with our dollars, the opportunity to vote is extraordinarily unequal.  Not only doesn’t the one-man-one-vote ideal apply to the marketplace, but with economic inequality spiraling out of control, the power of the ballot box has been substantially diluted by the influence of money in politics.

D’Angelo, argues for libraries as the kind of public sphere realms essential to support true democracy; he says (p. 117) that “democracy requires rational deliberation in a public domain about matters of common interest” and that “even ideal markets fail to construct public spaces or to recognize common interests.”

Other commentators like Nathan Robinson, editor-in-chief at Current Affairs magazine, posit that the example of properly functioning libraries, which are traditionally egalitarian, publicly controlled and not controlled by a company, are regarded as a threat seen as “dangerous to a certain kind of a free-market orthodoxy” by those who want everything filtered through market capitalism structures.

That trepidation and urge to preclude or ward off such examples of successful alternatives to evermore pervasive market forces, whether it be a consciously developed strategy, or a response to subliminal impulse, may explain the efforts of monied interests to dismantle traditional libraries and recast them in a capitalist mode reflecting, to use John Buschman’s words (Dismantling the Public Sphere, p. 8), a “radically market-oriented public philosophy toward public cultural institutions.”

Flipping the question around, Buschman asks: If libraries are not providing an alternative model, are not serving democratic ideals, “What public purpose is served by public funding of” projects that “are imitative of the private sector?  What right do we have to public funding to compete with [other?] businesses.  Perhaps more importantly, does society need another model of media-dominated, entertainment oriented consumerism in its public institutions?”

Buschman suggests that the key to attaining the equilibrium whereby libraries will provide the needed democratic public sphere is to avoid the “‘steering mechanisms’ of money and power (i.e. corporate-dominated mass media).”

Buschman, serving up themes very much aligned with Ms. Levy-Lyons' sermon, writes (p. 121) that essentially the idea of a consumerish “give ‘em what they want” focus of librarianship, putting up “a large number of `hot’ items on the shelf to compete with bookstore chains” and quantifying the value of a library only through popularity ignores “merit or lasting value” in curating selections.  While not arguing that libraries should be unresponsive to the public, Buschman says that “customer-driven librarianship abandons a number of public sphere roles.”  “The first of these,” he says, is “our role in organized social memory and rational discourse in a democracy.”  He says that the consumer driven fixation on “exclusively what is popular at the moment” by definition “abandons the public sphere goal of a plurality of ‘voices’ and viewpoints on anything not ‘hot’ to a present or future reader.”  He reminds us that “there is a reason some services are in the public sector; their value is very real but difficult to measure and requires a different kind of judgement and management.”

Levy-Lyons similarly bemoans the lack of collaborative curation and creation of value with the Amazon/Bezos “populist” vision being an “anti-expert, anti-intellectual” belief that, high ideals should be set aside “as a matter of principle” and that “the customers around whom the world spins” should “have the final word.”
                               
But returning to the question of democracy, freedom . . .  as well as whether the consumer really does have the last word in what Levy-Lyons calls this “free market ideology on steroids”:  Levy-Lyons makes the case that while the public is sold the notion that Amazon and the market represent “free choice,” that’s hardly the case:

    . . .  here’s the irony: as humans – in our full selfhood as humans – we have free will. But as consumers today, we are far from free. Our consumer desires are manipulated and even manufactured from scratch by corporations. This has always happened to some extent, but today’s technologies allow that manipulation to get deep inside us, using data about our habits and preferences to craft unique campaigns tailored to evoke our particular longing for products. Virtual assistants, like Amazon’s “Alexa,” and smart appliances – entire smart homes! – anticipate, suggest, and even order for you the thing you’re gonna’ want next.

You can read or listen to Ms. Levy-Lyons sermon in full (about 1,100 words), for her examples respecting the implications of this in terms of the devastation of our environment, our politics, nationally and also around the world (Brazil, and perhaps she should now add Andalusia).

As for expressions of individuality as another likely barometer of freedom, Rev. Levy-Lyons suggests that individuality is also suppressed in the Amazon controlled market world. As an example that should particularly concern those who care about books and book culture, Levy-Lyons suggests that the Amazon changes that are bleeding money out of the book world (with the consequent layoff of marketing and sales people and editors and the shrinking of author royalties and advances) mean that, “publishers are less able to take risks on first-time authors or authors with some off-beat weird idea.”  She says that these changes are continuing to happen so fast that she knows “for a fact that” if she had pitched her book, “No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments,” even one year later, her “publisher would not have bought it.”  Thus “authors are finding it harder and harder to make a living.”

In her sermon Ms. Levy-Lyons recommended and encouraged her audience to go to a bookstore to buy Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech” (2017).  Quite possibly, she drew upon it a fair amount when she composed her sermon.  The Penguin (its publisher) site for the book (or you could dare to go to Amazon) says in the overview it provides:

    Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. . . .

    . . . There have been monopolists in the past but today's corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. They’re monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making.

That’s ominous when you think, as we noted at the outset, that Amazon is selling nearly half the books in the country, that it collects enough information to know almost “every fact of our identities and . . decision-making,” and that with the roots of its origin and plus continuing links to the military and surveillance industries, it chose to launch itself by venturing into the book industry, which it both decimated and now dominates.

The hope that Re. Levy-Lyons offered to confront Amazon is to act collectively, to stop viewing ourselves as competing individuals and that we can instead create our reality collectively.  She gave the example of a collective of antiquarian book sellers that acted together in concert to protect one of their group when Amazon was victimizing them.

Of course, that acting together collectively in concert requires the public realm, public domain spaces for “rational deliberation” and public discourse about “matters of common interest” that writers like D’Angelo and Bushman are reminding us that we need, and reminding us that these are reasons we need traditional libraries organized so that’s what they provide. . .

. .   These public realm spaces, the same spaces so valuable and essential to us if we are to stand up to forces like Amazon, are the same spaces that are under threat from forces like Amazon.*  But, for the time being, we still have our churches and houses of worship.

(* Footnote and PS: And that is why the  New York Times architect critic Michael Kimmelman was wildly misguided when, responding to the announced arrival of Amazon, he suggested Amazon involve itself in providing our public libraries.  (Amazon is already involved anyway.)  See: Michael Kimmelman’s Unfortunate Suggestion That Amazon Invest In NYC’s Public libraries (per Eric Klinenberg)- See: “Amazon’s HQ2 Will Benefit From New York City. But What Does New York Get?”)

Eric Klinenberg in NY Times Op-ed calls for Defending Libraries Promoing His New Book- "Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life"

The New York Times Sunday Review his past weekend included an op-ed by calling for defending libraries by Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist who has authored the forthcoming “Palaces of the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.”  We didn’t hear from Mr. Klinenberg prior to the publication of his op-ed, but no, if you are wondering, we didn’t enlist Mr. Klinenberg him for ventriloquism purposes of having him recite top themes from our website . . .     

. . .  It just sounds a little that way.

Mr. Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University here in New York City.  He tweets at: @ericklinenberg.

Emblematic of our modern world, Mr. Klinenberg’s essay got totally different titles and subtitles in the print and digital editions of the Times even if they conveyed somewhat the same message.

Here is a link to and a sample of what he wrote.  If you want you play a game and try to match his sentences up with many of those on our Citizens Defending Libraries web pages.

New York Times OpEd- Why Libraries Still Matter- To Restore Civil Society, Start With the Library (In an age of polarization and inequality, the are the bedrock of civil society. -  This crucial institution is being neglected just when we need it the most.), by Eric Klinenberg, September 8, 2018.

Libraries are already starved for resources . . . . But the problem that libraries face today isn’t irrelevance . .  in New York and many other cities, library circulation, program attendance and average hours spent visiting are up. The real problem that libraries face is that so many people are using them, and for such a wide variety of purposes, that library systems and their employees are overwhelmed.

    * * *
Libraries are being disparaged and neglected at precisely the moment when they are most valued and necessary. Why the disconnect? In part it’s because the founding principle of the public library — that all people deserve free, open access to our shared culture and heritage — is out of sync with the market logic that dominates our world.* 

     . . .  they’re open, accessible and free.

(* For more about what's previously been written exploring such thoughts as this see the books: “Dismantling the Public Sphere- Situating and Sustaining Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy,” by John E. Buschman and “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good,” by Ed D'Angelo.)

    * * *
   
    . .  not everyone can afford to frequent [establishments like Starbucks], and not all paying customers are welcome to stay for long. . .  elderly library patrons . .  told me that they feel even less welcome in the trendy new coffee shops, bars and restaurants . .  Poor and homeless library patrons don’t even consider entering these places. They know from experience that simply standing outside a high-end eatery can prompt managers to call the police. [Like the two black young men in a Philadelphia Starbucks for two minutes before the police were called.]  But you rarely see a police officer in a library.
   

    * * *
Forbes magazine published an article arguing that . .  Amazon [should] replace libraries with its own retail outlets, and claimed that most Americans would prefer a free-market option. The public response . .  was so overwhelmingly negative that Forbes deleted the article from its website.

     . . .  it’s important that institutions like libraries get the recognition they deserve. It’s worth noting that “liber,” the Latin root of the word “library,” means both “book” and “free.” Libraries stand for and exemplify something that needs defending.

Yes libraries do need defending!   . .

. . . Mr. Eric Klinenberg's book includes a footnote reference to Scott Sherman's “Patience and Fortitude- Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library,” in which Citizens Defending Libraries and our sister library defending group the Committee to Save The New York Public Library are written about.  Mr. Klinenberg's book doesn't mention us, but we are reaching out to him about how so may of our thoughts seem to be on the same page.

PS: (9/25/2018)  For a second chapter to what is written here and to find out what happened at the Brooklyn Book Festival panel discussion that involved Mr. Klinenberg see:  Authors Anand Giridharadas, Eric Klinenberg, Kristen Ghodsee, and Activist Blair Imani, On Panel at Brooklyn Book Festival Discuss, `How To Change The World’ (With Libraries and Social Infrastructure!) Plus Who NOT To Trust— When In Jumps Untrustworthy, Library-Selling Councilman Brad Lander!!

Libraries As A Threat To The “Perspective” That Virtually Everything Should Be Dictated And Run By The Forces of Market Capitalism

Covering the subject of the current popularity of socialism On The Media used this visual for socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with (library defending) Zephyr Teachout.

WNYC’s On The Media ran a segment July 27, 2018 in which the value of public libraries was discussed (again).  Their value was discussed in terms of the threat public libraries pose to those wanting to promote the idea that capitalism should control and set the terms for virtually all our social exchanges.  (The title of this post of ours intentionally refers to “market capitalism” not “free market capitalism,” because the corporate monopoly markets of today are a sad and far remove from Adam Smith’s idealized environment for “invisible hands” to be at work, but that’s another, longer discussion.)

The OTM segment was about how, with capitalism increasingly unpopular, people, especially Democrats and young people increasingly prefer socialism to capitalism.  This is along with polls that show self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders, who did better in many Trump-voting districts than Hillary Clinton, would defeat Trump if paired in a future election.  (Just like polls showed that Sanders would have defeated Trump in 2016.)   Sanders is currently the “most popular politician in America.”  The segment is: "Socialism" in the Air.

On The Media’s visual for the hour long program, of which the segment is a part, is of socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with (library defending) Zephyr Teachout.  Teachout is now a candidate, in a very important race, for New York State Attorney General.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the organizer for Bernie Sanders who, while she was largely ignored by mainstream media, surged to popularity and a surprise victory running as a candidate for Congress. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is the one who is now, in a rush of fairly embarrassing haste, retroactively getting the mainstream media attention she previously deserved.

Cover of New York Times Sunday Review: Socialism because capitalism makes us less free.

Why is socialism increasingly popular?  As discussed in the OTM segment, it is probably, partly because it appeals to “an egalitarian instinct” and to a sense of fairness and justice associated with a “fair distribution of resources.”  This is not to mention how we are seeing capitalism’s proclivities pushing us perhaps irretrievably over the brink where runaway global warming may destroy most of the life on this planet.  Then there is simply the feeling that, compared to what we’ve got, socialism affords more real freedom.

Here is how during the program, On The Media host Bob Garfield discussed with socialist Nathan Robinson, editor-in-chief at Current Affairs magazine, how libraries are a threat to those who want everything filtered through market capitalism structures:

NATHAN ROBINSON:  . . .  I just read an article about public libraries, why socialists love public libraries. They are places that are free for everybody. They’re controlled by the local people who have authority over them; they’re not controlled by a company. And there is that sense of everyone is equal in a public library.

BOB GARFIELD: Although it does, to some, seem fearsome. It’s the kind of socialism that is usually prefixed with the word “creeping.”

NATHAN ROBINSON: Well, public libraries embody an egalitarian spirit and they do sort of challenge the perspective that almost everything other than basic services, like police and the military, should be left to the market. And public libraries show an example of a well-run state institution. They kind of prove something, which is a little dangerous to a certain kind of a free-market orthodoxy, which is that they suggest that state-run institutions aren't necessarily a nightmare. So the public library kind of provides a vision of a way that common ownership and common control could work. So I, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to view it as creeping.

I think it does creep.

Very similarly, in 2013, National Notice postulated that with no good reason for the Koch brothers to want to deprive U.S. citizens of healthcare, there can be no other explanation for the Kochs to be fighting healthcare so vigorously except for the Kochs' fear that if we had the example of a national government working demonstrably well to provide people with something they very much want and need, good health care, the national agenda would then move on to other obviously necessary top priorities with a stronger, more highly regarded government tackling climate change.  Addressing climate change would hurt the Koch fossil fuel industry profits.

If we conceive that well-run libraries are, indeed, a somewhat “fearsome” example of a public commons that is “dangerous to a certain kind of a free-market orthodoxy” because it provides a vision of a communal escape from the strictures and dictates of private enterprise, then perhaps we can better understand what is being done to New York City’s libraries by the private enterprise enthusiasts who have gotten in charge of them.  These enthusiasts don’t necessarily want libraries to be well run or to succeed in the traditional fashion.

In 2003 and 2006, respectively, two perspicacious writers with intimate knowledge of the libraries and their traditions wrote books warning about how libraries were being destroyed as new management forced libraries to kowtow to and fall in line with capitalist modes of operation: The books are “Dismantling the Public Sphere- Situating and Sustaining Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy,” by John E. Buschman and “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good,” by Ed D'Angelo.  At the time he wrote his book Mr. Buschman was department chair, collection development librarian and professor-librarian at Rider University and was a co-editor or the journal Progressive Librarian.  When Ed D’Angelo, who has a philosophy background, wrote his book he was a librarian working at the Brooklyn Public Library where he was working until recently for many years, including at the New Utrecht Branch.

Both men in both books recognized the interrelated importance of libraries and education to democracy and the necessity of a public commons for the kind of public discourse and exchange of ideas necessary for democracy to flourish.  In fact, before we decide to try to define libraries in economic terms we should remember that the economics in this country of ours are producing results that are highly unequal and not egalitarian.  Both men also presented strong cases for how libraries and what they can provide wind up dumbed down by the effects of the corporate consumer model, information capitalism, the relentless commodifications thereof, along with neo-liberal ideology and its “radically market-oriented public philosophy toward public cultural institutions.”  Both men concerned themselves with how librarians themselves were being de-professionalized by disdainful higher-up corporately oriented non-librarian managerial overlords with the resulting loss of meaningful curation of content and collections.

Buschman has an especially pertinent question about libraries shifting over to a market-oriented consumer model: He asks if libraries are not providing an alternative model, are not serving democratic ideals, "What public purpose is served by public funding of" projects that "are imitative of the private sector?  What right do we have to public funding to compete with [other?] businesses.  Perhaps more importantly, does society need another model of media-dominated, entertainment oriented consumerism in its public institutions?"

Conversely, why are market capital apostles so afraid of the success of alternative models for organizing society such that they have to deny the success of those models or snuff them out?

A Koch funded Mercatus Center study, although it was slanted and cherry picked while it worked towards a different hoped for result, recently found that the Bernie Sanders medicare for all plan would not only provide more health care while additionally insuring the currently 40 million insured Americans, but would also save the American public $2.1 trillion over ten years.  But much of mainstream media misreported the story communicating the exact opposite, that the Sander plan would cost more rather than more than $2 trillion less: Reporting on Medicare for All Makes Media Forget How Math Works, by Justin Anderson of FAIR, July 31, 2018. . . .  Even worse, when Sanders pointed out how the study supported that his plan would save the public money, mainstream media wanted to debate the obvious facts with entities like the Washington Post and CNN’s Jake Tapper entering the fray to offer false facts that were opposite to the truth in the name of “fact checking.”  Elsewhere on CNN Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs reiterated that the results of the Koch funded Mercatus Center study were indeed being misrepresented in “frightening terms” essentially trying to ignore or bury the facts about the obvious and significant benefit and $2 trillion cost savings of the medicare for all plan.

As anyone paying attention to this back and forth knows, healthcare in the United States costs about twice as much, with less satisfactory results, than pretty much anywhere else in the civilized world.  Yet those who don’t want the government to succeed with medicare for all, because it is essentially a socialist kind of program, try to deprive the public of the achievable benefit by denying the facts.

In the On The Media’s segment, Bob Garfield noted that since the specter of “Soviet Communism” can no longer be invoked to scare people away from socialism “it seems to be Venezuela” that the mainstream media wants to use instead, and the segment provides two clips as examples of exactly that (emphasis supplied):

MALE CORRESPONDENT: My gosh, socialism has never failed so vividly as it has in the modern times, and yet, these guys come out there and say. that’s what America needs. I don’t think so.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: Venezuela is currently at one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Hunger and crime are rampant, clean water and medicine scarce. So why on earth would anybody want to bring those catastrophic policies and conditions to the US?
   
    * * *

MAN: You know, as we look at other countries, like Venezuela, etc., where socialism is imploding their country, do we really want that here?

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: What happened in Venezuela? They call that Democratic Socialism but they don’t have toilet paper…

MAN: Note to socialism fans, go visit Venezuela.

But again, is it fair to allow Venezuela to be portrayed, for negative purposes as “the” alternative?  The United States has gone out of its way to sabotage the economy in that country and create hardship there (in fact, too many people in our government are also pushing to go to war with Venezuela.) To wit, consider this from FAIR:

The United States has for years undermined the Venezuelan economy with economic sanctions, but US media coverage of Venezuela’s financial crisis has gone out of its way to obscure this.

The intent of the sanctions is clear: to inflict maximum pain on Venezuela so as to encourage the people of the country to overthrow the democratically elected government.

See: Exonerating the Empire in Venezuela, by Gregory Shupak, March 22, 2018.

When asked by Garfield about consideration of Venezuela as “the” alternative Nathan Robinson was either too timid or too uninformed to offer such a caveat about problems there.  Instead, he feinted suggesting that “Venezuela doesn’t tell you much at all” and isn’t a “verdict” on the kind of socialism that “strongly anti-authoritarian” people “skeptical of the concentration of unaccountable power” like him would want because it doesn’t have the kind of democracy in the workplace that he’d like to see and “because we oppose every measure that would increase centralized and, and dictatorial power.”  But this goes along with another myth: That things are very `undemocratic’ in Venezuela.

After the last election where President Nicolás Maduro won a second term in May, the New York Times essentially led its reporting of the event (spelling his name wrong at the time- “Nicholas”) with a fairly outright implication that the election should be disregarded as simply“rigged.”

President Nicolás Maduro won a second term as president of Venezuela, a country in the midst of a historic economic collapse marked by soaring prices, widespread hunger, rampant crime, a failing health system and a large-scale exodus of its citizens.

Electoral officials declared Mr. Maduro the victor Sunday night, in a contest that critics said was heavily rigged in his favor.

However comparable or not comparable the very challenging situation in Venezuala makes that besieged country as “the” only possible alternative example to the neo-liberal, capitalist, private-market orthodoxy now routinely promoted in this country, plus whatever controversies can be intruded into the debate about President Maduro’s governance under those difficult circumstances, it is in the very least exceedingly glib to suggest that Mr. Maduro was not democratically elected: He received 5.8 million of the 8.6 million ballots cast, with a turnout of the electorate quite comparable to presidential elections in the United States and France even though the tactic of his opposition was to urge the public to boycott the election.  His nearest challenger in the election received 1.8 million votes.  Further, the country has a history of well run elections.

With calls for regime change the United State has called Venezuela an “extraordinary national security threat.”  Why?

It seems as though no matter what they look like, those in power in the United States don’t want any examples of functioning alternatives to capitalism. . .  As, for instance, in Chile with the CIA backed coup murdering democratically elected President Salvador Allende, or in Iran with the CIA backed coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.  Similarly, we couldn’t tolerate independence leader Patrice Lumumba as the elected president of the Republic of the Congo. . .

 . .  Not liking the communist country of Cuba so close off the shores of Florida, we have made life for that country as economically difficult as possible for decades.  Yes, the merits of our respective systems can be debated, but after the hurricane season ended in 2017 we could see the differences of those systems in operation after both Cuba and the United States territories of the Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands were directly hit by that year’s powerful storms: The Cuban people were largely safe and well prepared and able to send out help to countries elsewhere in the region afterward; in Puerto Rico thousands of U.S. citizens unnecessarily died from what appeared to be malevolent neglect while monied interests viewed the disaster as an opportunity to privatize much of the Island’s resources for the benefit of the wealthy.

The United States under Reagan even found it urgent to militarily invade the tiny Caribbean Island nation of Granada, a recent former colony of Great Britain, to replace the new (in this case, not Democratically elected) Marxist government that took charge there through a coup.

It is not to argue that any of the above mentioned nations should be looked to as particular examples of socialism success (besides we also have other examples, from the Nordic and Scandinavian countries, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark* to the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand and Canada). . .  But one must wonder at the regularity with which the powerful in the United States have the urge to snuff out such alternative systems and the speed and frequency with which that has often been done.

(* Actually, there are those striving to take away the Nordic nations as examples.)

Why snuff out alternatives?

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis offered a concept that our federal system, where states are largely autonomous, offered the opportunity (one of its “happy incidents” he said) where, so long as it was the choice if the respective citizens of those states, states can operate as “laboratories of democracy” trying out “novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”  Concomitantly, successful policies can be expanded to other states or, if appropriate, adopted nationally.  Brandeis ventured that because the “denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences” it involved a “grave responsibility” lest “prejudices” went unchecked.

The same principle could and should also apply to different countries. 

Henry A. Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice president, whose once immense popularity meant that he almost became president rather than Truman, envisioned that the United States and Soviet systems could compete in friendly, peaceful coexistence each endeavoring “to prove which can deliver the most satisfaction to the common man in their respective areas of political dominance” and that under such circumstances “the Russian world and the American world” would “gradually become more alike,” the Russians “forced to grant more and more of the personal freedoms” and the United States becoming “more and more absorbed with the problems of social-economic justice.”  Unfortunately, arguably mostly because the idea of peaceful coexistence did not appeal to the United States, the way in which the two countries grew more alike was, instead, in their increasing militarization preparing to defend against and confront the other, something the common man paid for.  The vast resources paid to build up huge parallel military establishments could easily have been devoted elsewhere ingeniously.

What if more alternatives to the dominating style of U.S. capitalism had been allowed?  What if more different national systems centered on ideas of communal welfare had been allowed to evolve and flourish?: Mightn’t some of those other countries have become leaders in a more rational world approach to ensure that mankind successfully forestalls climate change and survives by transitioning away from fossil fuels?

Before we jump on any high horse to argue that these two cold war enemies, the U.S. and the Soviets, could not have become more like each other, borrow from each other, or that their systems were like oil and water, incapable of mixing it up, it should be noted that librarian Ed D’Angelo ranges far enough afield in his examination of potential management systems (including the freedoms for individuals potentially or not provided within them) in “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library” to note similarities between the Soviet state and American corporations in their top-down, centralized, hierarchical management approaches.  To wit:

The structure of both the state managed economy in the Soviet Union and the American blue-chip corporation of the 1950s could be traced back to the centralized, bureaucratic structure of the Prussian state.

That’s because, as D’Angelo lays out, that style of management (“Weber-Taylor bureaucracy” or “Taylorism” as D’Angelo refers to it, after Max Weber and Frederick W. Taylor) hails back to where it was “especially well represented in Germany” during the era of the Junker Aristocracy (from the late 1880's through the Weimar Republic that ended in 1933) “where monopoly capitalism was somewhat less restricted [back then at least] than in the United States.”  (Although D’Angelo does not make this particular point, the monopolies of monopoly capitalism tend almost inevitably to align themselves so as to act concertedly with the state, and the alignment of such corporations, or at least society’s economic elite, with an ensuing merging of the powers of the state, constitutes one of the classic definitions of fascism or the typical economics of fascism.) 

In turn, the “Weber-Taylor bureaucracy” style of management influenced the United States (“Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller admired* the German model”) and Vladimir Lenin who imported it to the Soviet Union (“Lenin believed that it would be possible to retain the technical advantages of the Weber-Taylor bureaucracy while subordinating it . . to the interests of the working class” and “Lenin sought to do for Russia what the Ford Motor Company did for the United States”).

(* Some of the admiration flowed mutually: Hitler had a life-size, full-length portrait of Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich; the German’s awarded Ford and he accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, in 1938, that nation's highest decoration for foreigners; and Ford subsidiaries busily manufactured armaments that the Nazis used against the U.S., trucks and plans.)

We, ourselves, have gone rather far afield discussing management theory, except that it is worth circling back to say that, D’Angelo asserts that given their totalitarian traits and lack of freedom for the individual, systems incorporating “Weber-Taylor bureaucracy” do not constitute “socialism.”  Nor, for that matter, is that the way libraries have historically been managed.   Further, given a similar lack of freedoms, D’Angelo views as a new tyranny capitalism’s more recently evolved “market populism” incarnations and theories around which capitalists would now like libraries organize themselves.  He cites its enforcement of an unquestioning “humility before the market” and says that following the dictates of these theories reverts us to a `feudal age’ where ‘power is private’ and the `public realm falls into decay’ as high salaried “CEOs with inflated egos” and managers rule by fiat.

Why are some in such a rush to change the way that libraries are run?  What is the threat their traditions pose?  They are time tested institutions.  Isn’t it peculiar and also telling that, as Nathan Robinson suggests, it is their long-standing popularity and success that makes them a threat?  What’s more, we don’t even know and can’t see clearly what is being substituted for the traditions that made libraries such strong, powerful and admired institutions.   . .   Neo-liberalism with its privatizing, let-the-market-prevail-in-everything schemes hasn’t been around long enough for most of us to get acquainted with it or recognize its ploys, let alone for its `promises’ to have been properly tested.  And when it comes to libraries, the neo-liberal proponents piggyback on arguments of change for the sake of change and technology for the sake of technology, thereby introducing huge unknowns.  Technology is changing so fast that, like neoliberalism, we can hardly catch up to acquaint ourselves with it its current incarnations or evaluate its implications.

But let’s keep the conversation simple: Both John E. Buschman and Ed D'Angelo presciently wrote books about how traditional libraries are being dismantled.  As Nathan Robinson pointed out on On The Media, there are those who, because they have a capitalistic private market bent, are more inclined to consider libraries as a “fearsome” threat to their orthodox belief systems, rather than hope libraries will continue to succeed.  Unfortunately, in New York City those people are the people who are in the driver’s seat as decisions are made about whether our libraries should change for better . . .  or worse.

Planned Overhaul of Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza Library- Another “Central Library Plan” Questionable In All The Same Ways

Presentation of the Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library Plan to the real estate committee of Community Board 9 (courtesy of The Movement To Protect The People (MTOPP)

The Brooklyn Public Library is overhauling the Grand Army Plaza Library, by far the biggest library in the Brooklyn system.  This so-called “renovation plan” ensues after the destruction of the second biggest library in Brooklyn, the central destination, downtown Brooklyn Heights Business, Career and Education Library, a library that was also an important Federal Depository Library whose function was to make now increasingly scarce and unavailable federal government documents available to the public.

A Brooklyn Central Library Plan Like the NYPL Central Library Plan

The Grand Army Plaza Library overhaul is not newly planned.  Planning goes back to at least 2008 when the BPL hired an architect to create a Master Plan for its Central Library (eliminating books) that was very much like the NYPL’s contemporaneous “Central Library Plan.”  In 2014, in the face of enormous public resistance and opprobrium, which Citizens Defending Libraries helped provide, that other Central Library Plan, the New York Public Library’s “Central Library Plan” was derailed.  The NYPL has nevertheless resurrected aspects of the NYPL “Central Library Plan,” one remnant at a time, while continuing to be careful not to again use the derided “Central Library Plan” name . . .

. . . The BPL is presenting this plan for its own biggest library as its “plan for the Central Library”; That’s easily transposed to simply calling it Brooklyn’s own `Central Library Plan.’*

(*  If you would like another, almost eerie connection linking these two central libraries found in Manhattan and Brooklyn respectively, besides the fact that they are now both going through similar, and similarly-driven "Central Library Plans," try this:  Previously, just before each library was created, the site of that library was the location of a major, incredibly huge reservoir serving the borough, in Manhattan at 42 Street and Brooklyn at Mount Prsopect by Grand Army Plaza.  So each of these libraries found in public parks is more a dapple-ganger of the other than one might immediately suspect.)   

One reason the consolidating shrinkage of the NYPL’s very expensive Central Library Plan, unveiled at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008, was so widely opposed was it’s elimination and banishment of books.  The contemporaneously proceeding BPL Central Library Plan also eliminates books and banishes them off-site.  It’s first inaugural phase was the computer and tech oriented (Shelby White and) Leon Levy Information Commons (January 2013).  The “Information Commons” has no books and, located smack dab and center on the first floor, it is what automatically sops up your attention when you enter the Grand Army Central Library.

Most prominently before you when you enter Brooklyn's biggest library: The bookless, tech oriented "Information Commons"

As with all these central library plans what you see reflected in them is what might be described a slow drift away from what libraries have traditionally been towards something increasingly bookless, something that is also increasingly commercial and corporate in theme, and thus less democratic in insidious ways; something less substantive, that’s more superficial.  It is not really a “drift” so much, as it is a steady pull or tug by those who are now library administration officials.  The changes may seem slow, particularly if your visits to the libraries are not so frequent or closely observed, but the change is not as slow as it seems.  It seems slower, however, because the language used to present these plans generally obscures where library officials intend to go with them.  Their language also obscures memory of the ways in which libraries have succeeded in the past.

Presentation of the Brooklyn Central Library Plan to Community Board 9 land Use Committee- Conflicts of Interest

On April 10, 2018, the BPL’s Central Library Plan was presented to the Brooklyn Community Board 9's Land use Committee for approval.  The suspicious handling it got at that community board meeting deserves scrutiny.  It came before the board without warning or fanfare.  We have the community activist organization The Movement To Protect The People (MTOPP) led by Alicia Boyd to thank for letting us know what went down that evening.  You can watch the entire presentation in two segments via video MTOPP has posted:

Community Board 9 Land Use committee meeting on April 10, 2018 Part 1

Community Board 9 ULURP committee meeting April 10, 2018 Part 2

Along with the videos, Ms. Boyd sent her MTOPP mailing list an outraged description of what unfolded at the meeting.

One of the biggest headlines about this CB9 Land Use Committee library plan presentation was an abject failure of proper process; one that is hard to dismiss as unintentional.  The meeting was chaired by Michael Liburd, the Land Use committee’s usual chair.  (For those of you who do not know Community Boards of New York City, think of the Land Use Committee as the Community Board’s committee for handling real estate development.  Also know that for political reasons, the composition of these land use committees and their leadership tend to reflect friendliness to development.)

Near the end of the CB9 Land Use Committee meeting Michael Liburd says “thank you very much library folks” as if these presenters were somehow separate from him; on the contrary, what he doesn’t say is that he is a trustee of the Brooklyn Public Library, a member of the board to whom the “folks” must report and are accountable to.  If you don’t believe it without seeing it with your own eyes come to a Brooklyn Public Library Trustees meeting and watch these same presenting  “folks” deferentially report to Liburd and the other trustees.  In other words, Liburd personifies the BPL too; he is one of these “library folks.”

This is a particular concern in terms of what then happens immediately afterward—  Liburd tells the Land Use Committee that he is interested in giving “these folks” (he uses that term yet again) “what they are looking for.”  There was no quorum of the land use committee (a problem in and of itself), but then Liburd has the committee members who are present vote their approval of the proposed plan, himself leading off the vote with his own raised hand voting approval.  This failure to disclose important underlying relationships is despite the fact that BPL's press release telling the public about the renovation says: "Library staff is committed to open communication throughout the construction process."

There is another layer of seeming conflict with the community's interest in that Liburd, often criticized by the community for pushing real estate development plans, has apparently been positioned as the head of the CB9 Land Use Committee in order to do so more effectively.  His function as a pro-real estate development operative pits him against the interests of the public if the priority of a board overseeing the libraries should be the provision of library services, not real estate developments.

Another question to ask: If what is being done to Brooklyn’s now most important library is truly about what libraries actually are supposed to be, then why was the presentation to CB 9's real estate oriented Land Use Committee?  It could have been instead to (or also to) the CB9 Education Committee (“responsible for advocating for the educational needs of the district”), its Parks, Recreation and Culture Committee (if it has responsibilities for “Culture”), its Health and Social Services Committee (“addresses the district’s needs for social services”), or its Youth Services Committee (“responsible for . . youth services needs assessments, and . . filling any gaps in services provided for young people.”)?  (The BPL presenter said "We want to talk to everybody we can about this project.")

And should this presentation be limited to Community Board 9, just one community board in Brooklyn?  At over 350,000 square feet, this biggest library in the Brooklyn system that has about 1 million square feet of library space, comprises about one third of all the public library space in Brooklyn.  What happens to it should be of concern to all Brooklynites and to all New Yorkers.   The now leveled central destination Business, Career and Education Library that was in Brooklyn's Downtown Central Business District easily reached by almost all New Yorkers was 63,000 square feet.

Conflicts of Interest at the Board Level, Including Newest Trustee Working For The Real Estate Development Mayor

For those who don’t think they understand how conflicts of interests like Liburd’s (or those of the others of the member’s of the BPL board) can be a problem, consider how Liburd chose to pitch his request for the vote to the Land Use committee and public attending the Meeting: In essence he was saying, “you may know me as the head of the Land Use Committee and you may have pegged me as someone who likes to promote development, but these here are `library folks,’ not like me– You can trust them to be caring about libraries, not development priorities.”

Unfortunately, if you look at the board of the BPL and its other members besides Mr. Liburd you find a rogues gallery of people whose first and foremost priorities are likely to be in conflict with the public getting the best possible libraries.  Most commonly those conflicts are by virtue of the interest those BPL board members have in Real Estate development.

Carolee Fink

Just Seven days after the Liburd CB9 BPL Central Library Plan Presentation, Mayor de Blasio’s newest appointment to BPL board attended her first board meeting with Mr. Liburd.  The name of that new appointee is Carolee Fink.  Ms. Fink is Chief of Staff to Alicia Glen.  Alicia Glen, who joined the de Blasio administration coming from Goldman Sachs (there are a lot of connections of BPL board members to Goldman Sachs), is Mayor de Blasio’s Deputy Mayor in charge of real estate development.  See:  New Brooklyn Public Library Trustees- Can You Imagine?; One of Them Is Carolee Fink, Chief of Staff to Alicia Glen (formerly of Goldman), DeBlasio’s Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development.

When the BPL sold the central destination downtown Brooklyn Business, Career and Education Brooklyn Heights Library that real estate deal (investigated for pay-to-play) was pushed through at City Hall by Alicia Glen.  In December 2015 when BPL president Linda Johnson told the BPL board of trustees how the sale of that library sale went down (it’s a shrink-and-sink deal replacing the central destination library with a luxury tower), Johnson told the BPL board of trustees that Ms. Glen had adopted the library sale and shrinkage deal as “her own” to “push it across the finish line.”  The secretive final negotiations at City Hall included raiding Department of Education funds for space in the luxury building to help the developer.

Moreover, the trustees were told that this sale was a “huge turning point for the library system” and “across the city in general” with Johnson `pioneering’ the future of libraries.  And previously Ms. Johnson had told the city council that the shrink-and-sink sale would be a model for all three of the city’s library systems.

Introducing Ms. Fink to the other BPL board members, Ms. Johnson told them that Ms. Fink “loves libraries.”  Maybe so, but in just what manner of speaking does Ms. Fink love libraries?  For their libraryness?

When "Loving Libraries" Is Nothing But Satire

Although those trustees and administrators now in charge of the libraries increasingly see them in real estate development terms, they do not want the public to know that.  Hence the need to carefully parse what is behind their actual words.  On April 1st Noticing New York did an April Fools satire about the PR the BPL was breaking out for its Central Library Plan: Reimagining Our Library Spaces: Where Once There Were Books There Will Now Be “Maker Rooms” To Be Named Appropriately After A Famous Hedge Funder and Presidential Candidate.  The satire did not have to stray very far from actual facts in its lambasting of the kind of library administration double talk that requires incredible vigilance from any listener.

One thing that helps when listening to current library administration officials telling us about plans for the libraries is to let what we know other library plans inform our intuition about what we should be alert for: For instance, the former NYPL Central Library Plan and now, in the wake of its derailment, the NYPL plans for the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, the Mid-Manhattan Library and the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL).

The presentation to the CB 9 Land Use Committee began by telling those present that the Grand Army Plaza Library "has challenges" because it “opened in 1941" and "hasn't seen much comprehensive improvement since that time."  That disingenuously seems intended to make the library seem like an old library in need of an expensive overhaul.  The presentation did not say that the library was actually not actually completed until 1955 (a substantial public commitment, the library took almost sixty years to put in place beginning back in 1898), or that it was expanded in the 1990s and again in 2005.  After that last expansion (back in the days when libraries were still expected by everybody to have books) the library was still not sufficiently large to house the Education Library, which had to be moved to the Brooklyn Heights downtown Brooklyn central destination library. (Because the Heights library is now destroyed, the Education Library has theoretically come back to Grand Army Plaza.)   The Land Use committee was also not told that the Brooklyn CPL, as previously defined, was already underway with the opening of the Leon Levy Information Commons in January of 2013, done with at least a $3.25 million expenditure that replaced the library's media section. Additionally, according to the BPL‘s minutes, it cost $5 million to jettison the books (February 23, 2010 BPL minutes), not the $3.25 million figure given by the Times, which lower figure in the Times, was the amount of Leon Levy Foundation gift money paying for this.  One figure the Times gave doesn’t include, for instance, is the $1,334.764 that came from Albany by virtue of taxpayer largess (June 15, 2010 BPL minutes).

The Land Use Committee was told that the library was not getting rid of books.  This despite the fact that New York Times article about it said that plan called for, among other things, getting rid of “two levels of old-fashioned `stacks’” describing these shelves to hold books as “unused space that Ms. Johnson wants to repurpose.”   This is the kind of deceptive description of what is going on that listeners need to be alert for.  It also says something about how administrators proceed.  If library administration officials remove books from the shelves before they tell the public about subsequently revealed physical changes they intend to make to the libraries then they can say then, they are not getting rid of books.  If the stacks have already been denuded of the books they were built to hold then the space that they occupy can be derisively referred to as “unused.”

Pictures Citizens Defending Libraries posted in 2016 showing shelves at the Grand Army Plaza Library were already extensively emptied as of that spring.

Pictures Citizens Defending Libraries posted in 2016 show that shelves at the Grand Army Plaza Library were already extensively emptied by the spring of that year.  These empty and thus “unused” shelves were in public areas like the Grand Army Plaza Library’s history section, but the Times article referred to elimination of other book shelving stacks the public doesn’t even see and thus, with the books they held, would not be as automatically conscious of.  These empty shelves were despite and don’t take into account all the books that disappeared from the Brooklyn Heights Business, Career and Education Library, including the Federal Depository included there that disappeared with it.  The layers of forgetting are being lathered on . . .

In his book “Dismantling the Public Sphere- Situating and Sustaining Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy,” John E. Buschman, complaining about some of the objectionable things that befell libraries after 9/11, noted that, in addition to some of the surveillance undertaken at libraries, “librarians have been ordered by the federal government to purge government documents items from their collections.”   Early in the book, Buschman noted that in 1984 “the Federal Depository Library program was seriously curtailed” and that “between 1982 and 1985, about four thousand government documents were eliminated— among them titles like `Statistical Reporter’ and `Health Care Financing trends.’” Nevertheless, in 1993 the Brooklyn Heights Federal Depository library needed to be expanded in 1993.

When the BPL closed the Brooklyn Heights Library, it promised that the once very substantial Business and Career Library that functioned within it (not, however, the “Education” portion) would be reopened at Grand Army Plaza.   Technically, this was a consolidating shrinkage.  What the BPL opened immediately at Grand Army Plaza was a pathetically small room of books hidden at the end of a narrow wending hall that it called the Business and Career Library while promising at the time, with supplied visuals, a bigger and glitzier “Business and Career Library” via future remodeling of some other Grand Army Plaza space.

In a hidden room the remains of a Business, Career and Education Library that was also a Federal Depository Library

What they were then destroying in 2016 was called a “Business and Career Library” (emphasis supplied) and so that losses would perhaps be less noticed, what they in 2016 provided in the interim and promised to provide in improved form in the future was a “Business and Career Library.” The word used was “Library.”  Now in 2018 as the BPL promotes the overhaul at Grand Army Plaza the terminology has shifted and the public is being told that what it will be getting with the overhaul is a “Business Career Center,”(emphasis supplied) a “center” not a library.  These shifts in terminology are important, insidiously implying that libraries don’t have value and must be replaced with facilities described with other terms, most likely those sounding more potentially more worshipful or respectful of technology and sometimes real estate.

Although Buschman was writing his “Dismantling the Public Sphere,” in 2003, before some of the worst NYC library plans would first see the light of day, he was already picking up the way even library schools were starting to eschew honoring graduates with the title of “librarian” or referring to collections of books; library schools were instead becoming “schools of information” and the schools were coming up with descriptors for graduates like “information professional,” “information manager,” “knowledge specialists.”  In New York we had also stopped referring to those in charge of libraries as head librarians, substituting the real estate term “project manager.”  As
Buschman points out these terms, increasingly general and abstract tend to lose their meaning.  What is the difference between a bookless "Information Commons" that encourages business meetings and a bookless "Business and Career Center?"  Probably not much: The BPL told the Community Board that two spaces would on top of each other and would "work together." 

Indeed, the new image of what is now proposed to be the “Business Career Center” is now supposed to look like is unabashedly devoid of books.  Sterile and white, rather like a makeshift low-budget hospital cafeteria I suspect that most people will find the image unappealing and lacking in imagination.

Don't call it a "library", call it a "Business and Career Center"

It feels like a bait and switch: As noted, called a "center" now, not "library" it's not the same name given for this 'replacement' as when the Brooklyn Heights Business, Career and Education Library was being sold to a developer and it's not the same name rendering supplied at that time either.  One must wonder if the budget has changed.  Perhaps it's not the budget for building what the public might actually get someday (who knows if there were actual designs to price that out back when the Heights library was being destroyed); Maybe it's just the budget available for making attractive renderings.  When approval of a developer's development proposal is at stake gobs of money get spent on persuasive PR and renderings, but now the David Kramer Hudson Companies proposal is in the bag and the Heights library leveled, a hole in the ground.  Does the budget for renderings therefore go down now?

A better "library" or a better "rendering"?: The previous "conceptual rendering" of the "Business Career Library" offered in 2017.  Does it seem to have more books, or is it just that you can't tell because the elevators and stairs are featured so prominently instead?

How do you tout bleak, empty spaces as beneficial to the public and distract from mention of their unlibrarylike booklessness?:  Dutifully picking up, without question, from the Monday, March 26, 2018 BPL press release announcing the latest iteration of these plans the Brooklyn Eagle article about them quotes Linda Johnson as saying that with the overhaul of the library the public will get, not a `library,' but the “inspiring, flexible space” the public `richly deserves.’  That's right, the empty bookless space that Johnson thinks the public deserves is “inspiring, flexible space.”
 

The "so cool, so cool" Leon Levy Information Commons space- Immediately usable to hold your wedding!

"Flexible space" means that once was once "library" space dedicated to such uses can be diverted to other uses.  The "so cool, so cool" Leon Levy Information Commons space be easily used to host a wedding (with the BPL swiftly contacting the press to promote it). (See:  Public Spaces- At Brooklyn Library's New Center, Books Are Secondary, by Eli Rosenberg, May 9, 2013.) The BPL, just like the NYPL, has a whole program now set up devoted commercially renting its spaces to host events; Weddings are a featured subcategory— That's if you are among those luck enough to be able to afford them.  One problem is that this can dictate that the library sometimes closes for special events, evicting those who want to use actual library services and making library hours unpredictable.

Another rendering of“inspiring, flexible space,” a virtual empty dance floor devoid of books that the BPL intends to create out of library space in its plan, is what the BPL is now calling its "Civic Commons" . . . a "first-of-its-kind."

"Civic Commons"?

The Noticing New York April 1st satire about the BPL's plans spoke in jest about how the BPL supposedly saying it was creating the “neo-commons that makes sense today.”  How far away from this satire will the "Civic Commons" be?   The BPL says that it intends to make use of this space with "partners."   One day we may find out who those "Civic Commons" partners actually wind up being as they materialize, but it doesn't bode well that some of the first "partnering" the BPL started off with when going down this road was real estate developer Forest City Ratner and partnering with the Nets basketball team.  That's what Ms. Johnson told her board of trustees at the December 2013 board meeting just months before the Ratner/Prokhorov "Barclays" arena for the Nest was to open.  Indeed, afterward tents were set up taking over the plaza space fronting the Grand Army Plaza library to promote the Nets to children.

That the BPL's future be structured to involve “alliance and partnerships” was recommended in a suspiciously produced “Community Needs Assessment” that finally saw the light of day at the Trustee level in the fall of 2009.  The same “Community Needs Assessment” said that BPL should be engaged in "support for economic development."  Don't such "partnerships," especially when they are commercially oriented, together with the support of economic development compromise the mission of the library and subtract from public sphere?. . .

John Buschman has another question in this regard: He asks if libraries are not providing an alternative model, are not serving democratic ideals, "What public purpose is served by public funding of" projects that "are imitative of the private sector?  What right do we have to public funding to compete with [other?] businesses.  Perhaps more importantly, does society need another model of media-dominated, entertainment oriented consumerism in its public institutions?" 

Buschman suggests that key to attaining the equilibrium whereby libraries will provide a democratic public sphere is to avoid the "'steering mechanisms' of money and power (i.e. corporate-dominated mass media)." 

 
Here is what might happen to the "Civic Commons" or some other of the library space being converted through possible future "partnering."  Along with a lot of other commercializing changes, The NYPL is currently proposing to convert the Map Room and map reading space at its fabled 42nd Street Central Reference Library into an apparently fancy wine-serving wait staff-equipped café.  Rather than being alarmed by this proposal when it was presented to them NYPL trustees wanted to make sure officials were considering expanding and opening up the café to absorb some of Bryant Park’s public space. That was something apparently part of their out-of-public-sight discussions. . . .

Parts of the BPL's plan would readily facilitate a Brooklyn version of this: a new restaurant space within the library building that could open up into and include outdoor café space in a public park.  The BPL intends to convert parking space now behind the library into green space.  That green space abuts Mount Prospect Park, a public park which sits between the library and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  Mount Prospect Park includes the promontory that is the second highest point in Brooklyn; the highest point in Brooklyn is Battle Hill in Greenwood Cemetery.  Explaining what was intended, the BPL spokesperson said that it was hoped the park's boundary with the BPL's space 'seamless.'  The BPL press release says, "to connect the branch with Mount Prospect Park to create a Central Brooklyn green campus that includes the library, park and Botanical Gardens."

The BPL spokesperson said this plan to “dramatically open up the exterior of the library” was what “gets the Oohs and Ahs.”

Right now Mount Prospect Park, closed on all other sides, can only be entered from Eastern Parkway. To the Park's East side, there is the boundary around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden where visitors must pay a fee to enter, a fee which, after 85 years of being free, the Garden started charging in 1996. That fee was originally $3.00 if you weren't a student or senior, but, significantly outpacing inflation, it's now up to $15.00.

Where it not for the heavily trafficked Flatbush Avenue and the fences that close both of them off, Mount Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden would be extensions of Prospect Park.  The creation of connections that would allow people to, by walking behind the library, go from Flatbush Avenue through Mount Prospect Park all the way to Eastern Parkway arguably could be a good thing; Jane Jacobs in her precepts generally praises the multiplication of connections in cities.  Still, there should probably be some wariness about for whose benefit these changes are being launched intending and whether they are intended to serve a gentrifying impulse.

At the same time that the BPL is creating the "Civic Commons" and adding the green space outside, it is asking for Landmarks Commission approval to add a new door on the Flatbush side of the building to access the "Commons."  Although that could be convenient for some patrons, it would also allow for that portion of the building to be accessed separately from the rest of the building and perhaps shut off from it to maintain separate hours.  The proposed door, no image of which was circulated by the BPL with its press release, was shown to Community Board 9, presumably so Landmarks could be told they had seen it.  The board was told the door along with new windows would make the building look less "scary."

A new door and windows will be less "scary"?

For some reason the BPL with its press release included an image of new staircase and seating area looking rather like the reception area of a midtown law firm (minus a magazine table).  

A staircase you can sit under to watch people ascend and descend!

Although the Central Library Plan involves all this bookless space in the images above, the first picture slide that was actually shown to the land use committee was the one slide that showed them the most books. In fact, the committee was told that BPL wanted to have the library to feel more like a library when someone walked in the front door;  “When you walk into the library it doesn’t feel much like a library”(i.e. You don’t see any books), said the BPL's presenter.  (That's partly, as noted, because the smack-dab-in-the-middle "Information Commons" — soon visually to be essentially two stories when  — is presented as the most prominent feature.)  So the BPL says it is proposing to “pull the library experience forward” by “repositioning” the “Popular Library” near the entrance.  The “Popular Library” according to the presenter is currently it’s a lot of “magazines and a lot of comic books,” but he said to generate that book experience the BPL plans to "reformat" the Popular Library to make it more “book focused” “so that just as you walk in the front door you” by turning you head will “see the popular library off to the right.”


New York City libraries have been focusing on the popular and the new designs for them tend to include "grab and go" book desks by the front doors of the redesigned libraries to streamline visitor interactions with the libraries to efficiently brief interactions that supply the patron with what they probably think they already want when they walk in the door.

Pushing a superficial focus on the currently popular has a lot in common with the how media obsessions with junk food news stories (Jonbenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy or runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks) can take over the 24/7 news cycle of outlets like CNN, corporate commercialism thus hijacking, en mass, public attention away from deeper exploration of probably more relevant news. Even obsessions with supposedly “serious” news like Russiagate can effect that kind of hijacking.  And should we all be steered into reading exactly the same books as suggested by a new Mayoral NYC subway promoted ad campaign “Let's get everyone in New York on the same page— NYC.gov/onebook #OneBookNY.”  (The NYC library systems are participating in this campaign.) Doesn't this crowd control of having everyone reading the same few books at the same time thwart discovery shunting the exploratory wandering of individual imaginations into more predicable mainstream channels while exacerbating that fabled race to the down to “the lowest common denominator”? . . .

. . . Does it also remind you of how "teaching to the test" has turned over to the monopoly of a few testing corporations the job of determining how everyone should be educated no matter where they live or what communities they are parts of?

In the subway, the NYC-promoted campaign“Let's get everyone in New York on the same page— NYC.gov/onebook #OneBookNY.” (click to enlarge)

In “Dismantling the Public Sphere” Buschman (p. 121) writes that essentially the idea of a consumerish “give ‘em what they want” focus of librarianship, putting up “a large number of `hot’ items on the shelf to compete with bookstore chains” and quantifying the value of a library only through popularity ignores “merit or lasting value” in curating selections.  While not arguing that libraries should be unresponsive to the public, Buschman says that “customer-driven librarianship abandons a number of public sphere roles.”  “The first of these,” he says, is “our role in organized social memory and rational discourse in a democracy.”  He says that the consumer driven fixation on “exclusively what is popular at the moment” by definition “abandons the public sphere goal of a plurality of ‘voices’ and viewpoints on anything not ‘hot’ to a present or future reader.”  He reminds us that “there is a reason some services are in the public sector; their value is very real but difficult to measure and requires a different kind of judgement and management.”

In a democracy where we can get our information and where we get out news is important.


There was one slide the committee was shown that was not one of those it distributed with its press release about its central library plan:  The BPL says that early on they want to implement “a concept” of a “teen center” they say they will work out after they have talked with some teens.  Is this sort of "been there-done that"?:  May 4, 2000, with a $2.5 million "renovation and expansion of the Eastern Parkway wing" completion, the "new Youth Wing" officially opened that had "exclusively designed areas for children and teens."

Getting Rid of Books Is Expensive

At a time when the BPL claims a desperate shortage of capital funds is hobbling its entire system, these book-eliminating Central Library Plan changes will not come cheap.  Now, at the starting point the BPL is projecting, without actual plans to cost everything out, the total project costs will be $135 million, but over the at least eight years execution of the plans if now expected to take it is more likely to exceed $200 million.  When the NYPL first promoted its original plans for its own Central Library Plan they promote the plan as expected to cost $300 million for the consolidated shrinkage that would eliminate space, bookshelves and books; We never found out how much more those plans would actually cost, only that they would cost more than half a billion dollars ($500 million+).

John Buschman in his book looks skeptically at how promoting a "crisis culture" in libraries is used to put libraries on the defensive while pushing them into ill thought out responses.   The suspect tales of how we are supposedly no longer able to afford our libraries sure fit within that mold.

Buschman also makes the case (p. 149) that there is an extreme imbalance that allows those hyping "technology"  to speak with a louder voice during decision making about our libraries; that when librarians shop for any traditional library resources that are somewhat expensive they "will professionally and critically evaluate the resource against their needs and weigh costs," but "when an electronic resource costing multiples" of those amounts are considered "critical facilities seem to go out the window," the focus becoming presentation and style, while "the authority and efficacy of the product" is just assumed because there is no real way to evaluate it.  This is the way that technology that will readily be outdated in just a few years gets substituted for the time-tested curation of books and human history of the centuries.
    

Meanwhile, where are the books going?  Not so very, very long ago, New York Magazine put the number of books at the Grand Army Plaza library at 1.5 million.  The Business, Career and Education Federal depository library previously in Brooklyn Heights and now leveled once had at least another 130,000 books.

Getting Your Head Around The Idea of a Commons 
       
As they were waiting for a quorum, before the BPL’s April 10th meeting officially began BPL president Linda Johnson told some of the BPL trustees that she had just returned from a trip to Cuba.  Explaining what it was like, Johnson said about the island that “it was hard to get your head around, but the people are very nice.”

“Hard to get your head around”?— Cuba is a country organized insistently around the idea of much more extensively shared public commons and mutual support.  Among other things it’s been observed how that means delivery of better health care than in the United States.  It also means that after Cuba was one of the islands hardest hit by Hurricane Irma in September, Cuba, “a world leader in hurricane preparedness and recovery” suffered minimal loss of life and, within days provided aid to its neighbors sending “more than 750 health workers to Antigua, Barbuda, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Saint Lucia, the Bahamas, Dominica and Haiti.”

By contrast, Hurricane Maria hit the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico just a few days later that month and six months later, under the auspices of our capitalist country, tarps had still not been provided to cover leaking and wrecked roofs and all sorts of other basic relief lags.  The New York Times was willing to blame “bungling” on its front page (subsequently suppressing the word, not the concept, from its internet article), but that ignores how this “bungling” furthers plans for privatization of the island of Puerto Rico that were afoot before the storm hit and how, there has been a subsequent  “disaster capitalism” intensification of the machinations to privatize the island of Puerto Rico, chase out its current inhabitants and make it a tax-haven paradise for the likes of cryptocurrency adventurists. 

What was Linda Johnson doing in Cuba?  Theoretically, as head of the Brooklyn public library system, she is herself is in charge of caretaking one of the biggest most important commons in the city of New York.  Officially, the Trump administration is now trying to dissuade Americans from the more frequent visits to Cuba that began with policies the Obama administration made.  Johnson went to Cuba just before April 17th, the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, the U.S. sponsored invasion of Cuba, chosen as the day for Raúl Castro, brother of Fidel, to step down from power.  What changes are expected; hoped for?  Who hopes to be in on them?

Meanwhile, there are interesting developments on an island closer to Brooklyn.  When Governor’s Island was transferred from the U.S. government to New York City there was a covenant that housing on the island was prohibited.  Since the military left and the subsequent transfer, people haven’t been sleeping on the island; everyone gets ushered off at the end of the day. . . But now, although the word is being avoided, "glamping" is coming to Governor’s Island via a company that specializes in it.  What is "glamping"?: It is `camping' for the glamour set.  "Luxury tents that come equipped with chandeliers  . .  start at $500."

April BPL Trustees Meeting

At the April board meeting, Linda Johnson told the trustees that the Brooklyn Central Library Plan "is underway" and that "all of the planning is being done so we have actually just one big construction project that goes over a significant period of time" saying the BPL wanted to "seemlessly move from one phase to the next."  She said that the BPL was thinking of the phases from a "development standpoint," because they are "concerned about raising the money needed as `public-private partnership.'"  She said that come next January people using the library are going to need to understand that use of the library is going to be "compromised" for a time because "things are going to be tight around here."

At the April board meeting, the trustees were told that the demand for physical books at the library was not diminishing, not being reduced by any continuing shift over to the more expensive digital books library administration officials years have been pushing after introducing many years ago: Digital books steadily remain at a continually low, essentially flat, 7%, with circulation of physical books for the year at 13 million, and the more expensive, more evanescent, typically just "rented" digital books being pushed by the library at only 1 million.  Nevertheless, Johnson's focus was to emphasize to her board that there had been an incremental increase to that low 7% figure this year (about 1%).

Elected Officials?

 Can we expect help from our New York City elected officials? . . .

The BPL press release includes the statement of New York City Council Majority Leader Laurie Cumbo that she is "proud to join in support of the four-phase renovation" and what it will mean in terms of the ability of "future generations" to access the "vast resources" of the library.  Other statements showing a lack of appreciation for the very worrisome aspects of the BPL's plans were furnished in the press release from United States Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, New York State Senator Kevin Parker, Assembly Member Walter T. Mosley.