A Flourish of Stories About So-Called Philanthropy Being Used As A Guise For Diminishing The Public Commons– That Includes Libraries

There’s a bouquet of new stories blossoming about how what wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations would have us accept as `generous philanthropy’ is actually money deployed as a force to seize influence, diminish the public commons, control public discourse, and supplant the narratives in our culture about what is truly for the public good, who is doing good and who isn’t.

If this sounds familiar to fellow library defenders, it could be because of information we have previously supplied about, for instance, who is one the boards of our NYC libraries and their private sector conflicts of interest (Brooklyn Public Library Trustees- Identified + Biographical and Other Information Supplied), and how readily the board of “charitable” institutions like libraries are getting off track (Why Nonprofit Boards May Stray From Their Core Missions And Obligations To the Public- Considered Generally And Particularly With Respect To Libraries).

It might also be because you recall what we have written recently respecting these themes talking about Anand Giridharadas, author of  “The Elite Charade of Changing the World” (we've written about him before).  Now, in yet one more very valuable interview by “On The Media” you can hear Giridharadas (who says “that “giving has become the wingman of taking. Generosity has become the wingman of injustice. Changing the world has become the wingman of rigging the system”) address these theme again.  See: On The Media-  How Philanthropy Lets Rich People Off the Hook.

The “On The Media” story was generated after “philanthropic” pledges from wealthy individuals in France for repair of Notre Dame Cathedral.  It’s quickly been noted that these same individuals who were seeking acclaim for their “charity” as they readily unearthed cash for the cathedral have been saying they can’t afford to pay taxes and claim that they currently pay too much in taxes.  There was even a synchronous effort made to get their taxes lowered still further: In effect, through the treatment of their ‘charitable’ deductions, to have the government pay for restoration of the cathedral while the wealthy got credit and naming rights.  (There is fear that in order that this can be done more ostentatiously, those jostling into the limelight might even restore the cathedral with an anachronistic glass ceiling via, perhaps, Norman Foster who was involved in the NYPL's Central Library Plan.)

Giridharadas seems to be getting better and better at his interviews, sharpening his expression of the issues if not his analysis itself.  In his “On The Media” interview he speaks about what people should be skeptical about when the wealthy “give” enumerating three concerns:

    . . . One, is this giving single individuals or companies way too much power over public life? Number two, are these problems better solved by government? Where you have accountability, where you can throw people out in an election if they don't solve the problem and the right way. Number three, is the money that is being used to solve these social problems also culpable in the creation of these social problems?

On the subject of why Mark Zuckerberg’s “philanthropy” is problematic Giridharadas says:

I actually think journalists and regulators would have had way more aggressive scrutiny on Zuckerberg over the last 10 years [absent Zukerberg's `philanthropy']. So I'd be willing to lose whatever schools and disease programs Facebook has funded in exchange for having a healthier democracy where Facebook is in check. And I really do think in so many cases there's a link between these things. And a lot of these billionaires really understand that doing this giving buys you reputational space to keep doing the things you need to do to make money.

“Reputational space to keep doing the things you need to do to make money”: That obviously applies to the NYPL awkwardly renaming the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and putting on it the name of Stephen A. Schwarzman (as we have written before). . .                                              

. . .  Stephen A. Schwarzman is the head of the Blackstone Group (and the highest paid CEO in the country- the first $1 billion CEO).  Many are familiar with the fact that the 42nd Street Central Reference Library has awkwardly been renamed after Schwarzman, who, is not exactly about spreading the wealth or being magnanimous to the common man or general population.  He wants the poor to pay more taxes, while he pays, along with others in the hedge fund industry, an exceptionally low rate in taxes due to the carried-interest tax loophole, from which he personally benefits.  He has opposed that loophole's repeal saying repeal would be akin to the German invasion of Poland. And Mr. Schwarzman has also been leading the Trump administration’s initiative to privatize America’s public infrastructure. Mr. Schwarzman is a trustee of the NYPL.  

The “On the Media” story also mentions, for context, the Sacklers, the family that controls Purdue Pharmaceuticals.  Like Schwarzman they like their name up all over the place.  "On The Media" mentions how “in the face of mounting public pressure,” including dramatic protest demonstrations at the Guggenheim Museum, “Britain's National Portrait Gallery, New York's Guggenheim and the UK'S Tate Galleries have announced that they will no longer accept their money.”

That brings us to a recent FAIR Counterspin radio segment about activist work to reclaim our museums and public institutions from so-called wealthy philanthropists creating “reputational space” for the questionable things they continue to do while influencing public discourse narratives.  See: Amin Husain on Decolonizing Museums, Nikole Hannah-Jones on School Resegregation, May 10, 2019.

FAIR’s Counterspin text describing the show's segment reads:

This week on CounterSpin: If someone makes lots of money by, say, knowingly and cynically exacerbating opioid addiction, is it OK as long as they give some of that money to an art museum? Cultural institutions are important sites of public conversation, but the public doesn’t have much say in who gets to lead that conversation, or the stories they tell. Activists are asking us to talk about what that means, and what it would mean to change it. We’ll talk about accountability for cultural institutions with Amin Husain, core organizer with the group Decolonize This Place.

The Counterspin segment begins with a quick reference to the New York Museum of Natural History not allowing its museum space (its Hall of Ocean Life) to be used for a gala event by the Amazon ecosystem-destroying Jair Bolsonaro, the fascist president of Brazil (newly in charge in that country after a soft coup that imprisoned the former president and popular candidate Lula during the election and still holds Lula incommunicado).  The segment then proceeds to its central topic: Protests being organized concerning who is allowed to be in command of the resources of public cultural institutions like museums.  The Counterspin discussion with Amin Husain, of Decolonize This Place cites as a prime example, how Warren B. Kanders is on the board and vice-chair of the Whitney Museum.

Kanders is the owner of the Safariland Group that sells what it calls “non-lethal solutions,” which means that it supplies tear gas used against asylum seekers at the U.S. boarder, against the Furguson protestors, in Baltimore, by the repressive governments in Egypt and Turkey, plus the Safariland Group supplies lethal bullets used against Palestinians.  Mr. Husain points out that, at the same time Kanders is on the board, the Whitney is putting on exhibitions that “define what protest is” and what our art is.  Husain discusses how there is a “whole other economy going on” in museums and similar institutions based on the “one-percenters” determining what “aesthetics and culture” are, but notes that with people like Kander on the boards of such institutions they are not accountable to the communities they “claim to serve,” which raises questions about what these environments are “hospitable” to, even, as the Whitney, for instance, self-promotes and self-defines itself as a “progressive” institution.

Program host Janine Jackson commented about the “confused view of wealth” when people “make their money off misery,” while it is expected to somehow “all balance out” if they use that money for things like museum thus making these institutions “in some sense money launderers.”  Husain noted something else ingrained and related that the defines culture in the art world: How wealth finds a “home” as the art world creates a parking place, a repository for wealth, plus it creates a medium of exchange for great, often stolen, wealth (e.g. the $91 million Jeff Koons rabbit) while furnishing the wealthy with the benefit of tax write-offs.  Money is often being hidden this way.  Meanwhile, Husain notes these institutions are supposed to make rich people look better while they are engaged in ‘philanthropy that’s not really philanthropy.’  He said these institutions need to stop getting a pass on “pretending to be something good, but actually advancing something bad.”

Husain and his protestors are targeting the leadership of these institutions, not the employees, who often share these same criticism and concerns– Over 100 staff members of the Whitney joined in signing a letter calling for the removal of Kanders.

Fittingly, given that Counterspin is a media watchdog program, there was some discussion about the too frequently skewed, somewhat “containing” reporting of these protests by news media– An analogy was also made to how corporately-owned news media, like institutions such as museums, often purports to be serving the public, when it actually isn’t.   

Husain spoke about how these culture-defining excursions can be exclusionary and biased, saying it is important to be conscious how these institution are “not neutral” in ongoing public justice fights and dialogues.  He rhetorically asked how can you summon people in to spaces at the Whitney to speak out against fascism when there is someone like Warren Kanders on the board.  Husain concluded saying that challenging such leadership at these institutions was part of changing the nature of the conversation.  The public, he said, needs to reclaim these institutions.

Now, let’s progress more directly to the subject of libraries, starting with a Carnegie library.  Would the Whitney be better of if, rather than having to deal with Safariland Group associations, Apple just slapped its logos on the Whitney property?. . .

. . .  A new article up in the Boston Review makes the point that Andrew Carnegie’s style of giving, for instance, when he donated libraries all over this country (whatever questions his style raised), was far less problematic than what is going on now with the modern style of “philanthropy.”  The article’s case in point is Apple’s takeover of the Carnegie donated Washington Public Library.  See: The Boston Review: Apple's Newest Store and the Perverse Logic of Philanthro-Capitalism- The Apple Carnegie Library embodies recent developments in philanthropy that should trouble us: the uncritical valorization of philanthro-capitalism and the privatization of public goods and public spaces. Benjamin Soskis, May 21, 2019.

Benjamin Soskis, the article’s author, says: “The Apple Carnegie Library betrays the core goal of Carnegie's giving: to create fully public institutions. . .” and that Apple’s approach to an expensive physical restoration of the building “was not merely architectural.”  (“The library’s marble façade now glows, as do the two Apple logos that flank the entrance like totemic laptops.”)

Soskis observes:

It is true that plenty of knowledge will be diffused on the screens sold there. But in two fundamental respects, the Apple Carnegie Library embodies recent developments that betray the principles that animated Carnegie’s giving: the uncritical valorization of philanthro-capitalism and the privatization of public goods and public spaces. Carnegie’s philanthropy was certainly not unimpeachable—it was often warped by his own ego and eccentricity—but we don’t need to idealize it in order to admire elements of it, especially his library campaign. Indeed, reexamining that campaign should help us appreciate the problem with using Carnegie’s philanthropic legacy to promote the opening of an Apple store in the shell of Washington’s old public library.

He contrasts the Tech industry’s self-promotional furnishing of benefits with Carnegie’s ideal of truly public institutions:

    . .   Apple, and the tech industry more generally, has embraced a particular approach to philanthro-capitalism, one in which the products and services they profit from are presented as powerful forces for good themselves—today’s tech products forge social networks and connections, offer ladders for the aspiring to rise, and, yes, diffuse knowledge.

    . . . . Fundamental to Carnegie’s library campaign was the idea that they be fully public institutions—that is, democratically supported and tax-funded. In order for a town to receive funding to construct a Carnegie library, it needed to provide the site of the building, as well as an annual appropriation of 10 percent of the construction costs, in order to cover maintenance and upkeep, staff salaries, and books. . . .

Soskis’ analysis, citing Carnegie own words, that a man of wealth must consider himself “a mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer” tracks that of Carnegie biographer David Nasaw.

Nasaw at BPL

Speaking at the Brooklyn Public Library (of all places!) Mr. Nasaw made this point precisely, that Mr. Carnegie was actually very different from many of the wealthy today.  Saying that Carnegie had a lot in common with Senator Elizabeth Warren, Nasaw said that Carnegie was a  proponent of the “dangerous but cogent belief” that the wealthy hold their wealth “in trust for the benefit of the public.”  Carnegie did not believe that he should die possessed of wealth that he had not directed toward the public benefit (he actually failed to give his money away fast enough because of the rate at which it was coming in).  Nasaw said that, although, Carnegie considered himself to have a superior ability to administer and direct wealth, he viewed his ascendance to wealth as somewhat accidental, the luck of his being where two rivers converged at Pittsburgh where iron ore and coal for smelting were also plentiful.

We should mention that David Nasaw was also a co-plaintiff with Citizens Defending Libraries in two lawsuits seeking to stop the NYPL “Central Library Plan” selling and shrinking libraries and getting rid of books and librarians.  That plan was being funded in part, by Mr. Schwarzman, the ostensible reason his name was put on the 42nd Street library that it put in jeopardy.

Using Apple’s ambitions as example, Soskis’ speaks about the erosion of the public commons as private sector branding takes over:

    The Apple Carnegie Library is one of thirteen that the company has recently opened and introduced as “town squares,” shifting attention from the stores’ commercial purposes to their civic ones. . . .

    . . .  The “town square” label is an impressive branding effort, but no amount of rhetorical silting can hide the erosion of public space that has taken place on Mount Vernon Square. The Carnegie Library Apple store—let us call it that—is fundamentally a commercial venue, run by a corporation accountable to its shareholders. And it arrives on the scene when actual public libraries are both starved for resources and dramatically expanding their own civic functions . .

Soskis is thus echoing concerns raised by two prescient librarian authors of books we have written about before: John E. Buschman “Dismantling the Public Sphere– Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy” (2003) and Ed D’Angelo  “Barbarians at the gate of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good” (2006). Each of those authors cite back to the concerns of Henry Giroux, who in a cover blurb endorsed D’Angelo’s book.  (One source to hear interviews with Giroux is the Project Censored Radio Show, a recent segment of which was an interview with Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White about the dismantlement of libraries.)

Our near final stop on this series of stories about so-called philanthropy as a guise for diminishing the public commons, including libraries, is our report on the Brooklyn Public Library’s May 22nd `charity’ gala honoring the private Ratner/Prokhorov Barclays basketball arena and the Nets basketball team.  See:  As The Brooklyn Public Library Holds Gala At The Barclays Arena Honoring Nets And Barclay’s Arena, Citizens Defending Libraries Is There With A Message: End Faux Philanthropy; Take Less And Don’t Sell Our libraries!

Citizens Defending Libraries was leafleting outside the gala.  Our chant (borrowing a bit from Mr. Giridharadas) was: “Put a stake in faux philanthropy: Take less and don’t sell our libraries!”

There was much that was especially troubling about the gala.  Linda Johnson, the president on the Brooklyn Public Library said when she arrived in her position at the BPL that turning libraries into real estate deals was her biggest priority. Topping the list for those deals: Two libraries next to Forest City Ratner property, including Brooklyn’s second biggest library.  The Ratner organization headed by mega-subsidy collector Bruce Ratner created the “Barclays” arena as part of the ill-famed Atlantic Yards eminent domain project.  The dots to be connected concerning library sales, the real estate industry and Ratner are myriad.  The latest connection: BPL president Linda Johnson has literally shacked up (in a Brooklyn Bridge Park apartment) with Bruce Ratner.

Yes, that, indeed, is the background for the BPL “honoring” (i.e. advertising) the private basketball arena.

The BPL’s press release for the event made several points about how this public commons is  “partnering” with arena.

In our flyer that we handed out we made the point that a huge amount of tax dollars had been diverted into subsidies for the private Barclays area while city public libraries were simultaneously starved.  Specifically, what was spent on the Barclays and sports arenas was “a sum more than one-third greater” than “the city committed for capital improvements to the its 206 branch libraries and four research centers” even though those libraries serve “roughly seven times as many people a year as attend baseball games.” (That’s not to mention that the teams are getting an additional $680 million in subsidies spread over 40 years.)

A basic point of the flyer that we handed out that evening is that we the taxpayers pay for our libraries, that "NYC Public Libraries Are Mostly Public Tax Dollar Funded," and that when taxpayer money is diverted into huge subsidies for projects like the private Barclays arena and then the BPL is induced to use our publicly funded libraries to advertise that private arena, it's not charity, and our public tax dollars are being stolen to support private interests. . .

Plus, as essentially all of the stories above observed, this amounts to a dismantlement and privatization of the public commons.

This `philanthropically' funded dismantling of the public commons is not the way it has to be: We make these rules up.

In a May 2017 interview, Jane Mayer, author of  “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” (it’s on another “On The Media Segment,” recently reprised) said that a lot of what we are looking at today in terms of the working of modern day politics is “set up as sort of an arm of `philanthropy.’”   That includes, as noted at the beginning of the interview segment, a general deployment of philanthropy to support the “preservation of capital for rich people.”  That includes, for example, concerted and well funded efforts to ensure we keep polluting the atmosphere with fossil fuels creating climate catastrophe.

It's all the result of rules created in 1916 to allow the wealthy to get tax breaks for giving money to charities.  It's money that is supposedly to serve the `public good.'  See: Dark Money and the Rise of Conservative Orthodoxy, May 31, 2019.

From the very beginning the danger of this was understood, in a way that it too little spoken about today.  Mayer says that when the Rockefeller family wanted to set up the first of these big philanthropies, the Rockefeller Foundation:

 it was incredibly controversial. There was bipartisan opposition from across the board. All of these congressmen and senators said, this is an undemocratic thing, to have a rich family be able to spend its money on public policy and get a tax deduction. They saw foundations as unaccountable to anybody but the super rich and playing a undemocratic role in the midst of our democratic society.

Stephen A. Schwarzman in Jane Mayer's book

The previously mentioned Stephen A. Schwarzman makes an appearance as one of the powerful billionaires in Mayer’s “Dark Money” book as a class warrior agitating to have the poor pay more in taxes and for the wealthy, like himself, to pay less, including through tax loopholes that make his own real estate exceptionally low.  Schwarzman, of course is the man who hopes to get a pass on “pretending to be something good, but actually advancing something bad” by having his name on the NYPL’s 42nd Street Central Reference Library.

(PS: For more about how money is being used to so that the public doesn't get what it wants, but should, see- Everybody’s Realizing It Now: The Political Establishment Is Not Willing To Give The Public The Things The Vast Majority Of Americans Want And That We Could Easily Have)

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.

Self Proclaimed As Fighting Surveillance, Library Freedom Project Is Tied to Tor Service With Its Deep Ongoing Connections, Including Financing, To The U.S. Government

Two WNYC On The Media segments, both about surveillance, clash because of what connects them: What you might learn from each of them about the relationship of the Tor Service to our federal government and its surveillance efforts.  For libraries this means. . . keep reading.

We first heard about the Library Freedom Project on what we thought was an excellent WNYC On The Media segment about United States government surveillance of patrons in American libraries aired on June 5, 2015: Librarians Vs. The Patriot Act.  Our library defending interest was already piqued and attuned to the issue.  The On the Media segment aired just a few months after a National Notice article about surveillance in libraries: Snowden Revelations Considered: Is Your Library, Once Intended To Be A Protected Haven of Privacy, Spying on You?

In that On The Media segment an interview with Alison Macrina was used to supply and put much of the information in context and it informed us that Ms. Macrina is the founder of the Library Freedom Project, and that with “help from the Knight Foundation, she and an ACLU attorney have created workshops on how to maintain privacy online.” 

The Library Freedom Project Twitter page (with a crossed-out surveillance eye symbol as its logo) promises that “We fight for privacy rights” and that the Library Freedom Project is:

Fighting for intellectual freedom and against authoritarianism. Coming to a library near you.

On the Library Freedom Project website we learn more about Alison Macrina and her connection to the Tor Project (emphasis supplied):

Alison Macrina
Founder & Executive Director

Along with founding the Library Freedom Project, Alison is a librarian, internet activist, and a core contributor to The Tor Project. Passionate about surveillance and it’s connection to global injustice, Alison works to demystify privacy and security topics for ordinary users.

On the Library Freedom Project “Resources” page (which includes a tweeted compliment from Edward Snowden) their website has more about TOR touting it as "beneficial to libraries":

All About Tor

What is Tor, and why is it beneficial to libraries? How does it work? How can it help my library patrons? In this course, we discuss the need for anonymous browsing, give a crash course on using Tor, and walk librarians through the process of adding it to their library labs.

That links to a “Curriculum for teaching all about Tor” page including a link to download Tor.

On another page of the site the Library Freedom Project announces “We are excited to partner with The Tor Project to bring Tor exit relays into libraries!”  What this means is a little complicated, but it means using the libraries to help Tor.  In fact, it's interesting how much of the Library Freedom Project website involves efforts to make Tor available and get it used.

What is all this about “Tor”?  Does Tor provide privacy?. . .

. . . If you listened to another relatively recent On The Media segment (May 25, 2018), this time about Yasha Levine’s book “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet,” you learn that Tor does NOT provide privacy as advertised and that it is heavily funded by the United States government, thus raising questions about what the government is accomplishing through that funding.

Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet.”

Here is some of the transcript of Yasha Levine being interviewed by OTM's Bob Garfield:

    YASHA LEVINE: So the Tor browser, it’s a separate browser that you download and that you use, and it promises to protect your anonymity on the internet. So the websites that you go to don't know who you are. . . .

    BOB GARFIELD: So that’s great. These apps have delivered us from the prying eyes of the state, whether it's the Iranian state or the US government. We can navigate around the net without fear because these civilian heroes have given us the tools to do so.

    YASHA LEVINE: Except not. [LAUGHS] And one thing that I outline in my book is just how dependent both Signal and Tor are on government contracts. So Tor, anywhere from 90 to 98 percent of its budget depends on government contracts. . . .. And the origins of Tor are very interesting. The origins of Tor are not to protect human rights, are not to protect dissidents in Iran or China. Tor originated in a US Naval laboratory as a way of protecting spies from surveillance. So imagine if you're conducting an investigation for the FBI and you’re trying to infiltrate, let’s say, an animal rights group on the internet, if you are sitting in an FBI office and you go and register with this forum, the administrator will see your IP address and, if they take the time to trace that, they’ll be like, wait a second, this guy is the Fed. And so, you needed a technology that could hide your information. But the problem was if it's only American agents using this system, it defeats its purpose because it’s like, oh, they’re using Tor, another Fed. So the only way that that system could work was if it's used by as broad a range of people as possible.

    BOB GARFIELD: Aha, make it ubiquitous so that we’re not dimed out by the very fact of being on the platform.

    YASHA LEVINE: Exactly. And that’s what Tor has become. . . .  And to me, what’s interesting about the Tor project is that it shows that the military is so involved in every part of the network that it even controls and develops parts of the network that are supposed to be opposed to it.

    BOB GARFIELD: But that doesn't necessarily mean the government has backdoors to subvert the encryption or the IP address masking, does it?

    YASHA LEVINE: No, not necessarily. . . .

Citizens Defending Libraries just put up an article about Levine’s book: Reading on the Internet vs. Reading a Book You Picked Up Browsing In Your Library: Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet.”  There we described how Levine, pointing out the oddity of the connection between Tor and the federal government, went into the likelihood of (not very necessary) government backdoors to allow the Tor service to surveil its users, and how TOR may serve “as a `honeypot’ to attract and concentrate more accessibly for evaluation all the communicators who really do want hide significant things from the U.S. government.”

On his own website Yasha Levine wrote about his OTM interview

Yasha Levine himself wrote more about his On The Media interview (quoting from it) and specifically about Tor.

        "My problem with tools like Tor and Signal is that they distract from a bigger problem that exists on the Internet. It is in Google's interest. It is in Facebook's interest to promote Tor and to promote Signal. Because these tools do no threaten their business models. When you use Tor and you log into your Google account or if you log into your Facebook account, Tor does not protect you. Google knows who you are. You just logged into their service. Facebook knows who you are. You just logged into their service. Tor does not protect you from surveillance that happens on the Internet as a matter of routine. It does not protect you from Facebook giving away or selling your data like we've seen with Cambridge Analytica. These tools give people a false sense of privacy. And we don't have any privacy."

        "Tor narrowly protects you when you're browsing the internet, and it's sometimes useful. Signal protects a narrow band of communication — your text messages. It does not protect anything else that happens on your Android phone that siphons up everything it can collect and sends it to Google. What can you do if you want to protect yourself from Google? There is nothing you can do."

        "The NSA does not run its own social media platform. That social media platform is run by Facebook. So we have to focus not just on government surveillance, but on the private telecommunication systems and platforms that make that surveillance possible. And so as a privacy movement, we have to move away from simplistic technological solutions and figure out political solutions because that's the only way we are going to guarantee our privacy."

As our previous post about Mr. Levine’s book noted, his book never mentions by name the concept of a “limited hangout” by the intelligence agencies, but he supplies enough information about people involved with promoting Tor to give cause to wonder who those people may actually be working for when they promote Tor or, alternatively, whether they know they are being used by the Big Brother forces they say they are providing protection against.  In this regard, Levine provides intriguing background stories and details about Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden (all of whom are also connected one way or another to Julian Assange).

Whether or not some people might be working as agents of the federal government and intelligence community or are simply being used as tools by them while they, duped, in good faith believe in the benefits of Tor, if Yasha Levine’s various suspicions about Tor are valid, as it appears that they almost certainly are, then it is important to bell this cat for the otherwise unwary.

In June of 2015, right after the On The Media segment featuring them, we contacted the Library Freedom Project and wound up exchanging emails with Alison Macrina because we wanted to exchange information and dig deeper into the subject of library surveillance in general.  We didn’t actually talk with Ms. Macrina, because Ms. Macrina wanted communications to be by email.  Although there were over a dozen emails exchanged back and forth between us the information exchanged was mostly an outflow of what we sent the Library Freedom Project.  We also worked to engage with them via Twitter.

When we sent Ms. Macrina the National Notice article (by Michael D. D. White) about the Snowden revelations and surveillance in the libraries saying that we were interested in “what is  happening in New York City libraries, and why it may be happening” and what besides real estate deals may “also factor into driving what is happening as books are disappearing from our libraries” Ms. Macrina responded that she was “in agreement about all this stuff of course.”   Despite all our ensuing emails we really never got deeper into things than that.

Maybe Ms. Macrina didn’t view our Citizens Defending Libraries interests as truly extending to the same concerns about surveillance the Library Freedom Project said it was addressing, instead of expecting that we'd only take issue with library sell-offs, library contractions and the elimination of books.  (As our post about Yasha Levine’s book makes clear, those contractions and elimination of books are definitely interrelated with surveillance concerns.)

Talking about the way Citizens Defending Libraries addressed and wanted to prevent “closures” Ms. Macrina referred us to Urban Librarians Unite as being similarly interested, but while we said that we didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with her, we had to explain that Urban Librarians Unite did not want to ally with us to protect the public and that, running into problems with them from the start, we found them consistently on the other side, testifying in favor of the library sales and shrinkages, and promoting keeping library books off-site (actually a surveillance issue itself).  Ms. Macrina communicated that library “closures” was not an “arena” the Library Freedom Project was working in.

Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries

Since our 2015 communications with the Library Freedom Project, however unproductive they may have been, we have not heard from them again although we ourselves have substantially added to the information we have been passing along to the rest of the world about library surveillance, setting up a dedicated page of links about it (Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries), and, among other things, furnishing information from an October 2016 Noticing New York article based on information from the minutes of NYPL trustee meetings:  Snowden, Booz and the Dismantling of Libraries As We Know Them: Why Was A Private Government Spy Agency Hired to Take Apart New York's Most Important Libraries And Turn Them Into Something Else?

We think it suffices to say that there are issues about surveillance in our libraries that need to be pursued much more deeply than they have been and that there are too many unanswered and unpursued questions relating to surveillance in our libraries and why certain things that are happening to our libraries are happening.