Urgent Appeal from Save Inwood Library to All Our Library Defenders- Inwood Legal Action Needs to Raise $$$ To File Lawsuit

Inwood Manhattan's northernmost neighborhood is targeted for a radical, destructive rezoning and its library is targeted to be sold for a real estate redevelopment deal.  Both of these things are interrelated and both the library and the neighborhood need to be saved.

This appeal comes in from the Save Inwood Library people who are working hard to save that library.

We believe that, like us, you will find yourself endorsing their appeal, wanting to answer it and passing the word around.  We are transmitting the message below in basically the same wording of the entreaty they sent asking that it be passed along to you. . . . .  

As you probably know, the latest library on the sink-and-shrink chopping block is the Inwood branch of the NYPL, located near the northern tip of Manhattan. This library serves its community so well that in 2016 it won a prize as the best neighborhood branch in Manhattan. Inwood opened in 1952 as New York City's first postwar library. It was extensively renovated and enlarged quite recently (1998-2001) under the Adopt-a-Branch Program at a cost of $4.3 million, nearly 90% of it city money. It is well laid out, and in good condition, despite what the NYPL's recent attempts to denigrate this library in order to sell it.  In fact, just recently, in 2010, NYPL president Tony Marx, who grew up in Inwood knowing the library well, visited it again and crowed effusively about how he was blown away by those renovations.  Of the seven branches renovated at that time, Inwood was the newest, yet it is the only one that has been pegged for demolition. That's because this plan has nothing to do with the library and everything to do with real estate.*

[* See our Citizens Defending Libraries testimony on the subject here:  Testimony To City Council Subcommittee Respecting Proposed Sale of Inwood Library for Redevelopment and Upzoning of the Inwood Community, Tuesday, July 10, 2018.]

Inwood is a diverse, working-class neighborhood with a high percentage of immigrants and first-generation Americans of many national origins, and an AMI far below the median for the metropolitan area. Inwood is one of the twelve neighborhoods selected by the mayor for upzoning; the City Council passed the upzoning in August, pushed by the mayor and council member Ydanis Rodriguez but opposed by virtually every resident and business in the neighborhood. An unprecedented feature is that a library/affordable housing project of 14 stories (twice as high as nearly all other buildings in Inwood) planned for the site of the present library was folded into the rezoning plan and excluded from any other regulatory process.

Inwood is not the first New York City library to become a pawn in a real-estate deal, but it is the first to be used as a tool in the rezoning of an entire neighborhood. If this is successful, it will surely not be the last. The think tank, Center for an Urban Future, which is developing these plans, has said as much, for example here (pp.51-52) and here.

This rezoning, if carried out, would devastate our community. We have no choice but to fight it in court. The defense of the Inwood library is a key factor in this fight and inseparable from it; the only way to save the library is to stop the rezoning.

Inwood Legal Action needs to raise $50,000 for an initial filing. We ask everyone reading this to give generously, whatever you can afford. Please go to our site here:

Inwood Legal Action

Remember, our fight is your fight.

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?”)

Mark Lamont Hill’s Ouster From CNN- We Add To The our List of Journalists Exiled From Mainstream Media Because of Their Views

From the coverage by FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting

As part of our “Where Do You Get Your News” forums we created (and included in our background materials) a list of journalist exiled from mainstream media for expression of their views.  See: 

List of Journalists Fired or Self-exiled From Mainstream Media Outlets Because They Expressed or Wanted to Express Views (Like Being Critical of U.S. Wars) Unacceptable to the Outlets They Were Working For

We have now updated that list to include CNN’s firing of Marc Lamont Hill in November, 2018.  Mr. Hill, an American academic, author, activist, and television personality, a Professor of Media Studies and Urban Education at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was fired from his position as a commentator for CNN twenty-four hours after he expressed his opinion on the Arab–Israeli conflict before the U.N. that was too sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians.  He said that Palestinians have a right to resist their occupation by Israel through international boycotts of Israel and to defend themselves from the Israeli military.  This point of view was considered unacceptably anti-Israel (while some tried to cast his view as being antisemitic).

And the views of the others exiled from mainstream media?  We invite you to take a look.

PS: The coverage by FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, is especially insightful and detailed, plus it includes a call to action.

New York Times Obituary for Victor Marchetti Adds Another To Our List of Suppressed Books– Interesting What Gets Suppressed and the Selectivity of What Sometimes Gets Reported

At the end of October, the New York Times ran an obituary for Victor Marchetti, a former C.I.A. employee proclaiming him as “co-author of the first book, about the agency’s inner workings, that the federal government sought to censor before its publication.” See: Victor Marchetti, 88, Dies; Book Was First to Be Censored by C.I.A., by Katharine Q. Seelye,  October, 31, 2018.

The book, written with John D. Marks, “The C.I.A. and the Cult of Intelligence,” was ultimately published in 1974.

According to the Times, Marchetti’s book “became a critically acclaimed best seller” and “was one of several accounts of the C.I.A.’s attempts to subvert foreign governments and spy on American citizens (Mr. Marchetti among them) that led to the creation in 1975” of the Senate select committee to study intelligence abuses chaired by Senator Frank Church.

Although the book was so catalytic to government investigation and the ensuring recommendations for policy change and reining in the intelligence community, the Times obituary reported how the CIA fought to suppress it.  They did so based on Marchetti’s confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement with the CIA even though Marchetti’s publisher was able to argue that much of the information sought to be suppressed was already public. That means, the effort was to suppress an overall picture or point of view.

The Times obituary quoted one of its own, Anthony Lewis, a longtime columnist and legal affairs specialist for The New York Times, who weighed in back at that time worrying about the implication of knowledgeable authors in the area being so restricted that “They cannot write anything in the vaguely defined area of national security without the prior approval of the C.I.A.”

Citizens Defending Libraries has previously posted about a long list of potentially influential books that have been subject to efforts at suppression even though they often were not the subject of direct censorship.  See: Books As Catalysts In A World Where Information And Points of View Are Often Suppressed.

We’ll thank the Times obituary for calling one more such book to our attention.

While, on its face, it’s seemingly comprehensive, the Times obituary for Marchetti was selective about what it reported.  One story in the newspaper’s morgue of the collected stories the New York Times  previously ran that concerned Mr. Marchetti did not get woven into the obituary’s fabric.  It was a story was reported February 7, 1985: Watergate Figure Loses Suit Against Tabloid.

The, albeit, brief Times article reported that a Federal jury had decided that Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt Jr. was not libeled in a 1978 article by Marchetti where Marchetti  reported that a 1966 C.I.A. memorandum said Mr. Hunt was in Dallas the day Mr. Kennedy was slain and in which he suggested that Mr. Hunt was part of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.  (The L.A. Times reporting the same grand jury decision related that the CIA memorandum said Hunt “was disguised as one of three `bums’ who were arrested in Dallas the day Kennedy died.”)  Whether, or not, Hunt, as a serial fabricator (and serial novelist), can be believed, he reportedly told his son before he died (including in recordings and videos) that there was truth to the story of his involvement in the assassination.

The New York Times obituary for E. Howard Hunt does not mention any of the talk about such possible involvement of Hunt in the Kennedy assassination.  See: E. Howard Hunt, Agent Who Organized Botched Watergate Break-In, Dies at 88, by Tim Weiner, January 24, 2007.  Instead it reports that “Mr. Hunt was never much of a spy. He did not conduct classic espionage operations in order to gather information”; that his “field was political warfare: dirty tricks, sabotage and propaganda.”

It portrays Hunt as a bungler who “mishandled many of the tasks he received from the C.I.A. and the White House” and incorporates a serviceable quote from a colleague that Hunt “went from one disaster to another” right into Watergate.  Although Hunt was once CIA station chief in Mexico the obit writer assures that enough of Hunt's secret activities are known to assure the reader that he “was a rank amateur” in “political and psychological warfare” despite the fact that he was charged with training CIA recruits in this area.  The Times article credits Hunt with helping “to plan the covert operation that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala,” but mentions, as if it’s squarely on Hunt's doorstep that the country suffered when the military regime that came in afterwards was repressive.

The Times Victor Marchetti obituary winds up by letting us know that Mr. Marchetti reckoned the attention his book received to be “a dubious reward” that in retrospect he would have avoided to instead `play the game’ instead, because he “lost everything.”  Marchetti’s son explained that the losses even extended his mother, Marchetti’s wife, being prevented from getting jobs by the CIA.

Mr. Marchetti’s son told the Times: “When you take on the system, it’s hard to beat the system.”

In other words, a word to the wise from the conclusion the Times offered: It is difficult for the public to learn about the intelligence community those things that are inconsistent with the way that the intelligence community wants itself depicted.

If New York readers want to read Mr. Marchetti’s groundbreaking book, the NYPL has one copy in its research collection that cannot be borrowed (or discovered by browsing the shelves) and it keeps it off-site so that it must be requested in advance; the two other public library systems in New York City, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Library do not have any copy of the book.

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?”

There are a lot of people alarmed and/or already woeful about the announcement of the imminent arrival of an Amazon headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, even people who have not fully thought through everything there may be to get alarmed about in connection with the book industry-disrupting and imagination-defying growth of Amazon.*  One of those people quickest out of the starting gate with such opinions, is New York Times architect critic Michael Kimmelman.  See: Amazon’s HQ2 Will Benefit From New York City. But What Does New York Get?

(* See: National Notice- 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. . . )

The arrival of Amazon is a huge topic so people will have to do a lot of thinking about it and it is too much to expect that everyone is going to get all their best thoughts together quickly.  This time, Kimmelman, who has done some good work in the past, has some worthwhile observations, but he also falters somewhat unfortunately with respect to his key recommendation.
                               
On the perspicacious side, Kimmelman wonders how well a huge tech company like Amazon will fit in in New York City:

    . . .  the tech industry isn’t culturally urban. Its insularity, secrecy, its bedrock libertarianism and algorithmic notions about progress, land use and corporate independence have never easily meshed with the slow, open-society, regulatory-heavy, greater-good mission that defines city living. Disruption is a virtue and instrument of efficiency in tech circles. But it isn’t repetitiously welcome where protections and a focus on collective welfare remain abiding democratic ideals.

As the title of Kimmelman’s essay implies and as he, in his essay, then directly states, for Kimmelman the, “The question for city residents is what these companies give back.”

That’s hardly the only question, but Kimmelman presents one particularly unfortunate suggested answer.  He suggests that Amazon make “self-interested” investments in NYC public libraries per the thinking of “Eric Klinenberg”:

In turn, Amazon, which dominates the book market, could, up front, make self-interested commitments in local school programs and, as Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, advocates, in public libraries, our most vibrant, multipurpose community hubs.

In other words, Kimmelman clearly sounds as if he is dangerously suggesting that Amazon engage in exactly the kind of public/private partnerships that library administration officials repetitiously crow that they are eager to promote now-a-days, projects that unfortunately commercialize the libraries and are all the more and especially dangerous when the private corporation `partners’ in them are acting `self-interestedly’ . .

Where do we start?  Do we start by saying Amazon, the great disruptor, has already been “partnering” with NYC library administration officials to promote more reading of digital books (in the subways)?  Do we wonder at the fact that Kimmelman, bypassing others (for instance John E. Buschman and Ed D'Angelo), is constituting Eric Klinenberg, “a sociologist at New York University,” as the new automatic go-to expert on what is desirable with respect to public investment in libraries after Klinenberg’s just publishing a book that he just recently put together in short order as the result of his being approached for a “collaborative project” on NYC libraries by the Revson Foundation?—  While Mr. Klinenberg describes the Revson Foundation as a “fierce champion of public libraries,” the foundation can probably more accurately be described as deeply involved in promoting (with behind-the-scenes funding) the current notion of selling libraries and turning them into shrink-and-sink real estate deals, their book collections drastically reduced, the talents and contributions of librarians dramatically deemphasized.

Do we point out that what the Revson Foundation promotes as the new libraries of the 21st Century future is all tied in with the neo-liberal, capitalist, private-market orthodoxy that promotes public/private partnerships between libraries and benefactors like Amazon?  Do we point out how Amazon’s ethos of, and roots in, data collection and its ties to the military, going back and forward, is gratingly at odds with the tradition of libraries as the havens of privacy as free speech requires?  That's what's makes their acting `self-interestedly’ far more scary if they partner on library investments.*

(* Next we are bound to hear that Queens City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who oversees libraries- and their sell-offs- and who has made himself initially visible opposing Amazon's arrival, will fold his opposition to Amazon when Amazon promises such library investments because Van Bramer doesn't believe that concerns about Booz Allen or surveillance in the libraries is real enough to worry about.)

Kimmelman once wrote a very important column of his own lambasting the NYPL's Central Library Plan following in the footsteps of Ada Louise Huxtable’s very last column, published just weeks before her death (Wall Street Journal: Undertaking Its Destruction, December 3, 2012), in which she railed against what they were doing to Manhattan’s central libraries and the elimination of books.  Mr. Kimmelman (New York Times: Critic’s Notebook- In Renderings for a Library Landmark, Stacks of Questions, January 29, 2013) likewise scorned how the “potential Alamo of engineering, architecture and finance would be irresponsible,” the result of “a not-uncommon phenomenon among cultural boards, a form of architectural Stockholm syndrome.”   We think he also got caught up with the fact that what was happening to the libraries, with its real estate deal underpinnings, was something very different from what was being touted.

When it comes to Amazon, however, Kimmelman seems to have some more catching up to do. . .

. . .  By the way, not too long ago, Forbes ran an op-ed arguing that Amazon should simply replace libraries with Amazon retail outlets–  “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money” (out of embarrassment Forbes quickly took the piece down): At least Kimmelman is not going so far as to make that exact same argument.

Tuesday Election Results For Three NYC Ballot Proposals- Analysis Of What That Means And Why You Want To Be Put on Citizens Defending Libraries’ Short List For Emails and Communications

Tuesday was Election Day and there is much to analyze.  In New York City one of the significant things to analyze about local results concerns changes to the New York City Charter that will have an effect on city governance and the way that proposals for approval, including real estate projects, move through the city system.  That obviously could affect libraries which the city tends now to regard more in the category of pawns on the chessboard of real estate development, rather than for what they offer in terms of societal benefits.

The three proposals were all approved (on the real estate site "Curbed).

Like most ballot proposals, they were all worded to sound good to people strolling into a voting booth.  Nevertheless, the thinking about how desirable each of them was varied substantially, even though one of them was dubbed a  “campaign finance reform.”  The one that most concerned informed community activist groups (except for bicyclers who view the current Mayor as being on the same page with them), was a proposal that would, in a Trojan Horse fashion, give the Mayor more control and influence over the Community Board Planning process by putting the Mayor in change of the flow of additional planning resources to local Community Boards.

The best way to consider what the proposals might mean for future is to go back and look at some of the analysis offered prior to the election.  Citizens Defending Libraries endeavored to send out information to inform all our petition subscribers to inform them of various positions and analysis so that they could decide about their votes. . . . MoveOn (through whom we communicate with the bulk of our petition signers) blocked our email.*—   MoveOn communicated that advocating a position on the proposals (or offering information as we were?) Violated its regulations.—   This is a good reason for our Citizens Defending Libraries signers to want to be put on our short (more nimble) email list that doesn’t bog down in the vicissitudes of waiting for and getting MoveOn approvals: If you want to be on our short list, send an email to Cemac62 [at] aol.com saying that you request to be on the Citizens Defending Libraries “short list.”

(* MoveOn suggested that to comply: "Sorry we can't let this one through due to NY's regulations regarding elections and ballot initiatives. Maybe you can post something more vague telling people in general how to support libraries and linking to Facebook for more info?")

Also, for analysis and discussion of the potential impact of the charter changes that were on the ballot you can listen to WBAI’s morning show last Tuesday (wth Michael G. Haskins), where Citizens Deafening Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White discussed them with Alicia Boyd of Movement To Protect the People (in the WBAI archives for Tuesday, November 6th, advance to the 7:25 AM slot of the two-hour program- about 2/3rds of the way in- that starts at 6:00 AM).

The emails we attempted to send out to our petition subscribers will lead you to the analysis of the proposal that may help you as you works to confront development proposal going forward:

Here is the text of the email that was blocked by MoveOn even as we worked hard to conform to their regulations:

Subject: Defending Libraries: Voting on Tuesday's City Charter Proposals- Information Available

        (IMPORTANT:  Please email us to be added to our short list of contacts to get urgent information more quickly than through MoveOn.   Our emails often take more time than we would like to get through the MoveOn clearing process than we would like.  We apologize for all the times that urgent MoveOn emails can’t get to you in time.)

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This email is arriving to you late because MoveOn blocked our original email (which was to go out Saturday).  MoveOn informed us that it did so because MoveOn regulations didn't permit an email that appeared to be making specific recommendations on Tuesday's NYC ballot initiatives- As such, we can only inform about the analysis offered by others and their analysis (which is actually what we were doing).

          So, we can tell you that if you look at the somewhat varying recommendations (and analysis) of Save The Inwood Library, MTOPP– The Movement To Protect The People, The New Yorkers For A Human-Scale City Alliance, Transportation Alternatives and Noticing New York, you will see every possible variation of recommendations on how you might vote on each of the three ballot proposals.  Varying with some of the others, The Save the Inwood Library group argues against term limits for community board members, which seems to align their analysis on that with Noticing New York.  The Inwood group also favors voting for the campaign funding change that is proposal #1.

          Transportation Alternatives will give you a different viewpoint cheerleading for all three of the proposals and figuring that term limits could somehow be a great cure for how community boards not represents the public properly.

More analysis, recommendations, and other points of view and deeper analysis can be found here:

    Noticing New York: How To Vote On The Three City Charter Reform (Reform?- Really?) Proposals on The November 6, 2018 Ballot! (NO, NO. . . & MAYBE. .?), Saturday, November 3, 2018   

See also our Citizens Defending Libraries Post:

    Want To Know How To Vote On The Three City Charter Proposals on November 6th?: The answer is NO, NO. . . & MAYBE. .?- Covered in Noticing New York.  

   
That’s where we point out the thoughts Noticing New York includes pertaining to libraries and the need for charter and community board reforms.

REMINDER: To keep up-to-date between emails monitor our Citizens Defending Libraries Facebook page or our Citizens Defending Libraries Twitter feed (@DefendLibraries), and there is also our Citizens Defending Libraries YouTube Channel.

Thank you for reading and passing along* this email, and thank you for defending and caring about our libraries and public assets.

Carolyn McIntyre Citizens Defending Libraries

(* REMEMBER THOUGH- NEW RULE!- MoveOn Tells us when you pass along your MoveOn emails you should delete the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom or someone else could accidentally unsubscribe you from our mailing list.- One more reason to ask to be on our short list!)

MoveOn also blocked this earlier attempted email to our petition signers:

Subject: Defending Libraries: Voting on Tuesday City Charter Proposals- NO, NO, and MAYBE?

    (IMPORTANT:  Please email us to be added to our short list of contacts to get urgent information more quickly than through MoveOn.   Our emails often take more time than we would like to get through the MoveOn clearing process than we would like.  For instance, because of such delays our pre-election email reminder to vote with important related links didn’t go out until AFTER (long after) the election.  We apologize for all the times that urgent MoveOn emails can’t get to you in time.)

    (NEW RULE!- MoveOn Tells us when you pass along your MoveOn emails you should delete the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom or someone else could accidently unsubscribe you from our mailing list.- One more reason to ask to be on our short list!)  

Do you want to know How to vote on the three City Charter Proposals on November 6th?   The answer (NO, NO. . . & MAYBE), is covered by Noticing New York (with huge indebtedness to MTOPP– The Movement To Protect The People–  and the  The New Yorkers For A Human-Scale City Alliance) in this article:

Noticing New York: How To Vote On The Three City Charter Reform (Reform?- Really?) Proposals on The November 6, 2018 Ballot! (NO, NO. . . & MAYBE. .?), Saturday, November 3, 2018.

See also our Citizens Defending Libraries Post:

Want To Know How To Vote On The Three City Charter Proposals on November 6th?: The answer is NO, NO. . . & MAYBE. .?- Covered in Noticing New York.

That’s where we point out the thoughts Noticing New York includes pertaining to libraries and the need for charter and community board reforms.

The three proposals and the recommendations?

    1.    On “Campaign Finance Reform- Reducing the amount of contributions to politician’s campaigns and increasing the amount of matching funds.”  VOTE NO.

    2.    On “Creation of New Community Engagement Agency.”   VOTE NO.
  
    3.    On “Term Limits on Community Boards.”  MAYBE VOTE YES (but THINK ABOUT IT!!- see . . . The Noticing New York article)

REMINDER: To keep up-to-date between emails monitor our Citizens Defending Libraries Facebook page or our Citizens Defending Libraries Twitter feed (@DefendLibraries), and there is also our Citizens Defending Libraries YouTube Channel.

Thank you for reading and passing along* this email, and thank you for defending and caring about our libraries and public assets.

Carolyn McIntyre Citizens Defending Libraries

(* REMEMBER THOUGH- NEW RULE!- MoveOn Tells us when you pass along your MoveOn emails you should delete the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom or someone else could accidentally unsubscribe you from our mailing list.- One more reason to ask to be on our short list!) 

   

National Notice Updates and Republishes Citizens Defending Libraries Post About Amazon’s Huge Growth Beginning With BOOKS– Except It Didn’t begin There: Think DARPA Instead (per New Op-Ed In the NY Times)

National Notice, written by Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White, took over and updated a previous Citizens Defending Libraries post: Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS! Amazon, With Bezos Now The World’s Wealthiest Man At Its Helm, Tops $1 Trillion!

The update: 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)

The updates?  They stem from a new op-ed in the New York Times about the connections between the tech industry and the military.  There’s lots to learn about the connection of Amazon’s wealthy founder Jeff Bezos and his seriously connected grandfather, a key senior figure involved in starting up DARPA (the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which started the Internet, which . . .   Oh well, you'll just have to read the National Notice article for more, but one of the subjects it gets into while considering books is surveillance and it will get you wondering further about the perhaps not so accidental reasons for Amazon’s unusual success.