There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
-- Andrew Carnegie
In this week's Sift:
- Beyond Wisconsin: The Battle Spreads. description
- Second Story. description
- Public Goods and the Public Good. description
- Short Notes. description
- This Week's Challenge. description
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One of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's most controversial proposals is for the legislature to give him the power to take over bankrupt local governments and appoint managers who are unaccountable to local voters. That may sound unconstitutional, but Slate's Richard Thompson Ford explains why it isn't.
I'll take my own stab at an explanation: The federal Constitution defines the powers of the federal government, and gives it (under Article IV, section 4) the responsibility to "guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." But the federal government has no similar responsibility to the cities and towns.
And state constitutions do not devolve powers to the local governments in the same way that the federal constitution devolves power to the states. So a local government's powers are not inherent, they're defined by state law. (Article VII of Michigan's Constitution says "Each organized county shall be a body corporate with powers and immunities provided by law.") So if the state decides to abolish local government completely -- as Michigan seems to be doing in this case -- that's it's prerogative.
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Way back in 1998, The Atlantic did a long article called The Prison-Industrial Complex. Through the 70s and 80s, politicians from both parties competed to be tougher on crime than the other guy, with a result Atlantic summed up like this:
Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a prison-industrial complex—a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population.
In the 80s and 90s, the fad was privatization: Companies like Wackenhut or CCA making money by building and running prisons. Today there's an added profit source: cheap prison labor. The NYT reported last Thursday:
Prison labor — making license plates, picking up litter — is nothing new, and nearly all states have such programs. But these days, officials are expanding the practice to combat cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue, using prisoners to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees.
… Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, introduced a bill last month to require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week. Creating a national prison labor force has been a goal since he went to Congress in 1995, but it makes even more sense in this economy, he said.
Think that through for a minute. At a time when voters say the #1 priority of government should be jobs "it makes even more sense" to use what amounts to slave labor so that government doesn't have to hire people.
At one particularly dramatic moment in Atlas Shrugged, industrialist Hank Rearden declares: "The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!"
This is all part of a larger philosophical idea, which the novel's author Ayn Rand defended in her essays: There is no such entity as "the Public", so it can't appreciate or value or own any goods. Margaret Thatcher was expressing something similar when she said, "There is no such thing as Society." Only individuals really exist; everything else is just an abstraction. (I sometimes wonder how this notion can get squared with the belief that Exxon-Mobil exists and has rights, but that's a different article.)
You may be tempted to stop listening and move on when someone starts talking like this. Practical people don't have time to debate about whether Cleveland or the State of Florida are real. But what we're seeing in the current budget battles is the ultimate result of letting these kinds of arguments go unanswered for the last half century: A number of state governments are now controlled by factions who don't believe in the Public.
From there it follows that public goods like libraries and schools and parks are owned by Nobody, and those of us who use them are freeloaders of one sort or another. In the Libertarian Utopia, everything is private. All roads are toll roads, all schools charge tuition, parks are only open to their members, libraries rent books rather than loan them for free, and so on.
The one public institution that has to be defended at all costs is the library. Knowledge is power, and at a public library knowledge is free. Do the math. Democracy may fall asleep sometimes, but as long as there are free public libraries, it can never die.
The plutocrats have done the math. If you want power to cost money, you absolutely have to either defund or privatize the libraries. They're working on both approaches.
The next time somebody tells you we can't afford Head Start or some other worthy government program, remind them of the F-22. We've spent $65 billion on it so far, and it has yet to fly a combat mission. We're currently not using it over Libya because … well, it was designed to win dogfights "against a highly advanced enemy fighter fleet" -- assuming some hostile power builds such a fleet someday. For any other mission, there's already some better, cheaper tool.
The NFL owners have started a lock-out because their current agreement with the players doesn't give them enough money. Right now the league rakes in about $9 billion a year and the players and owners each get about half of it.
I know what the players do in exchange for their $4.5 billion. You can argue that they don't deserve that much, but at least we know what they do. Anybody know what owners do? If the owners just went away -- the Packers don't have one -- would anybody notice?
The NFL is actually a pretty good example of one fundamental problem with the capitalist model. Back in 1920when the NFL was formed, it took real foresight to believe that a professional football league would be a good business. Those founding owners had to be visionaries and risk-takers and marketers and problem-solvers. It makes sense that their faith and hard work was rewarded. They deserved to get rich.
But those guys are all dead now. In their place we have parasites who each suck away tens of millions of dollars in profit every year just for "owning" -- a non-activity that adds no value either to the sport or to the larger society. And now the parasites are threatening to shut the league down because they want to suck more.
If you own an e-book reader, don't nag your library about e-book lending. Yeah, it would be great, but some of the publishers are being jerks about this, as the Librarian in Black explains:
I cannot over-emphasize that we are in trouble my friends. The lack of legislative leadership and advocacy in the last decade has created a situation where libraries have lost the rights to lending and preserving content that we have had for centuries. We have lost the right to buy a piece of content, lend it to as many people as we want consecutively, and then donate or sell that item when it has outlived its usefulness (if, indeed, that ever happens at all).
So your library may need to boycott certain publishers' e-books. Don't complain about it. Or complain to the publisher, not the library.
Another important library issue, related to the larger issues about state budgets, is library privatization. The most important clients of a public library are the poor and the powerless -- people who don't figure in a business plan. There's never going to be profit in paying a trained professional to help a low-income middle school student research his term paper. So at some point that just won't happen anymore.
We're in an era when, as Orwell said, "the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious." Well, here's something obvious that needs restating: The public library is the most democratic institution in America. Knowledge is power, and in America knowledge is free. If that ever changes, our democracy is in deep trouble.
It doesn't take a genius to be a good journalist. Sometimes you just have to keep track of stuff and refuse to be blown off-course by PR announcements. Pro Publica has been maintaining a database on TARP since the program was first announced at the end of the Bush administration. Current tally: TARP is still $123 billion in the red, and the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts are behind by a similar amount. There's no telling how much of this might get paid back someday, but as of now "taxpayers are $257 billion in the hole."
William Bradley explains why you should be watching Doctor Who.
Corning's vision of the near future: A Day Made of Glass. Sort of neat, sort of creepy. Do you really want email showing up on the bathroom mirror while you brush your teeth?
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