Public libraries are among the most pure democratic institutions in the country. The goal of the public library is to provide free information to the public. Whether you have a home or not, you are welcome at the public library, no matter your education, your birthplace, or your financial situation. Public libraries serve everyone in a variety of ways. This is precisely why they have been demeaned and underfunded for decades by the more conservative lawmakers in our country.
Taking a page from the GOP playbook, New York City’s new mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, wants to decimate his city’s public library system with massive budget cuts. According to the Gothamist, Adams’ austerity measures (which boost law enforcement funding while cutting every other service that New Yorkers actually want) could mean “a total of $13.6 million in reductions for the current fiscal year (ending in June 2023) and $20.5 million in each of the next three fiscal years.”
The New York Public Library has been forced to do a lot with a very little for some time now, but as Tony Marx, president and CEO of New York Public Library, told a City Council oversight committee last week, “This may push us over the edge.”
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Public libraries are not simply a place that people go to get books and movies and newspapers, and use the internet, and talk with people from their neighborhood, and have safe after school time when you’re a kid who doesn’t have anywhere else to go because the city has already cut meaningful after school care, or a place for seniors to have reading clubs and other events. They are a place where people without internet access, or monopoly-weakened internet access, can go to use one of the main information highways in our world. They are an “essential social infrastructure.”
Libraries are used in every community of every municipality in our country, and library employees do it for very little in the way of salary and benefits. It is a labor of love because there is no financial reward for people who aren’t the progeny of exploitative Afrikaner diamond mines. Underserved communities benefit the most from places like the public library as a resource to help fill in for the myriad other failures of our government to create a robust social safety net and infrastructure.
Mayor Adams’ proposed budget has long been understood as a terrible blow to the city’s Public Library. At an earlier hearing in March of this year, Council Member Chi Ossé tried to remind everyone how the public libraries were used during the pandemic—the one that revealed how little our political and industrial leadership cared about essential workers. “The three systems also worked closely with the [previous] administration to offer vital services to city residents, hence I am very disappointed to see reduction to operation subsidy to the systems,” he said.
It is also important to note that libraries are uniquely vulnerable to the arbitrary budget cuts of greedy narcissists like Adams. As Linda Johnson, president of the Brooklyn Public Library explains, “The thing about the library business is that it is highly labor intensive. They're not a lot of places to go to save money, to cut the budget.”
Cuts will mean less staff, less hours open, and less classes and events and services available to the communities public libraries serve. Adams’ office has spewed the usual ‘we support public libraries’ out of one side of their mouth while telling reporters, "We must protect the city’s long-term financial stability by taking a hard look at how the city uses all of its limited resources in the face of strong economic and fiscal headwinds.” Of course, as the Jacobin reports, Adams’ budget plan includes creating an $8.3 billion boost of revenue in order to create surpluses. What will those surpluses go to? Clearly not all of the public services he’s cutting from in order to create it.
As of right now, the 2023 cost to New York City, for all three branches of the library, is $468.5 million for the year. The New York Public Library gets just under 60% of its funding from the city, mind you. The rest has to be begged for and fundraised through rich patrons. New York City’s 2023 budget for the NYPD? More than $11 billion. That’s one billion dollars multiplied by eleven. To make this a touch more graphic:
$468,500,000
vs.
$11,000,000,000
Adams is a ridiculous man who got into office running a similar campaign to other failed person Rudy Giuliani. Adams rode a fake crime wave fever that newspapers like The New York Times helped promote. Like Giuliani, he has a professional class willing to throw everyone under the bus, so long as he can get poor and homeless people out of the richest neighborhoods’ sight lines.
Any guess as to how he plans on promoting this program to take services away from New Yorkers? Good old classic xenophobic bigotry. The kind fascists have always relied on.
Haven’t heard about MS-13, that scary gang Republicans and Fox News were screaming about for months. ‘Member them? Wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t start hearing about them again—or some other equally scary immigrant “gang.”
