Monday, September 27, 2010

It's All About the Bidness

A new trend is starting of cities and counties contracting to private companies to run formerly public libraries. Ordinary citizens are rebelling at the practice in several California cities, and others around the country. fearful that a trusted source of community cohesion is being coopted by the profit model.

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.


Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?


It should be obvious that yes, a service like a library is held so central to a place it should not be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor. There are several reasons why this is a bad idea, and among them is certainly a sense of community free from the competitive wrangling people do during their work lives. But much more obvious is the library being a source, and sometimes a primary source of objective information, free from possible, or probable ideological corruption of information. Which is rampant and increasing as conservation alternate realities are on the rise to install right wing dogma in government and about everywhere else. Such as the war on science and substituting religious concepts and morality that are bible based and highly subjective. The smearing of the science of evolution is a prime example of this.

But mostly for me, it is the ethos of capitalism and profit worship above all else, in service to wealth and power becoming the first value leading this country into fear and ignorance of other values, such as art and literature and the like, that is most alarming. This God of Profit almost always is followed by other right wing misinformation contrived to dumb down our national reality and discourse, and needs to remain in the realm of the economic rather than allowed to infect the realm of broad knowledge and objective information.

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”


Of course, it is the disease of liberal laziness as the culprit, polluting our precious bodily fluids, and if the pointy heads would get a real job then libraries could become what they should be. Just another source of business jesus keeping folks in line.

It's all about the code. The right wing code.