New York City budget will decimate libraries

[Hannah Bell]

New York City’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced plans to cut nearly $100 million from the city’s libraries. This will have devastating consequences for a wide cross-section of the city’s population. At a time of growing poverty, unemployment and homelessness, public libraries are one of the few free services used by millions of working-class people in America’s largest city...




The New York system circulated over 21 million items last year. It not only includes branch libraries used by some of the poorest sections of workers, but also world-class collections of music, photography, manuscripts, and the premier public research library in the country, on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, with over 44 million non-circulating items. In Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, libraries held classes last year that over 820,000 people attended. 31,000 people used job-search programs at local libraries in the three boroughs.



The CEO of the New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc, told a New York City Council hearing that the cuts amount to the “the worst scenario ever,” with $40 million in budget cuts, on top of $17 million in cuts since 2008. Since that time the New York libraries’ 90 facilities were forced to lay off 423 workers or 18 percent of staff. The system will now be forced to eliminate 687 positions, mostly though layoffs, a full third of its staff...

Libraries benefited from the philanthropy of such figures as John Jacob Astor and Andrew Carnegie. These men, despised as they were for their ruthless class war policies, nevertheless saw fit to advertise their democratic credentials. Today the American ruling elite has lost the democratic sensibility and even these pretensions of this earlier period. The obscene wealth of a single hedge fund billionaire would meet the libraries’ immediate needs, but Bloomberg and his class insist that working people must pay for the crisis in every way possible.


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/libr-m27.shtml

[Forkboy]

1. Happening all over.

The library where I am went from being open 6 days a week to 3, and it's just 15 hours total. Doing anything negative to libraries is always a sad statement on our society, imo.

[Hannah Bell]

2. agree totally.

[phasma ex machina]

3. I've only been there in my imagination... (I'd rather read than watch a sports game.)

[Hannah Bell]

4. beautiful building. the way things are going they'll probably sell it for luxury condos

or retail space.

[phasma ex machina]

7. One can probably bank on the powers-that-be selling it for pennies on the dollar to banksters. nt

[spin]

5. In my small town the computers in the library are always in use ...

and often by people searching for and applying for jobs.

Bloomberg is probably far to rich to understand what it is like to be poor. To a great extent that is what is wrong with our nation as all too often the rich are in political office and many don't give a damn about the middle or lower classes. There have been some notable exceptions like Ted Kennedy.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

6. perhaps the rich oil men could make a donation?