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Neoliberal Parasites Now Want Public Libraries as Profit Centers for Wall Street
It happened fifty-six years before Ben Franklin walked out of Independence Hall in Philadelphia and told Elizabeth Willing Powel, the wife of Philadelphia’s mayor and one of the most influential women in the nation, that they had just created “a republic, if you can keep it.”
On July 1, 1731, Franklin and his twelve Junto Club associates incorporated the nation’s first public library. At the time, most books were imported and extraordinarily expensive, but Franklin and his associates believed the effort would pay off for the nation.
“[T]hese Libraries have improved the general Conversation of Americans,” he wrote in his autobiography, “made the common Tradesmen and Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some Degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Priviledges.”
Public libraries caught on and spread across the nation; literacy and thoughtful political debate followed them.
And now neoliberal parasites are trying to turn these public goods into profit centers for Wall Street through privatization.
Librarian and author Caleb Nichols is writing over at Truthout.org about “a for-profit, private company that has been…
