I was in the Main branch of the Long Beach Public Library last week and what did I find? A shrine to rich contributers and corporate crooks! The same people who are benefiiting from cuts in funding to libraries and other public services! For a tax-deductible contribution to the library (assuming these birds are paying any taxes in the first place) corporations and the social register crowd apparantly get their names on a plastic shrine that is wrapped around one of the round cement elevators in that God-awful ugly building that looks like it was designed to celebrate Francisco Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War or something. What are we library users supposed to do? Stop and worship them? Offer up prayers so that they will get time off from Purgatory for laying off workers, denying uninsured people medical care or evicting elderly tenants to make way for gentrication of some working class neighborhood?

Among the entities honored is Von's. Is it appropriate that a public organization, funded in part by the taxes payed by grocery workers, should be honoring Von's in the middle of a bitter strike that has plunged hundreds if not thousands of Long Beach residents and library users to the abyss of destitution?

Another is Occidental Petroleum, famous for stealing Indian land in South America and siding with brutal, ultra-right governments that think nothing of mass murder of indiginous peoples in order to please US corporations. The library actually has the nerve to sometimes have display tables honoring "multicculturalism" while at the same time committing this act of blatant racism.

Monuments to greed, racism and super-exploitation don't belong in a public library!

I forgot to add contact information if you want to protest the shrine to the thieves at Long Beach Public Library.

Contact Mayor Beverly O'Neill at mayor@ci.long-beach.ca.us telephone (562)570-6801. Also contact City Manager Gerald Miller at citymanager@ci.long-beach.ca.us.

Join the Friends of the Library, and get radical with the old ladies :0)

I saw some corporate self-congratulations at Target. They have a huge sign that celebrates their granting 5% of profits to community groups. That's nice, but those profits come at the expense of wages. And 95% of the profits still go to stockholders as dividends, or are reinvested into Target (or perhaps other companies).

Corporations give up scraps, and get plaques, for helping out the Tiny Tims of the world. God bless us, every one.