>> On April 2nd, over 3,000 people staged a 3 mile march through downtown Salinas in Central California’s fertile Salinas Valley to protest government budget cuts that will permanently close the city’s three public libraries. Demonstrators chanted: ¡Libros Si! ¡Bombas No! (Book yes! Bombs no!) ¡Si, Se Puede! (Yes we can!), and ¡Viva Chavez! as they snaked their way through poor neighborhoods to the Cesar Chavez Public Library. The libraries are the city’s community centers, where farm worker’s children can study, use computers, and wait after school until their parents come home from the fields. One marcher said, ‘When you close libraries, you are closing off opportunities. It is particularly wrong when you are closing them in a poor community. Where are the kids going to go to use a computer?’ Over 3,000 UFW Aztec eagle flags had been passed out to the demonstrators, so the march was a sea of red. All three of the public libraries in Salinas, the hometown of Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, will be closed on June 30th due to “lack of funds.” Salinas, known as “the Salad Bowl of the World”, is a city built on agribusiness where more than half of the population are native Spanish speakers.

I went to an OK high school, but much of what I learned was from reading at the library.

Today, library hours have been cut. Libraries were there backbone of my education, because they made it possible for me to extend my education at no cost to myself. (and what kids have any money?)

There are cuts all over that are going to impact kids negatively for years.

Schools are being cut back.

Libraries have seen declining funding for a decade. The hours are shortened.

Bus service is not expanding, despite population increases.

School lunch benefit programs are being attacked.

This is criminal. The anti-welfare people love to talk shit about "welfare queens" and a fraudulent subset of welfare recipients, but when it comes time to cut, they go after the social spending that benefits everyone.

They spit on the bums, and the stab the children.

Schools are failing, but it's not because we spend so much on them. We're down near the bottom in funding them. We're lucky to get the performance we achieve.

Our libraries close at 6 or 7 at night. How are kids supposed to do homework there? How are adults supposed to use the facilities? They used to be open until 9pm, so regular folks could go there and self-educate. Today, they're still crowded, but people won't pay for them.

There are more and more people, but city planning and transit isn't working to alleviate the crowding. Bus service improves, but slowly. Planning and transit aren't able to generate situations to maximize opportunity for work, education, and improvement for the poor.

The worst is the threat to free and cheap school lunches. This is an attack against the poorest kids, whose parents make low wages. The to the lunch program costs means a whole lot to their parents. It also means the kids get to have lunch, instead of doing what some kids do, and just not eat lunch, to save a few dollars to buy school supplies. (Wait, I did that! WTF.)

Hell, we should provide school supplies, too.

The rich and powerful are moving to create more poverty! They're evil.