Oakland Libraries

In the counties touching the San Francisco Bay, there's close to ten million people these days. The namesake popular city is well known, however with only seven-hundred thousand people, it should really be considered only a neighborhood of the larger Bay Area metropolis. Directly across the Bay from San Francisco is Oakland, which in many ways is the mirror image of her more popular sister. It's not quite as big, four-hundred thousand people and of course racially, the population of Oakland is 35% black, while San Francisco is less than 8% black, leading to the stunning other side of the track(bridge) figure, per capita income is $35,000 in San Francisco and just under $22,000 thousand in Oakland. That's almost a 40% difference.

I put these facts out there in regards to a piece in the SF Chron this morning. Oakland has shut their libraries due to lack of money. State and municipal budgets are being slammed hard in this economy and those at the bottom of the economic ladder are paying the heaviest price. It's important to keep this in mind when you consider all the money the Fed and Treasury have funneled to Wall Street, compared to the relatively little that's flowed to the rest of the economy. Trickle down economics, that is, getting pissed on, remain firmly entrenched.

It's also important to remember average wages have basically been stagnant for three decades in the country and that as things stand, it's fairly certain the step down many have taken in the last two years, will not be met with a corresponding future step back, much more a step up from where they were, unless we do some serious rethinking on how this economy runs. Oakland's closed libraries are sad commentary on the state of the union in 2009.