What Caught My Eye forJune 25 - July 1 (#20)

Some good news for US democracy. It’s important to continuously push back against Trump’s authoritarian push to take over state elections.

ROGOFF: So people – they hide it in safes. They hide it in their walls. I’m not making this up. There’s tons of police evidence on this. You know, the $100 bills you can fit conveniently in a little corner, depending on how many of them you have. And if you have $20 bills even, you’d need five times as much space. They’re five times as heavy. I mean, that may sound – that’s ridiculous. No. It’s a big deal. It’s why they are so popular.

So essentially it’s just to stoke his ego…

WONG: That’s right. It’s not just drug dealers and money launderers who like big notes. Tax dodgers love them, too.

…

ROGOFF: Tax evasion’s very large in the United States. The IRS estimated it was around $1 trillion a year. The tax evasion swamps what they’re getting from printing the notes.

At the cost of us.

404 Media has obtained records from dozens of public libraries, which include Requests for Reconsideration of Materials forms (RFRs) and official decision letters to challengers, along with draft versions of updated collection development policies. Much has been written in the last five years about the blatant efforts to suppress access to books that could contain any remotely challenging ideas or that deviate even slightly from cis white heterodoxy, but there’s been little talk about what that means from the rest of us. What my reporting confirms is that there are more books intended for children and young adults in adult sections because challengers didn’t believe it was appropriate for children and young adults to read about people of color and/or people who are queer, trans, or both, while also showing that a large-scale reorganization of public library collections is currently underway, that its application varies by state and locality, and that it’s been very hard to measure because it’s totally chaotic.

Parents should of course be able to determine what their child can read. But it’s so disappointing that so many are deciding for the rest of us what is considered appropriate. I wish I remember where I saw it, but the quote was something along the lines of “when in history has the person or group banning books ever been the ‘good guy’”