7/25/2023 0 Comments Julia koch daughter![]() But obviously your $275 doesn’t really matter. So how do you describe how you feel as someone who gave a middle-class $275? You’re glad to pitch in. They need it, and more-it definitely won’t even cover all their needs, which are the needs of the people of Cleveland. Shortly after making my donations, I saw news that a family in Cleveland had donated $500,000 to the food bank. I think one in three families using it now have never used a food bank before, for what that statistic means. I gave $275 to the major food bank in Cleveland, where I live, which has seen desperately escalating demand. Like a lot of you I feel aware of my good fortune and not sure what to use it for, from my own home. Why the fuck are the rest of us giving $5, $50, $100 when we certainly feel some pinches?ģ I work as a college instructor (non–tenure track) and I haven’t lost my job during this crisis, making me unlike 26-plus million people in the US so far. Though from observing how she spends it, anyone could guess that she could give SPD the whole $100,000 without feeling a pinch. I don’t even know how much money the woman personally has. It’s great that independent presses who don’t work with SPD support it, I could say banally. I don’t know if she made any decisions about this donation. I have no idea how present her money is as backup in their daily operations. Elizabeth Koch provided the seed money for Catapult. (Charles Koch is tied with his brother’s widow as the 18 th richest people in the world-no worries, Bezos is still #1.) I felt a sort of allergic reaction. Daughter of Charles Koch, his net worth $43.5 billion. If SPD didn’t exist, we might not exist to invent it.Ģ When I went to contribute to this GoFundMe, I saw a $500 contribution from Catapult, Counterpoint, & Soft Skull, the independent publishing trifecta whose CEO is Elizabeth Koch. SPD lets hundreds of micro culture-making endeavors come together and function in a system designed to benefit multinational corporations. When in the long days of shelter-in-place I daydream pretty stupidly about what societal change might come in the wake of all this, the sort of disaster anarchism I picture takes the form of organizations like SPD. If that ship went down, it would take so many books and presses and culture and history and writing and reading with it. It’s vital to the existence of independent and small press literature. And I’m a small press author one of my three books is distributed by SPD. Fingers crossed, local and federal loan money and relief funds will arrive shortly after.įull disclosure, I work as an editor for two of those 400 publishers. Meanwhile months of lockdown wreak economic damage: SPD’s “sales have decreased,” they report, “by upwards of 60%.” The GoFundMe money will help SPD cover payroll and health insurance for their small staff (10 people) and help them cover the royalties currently owed to the more than 400 independent publishers they serve. Though those considerations have definitely not been Amazon’s priority. Obviously the needs of Amazon warehouse staff-a nonunion shop-are paramount to consider. To state the obvious, the crisis has profoundly disrupted bookselling nationwide-even and especially by, which has suspended and/or greatly diminished the sale of “nonessential” items (books included) and whose monopolistic status in the bookselling industry is now on full display. SPD is looking for $100,000 to help cover its losses during the covid-19 crisis. 1 In April everyone involved in, or touched by, independent publishing saw a flare go up: Small Press Distribution launched a GoFundMe.
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