La Ventana

The University, Capital, and Crisis

2011-11-01T02:53:00.000-07:00

The University, Capital, and Crisis

La Ventana Collective

Last year’s struggles in the universities of California spawned a number of debates on the origins of the crisis they face and on how to best defend public higher education. We do not wish to engage with these but rather to provide a look into the formation of the public university, from its origins to the present. The following then is written for the current struggles in California and around the world, in hopes that it will be of use for those who seek ways to free themselves of capitalism’s shackles both from within the university and from without.

A widely held belief is that the public university is an untouchable institution, that it is immutable and timeless—even from economic conditions. It is from this perspective that much discourse on the budget cuts has been created, from which the strategy of unions and lobbying organizations has been based upon. These ideas have developed with no consideration for the current form of capital in the United States; they have developed from the perspective that the university’s function in society is static, a monument to a moment of capitalism long passed. The university must be understood, or at least acknowledged, to exist in relation to capitalist development and its need for profit, with its ever changing form, and the larger socio-cultural context by which the university is given meaning. The university in the United States is not separate from capital. It was at one time but since 1860 it has been used more and more for economic ends. The university over the last 150 or so years has played an essential part in the transformation and reproduction of capitalism.

The Unity of the University and Capital

The university cannot be viewed as a singularity, separate from the economic and social forces of society. To speak of the crisis of the university—as a problem to be confronted on its own—is to misunderstand the function of the education system.

The university’s function is related to and subjugated by the economy, by the strategic needs of capital. Though, the university’s function is not limited to the sphere of the reproduction of workers. Its role in the production of knowledge extends its use to almost all parts of social life.

The perception that the university exists for the advancement of human knowledge, for the bettering of humanity, that it is a neutral institution of learning separate from the outside world, needs only to be refuted by the history of the university itself. If we are to put forward the argument that the public university’s function is one linked to capital’s development, then we must trace its transformation in relation to capital from its beginnings to the present. This task though is much too large for what space will allow, so we will instead focus on the two different eras of great importance for capital and consequently for the university—the first of these being the Civil War and Reconstruction periods in which the idea of the public university first emerged, and the second being the Reconversion period after World War II in which public education became generalized.

The Reconstruction Period

1862. The year that the Land Grant College Act was enacted marked the first time the federal government had made a major effort to create a public university system. The Reconstruction period that followed saw significant economic and social transformations leading the country toward a fully industrial capitalist economy. In this era there was major growth as the result of industrialization and urbanization that in turn relied on the creation of scientific knowledge in industrial production and social organization. The university began to be understood as the institution that could fulfill this role.

The discourse among academics and industrialists reflected the emerging view that the university could and should be used as a tool of economic development. F.H. Stoddard, a New York University professor, remarked in a speech in 1890, “The college years are no longer conceived as a period set apart from life… the college has ceased to become a cloister and has become a workshop.”1 The industrialist Carnegie remarked, “While the college student has been learning a little about the barbarous and petty squabbles of a far distant past, or trying to master languages which are dead, such knowledge seems adapted for life upon another planet than this as far as business is concerned, the future captain of industry is hotly engaged in the school of experience, obtaining the very knowledge required for his future triumphs.” These statements made by Carnegie and Stoddard show the kind of ideas that began to take shape among elites and scholars alike concerning the university’s role in society. If the university existed before this time as a kind of separate social institution that had little connection to the needs of the economy, it appears that at this point it began to be utilized by economic forces if only marginally.

It is in the context of these economic and social developments of capitalism that the state took the first steps to create a public university. The Land Grant College Act allocated millions of acres in hopes of aiding the founding institutions of learning capable of fulfilling the needs of the economy.2 The university before this time educated only the elites and the land grant university in this sense was in many ways undistinguishable from its predecessor. The role of the university of the 19th century was not to educate the working class or to provide them with skills but, on the contrary, to provide the movers of capital—managers, industrialists, politicians, etc.—with the knowledge and technology required for developing an industrial capitalist economy in the United States. Its role was to help create the conditions under which a large industrial working class could be realized.

Reconversion Period and Fordism

We now move to the period of Reconversion after WWII, where the industrial working class had long been realized, having shaped the very form of American capitalism through 90 years of class struggle and crisis. The rise of fascism was largely a result democracy’s inability to deal with this crisis. The democracies that rejected the path of fascism with its repression and irrational ultra-nationalism—as the United States did—had to find a way to deal with the inherent contradictions of capital that also avoided the Soviet model. The solution to this problem lay in an alteration of state and economic relations that sought to regulate capitalism with state controls and discipline of the working class, an alteration that forged a new relation to work that was conducive to the new regime of production.

This regime, known as Fordist-Keynesianism, was based on a compromise of organized labor, corporate capital, and the state.3 This compromise is based on the defeat of militant working class movements after WWII. Over 5 million workers in 1946 were on strike at some point. The most menacing of these to the state was the 1946-47 wave of general strikes in response to the rolling back of wartime gains which started in Connecticut and spread to Pennsylvania, Texas, New York and came to a climax in Oakland, California. The general strikes, in which workers often faced off against union leadership, embodied precisely the type of behavior that Fordism sought to overcome. The bureaucratic unions, fortified by the Taft-Hartley Act, diffused conflict by absorbing labor into the state institutions of the Fordist-Keynesian period. How workers were disciplined into the Fordist production system is best understood through the concept of disciplinary government developed by Michel Foucault.

It is important to first look at the operation of Fordist production and the techniques of disciplinary government in order to understand why and how the university became transformed and became so important during this period to capital’s development.

The Fordist economic practice first emerged in 1914 when Henry Ford introduced five dollars pay for eight hours’ work in his automated car assembly plant. The generalization of this practice came about after WWII. What made Henry Ford’s style of industrial organization unique was not so much the fact that he utilized the Taylorist division of labor and deskilling, nor that he paid a high wage for an eight hour day, but rather that he understood that mass production also necessitated mass consumption by the working class.4 By allowing leisure time and an income sufficient to buy commodities, Ford hoped to produce the disciplined workers necessary for intensive assembly line production and also the consumers of mass-produced products that Fordist production perfected. Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, saw Fordism as having “amounted to the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose, unmatched in history, a new type of worker and a new type of man.” Gramsci saw this new organization of work as “inseparable from a specific mode of living, and of thinking, and of living life.”5 This practice of having work and all social life unified into the capitalist process is what made Fordist-Keynesianism different from those forms of social organization before it. Once it reached a compromise with the state, the organization of labor in the Fordist factory, which has the whole social life of the worker in mind, laid the foundation for disciplinary society.

The work of Foucault around the concept of power, when used in the investigation of the Fordist-Keynesian regime of production and governing, is useful for understanding how social life becomes completely subsumed by capital. Foucault explained power as such: “The characteristic feature of power is that some men can more or less entirely determine other men’s conduct—but never exhaustively or coercively. A man who is chained and beaten is subject to force being exerted over him, not power. But if he can be induced to speak, when his ultimate recourse could have been to hold his tongue, preferring death, then he has been caused to behave in a certain way. His freedom has been subject to power.”6 Foucault saw the utilization of power as a means of governing that induced behavior of individuals from within by imposing a hegemonic knowledge or truths by which they understand the world and act. Power is not repressive but acts in a positive or productive fashion where it operates. This does not mean that repression is replaced in a disciplinary society—it is always present—but rather pure state violence is obsolete for maintaining the economic order and therefore only utilized in the last instance. This clarification of power by Foucault identifies a type of governing that until the Fordist era was not coherent or developed enough to be named.

If power is present in all areas of social life—from the family to institutions—then the practices of Fordism/Keynesianism, with its project of absorbing all aspects of this social life into the productive processes in conjunction with the centralized and expanding institutional influence of the welfare state in the lives of the populace, are none other than the perfection of power in the service of capital. The university of the Fordist era, institutionalized by the state, opened up to a significantly larger percentage of the population and increasingly important to business, exemplifies the process by which a once autonomous point of power in society comes to the service of capital.

The University under Fordism

The university of the Fordist period (1940-1973) was transformed drastically from its post-war existence in a number of ways. For the first time in its history, the American university was established as an institution of the state and attended by an increasingly larger segment of the population, particularly among the white working class, with an increase in attendance of over 500 percent from 1945 to 1975.7 This era of mass education was necessitated by two related factors: the global struggles of the Cold War and the internal economic changes of the United States. Though it must be stressed that what occurred globally in this era had equal consequences for the economic situation nationally and vice versa.

Globally, the United States was in a state of self-conscious national panic from 1950 to 1958. The Soviets during these years had made great gains in both their economy and military technology. The Soviet gross national product had risen by 7.1 percent in 1956 and their industrial production rose by almost 11 percent.8 These economic gains were in conjunction with the launching of the Sputnik satellite, giving the Soviets superiority in space technology, and followed by the leaking of the Gaither Report by the Washington Post which revealed the innovations the Soviets had made in missile technology—presumably surpassing those of the United States.9 The President’s Committee on Education beyond High School wrote in its 1957 report, “America would be heedless if she closed her eyes to the dramatic strides being taken by the Soviet Union in post-high education, particularly in the development of scientists, engineers, and technicians.”10 The report expresses the fear of technological inferiority in the United States stemming from a weak higher education system. The answer to this fear came in the form of the Defense Act of 1958 which provided billions of dollars in funding to universities.

Internally the United States was undergoing a transformation from a war economy to one that could fulfill the role of managing the great financial empire secured at Breton Woods. The large number of returning veterans in need of work, the loss of wartime manufacturing jobs and the increasing financialization of the global economy posed a number of problems whose solutions lay in disciplining the population into the new regimes of work. The rapid growth in the decades after WWII of the service and professional sectors would require a larger, better educated and more disciplined workforce.

The university of the post-war years was changed dramatically in order to aid in this disciplinary process. The university became increasingly dependent during WWII on government funding and in turn was depended upon by the government for technical training. After the war, the implementation of the G.I. Bill, which gave billions to educate returning veterans, was followed by a number of subsequent bills that dramatically increased university enrollment during the next two decades. This process of institutionalization—the gradual generalizing by the state of a uniform social practice throughout society—had taken hold of the university in an increasingly rapid fashion from the beginning of WWII to the 1970’s. The premise for this institutionalization fits into the larger pattern of internal post-war development.

The suburbanization that helped solve the looming crisis of capital reinvestment following the war changed not only the face of American cities but also their character. This suburbanization could not have occured without the innovation of Keynesian style debt financing. Both suburbanization and Keynesian economics relied on a population that could or rather was willing to consume at an acceptable rate.11 All of these factors worked in conjunction to facilitate the post war transformation of society. While the manufacturing sector of the economy was increasingly shrinking (or moving overseas to lower wage labor markets), the growth of employment in intellectual, service, financial and other white-collar jobs was on the rise. At the same time the state and business became increasingly involved in every aspect of higher education. The idea became so generalized that in order for one to receive well-paying employment, one must attain a college degree.12 This normalization of the university into the social life of a large segment of the working class and its importance to the continuation of capital accumulation is what differentiates this era of the university’s development from those previous one in which it played only a marginal role.

The university of the Fordist era then, in the most abstract sense, was utilized by society for the project of transforming global capital into the new forms it would take in the Fordist era of 1945-1973. Having become a more generalized and well-funded educational institution, the university allowed for the production of ideology that was needed to ensure the dominance of capital globally and of the discipline of labor locally.13 The 1957 President’s Committee Report on Education beyond High School lays out the goals of the mass university quite clearly: “She [America] would be inexcusably blind if she failed to see that the challenge of the next 20 years will require leaders not only in science and engineering, and in business and industry, but in government and politics, in foreign affairs and diplomacy, in education and civic affairs.”14 The report emphasized the university not only as a means to remain a great power globally but to maintain political and economic order internally. This function of the university, for the service of both local and global capital, follows the trend of the development of capitalism that would become more globally unified, flexible and mobile in the decades to come.

The Fordist university transformed higher education into a common institution of American society, offering an educational opportunity that was the dream of many people and expected as a guarantee by many more. Our current conception of the university as a synthesis of an autonomous space of knowledge creation and also as an economic training institution stems from this era. Though, this conception is now being challenged by a new phase of capitalist development. The Neoliberal transformation of American society has set as its goal to privatize much of what was once held to be common property in American society—i.e. the public university. This modern day expropriation of the commons by capital—what David Harvey has called accumulation by dispossession—has no doubt begun to attacking public higher education, though not without resistance.15

American society, placing a high level of importance on higher education despite the growing irrelevance of the institution in the economy, is an example of the contradictions that often exist between subjective desires in society and the needs of capital for continuing its accumulation of wealth. The university as we know it no longer has as much relevance, in relation to labor demand (which is much more flexible, information-based, and precarious) than in the rigid labor regimes of Fordism. The well-funded state university is no longer rational from the perspective of capital, yet it is highly regarded in society.

The use of crisis to justify the cutting back of university funding seems to be an ideal method to circumvent popular resistance. The blame is not placed on the capitalist state but it is instead the natural order of the market. The irrational rationalization of capitalist crisis plays a double role here: one to fix internal contradictions of capitalism—such as an expensive university that proves to return little in terms of the demand for flexible labor—and second to obscure austerity measures and dispossession to appear as the collateral damage of crisis instead of a necessary practice for continuing profits.

This essay will be continued in a future issue of La Ventana

We Refuse to be Robbed: Resisting “The Economy,” from the 1930s to Today

2011-11-01T02:18:00.000-07:00

This history was written a couple of years ago, but it still resonates to this day. This is a history of the U.S. General Strikes of the 1930s

We all know that, in spite of the claims of politicians, wealth does not “trickle down” from the richest to the poorest. Even during boom times, when the rich might “create” a few jobs, we all end up getting paid less than we are worth – assuming we even get enough to survive. But as we are quickly learning, something big and ugly is “trickling down” to us: a multi-billion dollar “bail-out” of banks and corporations that lost their high-risk bets with our money.

Now that the latest speculative bubble has blown (remember the Savings & Loan scandal? The IMF-engineered debt default crisis? The dot-com bust?), we are once again hit with the bill, while politicians across the spectrum are trying to scare us into accepting this, otherwise “this sucker could go down.” 1

But the only sucker that’s going down is the latest model of capitalist accumulation – and if we don’t act together to stop it, the next model will be built upon the same hard working backs that are now getting stepped on by predatory lenders, executive con-men, and modern-day robber barons who lay low in their mansions while their cronies in government absolve them of their class war crimes.

We can’t wait for Mr. Obama! He has already joined the “trickle down” camp, back pedaling from his promise to reverse Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, as if that would somehow magically help everyone else.

No, we need to fight back the way people did in the 1930s, not by asking for a “New Deal”—which was barely effective compared to the military build-up that really ended the Great Depression—but by strikes, sit-ins and other direct actions to defend our livelihoods and our communities.

SF General Strike, 1934

For example, the Unemployed Councils of Detroit “practically stopped evictions.” According to Detroit resident Fred Vogel: “When there’s an eviction about to take place, the people notify the Unemployed Council and [they] go around and wait till the sheriff has gone and then move all the furniture back into the house. Then the landlord has to notify the authorities again, and the sheriff has to get a new warrant, and the result is that they usually never get around to evicting the people again. They’ve got the landlords so buffaloed that the other day a woman called up the Unemployed Council and asked whether she could put her tenants out yet. The Unemployed Council said no.”2 Groups like International Labor Defense gave free or low-cost legal defense for victims of eviction or mass arrest.

Strikes were also a common tactic that produced real gains: in the United States alone, during the 1930s, there were general strikes in five cities and towns—including San Francisco—and massive sit-down strikes in three others.3 These kinds of actions were a direct community defense against attacks by capitalists desperate to preserve a system that was, like today, imploding unto its own contradictions.

In the 1930s, even with people fighting for their very survival, the movement won social security, rights to workplace organization, and unemployment insurance. What can we win this time?

If the business press is any indication, it is clear that the current bail-outs are just the beginning of an offensive against poor and working people. Whose jobs are being saved with the money the banks have already received? The CEO’s and their drivers and butlers?

Just as Third World people were “structurally adjusted” into accepting lethal austerity measures after the World Bank schemes failed, our new regime will continue to try to make us pay for the failures of a take-the-money-and-run economy that they constructed. (If you need proof that it wasn’t just the Republicans, please refer to Clinton’s signing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which de-regulated the finance industry). Inflation, higher taxes for fewer public services, and the elimination of social security and Medicare are all on their agenda. If the auto industry is bailed out, you can bet that deep cuts in autoworkers’ benefits will be a required condition. Foreclosures (16,000 in process in Oakland alone!)4, evictions (hundreds in Oakland last year)5, and high food prices are ways in which they are already squeezing us in order to save their world of funny-money.

And we can expect that, just as the working poor are being blamed for the sub-prime fiasco, the sordid American tradition of racism and nativism will be re-charged: they will try to get us to blame and compete with each other in order to distract us while they once again loot our future and our planet.

What can we do about it? If we want to survive this crisis, mutual aid will be crucial. Eviction/foreclosure defense networks, collective demands for affordable healthy food, and workplace organizing for a living wage will all be urgent tasks – and this must be done across the racial and cultural divides that impede our human solidarity and only help the rich exploit us more easily.

Many unemployed organizations in the 1930s were known for their interracial character—the Chicago group that participated in the nation-wide demonstrations of March 6, 1930 included “negroes and whites together rioting against the forces of law and order” that had come to repress the protest.6 The Baltimore People’s Unemployment League was known for “getting white men and women to work with and under Negro men and women.”7

This kind of activity is already happening in U.S. cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland (e.g. www.esop-cleveland.org). Here in the Bay Area, the Eviction Defense Collaborative (www.evictiondefense.org) and Just Cause Oakland (www.justcauseoakland.org) are potential starting points. While some organizations may overestimate the value of “taking it to City Hall”, this does not have to exclude efforts at creating grassroots networks of people who will respond in solidarity when their more vulnerable neighbors are in trouble.

What else can we do besides defending ourselves? If we want to do more than survive, if we want to take this crisis as the opportunity to re-create our world in a way that exploits no-one, we are going to have to establish this mutual aid society on a wider scale.

Through organizations like neighborhood and workers councils, we will have to demand representation and foster popular participation in a way most of us have never seen.

Are we up to the task, brothers and sisters? Can we see what needs to be done, organize, and do it?

If we’re prepared for the worst, if we give reign to our most intelligent and generous instincts and stand together against the coming ruling class attacks, we just may achieve the society for which many of us have only dared to dream.

1 George W. Bush on Thursday, September 25th 2008. Reported in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/business/26bailout.html
2 Edmund Wilson, “Detroit Motors” in The American Earthquake. Doubleday, NY, 1958. p229. See also the account of Mrs. Willye Jeffries in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times (New York, 1970), p456-462
3 The general strikes: Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo (1934); Pekin, Illinois (1936) and Terre Haute, Indiana (1935). The sit-down strikes were in Akron, Detroit and Flint (1937-38).
4 According to RealtyTrac, cited in Kamika Dunlap, “Oakland Fights for Funds to Address Foreclosures” Bay Area News Group, November 7, 2008.
5 Housing Needs Fact Sheet, justcauseoakland.org
6 from St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis (New York, 1945), p.87. Quoted in Roy Rosenzweig, “Organizing the Unemployed: The Early Years of the Great Depression, 1929-1933” in Radical America, v. 10 no. 4 ((July-August 1976) , p42.
7 Rosenzweig, p53

La Ventana #4 is Online!

2011-05-14T16:20:00.000-07:00

Issue #4 is now available as a PDF. Look for it in the links section, or here: La Ventana #4.

Print and disseminate!!

Welcome Back

2011-03-05T17:07:00.000-08:00

After such a prolonged hiatus we are back. We got a new issue of La Ventana out, but you will have get that in real time... you will have to get a physical copy. Meanwhile, we will be posting out past issues, article by article, over the next few weeks. There has been much progress, and, much regress. Yeah, our grammar has improved. And looking back, we've come a long way aesthetically, but the budget cuts are still here...

This piece was published in our first issue in 2008.

Is SFSU Sweat Free?
By James

Concerning fair labor practices in the business conducted by San Francisco State and the larger CSU and advocates of global human rights, one would think that the clothing and products manufactured with the logo bearing our university’s name would be made by responsible manufacturers fully respecting the human rights and livelihoods of their workers. A few friends and I paid a visit to the SF State Bookstore and documented all of the clothing brands that we found bearing the university logo. And after some further research we found that many of these brands are known violators of workers’ rights around the world. This does not necessarily show that the factories in which the clothes found in the bookstore exhibit unfair labor practices, but it definitely does lead us to believe that the potential is very much there and that it needs to be investigated further. A few of the brands we have concerns with are known abuses of workers. They are Jansport (Sarah Lee), Champion, and Tommy Hilfiger. The Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirts flaunting the SF State logo particularly caught our attention. This company is listed in the 2008 Sweatshop Hall of Shame put out by Sweatshop Watch and the International Labor rights Forum for its inaction against the repression of Mexican maquiladora workers. Our investigation into the potential of San Francisco State clothing being bought by companies using unfair labor practices has just begun and there is still a lot to be researched and discovered.

Our school is a member of the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), which has over 140 participating members. The WRC is a non-profit organization involving students, workers, and labor rights activist that works with school administrators in order to ensure that a set of standards exist to ensure freedom of association, a living wage, proper working conditions, and that the many other rights of workers are acknowledged. The extent to which our university honors this commitment is questionable. What we do know for a fact is that our school is not participating in the Designated Supplier Program (DSP), which has a more rigorous set of standards for protecting workers rights and allows for long-term contracts with suppliers adhering to them. All of the UC schools are members of the program along with a handful of private universities. Humboldt State is currently in a struggle to be the first CSU to implement this program, and it is our wish to join them and also have SF State join in this act of solidarity with workers around the world. We have sent a letter to the bookstore management inquiring about their current standards and practices of selecting clothing contracts and hope to have a response soon which we will then publish in our next issue.

On revolutionary organization

2010-09-08T01:33:00.000-07:00

Revolution is not showing life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.

-Guy Debord, SI (Situationist International)

Estridentismo

2010-08-04T15:23:00.000-07:00

The task of the artist is to create art that reflects and serves the forces of change--and when necessary, by destroying the art that had preceded it and that could not but reflect the values of the old order. That is to say, we must move beyond the awareness that change is possible as being a prerequisite for popular action to the realization that change is inevitable and already in progress. The only thing constant is change. This, like the violence of popular armies, regenerates the creation of new values, above and beyond the destruction of old ones.

-Stridentist Movement, Mexico City
Movimiento Estridentismo, Ciudad de Mexico

Baile!

2010-06-03T15:45:00.000-07:00

Toma de Universidad en El Salvador

2010-03-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

«Se va a revisar el sistema de seguridad de los custodios, que es deficiente. Se van a seguir procesos disciplinarios, porque no podemos permitir la anarquía»
-Rector de la Universidad de El Salvador

"We will review the security system of the custodians, which is deficient. [We]will continue pursuing disciplinary proceedings, for we can not allow anarchy."
-University Administrator, University of El Salvador

After having successfully occupied the only public university of El Salvador, la Universidad de El Salvador, masked students some of whom were still in high school shut down the operations of the campus. This was a result of the fact that 12,500 students will not be admitted to the University of the 23,000 students that applied. Approximately 235 students engaged in the occupation which has come to an end this week and are facing disciplinary actions.

Read More:

http://bloquepopularjuvenil.com/node/257

http://www.diariocolatino.com/es/20100317/nacionales/77939/

Response to a Critic of the “White” Student Movement

2010-03-05T14:56:00.000-08:00

Response to a Critic of the “White” Student Movement
By *

This is a re-post from the Occupy CA website in response to an open letter that was written criticizing the "white" student movement.

On the night I chose not to die…

I was a woman of color. On the night I chose not to die, I fought with anger and determination, and finally fell asleep with a satisfied smile born not from my own sheltered existence, but from the momentary dissolving of the reality of privilege. That night I watched the hordes of college students exiting the bars and dispersing, walking past those of us confronting police in the streets as if it was simply none of their busjavascript:void(0)iness. That is the privilege you describe, which has no place in this movement.

Who was left? Who made it their business? If you were there, if you dared approach the dancefloor and “battlefield” of the streets, you’d know what we “looked” like.

And yet according to your fairytale of homogeneity and privilege, on the morning after “I chose not to die,” according to you, I woke up a white man. Let me tell you… NO I DIDN’T!

It’s as though all the work I’ve done, the lifetime of daily struggle, of people acting as if I was naturally inferior and practically invisible, is a waste of my time. Because the people I also struggle for, among others, could flippantly assert that now, because I fight alongside my white brothers and sisters, I have no identity, no history, and no color of my own.

~~~

To the author of the “Open Letter to a White Student Movement,” we respond:

You don’t just describe a false, whitened version of what happened in Berkeley last Thursday night. You create an archetypal persona of the student militant, who you describe in belittling terms: “As he storms buildings, as he rushes into battles in street against police, as he damages property in a drug induced haze, he screams ‘we have chosen not to die.’ … His white skin has kept him through the night and the politics that he believed he risked his life for are now over shadowed by the mountain of over turned trash cans and broken glass on Telegraph Ave.”

We’ve seen this figure before, in the critiques of direct action written by liberal and leftist groups since this movement emerged. It’s a constantly re-occurring rhetorical strategy that is used to condemn forms of political action that don’t follow the norms of non-violent civil disobedience. Only one problem: we’re not male, we’re not white, and we’re not upper class. And neither were the majority of people who participated that night.

This isn’t just a minor problem in your analysis. It can’t be explained away with a one-sentence disclaimer that acknowledges that some people of color have participated in the movement. It’s a serious erasure of our participation and it calls into question the very basis of your argument: that tactics like those used in Berkeley are grounded in “privilege.”

Honestly, we are tired of being erased from the student movement. We are tired of being told that militancy is a product of testosterone-driven machismo or race-based immunity to police repression. We’re tired of debates about tactics that are masked as debates about identity. We want a discussion that acknowledges that not just a few but many women and people of color have participated in the occupations and confrontational demonstrations of the last few months. Most of all, we want the people who attempt to represent women and people of color when they condemn these actions to know that they don’t speak for us.

We wonder whether you bothered to look carefully at the footage from that night or talk to people who were there. If so you would have learned that it was one of the most racially diverse political events that has occurred recently, much more diverse than a lot of the non-violent, legal rallies we’ve attended. In fact the riot and confrontation would never have taken place if students leaving campus hadn’t been joined by dozens of people who were on the streets and in the bars of Berkeley that night, people of every race, age, and subculture you can imagine. And women were on the front lines, pushing the line of riot police back and fighting alongside white men.

And who are these white men? They’re our friends and our comrades. They’re people we respect and who respect us, who take racism and sexism seriously and who don’t assume that our gender or our race excludes us from participating in illegal actions. They’re people who work low-wage jobs while going to school, who struggle with debt and economic precariousness, whose histories include experiences that simply don’t square with the tidy category of “privilege” you use to make everything they say or do illegitimate.

We’re not trying to deny the fact that racism and sexism exist, or to suggest that the student movement is immune from these institutionalized systems. But we won’t accept our identities being used to shut down forms of thought and action that we think are absolutely crucial in building a revolutionary movement. It’s with the histories of the militancy of women and people of color as inspiration that we embrace the events of last Thursday night.

~~~

I won’t know how to fight inequality as a single person, as much as anyone ever has, or ever will, until the conditions out of which such horrors emerge are successfully abolished. But I have so much anger against this world and I have as my only weapon the strength this world has given me to destroy its very foundations. That’s why I must act. That’s why WE do.

You just don’t know to whom you’re talking…

-The Invisible Women Committee

UCB: Occupy, Riot - All while Partying

2010-02-26T12:20:00.000-08:00

Last night's dance party at UC Berkeley started off as a dance party of a few hundred people.

The sound system moved.

Durant Hall was occupied. Partygoers danced their way in. People were in and out.

And the streets were then occupied.

Initial brief from OccupyCA here.

Mainstream News video and a cellphone video.

Santa Cruz is having another party tonight. See you there.

Dance Parties!!!

2010-02-25T18:14:00.000-08:00

Thursay, Feb. 25 @ Sproul Plaza, UCB

Friday, Feb. 26 @ Porter Quad, UCSC

Dance Party Benefit!!

2010-01-27T15:21:00.000-08:00

Statement from the Attempted Occupation of the Hibernia National Bank in SF

2010-01-20T15:00:00.000-08:00

Today, several students from Universities across the state attempted to occupy the Hibernia National Bank building in San Francisco. This building which has remained empty for years was recently sold for almost 3 million dollars in a neighborhood where thousands live without homes and hundreds die each year while lacking shelter. This space has been left empty because of the profit motive - placing the surplus value that could be acquired over the possible human needs that space could and should have fulfilled. We had planned on taking this space and holding it until later in the afternoon, when a march against homelessness and affordable housing would end in a rally nearby. We wished to take an action that would bridge the various movements that are taking shape from the growing discontent in this country and found it logical that the tactic of occupation be used to illustrate the nonsensical logic that dictates how and who uses space.

After a few hours of being in the building, a motion sensor alarm alerted the building owner who then called the police. As we sat in a room deciding how we should proceed the lights in the building suddenly switched on. We began to hear footsteps and voices travelling up from the stairs and initially attempted to hide in one of the rooms. After we realized that there would be no escape and no possibility of adequately hiding we revealed ourselves to the police. We were met with six loaded guns, yelling at us to put our hands up. Even after we had surrendered ourselves pistols were still aimed and ready to fire. The police questioned us and berated us for our "stupidity", one officer even scolded another for not shooting us on the spot. This threat of violence shown against those who were seemingly attempting find refuge from a winter storm is ridiculous and displays the criminalization of poverty that exists in our society. Furthermore, it shows the backward values of our community which place the protection of private property above the safety and well-being of people. It is doubtful that SFPD's response to a report of violence or sex slavery in the Tenderloin would be nearly as robust or timely.

We entered the space earlier in the morning to barricade the doors and with the hope of later creating an open space. The idea of an open and notorious occupation off campus requires a closer examination but should not be abandoned. The creation of liberated spaces in the community is something that we strive and dream for. In our decision to take this particular space as well to publicize it widely we wished to show to the student community the common circumstances that exist between two issues that are normally distant as well as show student support for those dealing with the reality of homelessness and precarious housing. Our failure illustrated to us how much we have to learn from those already involved squatting.

While this attempt was thwarted by the police, we are not finished. While currently in society we are students, we will not allow this designation to confine our action to the University. The issue of unaffordable housing leaves no person unaffected - all people must figure out some way to get a roof over their head. We will of course have to reexamine how and why we squat, but we will squat again.

We stand in solidarity with all of those without homes, those criminalized and demonized by society, and those who have begun this struggle before us.

There will be a march today against homelessness and for affordable housing starting at 11am from Justin Herman Plaza to the Federal Building

On Occupation of Hibernia Bank

2010-01-20T14:57:00.000-08:00

Below is the original statement that was to be issued by those occupying the Hibernia National Bank building in San Francisco:

Today, several students from Universities across the state attempted to occupy the Hibernia National Bank building in San Francisco. This building which has remained empty for years was recently sold for almost 3 million dollars in a neighborhood where thouslands live without homes and hundreds die each year while lacking shelter. This space has been left empty because of the profit motive - placing the surplus value that could be acquired over the possible human needs that space could and should have fufilled. We had planned on taking this space and holding it until later in the afternoon, when a march against homelessness and affordable housing would end in a rally nearby. We wished to take an action that would bridge the various movements that are taking shape from the growing discontent in this country and found it logical that the tactic of occupation be used to illustrate the nonsenical logic that dictates how and who uses space.

We entered the space earlier in the morning to barricade the doors and with the hope of later creating an open space. The idea of an open and notorious occupation off campus requires a closer examination but should not be abandoned. The creation of liberated spaces in the community is something that we strive and dream for. In our decision to take this particular space as well to publizie it widely we wished to show to the student community the relation between two issues that are normally distant as well as show student support for those dealing with the reality of homelessness and percarious housing. Our failure illustrated to us how much we have to learn from those already exploring new forms of life through squats.

After a few hours of being in the building, a motion sensor alarm alerted the building owner who then called the police. As we sat in a room deciding how we should proceed the lights in the building suddenly switched on. We began to hear footsteps and voices travelling up from the stairs and initally attempted to hide in one of the rooms. After we realized that there would be no escape and no possibility of adequtely hiding we revealed ourselves to the police. We were met with six loaded guns, yelling at us to put our hands up. Even after we had surrendered ourselves pistols were still aimed and ready to fire. The police questioned us and berated us for our "stupidity", one officer even scolded another for not shooting us on the spot. This threat of violence shown against those were simply attempting sleep is ridiclous and displays the criminalization of poverty that exists in our society. Furthermore, it shows the backward values which place the protection of private property above the safety and well-being of people. We have serious doubts that SFPD's response to reports of violence or sex slavery in the Tenderloin would be nearly as roboust or timely.

While this attempt was thrawted by the police, we are not finished. While currently in society we are students, we will not allow this designation to confine us to action on the Universitiy. The issue of unafforable housing leaves no person uneffected - all people must figure out someway to get a roof over their head. We will of course have to rexamine how and why we sqaut, but we will squat again.

We stand in solidarity with all of those without homes, those crminalizated and demonized by society, and those who have begun this struggle before us.

They Are All Stars

2010-01-04T17:29:00.000-08:00

What Kind of Fuckery is This?

*
Against the Left (and the Right) and Politics and Government

The government is the model for political activity. Politicians representing different countries, regions or “communities” battle with each other. We are encouraged to support the leaders we disagree with least, and we’re never really surprised when they screw us over.

All a politician’s working class background or radical ideals are worthless once they begin to govern. No matter who is in government, government has its own logic.

The fact that this society is divided into classes with opposing interests means that it is always at risk of tearing itself apart. The government is there to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Whether the government is a dictatorship or a democracy, it holds all the guns and will use them against its own population to make sure that we keep going to work.

Not that long ago, an extremely unstable situation in a particular country could be diffused by nationalizing all of a country’s industries, creating a police state, and calling it “communism.” This kind of capitalism proved to be less efficient and less flexible than good old-fashioned free market capitalism. With the fall of the Soviet Union, there is no longer a Red Army to march in and stabilize countries in this way, and Communist parties around the world are becoming simple social democrats.

Unfortunately, politics also exists outside of government. Community leaders, professional activists and unions want to place themselves between workers and bosses and be the mediators, the negotiators, the means of communication, the representatives, and ultimately the peacemakers. They fight to keep this position. In order to do that, they need to mobilize the working class in controlled ways to put pressure on more business-oriented politicians, at the same time offering business a workforce that is ready to work. This means that they have to disperse us when we start to fight back. Sometimes they do this by negotiating concessions, other times by selling us out.

Politicians always call on us to vote, to sit back and let the organizer negotiate, to fall in line behind the leaders and the specialists in a kind of passive participation. These non-governmental politicians offer the government a way to maintain the status quo peacefully, and in return they get jobs managing our misery.

Leftists like to point out that the Republican and Democratic parties are not each other’s adversaries but rather they are “two sides to the same coin,” that they both invariably represent the capitalist state, that they are merely a façade to the State, that they are a false dichotomy to mask true contradictions. But Leftists fail, or refuse, to see that they too are a “side” to that same “coin,” that they in fact are merely the loyal opposition. They do not realize that they too are a part of that same political spectrum that defines politics, because whenever anybody engages with the political system, even if they simply make demands of it, they become a player in that wretched game of politics, they become dependent on the rules and strictures of political hierarchy.

Leftists are ignorant in that they see the mainstream political parties as the sole exploiters of society. They seek the same political power that governments wield and in turn, whether intentionally or unintentionally, they present themselves as heirs to the capitalist state rather than its sworn enemies; they argue that those who currently hold power govern poorly and that it would be best if they instead controlled the State. In giving such credence to the false legitimacy of the State, Leftists are only perpetuating the falsehood that is the State despite its inherent and contradictory flaws. Through hyperbolic rhetoric, scant with esoteric terms and phrases, Leftists are arguing that we would best submit to another wolf in sheep’s clothing in the name of Democracy, Social Democracy or Socialism or Communism or Liberalism or Libertarianism, etc., etc.

*

Against (Political) Organizations

There is a clear distinction between organization and organizations, between an act and its abstract yet object manifestation, between processes and structures.

The purpose of any organization or organism is to survive then thrive. A political organization primarily concerns itself with maintaining its existence, an existence that requires only ideology and partisans where practice and adaptable political theory is neglected—resulting in dead theory.

If an organization secures its own survival, it then proceeds to expand itself by increasing its influence and by inflating its membership. That’s it: survive, then thrive (a nucleic, core membership or cadre, then recruitment); just wait for the means to get organized in that utopian “right moment”—which never arrives— or when conditions are perfect—which they never are.

Political groups are bureaucratic. They tend to mirror the structures of work, where activity is controlled from the outside. They create specialists in politics. They are built on a division between the leaders and the led, between representatives and represented, between organizers and organized. This is not a bad choice of how to set up organizations to be remedied with a large dose of participatory democracy. It is a direct result of what political groups and activists are trying to do—to manage a part of capitalism.

A working class political party is a contradiction in terms—not because the membership of a particular party can’t be largely working class, but because the most it can do is give the working class a voice in politics. It lets representatives put forward ideas on how our bosses should run this society—how they can make money and keep us under control. Whether they are advocating nationalization or privatization, more welfare or more police (or both), the programs of political parties are different strategies for managing capitalism.

Don’t fall prey. For many, many reasons, political organizations flourish in times of crises. Political organizations use hard times to inflate their membership, opportunistically promising change. In effect, an organization’s stated goals and aims (whether the passage of a bill or some kind of revolution) are used as rhetoric, lofty language and histrionics used as a means to garner membership, influence, foot soldiers, fodder, and chumps—well-meaning people who get bogged down in bureaucracy, mired in the tar pits of politics and hierarchy and activism, extinguishing the sparks of creativity before ever becoming the flames of direct action and self-determination.

Among members of organizations, one may even find individuals who are sincere—if a little desperate—who are enthusiastic—if a little conniving. Organizations are attractive due to their apparent consistency—they may have a history, a name, resources, leader(s), a strategy and a discourse. They are nonetheless empty structures, which, in spite of their ‘grand’ origins, can never be filled. In all their affairs, at every level, these organizations are concerned above all with their own survival as organizations, and little else. Their repeated betrayals have often alienated the commitment of their own rank and file. And this is why one can, on occasion, run into worthy beings within them. But the promise of the encounter can only be realized outside the organization and, unavoidably, at odds with it.

Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves. Organizations are not needed when we organize ourselves.

In truth, there is no gap between what we are, what we do, and what we are becoming. Organizations—political or labor, fascist or anarchist—always begin by separating, practically these aspects of existence. It’s then easy for them to present their idiotic formalism as the sole remedy to this separation. To organize is not to give a structure to weakness. It is above all to form bonds—bonds that are by no means neutral—terrible bonds. The degree of organization is measured by the intensity of sharing—material and spiritual.

Far more dreadful, though, are social milieus, with their supple texture, their gossip, and their informal hierarchies. Flee all milieus. Each and every milieu is oriented toward the neutralization of some truth. Literary circles exist to smother the clarity of writing; anarchist milieus to blunt the directness of direct action; scientific milieus to withhold the implications of their research from the majority of people today; sport milieus to contain in their gyms the various forms of life they should create. Particularly to be avoided are the cultural and activist circles. They are the old people’s homes where all revolutionary desires traditionally go to die. The task of cultural circles is to spot nascent intensities and to explain away the sense of whatever it is you’re doing, while the task of activist circles is to sap your energy for doing it. Activist milieus spread their diffuse web throughout the country, and are encountered on the path of every revolutionary development. They offer nothing but the story of their many defeats and the bitterness these have produced. Their exhaustion has made them incapable of seizing the possibilities of the present. Besides, to nurture their wretched passivity they talk far too much and this makes them unreliable when it comes to the police. Just as it’s useless to expect anything from them, it’s stupid to be disappointed by their sclerosis. It’s best to just abandon this dead weight.

All milieus are counter-revolutionary because they are only concerned with the preservation of their sad comfort.

*

Against Leftist (and other Political) Student Organizations

The student is passively content to be politicized. In this sphere, the student readily accepts the same alienated, spectacular participation. Seizing upon all the tattered remnants of a Left which was annihilated more than ninety years ago by ‘”socialist” reformism and Leninist/Trotskyite counter-revolution; the student is guilty of an amazing ignorance. The Right is well aware of the defeat of the workers' movement, and so are the workers themselves, though more confusedly. But the students continue heedlessly to organize demonstrations that mobilize students and students only. This is a political false consciousness in its virgin state, a fact which naturally makes the University a happy hunting ground for the manipulators of the declining bureaucratic organizations. For them, it is child's play to program the student's political options. Occasionally there are deviating tendencies and cries of “(fill in the blank)!” but after a period of token resistance the dissidents are reincorporated into a status quo which they have never really radically opposed.

*

Insanity

The primary goal for any organization is to maintain its existence. Organizations are held together by ideologies, or sets of ideas and aims. In order for an organization to keep itself together, its members must submit to a shared ideology.

Dead theory is then of primary importance for any organization because of the requisite of having to submit to an ideology. This stifles creativity and hopes and optimism because members have to collectively submit to a static ideology. Rather than have the immediacy of life fuel the actions of organizational members, theory prevents them from taking initiative and action, for the benefit of keeping together the organization.

It is not enough for theory to seek its realization in practice; practice must seek theory.

For organizations then, theory becomes the progenitor of practice, and because the ideology of an organization must remain static, the development of practice is stunted at best, since it is restrained by lifeless and abstract theory based on the semblances of ideology. As a result, organizations repeat the same disproven tactics in vain attempts to make their ideologies a reality.

In fact, they repeatedly use the same strategies and tactics expecting different results every time; this is an outward manifestation of insanity.

*

(Student) Debacle as Spectacle

Political organizations are entities of the politics that keep people alienated as only observers or often times as complacent actors in the spectacle that is politics defined by the State.

Political organizations may label themselves revolutionary but are in fact completely working within the framework of dissent allowed by the State. Such groups are more than happy to convince students to participate in rallies that in reality serve no other purpose but to provide images of resistance that alienate students in the same way as their bosses do: by rejecting creativity and thus empowerment—real subversion.

All is planned for one who wishes to express dissent; the roles of most are to hold signs and be an extra, or rather a prop, in the images that organizers wish to present to the media, who in turn portray the images in a way that the State wishes to present to the masses.

Boredom is exactly what the student suffers from. Boredom is the effect of the suppression of desire; it is the effect of the lack of participation and control we have over the conditions of our lives.

Political organizations and the actions they take are similar to the actions of the institutions they claim to oppose.

To put the role of the masses as observers, or passive participants, in spectacularly self-contradictory activities without substance, organizations further reinforce the conditioning of impotence that dominates our logic and acts as a conscience in service to the State and our further alienation.

It is absolutely no wonder, then, that students and workers are at best skeptical or at worst completely apathetic toward University political organizations and movements. This will continue until students and workers take charge of their selves and refuse to delegate power to others. Because once we stop fighting our own battles, we lose the war.

The struggle against capitalism and the State is a struggle for freedom and self-determination; its objectives cannot be achieved through the collaboration with bureaucratic organizations whose very structures are designed to thwart the achievement of those objectives.

The student/worker struggle against exploitation is automatically a struggle against bureaucratic organizations, including but not limited to student organizations and teachers’ unions, because they all invariably work together in collusion with and within the confines of the State regardless of intentions.

*

(Student) Apathy

Throughout the course of student life you’ll be implored to “engage,” to “express yourself,” to “have your voice heard,” to “stand up and be counted.”

The politicians and organizers will try and pull you into their orbit, to vote for them, to organize others or to join student government or organizations yourself.

Chances are you’ll feel uncomfortable and, ultimately, apathetic. You’ll dodge them in the hallways. You may feel (but most likely not) like you’re shirking your duty to your fellow students and soiling the participatory tradition of the University.

The truth is that non-participation in student government is no cause for shame. In fact, it is an entirely rational reaction to the shameful conditions of being a student.

It’s hardly a surprise that student government mirrors the form of national government, because both serve the same function. The committees, the assemblies, the senate and the vote all function to tamp down on expectations, diffuse and wait out struggles, foster a deference to unaccountable institutions, and separate us into atomized social actors. This is a form of mediation: the insertion of an institutional structure between desires and the means to meet them.

Moreover, these forms of government are based on a fundamental illusion. Students and citizens have no power over the content of their general conditions. The so-called “right” to choose between one and another unaccountable leader is merely the right to give up the only true power that people may have: the power to self-organize and directly struggle for their lives without the mediation of leaders. This holds just as true in the classroom as it does on the streets.

So when the politicians and organizers come and try and pull you in, embrace your apathy and your discomfort!

There are a thousand ways to make positive changes at the University. Talk with your fellow students and friends, figure out what you want, then organize and take it!

*

Direct Action and Organization

Do not hold direct action as a holy principle; there is an inherent stupidity of this type of mentality in organizations such as those seeking to recruit you, those organizations that stubbornly defend ideology and analysis from the rotting corpses of past movements. What should be held as a “holy principle” is: nothing is holy.

When we start to fight against the conditions of our lives, a completely different kind of activity appears. We do not look for a politician to come change things for us. We do it ourselves, with other working class people. Whenever this kind of resistance breaks out, politicians try to extinguish it in a flood of petitions, lobbying and election campaigns. But when we are fighting for ourselves, our activity looks completely different from theirs. We take property away from landlords and use it for ourselves. We use militant tactics against our bosses and end up fighting with the police.

From now on, to materially organize for survival is to materially organize for attack. When we go on the offensive we begin to recognize each other and fight collectively. We use the ways that society depends on us to disrupt it. We strike, sabotage, riot, desert, mutiny and take over property. We amplify and coordinate our activities. All kinds of new possibilities open up.

We form groups where everyone takes part in the activity, and there is no division between leaders and followers. We do not fight for our leaders, for our bosses or for our countries. We fight for ourselves.

*

P.S. On General Assemblies

A group of power-hungry students and organizations have come together to constitute a general assembly at San Francisco State University. These students (some that just won’t graduate) are making attempts to centralize everything before anything has materialized. In short, they are centralizing nothing. And, that is what they will get: nothing. They are incubating a stillborn movement, and they don’t care, or they are just that stupid, so long as the nascent stillborn is theirs.

This is beyond ridiculous, it is absurd, it is to be expected, and it is what is to be done.

A common reflex is to call a general assembly at the slightest sign of movement, and vote. This is a mistake. The business of voting and deciding a winner is enough to turn the assembly into a nightmare, into a theater where all the various little pretenders to power confront each other. Here, we suffer from the bad example of bourgeois parliaments. An assembly is not a place for decisions but for talk, for free speech exercised without a goal.

The need to assemble is as constant among humans as the necessity of making decisions is rare. Assembling corresponds to the joy of feeling a common power. Decisions are vital only in emergency situations, where the exercise of democracy is already compromised. The rest of the time, “the democratic character of decision making” is only a problem for the fanatics of process.

It’s not a matter of critiquing assemblies or abandoning them, but of liberating the speech, gestures, and the interplay of beings that take place within them. We just have to see that each person comes to an assembly not only with a point of view or a motion, but with desires, attachments, capacities, forces, sadnesses and a certain disposition toward others, openness.

If we manage to set aside the fantasy of a General Assembly and replace it with an assembly of presences, if we manage to foil the constantly renewed temptation of hegemony, if we stop making the decision our final aim, then there is a chance for a kind of critical mass, one of those moments of collective crystallization where a decision suddenly takes hold of beings, completely or only in part.

The same goes for deciding on actions. By starting from the principle that “the action in question should govern the assembly’s agenda,” we make both vigorous debate and effective action impossible. A large assembly made up of people who don’t know each other is obliged to call on action specialists, that is, to abandon action for the sake of its control. On the one hand, people with mandates are by definition hindered in their actions, on the other hand, nothing hinders them from deceiving everyone.

There’s no ideal form of action. What’s essential is that action assume a certain form, that it give rise to a form instead of having one imposed on it—like dead theory imposing itself on those who give it life. This presupposes a shared political and geographical position as well as the circulation of a shared knowledge.

As for deciding on actions, the principle could be as follows: each person should do their own reconnaissance, the information would then be put together, and the decision will occur to us rather than being made by us. The circulation of knowledge cancels hierarchy; it equalizes by raising up. Proliferating horizontal communication is also the best form of coordination among different people, the best way to put an end to hegemony.

We Are All Stars: The Enemy Within (Update)

2010-01-04T16:45:00.001-08:00

We Are All Stars

The student is a state of being. This state is a transitory one. It is a hazing. It is a rehearsal. It is a preparatory stage.

The student is a privileged person in an underprivileged world of suffering, but only because she does not recognize her own boredom as a form of imprisonment, of torture. The student is not only deadened to reality, he is also deprived of the consciousness of her own suffering. The student accepts this as “normal,” but it is only the “normality” of her repression that makes her like the rest of society.

The student lives in a state of protracted infancy because it is the function of the University to train future, docile low-level functionaries. This state of protracted infancy is seen in the classrooms, where students sit quietly in military formation, accepting the nonsense professors spew. The student is there, content and misguided, believing that the classroom is a setting for privileged and serious learning. Thus the student eagerly accepts the traditional teacher-student relationship.

It is in the University where subservience is ingrained ever more easily. Such inculcations formerly had to be forced upon the white-collar workers; now they are easily absorbed and passed along by the mass of future low-level functionaries. Students are being trained for jobs comparable to those of 20th century skilled workers ; except, back then, skilled workers never expected promotions.

The University is in fact a training ground for future docile, submissive workers. On these training grounds, the student unashamedly lives an overtly childish existence. The tighter authority’s chains shackle the student, the freer the student believes she is.

The student clings to the crumbling prestige of the University, and, in comparison to the former level of general bourgeois culture, the machine-made specialized education is just as profoundly debased at the intellectual level because the modern economic system requires the mass production of uneducated workers who have been rendered incapable of thinking—like domesticated cows.

The University has become an institution for organizing ignorance; “high culture” disappears at the same rate as the school assembly lines produce professors; professors are scum and most would be jeered at in any high school classroom. But the University student is oblivious to all of this and continues to listen obligingly to the masters; the student consciously suspends all critical judgment so as to wallow in the mystical state of being a student—someone seriously committed to learning serious things—and hopes thereby to learn the latest “truths” and repeat them as her/his original thoughts.

The future revolutionary society will condemn everything that takes place today in lecture halls and classrooms as nothing but noise, verbal pollution. The student is already a very bad joke.

Students live a poor existence. Student poverty—both material and emotional—is more extreme than that of the proletariat’s. However, this poverty is temporary and not comparable with that of society’s poor. Because this poverty is temporary, and because student life is, too, temporary and as a result detached from the historical processes, the student accepts the poverty without resignation. The transient student wallows in it, thinking that the approaching future will compensate. However, the student will only discover an endless, inevitable mediocrity.

Since the student is not a person, but rather a state-of-being, the student movement is blind to itself because it is detached from the rest of society; it cannot therefore understand the forces that push it into action; it cannot connect its struggle to its own life. The student movement seeks ‘demands’ everywhere, but because students cannot see the absurdity of their own lives and their own imprisonment, they cannot begin to imagine what the struggle is for.

The conspicuous dilemma reeking in the University is odious, and oft-ridiculed, ambition toward a state of grace and self-mortification:

The student activist serves the cause, and the cause serves to justify the student’s subservience.

Students consciously align their thinking with what they perceive to be that of an oppressed group (of which they may or may not be a member). They then proceed to self-righteously speak for that group and articulate the desires of that group, usually phrased as demands made of the authorities.

Such students believe that every person, every group, must be represented. However, representation is at the heart of the logic of modern politics, and its so-called enemies uphold this logic better than anyone. Such thinking is institutionalized among the academic Left, who is proud of its broad curriculum which includes women’s studies, queer studies, Raza studies, Black Studies, etc.

As long as students learn to demand “justice” for everyone, the possibility of revolutionary change can be ignored. Through appeals for justice or equal rights within the system, the academic Left perpetuates the system and its [im]moralistic logic. And since academia is virtually defined by the dissociation of thought and action, no revolutionary theory could possibly thrive in this context; conversely, it is here that revolutionary ideology is at home, an object of passive consideration and contrived musings.

The deaths of students who struggle all over the world for liberation reveal the poverty of the U.S. student movement and the superficiality of its own struggles.

When the real struggle comes, it will be easy to recognize because it will cut through all the bullshit in which the student is trapped.

We begin by killing the enemy within us and within our friends with whom we share our classrooms, homes, and beds. We come together in small bands with those we have learned to trust, occupying everything that represses us, taking back the schools, the streets, our lives.

The function of the student movement must be something other than making demands of the University, but to destroy the existence of the student as a distinct social role. More eager for grades than knowledge, more eager for a “good” job than to live without dead time, the first enemy of the student is within you.

The student alone cannot be singled out because student passivity is only the most obvious symptom of a general state of affairs, for each sector of social life has been subdued by a similar imperialism.

Three Great Posts re: SFSU Occupation from INDYBAY

2009-12-20T17:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/12/20/18633216.php

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/12/17/18632968.php

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/12/11/18632189.php

Thanks a lot Dave Id for compiling these posts including a map tracking police movements from the end of the occupation and the subsequent responses from the student protesters.

Check out this website for future updates:
occupysfsu.wordpress.com

The Enemy Within

2009-12-17T01:42:00.000-08:00

The Enemy Within
By: La Ventana collective

The student is a state of being. It is a transitory state. It is a hazing; it is a rehearsal. It is a preparatory stage.

The student is a privileged person in an underprivileged world of suffering, but only because s/he does not recognize her/his own boredom as a form of imprisonment, of torture. The student is not only deadened to reality, s/he is also deprived of the consciousness of her/his own suffering. The student accepts this as “normal,” but it is only the normality of her/his repression that makes the student like the rest of society.

The student lives in a state of protracted infancy because it is the function of the University to train future, docile low-level functionaries. This state of protracted infancy is seen in the classrooms, where students sit quietly in military formation, accepting the nonsense professors spew. The student is there, content and misguided, believing that the classroom is a setting for some privileged and serious learning. Thus the student eagerly accepts the traditional teacher-student relationship.

It is in the University where submissiveness is ingrained ever more easily. Such inculcations formerly had to be forced upon the white-collar workers; now they are easily absorbed and passed along by the mass of future low-level functionaries. Students are being trained for jobs comparable to those of 20th century skilled workers; except, back then, skilled workers never expected promotions.

The student clings to the crumbling prestige of the University, and, in comparison to the former level of general bourgeois culture, the machine-made specialized education is just as profoundly debased at the intellectual level because the modern economic system requires the mass production of uneducated workers who have been rendered incapable of thinking—like domesticated cows.

The University is, in fact, a training ground for future docile, submissive workers. On these training grounds, the student unashamedly lives an overt childish existence. The tighter authority’s chains shackle the student, the freer the student believes s/he is.

The University has become an institution for organizing ignorance; “high culture” disappears at the same rate as the school assembly lines produce professors; professors are scum and most would be jeered at in any high school classroom. But the University student is oblivious to all of this and continues to listen obligingly to the masters; the student consciously suspends all critical judgment so as to wallow in the mystical state of being a student—someone seriously committed to learning serious things—and hopes thereby to learn the latest “truths” and repeat them as her/his original thoughts.

The future revolutionary society will condemn everything that takes place today in lecture halls and classrooms as nothing but noise, verbal pollution. The student is already a very bad joke.

Students live a poor existence. Student poverty—both material and emotional—is more extreme than that of the proletariat’s. However, this poverty is temporary and not comparable with the miserable existence of society’s poor. Because student poverty is only temporary, and because being a student is too temporary and detached from the historical process, the student accepts the poverty without resignation. The student wallows in it, thinking that the approaching future will compensate. However, the student will only discover an endless, inevitable mediocrity.
The student movement is blind to itself because it is detached from the rest of society; it does not understand the forces that push it into action; it cannot connect its struggle to its own life. (The issue is not about incompetent state and school administrators and the severe budget cuts. Recovering funds will not solve the University’s perpetual problems.) The student movement seeks ‘demands’ everywhere, but because students cannot see the absurdity of their own lives and their own imprisonment, they cannot begin to imagine what the struggle is for.

The deaths of students who struggle all over the world for liberation reveal the poverty of the U.S. student movement and the superficiality of its own struggles.

When the real struggle comes, it will be easy to recognize because it will cut through all the bullshit in which the student is trapped. (It knows its objectives. Its tactics are clear. It moves with confidence.)

We begin by killing the enemy within us and within our friends with whom we share our classrooms, homes, and beds. We come together in small bands with those we have learned to trust, occupying everything that represses us, taking back the schools, the streets, our lives.

The function of the student movement must be something other than making demands of the University, but to destroy the existence of the student as a distinct social role and character structure. More eager for grades than knowledge, more eager for a “good” job than to live without dead time, the first enemy of the student is within you.

The student however should not alone be singled out for student passivity is only the most obvious symptom of a general state of affairs where each sector of social life has been subdued by a similar imperialism.

On the Actions of December 10th and in Defense of the SFSU Occupation

2009-12-12T04:46:00.000-08:00

The ISO posted a response to the occupation of the Business building at SFSU on their website at socialistworker.org. Here is a response to their criticism, which was drafted by the La Ventana Collective.
The International Socialist Organization writes:

One important criticism of the occupation has come from faculty and students involved in the campus movement--the action was organized in secret by a small group of activists, and intentionally excluding other leading campus activists. The result was that the number of occupiers was small, and outside support had to be put together hastily. This only made it easier for the police to break up the occupation.

Secondly, the occupation was organized on the same day as a planned SFSU General Assembly--and actually caused its cancellation. Dozens of students, faculty and staff had been planning for the general assembly as the next step in building a democratic, united movement on campus.

Building the General Assembly is still an urgent task--the next one will take place on Wednesday, December 16 (postponed from the previous week). A united, democratic effort is the best hope of building for mobilizing students, faculty and staff to strike and shut down SFSU's campus on March 4--and of moving beyond to get the budget cuts taken back.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/12/11/police-attack-sfsu-occupation

Here is the response of La Ventana Collective who participated in the events of December 10th:

On the Actions of December 10th and in Defense of the Occupation
La Ventana Collective

The actions of December 10th reflected an evolution on the campus of San Francisco State University.

While the ISO argues that the occupation was “undemocratic” it is important to note that in this particular case it was strategically valuable to have clandestine organization. This militant action will act as a spark for more expanded and informal organizing in the spring. Security is a huge issue on campus as the struggle to defend public education escalates in resistance. Additionally, the ISO’s organizing model is in many ways undemocratic in nature with centralized committees espousing orders that rank-and-file militants within their organization must follow, including the "party-line" and "platform" with which the ISO members must adhere.

Furthermore, to assume that outside support must be organized by a vanguard is to assume students on campus are incapable of acting on their own initiative to support an occupation that is an important step in mobilizing for power amongst students, employed members of the university, and the supporters of the community. They used the word "hastily" but the fact that a large number of students (the largest turn-out we have seen all semester) on their own volition decided to support this action the week before finals proves the potential of spontaneous self-organization. The students on this campus are willing to support actions that are outside the traditional framework of “activism” as defined on this campus (e.g. walks outs, marches, rallies, teach-ins). The thousands of students who showed up to support the occupation was what kept it alive for 24 hours. The "haste" of preparation for the occupation had nothing to do with the riot cops ability to break it up - they forced their way into the building by breaking windows at 3.30 in the morning, when many students were tired and on the verge of sleep.

The ISO criticizes the cancellation of the “General Assembly” despite the fact that a general assembly still took place, albeit in separate breakout discussion groups at each entrance to the occupied building. The decentralized structure allowed for intimate conversations, and provided an empowering space for those who would not normally have spoken up or attended. In light of these conditions, we ask the ISO two things:

(1) What is their definition of a "general assembly"?
(2) What is the best way to mobilize students to participate in the struggle to defend public education?

These questions are important and perhaps represent where we ideologically disagree with the ISO. Their version of a general assembly is one where procedurally they can control the facilitation. They bring members of their organization to vote in blocks to favor their pre-meditated proposals, which in the first General Assembly included a 10-person steering committee. This is a textbook tactic of vanguards—particularly of the rotting Leninist variety—to control a democratic assembly of people. Obviously, as demonstrated by the vote, this was one of the least supported proposals put forth during the first general assembly. Coincidentally, the ISO showed up to the General Assembly that occurred at the occupation with proposals that included approaches to organizing and requested that students support these proposals with a "straw-poll" at the western entrance. The organizing approach reflected how to build for March 4th by specifying the exact amount of hours students were to outreach and “flier” each week. However, we identify autonomy within the struggle as being a primary strength that was manifested within the occupation. The occupation inspired complementary actions and participation that counteract an authoritarian approach to expanding the organization of this fight.

It was strategic on the part of the ISO to send a representative to each mini-general assembly to try and co-opt the discussion and push to adopt their proposals as laid out.

Secondly, if we know anything about the ISO and their involvement in the General Assemblies, it is the fact that none of them advocated the proposal for a general strike, which was voted on as one of the most popular proposals to bring forth to the Berkeley Organizing conference on October 24th.

In the 2006 Oaxacan uprising and rebellion, the APPO (the Popular People's Assembly of Oaxaca) organized large general assemblies held in the midst of the occupation of the zocalo of the capital city of the state of Oaxaca. The "planton"—or occupation—was a space where meetings took up to 3 days in many cases due to the horizontal nature and directly democratic principles of the APPO, which functioned as guidelines and principles of the movement. For the ISO to argue that an occupation is undemocratic reflects their fears in not being able to control the situation and context of organizing on campus at SFSU. A general assembly, is for us, a large gathering of people willing to talk about the issues through discussion in order to formulate plans for moving forward. This is different than the symbolic and flawed "General Assemblies" we have seen at State, which pretend to have representation of the campus body but fail to do so. Students were bound to resolutions that were never popularly supported because the only people that came to the frustrating meetings were students involved within the “typical activist milieu.” If we are serious about March 4th then we have to be willing to step outside of the traditional organizing framework and create spaces for autonomous action and allow people to decide for themselves how they want to support the proposals and organize amongst themselves. Rather than centralizing the General Assemblies to consolidate power so that the ISO or other similar organizations can take over, we should promote a "diversity of tactics" that complement each other in a horizontal manifestation of our collective strength.

Throughout this occupation we have gained evidence that large numbers of people turn out and are willing to engage in dialogue about the course and direction of the movement. This is not unlike the Oaxacan model of organizing as demonstrated by the coalition known as APPO. Due to the large representation and diversity of the students that turned out, this action transcended the "leftist" facade on our campus and brought real people with representation on behalf of real issues. The ISO is not the only “leading campus activist organization” and their flawed theories on organizing exclude people from wanting to participate in building for larger actions on campus, which the ISO cannot contain. The “Socialist Worker” article also failed to mention perhaps the most important part of the occupation and that is the relationships that were formed and the lived realization that a self-organized student-worker university is possible.

It is as our friends in Tiqqun stated: "It is not the occupation that is important, but rather, the relationships that are formed during an occupation."

This is the most important part of an occupation—the communization of the struggle. The social interactions broke down old ideals and created new realities that, we as participants, wish to achieve not after we win the struggle but rather during the struggle. This is a philosophy that was stressed during the 2001 horizontalist movement in Argentina after the collapse of the economy. Once again, during the actions that followed the collapse of the government, the people self organized in their own neighborhoods. Rather than centralize the general assemblies, they decentralized them in order to coordinate from the particulars to the general as opposed to the general and on down to the particulars. This perhaps, was driven by the needs-based desires, to coordinate basic functions and activities in the neighborhoods in order to survive an economic collapse. In that tradition we must view our struggle as a process in which we are implementing our ideals not in a linear trajectory towards some abstract that is irrelevant to those most affected by the issues of inaccessibility to affordable and quality education for all.

The Bricks We Throw at Police Today Will Build the Liberation Schools of Tomorrow

2009-11-30T13:08:00.000-08:00

The Bricks We Throw at Police Today Will Build the Liberation Schools of Tomorrow
by Three Non-Matriculating Proletarians

taken from:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/29/18630823.php

Days later, voices in unison still ring in our ears. “Who’s university?” At night in bed, we mumble the reply to ourselves in our dreams. “Our university!” And in the midst of building occupations and the festive and fierce skirmishes with the police, concepts like belonging and ownership take the opportunity to assume a wholly new character. Only the village idiot or, the modern equivalent, a bureaucrat in the university administration would think we were screaming about something as suffocating as property rights when last week we announced, “The School is Ours!
The Bricks We Throw at Police Today Will Build the Liberation Schools of Tomorrow

“If you’re scared today you'll be scared tomorrow as well and always and so you've got to make a start now right away we must show that in this school we aren't slaves we have to do it so we can do what they're doing in all other schools to show that we're the ones to decide because the school is ours.”

The Unseen, Nanni Balestrini

Days later, voices in unison still ring in our ears. “Who’s university?” At night in bed, we mumble the reply to ourselves in our dreams. “Our university!” And in the midst of building occupations and the festive and fierce skirmishes with the police, concepts like belonging and ownership take the opportunity to assume a wholly new character. Only the village idiot or, the modern equivalent, a bureaucrat in the university administration would think we were screaming about something as suffocating as property rights when last week we announced, “The School is Ours!” When the day erupted, when the escape plan from the drudgery of college life was hatched, it was clear to everyone that the university not only belonged to the students who were forcefully reasserting their claim but also to the faculty, to every professor and TA who wishes they could enliven the mandatory curriculum in their repetitive 101 class, to the service workers who can't wait for their shift to end, and to every other wage-earner on campus ensuring the daily functioning of the school.

Last week, the actualization of our communal will gave us a new clarity. The usual divisiveness of proprietorship was forcefully challenged; cascades of hidden meaning rush onto rigid notions of possession and our eyes look past surface appearances. So now when asked, “who does the university belong to?” we can't fail to recognize that the college itself was built by labor from generations past, the notebook paper is produced by workers in South America, the campus computers are the output of work in Chinese factories, the food in the student cafe is touched by innumerable hands before it reaches the plates, and all the furniture at UC Berkeley is produced by the incarcerated at San Quentin. Thus the university, its normal operation and existence, ought to be attributed to far more than it regularly is. To claim that the school is ours requires our definition of ownership to not only shatter the repressive myth that the college belongs to the State of California and the Regents but to also extend belonging past national and state borders and throughout time. It's clear, the entire university, for that matter, every university belongs to everyone, employed and unemployed, all students and all workers, to everyone of the global class that produces and reproduces the world as we now know it. The school is ours because it’s everyone's and the destruction of the property relation, with all its damaging and limiting consequences, is implicit in the affirmation of this truth. It's our university...

…but, as of now, in its present configuration, who would want something so disgusting as a school?

The Poverty of Student Life is the Poverty of Capitalist Society

It's now larger than any conspiratorial plot by Thomas Huxley. In fact, he could have never envisioned the extent to which contemporary class society would transform education as such into another separated activity, detached from the totality of life and devoid of any practical worth or good, while, simultaneously, being in perfect accord with the needs of capitalist production.

Learning is now sapped of all its content, education is but another part of the assembly line in the social factory, and the university itself serves an important function within the reproduction of disjointed life in this divided society. While the collegiate apparatus infests countless minds with the logic and technical knowledge of capital, the illusion is being sold that somehow academic labor is divorced from the world of work. Our apologies, but a term paper is not the production of autonomous and creative knowledge, it is work and therefore exploitation. It is human activity animated for the sake of capital not for humanity itself. The conditioning and preparation of students for a life crushed by regimented value creation is the essential purpose of the college: to teach the young how to give and take orders. Nothing about the university is neutral; its role in society is clear. The lines are being drawn.

The Representation of the Student Body Has Become an Enemy of the Student Body

You will always be offered dialogue as if that were its own end; it will die in bureaucracy's stale air, as if trapped in a soundless room. In insurrectionary times, action is the speech that can be heard.
-Slogan written on a Digital Wall

Far before last week’s events, we've located them in the enemy’s camp. Student activist-leaders shamed, begged, pleaded, and finally began to shriek and scream at us when we ignored their megaphone-amplified orders. In their last ditch effort to see their commands followed, they physically assisted the police in blocking us from occupying buildings and protected the outnumbered cops from our punches and shoves. It’s obvious they've chosen their side some time ago. These are the idiots who were telling people who tried to break down the door of California Hall on November 18th that they should not do so because “there was no consensus.” These are the same fools who sabotaged the attempted storming of the Regents meeting at UCLA and the occupation of Covel Hall, ruining months of self-directed planning, after declaring the crowd had become too “agitated.” The Cynthias, who later that day went on to disrupt the occupation of Carter-Huggins Hall. These are the same politicians, who grabbed the megaphone as students marched in to the President’s office in Downtown Oakland, prepared to raise utter hell and instead directed them into a dialogue with middle-level administrators, later issuing an order that the crowd must leave “peacefully.” Disgusting, yet typical. The only consensus they want is rallied around the social peace and the preservation of the existent institutions and the only alteration they want of the power structure is their ascent to the top of it. By actively collaborating with the administration and police, by orchestrating arrests, by frittering away the momentum of the angry, they validate the insults we flung at them and they revealed themselves for the “student cops,” “class traitors” and “snitches” they are.

For them it’s a knee-jerk reaction: challenge their power and they fall back on identity politics. If they don’t get their way they cry privilege. When the actions escalate, when we begin to feel our power, the self-appointed are waiting to remind us that there may be the undocumented present – the activist super-ego. Somehow in their tiny paternalistic brains they believe they know what’s best for immigrants implying that the undocumented are too stupid to understand the consequences of their actions and god granted the student leaders the wisdom to guide these lost souls. In their foolish heads, immigrants remain passive sheep, black people never confront the police and just enjoy the beatings they get, and the working class always takes orders from the boss.

In pseudo-progressive tongue they speak a state-like discourse of diversity; the groans of the student-activist zombie is the grammar of the dead revolutions of the past. Their vision of race politics ignores the triumphs and wallows in the failures of the 60’s movements. The stagnant ghosts of yesterday’s deadlocked struggle; they are the hated consequences of the civil rights era that produced a rainbow of tyranny with a Black president mutilating Afghanis, Asian cops brutalizing students on campus, and Latino prison guards chaining prisoners. In this same way, the opportunists act out their complicity with the structures of order. When students defy preset racial categories and unify in order to take action on their own behalf, the student cops attempt to reinforce the present day's violent separations and reestablish governance. They fail to recognize that divisions among proletarians are questioned only within the struggle itself and the festering scissions between the exploited can only be sutured with hands steadied by combat with the exploiters. Like a scalpel used to reopen stitched wounds, the student activists’ brand of multi-culturalism is undoubtedly a tool of state repression.

During the scuffle with the police in front of California Hall on the inaugural day of the strike, one of the student cops asked, “What’s going to happen when we get into the building?” For us, given the social context of the strike, the answer is obvious, for them, even the question is problematic because of the risk it poses to their position of dominance. In the moment of rupture, their role as managers becomes void. Self-directed action crowds out the programmatic. They forever need to stand on the edge of the reality that something could pop off, because it is in that possibility that they can control the situation and ensure that things do, in fact, move in their way towards nowhere. When things get hot, the self-elected of the student movement are waiting with their trusty fire extinguishers ready in hand because they know that when people act on their own and valorize their self-interest, their authority crumbles and everyone can see how bankrupt their strategy of social containment actually is. The student activist stutter-steps on the path of nothingness. But we hope to turn the mob against them. To seize their megaphones and declare: “Death to Bureaucracy!” Some may ask, “Why have these hooligans come to our campus?” “They’ve come to ruin everything!” the student leaders will say.

And for once, we agree.

We Are Not Students, We Are Dynamite!

A movement results from combinations that even its own participants cannot control. And that its enemies cannot calculate. It evolves in ways that cannot be predicted, and even those who foresee it are taken by surprise.
-Paco Ignacio Taibo

Many will ask then, why have we thrown ourselves into the ‘student movement?’ We are not students, at least not now and never in the UC system. It is not feasible for us to attend the UC in the first place, either because of the cost or the lack of desire to live the rest of our lives ridden with overwhelming debt.

We have not come to the university to make demands of the Board of Regents or the university administration. Nor do we wish to participate in some form of ‘democracy’ where the ‘student movement’ decides (or is told to do so by student leaders) how to negotiate with the power structure. For us, Sacramento and its budget referendums are as useless as the empty words spewing from the mouths of the union leaders and activists on campus. Nothing about the “democratizing” the school system or forcing it to become better managed or more “transparent” even mildly entices us. No, we didn’t join the student movement to obtain any of these paltry demands.

Last week, we began to attack the university not just because we are proletarians scorned by and excluded from the UC, or that we hope by resisting we may reduce costs and thus join the UC system and elevate our class positions. Our choice to collaborate in the assault on California’s school was driven solely by our own selfish class interest: to take its shit and use it for ourselves. Occupied buildings become spaces from which to further strike the exploiters of this world and, at the same time, disrupt and suppress the ability of the college to function.

Like any other institution structured by class society, the university is one of our targets. We made our presence in the student movement to break down the divisions between students angry over fee hikes, workers striking against lay offs, and faculty at odds with the administration over cuts and furloughs. These are not separate struggles over different issues, but sections of a class that have a clear and unified enemy. We have come for the same reason we intervene in any tension: to push for the total destruction of capitalist exploitation and for the re-composition of the proletariat towards communism.

And so, ask yourself how could one even go about reforming something as debilitating as a university? Demanding its democratization would only mean a reconfiguration of horror. To ask for transparency is nothing but a request for a front row seat to watch an atrocity exhibition. Even the seemingly reasonable appeal for reducing the cost of tuition will leave the noose of debt wrapped snuggly around our necks. There's nothing the university can give anyone, but last week’s accomplishments show that there is everything for us to take. If anything, our actions, as a means in themselves, were more important than any of the crumbs the UC system or the Regents Board might wipe off the table for us. During these days, we felt the need for obliterating renewal give rise to intense enthusiasm. We felt the spirit irradiate throughout campus and press everyone “to push the university struggle [not only] to its limits,” but to its ultimate conclusion: against the university itself.

…And So It Must Spread

“It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. The spirit has broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form."

-The Phenomenology of Spirit

The stench that the university emits has become unbearable and students everywhere are reacting against the institution that has perpetually rotted away their being via an arsenal of disciplinary techniques. At campuses across California the corrosion of life is brought to a quick halt when the college’s daily mechanism of power is given the Luddite treatment, and suddenly, studying becomes quite meaningless. Shamefully, the administration, terrified they are losing control and supervision of the pupils they spent so much time training, turn riot police on anyone ripping off their chains. At UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, SF State and CSU Fresno the unlimited occupations display the universal need for free and liberated space. The recalcitrance is spreading. In Austria, students left their occupied territory at the Fine Arts Academy to march on the US embassy in solidarity with the police repression on California campuses. On the same continent, the occupations in Greece have now extended outside the universities into the high schools and even the middle schools. Everywhere, the youth are recognizing the school as a vapid dungeon stunting their growth and, at the same time, they are refusing submission to the crushing of their bodily order. All over, a new generation is seeking the passion for the real, for what is immediately practicable, here and now.

The assaults on police officers, the confrontations with the administration, the refusal of lectures, and the squatted buildings point the objective struggle in the direction of the complete and total negation of the university. That is, brick by brick smashing the academic monolith into pieces and abolishing the college as a specialized institution restricted to a specific segment of society. This will require the instillation of technique known as learning to be wholly subverted and recomposing education as a generalized and practical activity of the entire population; an undermining through which the student shall auto-destruct.

Going halfway always spells defeat, and so, the spreading of movement is our only assurance against this stagnation. Complete self-abolition necessitates that the logic of revolt spill out of the universities and flood the entire social terrain. But the weapons of normalcy are concealed everywhere and especially within the most mundane characteristics of daily life. The allegiance to the bourgeois family structure and interruptions by holiday vacations and school breaks threaten to douse the fuse before its ignition and hinder our momentum.

Let us not lose sight of the tasks before us.

We must forcefully eject the police from the campus. Find their holes and burn them out. Block their movements near occupied spaces. Build barricades; protect that which has been re-taken. We need only to look to Chile or Greece to see the immense advantage movements possess once they seize territory and declare it free of police. Blockade the entrances and gates of the campus as the students have already begun to experiment with at UC Santa Cruz.

We must also denounce and destroy the student Left (the recuperative, the parasitic, the “representative”) that seeks to de-escalate the movement and integrate it back into politics. Our venom is not only directed at those who assisted the police in blocking angry students from entering California Hall at UC Berkeley or obstructed the crowds during the Regents meeting at UCLA but also of those who sought to negotiate with the police “on behalf” of the occupiers of Wheeler Hall. It is telling that the police will negotiate with them, because to the cops, they are reasonable. We are not, however, because we seek the immediate annihilation of both the pigs and the activists.

Renew the strikes and extend their reach. Occupy the student stores and loot them. Sell off the computers in the lab to raise funds. Set up social spaces for students and non-students alike to come in and use freely. Appropriate the copy machines and make news of the revolt. Takeover the cafeterias and bars and begin preparing the communal feast. Burn the debt records and the construction plans. Chisel away the statues and vandalize the pictures of the old order. In short, create not an ‘alternative’ that can easily make its fit within the existent, but rather a commune in which power is built to destroy capitalist society. When faced with a university building, the choices are limited; either convert it to ashes or begin the immediate materialization of the international soviet.

To all waged and unwaged workers – students or not, unemployed, precarious or criminal we call on you to join this struggle. The universities can become not only our playgrounds but also the foundations from which we can build a partisan war machine fit for the battle to retrieve our stolen lives.

And to the majority of the students, from those paying their way to those swimming in debt, all used as collateral by the Regents, who bravely occupied buildings across California and fought the police against the barricades – we say this clearly: we are with you! We stood by you as you faced down the police in the storming rain and defended the occupiers. Your actions are an inspiration to us all and we hope to meet you again on the front lines. In you we see the spirit of insurgent students everywhere.

As our Austrian friends recently told us, “Take out your hairspray and your lighter”! Tear down the education factory. Attack the Left and everything that it “represents.” Attack the new bosses before they become the old ones. Life serves the risk taker – and we’re rolling the fucking dice!

FOR ANARCHY AND COMMUNISM!

-Three Non-Matriculating Proletarians

UCSC Students, workers stage successful library occupation, call for more occupations

2009-11-15T14:22:00.000-08:00

UCSC Students, workers stage successful library occupation
By spaceattack

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from the New UC

On Friday, November 13th students at UC Santa Cruz conducted a study-in at the Science and Engineering Library. Due to budget cuts, both of the large UCSC libraries have severely reduced hours which detrimentally affects employee pay and students with study needs late at night.

Students attempted to enter the building during normal library hours, but were denied access without handing over student ID to administrators at the door to keep until their later departure. People are not typically required to provide identification when entering the library. Students negotiated with the university administrators to provide any form of identification at the door, but students would be allowed to keep it. Furthermore, students agreed to create a list with names of students to use in case of emergency that would later be given to students to be destroyed. However, after hours of negotiation, the administrator in communication with representatives of the students failed to keep their end of the promise (specifically stating they need a copy of the list after the event).

On Fridays, the new library hours end at 5pm. Students entered the building around 4:40pm into the lobby area of the library (a small area prior to entry, thus keeping the doors open). At approximately 5:20pm, students upset by the broken promise entered the library peacefully without the expressed approval of the administration.

At 7pm, a general assembly was held to discuss the administration locking the library doors. After a discussion among 250 people, the administration caved-in and opened the doors, 40-50 students flooded in to chants of solidarity.

Later in the evening the administration finally agreed to allow students to remain in the library under certain conditions, including a locked door between the hours of 12am-8am. The administration has agreed to the library remaining open until 5:30pm Saturday. In order to partially compensate library staff working overtime, students passed a hat around for donations.

Throughout the evening, students have continued to follow the community rules established in the beginning by the collective of students that organized the direct action. No police have been present by request of students.

A general assembly has been announced to take place at 1pm on Saturday at the library.

Read the latest call out:

communiqué no. 1 – A call to those who can hear it.

DAYS OF ACTION AGAINST THE TUITION HIKES

University students and workers in California must organize immediately to occupy, blockade
and strike on all campuses November 17-19.

We call for a wave of occupations and blockades to bring the university to a halt. The proposed fee hikes of 32 percent, to be ratified November 17-19, are only the latest indication that the California university system is bankrupt. We cannot allow it to continue through the end of the term.

Too many workers have already lost their jobs. The jobs for which our educations supposedly prepare us have already disappeared. We have given our ‘representatives’ enough time to work out peaceful solutions to these problems, and we see no indication that they have made any progress.
We are not interested in any more tedious conferences or assemblies, which draw out hundreds of people, but only for an endless conversation. We are not interested in more ’symbolic protests’, whether walkouts or strikes, insofar as they are pre-announced to end after one or a few days. More meetings and protests will only waste our energies, while the administration continues to implement its plans without hindrance.

A movement of occupations has been building. Multiple occupations broke out in recent weeks at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, at CSU Fullerton and CSU Fresno. These occupations are part of a worldwide movement, stretching from California to New York, from England to Greece and Austria.

These occupations have proven that we can take action immediately. People are convinced to act not through endless talk, but when they see that others are willing to take risks. It is only when those who have little to lose actually do something that those who have a lot to lose can join them.

These occupations have proven that we can take action without fear. The administration has been so brazen, raising tuition and cutting jobs, only because we let them. In fact, they are the ones who have to fear confrontation, not us. They have done and can do nothing to stop us, but only if we act.
These days of action are a chance for us to expand our movement, for new people to get involved, for new spaces to be taken and transformed.

Another Reason for Appropriating Books from the Bookstore

2009-11-01T17:45:00.000-08:00

Another Reason for Appropriating Books from the Bookstore

By Friends of le Front Sophie Podolski de libération artistique

Marcela Soto: ¿No le importa perder los derechos de autor?
Roberto Bolaño: En lo más mínimo. Además, no pierdo los derechos de autor; el que pierde es el librero.

A Golden Gate [X]Press article that read like a press release or a story for the Bookstore’s company newsletter recently incited disgust among several literary lovers and their anti-capitalist friends with benefits.

This is a response to that apologist article…

http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/news/013510.html

Thieves sell Books, keep Funds
By Nathan Codd

A new school year brings old challenges for the for-profit SFSU Bookstore, including student buying and organized book-buying rings. The Bookstore keeps proceeds from University students and according to management, public libraries take away from this effort.

Since the semester began, four arrests have been made by the Department of Public Safety for the usage of school and public libraries and not buying from the Bookstore. In the first two weeks of class, an arrest was made every three days.

Associate General Manager Brian Zimmerman said that though the numbers are comparable with previous semesters, shoppers who lose a living buying books have been around for years.

“It’s a huge cash business,” Zimmerman said. “Since books can be bought and sold, it’s an industry.”

He explained that some shoppers select books with the highest resale value and will buy an entire stack in one quick motion, intending to read them and share them with friends and classmates. Although the number of bookstores compared to desperate students is relatively small, Zimmerman said the profit-making is much more severe.

“The amount they are buying is much bigger, and they are forced by the textbook-industry complex to buy high-value books,” Zimmerman said.

Zimmerman colludes with the City College of San Francisco’s bookstore general manager to share information and attract repeat shoppers, and bookstore employees are trained to look for price tag stickers, surplus of apparent usage and anyone attempting to buy used copies.

“That’s the signal to us that they might be looking for discounts that are hurtful, but not really, for business,” Zimmerman said. “Used book prices and discounts are illusory; they are really only marketing techniques.”

Zimmerman said that so far this semester all of the arrests have been for borrowing textbooks for personal use. He said students commit most book-borrowing during the beginning of the semester and usually poorer students show up more at libraries throughout the remainder.

For an organization that keeps its proceeds from the students, book-borrowing and non-book-buying have both made it difficult to steal the way it might otherwise steal from students, bookstore officials said.

According to Husam Erciyes, Director of Marketing and Strategic Projects for the Bookstore, $325,000 was given to the school administration’s general fund last year. Combined with Bookstore promotion events, various deceiving ‘discounts’ and the book steal-back-from-students program, the Bookstore stole millions of dollars from students and the university in the 2008-09 fiscal year.

Erciyes said surpluses at the end of the year go into the pockets of school administrators through the SF State general fund, but they’re eroded by student and non-student library usage.

“It affects how much we can take from the university every semester,” Zimmerman said. With a door alarm system, full-time security staff and undercover shoppers, Zimmerman hopes to coerce book-buying through an intimidating approach.

“Some of those students don’t realize that when they don’t buy from us, they steal from students,” Erciyes said.

“I feel that students should think before they borrow from a library about whom it is who is not going to profit,” said nineteen-year-old Kimrey Nicholson, unknowing class traitor. “I feel giddy.”

With hundreds of visitors flowing in and out of its twin entries every day, Zimmerman said his philosophy is to coerce buying with customer service.

“The first thing a potential library user wants to hear is ‘are you finding everything reasonably priced?’” he said.

For more information on the textbook-industrial complex and its consequences, read “What’s Up with Our Bookstore?” by Michael, from La Ventana Issue 1, Vol. 2 (LV#2).

Through the Eyes of the SF State Strikers

2009-09-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

Peru: Photo Essay and A News Report

2009-06-09T10:55:00.000-07:00

Upsidedownworld.Org has many photos, videos, and links posted up on its site.

Click here for more photos. (WARNING: Some photos are graphic)

Dirigente del CODEP Fue Asesinado/CODEP Leader Assassinated -- PLUS: Lima's Manifestation of Solidarity with Indegenous of Peru, AND Report.

2009-06-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

(Repost)

Desde hace varias semanas, desde los más altos mandos del gobierno de Ulises Ruiz Ortiz se orquestó y desató una intensa campaña estatal de difamación, hostigamiento y persecución en contra del Comité de Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo (CODEP-APPO), campaña que trae como una de sus primeras consecuencias el asesinato de Sergio Martínez Vásquez, integrante del Consejo Estatal del CODEP. Cabe mencionar que este artero asesinato ha estado precedido de vigilancia y seguimiento policiaco en nuestras oficinas, y de amenazas veladas y abiertas a distintos miembros del CODEP.

El compañero Sergio trabajaba como taxista y según los primeros informes, el día de ayer, 7 de junio, realizó un viaje a la agencia de Pino Suarez, distrito de Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca siendo asesinado en la noche de ayer con armas de alto poder, encontrándose el cuerpo el día de hoy, 8 de junio, alrededor de las 7 de la mañana. Por el modo de operar y alguna información recabada, todo apunta a confirmar que los actores materiales de este asesinato fueron los grupos paramilitares que Ulises Ruiz mantiene operando en la región.

Es claro que la campaña orquestada por el gobierno y operada por distintos personajes y grupos en el estado en contra del CODEP, pretende destruir a una de las organizaciones más antiguas y de mayor consecuencia en el estado (este año cumpliremos 28 años), integrada por comunidades indígenas mixtecas, triquis, zapotecas y mazatecas, mas ahora que hemos estado denunciando a los grupos que de manera cínica o encubierta se han puesto al servicio de los intereses del gobierno estatal y federal, dividiendo a los movimientos, mediatizándolos o de plano entregándolos a cambio de beneficios y canonjías personales o de grupo. Situación que se agudiza a raíz del trabajo contra las minas que el CODEP viene realizando con las comunidades del Valle de Ocotlán, Oaxaca y que ha estado extendiéndose a otras regiones del estado y vinculándose a otras luchas ecologistas a nivel nacional.

Continuar...

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For several weeks, from the highest levels of the government of [Oaxaca governor] Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, a state-wide campaign of defamation, harassment and persecution has been orchestrated and unleashed against the Committee in Defense of the Rights of the People (CODEP-APPO), a campaign that brings as one of its first consequences the assassination of Sergio Martínez Vásquez, member of the State Council of CODEP. It is important to mention that this calculated murder was preceded by the police surveillance and tracking of our offices and of veiled and open threats against different members of CODEP.

Comrade Sergio worked as a taxi driver and according to initial reports, yesterday, June 7, he made a trip to the Pino Suarez agency in the district of Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, was assassinated last night with high-powered weapons, and his body was found today, June 8, around seven in the morning. The way in which it was done and due to some information gathered everything points to the fact that the material actors of this assassination were paramilitary groups that Ulises Ruiz has operating in the region.

It is clear that the campaign against CODEP, orchestrated by the government and carried out by different individuals and groups in the state, is trying to destroy one of the oldest and most important organizations in the state (this year we turn 28), made up of indigenous Mixtec, Triqui, Zapotec and Mazatec communities, now that we have been denouncing groups that in brazen or hidden ways have acted on behalf of state or federal government interests, dividing movements, taking control of them, or completely surrendering them in exchange for group or personal benefits and cushy positions. It is a situation that has intensified as a result of CODEP’s work against the mines in the Ocotlán Valley communities, work which has extended to other regions in the state and has linked up with other ecological struggles on a national level.

Continue...

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Peru: Battle Lines Drawn Over the Amazon

The rhetoric was sharp enough to cut down Amazonian hardwoods. Yesterday, Sunday June 7th, after a number of ministers had been paraded out Saturday and the day before, Peru's el Señor Presidente, Alan Garcia decided to make it personal. After a joint police-military operation aimed at stopping an Indigenous protest had gone awry, leaving many dead on both sides, Garcia declared the Indigenous elements to be standing in the way of progress, in the path of national development, wrenches in the gears of modernity, and part of an international conspiracy to keep Peru down. In a troubling statement on the resemblance of the Indigenous protestors to the infamous Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) armed insurrection, Garcia seemed to imply the Natives were a band of terrorists as he stood in front of hundreds of military officers in a nationally televised speech. He continued to decry the Indian barbarity and savagery, and called for all police and military to stand against savagery.

Clearly, the battle lines were being drawn. Garcia demonstrated he is not about to allow anything to get in the way of "our development" of the oil and mineral resources the Amazon has to offer. Especially by a bunch of confused savages (his words) who are pawns to the international market and to Indian elites and therefore have no real reason to be resisting. At this point, it was obvious he thought nothing of the Indigenous cause, and what they actually stood for. There is too much money to be extracted from oil, from minerals, from logging, and from possible agriculture in the Amazon region, the 2nd largest stretch outside of Brazil. All on land with less than 200,000 Indigenous people. All now supposed to be open for business, as a result of a series of laws passed under the auspices of Free Trade Agreements signed with both Canada and the United States.

Continue reading...

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Manifestation of Solidarity with the Indigenous of Peru: Lima, Peru. June 5, 2009.

Police Attack Protesters Again in Bagua

2009-06-06T17:28:00.000-07:00

Protesters kill nine more police officers in Peru after the protesters were once again attacked today by the State. Three children have also been killed in the State attacks, according to indigenous leaders.

Read more.

UPDATE: Additional information and analysis, here.

UPDATE On Peru Story. June 5, 2009

2009-06-05T19:43:00.000-07:00

Twenty five protesters and 11 police officers have been killed in Peru's northern province of Utcubamba after police helicopters opened fire on 5,000 Peruvians blockading la Curva del Diablo in protest of the exploitation and destruction of indigenous lands in the Amazon.

The police fired tear gas and rubber bullets from helicopters after which the protesters set fire to government buildings.

Some of the police officers were killed with spears.

So far, 109 people have been reported to have been injured during the State-initiated provocation.

Read more, here.

At Least 30 Killed in Land Protest, Peru. June 05, 2009

2009-06-05T12:48:00.000-07:00

Mainstream news media are reporting that a blockade set up by some 5,000 indigenous Peruvians was brutally attacked by the State at dawn today in Peru's northern province of Utcubamba, resulting in the deaths of at least 22 protesters and eight police officers. The blockade was set up to keep the State from allowing foreign companies to exploit and destroy the land and homes of the indigenous in the region.

This comes after a May 6 declaration of a 60-day state of emergency in areas of the Amazon in which constitutional guarantees were, and currently still are, suspended in an attempt to suppress dissent.

Read more.

Read more in Spanish: Here and Here.

Feminicidios Sin Control

2009-06-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

DE: CONTRALINEA, 17 MAYO 2009.

Dieciséis años después de que en Ciudad Juárez se descubrieran los primeros cuerpos de mujeres asesinadas por cuestión de género, la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos juzga al Estado mexicano por su responsabilidad en éstos. Los motivos: fallidas políticas públicas y corrupción en todos los niveles de gobierno, argumentan peritajes ofrecidos como prueba ante el tribunal internacional

En unas semanas la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH) podría declarar al Estado mexicano como responsable de tres homicidios de mujeres, que involucran actos de corrupción y negligencia de funcionarios federales y locales, incluidos los expresidentes Carlos Salinas, Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox y Felipe Calderón; secretarios de gobernación, procuradores y autoridades de Chihuahua.

A dieciséis años de que se descubrieran los primeros cuerpos de víctimas del fenómeno conocido como feminicidio –término acuñado por la antropóloga Marcela Lagarde para definir “el genocidio contra mujeres”–, los familiares de tres de las víctimas, Claudia Ivette González Banda, Esmeralda Herrera Monreal y Laura Berenice Ramos Monárrez, tienen hoy en el banquillo de los acusados al Estado mexicano para que responda por sus muertes.

Si el tribunal internacional falla que se trata de un crimen de Estado (como hasta ahora apuntan los indicios), Felipe Calderón deberá pedir perdón público a las víctimas, indica la demanda del litigio identificado como “González y otras contra el Estado mexicano” o “Caso campo algodonero”, en alusión al lugar donde se hallaron los cuerpos.

Las víctimas

Encajadas entre las matas de algodón, las yerbas secas que a su paso dejaba el invierno sobre el campo apenas si cubrían el bulto. No fue la figura sino el olor putrefacto vaporizado con la arcilla del suelo el que lo obligó a fijar la atención en el cuerpo “sembrado” entre copos de algodón, hacía apenas unas horas, con la intención evidente de que lo cosecharan los sentidos de la primera persona que por allí pasara. Tocó mala suerte a un albañil que, en el afán de ahorrar tiempo, atajó el camino al trabajo.

Continuar...

Important News on the State of Mexican Autonomous Radio

2009-06-03T21:50:00.001-07:00

Reposted, Original Publication Date: the Ides of March, 2009
Full article here.

La Cofetel da cuenta de más de 100 estaciones de radio “aseguradas” –tres en 2009– y advierte más “visitas de cortesía” a emisoras sin permiso como parte de la estrategia calderonista de “imponer el orden”. Radio Ñomndaa decidió pugnar “por la autonomía y el reconocimiento pleno de los derechos indígenas”, por lo que rechazó el permiso legal que el órgano regulador le ofreció.

Con los tres desmantelamientos ocurridos a finales de enero y de febrero en Michoacán y en Baja California, suman 107 las radiodifusoras aseguradas en lo que va del periodo de gobierno de Felipe Calderón. Los operativos son ejecutados por la Procuraduría General de la República (PGR) y la Comisión Federal de Telecomunicaciones (Cofetel), pero las denuncias las interpone la Secretaría de Gobernación (Segob). Francisco García Burgos, director de Radio y Televisión de la Cofetel, argumenta que es la voluntad del gobierno federal que en todos los aspectos de la vida del país se exija orden. Por ello se ha decidido incrementar los operativos contra las estaciones ilegales. “El orden se obtiene aplicando la ley”, subraya. Así, a partir de junio de 2008, el órgano desconcentrado de la Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes comenzó a realizar aseguramientos contra las estaciones que no cuentan con el permiso o concesión para operar radiodifusoras. Los más recientes ocurrieron a inicios de 2009. El pasado 26 de febrero, las autoridades federales ocuparon y ce rraron las instalaciones de Radio Kompa, 106.1 de FM, ubicadas en Playa Rosarito, Tijuana, Baja California. Además, arrestaron a dos comunicadores. Otros dos aseguramientos ocurrieron a fines de enero, en contra de Radio Eiámpiti, en San Juan Nuevo, y de Radio Uékakua, en Ocumicho, ambas pertenecientes a comunidades indígenas de Michoacán. Dentro del programa de acciones en materia de radio y televisión (de 2006 a 2008), el órgano regulador tenía registradas, al 31 de diciembre de 2007, 224 estaciones de radio y televisión que operan sin concesión o permiso en el país. Y, a lo largo de la historia del registro, el funcionario calcula que ya han sumado 400.

En el Informe de actividades 2007- 2008, la Cofetel revela que 90 estaciones fueron aseguradas, 68 dejaron de operar y 66 continúan pendientes. De junio a noviembre de 2008 ocurrieron otros 14 aseguramientos, indica la Cofetel en la respuesta a la solicitud de información 0912100076308. “En este espíritu es como el gobierno federal, la administración del gobierno Felipe Calderón, a través del presidente de la comisión, Héctor Osuna Jaime, nos ha dado instrucciones para participar con otras dependencias federales en el proceso, e insistir en que las estaciones ilegales no tienen cabida”, advierte García Burgos.

De la documentación se desprende que las 90 estaciones aseguradas, hasta el 31 de diciembre de 2007, radicaban en las siguientes entidades: Estado de México, 14; Sonora, 13; Michoacán, 12; Oaxaca, ocho; Puebla, siete; Chiapas, seis; Coahuila, cinco; Hidalgo, Jalisco, Sinaloa y Zacatecas, tres cada una; Campeche, Guanajuato y Yucatán, dos; Baja California, Baja California Sur, Chihuahua, Distrito Federal, Guerrero, San Luis Potosí y Tabasco, una. Lo anterior deriva de las 81 visitas de inspección realizadas en el mismo periodo en todo el país. De éstas, “seis por denuncias presentadas por interferencias provocadas por la operación previamente establecidas”.

Attack on "Tierra y Libertad," Monterrey's Community Radio Station

2009-06-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

Reposted from Narco News:

Mexican Government Used the Drug War to Raid a Rebelious Poor Neighborhood's Radio; Radio Magnates Rejoice

This past March 12, Monterrey community leader Dr. Hector Camero arrived at the Mexican Federal Attorney General's Office (PGR) to provide witness testimony regarding a June 2008 raid on his organization's radio station, Radio Tierra y Libertad. When he arrived, government officials informed him that he was no longer considered a witness in the case; he was the main suspect, accused of "use of national assets without prior permission."

Within the next few days, the government is expected to issue a federal warrant for Camero's arrest because the Federal Prosecutor's Office has announced that it has enough evidence to charge him. Camero faces 2-12 years in prison and up to MX$500,000 (USD$37,920) in fines.

Camero's legal problems stem from the June 6, 2008, nighttime raid on Radio Tierra y Libertad, located in the lower-income neighborhood of Tierra y Libertad on the outskirts of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. Approximately 120 heavily armed Federal Preventive Police participated in the raid. The police ran up three streets in the neighborhood, reportedly yelling, "No one go outside! This is an anti-drug operation!"

The police arrived unimpeded at the station and broke down the building's steel door, interrupting a live transmission. When Dr. Camero heard the police attempting to break down the door, he managed to issue a call for help over the radio before police cut the transmission and stole the radio's equipment.

In addition to seizing the equipment, the police attempted to arrest Dr. Camero. However, approximately 300 neighbors heard Camero's call for help broadcasted over the radio and ran to his aid. They managed to prevent the detention of Camero and two other people who were with him in the radio station during the raid, but they couldn't save the radio equipment.

The neighbors' failure to mobilize enough people in time to prevent the raid and loss of equipment can't be written off as indifference. Camero told Narco News that since the radio doesn't have a history of police raids, and since Monterrey is a known haven for drug traffickers, many people who would have otherwise come out to stop the police did not do so because of the heavily-armed cops' claims that they were carrying out a raid on drug traffickers. These bogus claims "confused and delayed the support of the community," says Camero.

The Tierra y Libertad neighborood ("Land and Liberty" in English) is certainly no stranger to political struggle, and most likely would have mobilized to stop the invasion had the police not lied to them. Tierra y Libertad residents have fought hard for land rights in Monterrey for over thirty years, ever since the neighborhood's founders expropriated the land it sits on in the 1970s. Thanks to decades of organizing and struggle, the neighborhood now was all of the basic municipal services such as running water and electricity, and residents are the legal owners of the land.

Radio Tierra y Libertad has served the Tierra y Libertad neighborhood without a government license since 2001 and serves approximately 10,000 families. In November 2002, Radio Tierra y Libertad filed a formal request for a permit from the federal Ministry of Communication and Transportation's Monterrey office. The government never responded to the request--neither positively nor negatively--meaning that since late 2002 Radio Tierra y Libertad has operated in a state of legal limbo.

Since Radio Tierra y Libertad filed its request for a permit, other radios have done the same. In 2003, the Secretary of Communication and Transportation under former President Vicente Fox reportedly invited pirate radio stations to file for permits. Three community radio stations filed the necessary paperwork: La Voladora in Mexico State, Radio Calenda in Oaxaca, and Radio Bemba in Sonora. The Ministry of Communication and Transportation rejected their requests, justifying the rejection with the circular argument that the radios were operating without a permit.

Radio Tierra y Libertad's request was never rejected, and for nearly eight years it has broadcasted educational programs, children's programs, "poor people's news" programs, programs about labor rights, and cultural programs featuring traditional music. Then the Federal Preventive Police raided the station out of the blue. But why now?

Dr. Camero can't say for sure why the police chose the night of June 6 to raid their station, particularly because his station's request for a permit went six years without any response at all from the government.

What is known is that US lawmakers were scheduled to arrive in Monterrey on June 7--less than 24 hours before the raid on Radio Tierra y Libertad--for a two-day Interparliamentary meeting with Mexican lawmakers that included the Merida Initiative at the top of its agenda. It was at that meeting that US and Mexican legislators ironed out their differences over the Merida Initiative's controversial human rights conditions.

El Universal reported that heavily-armed agents from the Federal Preventive Police (PFP)--the same force that raided the radio in overwhelming numbers--were called in to guard the hotel where the lawmakers would meet. While it is not confirmed, it is possible that the federal government chose June 6 to raid the station in order to take advantage of the increased number of PFP officers who were in town for the Interparliamentary meeting. The press anticipation of the meeting may have also provided the cover of distraction.

This wouldn't be the first time that the Mexican government has taken advantage of increased militarization related to the drug war in order to carry out raids on local organizers. Victor M. Quintana, writing for the Americas Program, notes that the federal government used Operation Chihuahua to crack down on local organizers in that state. Under the auspices of Operation Chihuahua, the federal government sent 2000 soldiers and 400 federal police to Chihuahua. While the federal troops were officially there to combat organized crime in that state, during the first week of the operation they arrested six local organizers: five men from an organization that fights against the North American Free Trade Agreement, and one a woman who assists the families of femicide victims. Three of the five men were organization leaders.

Federal police and the military have been deployed to Nuevo Leon (where Monterrey is located) and the neighboring state of Tamaulipas since 2007 as part of those states' own joint anti-drug trafficking operation.

The timing of the PGR's notification to Dr. Camero that it was investigating him as a suspect due to his involvement in Radio Tierra y Libertad is also interesting, to say the least. The notification came about a month after he gave an interview to Radio Bemba regarding Monterrey's infamous (and highly suspicious) "narco protests." That interview was picked up by other media outlets--including Narco News--and made international headlines.

War on Community Radios

The raid on Radio Tierra y Libertad comes at a time of increased repression against community radios in Mexico. In addition to multiple raids and closures (107 closures during the Calderon administration as of March), community radios have lost a number of collaborators to suspicious murders.

In April 2008, just two months before the raid on Radio Tierra y Libertad, unknown gunmen assassinated indigenous Triqui radio broadcasters Teresa Bautista Merino and Felicitas Martinez Sanchez in the state of Oaxaca. The two young women worked at Radio Copala, "The Voice that Breaks the Silence." They were murdered on their way to a radio workshop in Oaxaca City, and they were the only ones killed out of the six people traveling in their car. The Mexican government, in addition to resorting to the racist argument that the two women were killed as a result of cultural conflicts (often used to write off the murders off indigenous people) instead of as a result of their media work, also refused to investigate their case. The government didn't even interview the surviving riders during its "investigation." (More detailed information on the Radio Copala assassinations can be found in John Gibler's book Mexico Unconquered.)

On June 10, 2008--just days after the Radio Tierra y Libertad raid, 40 federal agents attempted to raid Guerrero's Radio Ñomndaa, but the community there stopped them. Then, a month later, professor Miguel Ángel Gutiérrez Ávila of the Autonomous University of Guerrero was beaten to death on his way back from visiting the Suljaa' y Cozoyoapan community. He was there filming a documentary and investigating the government aggression against Radio Ñomndaa.

While Dr. Camero and Radio Tierra y Libertad are fortunate to not have suffered deadly attacks, they still feel the increased government pressure on unlicensed community radios. While in the past the government has charged non-profit pirate radio operators under the Federal Radio and Television Law, it has decided to charge Camero under the Federal Law of National Assets. The Federal Radio and Television Law contains provisions that allow for administrative penalties against operators of unlicensed radios, such as a fine and the seizure of equipment. The Federal Law of National Assets, on the other hand, is a criminal law that mandates 2-12 years in prison and up to $500,000 pesos in fines for those that use government assets without proper permission.

The government's use of the Federal Law of National Assets against Rario Tierra y Libertad is an escalation of the Calderon administration's offensive against non-profit community radios. Camero told Narco News, "This law [the Federal Law of National Assets] is applied to stations that use the electromagnetic space for profit, which has never been the case at Radio Tierra y Libertad. However, the Ministry of the Interior is trying to apply this law in our case, undoubtedly to teach a lesson to the over 200 other radios that have, particularly in the southern and central parts of the country, been looking for their own space."

The "national asset" in question in the Federal Law of National Assets is the radio spectrum. The radio spectrum is a range of frequencies with defined channels for different transmission technologies--that is, that is, something that is not produced by the government or anyone else and something that cannot be touched, a lot like air. Many governments, like Mexico, have decided that they not only have the right to regulate the radio spectrum, but that they own it. As such, the government grants licenses to radios to occupy their own little part of the radio spectrum.

These licenses don't come easy; the government reportedly charges radios over $100,000 dollars to file for a permit. IPS reports that of all of the community radio permit requests filed over the past thirty years, the government has granted only one license. Due to government restriction, 13 companies control 90% of Mexico's airwaves.

Those 13 companies are doing everything in their power to see to it that Mexico's airwaves continue under their control. The National Chamber of the Radio and Television Industry (CIRT in its Spanish initials) successfully lobbies the Mexican government for laws to protect and expand their monopoly over the means of communication. They pull out all the stops to push independent radios off the air. CIRT has pressured the government to close community radio stations, and it has even gone so far as to accuse the World Association of Community Radios (AMARC) of "fomenting clandestine, pirate and insurgent radio."

On June 12--just days after the police attack on Radio Tierra y Libertad--the CIRT unveiled a statue of its organization's logo in a public park in Monterrey "as a thank-you for the hospitality the city has shown."

The Dark Side of the Bubble

2009-05-04T22:46:00.000-07:00

When the school decided to renovate the library we lost a significant part of our campus here at San Francisco State University. The project which was driven by an initiative on the California ballot supposedly provided the funding for this project despite the fact that we are in the midst of an economic crisis--the worst since the great depression. The crisis doesn't lie in the fact that they have taken away a study space with access to books and knowledge but the fact that they have relocated students and members of the community into an inadequate study space right by the campus police station in the far reaching corners of campus.

Is it a coincidence that the pigs now monitor students seeking a safe-haven to complete their work after campus shuts down? Not only are we near the enemies that plague and contaminate our school with useless citations but we are now asked to show our identification when entering the new Library Annex I, the bubble, after 10 PM. While the original library wasn't perfect it wasn't in such bad shape that it needed to be shut down for renovations which will end in some vague future a couple years down the line. Additionally, students that utilized the space were never asked to show their identification. The 24-hour study space was one of the few spaces to get work done and escape the college routine in an attempt to ground oneself in work.

I spent many nights there last year taking care of loads of work that needed to be done and was joined by homeless people seeking refuge from the blistery cold nights here in San Francisco. Whether they were students or not there was a definite presence of recurring visitors that used the original 24-hour study space to read and sleep. When I would wake up after a few miserable hours of sitting in a chair I would print whatever needed to be printed and start tackling my day. When the library was closed for construction the bubble was meant to provide replacement services for students seeking to study, however, new policies set in place now require student ID cards to access the facilities. This is a blatant attempt to crack down on non-campus users of the space.

It is estimated that there are 300 homeless students at San Francisco State University and quite possibly more non-student transient members that use our facilities. Education should be free, access to our library services and functions should be opened up to the community, and homeless people whether students or not still deserve a space to seek refuge when the going gets tough.

My opinion of the bubble: If it aint broke don't fix it.

Bring back the library or this bubble will burst.

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And...

More about the Somali "Pirates."

Happy May Day!

2009-05-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

Female garment worker wrecks her workplace in protest at non-payment of wages - Chittagong, Bangladesh. 24 April 09 (Yeah, this was last week)

Happy Belated Birthday, MST!

2009-04-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

We'd like to thank the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) for continuing to inspire the world, for giving us all a taste of what is possible.

Here's an article written after the MST celebrated its 25th year of ongoing struggle, resistance and autonomy. It is taken from Upside Down World.

Written by Michael Fox
Upside Down World
Wednesday, 28 January 2009

In the dying days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, in late January 1984, a group of nearly a hundred "landless" farmers from across Brazil met in Cascavel, Paraná to debate the founding of a movement for agrarian reform which would unite landless campesinos and farm workers from around the country. It was an unlikely challenge in the world’s fifth largest nation, where even today less than two percent of landowners control nearly half of the total territory.

Two and a half decades later, the tiny Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) has grown in to a formidable force. According to MST co-founder João Pedro Stédile, the movement has forced the expropriation of 35 million acres of land -- larger than the country of Uruguay. MST numbers show that in the last 25 years, 370,000 families have acquired their own land, and 100,000 families are currently in encampments waiting for land. The movement has built hundreds of public schools and taught tens of thousands of its members to read and write. MST members have formed 400 association and cooperatives to collectively produce their food.

"But those are just statistics," said Stédile in his closing comments of the movement’s 25th birthday celebration on Saturday. "The most important thing that we have built over these last 25 years is that when someone joins the MST, he or she stops walking with their head down, and acquires dignity, and thinks with their brains, organizing their companions in struggle."

The birthday celebration marked the close of last week’s 13th national meeting of the MST, in which 1500 MST members from across the country descended on the Southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul to debate the direction of the movement.

"It’s been great," says João Paulo Cardoso, one of a delegation of 47 MST members that made the four-day bus trip from the Northern Brazilian state of Ceará.

"It’s really good to make new friends, and see old ones. Also the debates and discussions are important to acquire new understanding."

The meeting was held at the MST Anonni settlement in the North of the Southern State -- one of the first settlements occupied and won by the landless farmers two decades ago. 418 families now live in 7 communities on tens of thousands of acres of land. Except for the red MST flags, which fly in front of most homes, it’s hard to tell the difference between this MST settlement and any closely nit rural community.

Although while fighting for the land, these families lived for years in makeshift huts of black plastic tarp, their homes are now reminiscent of that of any humble small family farm in the Mid-Western United States. Most have an automobile, and farming equipment – which they share – like a tractor or a combine. Each family has about fifty acres of land to farm. A dozen families on the settlement have for many years been farming and selling their products collectively through their local cooperative.

"See those folks over there?" says Miguel Carter pointing out a group of people fifty feet away, "They’re founders of the movement. When I met them they didn’t have anything, and now their daughter is studying medicine in Cuba." Carter is an American University professor who has studied the MST for more than two decades, and who attended the 25-year anniversary celebration over the weekend.

"The MST has become the most sophisticated and the largest and the most energetic of all the social movements that have flourished in Brazilian society . . . but they have to permanently do it against a really steep hill." Says Carter.

While Brazilian law states that unproductive land may bought by the Brazilian government and distributed to landless farmers through Brazil’s Agrarian Reform Institute (INCRA), large landowners have violently defended their properties. To counter the MST "threat", landowners formed their own organization, the Rural Democratic Union (UDR) in 1985. According to Brazil’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), dozens of campesinos are assassinated each year across Brazil.

In Rio Grande do Sul, under the conservative governorship of Yeda Crusius, the state police force has also been cracking down on the movement. Last June, the state Justice Department called for the disbanding of the movement throughout the state.

The repercussions were felt even at the event, where a police helicopter kept vigil over the meeting, and the Rio Grande do Sul Justice Department and Department of Investigation erected a barricade on the road in to the Anonni settlement, where they controlled entry in to the event by inspecting names, cars and belongings.

"On top of the state military brigade here watching us, they also put a battalion of shock troops over there to protect the area of Monsanto." Said Stédile. The reference is a sign of things to come.

Changing Times

In a press conference on Friday, MST leader Marina dos Santos warned landowners that in 2009, they would be "intensifying (their) struggle for agrarian reform." But she also admitted that their "struggle for land, is much more difficult, because it is not just against the landowner, but a multinational corporation, and this means that there is no space for land distribution and agrarian reform."

At this year’s conference, MST members ratified that they are now primarily fighting against the multinational agro-industry.

"We spent many years struggling against the large landowners alone, because we believed -- and we believe -- that the latifundio is the principle cause of the poverty and inequality in the rural area," said Stédile on Saturday. "But over the last few years, capitalism has transformed itself . . . and dramatically altered the model of agricultural production in the world, and in our country. Now, because of this new dominance of financial capital, large multinational corporations indirectly control the land, the production, the seeds, and the agricultural riches."

Over the last ten years, the agroindustry in Brazil -- led by US companies, Cargill, Bunge, ADM, and Monsanto -- has grown by bushels. The Minnesota-based Cargill is the largest agribusiness in the world. According to Brasil de Fato, in Brazil, in 2005 alone, Cargill had a gross income of more than $4 billion. With the biofuel "revolution", ethanol production has increased. In 2008, sugar cane plantations in Brazil grew by 14%, to more than 17 million acres in production.
Monsanto controls a healthy chunk of the Brazilian chemical pesticide and Genetically-modified (GMO) seed market.

Even on the Anonni settlement, many residents have been forced to use Monsanto pesticides and cultivate genetically-modified soy because of marketability and constant seed contaminations from nearby farms. Last week, Jorge dos Santos, one of the founders of the Anonni settlement pointed out where crop dusting from the neighboring plantation had killed part of his garden.

In order to counter the growth of the agroindustry, the MST declared last week that they are entering "a new phase."

"It’s not just about acquiring one farm here and there. That’s still important, but it’s not sufficient," says Stédile, who called for "grassroots agrarian reform", but stated that it "cannot be carried out by the landless alone."

In what could mark a notable shift in their organizing strategy, MST leaders announced they will be building alliances with Unions, activists and progressive leaders in both the countryside and in the cities across Brazil, in order to create a united front against the agroindustry and "neoliberalism."

"Changes in the economic model are only possible in Brazil, if we can join with all of the union federations, with all of the Leftist parties, with all of the activists that want changes for the country," said Stédile.

A Taste of Eduardo Galeano: Los Estudiantes

2009-04-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

Ever since Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971), Eduardo Galeano has received a resurgence in popularity and interest.

Seeing the sudden, increased curiosity in Galeano, we'd like to share with you one of his poems that deals with the student massacre of Mexico City in 1968. It is taken from Memoria del fuego (1982–1986). This collection of poems attempts to cover all of Latin America's history, similar to Pablo Neruda's Canto General.

FOR STUDENTS EVERYWHERE!

México, 2 de octubre
Los estudiantes

Los estudiantes invaden las calles. Manifestaciones así, en México jamás se han visto, tan inmensas y alegres, todos atados brazo con brazo, cantando y riendo. Los estudiantes claman contra el presidente Díaz Ordaz y sus ministros, momias con vendas y todo, y contra los demás usurpadores de aquella revolución de Zapata y Pancho Villa.

En Tlatelolco, plaza que ya fue moridero de indios y conquistadores, ocurre la encerrona. El ejército bloquea todas las salidas con tanques y ametralladoras. En el corral, prontos para el sacrificio, se apretujan los estudiantes. Cierra la trampa un muro continuo de fusiles con bayoneta calada.

Las luces de bengala, una verde, otra roja, dan la señal.

Horas después, busca su cría una mujer. Los zapatos dejan huellas de sangre en el suelo.

Corrupt Corrigan Caught Keeping Kids' Cash: An Alliteration on President Corrigan's Evilness and Past

2009-04-20T12:01:00.000-07:00

(From August 2008)

The California State University’s administration was called out by name May 1st. In huge, colorful lettering, students protesting the reduction of faculty and staff job positions and the increasing of student fees wrote, “The CSU is run by thieves!” on a wall outside the J. Paul Leonard Library. And adjacent to the library, there sat SF State President Robert A. Corrigan, in his fifth-floor administration building office.

Former U.S. President Richard Nixon was once described as the only person who could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. However, one only needs to look within our educational system to find many more ‘Nixons.’ And, it happens to be that Corrigan is the one currently filling the position with the most executive powers and is therefore in the position prone to high-level and chronic corruption at our school.

Corrigan was praised and credited with changing University of Massachusetts, Boston into a well-respected university while diversifying its faculty during his tenure as chancellor of the university, the position Corrigan held before becoming president of SF State. But it was an internal audit that forced Corrigan to resign from his cushy job, in a place where he was well liked by many.

It is the purpose of this report to remind the SF State community of the history of the single most influential person who affects the lives of every student and faculty and staff member.
It was revealed to the SF State community in 1991 that Corrigan had been audited in 1987 for inappropriately using school funds while serving as chancellor for the UMass, Boston. The audit revealed that a total of $127,000 had been deposited into a special account that was secretly created and maintained by Corrigan. The “Chancellor’s Fund,” as the account was called, was active for 17 months and it allowed Corrigan to use its funds without adhering to any of the Massachusetts state guidelines that governed his other discretionary accounts.

A May 7, 1987 Boston Globe article stated that the audit questioned the misuse of school funds regarding the payment of personal parking tickets, the leasing of two cars, the purchase of liquor (a $242 case of cognac), cleaning and landscaping services for Corrigan’s home, a party for a certain city council president, personal credit card bills and numerous cash reimbursements of undocumented personal expenses. The audit also questioned the use of a college car by Corrigan’s wife and the expenses of her accompaniment on several business trips. In the end, the audit found that Corrigan wrote $96,000 worth of checks during the seventeen-month-long life of his pet account.

The most appalling abuse of school funds, however, comes from where Corrigan obtained the money.

Corrigan, the audit found, had violated Massachusetts state law by withdrawing $70,000 from the Boston Food Services Trust Fund without authorization. The money taken from UMass, Boston’s cafeteria trust fund was meant to pay off debts and purchase supplies and equipment for the university’s cafeteria but was instead deposited into Corrigan’s “Chancellor’s Fund” account.

Other sources of money came from donations that were not spent accordingly to their donors’ wishes.

In one instance, UMass, Boston was given a $5,000 gift from New England Mutual Life Insurance for allowing the company to host its annual clambake on campus. The company sent the $5,000 check along with a letter instructing Corrigan to use the check for university programs and projects deemed important by him and not for any kind of “administrative overhead.” Instead, Corrigan pocketed the money.

Corrigan’s secret account was eventually discovered by his vice chancellor after a routine check discovered an extra account free of restrictions. Corrigan then wrote 26 checks shortly before the audit, which totaled $933.08, in an attempt to reimburse the “Chancellor’s Fund.” He resigned as chancellor two months later, giving back UMass, Boston a total of only $3,000.

After his resignation, the UMass, Boston administration rewrote many of its spending policies to prevent such abuse from happening so easily. Corrigan has denied that his resignation was linked to the audit. However, at least two sources within UMass, Boston’s administration and close to the audit contradicted him.

We were able to uncover a forgotten secret that once had our campus in an uproar. However, what happened to Corrigan only shows us the contradictory and corrupt nature of the system. It was over 15 years ago when it was revealed that President Corrigan had robbed the very people that employed him. But the word ‘rob’ is a legal term. Corrigan was never charged with robbery. Instead, he resigned and received a nice, farewell compensation, a bonus: a little ‘thank you’ for time spent well from the system that rewards its thieves, even after they get caught.

SFSU Library Info: On the Renovation

2009-04-19T12:40:00.000-07:00

Beneath the Library’s Renovation: Balfour Beatty’s Crimes

The ridiculously huge U.K.-based transnational giant Balfour Beatty owns Barnhart Inc., the construction company contracted to renovate San Francisco State University’s library.

San Diego-based Barnhart is a subsidiary of Heery International Inc. In turn, Heery International is a subsidiary of Balfour Beatty. And, in the past, Balfour Beatty has had to pay fines for the crimes it has committed.

In 1999, Balfour Beatty was ordered to pay a fine equivalent to $1.8 million for the 1994 collapse of a tunnel that occurred during construction of a railway at London Heathrow Airport, the world’s third busiest airport. The fine was the largest for its time, in the U.K.

In June 2000, 40 FBI agents raided Balfour Beatty’s Massachusetts office because of a fraud investigation. The U.K. giant allegedly doubled its construction costs from $321 million to $680 million. The FBI took documents and computers. Twenty subpoenas resulted from the raid. Unfortunately, after extensive research, this reporter could not find any documentation in regards to what happened thereafter.

In Oct. 2000, a train accident in southern England killed four and left 102 injured. The accident was due to a broken rail. This broken rail was spotted almost two years before the accident, and a replacement rail sat alongside the tracks for the six months leading up to the crash. Balfour Beatty was initially fined $16.2 million in 2007 for its negligence. The fine was later reduced to $12.1 million, after an appeal.

After stating that he had kept from overreacting in his punishment, the sentencing judge added, “But I regard Balfour Beatty as one of the worst examples of industrial negligence in a high-risk industry I have ever seen.

In 2001, Balfour Beatty, along with many other transnational companies, was charged with bribing a Lesotho government minister. The bribes were related to the construction of a dam that was part of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. Balfour Beatty simply denied the accusations, despite evidence, and the investigation into the company stopped. Lesotho is a small country completely surrounded by South Africa.

After much opposition, Balfour Beatty was forced to withdraw from the Ilisu Dam construction project in Turkey in 2002. Controversy centered on the displacement of 25,000 Kurds and the flooding of the ancient Kurdish city, Hasankeyf, which dates back 10,000 years. However, construction of the $2 billion dam is still underway. The affected Kurds have had some of their houses burned and some have been forcibly evacuated at gunpoint, according to the Kurdish Human Rights Project.

Balfour Beatty was also briefly involved in the ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq. But, the company pulled out in 2004 due to high-risk security concerns.

And, finally, in 2007, the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office fined Balfour Beatty $3.6 million, due to “payment irregularities” in connection to a 1995 project to help recreate Egypt’s Alexandria Library.

It may seem as if there is a weak link between Barnhart and Balfour Beatty. In fact, Barnhart may act autonomously and, therefore, it may have no relation to Balfour Beatty’s actions. But this is false. The tarp-covered fencing surrounding the library is hiding more than just construction workers. It is hiding an international trail paved by our tax dollars and guided by unseen parasites.

From Our Good Comrade in Mexico...

2009-04-09T12:41:00.001-07:00

Greetings from México

Things in México are getting hard for Mexicans, this financial crisis is hitting hard over here, so many business are closing, banks, corporations.... so many people is getting fired. The other day I was talkig to an Army men and he told me that they are afraid about something to happen in 2010, he wasn't that specific but he said something like another revolution, that's why they, the Army, is getting ready for, because they know that in México there are the ideal growing conditions for the PUEBLO to raise up, he even said something about a potential coup d'état...

Brothers, I feel pretty glad about all this, not because I like bad things going on in the world, but because all this that we're going throught not just here in México, but in the whole planet means that a new DAWN is about to come, it is time to open our eyes and our hearts, to wake our counciouness up in love. All this things that are happening in the whole planet is something inevitable, is something that we have created all together, GAIA is sick and is about to shake away all this illness.

The prophecies (from all kinds of spiritual ways) from the Mayas, Hopis, Huicholes, Buddhism, Christians to even psychonauts like Timothy Leary and Terrance McKenna, like the ANCIANOS, the "people who know" and of course, our own COMMON SENSE tells the same story: we´re living the end of an age, we're about the get into a something better, and like they said "the darkest moment in a day is just before DAWN", I trust that it will be so, I don't know when, I don't think sincere people really know WHEN is this really gonna happen but we can infer because of the symptoms that we can allready see that it's gonna be a little bit pretty soon, I hope we could see that in our lifetime, we can see that something is really rotten in our social, political, emotional, economical and ecological system, GAIA is sick and only LOVE can get us throught this madness to the TRUTH, the LIGHT.

CHANGE is near and I'm so happy about it.

I hope I can see the fall of this system in my lifetime, this capitalism that kills a human being every two seconds because of lack of food when richest countries and food industries are puting good food into dumpsters, this WAR based on way of life, death culture, where you can go overseas and kill people when you're 18 but it's "illegal" to buy a beer, where in the so called "war against drugs" you can turn your army against your own people and violate their human rights even kill them, where you can earn a bonus for each extra abortion you can "sell".

I hope I can see the fall of this system where it's better to keep broadcasting lies to people about EVERYTHING 'cos it's profitable, where our food is being modified genetically without even caring about the effects on future generations, where poisoning this Earth is so profitable that becomes cheaper to keep doing it than to stop it, where HUMANS are turned into RESOURCES like if we were renewal, cheap and disposible THINGS.

I hope I can see the end of this COMPETITION system where just a few ones can win and the rest of us have to lose, because that's why a competition is made for, not everybody can win... win, win, win... fuck winning. COOPERATE brothers, that's the way.

I hope I can see the walls of this bird-cages also known as countries, to fall down, this cages that they want us to feel proud about it, kill for it, live for it and die for it, singing WAR songs also known as ANTHEMS and cuting all conections with the rest of our brothers overseas, even just a few miles away, making you feel that you're "better" than the rest.

...and then I hope I can see the NEW WORLD, where competition is replaced with COOPERATION, where NATURAL RESOURSES are turned into our HOME, into WE ourselves, we're part of everything, everything is part of us, we're not separated from everything else. I hope I can see this world where we live according to natural cycles, where all of us become CAMPESINOS, where we grow our own food for our worldwide community, where we can travel around our world, where we share what other people needs knowing that everyone else is gonna do the same thing.

I hope you, my friends, be there to share this world between us.

LOVE, PEACE and LIGHT.

PIgs Off Campus

2009-04-03T00:23:00.000-07:00

Pigs off Campus! On Accountability of SF State Police

Here at San Francisco State University the Department of Public Safety (DPS), our “friendly” campus police, is requesting an increase of a million dollars in funding. This comes at a period in time in which budget cuts and fee increases are severely affecting students. While students already pay the campus police money through their fees, the amount that is currently being sought is an additional amount of funding to support a staff of police officers that have a history of discrimination, excessive use of force for petty crimes, and misallocation of funds.

The school administration here at campus has decided to charge the Student Center $270,000 in an attempt to provide funding for the DPS. While the State government requires that the DPS receive $ 2.5 million annually, the additional million dollars has no justification and is essentially asking students to pay the police force twice for their services. When students on the Student Center governing board and Associated Students tried to challenge the $270,000 invoice which was sent asking them to pay, they were threatened by campus officials indicating that they would freeze the accounts of the student center and all services would stop functioning. This attack from the administration and campus police is a form of extortion because there is no evidence from the police or the administration that justifies this increase in funding.

The services provided by the police are little more than hostility and aggressive force in dealing with small crimes in and around campus. The jurisdiction of the police force encompasses a 2 mile perimeter around campus which has grown in the last few years. In analyzing the Campus Security Report 2007, the majority of crimes reported from 2004 to 2006 indicate that they came from theft and drug violations. Additionally, walking around campus there have been numerous incidents in which the campus police have cited bicyclists, skaters, and other non-violent offenders. Rather than busting kids living in the residence halls smoking weed and drinking on the weekends the campus police should stop harassing students with their tactics of intimidation.

This also raises issues about the use of surveillance currently being employed by the DPS. At every event put on by Palestinian Students, Muslim students, or other political demonstrators the police are seen monitoring the activities of students on campus while shutting down certain sections of the student center. These efforts to monitor students are representative of increased police activity in repressing student organizing by infringing on their right to expression and clearly demonstrate a bias against certain ethnic and religious groups by targeting them specifically. Not only do the police use surveillance as a form of repression but the use of undercover cops has been used to infiltrate the student community and incriminate them for offenses.

The DPS has a history of being run inappropriately dating back to the ’68 strike in which violence against student activists was not uncommon and used excessively to suppress student protests. According to an Xpress article from November 30, 1990 the DPS has a troubled legal history. In the eighties Lieutenant Schorle engaged in sexual discrimination against Officer Sheehan, used secret taping devices to incriminate her and other student organizations, and was convicted of sexual harassment against officer Lapeyrade. The academic senate chose to investigate the matter reporting the “chilling effect of secretly made tapes would have devastating effects on the quality of education and on the trust which is essential between faculty and students.” The use of surveillance is still occurring and under Schorle’s management of the DPS, police officer Wible was aware of the use of the secret tapes and became the chief officer of the DPS after Schorle resigned in 1989.

While Chief Wible served as Chief of DPS she was accused of misallocating funds in 1990 and wrongfully terminating Officer Lapeyrade for filing charges against Schorle for sexual harassment. Wible was acting officer in 2005 while Professor Antwi Akom was wrongfully racially profiled and beaten for a crime he did not commit, demonstrating a clear case of racism on behalf of the DPS. Wible was also commanding officer when a 15-year-old African American boy was slammed to the ground by San Francisco State police officers back in 2004 (Xpress Oct. 26, 2005).
In light of this information it is important to hold the campus police accountable and all police as well. With homeland security using wiretapping devices and secret courts under NSA, the police have more power than we’ve seen in the last few years. In order to avoid becoming a police state, students and citizens need to monitor the police and put an end to police brutality and lies.