Monthly Archive

It’s seven o’clock in the morning in California, and the November meeting of the UC regents is scheduled to get underway soon. Topping their agenda is another steep tuition increase.

When the regents met last fall at UCLA some three thousand students were on hand to protest their imposition of a 32% fee hike, but at least some student activists expect a smaller turnout this time around. Ricardo Gomez, External Affairs Vice President of the Associated Students of the University of California, told the Daily Cal this week that the meeting’s staging at UC San Francisco Mission Bay — a medical center and teaching hospital with no undergraduate student body — is likely to suppress student turnout.

Buses and carpools are heading to San Francisco this morning from across the state, however, and some activists are still hoping to shut the meeting down.

8:10 am PST | Tweeter @reclaimuc says that “approx 200″ protesters are on the scene, with more en route.

9:00 am | Reports on Twitter suggest that student activists faced off with cops in a parking garage on campus. Police are said to have arrested at least two students. “Most” of the regents are said to have made it into the meeting, and protesters are apparently leaving the garage. A tweet from the student regent says that the meeting has begun.

11:20 am | Activists apparently made an effort to storm the meeting not long after my last update. Several more arrests have been made, including a vice president of the Berkeley student government. Police have pepper-sprayed a number of demonstrators, and one source has claimed on Twitter that an officer on the scene unholstered his gun and pointed it at a protester.

As noted earlier, the University of California board of regents will be meeting at UC San Francisco Mission Bay beginning tomorrow to consider yet another massive fee increase. Protests against the move are taking place at several UC campuses today.

Berkeley

Activists blocked access to California Hall, Berkeley’s administration building, early this morning. As of nine am California time one entrance was reportedly re-opened.

Davis

Students, faculty, and staff staged a teach-out, as well as a banner drop with a list of demands.

Santa Cruz

At this hour (1:30 pm PT) protesters are on the move, marching through campus. Governor Schwarzenegger is on campus today, and the marchers are reportedly heading in his direction.

The next meeting of the University of California regents doesn’t start until tomorrow, but Berkeley’s activists are starting the protests early.

The regents are expected to impose a new eight percent fee hike at this week’s meeting, and other proposals on the agenda are meeting with student resistance as well. Students will be coming in to protest the meeting from all over the state, and we’ll be covering that story as it develops.

This morning, though, at six-thirty, activists at Berkeley gathered at California Hall, UCB’s administration building. It’s now 7:45 am on the West Coast, and according to reports on Twitter, all entrances to the building have been blocked.

Follow @reclaimuc and @callie_hoo for updates on Twitter, and check back here for more news as I get it.

8 am California time | As I posted last night, actions are reportedly in the works this morning at UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz as well.

9 am | The action is still going on. The blog Occupy California has a photo from the scene, and a report that the UCPD have managed to secure one entrance to the building, with the others still blockaded.

9:45 am | Another Berkeley activist blog — The University Belongs to Those Who Use It — has posted a report and a photo. They note that UCPD has received reinforcements from the Alameda County Sheriff.

10:20 am | Here’s the Facebook event page for the planned UC Santa Cruz action, scheduled to start at noon.

1:30 pm | Continuing coverage of events at Berkeley, Davis, and Santa Cruz today can be found here.

You remember James O’Keefe — the guy behind the fake prostitute scam that took down ACORN, the guy who got an anti-racist government official fired by pretending she was a racist, the guy who plotted to trap a female journalist on a boat and videotape himself making crude sexual advances against her.

Well, he’s at it again.

In August of this year O’Keefe sent a handful of operatives to a teacher’s union conference in New Jersey. They were armed with miniature video cameras, and they were looking for dirt — anything they could find, any way they could get it.

One of O’Keefe’s minions struck up a conversation with a teacher named Alissa Ploshnick at the hotel bar. She was 38 and single. He was younger. He engaged her in conversation. He flirted. He bought her drinks.

He taped the whole thing.

At one point, they got talking shop, and she told him a story about how tough it was to get teachers fired:

It’s really hard to fire a tenured teacher. Really hard. It’s really hard. Once you get that three years and a day, it’s like, “schwing!” It’s really hard. Like you seriously have to be in a hallway fucking somebody.

We had this, we had a teacher just recently that was like, “you nigger!” — he’s been moved down — to a student. And the teacher has been demoted, but is still teaching.

When O’Keefe posted this audio on YouTube, it was accompanied by Ploshnick’s name, photo, and title. It carried a voice over claiming that Ploshnick had “brag[ged]” about teachers “not getting fired for calling black kids the N-word,” though she had done no such thing. It carried a summary claiming that in it “NJEA Union Teachers call black students n******,” though again, she’d done no such thing.

Not long later, O’Keefe himself showed up at Ploshnick’s home and asked her — on camera — whether she’d ever “referred to a student as the N-word.”

Again, Ploshnick hadn’t called anybody anything. She hadn’t bragged about anybody getting away with calling anybody anything. She’d merely quoted someone using the word — just as I’ve done in this post — in the course of telling a story in which that quote was absolutely pertinent. For that she was suspended for teaching for nine days and docked a scheduled pay raise amounting to several thousand dollars.

Ploshnick has been a special ed teacher for twenty years. In 1997 she was seriously injured when she threw herself in the path of an oncoming van, saving a group of her students from being run down. (She got a commendatory letter from President Clinton after that incident.)

But ultimately this story isn’t about Ploshnick, who is merely collateral damage. The story is about James O’Keefe.

James O’Keefe, who dressed up as a racist caricature of a pimp to promote videos which he deceptively edited to give the impression that ACORN officials seeking to help a young woman were in fact supporting prostitution.

James O’Keefe, who got a black woman fired from the Obama administration by deceptively editing another video to portray her moving story of her anti-racist values as a racist tirade.

James O’Keefe, who conspired to bring a female CNN reporter onto a boat where he would videotape himself making sexual advances on her, surrounded by dildoes and other sexual aids.

James O’Keefe has a track record. It’s a track record of deploying false charges of racism against anti-racists. And it’s a track record of using deception and sexual harassment to bring women down. He keeps doing it. He keeps doing the same thing over and over again.

And why shouldn’t he? It works.

I’m not sure exactly what’s on tap but several blogs have posted calls for an action (including picketing) beginning at 6:30 Tuesday morning at California Hall at UC Berkeley. One of the blogs indicates that there’s an action planned at UC Santa Cruz too.

On Wednesday the University of California Regents are scheduled to take up a proposed eight percent fee increase that would bring UC’s in-state tuition above $12,000. Mass protests are expected Wednesday at that meeting, which is taking place at UC San Francisco Mission Bay.

More when I get it.

Update | There’s going to be an action at noon at UC Davis too.

Morning Update | Berkeley activists have apparently shut down California Hall, their campus’s administration building.