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If the voters of Wisconsin throw governor Scott Walker out of office in Tuesday’s recall election, it will be in large part the work of the state’s activist students, who have been organizing against Walker since the day he took office in 2011. For Walker, this is merely the latest chapter in a fight that goes back to before most of today’s undergrads were born.
Scott Walker’s career in electoral politics goes back to the spring of 1988, when he ran for the student body presidency of Marquette University. A 20-year-old sophomore, Walker initially won qualified praise from the campus newspaper, but its editorial board reversed itself after seeing what they called a “pouty” pamphlet put out by his campaign.
In the pamphlet, Walker described opponent John Quigley as a campus radical who was “constantly shout[ing] about fighting the administration” and threatening it with “silly” lawsuits. “Student protests and sit-ins,” he wrote, “are poor substitutes for effective leadership.”
That campaign was also clouded by accusations of campaign violations, including an incident in which Walker campaign staffers stole bulk copies of the campus paper’s endorsement issue.
Walker went on to lose that election by a 57-43 margin. He left Marquette two years later without graduating.
The student association at CEGEP du Vieux Montréal has come up with a rather unique response to the government’s controversial Bill 78 – and it involves purchasing assault rifles.
At a general assembly on Tuesday, the Association générale étudiante du CEGEP du Vieux Montréal expressed its unhappiness with the “intimidation” and “state violence” in the Liberal government’s “anti-democratic” Law 78, and then proceeded to authorize the purchase of 47 AK-47 assault rifles.
This was a joke, of course, or rather an act of political theater. The student association has no plans to actually buy any assault rifles, which are illegal in Canada anyway.
In case you were worried.
The British Supreme Court ruled moments ago that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s arrest warrant is valid, and that he may be extradited to Sweden to face official questioning on allegations of rape.
It’s important to note that today’s ruling did not concern itself with the specifics of the allegations against him. Those issues were addressed by a lower court, which found that the acts Assange is alleged to have committed would be illegal, and would in some cases be considered rape, under British law.
Today’s ruling addressed the narrow question of whether the Swedish prosecutors who have requested Assange’s extradition constitute a legitimate “judicial authority,” and the court ruled that it did. Assange’s lawyers have been given two weeks to file any further appeals they may wish to lodge.
I’ve just returned home from a trip to downtown for tonight’s march in solidarity with the students of Montreal, and I want to say a couple of things.
For background, it was a march of about three hundred people, give or take. Ebullient, given today’s events to the north, but not raucous. We started at Union Square, meandered around for about an hour and a half, and ended where we began. Pretty standard stuff.
I arrived at Union Square about 8:30, and headed south looking for the march. Within a couple of blocks I caught it circling back toward me, and joined up. Folks were walking on the sidewalks and in the streets, without incident — on the side streets we were mostly facing traffic, and parting when lights turned green. On the avenues we generally hugged the parked cars, taking part of a lane when there was traffic, more when there wasn’t.
Cops occasionally herded us back onto the sidewalks, and we uniformly complied when they did. (I never saw a person refuse to leave the street all night long.) But then when the cops moved on, the people did too, and folks wound up in the streets again.
It was probably something like 8:45 when I saw a white-shirted cop, a supervisor, point at a small group of people in the street a ways ahead, pretty much on their own, and say, “let’s get those kids.” He and a couple of other cops broke into a trot, quietly closing the distance. I yelled to the group to watch out, as did several other people, but we were too far back for them to hear, and so a couple of them got grabbed. When a woman got upset with the cops for busting her friends, she was grabbed too.
I want to be clear: The people I saw arrested weren’t blocking traffic. They weren’t disrupting anything. They weren’t refusing to comply with police orders. They’d just wandered onto an uncrowded street like tens of thousands of New Yorkers do every day. (A little while later, a cop stopped a few of us from crossing an empty crosswalk on a red. He actually said “don’t you see the red light?,” a phrase which, since I’m from here, left me giggling in his face.)
Folks who go to Occupy marches know all about these kinds of arrests. They’re commonplace at this point. But folks who don’t do the Occupy thing — New Yorkers who would never think twice about jaywalking in front of a cop, who’d never even notice that they were doing so — are missing something weird and unsettling in the life of the city.
I said earlier that the mood of the march was ebullient, but after every arrest, every small, unnecessary act of police violence, things turned uglier and angrier. At one point, on St. Marks Place, cops were being rough with a guy on the ground, and a bunch of us were taping to make sure that there was a record. A cop with a steroid body suddenly flew out of the group around the guy and started grabbing people, shoving them, telling them to keep walking. (None of us were blocking the sidewalk or interfering with the cops in any way.) The cop kept on that way for half a block at least, just putting his hands on whichever protesters were in arms’ reach, including people who had no idea what he wanted from them. He was clearly wound up, and physically aggressive in a completely unprovoked way, but he wasn’t out of control — he was a guy who wanted to do some shoving, and he knew for sure that he could do it without consequences.
And something occurred to me as he was doing it. Here’s someone walking down a New York City street, just assaulting people. Just pushing and shoving and yelling. He knocked one guy’s phone out of his hands, and almost sent a woman sprawling. And this miscreant was surrounded by cops. And they did nothing. Didn’t intervene, didn’t stop him, didn’t try to calm him down. They just let their guy go ahead and blithely break the law right in front of them.
If you want to know why people get in cops’ faces on these marches, this is why. If you want to know why people get amped up, this is why. If you want to know why folks chant “fuck the police,” this is why.
Dharun Ravi was sentenced late this morning, to 30 days in jail, three years probation, community service, counseling, and a $10,000 fine.
Is this justice?
Many people are saying no. Compared to the ten years (or, depending on who you ask, several times that) which he could have received, it certainly seems light, and it’s left a lot of folks I respect quite angry. But I’m not sure I’m among them.
Let me start by saying that I consider what Ravi did a serious crime. He spied, he attempted to spy again, he tried to share private sexual acts with the internet. He did all this in such a way as to tip off his victim to the abuse, and he did it with a giddy indifference to the pain he was causing. In the wake of Clementi’s suicide he compounded his crimes by attempting to destroy evidence and asking others to do the same. And even after he was tried and convicted he displayed an ugly, dismissive refusal to come to terms with his acts.
In an impact statement read to the court this morning, “MB” — the young man who Ravi watched with Clementi — offered a powerful account of the “embarrassment, emptiness and fear” Ravi had put him through:
For the past year I was filled with anxiety and hurt as the trial approached. I felt like I was continuously walking in a mine field, waiting for the sudden explosion. I kept my secret from my family because I did not want them to go through the same emotional turmoil that I was experiencing. With each news article I read or saw on television, this feeling of uncertainty and unsteadiness only became worse.
From the beginning, MB said, he “just wanted [Ravi] to acknowledge that he had done wrong and take responsibility for his conduct, but instead Ravi and his lawyers compounded his trauma:
I do not believe that he has taken responsibility for his conduct, and to this day he seems to blame me for the actions he took. His attorney made it very clear at the trial as did Mr. Ravi in his gratuitous media appearances that I was to be his scapegoat. He wants everyone to believe that his conduct was prompted on each occasion by his concern that I may be a thief and his possessions were at risk as a result of my presence. He even went to go so far as to say that when he learned about Tyler’s death, he thought I might have been involved so videoing me might have been a good thing.
Ravi does not bear responsibility for Clementi’s suicide, but he does bear responsibility for his actions both before and after that night, and those actions have been appalling.
But is he getting off easy? I’m not sure.
As disgusting as what Ravi’s actions were, for him to even have been arrested for them is extremely unusual. Untold numbers of college students have treated gay roommates as badly or worse and never been made to pay for their crimes at all.
In contrast, Ravi has been forced to leave college. He has been entangled in the legal system for nearly two years. He’ll go to jail for 30 days, spend three years on probation, and pay ten thousand dollar fine on top of the presumptive hundreds of thousands his family have paid in legal bills. And unless he somehow manages to get it set aside, he’ll have a felony record for the rest of his life.
Compared to what he could have received, this may not seem like much. But I think it may be enough, and here’s why.
First, there’s the question of prison itself. While I’m not an abolitionist, I do believe that in most cases sentencing someone to prison does them — and society — more harm than good. I can’t imagine that Ravi would walk out of a year in state prison a better person or less likely to re-offend.
And then there’s the question of setting an example. As I said above, I don’t regard Ravi as a particular outlier. The kind of crime that he engaged in is prosecuted rarely not because it is rare, but because it’s not treated as a serious crime. Moderate, rather than draconian, punishment is the best way to change that perception.
Finally, there’s the issue of culpability. As the judge noted in his sentencing hearing, Ravi wasn’t convicted of causing Clementi’s death, and in fact the evidence for a link between Ravi’s acts and Clementi’s suicide is largely inferential. I’m not saying that Ravi didn’t contribute to Clementi’s decision, but I will say that we don’t know exactly how — or how much — he did.
Ravi did something horrible, and his life has been pretty much ruined. I think it’s enough.
studentactivism.net 
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