Quote of the Day

January 26, 2012 in Politics | by | 1 comment

“The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure there wasn’t one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities. If they taught Judeo-Christian principles in those colleges and universities, they’d be stripped of every dollar. If they teach radical secular ideology, they get all the government support that they can possibly get.”

—Rick Santorum, today.

Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Was His First to Mention the “Rich.” Or the “Poor.”

January 26, 2012 in Class, History, Occupy Wall Street, Organizing, Politics | by | Leave a comment

When President Obama said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night that “when Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes,
it’s not because they envy the rich,” it was the first time he’d used the word “rich” in a State of the Union speech. And when he said, a few minutes later, that when Americans put on the uniform of our military, “it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor,” it was the first time he’d used the word “poor” on such an occasion.

Over four State of the Union addresses, including his “unofficial” SOTU in February 2009, the president had never used either term before.

In fact, one has to go back thirteen years, to President Clinton’s call in his final SOTU in 2000 for “a constructive effort to meet the challenge that is presented to our planet by the huge gulf between rich and poor,” to hear a president use the R-word in that way in a State of the Union. (Clinton referred to the poor several other times in that speech, as did George W Bush on a few occasions, most recently in 2008.)

I don’t want to make too much out of terminology. Presidents, including Obama himself, have used such phrases as “the wealthiest” in past SOTU speeches, and speaking and acting are of course two very different things too.

But the blunt language of rich and poor, previously absent, is absent no more.

Thanks, Occupy.

Update | A friend points out another difference:

2011 SOTU: “If we truly care about our deficit, we simply can’t afford a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Before we take money away from our schools or scholarships away from our students, we should ask millionaires to give up their tax break.  It’s not a matter of punishing their success.  It’s about promoting America’s success.”

2012 SOTU: “If you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up. You’re the ones struggling with rising costs and stagnant wages. You’re the ones who need relief. Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”

The change is unmistakeable.

What Winning Looks Like

January 24, 2012 in Access, Campus Communities, Campus Protests, Governance, Occupy Wall Street, Organizing, Student Power, The Corporate University | by | 2 comments

Students at Berkeley staged an occupation of the campus anthropology library last week, winning a rollback of planned cuts to library hours and a reversal of a planned staff reduction. This is the second time a Berkeley library occupation has ended in victory in the last two years.

Those two victories stand out — both at Berkeley, where the administration has often responded to peaceful protest with police violence and mass arrests, and as a national model, as library occupations have been among the most successful actions mounted in the current wave of student mobilizing.

It’s tempting to argue that such victories hold lessons for future organizing, and in some ways they clearly to — the fact that something is working is a pretty good reason to keep doing it. But it’s not a reason to stop doing other things with less immediate payoff, as one library occupier writes at Reclaim UC.

I’ll let her take it from here:

One lesson we may take from this is that direct action works. In fact, in the case of the Anthropology Library, it has consistently worked. And we should take this moment to celebrate the significant manner in which direct action has restored part of the basic functioning of the university and—at least in this one case—reversed the terribly damaging policy of an increasingly profit-oriented administration. […]

In the nearly three years of student uprisings, the library occupations have earned us our only concrete, measurable successes. But the wrong lesson would be that by keeping our demands small, and by staying “reasonable,” we may achieve our goals. What we have won here is a band-aid for a university system suffering from hemophilia. Don’t get me wrong: we need band-aids—we need lots of them—but our small, reasonable, achievable demands will fail to produce either the university or the society for which we fight. They will simply bandage up the tools of class reproduction.

Our greatest successes over the last three years have been neither concrete nor measurable. And although a good deal of thought must be put into what “Occupy” is and represents, there can be no doubt that at the beginning of 2012, we stand on an entirely different ground from where we were a year ago. This shift has been effected not by policy enacted or reversed, but by on-the-ground organizing and a growing consciousness of and a willingness to act—to take direct action—against the structures of domination of which we have become a part.

This victory is only a victory if we use it as a springboard for further escalation and further growth.

I couldn’t agree more. Go read the whole thing.

Higher Education Funding Drops Off a Cliff

January 24, 2012 in Access, Finances, Politics, Students, The Corporate University, Tuition and Fees | by | Leave a comment

Nineteen states cut higher education spending by more than ten percent last year, and total state funding to higher ed dropped by 7.6% nationwide, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

A quarter of the cuts came in California, which slashed its higher ed budget by 13.4%, but in percentage terms, ten states cut more. Three states’ cuts topped 20%,  with New Hampshire clocking in at an incredible 41.3% decline.

And though the budget crunch bore the blame for a lot of cuts in 2009 and 2010, the latest round is taking place in an environment of growing state revenue — according to the Chronicle, aggregate state tax revenue has risen nationally in each of the last seven quarters. Meanwhile, higher ed spending is now 4% lower than it was in 2007, and still dropping.

And of course the brunt of these cuts are being felt by students, in many cases by those least able to pay.

Undercover UK Police Fathered Children With Activists They Were Spying On

January 24, 2012 in Civil Liberties, Organizing, Police, Sexual Violence | by | 3 comments

An astounding story of police misconduct has been unfolding in Britain over the last year, as the press and the public have learned new details of the government’s decades-long infiltration of various political activist groups. Police officers, embedded in these organizations with false identities, are now known to have initiated sexual and romantic relationships with activists in order to gain information and establish their movement bona fides.

The latest such revelations are utterly mind-boggling:

In the mid-1980s married police officer Bob Lambert, deep undercover in the environmental and animal rights movements, engaged in at least two long-term sexual relationships with at least two activist women, one of whom became pregnant. Lambert was involved in the child’s life for two years before breaking ties with its mother, whom he never informed of his true identity.

And in another case an unnamed police officer deployed in a political group fathered a child with an activist, then disappeared from her life without warning when his assignment ended. Although he never re-initiated contact with either, he tracked them both through ongoing police reports on the woman, who remained under surveillance for her political activity.

Eight women duped into sexual relationships with undercover officers between 1987 and 201o are now bringing lawsuits against the London police force, charging that the officers’ acts were illegal and condoned by department higher-ups.

The sexual relationships were allegedly part of a larger pattern of misconduct in the undercover operations, which are also said to have involved officers listening in on conversations between activists and their lawyers and falsely testifying under their assumed identities at activists’ trials.

 

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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