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Monday, November 16, 2009

Education, Agitation, Organization at UCB This Week

The privatization and corporatization agenda that has devastated public education, eliminated public services, repudiated public investment in young people's education, looted public infrastructure and resources, handed as much as possible over to profiteers, and brought the State of California more generally to the brink of failed state status continues on, as generations of Movement Republican policy and ideology bears its poisoned fruits. Now ideologues and know-nothings are braying that the predictable and predicted devastation that has come of refusing to pay for civilization requires as its "solution" an orgiastic intensification of the same looting and pillaging and refusal of all responsibility.

UCBerkeley is dying, and for nothing, its campus is pimpling with slick corporate PR posters, its local and co-op vendors replaced with corporate franchises, its departments flooded with corporate dollars and agendas, its rare old trees chainsawed to make room for huge investments in splashy amusements unconnected to education, its fees rising so that fewer and fewer but the wealthiest have access to education, its teaching handed over more and more to precarious lecturers (among them, me), indispensable life-long staff-people fired everywhere while slick suited managers who have never had an original thought in their heads get raises, services slashed, idiotic advertising images and sales pitches metastasizing across the landscape....

Providing, as always, a glimpse into what may very well be the future of America, California has been paralyzed as ever greater majorities have repudiated (too often in an under-informed, under-critical way vulnerable to exploitation) the right wing ideology that is destroying us, but an ever more ideologically zealous core of right wing ideologues maintains a minority large enough to make it impossible to remedy the problems that beset us or govern sensibly, providing through their refusals the very paralysis and paroxysms from which their patrons benefit financially and which represent the destruction of responsive responsible governance that has always, and explicitly, been their goal in the first place.

If what you really want to do is steal and bark orders, there is nothing like chaos to provide the cover and the pretext for it.

Even in losing the losers keep the winners from governing, then reap the rewards of anti-governmental sentiment that follow from these failures to re-install themselves in positions to deepen the crisis further and further.

Nationally, Republicans as The Party of No are beginning to impose this strategy on the Senate, paralyzing reform of catastrophically failed for-profit insurance and unregulated financial institutions and planet-menacing extractive-petrochemical industries. As goes California, so goes the Nation.

Learn from California -- don't repeat our mistakes -- don't let our corporate-militarist Republicans drag down the Nation with us -- help us back to a strength with which our democratic majorities and the genius of our diversity can help the country help itself!

The corporate-militarists who define contemporary Republicanism and who still maintain too strong a hold on too many of the Democrats must be exposed very loudly and very clearly for what they are so that blame for the inevitable failures to come is fixed on those responsible for them rather than on those who are struggling against impossible odds to solve our shared problems.

Here, in California, we are fighting -- in substantial numbers at long last, possibly too late and still, I fear, without really educating people enough about the causes of our suffering so much as testifying to the scale of the catastrophe and to the suffering itself. We are protesting amidst the death throes of a public system of higher education that was once the envy of the world and an investment in knowledge that was one of the great accomplishments and benefits to our democratic way of life.

The vultures have all but killed it, and eagerly cheerfully pick at its bones. Even now our media are too ignorant or complicit or distracted to inform the people of the simple state of affairs that has brought us this catastrophe. Chief among these are the idiosyncratic constitutional barriers that enable small anti-government minorities to paralyze efforts to make the richest Californians pay their fair share in taxes to fund the services and investments without which this is not a place worth living in, even for comparatively rich people hiding in crappy McMansions or behind gated walls.

Still, things are happening here, and if you are a student or a concerned Californian, here are some of the things happening this week...

--Monday, Nov 16

2:30 pm

Action at the Bear's Lair to support long-time vendors Ann Vu, owner of
Healthy Heavenly Foods, and Arnoldo Marquez, owner of El Taqueria
Tacontento, who are striking in support of students and workers and to
protest UC management's efforts to drive them out and replace them with
corporate vendors like Tully's.

6-7:30 pm

Students: Know Your Rights, Stephens Room, 4th Floor MLK Student Union
Building

A presentation by the Student Advocate's Office, followed by a Q&A session
with a police officer. Are you striking next week? If so, do you know your
rights as a student? Do you know how your actions may signal police
response? What questions must you answer to, and when you can remain silent?
What rights do you have over your own property at a demonstration? How does
university policy blur with CA law? What do you do if you've been detained
or arrested?

6-8:30 pm

International Student Teach-In on the Budget, Multicultural Center in the
MLK Student Union Building

Speaker panel: Lecturer Darren Zook, Political Science; Professor Bob
Jacobsen, Physics (Physics for Future Presidents); Ariel Boone, ASUC
Senator; Viola Tang, Undergraduate International Student & ASUC Senator;
Farren Briggs, Graduate International Student & Graduate Assembly
International Student Affairs Committee Chair; Magrethe Nergaard, Concurrent
Enrollment & Exchange Student

--Tuesday, Nov 17

6 pm

ASUC Store Operations Board meeting in the ASUC Senate Chambers to discuss
the Bear's Lair Food Court and the public bid process. The Board has the
ASUC President, Vice President, and Dean of Students, so a mass of students
and workers in solidarity will be very persuasive. Free coffee and soup will
be provided in the Bear's Lair Food Court all night Tuesday night for
organizing meetings to plan for November 18.

8 pm

Waiting for Lefty, by Clifford Odets, Booth Auditorium in Boalt Hall on
College and Bancroft

An interactive staged reading directed by Peter Glazer (FREE). Featuring
Ariel Boone, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Michael Cohen, Lura Dolas, Alisha
Ehrlich, Ricardo Gomez, Suzanne Guerlac, Elijah Guo, Lyn Hejinian, Shannon
Jackson, Gregory Levine, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Isaac Miller, Shannon
Steen, Barrie Thorne, Elena Wagoner, Dick Walker

Less than an hour, and worth every second!

--Wednesday, Nov 18

UPTE, CUE, and graduate and undergraduate students will strike to protest
unfair labor practices (illegal layoffs of UPTE bargainers and president),
pay cuts without good faith negotiations, and planned student fee hikes of
32%.

5 am

Picketing begins at construction sites

7 am

Picketing begins at campus entrances

12 noon

Rally at Sproul Plaza--arrive at 11:30 if you can (Speakers will include
Ananya Roy, Bob Haas, speakers from the Davis and UCSC campuses including
Barbara Epstein, Annie McClanahan of the Graduate Students Organizing
Committee (GSOC), Tanya Smith of UPTE, Kathryn Lybarger of AFSCME, Juan
Garcia of CUE, Berkeley lecturer Mary Kelsey of UC-AFT, and several
students.

1:30 pm

Send-off for students and workers taking buses to UCLA, followed by a march
to California Hall and a large meeting

--Thursday, Nov 19

Same picketing schedule as Wednesday

9-3

Bear's Lair--talks on social movements and their history; classes by Kathryn
Lybarger, AFSCME gardener, will include a learning tour of the campus and a
talk on union organizing history

12 noon

Meeting or rally in front of California Hall

3 pm

At 3:05 pm people will deposit their trash in the trash container at
California Hall to dramatize the consequences of laying off maintenance
workers: garbage accumulating across campus.

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