Occupy’s Super Tuesday? Building on May Day Traditions

With class inequality reaching new heights and shaping politics in the U.S. and internationally, a new generation is discovering the importance of May Day and embracing its message of militant working class struggle and international solidarity.

This is the context for demonstrations planned for May 1 this year, organized by Occupy movement activists, along with labor unions, immigrant rights activists and antiwar organizations. Whatever the size and character of these protests, they represent an effort to connect activists in movements today with the rich traditions of working class struggle in the U.S.–with the goal of building a left alternative in a world dominated by the 1 percent.

http://tinyurl.com/brlw5pd

Get Ready for May Day and Nationwide ‘General Strike’

Occupy Wall Street, in fact has already declared a victory. “While American corporate media has focused on yet another stale election between Wall Street-financed candidates, Occupy has been organizing something extraordinary: the first truly nationwide General Strike in U.S. history,” OWS’s website says. “Building on … past General Strikes in U.S. cities…, the national general strikes in Spain this year, and the on-going student strike in Quebec, the Occupy Movement has called for A Day Without the 99% on May 1st, 2012. This in and of itself is a tremendous victory. For the first time, workers, students, immigrants, and the unemployed from over 125 U.S. cities will stand together for economic justice.”

http://tinyurl.com/d7hfll8

Occupy Hub Calls for NATO Protesters in Chicago

As Chicago ramps up for the NATO summit in May, at least one behind-the-scenes voice of the Occupy movement is calling for “31 magical days” culminating with “direct actions that paralyze capitalism” in cities worldwide.

The website Adbusters, considered a driving force of the Occupy movement as it gathered steam last year, called on thousands Friday to “take the plunge and strike” starting May 1.

In a post titled “The May 2012 Insurrection,” the group proposed actions ranging from blocking the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to the occupation of a tunnel in Manhattan and the seizure of ports.

http://tinyurl.com/dxerj4p

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 4/28/12” »

Occupiers join RAN activists to tell Bank Of America: “No Coal”

On Tax Day, RAN Boston activists joined a national day of action targeting Bank of America over….. well… everything.

Bank of America currently pay no taxes to the government, yet received massive bailouts after they crashed the economy. They are currently the largest forecloser of homes in the U.S. and the largest funder of the coal industry. They’ve laid off tens of thousands of their own employees, while bestowing their execs with lavish bonuses. It has just been recently reported that CEO Brian Moynihan’s salary quadrupled in the past year.

Early in the afternoon, RAN Boston activists showed up to Bank of America’s downtown offices at 100 Federal St. with flyers, signs and chants. They were soon joined by over 30 housing activists with Right To The City and then more with Occupy Boston. Tax Day all over the country focused on Bank of America’s misdeeds against the American public and this combination of housing, climate and economic justice activists.

http://tinyurl.com/cqptron

The Debate Over Student Loan Interest Is Nothing But a Sideshow

Inane politics aside, what’s frustrating about this issue is how little it matters in the scheme of college affordability. Yes, a few million students might have to pay more on their college debt if Congress doesn’t act. Given the state of the economy, and how particularly unkind it has been to young graduates, it’s probably worth it to give students a break, at least for another year. But whether or not it happens, this is a sideshow, a distraction from the deeply ingrained problems influencing college costs.

Just how irrelevant is this issue to the price of an education? The New America Foundation’s Jason Delisle has a great, short rundown that should give you some perspective, but here’s an even shorter version: In July, the interest rate on newly issued subsidized Stafford loans, which make up about one-third of all student debt, is set to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. They’ve only been at that rock-bottom rate for one year. By one estimate, the higher rate would cost the average borrower $1,800 more over ten years. Delisle calculates that, at most, borrowers would have to pay an extra $9 a month.

These are not the sorts of numbers that will make or break a student’s decision to go to college, nor would they vastly impact a graduate’s finances. Of course, keeping rates lower for one year, as Obama has proposed, would cost about $6 billion. It wouldn’t exactly be a budget buster.

http://tinyurl.com/cfg77ve

Understanding Student Debt

Yesterday, the level of American student debt passed the trillion dollar mark. There was little mention of the milestone in the mainstream media, but the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and its allies marked the occasion with “1T Day,” a national day of action. A few hundred gathered in New York’s Union Square and demonstrations were held in 20 other cities.

It’s a start, but it doesn’t come close to the scale of the problem. That’s an important juxtaposition: student debt and the crisis of higher education more generally is more pronounced in the United States than elsewhere in the developed world, but the level of student organization and resistance is lower here. Part of the trouble is awareness. To do my part, I’ve assembled a quick dossier.

http://tinyurl.com/cmpykxm
Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 4/27/12” »

At Brown University, a challenge to the student body to come out and support May Day protests [RI]

For the most part, the Brown community does a terrific job of making us aware of our privilege in society. But I want to challenge us to think about our privilege a little differently. Most of the time, we acknowledge our privilege only in order to qualify our opinions and contextualize our point of view. When I reflect on how fortunate I am to have the opportunity to study here and to be of a privileged race, gender and economic status, I often feel undeserving – why is my life and my education more valuable than the billions of other people in the world?

I hope that we can move beyond feeling guilty and helpless. You will all remember that great line from Spider-Man: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Used virtuously, our privilege can inspire and generate hope. I say we celebrate and embrace our responsibility to make the world a better place.

Maybe camping outside in public spaces isn’t your scene – you can still support the essential revolutionary spirit. I challenge the Brown community – if you think the Occupy movement is inept and ill-equipped, when can we try out your solutions?

http://tinyurl.com/73zcj38

Rove’s Tufts visit draws protest

Right-wing lightning rod Karl Rove is expected to speak at Tufts University tonight after he was invited to the Medford campus by the school’s Republican group.

Rove, a prominent Republican strategist who served under President George W. Bush, is also expected to draw protesters, with one group calling him a “torture apologist.”
. . .

Occupy Boston is also promoting a “Karl Rove Un-Welcoming Committee” protest on its website.

http://tinyurl.com/72obr2t

Sugar Daddies – The old, white, rich men who are buying this election

Whatever else happens in 2012, it will go down as the Year of the Sugar Daddy. Inflamed by Obama-hatred, awash in self-pity, and empowered by myriad indulgent court and Federal Election Commission rulings, an outsize posse of superrich white men will spend whatever it takes to have its way with the body politic and, if victorious, with the country itself. Given the advanced age of most of this cohort, 2012 may be seen as the election in which the geezer empire struck back.
. . .

Like corporate donors, sugar daddies tend to seek favors to serve their particular special interests (notably the golden oldies of oil and finance) and dedicate themselves to fighting and avoiding taxes. But their ethos departs from the corporate model. Precisely because they are lone wolves responsible to no one but themselves-not independent shareholders, let alone the communities they plunder-they can be “more ruthless than Wall Street,” as the Newt Gingrich super-PAC put it in its ad attacking Romney’s Bain career. Vulture capitalists are throwbacks not so much to the relatively modern bankers and industrialists whom FDR set out to police in the Great Depression as to the more primitive titans and robber barons of the Gilded Age that Teddy Roosevelt took on a generation earlier.

http://tinyurl.com/737by2r

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 4/26/12” »

Occupy Boston protesters’ aims smaller, more specific

Occupy Boston’s next large move will not involve physical occupation, protesters from the group said. Rather than convening and demonstrating as a large group, the Occupy movement in Boston now tends to consist of smaller, more diversified groups, said Jay Kelly, an Occupy Boston protester who has been involved with the movement since the first General Assembly.

Members tend to work with the groups they feel the most passionate about, he said.

“It really shows what Occupy represents – it’s very horizontal,” he said. “There’s not one person calling the shots. You can go out and do action because you feel good about it and because you’re passionate about it. It isn’t one person saying, ‘Let’s all go here.'”

http://tinyurl.com/7xvgrw9

Manhattan judge denies motion to stop Twitter subpoena

A Manhattan judge has rejected the plea of an Occupy Wall Street protester seeking to prevent authorities from checking old posts on his Twitter account, as well as personal data.

Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. said prosecutors had a legitimate right to ask for access to public tweets made by Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester, accused of causing traffic disturbances on the Brooklyn Bridge during a protest last October. Harris, along with other OWS activists who took part in the protest, has been claiming that they could not hear police warnings or that they thought the police were leading them onto the road. But prosecutors seek to dispel those claims by using Harris’ own tweets made in at the time as evidence against him and other demonstrators.
. . .

The authorities are increasingly using social media as evidence to build cases. A number of other Occupy activists have said their Twitter accounts have been subpoenaed. The issue has also been raised in Boston, where the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts unsuccessfully tried to block a prosecutors’ subpoena sent to Twitter on a user linked to Occupy Boston.

http://tinyurl.com/7laym3q

High-schoolers on strike

In a short video released last week, a group of students from New York’s Paul Robeson High School stand in an unremarkable classroom: school bags slung over wooden chairs and busy pinboards in the background. Their message, however, is a radical one: at front and center of the shot, a young man holding a white sheet of paper announces a mass high school student walkout on May 1, the day of the Occupy-planned general strike.
. . .

It would be easy to dismiss high-schoolers’ plans to participate in May Day actions – which included calls for “No School” alongside those of “No Work” – as an excuse to skip class. But the video from Paul Robeson High shows a politically aware and angry student body, which is keenly drawing connections between educational policy and broader political issues – most notably the production of racist systems. Their announcement connects the criminalization of schoolchildren to the institutionalized racism displayed in the case of Trayvon Martin’s killing.

“We believe that trying to control our schools is just another symptom of the blatant racism in our country similar to the government’s response to the senseless killing of Trayvon Martin,” the young man reads from the walkout announcement, while symbolically pulling up his hood over his head, referencing the hoodie marches in response to Martin’s murder.

http://tinyurl.com/6t5mhvc

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 4/25/12” »

Occupy Student Debt Campaign calls for national day of action to mark the moment total US student debt passes $1 trillion

On April 25th the total amount of student loan debt in the U.S. is due to top 1 trillion dollars. This marks a momentous victory for Wall Street-much to the despair of student loan debtors across the country. On this date, the profiteers on Wall Street will be popping champagne bottles, eating caviar, and sneering at the debt-burdened students and graduates who lug around this 1 trillion dollar ball and chain.

Occupy Student Debt Campaign is hosting a party of its own.  Throughout the country we will be taking direct action to raise awareness about this crisis as part of a new movement to make education a right.

http://tinyurl.com/7l9mmfa

1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed 

Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.

In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor’s degree or higher to fill the position – teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren’t easily replaced by computers.

http://tinyurl.com/79a2kse

Bad Education 

If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it; was hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never publish in the field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for the job because she was willing to work for wages around the official poverty line (often under the delusion that she could ‘work her way into’ a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working at your institution three years from now.

This is not an improvement; fewer than forty years ago, when the explosive growth in tuition began, these proportions were reversed. Highly represented among the new precarious teachers are graduate students; with so much available debt, universities can force graduate student workers to scrape by on sub-minimum-wage, making them a great source of cheap instructional labor. Fewer tenure-track jobs mean that recent PhDs, overwhelmed with debt,  have no choice but to accept insecure adjunct positions with wages kept down by the new crop of graduate student-workers. Rather than producing a better-trained, more professional teaching corps, increased tuition and debt have enabled the opposite.

If overfed teachers aren’t the causes or beneficiaries of increased tuition (as they’ve been depicted of late), then perhaps it’s worth looking up the food chain. As faculty jobs have become increasingly contingent and precarious, administration has become anything but.

http://tinyurl.com/3qgbln6

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 4/24/12” »