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” »