Calling the Chancellor to Account

All week, we’re holding pickets at noon in front of California Hall (the UCB admin building); this is why.

I sincerely apologize for the events of November 9 at UC Berkeley and extend my sympathies to any of you who suffered an injury during these protests. As chancellor, I take full responsibility for these events and will do my very best to ensure that this does not happen again.
        —Robert Birgeneau, November 22, 2011

(A deafening silence)

—Robert Birgeneau, today

When we saw students and faculty being beaten on the steps of Sproul Plaza last November, we were horrified. And when Chancellor Birgeneau dared to suggest that the victims of police had deserved it — because, as he put it, linking arms was “not non-violent” — he became the much-deserved subject of national ridicule, to such an extent that he retracted the statement, claimed he had been out of the loop, publicly apologized, and took full personal responsibility. He also declared that the students who had been arrested would have amnesty from student conduct proceedings and instituted multiple police review proceedings to ensure that such police misconduct does not occur again.  

Now, four months later, our community is being forced to relive this violence, and the Chancellor is nowhere to be found.  The Alameda County DA Nancy O’Malley is pressing charges against at least 9 of the students and faculty who engaged in public protest on November 9. These charges range from “malicious obstruction of a thoroughfare” and resisting arrest to battery of a police officer. They have been issued against several people who were arrested on November 9th but also against others who were not arrested. While all the charges are unwarranted, both the timing of the charges and the fact that visible activists have been particularly targeted raise a variety of very disturbing questions.

First and foremost, where is Chancellor Birgeneau? After accepting responsibility for the events of November 9th (see above), he remains conspicuously silent while Alameda County prosecutes his students and faculty. It is not nearly enough for the chancellor to do nothing: he has an affirmative responsibility to safeguard the free expression of political dissent on his campus.  Chancellor Birgeneau must publicly denounce all criminal charges and obey the UC Berkeley Faculty Association’s demand that he accept financial responsibility for legal fees incurred by those charged.

Secondly, to what extent have the UCPD and the UC administration facilitated the prosecution of its UC community members? In theory, the UCPD protects and serve campus values — of which free speech must be one — but in practice, UCPD routinely invokes mutual aid with outside police departments, invites riot cops onto our campus, and cooperates with outside agencies that have no necessary commitment to campus values. Several of the students singled out by the DA have a history of involvement in student activism.  Given this, it’s hard not to see the charges they now face as anything but a coordinated attempt to undermine public protest by intimidating the very student activists who are speaking out in defense of public education.

In the immediate aftermath of the November 9th protests, the UCPD solicited — and received — the medical records of protesters who sustained injuries at the hands of the police. These records were released by the UC Berkeley Tang Center and local hospitals without the knowledge or consent of the patients; they were then used to identify protesters. The fact that medical records can be turned over to the UCPD in order to incriminate victims of police violence raises serious questions about the ethics of medical care on the UC-Berkeley campus.  As the many videos taken on November 9th show, students and faculty were beaten simply because they were there.  When evidence of physical harm at the hands of the police is immediately read as culpability, our university has effectively criminalized protest.  By funneling confidential records to the UCPD and outside bodies, our medical system corroborated this view. What university policies allowed such breaches of confidentiality to happen?

We, the UC-Berkeley community, implore the UC administration to take responsibility for shielding the democratic values of free speech, political engagement, and socio-economic diversity upon which public higher education in California is premised.  Such responsibility starts with a frank assessment of the UCPD and UC administration’s role in the Alameda County DA’s actions.  We demand that the UC administration do what it always should have been doing: protect the right to protest on our campus.  Criminal charges against students and faculty must be dropped so that the work of restoring our university system can continue.

Numbers to contact:

Chancellor Birgeneau
phone: 510-642-7464 
email: chancellor@berkeley.edu

Charles Robinson (UC General Counsel)
phone: (510) 987-9938 
email: charles.robinson@ucop.edu

Nancy O’Malley (District Attorney of Alameda County)
phone: (510) 272-6222

On charging Nov 9th protesters

This is primarily for UC folks, but please, any and all, be in solidarity! 

(and context) 

1. Chancellor Birgeneau declared — under heavy pressure and criticism — that Nov 9 protesters would not face student conduct charges. He even apologized and took personal responsibility for what happened. Now that the Alameda County DA is laying criminal charges on them, his silence is deafening and infuriating. 

Birgeneau’s phone #: 510-642-7464 email: chancellor@berkeley.edu

2. The entire logic of having UC cops on campus — a rationale we’ve heard over and over again — is that they “share our values,” that if we don’t have “our” cops on campus, we’ll have to deal with outside cops policing us. Whether or not you agree with that, that’s the party line: Dean Edley said this at the police review meeting, and the general counsel, Charles Robinson, said exactly the same thing, in exactly the same words. What we are seeing here, however, is a total breakdown of that logic: the UC chooses not to charge its students and faculty, but says nothing as “outsiders” lay charges. 

Charles Robinson’s phone #: (510) 987-9938 email: charles.robinson@ucop.edu

3. Even more directly we should note that the DA’s actions are VERY convenient for the UC admins, who will be facing lawsuits for what their police did on Nov 9th. Having the Alameda county DA charge the plaintiffs — ostensibly an “independent” actor — serves to retroactively legitimize what the police did and insulate them from these lawsuits; putting criminal charges on people who are or could be suing for infringements on their civil liberties, or police brutality, makes police actions seem more legitimate.

4. Our beloved president loves to proclaim himself a first amendment scholar, and that “free speech” is in the UCB’s DNA. I think he needs to go back to school: this is (not only but also) a first amendment issue, and if the admins do not actively support their students’ right to assemble, they are actively abandoning their responsibility. Not that we expect anything less from them, of course. But we need to say that we see it, and as loudly as possible.

“When their ventures caused local conflict or financial distress, the investors portrayed them as ‘imperialism’”

From Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy:

“The continuous expansion of imperial rule, and the increasing military expenditure this required, were not the result of psychological or racial drives, as orthodox British opinion held. They were driven by the needs of those who, in distinction to manufacturers and merchants, were now known as ‘capitalists’: financiers and large banking houses, unable to find profitable investments at home – because, in Hobson’s analysis, the majority of the population earned too little to create a demand for additional goods. Finance capital instead flowed overseas, investing funds in mining and other capital-intensive methods of producing raw materials, and in building the railways required to carry these materials for shipment back to Europe. When their ventures caused local conflict or financial distress, the investors portrayed them as ‘imperialism’ and used their influence in the offices of state to have public funds spent on military protection for these supposedly public interests.”

“The farm colonies of the Salvation Army”

I just came across this; a completely bizarre attempt to re-frontierize as a means of dealing with urban poor.

FARM COLONIES OF THE SALVATION ARMY. BY COMMANDER BOOTH TUCKER.

The farm colonies of the Salvation Army in the United States were first organized in the spring of 1898 for the purpose of enabling stranded but worthy families to keep together and ultimately, by their own exertions and payments, to become home owners. Experience has shown that, while it is comparatively easy to take care of the unmarried poor in the cities, and to find sufficiently remunerative work for them there, the case is different with the family.

In case of sickness or loss of work the position of the women and children is especially distressing. Rent has to be paid, hungry mouths have to be fed, clothing must be provided, and the numerous requirements of a growing family must be met.

It is stated that in London 3,000 families consisting of 9 persons each, 7,000 of 8, and 23,000 of 6 or 7, live huddled together in dwellings of but one room. The furniture ordinarily consists of one bed, and as many as can do so get into it, while the others sleep under it, that being the next warmest place.

While conditions are not at present so bad in American cities, they are rapidly trending in the same direction. Hence the colonies of the Salvation Army were specially organized for the purpose of relieving city congestion and of preventing families from being broken up, the theory of redemption being thus formulated: “Place the waste labor on the waste land by means of the waste capital and thereby convert the trinity of waste into a unity of production;” or, as it has been tersely put by one of our great writers and thinkers, “The landless man to the manless land.”

In the United States the experiment now comprises the following three colonies: (1) Fort Amity, in Colorado, in the fertile valley of the River Arkansas; (2) FortRomie, in California, not far from the famous Hotel del Monte, near the Bay of Monterey; (3) FortHerrick, in Ohio, about 20 miles from the city of Cleveland.

The Drone Caucus

Mission & Main Goals

The mission of the U.S. House Unmanned Systems Caucus is to educate members of Congress and the public on the strategic, tactical, and scientific value of unmanned systems; actively support further development and acquisition of more systems, and to more effectively engage the civilian aviation community on unmanned system use and safety.

As members of this Caucus, we:

1. Acknowledge the overwhelming value of these systems to the defense, intelligence, homeland security, law enforcement, and the scientific communities;
2. Recognize the urgent need to rapidly develop and deploy more Unmanned Systems in support of ongoing civil, military, and law enforcement operations;
3. Work with the military, industry, the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and other stakeholders to seek fair and equitable solutions to challenges created by UAV operations in the U.S. National Air Space (NAS);
4. Support our world-class industrial base that engineers, develops, manufactures, and tests unmanned systems creating thousands of American jobs;
5. Support policies and budgets that promote a larger, more robust national security unmanned system capability.

http://unmannedsystemscaucus.mckeon.house.gov/about/purpose-mission-goals.shtml

“the first shot of Megan Fox in T2: ROTF”

“Consider, for example, the first shot of Megan Fox in T2: ROTF. Understanding that Fox is to supply the film’s sex appeal for adolescents of all ages who love cars and chicks (and especially chicks in proximity to cars), Bay introduces his leading lady sprawled across a motorcycle wearing a tank-top, cut-off shorts, and cowboy boots. In case we still don’t get the message that Fox is SEXY, SEXY, SEXY, Bay has her thrust her ass up in the air to signify that either she or the bike is about to get mounted (and given the premise of the series, who’s to say what will fuck whom?  Here I think we have to proceed from Freud’s assertion that all dreams of machinery are ultimately about the genitalia—a point elaborated on by his student Victor Tausk, who speculated that boyhood fascination with magical machinery is linked to the somewhat uncanny hydraulic mysteries of the erection.  Actually, we need go no further than the logic of the Transformers franchise itself to understand that she’s giving some lucky Bot here a Prince Albert or a Henna tattoo on his shiny metal glans).

One reason most “tasteful” critics find Bay appalling is that his “style” is so exceedingly obvious.  The introduction of Fox’s character here unfolds much like a late-night spot for the Sham-Wow, so hysterically overloaded with signifiers of sex appeal as to become laughable (all that’s missing is some form of testimonial, perhaps a cutaway to a guy’s eyeballs popping out a la Tex Avery). The “objectification” of Fox is in itself extremely obvious.  But this “objectification” goes beyond simply making her a slab of meat on display (I mean, really, who would care about that anymore?); it also renders her—like every other “character” in T2:ROTF—a functional object, or perhaps more accurately, a cog that simply takes its place in the overall schematic of the story.  As befitting a director who makes movies about trucks that turn into robots and robots into trucks—all rendered with a clean, hypervisible attention to each detail of the transformation—Bay’s movies do little to disguise, nuance, or even delay the functionality of each individual “part.”  Establish that Megan Fox is the sexy girlfriend.  Check.  Moving on.  

http://ludicdespair.blogspot.com/2010/09/transformative-mysteries-ii.html

“Militant Stupidity”

“I take it for granted there is really no such thing as “intelligence”. There are a million ways to be smart and no one’s smart in all of them; everyone can be slow on the uptake, and most human beings, whether plumbers or professors, will be remarkably apt at some things and hopeless at others.

But stupid isn’t dumb. Stupidity is different. It involves an element of will. This is why no one ever talks about “militant dumbness” or “militant cluelessness”, but they do talk about “militant stupidity”.  The Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem once tried to imagine the stupidest possible computer. It could only do one problem, 2+2, thought the answer was 5, and when anyone tried to tell it otherwise, it grew outraged and eventually, tried to kill them. It is in this sense that I we can call Bush stupid. He is a man used to deciding what he thinks is right, and then sticking to his guns no matter how insane, disastrous, or simply incorrect his premises turn out to have been. But of course this is precisely the core of what his supporters like about him. He’s firm. Decisive. A strong leader. Not like those over-intellectual flip-floppers who are always going on about how many sides there are to a problem.”

http://www.commoner.org.uk/10graeber.pdf

Selmeya and Violence

Ashraf Khalil’s Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation:

Much has been made of the near-obsessive dedication to nonviolence on the part of the Tahrir square protesters. For the most part, that’s true. From the very start, one of the dominant chants from the protesters was salmeya, or peaceful. But let’s pause now to acknowledge and honor the fact that Egypt’s nonviolent revolution wouldn’t have happened without some people who were willing to be extremely violent at times. Over a four-day period, a hard-core cadre of protesters confronted and physically shattered the Egyptian police state—overwhelming the shock troops of the Interior Ministry’s Central Security riot police. It was only after that vanguard had been physically destroyed and demoralized that the real revolution could begin. Most popular uprisings boil down to very simple mathematics at some point. First, the people overwhelm the traditional security forces. At that point it becomes a question of whether the government in charge has the will to order its military to attack civilians, and then whether the military is willing to follow those orders. If both are willing, then you get Tiananmen Square; if not, then you get Tunisia. It was on January 28 that Egyptians forced that dilemma onto Mubarak’s government by violently defeating Egypt’s Interior Ministry, essentially stripping away Mubarak’s armor and forcing him to genuinely deal with his people for the first time in decades. I witnessed scenes of incredible violence on January 28, with protesters using military-style organization and tactics to harass and pressure the police until they collapsed.(p162)

and 

[Fear] began to grow among the protesters about the safety and security of the Egyptian Museum. The low-slung red-domed building houses a treasure trove of Egypt’s rich archeological history—much of it badly maintained and chaotically archived. There was little hope that a fire truck would appear on the scene, so the demonstrators could only hope that the flames from the NDP building wouldn’t spread across the communal wall shared by the two structures. The demonstrators turned their attention to making sure the museum wasn’t looted during the chaos. People here had vivid memories of the widespread looting that plagued Baghdad after Saddam Hussein was defeated. Some looters had already broken in; Times of London reporter James Hider witnessed as a squad of volunteers entered the building, dragged out several aspiring thieves, and aggressively strip-searched them. A second group of volunteers, some of them carrying riot batons, formed a human chain around the building. One of them passionately told Mohamed El Dahshan, “Cairo is not going to be another Baghdad.(p192)

and

By the time Mohamed El Dahshan appeared on the scene, the NDP headquarters was already in flames—but protesters and looters were still streaming in and out of the smoldering building. Several cars parked in the courtyard were burning as well, and some protesters were trying to pry open the trunks while the cars were on fire. “There were families, a guy, wife, and child pushing leather desk chairs into the street. Some guy had found a box of Qurans inside and was handing them out free to people,” El Dahshan told me. “I saw a guy coming out with three cartons of milk. Really, it was anything they could carry away.” Feeling conflicted by what he was witnessing, Abdalla climbed a set a stairs onto the October 6 Overpass—a several-miles-long structure that connects to the bridge of the same name and runs directly behind the NDP building and the Egyptian Museum. With a bird’s-eye view of a city in convulsions, he paused to reflect. “I don’t smoke, but I borrowed a cigarette from a friend. I lit it and opened my apple Fanta and watched the NDP burn for a while,” he said. “People were congratulating each other but I felt a little scared, actually. I love downtown Cairo and it was painful to see scenes of destruction. (p192)