UC Regents Meeting, July 12-14: Class War Edition

Today the UC regents officially voted to once again raise student tuition while at the same time increasing compensation for high level execs:

SAN FRANCISCO -- University of California Regents voted Thursday to raise tuition by 9.6 percent -- on top of an 8 percent increase already approved for this fall -- over the objections of students who said they'll drown in debt.

At the same meeting, the regents also gave large pay raises to three executives, including two who are paid from state funds.

This fall, undergraduate tuition will rise to $12,192, more than 18 percent higher than last year's $10,302 -- a level that prompted violent student protests. With a mandatory campus fee of $1,026, a year at UC now costs $13,218 before room and board.

That's more than twice what it cost in 2005.

If austerity is class war, as our compañeros at Bay of Rage like to say, then these repeated tuition hikes should be considered a weapon in the administrative arsenal. Notably, the regents themselves relied heavily on war rhetoric today in discussing student tuition. Sherry Lansing, the regents' recently inaugurated chairperson who stumbled through the motions of her new role today, called for students to join with "staff and chancellors and all of us" to "continue this battle." For his part, Richard Blum, husband of U.S. senator Dianne Feinstein, huge investor in for-profit education, and perhaps the single most corrupt of all the regents, outlined what he saw as the first step of this battle as follows: "we should determine who our friends are and who are our enemies."

We too see what's happening at the universities -- and in every other sector of this country -- as a form of war. But we draw different lines around our friends and our enemies. For regents like Blum and Lansing, the enemies are students, workers, and faculty. Each of these groups constitutes a target to be attacked via specialized instruments of war: tuition hikes for students, layoffs and wage cuts for workers and (to a lesser extent) faculty. That is why we are the crisis and the job of the university's corporate management is precisely that -- to manage the crisis, to manage us.

(image from the daily cal, quotes via dettman)

Communique from Anticut 3

[Update Wednesday 4:48 pm]: For full coverage of Anticut 3, there's a reportback from Bay of Rage here, another one from Surf City Revolt here, a third by Reginald James here. Pictures are up on Indybay here and here.

Yesterday, Anticut 3 marched through downtown Oakland, stopping outside the jail and chanting so loud -- "Inside! Outside! We're all on the same side!" -- and generally making so much noise that prisoners inside could be heard banging on the windows in response. Expect a reportback soon, but for now here's the media's take:

OAKLAND -- A vociferous but peaceful protest turned heads Friday evening as a group of about 100 marched through downtown Oakland in solidarity with Pelican Bay State Prison inmates who are on a hunger strike and the victim of Sunday's BART shooting.

Also, be sure to check out the statement that was handed out during the march:

Now, finally, the money is gone. The world has run out of future, used it up, wasted it on the grotesque fantasies of the rich, on technologies of death and alienation, on dead cities. Everywhere the same refrain, the same banners and headlines: there is nothing left for you. From the US to Greece, from Chile to Spain, whatever human face the State might have had: gone. The State is no longer a provider of education or care, jobs or housing. It is just a police force, a prison system, a bureaucracy with guns. . .

Sometimes, maybe, we get treated to some political theater: faked expressions of concern or outrage from the puffy, grimacing faces. But the result is always the same – in Oakland, in Sacramento, in Washington, in the offices of the IMF – whatever the owners of wealth want, they get. The rest of us are sacrificed on the altar of the bottom line.

No money on which to retire after a lifetime of crushing work. No money to go to college. No money for the grade schools and high schools, which every day look more and more like prisons. No money for the people maimed, sickened and driven insane by this unbearable society.

We could go through the new California budget line by line, but you basically already know what it contains. It’s not a budget but a bludgeon. Every line says the same thing: Fuck you. Die.

There is no money. And yet, still, we live in a society of vast, almost obscene wealth: blocks of homes sit empty, mountains of luxury goods glut the shopping emporia, unused factories and equipment gather rust. All of it under the spell of a strange collective hallucination called “property.” All of it protected by cops and the threat of prison. . .

Yes, the money is gone and there is no future. No future for capitalism. All attempts at reform are now as absurd as making home repairs while the rest of the house is on fire.

Anticut 3: Austerity is Prison

The latest from Bay of Rage:

//July 8th, 6:00 sharp, don’t be late//
//Intersection of Broadway and Telegraph//

against capitalism
against austerity
against prisons
in solidarity with the Pelican Bay hunger strike

This is the third in a series of anti-austerity actions designed to resist and make visible the new age of austerity and crisis in which we find ourselves. As many will know, the state of California recently passed a devastating budget, inflicting deep cuts to health care programs, universities and community colleges, public assistance grants, mental health, and programs for the elderly and disabled. Resistance is more necessary than ever. Since it has become clear that neither corporations nor the state can provide jobs or resources for us, we need to begin providing for each other directly. To do that, we first need to get together, get organized and get going. This is what Anticut 3 is about.

But because any attempt to fight the austerity regime will be met by state repression -- which we saw a glimpse of during Anticut 2 -- and because the current budget will swell California’s already overcrowded prisons, we have decided that this next action should stand in direct solidarity with the important hunger strike by prisoners at the notorious Pelican Bay “Supermax” prison. Anticut 3 is dedicated to articulating the links between austerity and the prison system.

• be on time; we leave at 6:00 pm sharp
• bring noisemakers! pots and pans, horns, etc
• bring friends, banners, propaganda
• let’s keep each other safe
• for more information on the newly-passed California austerity budget, read this
• for more information about the Pelican Bay hunger strike, visit this website

also, be sure to make it to our comrades’ action in SF on July 7th: Take Back the Day

[Update Thursday 12:48 pm]: The Pelican Bay hunger strike is spreading -- even the official numbers (which are most likely underestimates) suggest that 6,600 prisoners from 13 of the state's 33 prisons are refusing to eat.

Also, if you can't make it to Anticut 3 on Friday, there are a number of other actions planned for this weekend. Check them out here, along with a couple new propaganda posters you can download and post around. As always, austerity is accompanied by the deployment state violence -- the murder of Charles Hill by BART cops last Sunday night is only the most recent and extreme example, but it can't be separated from the everyday violence of the prison-industrial complex. Solidarity with the Pelican Bay hunger strike!

The Strategic Value of Summer

Summer means no students -- for the UC administration, that means the absence of one of the largest obstacles to their privatizing designs. There's a similar logic in the UC regents' decision to hold their meetings at UCSF Mission Bay. It is a highly strategic space: not only is it extremely out of the way and difficult to get to from Berkeley, but it's also located in what is essentially a post-industrial wasteland, with little else around to provide cover. After thousands protested the meeting at UCLA in November 2009 to approve the original 32 percent tuition hike, it seems the regents decided to retire to less accessible locations.

Summer vacation is the temporal version of UCSF Mission Bay. It's not surprising that it was in July 2009 that the regents voted to give UC president Mark Yudof "emergency powers" due to the "state of financial emergency," which gave the administration unilateral authority to impose austerity measures. Especially as "shared governance" becomes less and less of a reality, we should expect more and more executive decisions to be made and policies to be approved at this time of the year.

The title of this article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel is right on: "During Serenity of Summer, UCSC Implements 'Painful' Cuts."

SANTA CRUZ -- UC Santa Cruz's wooded campus is relatively serene in the early days of the more quiet summer session.

Beneath the tranquility though, the campus is set to execute another round of cuts including laying off roughly 50 non-academic employees in what has become an annual occurrence since 2008.

The layoffs go into effect on Friday, July 1, the start of the new fiscal year. In addition to layoffs, workers are seeing their hours (and pay) cut back. As expected, these cuts will primarily affect non-academic workers. (While there are no layoffs on the academic side of things, 40 more faculty positions that are currently empty, and 120 teaching assistantships for graduate students, will be permanently eliminated.) While UC spokespeople talk about how much much their work is valued, they acknowledge that the student-as-consumer is the primary target.

"After years of reductions in state support, we've gotten to the point where every corner of the campus has been impacted by these cuts," UCSC spokesman Jim Burns said. "It's also true that units farther from the classroom have been particularly hard hit -- not because the campus doesn't value those areas and the people working in them. But because we have tried to the extent possible to reduce cuts to the academic areas in an effort to protect student access to the courses they need."

Much like the tuition increases, however, these poverty wages are not a function of the so-called financial crisis. Rather, it's a function of a class war that's been occurring for decades:

During her two decades at UCSC, [custodian Rosario] Cortez has held several second jobs, including other custodial positions and a job at a bread factory. Currently she works five days a week at UCSC, eight hours a day, where she earns about $2,200 a month after taxes, then makes and sells tamales on the weekends for extra income.

Cortez's sentiments were echoed by Ernesto Encinas, a cook at UCSC who cares for his 86-year-old mother and 14-year-old son.

"Everyone I know has a second job," Encinas said. "There is no rest with the wages we make here. You can't make ends meet with just the one job with the way cost of living keeps rising. Any little change in our income can be devastating."

With these cuts comes not a decrease in the amount of work expected but precisely the opposite: speedup. Custodians, for example, are required to clean more areas during a single shift. Administrators get around this in a curious way -- by telling workers, apparently, to "clean less," that is, to do a worse job at cleaning more areas. It's a recipe for disaster -- especially in the context of ongoing layoffs, this amounts to an incredibly difficult balancing act for the workers. On this note, check out what an asshole Jim Dunne, the director of UCSC's physical plants department, is:

"I have heard [the complaints]," Dunne said. "We often only have a few months to implement changes and rework how we do things. We are making a lot of effort to communicate to custodians what that redesign is, but adjustment takes time. It is a difficult situation for both sides. Custodians take a lot of pride in their work. When you tell them to clean something less, that's hard for them."

Yeah, that's the only thing that's hard for them.

If they ever doubted it before, UC administrators now understand that the best time to implement austerity are the summer months. Summer evacuates much of the potential resistance -- with students and faculty mostly away, the only thing standing in the way are the workers, precisely those hardest hit by the cutbacks. It also functions usefully as a time barrier -- one of the administration's most effective tactics is simply to wait protesters out. (Look at what's happened with the last two hunger strikes at UC Berkeley.) Finally, summer marks the point at which many veteran student protesters graduate and move on. For anti-austerity protesters, it will become increasingly important to incorporate the summer into strategic thinking. This does not necessarily imply a need for stable organizing structures, which contribute their own problems, but it does indicate the need to directly address and even intervene in some way during these months. After all, the success of the walkout on September 24, 2009 depended on the work that was done by students, faculty, and workers before the school year had even begun. This does not necessarily have to take place on campus. It could also mean looking to other organizing bodies outside the spaces of the university that are attempting to build capacity for resistance against austerity.

If fall is the moment of attack, and after the fall the moment of reflection, then before the fall is clearly the moment of preparation. But maybe it's time to rethink this calendar?

Books, Banks, & Pigs: A Report on Anticut 2

Check out the full write-up at Bay of Rage.

The Oakland Book Bloc

A quick write-up on this afternoon's action:

Anticut 2 disrupted downtown Oakland this afternoon in an anticapitalist defense of the libraries. 75 people took the streets of downtown in the face of an ominous police presence. Crowds walking by and waiting for buses cheered on the action as banks locked down in fear of the disruption. At one point, police attacked the crowd and arrested multiple people but failed to halt the movement of the action. The mobile disruption ended at the downtown Oakland Library Branch where it was greeted by local librarians. 14 out 18 libraries in Oakland are facing closure due to the proposed budget by the city.

For context, a genealogy of the book bloc, plus some previous coverage on this blog. More to come soon.

Anticut 2 Tomorrow!

The latest updates on tomorrow's action from Bay of Rage:

Take the streets of Oakland this Friday, June 17!

• mobile blockade & march against austerity plans in Oakland:
3:00pm @ Telegraph & Broadway in downtown

• ending in a gathering and street party in solidarity with the fight for the Oakland libraries:
5:30pm @ 14th & Oak, in front of main library branch

+ Food Not Bombs will be serving at the 5:30pm street party
so even if you can’t make the 3pm action come join us afterwards!

bring your banners, propaganda and friends to manifest the second in a series of counterausterity marches and events planned for the summer

the statements that will be handed out during this action are now available online! check them out here and here!

“The city itself is a bank, a dazzling accumulation of wealth, increasingly withdrawn from our lives and stashed in broad daylight, policed with public funds for the enrichment of a few. Join us in jamming, temporarily, these circuits of dispossession.”
read the full invite here

“Austerity is not just cutting a school budget. It is not just closing libraries. It’s filling prisons and killing poor people, as the alternative to the libraries, schools, and services they cut. It’s a whole system of “crisis” that makes the poor pay for the problems caused by the rich.”
read the invite handed out during protests against Mehserle’s release

Anticut 2: Let's Block Everything!

From Bay of Rage:

This is the second in a series of counterausterity marches and events we have planned for the summer, in order to begin assembling an anticapitalist force capable of combating the current age of budget cuts and economic violence. This second event is a disruption -- a mobile blockade -- meant to interrupt, temporarily, the business as usual which economic crisis ever more desperately imposes as the public face of private wealth. For every library and school closure, ten ATMs spring up overnight, circulating ever more swiftly the wealth, looted via predatory lending and home foreclosures. This is not news. Just as globally the US seeks to prop up brutal plutocracies and autocrats in order to maintain its grip on oil reserves and military outposts in the face of popular revolts, so, too, in Oakland we daily confront mechanisms meant to insure our passivity in the face of dispossession: pernicious sit-lie laws, skyrocketing tuition, mounting layoffs and rising unemployment. The city itself is a bank, a dazzling accumulation of wealth, increasingly withdrawn from our lives and stashed in broad daylight, policed with public funds for the enrichment of a few. Join us in jamming, temporarily, these circuits of dispossession.

The action will start at the intersection of Broadway and Telegraph in downtown Oakland on Friday, June 17, at 3 pm. Anticut 2 flyer here. Also worth checking out: during last Sunday's protest about the release of Johannes Mehserle, the BART cop who murdered Oscar Grant, an invitation to Anticut 2 was distributed as well.

Interview: Austerity and the Anticut Actions

This interview aired on a pirate radio show called Relatos Zapatistas (via Indybay):

interview with the compañero ilya on the "anticut 1" action which took place in downtown oakland on june 3. conversation includes a working definition of austerity, the relationship between austerity and gentrification, between austerity and the police, and the difficulties of articulating an anti-austerity politics from an anti-state position. (mp3, 23 min)

A Message to Occupied Oakland in a Time of Cuts and Crisis

The following statement was distributed last night during the Anticut 1 action last night:

Now that the banks have been bailed out and the rich treated to yet another tax cut, our libraries and schools, already devastated, are once again on the chopping-block, while our elderly and poor are turned out on the street. Heavily armed cops with increased powers roam our city’s streets, threatening anyone who steps out of line. Times have never been better, in other words, for the rich.

It’s not as if things weren’t already pretty bad. Each one of us is a casualty of the economy, in one way or another -- jobs that pay next to nothing or no jobs at all, rent that keeps increasing, gas prices that double overnight, student loans we’ll never be able to pay back. But what is most distressing of all is how little we are able to do about this, how little control we seem to have over these things. Perhaps, though, our lack of control is not so complete. On nights like this, with all of us in the street together, we remember that when people number in the hundreds and the thousands they can do nearly anything. Laws, it seems, apply to individuals, not crowds.

In Oakland, of course, the legacy of Black Panthers remains inescapable. The Panthers, we remember, were not merely indignant. They did something about it. They organized themselves. They did not simply petition the ruling powers for more resources but took what they needed, as necessary. And what the state couldn’t provide, they would. This is the meaning of their Free Breakfast programs for school children, their Free Clothing programs, their libraries and crossing guards. So, we understand that the decision-makers will never give us what we want because it’s not something they can give. And although the street is merely a small portion of what we must reclaim, it’s a crucial start. Without this public space for us to meet each other and organize, outside of our homes and jobs, nothing could even begin to happen.

So, tonight, we are in the streets in resistance. We will be here until we no longer need to be.

Our second march, Anticut 2, meets on June 17th in the afternoon. For more specific info, check out BAYOFRAGE.COM

Here's a halfsheet PDF version for printing.

[Update Sunday 7:34 pm]: For more information about the action, check out this reportback which includes some photos.

Anticut 1 / Downtown Oakland / Tomorrow!

Don't forget:

Oakland: Friday June 3, during Art Murmur

- Gather at 7:30, Broadway @ Telegraph,
- Guerrilla Film Screening at 9:30 following march

*Note: There’s a chance of some scattered showers tomorrow night. We’ll be there either way.

Anticut 1: Friday, June 3

From Bay of Rage, a new anti-capitalist initiative in the Bay Area:

This is the first in a series of counterausterity marches and events we have planned for this summer, in order to begin assembling an anticapitalist force capable of combating the current age of budget cuts and economic violence. This initial event -- a roving street party ending in a guerrilla film-screening -- coincides with First Friday and Art Murmur because we want to draw attention to the fact that while the gentrification of certain areas of Oakland continues via mechanisms like First Friday, the majority of Oakland residents will face a new round of punishing budgets cuts, staggering levels of unemployment and an increasingly militarized police force. This is no accident. Just as on a national level the money cut from education and public assistance reappears as bank bailouts and tax cuts for the rich, the wealth squeezed out of certain parts of Oakland reappears in other parts of the city, in the form of art galleries and expensive restaurants, new condominiums and police weapons. So come take the streets with us on Friday night as we show our power.

We expect this to be a disruptive but relatively low-risk event. Our intent is to build up momentum, energy and intensity over the course of the summer.

Get your flyers for Anticut #1 here

Also, mark your calendars now. Anticut #2 will be taking the streets on the afternoon of June 17 at the same location. More info to come.

Also, check out these thoughts from Socialism and/or Barbarism and this killer analysis of austerity:

The only possible response to the antinomies of anti-austerity politics -- which breakdown all too often into a fight between anti-tax and pro-welfare populisms -- is to say that if we had direct, immediate access to such things, we would need neither state provision nor its powers of taxation. Only when capital is a natural, unsurpassable horizon does this appear as a real problem.