Conduct Hearing Continues [Updated: Defendant Found Not Guilty on All Counts!]

From thosewhouseit:

If you recall, we reported a little over a week ago that our comrade Julian Martinez’s student conduct hearing for the 11/20/09 Wheeler occupation ended before it even began. It was scheduled for Friday, February 18th, but the hearing panel spent most of the evening deliberating over several procedural matters, and neither side even had the opportunity to present their respective opening statements. After graduate student panelist David Fannon recused himself, Martinez’s hearing was rescheduled for February 28th. Martinez is not the only Wheeler student currently in the hearing stage of the student conduct process, but his hearing is the only one currently open to the public. Please come out and show your support!

We’ll have info on subsequent public hearings shortly. It sounds like one of our closest comrades will have his hearing for the Wheeler occupation a week from tomorrow. We’ll post details once it’s confirmed. In the meantime, please, please, please come out to Julian’s hearing and show him some solidarity.

The hearing will begin at 5:30 pm, Monday, February 28 in Building 14 on the Clark Kerr Campus.

[Update Monday, 12:45pm]: If you want to follow the hearing, it looks like @callie_hoo will be doing some live-tweeting.

[Update Tuesday, 7:58am]: Julian found "not responsible" (i.e. not guilty) for ANY of the charges against him! This is the one of the first times a protester from November 2009 has been cleared -- and, notably, it is the only time where the defendant's "adviser" (i.e. lawyer or lawyer-like helper) has been allowed to speak. Congratulations to Julian and to his adviser Thomas Frampton! Here's the summary from thosewhouseit:

For the first time, the Berkeley Office of Student Conduct (OSC) lost its case against a student protester who occupied Wheeler Hall on 11/20/09. Julian Martinez was found not guilty on all counts. The verdict was read around 1:30 am last night at his hearing on the Clark Kerr Campus. We highly recommend reading over the de facto summary on our comrade’s live-tweet. Thomas Frampton from the Campus Rights Project (CRP) ripped it. Highlights include Thomas telling the panel he is offended as a Berkeley student that this is the standard of justice on campus; pointing out that OSC threw a charge intended for rapists at most of the Wheeler occupiers; and telling the arresting officer that he is an embarrassment to UCPD. Congrats to Julian, Thomas, and CRP, and ironic kisses to the career functionaries at OSC.

We can draw several immediate conclusions from this decision. First, of course, it demonstrates the utter incompetence of OSC, which was unable to prove (even given the absurdly low standard of proof) that one of the protesters who was arrested in Wheeler Hall during the occupation was "responsible" (i.e. guilty) for even a single charge. At times like this, such incompetence ends up working out in the favor of student protesters; most of the time, however, it works against us. The reason is that the student conduct procedure is specifically designed to hold certain kinds of people (namely, students) accountable, while consistently letting administrators and institutions at large off the hook. Thus, we should not take this as a sign that "the system works" or let down our guard in any way -- rather, we should recognize that what just happened is a flaw in the system. We should also expect that flaw to be "resolved" quickly -- much like the comment made by undergraduate member of the hearing panel on her AOL Lifestream page four days after Julian's prehearing ("Never pass up an opportunity to castrate a man") has since been removed. Don't worry -- we saved a screenshot of it. [Editor's note: As of 6/23/2020 we have edited this post to remove the identifying information of the undergraduate member of the hearing panel.]

Second, this decision demonstrates the significance of affording students their full due process rights instead of the abridged version on which the student conduct procedure is based. Julian's case is the first time a protester from the 2009 occupations has been able to have his adviser speak for him; significantly, it is also the first time all the charges have been overturned. What this demonstrates -- and this is fairly obvious, but it still needs to be said -- is that someone who is trained in dealing with such pseudo-legal matters is obviously better at it than someone who isn't. By forcing students to defend themselves, OSC and the UC administration are blatantly attempting to skew the playing field.

Third, this decision calls into question all previous and future decisions regarding protesters from the 2009 occupations. What Frampton referred to as the "three P's" during the hearing -- procedure, politics, and proof -- are more or less the same in very case, and the university has failed in each of them. All previous decisions against student protesters have therefore been reached wrongly and should be retroactively dismissed; simultaneously, all future decisions must be seen through the lens of what happened here. This will be especially true if an adviser is not allowed to speak for his or her client.

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Sick Out

From Burnt Bookmobile:

We’ve heard, from numerous sources and from talking to TAs at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, that a large and indefinite “sick out” is taking place among the teaching assistants. Exact numbers are unknown, but appears to be many. As state employees and students they are doubly effected by the new austerity measures proposed in the looming legislation at the Capitol. People who aren’t TAs or involved with teaching on campus are mostly hearing about this through rumors. Apparently there’s of a constant stream of emails in the email lists shared by the TAs, saying things like “It looks like I’m coming down with something. I’m not going to be able to teach my class. Can someone cover it?” To which others reply with “oh no, it looks as if I’m also coming down with something as well.” And this goes on and on. We can only hope that it continues, strengthening the resolve of others who are on the verge of their own collective sick outs, strikes or occupations.

Hanging by a Thread

Fuck the regents. More information here.

Berkeley Campus Monitor, Issue 2

The February/March 2011 issue of the Berkeley Campus Monitor, a broadside serving up "subterranean student news," has been released and is circulating around campus. This issue features an article by Slavoj Zizek on the revolution in Egypt, as well as articles taken from the blogs. Keep your eyes out for a hard copy, or check it out here.

Really Free School

We're a little late to the draw on this one, but it seems that on February 13 a mansion valued at £6 million and owned by film director Guy Ritchie was occupied and converted into a free school by a collective appropriately called the Really Free School. The corporate media reported:

At least 12 people have occupied the large Grade I listed property in Fitzrovia and claim they now plan to convert the building into a free school.

The collective known as the Really Free School entered Mr Ritchie's property over the weekend.

The police were called but the squatters refused to leave.

They have now placed large banners in the front windows that say "strike", "resist" and "occupy".

Occupied, or reclaimed -- "It is believed Mr Ritchie wants to convert the former language school into two homes and sources claim the cost of the refurbishment could run into millions." In any case, unfortunately the squatters were evicted on Friday, but not before throwing a party and publishing a "Call to Celebration", which is below the fold:

Shock Doctrine and Budget Crisis in California and Wisconsin

Only a crisis produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
--Milton Friedman

Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism lays out an important argument for understanding how neoliberal reforms -- which are often incredibly unpopular -- are implemented. Because these policies generate so much resistance, Klein argues, governments are generally unable to pass them through democratic means. What they do instead is take advantage of moments of crisis -- financial collapse, military coups, even so-called natural disasters -- to push through legislation that fundamentally restructures economies in ways that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. This is what Milton Friedman is getting at in the infamous quote above.

It's always important to remember, however, that these crises are not natural but actively produced. This is especially the case with economic crises. There is a tendency to talk about the financial crisis, for example, as if it were out of our hands. Even when the banks' illegal, manipulative, and exploitative practices are noticed and criticized, politicians across the political spectrum continue to talk about appropriate responses in terms of inevitability. There is no other choice. Our hands our tied. They love the phrase "difficult choices." In his State of the State address, California Governor Jerry Brown used the expression, and went on: "Do I like the choices we face?" he asked rhetorically. "No. I don't. But after serious study of the options left us by a $25 billion deficit, the budget I have proposed is the best I can devise." In the wake of his recent budget proposal, President Obama did the same and added a little something extra about "sacrifice." These are extremely common references, tropes of our current political discourse.

Obviously this is also the case with the "state of fiscal emergency" declared by UC President Mark Yudof and the UC regents in 2009. It was this crisis that UC officials used to justify the 32 percent tuition increase the forced through in November 2009. Far from natural or unavoidable, however, both the crisis and the tuition hike were planned and produced. Not only did those responsible for the UC's investments lose $23 billion in 2008-2009, but as Bob Meister has demonstrated convincingly the UC committed itself to raising student fees long before the so-called financial crisis hit:

To people in the financial world, it’s already obvious that UC committed itself to raise tuition and cut budgets when it decided in 2004 to secure its bonds. Most of my UC colleagues -- faculty, students and staff -- nevertheless find it unthinkable that UC would actually raise tuition and cut instruction in order to fund construction. People understand that UC wants to build. What’s unthinkable is that UC would still want to build rather than protect its programs and people when other great universities, including Harvard, indefinitely postponed new construction when their endowment income fell.

In fact, it turns out that the UC actually benefits from reductions in state funding, at least as far as its bonds and capital projects agenda are concerned. State funding cannot be used as bond collateral, but student tuition can.

Not only are current reductions in state funding a drop in the bucket of UC’s total endowment -- and nothing compared to the growing revenue of the university’s profit-generating wings -- it is also the case that UC administration has powerful motives to both collaborate with the continuing divestment of state funding and to divert its own resources from spending on instruction. . . . "I’m here today to tell you," said [UC Berkeley graduate student Annie] McClanahan, "that when students and their parents have to borrow at 8 or 10 or 14% interest so that the UC can maintain its credit rating and its ability to borrow at a .2% lower rate of interest, we the students are not only collateral, we are collateral damage."

Something similar is happening right now in Wisconsin at the state level, where the new governor has used the specter of massive deficits to attempt to destroy the state's unions. While his proposal includes some budget cuts,  what is most striking -- and most damaging -- is the attempt to eliminate or at least severely curtail the ability of public employees unions to engage in collective bargaining. Educators are obviously a huge target, and in response teachers and students across the state have staged massive walkouts and work stoppages. Once again, as Brian Beutler has shown, not only the budget crisis story but the budget crisis itself -- the entire basis of the political intervention -- is completely manufactured:

Wisconsin's new Republican governor has framed his assault on public worker's collective bargaining rights as a needed measure of fiscal austerity during tough times.

The reality is radically different. Unlike true austerity measures -- service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money -- rolling back worker's bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own. But Walker's doing it anyhow, to knock down a barrier and allow him to cut state employee benefits immediately.

Furthermore, this broadside comes less than a month after the state's fiscal bureau -- the Wisconsin equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office -- concluded that Wisconsin isn't even in need of austerity measures, and could conclude the fiscal year with a surplus. In fact, they say that the current budget shortfall is a direct result of tax cut policies Walker enacted in his first days in office.

The point, then, is not that there's no crisis, that there's nothing wrong. Rather, what's important to remember is simply that disaster capitalism and economic austerity are not a inevitable response to disaster, "natural" or otherwise. Indeed, they are not a response at all: the production of crisis is not exterior to, but a necessary component of, economic shock. The shock doctrine actively generates crisis in order to create the appearance of the accident, the natural, the unavoidable.

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More info on the Wisconsin protests is at The Burnt Bookmobile (we found our way there via occupyca). Among other things they've posted the text of a communiqué that was circulating at the takeover of the capitol building the other day:

Crisis isn’t simply what happens to us. We aren’t victims with no agency who desire a return to a capitalism that works. We understand that capitalism is working. This is what it does. But what do we do? How do we escape the order of established politics and protest and enter into resistance? How do we render the world which alienates us inoperative and become a force capable of being the contradiction that tears it apart? How shall we become the crisis?

We propose: Choose to be partisans in this war which has already started. Block the economy, strike, occupy, and sabotage.

We respond to Scott Walker, his policies, and what he represents, but we must become a force that makes all positions of power obsolete. It will then no longer matter what politicians think or do. It will only matter what we do.

[Update Sunday, 5:19pm]: I missed this yesterday. In this video, Naomi Klein discusses the shock doctrine in the context of what's happening in Wisconsin. Take a look at the video and note the underlying assumption of Klein's formulation here: "Lo and behold you have a budget crisis, you exaggerate the extent of the crisis, and you say, 'We don't have any alternative but to push through these very unpopular measures.'" What she is suggesting, in other words, is that crisis is external to these political games. Crisis just is -- what the politicians do is exaggerate it. But, as the case of Wisconsin demonstrates, crisis is made, at times in carefully calculated ways.

[Update #2, Friday 2/25]: Even Paul Krugman's on board now.

Berkeley Campus Monitor

Issue 1, January 2011, contains both original pieces and some stuff taken off the blogs. The next issue, which should be coming out in the next couple days, will include Operational Excellence, political issues in the greater Bay Area, and more -- keep your eyes out for it.

Preliminary Hearing for UC Merced Student Facing Felony Charges

UC Merced student Peter Howell, who was arraigned on December 28 after being subjected to a full-fledged manhunt by UCSF police, continues to face criminal charges stemming from the protest at the UC Regents' meeting at UCSF Mission Bay last November. The most serious of these charges is a felony, for allegedly taking the baton of and attacking UC Irvine police officer Jared Kemper, who pulled his gun on and threatened unarmed protesters. As thosewhouseit has convincingly documented (here and here), the charges are completely absurd -- KTVU's video of the incident clearly shows Kemper violently pushing his way through a group of students and in the process dropping his baton on the ground. Nevertheless, at his arraignment the judge refused to consider reducing the felony charge to a misdemeanor.

We have just received word that Peter's preliminary hearing will take place on Tuesday, Feb 22 at 9am in room 10 at 850 Bryant in San Francisco. Come out to support him!