Just returned from my second long walk of the day, this one accompanied by my mom, which was fun.  I still need help getting the code in my sidebar left-justified again.  If anyone knows what i need to do, please please please let me know.  (That means you, phoebe or alyssa, whose coding skills are far superior to mine.  Sorry Josh, i love ya, but i trust you about as much with electronics as i do with directions.)

 

Like Evan, i have also been told that i resemble Harry Potter.  Not by 36 year old men in gay chatrooms, but, in fact, by my roomate for the past two years, Grace, right before she decided to cut my hair back in october.  (I wonder if that hair-cutting ought to be lumped, in retrospect, into the larger trend of post-strike hair mutilation by UOC members, by which i was initially so repulsed.) 

 

Michael Berube, a Penn State Cultural Studies Professor who is a staunch defender of the graduate student labor movement, in a blog entry today places the blame for last week's execrable NLRB disgrace on none other than Ralph Nader. 

 

Full disclosure: I voted for Nader in 2000, albeit in a district (New Haven's first ward) where Nader beat Bush and Gore beat both by a huge landslide and in a state which Gore carried easily.  Had i not voted for Nader, i would not have voted, because 1) Gore was running a right wing campaign i, as an anarchist, would never have been able to support, and 2)as a New York resident then transplanted to New Haven, Connecticut, my vote wouldn't have made a difference no matter who i voted for.  I ultimately voted not because i was enthusiastic about Nader - i was and remain deeply skeptical about electoral models of social change, and Nader's latest campaign has made concessions to the far right on the critical issue of immigration, employing the discourse of "absorbtion rates" and illegality, which i find completely unnaceptable.  I voted in the 2000 election because i felt like it, and i didn't vote again until 2003, when i voted for Vic Edgerton's ward 9 alder campaign.  (He lost to Elizabeth Addonizio, who had the backing of New Haven's democratic party machine and still hasn't secured the construction of that monorail promised in her campaign literature.)  In the 2004 election, i will vote, i think, even though my vote will mean nothing in this election, because George W. Bush is a fascist and voting him out is just one more of many nonviolent ways in which i plan to tell his administration to do what Mr Cheney urged Senator Leahy to pursue on the senate floor last month.  And i'll vote for Kerry, not Nader, because this time around i think the Nader campaign is, as i have said, deeply problematic, because i don't trust him any more than i trust Kerry (which is not very much at all, and because my vote means nothing either way, and because Kerry supports Card Check Neutrality agreements which the Bush recess appointee-stacked NLRB is threatening to rule against.

 

Ok, now that all that's out of the way, i think Berube's argument here doesn't hold weight.  I have never accepted the argument that Ralph Nader is responsible for the Bush presidency.  Had Gore engaged with his party's left wing in an honest way during the 2000 elections, had he continued to fight the legislative and de facto disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida and of thousands of others through ballot "malfunction," Bush could have been soundly beaten.  Positing Nader as the individual ultimately responsible for Bush's presidency, let alone the NLRB dismisses as inevitable a concrete set of processes through which a New Haven born scion of privilege essentially bought or was given state power through an alliance of powerful capitalist interests, radical right wing politicians, and the power structure of the New Right fundamentalist movements.  Even Kerry has made more overtures to the post-Seattle social movements than his predecessor on the Democratic ticket.  Berube's attack on Nader strikes me as not sufficiently differentiating itself from alarmist denunciations of unwitting fifth-columnists who have accidentally hand-delivered the country and the fate of the academic labor movement to monolithic right-wing forces of ineffable damnation.  I don't think this was ever the case.  Gore won the 2000 election after all, and is not president today not because of Ralph Nader, but rather a complex set of occurences which tranpired prior to, during, and following the election and for which we ought to blame the Bush family, Katherine Harris, and five supreme court justices.  But what seems more important to me is that we look elsewhere than Nader for the structural causes of the NLRB decision  Although, as i noted in my comments on Mr. Berube's blog, i have questions about whether this is really a worthwhile pursuit at this point.

 

The first guest to sleep at the second Bush White House was Richard Charles Levin, the neoliberal economist president of Yale University, whose antiunion management tactics have been well documented and whose administration's outrageous union busting and attempts intimidate and discriminate against what i believe is the longest currently active organizing drive at a private university Berube has discussed powerfully in his contribution to the "Yale Strike Dossier" in Social Text 49 and later included in Cary Nelson ed., Will Teach For Food: Academic Labor In Crisis.  Levin has been perhaps the strongest and most influential voice against graduate student organizing at private universities, joined by administrators like Columbia president Lee Bollinger and University of Pennsylvania's outgoing president Judith Rodin, a former anti-union dean of Yale's graduate school.  Since their post-election rapprochement, Levin and Bush seem to be getting along famously - the first family stayed at the Levins' house when George delivered his commencement address to the graduating class of 2001  and Bush named Slick Rick to his farcical "weapons of mass destruction" panel back in February.  (Leading to my whole "weapons of class instruction" schtick, in case anyone forgot.  I'm milking it for all i can.)  I agree very much that the Brown Decision needs to be situated in the context of the Bush attack on workers, but i think it also needs to be seen in the context of the long and sordid history of university administrators using whatever means available to them to try crush movements to create more just, democratic, and diverse visions of the academy.  This seems both a more immediate and more profound place to locate the culpability, as it were, for last week's decision.  The question which remains then, is "what do we do about it."  (And "elect Kerry" doesn't seem nearly enough given the fact that even with a Kerry victory, as Phoebe has noted, it may take years before this ruling can be thrown out.)  Clearly, this weekend's CGEU conference at Columbia is going to be very important.  I feel like we should start mobilizing as soon as possible - those of us who aren't currently graduate employees - not only to defend the right to organize, but to push for the vision of teaching and learning that unions like GSEU, GET-UP, GSOC, and GESO have been struggling to make possible.

 

Note: this post took over two hours to complete and i'm not sure how coherent it wound up being.  I guess i'll have to shore up loose ends tomorrow or something.