Where Were You The Day That Hip Hop Died?

It is officially both too late to mourn and too late to ride. Minstrel show.

Tonight was brought to you by
Oliver Nelson's "Stolen Moments"
The Clash's "Death or Glory"
that shitty Killers song A and I were ironically "dancing" to
random dude from my high school who is also A's roomate's ex who was randomly at random bar.
Excuse 17's "Hope You Feel Bad"
Stars' Set Yourself On Fire
My New Pornographers T-shirt with a stylized cartoon panda on it.
the bass guitar player in high school who had stickers on the back of his instrument which spelled out "NOBODY KNOWS I'M A LESBIAN."

we grew up in spite of it

I have Against Me!'s "Baby I'm an Anarchist" stuck in my head today, a song which I have always kind of loathed for what seems to me a fetishization of radicalism qua radicalism, a shallow and privileged investment in a transparent and extraordinarily limited genealogy of struggle which stops when and where more complex relationships to work and capital and the state become evident and necessary. And no, I'm not saying I'm not an anarchist (though I have many frustrations only in part encapsulated by Andy Cornell's trenchant intervention in his letter in Letters From Young Activists) nor am I talking here about a capitulation to the kind of liberal pathologies Phil Ochs and Josh Eidelson expertly demarcate.

And then there's the HOD...

I listened to Giant Steps tonight for the first time since god knows when. If I were Alek I would tell you that "Syeeda's Song Flute" and "Mr. P.C." are both underrated, but I am not. (And nothing on that album is particularly overrated, although when "Naima" is getting namedropped by Talib Kweli (albeit a decade ago and under somewhat erroneous pretenses (if he loved Naima so much, what do we do about Alice? Or maybe that makes Kweli's simile somewhat more profound than it would otherwise seem), maybe it's more, um, overdetermined. I think I swore to myself I'd never use that phrase on this blog, which hasn't been much of anything lately due to other commitments and/or boredom and/or a lack of interest in or ability to organizing my thoughts and frustrations for pixellation. I like Giant Steps so much more than My Favorite Things. My Favorite Things revolves around the soprano sax, does not involve Paul Chambers, and includes two standards. However revolutionary the melodic phrasings Coltrane et al employ here, I've always found Giant Steps more exciting and rewarding. Maybe that makes me a philistine. I am ok with that.

Ok, Hora Decubitus. Speaking of which I was walking up 5th ave in sunset park today whistling "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" and thinking about the time i missed my cue on "work song" in a concert in 10th grade. And wikipedia says Paul Chambers died of Tuberculosis not heroin, which means someone lied to me in high school.

YNHH is attempting to block discovery by the union's own arbitrator to gauge executive involvement in anti-union intimidation violating last year's conduct agreement as well as NLRB law.

According to the order, one representative of IRI Consultants to Management, Lou Bardi, met 17 times with “executive leadership to review the campaign,” as well as seven times with “key executives” and 11 times with “senior” and other leaders. Jim Trivisonno, CEO of IRI, also met five times with senior leaders and “management.”

Although the document does not explicitly accuse specific administrators of misrepresenting their role in the anti-union campaign, Meyerson said the document brings into question the extent of Borgstrom’s and other leaders’ interactions with consultants.

“The more we learn, the worse it gets,” he said. “There’s still more to learn, and I suspect it’s going to get worse.”

Petrini said he was unsure what “executive” referred to, though he said senior leadership includes about 40 vice presidents and top directors.

But Kern appears to include Borgstrom among the executives who met with the consultants. In the written order, she juxtaposes the list of meetings with Borgstrom’s statement that there was “insufficient hospital oversight” of the consultants. According to the order, Borgstrom testified on Feb. 12 that she had met Bardi and Trivisonno once in July 2006 and then seen them periodically in the hallways. Immediately following that in the document, Kern enumerates the 40 meetings, as well as 45 other invoices for strategic assistance and advice provided to the hospital during the campaign.

IRI was hired to advise the hospital on how to work within the bounds of the Election Principles Agreement signed last March, Petrini said. The company focuses on preventing unions from forming but is not considered to be one of the most aggressive at union-busting. “Union avoidance” firms, as they often call themselves, now constitute a several-hundred-million dollar industry annually.

Another IRI consultant, Ted Pilonero, attended at least 15 voluntary employee meetings over five months before the union election scheduled for Dec. 20 and 21, according to the invoices. These meetings were later found by Kern to be improper under the election agreement.

Hospital administrators have maintained publicly that senior officials at the hospital knew nothing about the meetings until Dec. 6 because they were implemented independently by IRI. The arbitrator’s order states that Borgstrom had told Kern that she, the hospital’s chief operating officer Richard D’Aquila and labor relations head Ed Dowling all were unaware of the meetings until Dec. 6.

Kern implies in the order that Borgstrom’s testimony was misleading.

“It is to be noted that the June, July, September, October, November and December monthly invoices are date stamped as having been received in the office of Ed Dowling,” she wrote.

this is saturday.

you should go to it. Judson Memorial Church 12-3. That's West 4th and Thompson.

And the NYT reports on the outsourcing of the financial aid office to lending corporations.

Corin Tucker covered "Can't Hardly Wait?" What?!!?

NYT: "City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention"

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.

From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.

They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.

From these operations, run by the department’s “R.N.C. Intelligence Squad,” the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.

But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. A police report on an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was planning concerts on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would be political speeches and videos.

“Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda,” said the report, dated Oct. 9, 2003. “Police departments in above listed areas have been contacted regarding this event.”

Police records indicate that in addition to sharing information with other police departments, New York undercover officers were active themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe.

The operation was mounted in 2003 after the Police Department, invoking the fresh horrors of the World Trade Center attack and the prospect of future terrorism, won greater authority from a federal judge to investigate political organizations for criminal activity.

To date, as the boundaries of the department’s expanded powers continue to be debated, police officials have provided only glimpses of its intelligence-gathering.

Now, the broad outlines of the pre-convention operations are emerging from records in federal lawsuits that were brought over mass arrests made during the convention, and in greater detail from still-secret reports reviewed by The New York Times. These include a sample of raw intelligence documents and of summary digests of observations from both the field and the department’s cyberintelligence unit.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, confirmed that the operation had been wide-ranging, and said it had been an essential part of the preparations for the huge crowds that came to the city during the convention.

“Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in advance what was coming our way,” Mr. Browne said. When the detectives went out of town, he said, the department usually alerted the local authorities by telephone or in person.

Under a United States Supreme Court ruling, undercover surveillance of political groups is generally legal, but the police in New York — like those in many other big cities — have operated under special limits as a result of class-action lawsuits filed over police monitoring of civil rights and antiwar groups during the 1960s. The limits in New York are known as the Handschu guidelines, after the lead plaintiff, Barbara Handschu.

“All our activities were legal and were subject in advance to Handschu review,” Mr. Browne said.

Before monitoring political activity, the police must have “some indication of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or organization to be investigated,” United States District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. said in a ruling last month.

Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention, said the Police Department stepped beyond the law in its covert surveillance program.

“The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and this wide-ranging N.Y.P.D. program was wrong and illegal,” Mr. Dunn said. “In the coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us many more details about its preconvention surveillance of groups and activists, and many will be shocked by the breadth of the Police Department’s political surveillance operation.”

The Police Department said those complaints were overblown.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the convention lawsuits are scheduled to begin depositions of David Cohen, the deputy police commissioner for intelligence. Mr. Cohen, a former senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency, was “central to the N.Y.P.D.’s efforts to collect intelligence information prior to the R.N.C.,” Gerald C. Smith, an assistant corporation counsel with the city Law Department, said in a federal court filing.

Balancing Safety and Surveillance

For nearly four decades, the city, civil liberties lawyers and the Police Department have fought in federal court over how to balance public safety, free speech and the penetrating but potentially disruptive force of police surveillance.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Raymond W. Kelly, who became police commissioner in January 2002, “took the position that the N.Y.P.D. could no longer rely on the federal government alone, and that the department had to build an intelligence capacity worthy of the name,” Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Cohen contended that surveillance of domestic political activities was essential to fighting terrorism. “Given the range of activities that may be engaged in by the members of a sleeper cell in the long period of preparation for an act of terror, the entire resources of the N.Y.P.D. must be available to conduct investigations into political activity and intelligence-related issues,” Mr. Cohen wrote in an affidavit dated Sept. 12, 2002.

In February 2003, the Police Department, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s support, was given broad new authority by Judge Haight to conduct such monitoring. However, a senior police official must still determine that there is some indication of illegal activity before an inquiry is begun.

An investigation by the Intelligence Division led to the arrest — coincidentally, three days before the convention — of a man who spoke about bombing the Herald Square subway station. In another initiative, detectives were stationed in Europe and the Middle East to quickly funnel information back to New York.

When the city was designated in February 2003 as the site of the 2004 Republican National Convention, the department had security worries — in particular about the possibility of a truck bomb attack near Madison Square Garden, where events would be held — and logistical concerns about managing huge crowds, Mr. Browne said.

“We also prepared to contend with a relatively small group of self-described anarchists who vowed to prevent delegates from participating in the convention or otherwise disrupt the convention by various means, including vandalism,” Mr. Browne said. “Our goal was to safeguard delegates, demonstrators and the general public alike.”

In its preparations, the department applied the intelligence resources that had just been strengthened for fighting terrorism to an entirely different task: collecting information on people participating in political protests.

In the records reviewed by The Times, some of the police intelligence concerned people and groups bent on causing trouble, but the bulk of the reports covered the plans and views of people with no obvious intention of breaking the law.

By searching the Internet, investigators identified groups that were making plans for demonstrations. Files were created on their political causes, the criminal records, if any, of the people involved and any plans for civil disobedience or disruptive tactics.

From the field, undercover officers filed daily accounts of their observations on forms known as DD5s that called for descriptions of the gatherings, the leaders and participants, and the groups’ plans.

Inside the police Intelligence Division, daily reports from both the field and the Web were summarized in bullet format. These digests — marked “Secret” — were circulated weekly under the heading “Key Findings.”...

They Report, I Deride

Counterpunch today published what purports to be an article on Anna Nicole Smith and environmental politics. instead what we get is an orgy of bourgeois psychobabble, fucked up class politics ("She represents the postmodern fantasy of success, a fantasy shared equally by "white trash" girls as by "ghetto" ball-playing boys as by weekend gamblers feverishly scratching their Lotto cards.",) and arguably even more fucked up gender politics ("Smith illustrates how the deformation of the living body represents the destruction of the earth.") The author attempts to mitigate what is a profoundly conservative outlook by namedropping Adorno. Of course. This doesn't get him very far. The man hated jazz more than Hobsbawm hates jeans.

Does Rosen really think the body is only now being commidified? Are the folks at Counterpunch too damn lazy to demand a deeper gender critique and more liberatory gender politics? Is it morally wrong that my great aunt and uncle are having a passover seder the night before passover actually begins? Stay tuned.

things i (re)read while writing my paper

Moten and Harney, "The University and its Undercommons: Seven Theses"
Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Cognitive Capitalism and the Contested Campus,”
Richard Levin, "The Global University," The Yale Club of Korea, 2003
John Sexton, "The Common Enterprise University and Its Teaching Mission"
Anita Seth, "Unionizing for a more democratic and responsive university"

GHOD went well tonight. Working on paper now. Scanned Cynthia Young's "On Strike at Yale," (the best history I've read of the early history of graduate employee unionism at Yale and the grade strike purges from one of the three organizers targeted by the administration's disciplinary putsch) into .pdf today for use with paper and because I'm sick of having to go to the panopticon every time i want to read it - I do wish the Minnesota Review would put its archive online.

If you'd like a copy, let me know, and i'll pass it along unless someone tells me i shouldn't for copyright. It's worth reading for NYU folks because of the parallels which are so easy to trace between Yale's response to graduate employee job actions and NYU's, and because of the methodical account of Kagan Pollitt, the "six year" plan, and the relationship between time to degree "streamlining," casualization and specifically the rise in adjunct labor, and Yale's transformation from a 4.2 billion dollar corporation to the 19 billion dollar behemoth it is today.

And on that note, i just filled out my application for a TA job next semester.

I give you NYU.

By which i mean i don't have anything to add to an article about a university doing its damnedest to hold on to fraudulent money. Paying certain eminent philosophers not to teach is expensive, i guess. (And hardly paying the adjuncts who do still adds up when you shovel your whole endowment into buying French islands for no reason.)

No dreams last night that I can remember because i only slept two and a half hours. Wrote an abysmal first page of my paper for tomorrow, now need to write two pages on marx, interest, and fictitious capital, so i will leave you until saturdayish when i will hopefully be done with the most urgently pressing work. I'll leave you with a photograph of a former history teacher at my high school (of which she herself was an alumna) standing next to my senior essay advisor at a Lopez Obrador protest in Mexico that I really don't know what to do with.

Oh, also, Casey Miner looks at the YNHH union busting strategy literature.

Kinda reminds me of that piece Paul Bass did years ago on the anti-david lee campaign, stylistically at least.

Two more strange dreams these last two nights, the first a sexual (sort of, anyway) fiasco turned bloody encounter with a half-shark half-whale in a swimming pool turned having my foot stuck in a display of massively multiplayer online games at a book signing by none other than Ana, who as far as I know has not yet written any books. And yet still i reject Freud.

And last night was more about dealing with the past, with death and transition and thirteen year old friendships and these feelings of inadequacy and uselessness graduate school is so adept at promulgating.

Inside Higher Ed reports on university mobilization against the Employee Free Choice Act.

Several officials who represent or work for private universities said that there was nervousness about the bill, but also anxiety about opposing it in a prominent way. Private universities stated repeatedly during the battle over T.A. unions that they weren’t against all unions, just those for graduate students, and the institutions don’t want to be identified with other employer groups that are more actively opposing the bill. At other institutions, campus leaders are aware of strong student protest movements on campus in favor of the rights of custodial workers to unionize. Several officials who have been watching the legislation and who oppose it said that they didn’t want to be quoted, but were happy that one higher education group had publicly come out against the bill.

That group is the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.

Josh Ulman, chief government relations officer for CUPA-HR, said that the group was conflicted about the legislation and might not have opposed it except for the provision that authorizes union recognition based on union cards signed by employees, rather than requiring a secret ballot election. “For any democracy, we feel it’s important” to have a secret vote, he said. “Employees need to cast their votes in a private setting, without the knowledge of their employer, the union or their co-workers,” Ulman said.

He also said that CUPA-HR had worries about the mandatory arbitration called for in the law. “We’re concerned about terms of employment being forced on both the employer and employees by a government official, rather than rising organically out of negotiations,” he said.

Mike Mauer, director of organizing for the American Association of University Professors, which is among the groups that have been organizing adjunct faculty members in recent years, said that while the AAUP has not taken a stand on the issue, he personally supports the legislation and thinks it would help organizing drives. He said that there have been “such severe restrictions” on organizing that a card majority system would greatly speed up the process and allow more adjunct faculty members to have unions.

Once a union is recognized, he said, the arbitration process would help adjunct faculty members win gains. First contracts — not just in academe, but generally — are notorious for taking a long time to negotiate. “If there is no time limit, the employer can just play it out,” he said.

If the bill becomes law, the most immediate impact may be on union drives and contract talks on behalf of custodial workers. Union activists have been pushing hard to organize such workers, both those who work directly for universities and those who work for companies that universities hire for such services.

Renee Asher, a spokeswoman for the Service Employees International Union, which has been involved in several efforts to organize college employees, said that the concern about secret ballots is “the standard industry line used by those who don’t want unions.” Asher said that the problem with intimidation today comes after employees have turned in a majority of union cards and an election is scheduled. At that point, she said, it has become common for employers to scare employees about the impact of a union. The system called for in the bill “is how unions were formed for years,” she said.

Asher said that higher education, when acting as an employer, has “a special responsibility” to promote good employment practices. If college leaders truly aren’t hostile to unions, she said, they would embrace the bill. She noted that several universities have in fact changed policies recently to improve wages and benefits for custodial and maintenance workers — a trend she applauded.

To those higher education leaders who fear the bill, if enacted, would lead to more unions, she said that the working conditions of the workers are the relevant factor. The reason more colleges have seen protests and organizing drives, she said, “is that they have employees making poverty wages and without health insurance.”

Even worse than NYU:

The report from human resources — recently made public at the university — quoted students as saying that they were being subjected to comments such as, “As graduate students, you should be doing these three things: research, drinking and screwing” and comments related to the female body, female students’ sensuality and weight, and crude and sexual language. Graduate students also reported being pressured by professors to “not rock the boat.”

In interviews with Inside Higher Ed, some graduate students said that the problems remain. “Unless people come forth and martyr themselves, nothing can be done,” said one, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her relationship with professors. She said that students constantly say, “I want to get my degree so I won’t say anything.”

She also said that the discrimination was not just coming from the professors, but from students as well. For instance, she said she had witnessed students rolling their eyes when a student of a different ethnicity speaks up in class because they are harder to understand than others in the class.

Robert Heck, another graduate student, said that he witnessed harassment when a professor placed his hand on that of a minority female graduate student and asked if it was true that her group was known to be sensual. “He continued stroking her arm afterwards,” Heck said.

i know you like to linedance...

The snow is turning into rain, and I am sitting in my apartment procrastinating again, thinking about another bizarre dream last night involving an immigrant rights rally in which some fictional figure i was supposedly affiliated with was getting booed for supporting a guestworker program or something to that effect. Also, Anita was there and inexplicably working at a bookstore. I get weird dreams when i'm stressed out - like during reading week and finals my first semester of college, but I don't feel stressed out right now so much as listless and pessimistic and detatched, so i'm not really sure whence all this crap is spewing forth into my subconscious.

Watched "October Road" last night because I had no desire to do anything else, and it was sort of ridiculous - racist fantasy of escape and return to pastoral suburban idyll disguised as "you can never go home" parable complete with Gin Blossoms or their imitators-heavy soundtrack, decadent urban alienation depicted by former MTV personality Bill Bellamy. WTF.

Joss Whedon's first installment of Buffy: Season Eight in comic book form came out on wednesday and it's pretty good. Looks like he's going to more explicitly go into the slayer/anarchist/terrorist trope from season four, Buffy vs. the state, and that should be interesting, though i still feel like anything after "Chosen" is anticlimactic by default - including all of Angel Season 5. Enough babbling.

Faculty and staff at the Community College of Philadelphia are on strike, and the administration has been forced to cancel classes with no one to teach them.

I dreamt last night that I had left grad school for a research job with unite-here that turned out to actually be an organizing job that no one told me would be an organizing job, and i was very confused. Also, i think i didn't so much leave grad school as take the job on top of grad school so i was juggling the two. I'm very bored. Spring "break" sucks.

Edit: Also, in my dream, i was running around the Upper West Side writing anti-war slogans on the sidewalks with big peices of chalk and ran into a friend from high school whom i have not seen in over five years. Why i thought chalking was a revolutionary activity i don't know. Perhaps it evinces the evacuation of politics and organizing I've felt in New York these past few years, or perhaps I simply need therapy. Fuck it, I'm going for a walk.

You say mountain, I say nightmare

Last week I bought a cheap copy of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte off the internet, (The Mondial edition, used,) and it arrived today. I am somewhat dissappointed with the translation. Arguably the most oft-quoted and perhaps most famous sentence in the book (just edging out "once as tragedy and again as farce") reads, in the version you can read for free on the nifty website marxists.org:

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Holy shit, right? That's pretty deep. Now, in the Mondial edition, this sentence becomes.

The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp on the brain of the living.

Now i like "brain" singular, and I'll leave off criticism of substituting "past" for "dead," because i think the point still gets across, but "alp" and "nightmare" convey two very different meanings, the former history's omnipresence and mass, it's arbitrary inevitability, the latter also conveys history's horrific and lingering legacies and its trauma. I don't know German, let alone what the original text says, so i don't know which is more accurate, but i like the Marxists.org version better - and not just for aesthetic reasons.

I awoke from a bizarre dream this morning. It beganin the cubicle labyrinth of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, with Andy yelling at me because of some undergrad I was supposed to call about GSOC, which, in reality, never happened because no such situation existed. Things shifted to the other side of the department and a large classroom which does not in fact exist, and a meeting with the first years about the union was interrupted by heckling right wing racists, everyone stormed out, and i scurried after them trying to conduct the meeting, only to find myself at a UOC rally at which the UOC was inexplicably and improbably performing orientalism in the figure of some supposedly Turkish woman clad like a bellydancer in some old movie and then that turned into a civil disobedience and everyone got arrested, including me, next to Meghan D whom I have not seen in like 3 and a half years, and then the cops put iron masks on our faces (like the kind they use for welding) and tortured us by pouring acid on our skin.

Thoughts?

A University Donor Actually Does Something Vaguely Progressive

After seeing the Exxon Mobil commercial and several similar ads in the New York Times, Bing, who had already donated $22.5 million to the school, called Stanford President John Hennessy and said he would give no more. Bing also is asking other major philanthropists to reconsider their promises to give to the Stanford cause, broaching the subject in phone calls and at functions he attends. He hasn't had any takers yet, but expects that one day he will.

"Exxon Mobil is trying to greenwash itself, and it's using Stanford as its brush," said Yusef Robb, who works with Bing on climate issues. "We think that people who give to Stanford do so because they want to help the future leaders of this nation, not because they want to advance the agenda of Exxon Mobil."

Bing, a former Stanford student who would comment only through Robb, is seeking an end to the 4-year-old ad campaign, which recently featured an ad on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. In addition, Robb said, "Stanford must reassure the public that its research, faculty and good name are not for sale."

Stanford officials have declined to comment on Bing's decision, saying that the details of private donations are kept confidential.

Fair trade goes massively multiplayer.

well grubbed old mole blah blah blah

I cut all my hair off.

Neon Bible is ok.

Boycott Saigon Grill.

I like the Marnie Stern album.

I'm sick of "overdetermination." Say something useful. Althusser=overrated.

I'm going to sleep now.

Just Ask Marna: Stories From The Ground of Shameful Union-Busting Tactics

This is profoundly dirty and wholly demonstrative of just how committed to anti-union terror tactics Marna "The Borg" Borgstrom really is. I want to write more about this, but have to read some Capital Vol 3. and Limits to Capital and write a 2 page response paper and get to Manhattan all before 11 AM, and last night's protracted HOD meeting left me a bit drained but also excited for our "conference committee" to finally start "conferencing" with the administration on the terms and conditions of our "not-work." So I will be back, sometime after my class and some time before this weekend's birthday celebrations for both my nonagenarian grandparents, for which i will wear a tie and jacket for the first time since my senior prom, I think, and for which i am told my awesome cousin Kyla has returned early from the antarctic. Thankfully, as always seems to be the case in New Haven, that movement Sherman Chickering saw in the picket signs and faces of the local 35 strikers in 1971 remains very much alive.

expropriations

I stole a bottle of Diet Coke from the House of Delegates. If the GHOD is going to flagrantly violate the coke boycott, i'm stealing their shit. I'm not sorry.

I also nominated myself to be on the "constitution committee." This should be interesting.

The Times bacs the Employee Free Choice Act

The bill’s opponents charge that replacing secret ballots with the majority signup would be undemocratic. But the current system is by no means fair. The law prohibits union advocacy by employees during work hours and allows employers to ban organizers from the work place. But employers can require workers to attend anti-union presentations, and can discipline or fire those who refuse to attend.

In 2005, according to the most recent annual report of the National Labor Relations Board, 31,358 employees were receiving back pay after being discriminated against for their union-related activities. In research for a bipartisan Congressional commission in 2000, Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor relations professor at Cornell University, reported that 25 percent of employers illegally fired at least one employee during organizing campaigns.

Labor unions have a role to play in helping to fix today’s economic ills — most notably, worsening income inequality, a problem that’s caused in part by unions’ decline and the workers’ resulting lack of bargaining power. What’s needed is a Congressional drive to help Mr. Bush see this obvious connection. The Senate should take up the House bill promptly and send it to the president for his signature.

It's now - barely - officially March 6, 2007. This means that my grandfather joins my grandmother in the ranks of the nonagenarians, so happy birthday to him.

It also marks four years since my grandfather's 86th birthday, and this:

On March 6, 2003 hundreds of workers and students and other members of the New Haven community came together in the middle of a snowstorm to demand a new relationship with the university and a new set of contracts for each of four bargaining units - five if you count the new social contract, which you should, though the picket sign on the back of one dog read, if i remember correctly, four legs, four unions, one contract, and that was kind of awesome. Folks came to teach each other about what education and justice can and should mean, to articulate and bring to birth - to use Ralph Chaplin's gestational-apocalyptic metaphor - a new university from the ashes of the old, radically participatory and indeed performative, but with a tone firmly (sorry) rooted in histories of the transnational labor migrations - forced, nominally volitional, or otherwise, which built - or at least completely reordered New Haven and constituted the movements which had struck Yale eleven times before March 3 of that year, and have done so three more times since then. I haven't really felt that sense of possibility and, um, power - in a subversive, non-Foucauldian, liberatory sense, since then. I hope to soon. Because i think actions like the AJH-masterminded E.I.T.S. are so powerful because they articulate on the ground organizing and demands (and this foreshadows a response to Alek which I may or may not ever get around to dealing with more formally) with the simultaneous eruption of the Harney-Moten undercommons into a realm in which the "criminality" of the subversive academic "refugee" is however momentarily displaced and utopian possibilities become plainly illuminated, from the undercommons the spectre of a new commons, perhaps - and concretize a shared vision of what it is we are fighting for, which cannot be contained in Harney and Moten's formation of the Cary Nelson-Bill Readings reformist impulse in even its strongest iterations. Also, we need a fucking contract, but that demand isn't just about reforming something gone awry, or stopgap measures meant to slow the erosion of job security and labor rights and the forward march of casualization, because we can't let it just be that. We have to always demand and imagine more.

Dear world,

Where did you put my copy of Impossible Subjects? I swear i had it on Monday.

Edit:
Found it. No thanks to YOU.