random ten

Television, "Friction."
Wu Tang Clan ft Gerald Alston - "Stick Me for My Riches."
Beaufort Express - "You Got To Do Your Best."
Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - "Be Easy"
The Advantage - "Guardian Legend - Corridor I." I love this band.
Linton Kwesi Johnson - "Two Sounds of Silence"
The Advantage - "Ghosts 'n' Goblins"
Jospehine Taylor - "I've made up my mind"
Sonic Youth "swimsuit issue"
The (International) Noise Conspiracy - "The Reproduction of Death." I used to love this band before Rick Rubin got ahold of them. Discuss.

This week has been a rather brutal one for several reasons. I'm going to have to get my wisdom teeth pulled, and my mouth hurts. So does my skull. My 92 year old grandparents and my sexagenarian parents were in a harrowing car crash that they are very lucky to have survived and survived with only bruises and aches (and I am very lucky that they did so.) Work is piling up, and I'm wondering again what the hell I'm doing here, and feeling generally useless, and not at all surprised by that study that suggests the more tv you watch the unhappier you are - in college, when i was much smarter than i am now, i would have said this was reductionist and indicative of the obsession of a particularly fraction of the bourgeoisie with policing the consumption practices of the less cultured (in the Arnoldian/Bordieuian sense.) Now I'm cursing ridiculous Grey's Anatomy plotlines and wondering why my head feels so heavy (is it the teeth? My brain atrophying? Stress?) And I'm staring at this and wondering who drew it. (Book doesn't specifically say, but credits one Andy Dark with the jacket design. Dark, according to Ashley Dawson, was an antiracist SWP youth organizer, so this makes some sense, though the image reminds me of the style of the "deconstructionist" british comic books of the time (1988. Brian Bolland, David Lloyd, maybe. Some of the people doing Moore's Miracleman.) This may be because I'm an idiot. Perhaps this image is really famous, and i'm just two ignorant of the cultural iconography of Thatcherite Britain to realize it.

Anyway.

Random ten songs from the ipod:

Beatles - Polythene Pam
Voices of East Harlem - Music in the Air
Sleater-Kinney - Steep Air
Desmond Dekker & The Aces - Rudy Got Soul
Amy Winehouse - Rehab. forgot i owned this album.
Le Tigre - LT Tour Theme
Miles Davis - Darn That Dream
Rufus Thomas - Do That Push and Pull (Part 1)
Nathan Wilkes - Strenge Feeling
Jackie Mittoo - Black Organ

For those of you who are New Yorkers or in the tri-state area, tomorrow evening (Thursday, November 20th,) the Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU is holding a panel discussion entitled "Who's Building The Global U," examining the conditions of the migrant labor that will build and operate NYU's satellite campus. The event is co-sponsored by Human Rights Watch and Law Students for Human Rights, and will take place in Furman Hall, room 214. Speakers include Human Rights Watch's SarahLeah Whitson and NYU Historian Molly Nolan. For more information, go here

Yesterday twenty members of the Yale Undergraduate Organizing Committee led a four-hour sit in in the university's investments office to protest - and to try to get a meeting with David Swensen about - Yale's endowment investments in the abusive hotel corporation HEI. The YDN article is priceless, complete with a snippy dismissal from Tom Conroy and the supposition that Swensen came up to the floor at one point, saw the students, closed the elevator without leaving it, and fled.

But, in the end, the students did not meet with anyone in the office. At 1:45 p.m., Landino had to leave to catch a flight back to California so he could report to work at 5 a.m. on Wednesday. As Landino left, the student protesters applauded him and then packed up their belongings. All 16 students crammed into one elevator for the trip downstairs chanting, “We’ll be back.”

Though no meeting materialized, the students and Landino said they still considered the event a success.

“We did not speak with him but we left a very clear message,” Landino said through a translator. “Like farmers we’ve planted something that is going to grow and we will reap the rewards.”

Before they left, the students wrote a note for Swensen on a yellow legal pad, which concluded, “We are firmly resolved to see this matter through to the end.”

Targeting university endowment investments is one of the most powerful and important ways activists and workers can fight to make universities more just places. It challenges the university's circuits of capital accumulation, exposes the ways in which universities participate in, and affect a broad swathe of economic activities and command the labor of diverse and deterritorialized groups of workers, and it hits the university's neoliberal foundations on multiple fronts and from many sites, making possible a truly global struggle against the "global (network) university."



For more on Unite-HERE's campaign against HEI, go here, here, here, and here

In case you had any doubts about the NYU board of trustees' priorities

In a year when John Sexton forced a destructive strike, harassed, fired, and blacklisted graduate student employees, spat in the faculty's face (metaphorically,) and raised undergrad tuition by more than 5%, he was given a 56% pay increase by Marty Lipton and the other powers that be on the university's bloated corps of high finance miscreants that is its ruling body. $1.3 million. That's like Swensen money. More, actually. And NYU's endowment is about 1/10th the size of the one Swensen's presided over, though both have invested in predatory hedge funds like Farallon Capital Management and both like to gobble up urban real estate for private gain.

The Washington Square News is understandably miffed.

In addition to many unjustifiably elusive statements, NYU has yet to reveal whether the opinions of faculty and students are considered in the evaluation. It was in 2006 that the committee decided to increase Sexton’s base salary, a year of controversial graduate student strikes. Despite vocal disapproval of Sexton’s response to the strikes by student groups and members of the faculty, the committee still decided to raise his salary.

President Sexton’s salary might be raising at an entirely justifiable rate. But until the university becomes more candid about its methods, suspicions will justifiably abound.

Sounds like they might have something in common with those "angry radicals" after all.

And more reasons why Jacob Lew shouldn't be managing the federal budget.

No, he can't.

The NYT's reporting that Jacob Lew may be tapped for an Obama administration job. There are many reasons why those of us who care about workers' rights, economic justice, and the future of higher education, among other things, should oppose this.

• Lew is a Clintonite neoliberal significantly to the right of where Obama ran during both the primary and the general campaign. He's one of those people Obama made a very good case for not entrusting another four or eight years to, because his fiscal policies aren't very progressive at all.
• After leaving NYU, Lew went to Citigroup's Alternative Investments division, which manages private equity, hedge funds, and real estate investments - in other words, very risky, un- or underregulated high yield investments. This doesn't speak well of his interest in or ability to help people feeling the weight of the credit crisis, given his involvement in the industries that created it. And finally:
• As executive vice president of New York University, Jacob Lew played a major role in carrying out the campaign to crush GSOC-UAW Local 2110. Thousands of workers were subject to threats and intimidation, dozens were blacklisted and fired, and Lew was instrumental in refusing to negotiate and in the vicious rhetoric and tactics the University Leadership Team employed. Some accounts have Lew even more invested than president Sexton in breaking the union. In the last eight years we've seen the state once again bend over backwards to fight attempts by workers to build power on the job and assert a voice in their work and in the direction of the country. We don't need more union-busters in office, particularly not in the administration of a president who owes much to the labor movement and on whose support for the Employee Free Choice Act and the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act many of us have placed our hopes for change.
  

This isn't someone progressives and leftists want managing the federal budget or advising the president on domestic policy.

snowballing

Trying to shut its security guards up, NYU's management imposes a gag order, and tells guards that by speaking out about cutbacks, in effect, they're helping the terrorists.

Undergrads aren't happy. Maybe because they've internalized the logic of student as consumer, maybe because they're complicit in NYU's racialized security apparatus, maybe because they're being ripped off by the university's grandiose expansion plans, probably all of the above, and in any event they have a right to be pissed off, and, more importantly, the guards have a right to speak out about what's happening and not have John Beckman try to brand them as traitors. But then, that's pretty much par for the course.

Wait, did i just make a golf metaphor?

more with less

More NYU cutbacks, this time to security officers, whose night shifts at certain dorms are being eliminated, according to the WSN. Guards are speaking out.

Even with reduced staffing, the dorm posts are normally manageable, guards say. But if anything goes wrong, there may be no one to respond immediately. In emergencies, guards cannot leave their posts; instead, they must call Public Safety and request backup.

That can take time, one noted. Once, after a roof-top alarm went off, it took more than 20 minutes for another officer to arrive at the building to check, the guard on duty at the time said.

Last spring, a faculty in residence suffered a heart attack. There were three guards working in the building; after being alerted by the faculty member’s spouse, they assisted emergency responders, holding doors and elevators to speed the team’s access to the professor, according to a guard.

The response “would have been slower” with the new cuts, the guard said.

At the Third Avenue North dining hall, a student reportedly fainted several weeks ago. Guards remained at their posts and called for backup. According to two guards familiar with the situation, the girl was left in the dining hall for five to 10 minutes waiting for the responding officer.

John Beckman isn't pleased.

“I think it is deeply regrettable that some security officers would try to frighten members of the NYU community by wrongly suggesting that entirely reasonable new deployment patterns in any way make them unsafe,” he said. “I consider it very much out of character with the kind of dedication to NYU the vast majority of our officers customarily display, and I would be disappointed if they were saying such things over a matter such as overtime.”

And President Sexton faces another contentious town hall meeting in his failed faux-proletarian Brooklyn Prep sweatshirt.

ABC news has a lengthy report this morning on the conditions of migrant labor in Abu Dhabi, with particular focus on the NYU satellite campus.

"We don't believe that they are doing nearly enough to avoid the exploitation of workers in their own projects," said Human Rights Watch's Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the organization's Middle East and North Africa division. She said that the institutions have not made public commitments to ensuring that its construction workers are not exploited.

Whitson says that while the UAE government needs to investigate, prosecute and penalize contactors that break the nation's labor laws, these organizations need to take responsibility themselves. These measures, she said, should include reimbursing workers who are found to have paid an illegal recruiting fee (one of the most common abuses that can total as much as $3000), ceasing dealings with contractors who use recruiters who charge such fees, ensuring that housing and work sites are safe and that health and safety records are kept, and guaranteeing that workers' passports are not confiscated and that monthly wages are paid regularly.

random eight reggae songs, one appropriation thereof, and Phil Ochs

The Pioneers - "Let Your Yeah Be Yeah"

Desmond Dekker (and the Aces) - 007 (Shanty Town)

Phil Ochs - "Santo Domingo." ("There's been a drastic change in American foreign policy. Take the Dominican Republic. Which we did.") (cover)

Trinity Meets Dillinger - "Jesus Dread"

The Toasters - "Ploughshares into Guns"

U-Roy and the Paragons - "Tide is High." Here's the non-DJ version, sans U-roy.

Skatalites - "Lawless Street"

Shark Wilson & The Basement Heaters - "Make it Reggae" Cover of this, obviously.

Leonard Santic All Stars - "Santic Special"

Augustus Pablo - East of the River Nile Last night i dreamed of Melodicas.

Taught the "Diaspora, Utopia, and the Critique of Capitalism" chapter from There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack today. Went ok. I probably talked too much, brought in too much music, but it was fun to make them grapple with Linton Kwesi Johnson and "Israelites" and even "Ghost Town," which someone said something really funny about, though i don't remember what it was. Like it sounded science fictiony or something. I got more questions than i was expecting about the origins and implications of the 1990s ska revival in the U.S., given that my students were, on average, 10-12 years old in 1998, when that party, for most purposes, ended. In retrospect i think i forgot to get to talking about the implications - whitewashing the music, on one hand, fetishization of "roots" and racialized codification of expertise on another. In other words, i guess my instinct would have been to extend Gilroy's critique of Madness and Bad Manners to the Orange County ska-punk hordes and then drop some Bordieu on the self designated archons of "trad" cultural purity be they in L.A. or New York or whatever, though i suppose Skinnerbox kinda already did that (see "This a New York." I don't know if this is quite fair, since however absent the antiracism of the better two tone bands is in even the most politically committed ska-punk and ska core bands (Mike Park notwithstanding) Operation Ivy (although maybe "Take Warning" functions in much the same way as Gilroy describes "Ghost Town," with interscenester violence standing in for racialized antagonisms) and Against All Authority were a far cry from the imperialist minstrelsy of "Night Boat to Cairo" or Madness's failure to refute its more neo-nazi fans. And what happens if we take "Ska Against Racism" at its word? Or was it already compromised by the erasure of any jamaican referent, by the marketing of the "rude boy/girl" as fashion option rather than shanty town youth outlaw? (Or more precisely the commodification of shanty town youth outlaw as fashion option.)

Oh, by the way, Barack Obama is the president elect of the united states, and that's a good thing for a lot of reasons. And, putting aside the troubling exceptionalism and haste with which many have sought to cast the Obama victory as the redemption of the US from the blood-soaked Bush years and the whole long history of racial violence and subjigation, that a person of African descent will assume the presidency of a nation founded on plantation colonialism in a few short months is certainly more than noteworthy, and Obama's speech, with its deft allusions to Sam Cooke and Dr. King, was powerful for the ways it cast the election not as a culmination but instead as an inception, as a moment in a longerstruggle now inchoate. Such a discursive opening lays forth a wide rang of intriguing possibilities, and I say that as someone who still sort of considers himself an anarchist. But if Larry Summers really gets reappointed to the post of Treasury Secretary, one would have to start seriously questioning the priorities and progressive potential of such an administration. Even though the department of labor's always been compromised, an agent of state corporatist labor policy, it'll be interesting to see whom Obama names to the post. Hope it's someone less Daniel Bellish than Reich. I suppose it's up to us, then, to hold our new chief executive up to his Lincolnian "better angels?"

In the meantime