Taking its cues from the same group that held a "find the illegal immigrant" debacle here two years ago, the NYU University Senate has voted by a slim majority to lift the ban on Coca-Cola products which it imposed in 2005 in response to Coke's complicity in the murder of trade unionists at its bottling facilities in Colombia by paramilitaries.

There is no evidence that conditions are any better or that coke has taken any steps to ensure the right to organize free from fear, intimidation, murder, or torture. A recent report by the International Labor Organization failed to even call the question and one of the the organization's trustees is also on Coke's board. Meanwhile, the yearly death toll in Colombia has remained high since Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002. This is what NYU is welcoming back onto its campus.

I can't say that I'm surprised, given this campus's abominable labor record of late. Sexton et al clearly do not care about the rights of working people, especially not those in far flung subcontracted corners of the globalized division of labor/coloniality of power.

But I am apalled. Apalled that a university that claimes to be in the public service would so blithely traffic with militarized terror against rank and file union members, apalled that with no justification 28 NYU senators decided to affirm their sudden support for a status quo they had voted to reject less than three and a half years ago, a status quo of torture, terror, and murder. Today the global university just became even more compromised by its imperial entanglements than it was yesterday. Today NYU has a body count.

I spent most of the day in the panopticon, reading Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty instead of grading. Watched the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica on the long subway ride home, and holy fuck (I had to sit down on my couch and not do anything for like five minutes after i finished it to let my heart slow down), and then read the kakistotle (that's a greek joke. aristotle from aristos, best, kakistos=worst, also a demon in buffy season three.) I like the Sugrue book a lot, narrative but also theoretically grounded and both deeply enmeshed in the archive and demonstrating widespread knowledge of recent historiography of the long civil rights movement. I would like to see him engage more directly with some of Nikhil Singh's critiques of a few of the figures and movements he discusses, but maybe that's another book?

The ontario provincial government has ordered striking York U graduate employees in CUPE 3903 to return to work, and the workers are returning without a contract. This is no resolution.

Some folks from the Republic Window Workers' Strike stopped by Judson yesterday and it was inspiring to hear firsthand abotu what went down and what the struggle and the victory meant to the folks who fought and won it. Kudos to jobs with justice for making folks submit questions on index cards to minimize the sectarian rostrum hoggers. I sat behind the folks from DWU and next to the dissident TWU contingent, which was interesting. Ed Ott is pretty awesome as CLC presidents go. Oh, btw, Boycott Stella D'Oro. The factory, oddly enough, is a couple blocks away from where i went to high school. They tried to force the workers to accept some severe cutbacks and workers have been on strike for nearly six months.

This is going to be one of those semi-narcissistic blog entries about me in which i try to work in stuff about the rest of the world too. I'm mostly kidding with the disclaimer. I don't think i'm much of a narcissist. You may disagree, of course.

Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.

I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.

Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.

Still no cease fire in Gaza, no contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)

At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.

Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.

EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer

Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.

Charlie Parker - Donna Lee

Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school

Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?

Darkness - Gamith

Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.

Specials - Blank Expression.

De la Soul - Supa Emcees

The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.

clarification

My problem with an academic boycott is entirely tactical. I think it's useless and i think student movements and yes even faculty associations can intervene in ways that are way more direct and way more powerful. I think that even when their are caveats (e.g., "unless they reject the invasion of Gaza") it looks fishy, it ascribes the actions of the state on to the bodies of the citizen in a way that winds up reproducing Zionist logics, and it doesn't really attack in any way the policies or forces against which folks are trying to organize against.

If you've got an argument for why a boycott against Israeli academics makes strategic/tactical sense, I'd love to hear it.

Zach divests from Israel

I divested from Israel this week. I didn't actually know i was invested in Israel until a couple of days ago. My great-grandmother, who died in 1987 (when I was six years old) apparently took out a bond in my name with the state of Israel which matured about thirteen years ago. My great grandmother never told anyone about this bond, in all likelihood because she had Alzheimer's when she bought the bond, and her symptoms only intensified in the last six years of her life. This meant that I never really knew her. It also meant that nobody knew that this bond existed until my dad found it, going through his grandmother's papers last week. (My dad's side of the family were suburban Philly republicans, the right wing branch of the family, at least compared to the anarchists and bundist/communists on my mother's side.)

I promptly sent the bond in to be cashed (apparently you can do this by mail.) I have doubts about the efficacy of, say, boycotting Israeli academics, but I'm staunchly anti-zionist and the thought that my name and my family have been wrapped up in the occupation of the West Bank and the brutal state terrorism in the Gaza strip sickens me. So, IDF, consider my personal divestment from your repressive and ideological state apparatuses long overdue, and a gesture of solidarity, however small, with Palestinians, Israelis, and other Jews fighting for social justice in the middle east and all over the world.

Happy May Day

That's GEO/University of Michigan organizers celebrating their contract victory after a one day strike earlier this semester. I stole it from Youtube.

Here's another one, which takes us from Lawrence 1912, Joe Hill, Lucy Parsons, through the 1934 San Francisco longshoremen's strike, up to Cesar Chavez and the Delano Grape Boycott.


And some footage of the 2006 LA May Day March...:

Same Struggle, New Fight

This summer, when NYU unilaterally decided to use the Brown Decision to refuse to negotiate a new contract with GSOC, they claimed that their magnanimous paternalism would ensure "the continuation of the University paying 100% of the student health insurance plan premiums for the GAs" (shouldn't that be premia?) and that the benefis of the post-union regime would be "exactly the same" as those guaranteed by the GSOC contract. Sounds nice, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, that's about all it does. Out of pocket maximums (maxima?) and prescription drug copays have risen by 50% or more. Maximum visits to outptient mental healt (including therapy) have fallen from 30 to 20 maximum visits per yeqar. (And this place makes people need therapy real fast.) Many other benefits, including chemotherapy, mammography, and anaesthesia fees have either become less covered or aren't even listed - as is the case with radiation therapy, chemo, and home IV therapy. It seems that NYU flat-out lied about continuing to provide the same health care to graduate students and employees. At the Town Hall meeting on the 26th, President Sexton dismissed these increases by referencing the rising costs of prescription medecines and told us we should be thankful for the university's magnanimity, since he argued that this is csting them more than last year. I haven't seen the math for that, but even if it's the case, that excuse didn't fly when it was trotted out by the San Francisco Hotel Industry's Multi-Employer Group, and we shouldn't accept it from the president of a very rich corporate university, either.

You better WORK

I was here in the office until 10:40 last night doing database work. Fourteen hour days aren't particularly fun.

Today i need to go buy some coal - enough to stuff 100 plastic stockings. I still don't know if we shut down this morning's event or not. I also need to clean my apartment up and get myself in good shape to leave for san francisco tomorrow morning. And i need to run to the store and buy the expanded edition of ROTK, because i'm obsessive like that. And it'll give me something to do on the plane. Assuming i bring my computer, which i'm not sure i will.

Oh yeah, and i need to complete a draft of my personal statement and find a third reccommender. Oy vey. (Anyone want to write me a letter of recommendation for graduate school?)

Hopefully, i'll soon post a response to Katie's thoughtful comments on the Kerik post, though there will probably be a hiatus here until saturday or sunday while i deal with san francisco and moving and hopefully get some grad school stuff done too.

The Mets are signing Pedro Martinez!

Update: 40 lbs of coal purhased and hauleed back to the office by hand from Shaw's. I feel all manly. Well, ok, i'm kidding about everything except the coal part.

last night's craziness

so we did our first post-lockout boycott leaflet last night. It was extremely cold out. Anyway, about a half hour after we started, Minnie Driver walks out of the hotel with her entourage of well-dressed young men. Upon seeing us leafletting (i think i may have tried to say "please check out of the hotel" before i got a good look at her and realized that it was Minnie Driver,) she says "oh, what's this," or something to that effect, and i triy to launch into the boycott rap despite the fact that I'm slightly starstruck, barely able to talk, and afraid of accidentally blurting out something like "I loved you in Grosse Pointe Blank" or "I had a crush on you when i was in high school." So, with help from Ariana, i'm able to explain the boycott, sort of, and Minnie Driver volunteers to complain to management and seems genuinely angry about the fact that she wasn't informed of the labor dispute. She also volunteers to write a letter to management and cc it to us. Then she invites us to her show at the Paradise. We all decide to go, and then everybody else changes their mind while i'm already at the club, but i decided to stay anyway, cause, well, fuck it. And i had fun. Uncomfortable fun, but fun nonetheless.