two more things about the inaugural speech

1. I liked the remaking america stuff, because of the constituent politics it creates a space for, hopefully not neoliberal reaganite voluntarism but instead an invitation, not that we needed one, to bring "change" from below, not a cooptation but instead a gesture of solidarity, though that's ultimately up to us.

2. I liked the hope not fear line. Obviously.

Other schools are canceling searches and imposing hiring freezes, but not my mala mater. Yale, instead, has decided to hire war criminal and death squad pal John Negroponte to join union-buster Paul Kennedy's grand strategy program along with John Gaddis and fellow neocon iran contra figure Charles Hill.

This despite a 25% drop in the university's endowment which has led administrators to impose a freeze on salary increases and swear to continuously trim budget costs from employee benefits. So is Negroponte, who holds no PhD, whose hands-on experience should land him not in front of undergraduates but rather in front of the international criminal court, worth it? Or, put differently, what does this say about the "scarcity" dynamics of university job markets (academic and otherwise) and what does it tell us (as if we didn't already know) about the priorities of the "global" university?

inaugurations

First day of lecture is tomorrow after a break of hermitude, gramsci, and autonomia. I'm suddenly extremely stressed out. It snowed a lot yesterday. I walked through Green-Wood cemetery - whence originate that picture of those geese, snow covering their backs. It was quiet and beautiful, and a nice escape from reading/writing/worrying, though no substitute for the way MLK day should be commemorated, which is in struggle, not shirking from critiquing the more problematic aspects of King's ideology while nevertheless adamantly refusing the neoliberal attempts at cooptation of a leader and organizer who demanded a "radical revolution of values" and was murdered fighting for striking service workers in Memphis, on the very spot where today a crowd watched Barack Hussein Obama's inauguration as the president of the U.S.

I watched the inauguration from my home, flipping back and forth between ABC (cheesy insert shots of the golden gate bridge and various sundry national icons during Aretha's performance, ugh) and PBS (David Brooks and the two historians not named Peniel Joseph, ugh) because ABC got the best picture on my bunnyt ears and PBS had a historian who wrote a book about the black power movement commenting on the inauguration speech instead of like, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who I'm sure is a perfectly nice person and who people tell me is a good historian, but is also a convicted plagiarist and writes books i find entirely uninteresting. Rick Warren apparently asking god's forgiveness for his homophobia was a bizarre spectacle, as was wheelchair-bound Emperor Palpatine. Were i less sympathetic to disability studies critiques, i might conjecture that we had seen medeival literature come to life, not so much physical defacements reflecting inner and innate corruption as the vice president having been literally crippled by his own secrets as he tried to spirit them away from the eyes of historians to god knows where. But of course i don't know what was in the box, and my logic here is complicit in the privileging of certain kinds of bodies.

Anyway, i found a couple of things problematic about the speech - the nationalism, although what else can you expect from a president's inauguration, even this president. The foreign policy stuff, however much more muted and qualified than with the last guy - smart, diplomatic imperialism is still imperialism and it's still in crisis - and that the extremely powerful nods to sweatshop workers, to thie history of the working class, had to be framed by invocations of the gospel of work a la Joe Leiberman on Beinecke Plaza in August 2003. (Joe the traitor kept asserting that "they" - the workers - weren't asking for a lot, kept excusing their struggle's righteousness with fictitious, thankfully, claims as to its narrowness.)

And likewise I'm glad President Obama recognizes the selflessness of workers who accept cutbacks, but i don't think that workers should be expected to, as they say in Italy, "pay for your crisis," that there is a difference between selflessness and exploitation, that who is called upon to sacrifice what for whom is never a neutral set of relationships, always fixed within the shifting ideological and historically produced matrices of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.

Among the most powerful moments of the speech was

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall. And why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

This was extraordinarily powerful, both because the emotion, the desire for the fulfilment of the dream King described 46 years ago remains a strong component of liberal nationalism, the idea that we can progress towards, are progressing, even have progressed towards an abstract equality that has now reached in the form of president obama, its apotheosis, retains every bit of its hegemony even as the multiculturalism of the 1990s has long since, it seems, given way to the libertarian "post-racialism" of 30rock and south park (which is often just "new racism" in disguise). But, historical objections aside (segregation in DC did not end in the 1940s) this is also powerful because it commemorates what it's stupid to claim as anything other than a victory in a deeper and more profound struggle against histories of race and racism not confined to juridical or representational arenas, that antiracists and pro-POC organizers and activists, workers and thinkers, produced, in a sense, this President in all his contradictory brilliance (here i'm thinking about something Nikhil Singh said at the Policing the Crisis panel back at ASA in october), that his victory (here i'm on my own but inspired by the hope from people bloc) is not simply the victory of neoliberal racial ideology, that he is no mere "centrist," that calling him a neocon in blackface (as i have seen some 'radica;s' allege in the wake of Ken Salazar and Robert Gates and Tim Geithner) is stupid and wrong, however much we need engaged, perceptive critique in the days ahead. To summarize, there were parts of the speech I found deeply moving, not simply as oratory, because they meant that we, at least the we i would like to identify myself with, had won a victory in a struggle that's nowhere near done.

Elizabeth Alexander said it best, more powerfully, my mother thought, bringing to the fore what was and is at stake in what has transpired and what is to come than even the momentous speech her poem followed.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

And I would be remiss if I failed to mention Rev. Lowery, who brought my anarchist ass to tears as soon as he started speaking, and who offered not the platitudes of Warren's invocation but instead lessons in organizing.

And while we have sown the seeds of greed -- the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance. And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Amen.

on the logic of budget cuts and hiring freezes

And so the scapegoat mythology of "Hunt the Parasite" - the lynchpin of the crisis ideology - comes to the fore... A sort of vague egalitarianism emerges, which scrutinizes the income of the clerical worker, the student, and the tertiary worker, and says nothing, for example, about the transformation of capital-which-is-productive-of-interest: in its most shameful form, this egalitarianism assumes tones of workerist chauvinism. It appears that it is no longer capital that exploits the worker but the postman, the milkman, and the student. These are the first shots in that "class analysis" which will become the official ideology and the preferred argument of the super-paid editorial writers of the Regime's press. It is a crude and effective ideology...

-Sergio Bologna, "A Tribe of Moles," 1977

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.

a las barricadas

Spent some time today over at the occupied new school, watched the NYPD, particularly Officer Singer of the 6th precinct harrass and assault people for no reason whatsoever, until the administration got smart and diffuesed the very hairy situation by letting the new school students trapped outside the graduate faculty building back inside to join those still occupying the cafeteria. At least two people were arrested. I saw one of the arrests - a guy just handing out flyers whom police forced onto the ground. Officer Singer pulled a Baton on a friend of mine and a New School security goon pushed an NYU undergrad onto the ground, again, without any justification. But as of this writing, the occupation is still going strong, and there's a rally planned for 10:00 tonight that folks in the city should try to be at. Check out updates here and at their blog here.

ETA: That would be at 65 5th Avenue, btw 13th and 14th. The occupiers have reported that police have returned to the area but as yet no violence has occurred...

YNHH, the state, and the post-fordist city

I'm in the process of working out my dissertation proposal, which is about the history of service workers at urban universities, about what the expansion and restructuring of universities looks like when read through the experiences of racialized and gendered food service, maintenance, custodial, clerical, and technical workers. I'm also going to talk about, but have been thus far giving short shrift to, workers at university hospitals, which have been a major part of the aforementioned expansion as universities prioritize the maintenance and care of bodies in what's been an era dominated by economies of biopolitical (re)production. Universities and their teaching hospitals have come to dominate the social and physical geography of urban spaces - just look at this peice today in the New Haven Independent reporting that Yale has now completed it's formal takeover of the building that was once an important Hill neighborhood high school (and site of student protest) and has in the process subtracted even more New Haven real estate, as one anonymous commenter notes, from the city's dwindling tax base.

And if that isn't a good enough reason why i need to more centrally address the effects of hospital service work on the terrain of post-fordist labor relations, Undergraduate Organizing Committee member Hugh Baran offers readers of The Nation an even more instructive tale about a violated community benefits agreement, an intimidated and betrayed group of 1800 Yale New Haven hospital employees, and one of the clearest examples we have of the necessity of card check neutrality agreements in protecting the rights of working people, and a strong message about the role of the state in protecting or assailing workers' voices. Whether you're like me, and you've been following what's happened at the hospital, on whose governing board many Yale executives and trustees sit, along with local New Haven plutocrats and a scant few medical professionals, since you watched Rick Levin shrug off questions from concerned SLAC members eight years ago, or you're learning of this just now (in which case, welcome to the blog) Hugh writes powerfully about what YNHH tells us about U.S. labor politics, and you should go read his article.

"financial aid" is just work they don't acknowledge

"financial aid" is an interesting term. On an undergraduate level, it often conceals a massive labor system of debt and exploitation - see the fourth chapter of Marc Bousquet's How The University Works, online here. (Doesn't mean we shouldn't absolutely be organizing for it, but we have to do so critically, understanding the fundamental inequalities it doesn't resolve.) At NYU in recent years, the term has also come to stand in and ideologically erase and deny the labor of contingent teachers and researchers, as NYU reorganizes its job structures in anticipation of the possibility of a new NLRB and the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act.

No longer are we workers, now we are not even "graduate students who teach," but instead "students who recieve financial aid," not workers, but instead the overprivileged welfare queens of the academy, lucky to be here, lucky to be afforded the privilege of doing the "non-work" we are permitted to do.

This strategy on the part of the administration has material effects. This semester the administration has merged fellowship stipend checks and paychecks into the same system. For some reason this led them to put me on a direct deposit program i never authorized, and my last paycheck went to a bank account i don't have. What this ultimately means is that I haven't been paid for a month.

Apparently, we need a union.

Which "Love Me I'm A Liberal" Youtube video is more sexist?

This one:

Or

This one?

Don't they get that the "Dykes of the American Revolution" crack was a)part of the gag, b) dumb, and c) homophobic?

But just so I don't sour you on the genius of Phil Ochs...


Bonus:


I'd post Josh Eidelson's "Love Me I'm a Yalie," but I don't remember the lyrics.

(If you're reading this on facebook, you won't be able to see the embedded youtube clips. click through to the blog.)

Marc Bousquet reports on McGill's unionbusting as the strike there continues into its third week.

Meanwhile the Washington Square News, which spent the second half of the strike parroting administration anti-union rhetoric, is welcoming the Kennedy bill and the "return" of graduate employee unions. I welcome the sentiment, and I'm glad the new editors have their heads on straighter, but Prince's comments upon hearing "Sexy Back" seem appropriate nevertheless.

Ted Kennedy, Killer Coke Still Banned From NYU Campus, (except ) David Swensen is the New George Berkeley, and other stuff.

Ted Kennedy's introduced a bill to amend the NLRA to include graduate employees.

More than ever in modern education, teaching and research assistants are in classrooms every day, educating students in colleges and universities across the country. Their numbers are increasing as the number of full time faculty dwindles. Often, teaching and research assistants are now doing the same job as junior faculty members.

In fact, the classroom is a workplace for these scholars. It’s where they earn the money they need to pay to put food on their tables and a roof over their heads. They deserve the right to stand together and make their voice heard in their workplace. Like other employees, they should have the right to join a union and improve their working conditions. Obviously, better wages and working conditions for them also means better education for their students.

In 2004, however, a decision by the National Labor Relations Board changed the law and denied fundamental workplace rights and protections for teaching and research assistants. This ruling stopped an active organizing movement in its tracks and deprived thousands of teaching and research assistants of their right to organize and bargain over their wages and working conditions.

It’s hardly the only bad decision by the National Labor Relations Board under the Bush Administration, which has been the most anti-worker, anti-labor, anti-union NLRB in history. The Board has let workers down at every turn. It has blocked efforts to gain union

representation, undermined workers’ attempts to improve their pay and benefits, and exposed them to penalties for seeking to improve their working conditions.

The National Labor Relations Board is supposed to protect the rights of American workers, but it is failing teaching and research assistants, just as it has failed so many others. By passing the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act, Congress will give these workers back the rights that the National Labor Relations Board has taken away. This legislation amends the definition of employee under the National Labor Relations Act to explicitly include teaching and research assistants at private universities and colleges and restores the law to where it was before the Bush Board’s anti-worker decision.

This bill is a significant step forward in restoring workers’ rights, and I urge my colleagues to join in supporting this important legislation.

The NYU University Senate has upheld the coke ban. Good.

S.P. and A.S.C. are the new masters of Ezra Stiles College. They're great teachers and deeply invested in undergraduate education, so congrats to them both.

They could have picked a worse college to take over, (seriously?)

Barf.

Well, Stiles has its own histories of erasures and injustices, (Yale demolished a top notch public high school to build the dorms, and see also 'Newport') and these histories constantly haunt the Yale campus and like the acid they pour on the buildings to artificially age them, leave lasting marks. But if these institutional spaces are going to exist, i can't think of better folks to occupy them and do good things with them, and I wish them the best.

I went to a job talk today in 19 University Place - home to the language and literature departments at NYU. The talk was by a former TA of mine who works on visuality, trauma, and black diasporic women's bodies, for a joint appointment in compl lit and the megadepartment which includes American Studies. It was a good job talk. Afterwards in the subway i saw a flotilla of cops investigating violently racist graffiti someone had markered onto pylons and a door on the Downtown N/R/W/Q track at Union Square. Swastikas, "N______ must die," etc. The social geography of New York after gentrification is deeply racialized. Racialization being the "extension of racial meaning to a previously uracially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group." That's Omi and Winant. I taught it this morning.

On the way back home tonight I thought about the politics of academics "making trouble" in the university, frustrated by David Graeber's explanation that he really thought it was best for so much time to avoid "making trouble" in New Haven, to avoid "getting sucked in" to Yale's union "troubles." Of course, to Graeber's credit, when he needed to, he came down on the right side, at the cost of his job. I greatly admire him for that. But the notion that one can be an activist in New York and a professor in New Haven (and never the twain shall meet) greatly irks me. It irks me because the university is everywhere - New York, Baca Ranch, Abu Dhabi. It irks me because while not anarchistically correct, those many-headed struggles in new haven are so important, so innovative, so hybrid, that I think it's foolish to even try to ignore them or dismiss them. Granted, Graeber was junior faculty, and as for Westheimer at NYU, vocally supporting any of the Yale unions and GESO in particular - and especially when senior faculty in your department are trying to boot a graduate student for being a union organizer - is an easy way to derail your academic career. That's professionalization for you, which is one of the reasons why I find that Moten/Harney piece so useful.

A professional education has become a critical education. But one should not applaud this fact. It should be taken for what it is, not progress in the professional schools, not cohabitation with the Universitas, but counterinsurgency, the refounding terrorism of law, coming for the discredited, coming for those who refuse to write off or write up the Undercommons.

David Graeber's a brilliant scholar. He's, from the accounts of all my friends who studied with him while he was at Yale (i never had the opportunity to do so) a fantastic teacher. I loved his "The New Anarchists" and I started reading through "Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology" today and liked it very much too, though i think he's sometimes prone to oversimplifications and reifications about what "Marxism" is. My point is not to attack Graeber, whom, again, I admire, but rather to point out that even he is, or was, anyway -- one could argue he's rejected it now, a subject of this "counterinsurgency," a counterinsurgency against which we ought to be envisioning some alternatives.

Another University possible. Another New York is possible.

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.”...

Labor, Metablog, and season's greetings for goyim

Building Bridges, the WBAI Labor-Community report, did a show this week on the UAW Parking Production Assistant's rally (which I couldn't go to because i was trying to wrote papers) and ROC-NY's fight against racial discrimination at upscale NYC restaurants like Restaurant Daniel. You can listen to it here.

Bruce Raynor responds to the anti-union lobby's anti-card check campaign with this op-ed at the American Prospect's website, demonstrating the complete failure of the NLRB process to compel companies to recognize the results of elections when unions win. It's one of the more powerful arguments I've read for card check, and it only barely touches on mass intimidation campaigns during election drives, such as that apparently perpetrated by Yale New Haven Hospital earlier this month. Read it when you get a chance. Here's an excerpt:

I don't know what the Board was doing over the next five years and two months.

I do know what our union was doing: organizing workers in other places, negotiating contracts for them, trying to improve both their economic circumstances and their voice and power in the workplace. But we were powerless to do much to help the Goya workers during those five-plus years we waited for the Board to rule.

I also know what the Goya workers were doing: they were suffering. They went on about their jobs, without a voice, without power, waiting for whatever raises the Goya bosses felt like giving them -- or not. They were suffering without the benefits of union representation they thought they had voted to secure in 1998. And the four illegally fired Goya workers were looking elsewhere for jobs during those five years because they had families to feed.

And I also know what the Goya bosses were doing over those five years: counting their money and patting themselves on the back. Counting the money they might have otherwise had to give their employees in the form of fair wages, better health insurance, and a decent pension. Patting themselves on the back for making the decision to cease bargaining with the union, knowing that at most -- at most -- all the Board would ever order them to do was to sit down again and bargain in "good faith" with the union.

Finally, the Board did rule -- on the last day of August, 2006. We won on every important issue. The company was found to have unlawfully withdrawn union recognition, and the Board ordered it to resume bargaining with us. But the Board hasn't ordered that Goya agree to a contract for the workers -- it can't under our legal system. The company was found to have engaged in unlawful threats, interrogation, and the like -- and for that, they have to post a notice in their plant saying they won't do it again and pay backpay to workers who lost work because of the company's misconduct. That's it. No fines, no penalties, no assessments, no order to pay the union's (or the government's) legal fees -- none of those remedies are available under our legal system.

So after seven years, winning doesn't look all that different from losing for these workers. They have lost seven years of wage increases, health care benefits, pension contributions, and other essentials that families need -- things they could have bargained for if they had a contract. Some lost their jobs, most lost respect for their employers, and immigrants lost faith in the system of their new home.

Our union, for one, simply can't accept wins that turn into losses. Workers are already too far behind -- no federal minimum wage increase in 10 years, pensions disappearing, and the ever growing divide between what working people earn and what their CEO's take home. Workers need to win whatever and whenever we can. So we decided a few years ago to stop using the Board as a means of organizing workers. The Goya case is everything that's wrong with the law and with the Board. We get weak decisions that come too late to matter much. Employers get exactly what they want: huge delays at virtually no cost and a non-union workplace even when their workers have voted, overwhelmingly, otherwise.

This is the 1400th post on this blog. (If you're reading this as an imported facebook note, you can ignore this part.) This year has seen far fewer posts than the previous two years of this blog's existence, because I've been busy, because there's been a great deal i've been unable to write, and because I've often found myself in situations like I am now in, in which i have papers to finish and no time to blog. But the discrepancy between the 439 posts between late April and Dec. 31, 2004, and the thus far 365 posts this entire year, a figure inflated by youtube clips and cameraphone picket line images, is interesting. In a few days, I'll post my usual end of the year entry, but until then I'll be relatively quiet as i try to finish work i should have finished already.

Happy holidays.

"We're the FBI. We just do acronyms."

I was looking at W.E.B. DuBois's F.B.I. declassified FOIA file (the FBI seems entirely unaware of Du Bois's existence prior to 1942 and spends a great deal of time thereafter tracking him around the globe and analyzing his writing and speeches) and stumbled on this, which is fucked up on so many levels, the least of which being that the web person refers to Myles Horton, one of the more important figures in the history of movements for social justice in the U.S. South, as "Miles Norton." I think this qualifies as "adding insult to injury.

Also worth taking a look at: Ayn Rand and J. Edgar Hoover's bizarre correspondence
and was Obi-Wan Kenobi a communist?

I briefly forgot that there was a 24th of december, and thought that that holiday I don't celebrate was today instead of tomorrow. Usually I'm pretty good about figuring out stuff like dates and cardinal directions, but the fact that I've barely left my apartment now in over two weeks has apparently thoroughly befuddled my once keen sense of the useless. Or marginally useful.

For the first week of seclusion, I was extremely productive. I wrote 26 pages in three days. I read like four books. I took lots of notes. The last week's been more difficult, and i'm not sure if it's cabin fever or what. I need to finish regardless, and I don't really understand when finishing papers became this hard (maybe it's the added stress of trying to be "an academic" and having so much of your self worth wrapped up in what and how you write.) When I have left my apartment in the last couple weeks, which has been rarely, I've mostly just walked around my neighborhood, investigated a couple taquerias, found a halfway decent pizza place on 5th and 50th, and made innumerable trips to Key Foods for pasta supplies, candy canes, fat free saltines, and caffeinated soda. As much as I love walking to manhattan every day (which I have not done in weeks,) I also love not having to go to Manhattan. And as much as I hate the fact that I've been unproductive, I love not having to be on the NYU campus or in the panopticon more than words can express. Finally getting internet access in my apartment after a year and a half of living here was a smart move.

My paper-writing was slightly aided by the fact that the entirety of the 1968 San Francisco Newsreel film Black Panthers is on Youtube in its entirety (in six parts). It would be cool if someone would post Finally Got The News or Columbia Revolt or El pueblo se levanta or At The River I Stand, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Black Panthers documents a mass rally/birthday party for Huey P. Newton, who was then in jail on trumped up charges of shooting a police officer. The rally clips are spliced with Okland cops talking about the shotguns they carry, rallies outside the courthouse in which people sing "No more brothers in jail (off the pigs)/the pigs are gonna catch hell (off the pigs)" and extended interviews with Newton in prison and several other figures (all men.) Stokely Carmichael had a pronounced New York/West Indian accent, which makes sense, because he was born in Trinidad and went to Bronx Science before Howard and SNCC and the Panthers and Ghana and CLR James was proclaiming him as the revolutionary hope of diasporic/transnational West Indian radicalism. But I don't think I'd ever seen him on film or heard his voice before, and that was interesting. There's a short clip of Kathleen Cleaver speaking at a rally, but the filmmakers chose to run a Huey Newton voiceover over the footage, so you can't actually hear whatever she was saying. This makes for some problematic gender politics.

This seems way too short to actually be Newton's dissertation, right? Anyone know the story with this?

CIA Recruitment Commercial

Because what college student hasn't wanted to assassinate a democratically elected anticolonial nationalist prime minister and innocent civilians alike, economically assist military dictatorships which torture students and leftists and murder folk singers, or plunge the largest country in Central America into four decades of violence and repression?

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2223915657

Hospital Update

The New Haven Board of Alders, after clergy from across New Haven denounced Yale-New Haven Hospital's betrayal of the agreement which allowed construction on the Cancer Center to go forward, weighed in on the failed election process. The board voted to “condemn YNHH’s actions as documented by the arbitrator in the strongest possible terms.”

Hill Alderwoman Dolores Colón saw the need to intervene in a power struggle. “We have to shed light on what the hospital has been doing, otherwise the rich will get away with whatever they’ve been doing, just get away with a slap on the hand.”

“The process is broken,” chimed in Westville Alderman Tom Lehtonen, referring to the historic labor peace treaty the city and aldermen helped broker after years of strife.

Downtown Alderwoman Bitsie Clark took issue with that stance. She saw the arbitrator’s ruling as proof that the process worked. “I do not believe that the aldermen should inject themselves at this point. I think the hospital did a terrible thing, and the arbitrator told them that.”

“I cannot make myself vote for this because I feel that the process is going [forward].”

Goldfield, too fired up to wait his turn to speak, said “the process could not be upheld” because of the hospital’s actions.

After the meeting, he drew a distinction: The process was designed to handle occasional incidents, such as when a union organizer was found guilty of getting into a fight with an employee, and was dismissed. But the hospital “took advantage of the process” by overloading the arbitrator with complaints to investigate.

On the aldermanic floor, Hill Alderman Jorge Perez agreed “the process didn’t work.” The agreement was designed to allow for “speed bumps,” not "a cement wall."

“It’s just something that happens, it comes with the unions,” countered Quinnipiac Heights Alderman Robert Lee. Lee suggested the election take place anway, violations or not.

The resolution passed, with Clark voting “no” and Lee and three others abstaining.

SEIU/1199 organizer Bill Meyerson, joined by rows of union supporters, embraced the resolution and the idea that the process didn’t work. “If the process had worked, we would have had a fair election.”

Carl Goldfield also wants to call Marna Borgstrom and other high-ups before the board to give testimony on the anti-union campaign. Borgstrom wrote a letter continuing to claim, incredibly, that the incidents cited by the arbitrator were isolated incidents, not part of a larger campaign, and perpetrated by hapless mangers "trying to do the right thing." She defended holding 'voluntary meetings' on work time and both she and Petrini continue to call for an election, rather than the card check agreement DeStefano demanded last week.

The board was skeptical of Borgstrom's "trustworthiness."

In an interview, Goldfield said these violations were not simple misgivings, but a purposefully lawbreaking anti-union campaign. “It was a tactic — you get up to the last moment and bam, you can overwhelm the arbitrator.” The bulk of the union’s 200 complaints occurred within the last two weeks....

East Rock Alderman Ed Mattison called Borgstrom’s letter “not satisfying.” “It was far too timid, and failed to recognize the breadth of the violations.”

And there's even a cool picture.

Financial Times: U.S. Army Might Break Goodyear Strike

Two and a half months ago, 17,000 USWA members struck 16 Goodyear Tire & Rubber plants. The Financial Times reported Friday that the Army is "considering measures to force striking workers" at at least one plant "back to their jobs" via Taft-Hartley injunction. Right now the plants are running way below capacity with managers and scabs for hire replacing the strikers.

So, does this derail or at least complicate the whole "labor aristocracy" theory in which the metropolitan proletariat benefits from imperial conquest? Granted, there's the whole question of oil, but it's not like people wouldn't by hummer tires if the U.S. weren't occupying Iraq, and while defense spending may mean pork in the form of jobs, it seems like there are some serious strings attatched...