The Nation's Liza Featherstone on labor in the Bush years:

The Bush Administration might have enjoyed a champagne toast to another recent victory over workers, also engineered by its NLRB. In July the agency declared that graduate students do not have the right to organize and that under federal law they are not employees, thus abruptly reversing a legal precedent set by several earlier decisions. The decision fell sharply along party lines: The three judges voting for it were Republicans; the two dissenters were Democrats. Presidential hopeful John Kerry, meanwhile, has firmly opposed the Bush Administration on overtime as well as card check, even co-sponsoring the Employee Free Choice Act, which would require an employer to recognize a union when 50 percent of its workers sign cards. At present, recognition is up to the employer, so if enacted this bill would hugely improve workers' chances of organizing.

Uneventful night. Kind of sad for a friday. Ate two pints of tasti-d-lite and watched "save the last dance" on TNT. Don't tell anyone. I'll read a book tomorrow, i promise.

This is what democracy looks like?

Among the first published pictures of the Pier 57 "detention facility," courtesy of New York City Indymedia. I personally saw folks unjustly arrested during tuesday's brutal crackdown who were far too old and/or sick to be housed in such a facility, as many were, for over 24 hours. Shame on Mayor Bloomberg and shame on the NYPD for turning into the private security force of capitalist plutocrats intent on exploiting the city's trauma.

Quis Custodiet Custodies? Or, as KRS-ONE put it,

"You were put here to protect us

But who protects us from you?

Every time you say "That's illegal"

Doesn't mean that that's true (Uh huh)

Your authority's never questioned

No one questions you

If I hit you I'll be killed

But you hit me? I can sue (Order! Order!)

Lookin' through my history book

I've watched you as you grew

Killin' blacks and callin' it the law

(Bo! Bo! Bo!) And worshipping Jesus too

There was a time when a black man

Couldn't be down wit' your crew (Can I have a job please?)

Now you want all the help you can get

Scared? Well ain't that true (You goddamn right)

You were put here to protect us

But who protects us from you?

Or should I say, who are you protecting?

The rich? the poor? Who?

It seems that when you walk the ghetto

You walk wit' your own point of view (Look at that gold chain)

You judge a man by the car he drives

Or if his hat match his shoe (Yo, you lookin' kinda fresh)

Well, back in the days of Sherlock Holmes

A man was judged by a clue

Now he's judged by if he's Spanish,

Black, Italian or Jew"

best sign at the UFPJ vigil: "Restaurant Workers to RNC: We Spit In Your Food."



the vigil was beautiful and fun. Peaceful, chill, happy atmosphere was kind of a good antidote to the police state this city has become. Every time i see a cop i want to fucking scream.

I place no stock in the "coarsening of campus debate" hysteria. Such alarms are raised primarily by neoconservatives upset that new generations of scholars have entered the ivory halls of academe in the last four decades with last names other than Bemis, Buckley, and Brewster and are producing new kinds of knowledge and reshaping and reimagining higher education. Yet if such a "cheapening" is taking place, it's because of interventions like Jamie Kirchick's crass, childish, vicious ad hominem attack on Yale activist Thomas Frampton in today's Yale Daily News. The YDN should be ashamed of itself for publishing what amounts to a right wing hatchet job by one student against another. Whether or not Thomas's actions on monday night constitued the height of narcississm, it's clear that Kirchick well deserves such an appelation, and if i didn't think Kirchick had repeatedly proved himself to be little more than a whining child with aspirations to supreme punditude, i might urge others to question his own pathologies. Kirchick's account of the Coca-Cola protest, at which he was not present, is not accurate - police confronted Thomas, not the other way around (i was with him when they did so,) and then allowed him to pass when he presented his student ID), while his callous dismissal of the comapny's litany of global human rights abuses is simply outrageous. (Kirchick's contempt for "New Haven hangers-on" is elitist and offensive, while his numbers are also wrong - while approximately 20 'died' at the protest, there were at least a dozen others in the audience who were part of the action - designated as corpse haulers or leafleters.) I will not futher refute Kirchick's factual innacuracies here (though there are many) save to note that his notion that indignation at Levin's appointment to Bush's sham WMD panel in February was unwarranted and inappropriate ignores Levin's personal friendship with George Bush, which many feel played a role in last July's National Labor Relations Board decision at Brown University which reversed the 2000 NYU Precedent along deeply partisan lines. Kirchick's claim that Thomas's actions were merely theater deserves to be contested from the vantage point of performance theory - after all, all the world's a stage, and Thomas's improvised attempt to speak the truth to power anticipates a far more inclusive and democratic project than the fascist manipulations behind the convention's staging and the militarized perimeter surrounding it. But we also need to ask what theater Kirchick here performs, and why the Yale Daily News would publish such a self-aggrandizing screed of a monologue. But i suppose we can console ourselves with the fact that no one's really listening, anyway.

I'm glad that Thomas is free and am confident that all charges against him will be dropped. I have no other comments at the moment other than that like Evan, i too hate the YDN and am extremely happy that i am no longer included in the symbolic community imagined by their obnoxious mastheads.



edit: correct late night tense madness