Category Archives: Human Rights

#OUTweek rainbow flag burned at #UBC suspect hate speech #pride #ubysseynews #ubc100 #ubcnews

Pride

Moira Warburton, The Ubyssey, February 9, 2016– A rainbow flag, raised on the pole outside the old SUB for the Pride Collective at UBC’s OUTweek this week, was discovered to have been burnt down earlier today in what is presumed to be a violent act of hate.

Pride Collective members noticed that the flag was missing this morning and contacted the UBC Equity and Inclusion Office to ask if they knew anything about the disappearance. Upon investigation, the office found remnants of the scorched flag still attached to the pole.

“It’s been a rough day,” said Rachel Garrett, one of the coordinators of the Pride Collective. “[There’s been] a lot of stress. I don’t think any of us feel safe right now and that’s a really hard feeling to be going through.”

OUTweek is an annual eight-day event, organized by the Pride Collective, which celebrates “queer and trans identities, communities and learning,” according to its Facebook page.

Although OUTweek will not be completely cancelled, the Pride Collective has cancelled a Fuck the Cis-tem March due to take place tomorrow in response to the event because of concerns that it would give public recognition to individuals who could then potentially be targeted by further acts of hate.

Although OUTweek will not be completely cancelled, the Pride Collective has cancelled a Fuck the Cis-tem March due to take place tomorrow in response to the event because of concerns that it would give public recognition to individuals who could then potentially be targeted by further acts of hate.

Read More: The Ubyssey

Adult Basic Education is a basic right

Adult Basic Education is a Basic Right is a collaboratively authored by researchers and educators in the adult education field in British Columbia. Our aim to gather and share information about how ABE tuition cuts and adult education policy in BC effects people, programs, depending inequity and socio-economic participation.

Read Lynn Horvat’s paper: “Re-Framing the Conversation: Respecting Adult Basic Education in British Columbia”

Lilia D. Monzó & Peter McLaren on Red Love: Toward Racial, Economic and Social Justice #handsup #highered #criticaled #race

Lilia D. Monzó & Peter McLaren, Truthout, December 18, 2014– Racism is exacerbated by a capitalist production process that teaches us that some people have a God-given right to pursue their economic and social interests without regard for other people’s right to thrive, free of fear for their own survival. The antidote is red love.

The Slaughter-Bench of Race

It seems that it is an everlasting open hunting season in the United States and the kills are Black men. The senseless killing of unarmed Black young man Michael Brown by a White police officer and the grand jury’s decision to allow the officer to walk without facing a trial through a faltering prosecutorial process (that aims to defend when the target of indictment is a police officer) has brought Ferguson, Missouri, and other communities across the country to their feet in loud and incendiary protest.

Approximately 50 protesters on a 120-mile march from Ferguson to Jefferson City decrying the shooting death of Brown were met with counter-protesters all along the route. Especially stomach-churning was the reception given to the protesters in the sleepy hollow of Rosebud, where the caterwauling and public scouring was most intense as 200 residents screeched at the protesters to “go home and get jobs” along a route littered with 40-ounce beer bottles, watermelons, Confederate flags and fried chicken, and where at least one concerned citizen was wearing a makeshift white hood, redolent of the vile knights of the “Invisible Empire.”

While the corporate media has suggested that the violent response by some protesters – property damage and looting in some instances – diminishes the authentic call for “change” – i.e., a demilitarization of the police, improved police-community relations, urban job creation, increased sensitivity training regarding race among police force recruits – it is hard to ignore the storied observation by Frantz Fanon that violence is oftentimes the only possible response by communities that have lived through centuries of violence – slavery, joblessness, poverty, police profiling, the school-to-prison pipeline and a military-industrial complex that thrives upon the deaths and killing of Black and Brown young men.

In the wake of this blow to the Black community, we have seen a string of similar White police killings of unarmed Black men and an unwillingness to indict them. These include the killing of Eric Garner who was caught on video repeating the words, “I can’t breathe,” 11 times as a New York Police Department officer had him in a chokehold that has been banned by the NYPD for years; the killing of Rumain Brisbon in Phoenix, Arizona; the killing of a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun in a park and shot within two seconds of police arriving on the scene; and the killing of Akai Gurley, a young man who was fatally shot by a rookie NYPD officer in a dark public housing stairwell in Brooklyn. With the growing confidence among White police officers that Black men are fair game for killing without consequences, how many more of our Black children’s lives will we lose?

In the cases of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Akai Gurley, the police did not make any effort to assist their dying victims. In the case of Gurley, the officers who shot him – in true “cover your ass fashion” – decided to text their union representative while ignoring calls from the police and medics. Six and a half minutes went by before they finally radioed for assistance. It wasn’t until a detective and FBI agent arrived at the scene of the Tamir Rice slaying that the victim received any first aid. In Eric Garner’s case, numerous police officers stared at his unconscious handcuffed body for seven crucial minutes instead of performing urgent CPR or frantically seeking professional medical assistance. In the case of Michael Brown, we know that his body lay lifeless on a Ferguson street for four hours before it was carted off to the local morgue. While some have attempted to justify police killings of Black men as a function of the job demand for quick decisions and their own survival instincts, this unconscionable and merciless failure to attempt to save these men’s lives, points to something much deeper.

Astonishingly, we are now hearing backlash against protesters that Black men must be suicidal since they are acting in ways that are surely to get them killed. It seems no matter what the circumstance, the narratives shift in order to maintain the sanctity of the White cop. The institutionalized and pretentious discourse of conservative talk show hosts now includes remarks to the effect of: “If Garner can say ‘I can’t breathe’ 11 times, then he can breathe” (obviously these self-proclaimed “critics” don’t realize that being pinned down by police may prevent lungs from re-expanding, forcing out the functional reserve capacity of air while the expiratory reserve volume – which is not oxygenated and basically exists as carbon dioxide gas – still permits vocalization). This vicious insensitivity from the frenetic ranks of these racist prodigies have ripped away any cosmetic prostheses hiding the seething subterranean animus of the White population who have inherited a historical proclivity to blame Blacks for their own suffering and who continue to do so with an increasingly smug impunity.

Given the rancid history of racial violence in the United States, should we be aghast at the audacity of White police officers who continue to shoot first and show little restraint prior or remorse after, and at the imperviousness of prosecutors and grand juries that see only through the dominant lens, justifying the growing epidemic of Black killings by White cops as a “natural” reaction to fearing for their lives? Protesters are demanded to show restraint in a country that has shown no restraint in killing Black communities and other communities of color – physically, psychologically and economically. While we do not advocate for violence, we understand how centuries of pain and humiliation can result in a pent-up rage that eventually explodes.

More recently, African-Americans face the grim new reality of moving from the super-exploited sector of the working class to being even more marginalized as capitalists switched from drawing on Black labor in favor of Latino/a immigrant labor as a super-exploited workforce. As a result of increased structural marginalization, African-Americans are subject to what William Robinson describesas “heightened disenfranchisement, criminalization, a bogus ‘war on drugs,’ mass incarceration and police and state terror, seen by the system as necessary to control a superfluous and potentially rebellious population.”

Racism is not a natural phenomenon, but one that has been produced within each and every institution of our society. Racism is exacerbated through a capitalist production process that teaches us that some people have a God-given right to pursue their own economic and social interests with little regard for the right of every human being and other living organism to thrive in the world free of fear for their own survival and with dignity and freedom. Racism stems from a world that has lost its ability to recognize its social nature and absolute need to love one another. While we must work to make people safe today, we must also consider the long-term goal of anti-racist struggle, which in our view is one and the same as class struggle, such that a new world order, one free from class and founded on love, interdependence, social responsibility, equality and freedom can thrive.

Read More: Truthout

Police removing #HongKongStudents barriers #scholarism

CBC, October 12, 2014– Hong Kong police began on Monday to remove barricades erected by pro-democracy protesters who have occupied several sites around the Chinese-controlled city for two weeks, according to protest group Occupy Central.

At the main protest site, around government offices in the downtown district of Admiralty, scores of student protesters faced off with police who were massing in the area, a Reuters witness said. The Hong Kong government has said the demonstrations are illegal.

On Saturday, student leaders issued an open letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping, urging him to consider political reforms in the city and blaming the city’s unpopular leader for the demonstrations.

The letter, issued by two student groups leading the protests, said Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying was responsible for a civil disobedience campaign that has seen tens of thousands of people throng the semi-autonomous city’s key thoroughfares over the past two weeks.

Thousands of demonstrators showed up in the main protest zone on Saturday, two days after Hong Kong’s government called off scheduled negotiations with students who are demanding voters have a greater say in choosing the city’s leader in 2017 elections.

The protesters have vowed to keep up the demonstrations until the government responds to their demands.

“Students walked out of classes and are occupying different places now because Leung and others have repeatedly ignored what the people want,” the letter read. “If the central government is confident, it should not be afraid to let Hong Kong people elect their own chief executive.”

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Friday that he was confident Hong Kong’s government can preserve “social stability.” He did not directly mention the protests, but stressed that Beijing won’t change its “one country, two systems” approach to running Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, a Chinese state-run newspaper blamed the United States for being behind the protests — a claim the U.S. State Department strongly rejected.

Read More: CBC

#CapilanoUniversity whac-a-sculpture futile as yet one more surfaces #GeorgeRammell #caut #bced

"Margaux and the Monarch"

“Margaux and the Monarch”

Ever futile is Capilano University’s game of whac-a-mole turn whac-a-sculpture, as yet one more caricature of President Kris Bulcroft has surfaced. When Blathering On in Krisendom surfaced Capilano University whacked it to pieces in May.

Now in October, where life imitates art as whac-a-sculpture, another has surfaced at the hands of sculptor George Rammell. Margaux and the Monarch is indeed a thing of beauty, mace, pen and pooch! What grand preparation for the graduation ceremony!

As Capilano’s Convocation guide indicates, “The mace depicts the authority vested in the University to…” well, fill in the blanks. “In keeping with this longstanding tradition” of a raw and visible demonstration of power, the Convocation guide indicates, “our ceremonial mace will be carried by Capilano University’s director of Buildings and Grounds.”

It is unlikely the Director of Building and Grounds will carry the entire sculpture. Just the mace. Margaux and the Monarch!

PS. Just looked outside and swear the garden gnome is now a  $^@&% ‘n mini-Margaux and the Monarch statue.

#CapilanoUniversity censorship of #GeorgeRammell case progresses #caut #bced

dismantled_sculpture

George Rammell with the remnants of Blathering On in Krisendom, which Capilano university officials confiscated and dismantled.

Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher EdOctober 8, 2014– It took 53 days for George Rammell to get back a sculpture he’d made caricaturing his university’s president and, when officials at British Columbia’s Capilano University finally returned it to him, it was in pieces.

“They gave it back to me all smashed up,” said Rammell, a former instructor at Capilano whose sculpture was seized from the studio arts building last spring by university officials on the grounds that it constituted “harassment” of Capilano President Kris Bulcroft.

“They claim they had to destroy it in order to move it, which is absolutely ridiculous. I’ve moved it myself.”

The original sculpture, titled Blathering On in Krisendom, depicted the president and her poodle as ventriloquist dolls draped in an American flag and was conceived, as Rammell explained it, as an “anti-monument” to the president in protest of her role in carrying out program cuts. Bulcroft oversaw the elimination of several programs, including the studio arts program in which Rammell taught, in a process that was later deemed by British Columbia’s Supreme Court to be contrary to the province’s University Act in that Capilano’s Senate was not consulted.

Rammell described the original sculpture as an example of constitutionally protected caricature, but Capilano’s former board chair, Jane Shackell, directed that it be confiscated from university property because it was, she said, being “used in a manner amounting to workplace harassment of an individual employee, intended to belittle and humiliate the president.”

In order to reclaim his artwork, Rammell said, he signed an agreement that stated that he would be permitted to work on the piece in the studio arts building until his employment at the university ended on July 31. After that time, he would remove the sculpture from campus and would not bring it back. Rammell said the agreement also stipulated that he would not display any photographs of the sculpture on campus until five years after the president’s retirement. (Rammell declined to share the text of the agreement he signed but described its contents to Inside Higher Ed. Capilano officials declined to comment on the specific terms of the grievance agreement, which a university spokeswoman described as related to a personnel matter and thus confidential.)

In compensation for the damages to the sculpture, Rammell said, he received the equivalent of four days’ teaching wages.

“In retrospect I should never have signed the stupid thing; I could have finished the sculpture without getting the heap back,” said Rammell.

Finish the sculpture he has. The new sculpture, made up of pieces of the original as well as newly created components, was unveiled last week in an event at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, in Vancouver. The piece has two faces, or fronts: a newly sculpted depiction of the president holding a mace backs up against the reassembled components of the original sculpture. Among the new elements of the sculpture, Rammell said a mace is intended to signify the trust placed in the university president, and a pen is intended to represent Bulcroft’s “unilateral” signing authority in eliminating the studio arts and other Capilano programs. The new piece is entitled Margaux and the Monarch, Margaux being the name of Bulcroft’s dog.

As for the American flag, Bulcroft previously worked at Western Washington University. Rammell said that while he has nothing against international hires, he did object to Bulcroft’s seeming disregard for a Canadian law, specifically the University Act.

“The whole piece is about academic freedom and everybody seems to be under threat,” Rammell said.

Bulcroft declined an interview through a Capilano spokeswoman, Borjana Slipicevic. A statement emailed by Slipicevic that repeatedly misspelled Rammell’s name said that “Capilano University is aware of Mr. Rammel’s current actions. The university is committed to a safe and respectful workplace for all faculty and staff; the decision to remove Mr. Rammel’s sculpture from campus was made in this vein. Capilano University and Mr. Rammel’s union negotiated a mutually acceptable settlement that resulted in giving the sculpture to Mr. Rammell; thus Capilano University considers this matter closed.”

As for the condition of the sculpture upon its return, the university’s statement said, “The effigy was dismantled to facilitate its removal; Mr. Rammel was advised that this was the case.”

Read More: Inside Higher Ed

Tensions mount with #HongKongStudents resolve #scholarism

HKStudentsClashDay6

Wall Street Journal, China Real Time, October 3, 2014– Toward evening on the seventh day of protests that have rocked Hong Kong, fears grew of a confrontation. Protesters were giving the city’s chief executive until midnight to resign and said they would block him from going to work; police vowed to stop them. How the next hours played out; times are approximate:

5 p.m. Thursday: Crowds swell outside the offices of Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying. Photos on social media show police carrying supplies of rubber bullets and tear gas into the building.  Students block a van from entering the compound.

6 p.m. Police spokesman Steve Hui says police is prepared to take “resolute” measures.

7 p.m. Organizers tell people with children and pets to clear the area around the chief executive’s office and the adjacent People’s Liberation Army complex. Students start donning gas masks and goggles. “I’m afraid, just hoping for the best,” says student Ashley Yeung, 22, who was at the protest on Sunday when tear gas was fired into the crowd by riot police.

8 p.m. Student leader Joshua Wong pleads for calm on Twitter: “Those we oppose are crazy. We don’t want to be mad like them.”

9 p.m. The Hong Kong Federation of Students, one of the student groups leading the protests, posts an open letter on Facebook to Carrie Lam, the No. 2 official in the Hong Kong government, seeking negotiations.

Some protesters near a PLA garrison on Hong Kong island block traffic but others try to stop them, “It’s the only road Hong Kong has!” shouts one woman through a loudspeaker.

10 p.m. Crowds are now huge at the government buildings. Police again warn protesters not to charge police lines.

11 p.m. As the midnight deadline protesters have set for Mr. Leung to resign approaches, the mood is apprehensive but crowds are orderly: They have heard Mr. Leung will speak and are waiting. Periodically chants erupt when student leaders speak.

11:30 p.m. The presidents of the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong appear at the government buildings to appeal for calm.

Midnight: The word from the chief executive mere minutes before midnight: He will appoint Ms. Lam, to meet with student protesters. He won’t resign.

Early morning hours Friday: Crowds start to disperse but many stay, saying they’re far from satisfied. “What they said was so distant from what we wanted,” says 26-year old Lawrence Chak, who still plans to spend the night with his friends at the main protest site.

The leaders of Occupy Central, two college professors and a Baptist minister, welcome talks between students and the government, but say the chief executive must still step down.

As many protesters sleep on the lawns and sidewalks, others sit with textbooks on their lap, trying to catch up with their studies after days of protesting.

5 a.m. Some protesters holding red traffic sticks try to prevent others from blocking the main roads outside the government buildings as morning nears and people start going to work after a two-day holiday.

Police plead for protesters to allow through a truck they say is loaded with food for police officers. Protesters shout back that they will pass the food in: “We can give you what you need–food, not the truck.”

8:30 a.m. The Hong Kong government says the city’s government offices will be temporarily closed.

9:30 a.m. Hong Kong stocks fall 1.2% as markets open after a two-day holiday and are down around 4.6% on the week, with crowds still in the street and many government workers unable to work normally.

Read More: Wall Street Journal, China Real Time

Critical mass of labour activists build around #HongKongStudents #scholarism

hk-protests-web

Lily Kuo, Quartz, September 30, 2014– While tens of thousands of students continue to paralyze Hong Kong’s financial and commercial districts for a third day to demand free elections, across Victoria harbor in Kowloon the pro-democracy movement is starting to look a little different. In Mong Kok, a dense working class neighborhood, demonstrators are older, quieter, and in some ways, a little more cynical.

“The politics here are so bad. That’s why we have to fight for democracy,” 78-year old Li Kon-wah tells Quartz. Li says Hong Kong’s top official, the chief executive CY Leung answers only to Beijing, a government that he remembers most for having ordered a violent crackdown on nonviolent democracy protesters in 1989. “I was so angry. I cried,” he says, after carefully taping a sign onto a nearby bus that reads, “Blood bath Tiananmen Massacre.”

What started as a pro-democracy movement mainly among the city youth—sparked by student activists as well as another pro-democracy group, Occupy Hong Kong—is starting to capture a broad cross-section of the city’s population of seven million. The majority of these residents initially opposed Occupy’s strategy—to disrupt the city’s economy and force the government to withdraw electoral reforms that give Hong Kongers direct elections in 2017 but allows Beijing the ability to vet candidates for the city’s top office.

Now, news reports and footage of police clashing with students, as well as tear gassing or pepper spraying them, have brought more people into the streets. In Mong Kok, thousands of demonstrators, including students, retired local residents, and workers have overtaken Nathan Road, a main thoroughfare. They are decorating streets with chalk drawings of umbrellas—the latest symbol for the demonstrations—and plastering signs on a row of buses that had to be abandoned when drivers couldn’t move in crowds that descended on the street late Sunday.

 Elderly demonstrators like Li mill around the area listening to speeches, handing out yellow ribbons and leaflets. Another retiree, Chan Kin-hoi, 76, wears a hat with a sign that reads, “Oppose the communist party, save Hong Kong.” Chan says: “I’m here because I support universal suffrage.” Local workers, like delivery drivers have volunteered to bring goods to demonstrators.
Young and middle-aged professionals are also joining the protests during work breaks or after work. Grace Fu, 22, who works at an office nearby, is under no illusion that the protesters’ demands will be met. Chief executive Leung said again today the government will not change its stance on how Hong Kong elections will be run, despite the spread of “illegal” protests.
 But, says Fu, “Even if this movement doesn’t change anything, it’s good that people can now know what’s going on in Hong Kong. That would still be worth it.”
Read More: Quartz

#HongKongStudents second week of university strike #scholarism #occupyallstreet

tamar-oct1-sam-bOccupy Central

Yojana Sharma, University World News, September 30, 2014– Hong Kong university students – part of a huge, often spontaneous pro-democracy movement that has occupied the streets of central Hong Kong in recent days – said on Monday that they would extend their week-long boycott of classes to an indefinite one. 

“We urge students to boycott classes indefinitely and teachers to boycott teaching,” said the statement by Hong Kong University Students’ Union and Scholarism and other groups.

The week-long university strike that started on 22 September with rallies around the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, or CUHK, before spreading to central Hong Kong was to have ended on Friday 26 September with school-age students led by the campaign group Scholarism joining the strike for its final day. 

Instead, huge crowds surged onto the streets at the weekend and into Monday, blocking major roads. The students and public were angry about police tactics and dozens of arrests made outside Hong Kong government headquarters, where students broke through the police cordon to occupy the area late on Friday night.

The one-week class boycott has been extended because of “violence by the police force”, said the Hong Kong Federation of Students, or HKFS, which has 60,000 members and is one of the student boycott’s largest organisers.

The boycott had been called after China last month insisted that candidates for a promised Hong Kong leadership election in 2017 would be pre-selected by representatives of China, angering pro-democracy groups. Young people are demanding genuine democracy. 

HKFS and Scholarism warned that civil disobedience would spread unless Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung responds to protesters’ demands by 1 October. Possible action includes a general strike, and more class boycotts, they said. 

Occupy Central co-founder Chan Kin-man said that if Leung announced his resignation, the occupation of the key areas in Hong Kong would stop for a short period of time before they decide on their next move.

But Leung said in a press conference on Tuesday that he would not give in to demands for his resignation. Any such action before ‘universal suffrage’ was implemented would mean Hong Kong picking a new leader under the existing system.

Arrests

The protests escalated after pro-democracy legislators, professors and student leaders were arrested during the police action at the government offices on Saturday morning, among them Alex Chow and Lester Shum, leaders of HKFS, three Hong Kong legislators and the convener of the Alliance for True Democracy, Joseph Cheng, a political science professor at Hong Kong’s City University. 

Thousands poured onto Hong Kong’s main arteries demanding their release – in particular the release of Joshua Wong, 17, leader of Scholarism, a group of high-school students. Yvonne Leung, president of the Hong Kong University’s student union told media that Wong had been dragged away by police on Saturday morning. 

Michael Davis, a professor of law at Hong Kong University, or HKU, said: “The legitimacy of the Hong Kong government is at stake and they certainly undermined their position by [tear] gassing students on the streets.

“That kind of aggressive behaviour, I think, stimulated almost half the protesters to come out,” he told local radio, describing it as a critical moment for the Hong Kong government. “They really need to be trying to do something to represent Hong Kong concerns and not just Beijing concerns.”

While Wong was held for 40 hours – the maximum allowed under Hong Kong law without charges being laid – the crowds on the streets mushroomed to over 80,000, according to HKFS estimates, with police unsuccessfully attempting to disperse them with pepper spray and teargas. 

“I don’t think they [Beijing] will listen to our demands, but I am angry that the Hong Kong police treat us in this way, that is why I am here,” said a HKU law student who gave her name only as Grace. She said she had not taken part in the initial student boycotts though she had joined pro-democracy rallies through the streets of Hong Kong in early July.  

While police refused to answer many questions at a press conference, they said teargas was used 87 times at nine different locations on Saturday and Sunday. 

While many protesters had come prepared with goggles and face masks, most had only their umbrellas to protect them, leading to the protests being dubbed the ‘umbrella revolution’.

More than 70 people were arrested during clashes with police outside the government headquarters over the weekend, with CUHK offering legal advice to students who were arrested. HKU estimated that least 10 of its students were arrested and said it would provide legal advice and other support to the students. 

In a statement, HKU’s Vice-chancellor Peter Mathieson said: “We will be flexible and reasonable in understanding the actions of students and staff who wish to express their strongly-held views.”

He added a plea for all parties to express their views peacefully and constructively. “We will also be flexible in understanding practical difficulties that staff and students may face in reaching the campus during periods of transport disruption,” the statement said. 

Refusal to back down

Despite a major escalation in the protests, Chief Executive Leung – who had refused to meet with students to consider their demands – said at a press conference on Sunday that the Hong Kong government was “resolute in opposing the unlawful occupation of government buildings”. He reiterated that the Hong Kong government would uphold Beijing’s decision on elections. 

A Hong Kong government statement on Sunday said the decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, or China’s one-party parliament on Hong Kong’s elections, was “legally binding”. 

Consultations on the Hong Kong election system had been scheduled to take place but the administration announced that these would now be held at a “better time” – a move that Occupy Central slammed as a delaying tactic. The administration was “just hoping people’s desire for genuine universal suffrage to fade over time”.

Leung issued a video-statement addressing Hong Kong citizens. He called on people to leave the protests, and dismissed rumours that police had opened fire or that the government was ready to call on China’s People’s Liberation Army to maintain order.

Commentary in the online edition of China’s communist party newspaper the People’s Daily blamed the unrest in Hong Kong on “extremists” backed by “foreign anti-China forces”. Pictures and reports of the Hong Kong unrest has been censored in China.

Read More: University World News

#scholarism #youth in #HongKongStudents protest #occupyallstreet

Photo by Lam Yik Fei/Getty

Photo by Lam Yik Fei/Getty

Wilfred Chan & Yuli Yang, CNNHong Kong (CNN), September 28, 2014— He’s one of the fieriest political activists in Hong Kong — he’s been called an “extremist” by China’s state-run media — and he’s not even old enough to drive.

Meet 17-year-old Joshua Wong, a skinny, bespectacled teen whose meager physical frame belies the ferocity of his politics. Over the last two years, the student has built a pro-democracy youth movement in Hong Kong that one veteran Chinese dissident says is just as significant as the student protests at Tiananmen, 25 years ago.

Echoing the young campaigners who flooded Beijing’s central square in 1989, the teen activist wants to ignite a wave of civil disobedience among Hong Kong’s students. His goal? To pressure China into giving Hong Kong full universal suffrage.

Wong’s movement builds on years of pent-up frustration in Hong Kong.

When the former colony of the United Kingdom was returned to Chinese rule in 1997, the two countries struck an agreement promising Hong Kong a “high degree of autonomy,” including the democratic election of its own leader. But 17 years later, little resembling genuine democracy has materialized. China’s latest proposal suggests Hong Kongers may vote for their next leader, but only if the candidates are approved by Beijing.

Hong Kong is a seed of fire… the Communist Party is very scared of this tiny bit of land.

Wong is bent on fighting the proposal — and impatient to win.

“I don’t think our battle is going to be very long,” he tells CNN. “If you have the mentality that striving for democracy is a long, drawn-out war and you take it slowly, you will never achieve it.

“You have to see every battle as possibly the final battle — only then will you have the determination to fight.”

Youth awakening

Doubt him if you like, but the young activist already has a successful track record of opposition.

In 2011, Wong, then 15, became disgusted with a proposal to introduce patriotic, pro-Communist “National and Moral Education” into Hong Kong’s public schools.

With the help of a few friends, Wong started a student protest group called Scholarism. The movement swelled beyond his wildest dreams: In September 2012, Scholarism successfully rallied 120,000 protesters — including 13 young hunger strikers — to occupy the Hong Kong government headquarters, forcing the city’s beleaguered leaders to withdraw the proposed curriculum.

That was when Wong realized that Hong Kong’s youth held significant power.

“Five years ago, it was inconceivable that Hong Kong students would care about politics at all,” he says. “But there was an awakening when the national education issue happened. We all started to care about politics.”

Asked what he considers to be the biggest threats to the city, he rattles them off: From declining press freedom as news outlets change their reporting to reflect a pro-Beijing slant, to “nepotism” as Beijing-friendly politicians win top posts, the 17-year-old student says Hong Kong is quickly becoming “no different than any other Chinese city under central administration.”

That’s why Wong has set his eyes on achieving universal suffrage. His group, which now has around 300 student members, has become one of the city’s most vocal voices for democracy. And the kids are being taken seriously.

In June, Scholarism drafted a plan to reform Hong Kong’s election system, which won the support of nearly one-third of voters in an unofficial citywide referendum.

Joshua Wong could be arrested, or jailed. I hope he understands this will be a battle of resilience.
Hu Jia, Chinese dissident

In July, the group staged a mass sit-in which drew a warning from China’s vice president not to disrupt the “stability” of the city. In the end, 511 people were briefly arrested.

This week, the group is mobilizing students to walk out of classes — a significant move in a city that reveres education — to send a pro-democracy message to Beijing.

The student strike has received widespread support. College administrators and faculty have pledged leniency on students who skip classes, and Hong Kong’s largest teacher union has circulated a petition declaring “Don’t let striking students stand alone.”

China’s reaction has been the opposite: Scholarism has been named a group of “extremists” in the mainland’s state-run media. Wong also says he is mentioned by name in China’s Blue Paper on National Security, which identifies internal threats to the stability of Communist Party rule.

But the teenage activist won’t back down. “People should not be afraid of their government,” he says, quoting the movie “V for Vendetta,” “The government should be afraid of their people.”

Compared to activists in Hong Kong, activists in mainland China face a situation far more grim.

Few understand this better than veteran human rights activist Hu Jia, 41. A teenage participant in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, he remembers witnessing the carnage in the aftermath of Chinese government’s crackdown.

“At the age of 15, it made me understand my responsibility and my mission in life,” he tells CNN in a phone call from Beijing. “The crackdown made a clear cut between myself and the system.”

Tiananmen protester: I was willing to die

Read More: CNN

U Illinois urged to reinstate prof Salaita, critic of Israeli war in Gaza

Democracy Now!, September 9, 2014– As the fall school term begins, an Illinois college campus is embroiled in one of the nation’s biggest academic freedom controversies in recent memory. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has sparked an outcry over its withdrawal of a job offer to a professor critical of the Israeli government. Steven Salaita was due to start work at the university as a tenured professor in the American Indian Studies Program. But after posting a series of tweets harshly critical of this summer’s Israeli assault on Gaza, Salaita was told the offer was withdrawn. The school had come under pressure from donors, students, parents and alumni critical of Salaita’s views, with some threatening to withdraw financial support. Thousands of academics have signed petitions calling for Salaita’s reinstatement, and several lecturers have canceled appearances in protest. The American Association of University Professors has called the school’s actions “inimical to academic freedom and due process.” A number of Urbana-Champaign departments have passed votes of no-confidence in the chancellor, Phyllis Wise. And today, Urbana-Champaign students will be holding a campus walkout and day of silence in support of Salaita. We are joined by two guests: Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke, who has canceled a lecture series at Urbana-Champaign in protest of Salaita’s unhiring; and Kristofer Petersen-Overton, a scholar who went through a similar incident in 2011 when Brooklyn College reversed a job offer after complaints about his Middle East views, only to reinstate it following a public outcry.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: As the fall school term begins, an Illinois college campus is embroiled in one of the nation’s biggest academic freedom controversies in recent memory. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has sparked an outcry over its withdrawal of a job offer to a professor critical of the Israeli government. Steven Salaita was due to start work at Urbana-Champaign as a tenured professor in the American Indian Studies Program. But after posting a series of tweets harshly critical of the summer’s assault on Gaza, Salaita was told the offer was withdrawn. Urbana-Champaign has come under pressure from donors, students, parents and alumni critical of Salaita’s views, with some threatening to withdraw financial support.

The move has been criticized both in and outside of the school, with administrators accused of political censorship. Thousands of academics have signed petitions calling for Salaita’s reinstatement, and several lecturers have canceled appearances in protest. The American Association of University Professors has called the school’s actions “inimical to academic freedom and due process.” A number of school departments have passed votes of no-confidence in the chancellor, Phyllis Wise. And today, students will be holding a campus walkout and a day of silence in support of Salaita. A news conference is being held, where Salaita is expected to make his first public comments since his unhiring last month.

AMY GOODMAN: In a public statement, Chancellor Phyllis Wise said her decision to unhire Salaita “was not influenced in any way by his positions on the conflict in the Middle East nor his criticism of Israel.” She goes on to write, quote, “What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them,” unquote. The school has now reportedly offered Salaita a financial settlement for his troubles. The school’s Board of Trustees is expected to take up the controversy at a meeting on Thursday.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Kristofer Petersen-Overton is an adjunct lecturer of political science at Lehman College. In 2011, Brooklyn College initially decided not to hire Petersen-Overton as an adjunct professor for a seminar on Middle East politics. But the school reversed its decision after criticism that the decision was politically motivated. And Katherine Franke joins us. She’s a professor of law at Columbia University and the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. She recently canceled a lecture series at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in protest of Steven Salaita’s unhiring.

Professor Franke, let’s begin with you. Talk about the facts of this case and how you got involved.

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, Professor Salaita was previously a professor at Virginia Tech University, and he had a well-known dossier of books and articles thinking critically about the relationship between indigeneity, meaning native people, and the political environments in which they live—hard questions about dispossession, belonging, state violence and identity. And because of that important scholarly record, the University of Illinois went after him—in a friendly way, unlike what they’re doing now. And he was hired by an overwhelming vote by the American Indian Studies Program there in the normal way that we hire faculty in universities. An offer letter was issued to him. He accepted it. They paid for his moving expenses. He quit his job, a tenured position in Virginia. And he has a small child and a family and a wife, and was ready to move. His course books had been ordered. He had been invited by the university to the faculty welcome luncheon.

And then, on August 1st, he got a letter from the chancellor saying, “We’re sorry, we’re not going to be able to employ you here, because I haven’t taken the last step, which I had not informed you about before, of taking your candidacy to the Board of Trustees.” He had assumed he had an accepted job offer. He had relied on that offer—and at his peril. He now doesn’t have a home, doesn’t have a job and doesn’t have an income.

So what we now have learned, through a FOIA request and the disclosure of emails at the university, is that there was enormous pressure put on the chancellor and the Board of Trustees by large donors of the university, who said, “I’ll take my six-figure donations away if you hire this guy.” And this is as a result of some tweets that Professor Salaita made over the summer during the heat of the Gaza—the Israeli assault on Gaza. He was very upset about it. He himself is Palestinian. He was watching children die and the destruction of Gazan villages that we all watched. And like many of us, he was quite impassioned and used colorful language on Twitter to express his views, and that those tweets somehow made their way to donors at the University of Illinois. And so, the job, as been described even here in the setup, is either withdrawn or somehow not—well, what has happened is he’s just been fired. And so he’s now organizing, along with the rest of us, a response to what is a deliberate campaign by a number of political operatives who put pressure on universities like the University of Illinois to censor critical scholarship, critical comments, critical research about Israeli state policy.

Read More: Democracy Now!

CFP: Academic Mobbing (Special Issue of Workplace) #edstudies #criticaled #occupyed #bced #yteubc

LAST Call for Papers

Academic Mobbing
Special Issue
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

Editors: Stephen Petrina & E. Wayne Ross

Editors of Workplace are accepting manuscripts for a theme issue on Academic Mobbing.  Academic mobbing is defined by the Chronicle of Higher Education (11 June 2009) as: “a form of bullying in which members of a department gang up to isolate or humiliate a colleague.” The Chronicle continues:

If rumors are circulating about the target’s supposed misdeeds, if the target is excluded from meetings or not named to committees, or if people are saying the target needs to be punished formally “to be taught a lesson,” it’s likely that mobbing is under way.

As Joan Friedenberg eloquently notes in The Anatomy of an Academic Mobbing, the toll taken is excessive.  Building on a long history of both analysis and neglect in academia, Workplace is interested in a range of scholarship on this practice, including theoretical frameworks, legal analyses, resistance narratives, reports from the trenches, and labor policy reviews.  We invite manuscripts that address, among other foci:

  • Effects of academic mobbing
  • History of academic mobbing
  • Sociology and ethnography of the practices of an academic mob
  • Social psychology of the academic mob leader or boss
  • Academic mobbing factions (facts & fictions) or short stories
  • Legal defense for academic mob victims and threats (e.g., Protectable political affiliation, race, religion)
  • Gender norms of an academic mob
  • Neo-McCarthyism and academic mobbing
  • Your story…

Contributions for Workplace should be 4000-6000 words in length and should conform to APA, Chicago, or MLA style.

FINAL Date for Papers: May 30, 2014

Time for action on racial equity in Education at #UBC #ubced #yteubc #bced #bcpoli #edstudies #highered

In a previous blog on UBC Professor Jennifer Chan’s complaint of racial discrimination in her application to the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education, I suggested a few things:

  • Given that the term of the current Lam Chair expired, it should itself should be left vacant, without a faculty member holding for two years.
  • With administrative terms winding down, the spring will be time for our new Dean, closing in on his third year, to ‘shuffle the cabinet’ and appoint a new administration to take affirmative action on racial equity in Education.

Questions were raised about why I said “time for reflection” when I should have said time for action on racial equity. Point taken.

Time for reflection on racial equity in Education at #UBC #ubced #yteubc #bced #bcpoli #edstudies #idelnomore

The Ubyssey‘s coverage of the UBC Professor Jennifer Chan’s complaint of racial discrimination in her application to the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education has been outstanding. Jonny Wakefield’s feature article on the background and Sarah Bigam’s synoptic article on the final dismissal of the case provide models for media.

The case law assembled for this will be indispensable to future complainants on employment equity and protected ground of human rights:

The term of the 2009 awardee of the David Lam Chair expired in December 2013.  Respondents in this case (Beth Haverkamp, David Farrar, Jon Shapiro, Rob Tierney) finished or are winding down their terms. It is time for the Faculty of Education to phase in a period for reflection on racial equity within the ranks. The Lam Chair should itself should be left vacant, without a faculty member holding for two years. Leaving a Chair vacant is not at all uncommon in Universities. In Education, for example, the David Robitaille Chair in Mathematics, Science, and Technology has been dormant and vacant since 2010. With administrative terms winding down, the spring will be time for our new Dean, closing in on his third year, to ‘shuffle the cabinet’ and appoint a new administration to take affirmative action on racial equity in Education.

Racial discrimination complaint against UBC dismissed #ubc #ubced #yteubc #bced #bcpoli #edstudies #idlenomore

Photo by Steven Richards, The Ubyssey

Sarah Bigam, The Ubyssey, January 15, 2014– The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has dismissed the complaint of a UBC education professor who says she was the victim of racial discrimination.

Jennifer Chan argued she was denied appointment to the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education, which was granted to a white candidate, in part because she is Chinese-Canadian. The tribunal dismissed her complaint after four years of legal proceedings.

On Dec. 19, tribunal member Norman Trerise determined that, based on the evidence before him, the case had no reasonable chance of success at a hearing.

“There is really nothing to support that race, colour, ancestry or place of origin played a role in the outcome of the selection process,” Trerise wrote.

He determined that the decision likely came down to the differences between the hiring committee and Chan’s definitions of multiculturalism, since “breadth of representation of multicultural education” was a criterion for the position.

Chan asserts that five of the six members of the hiring committee were not experts in multiculturalism.

“It’s huge pity because if [Trerise] had moved the case to hearing, then obviously the crucial thing would have been to hear the experts in the field, which the hiring committee never did,” Chan said.

Chan first brought her complaint to UBC’s Equity Office in 2009 after being denied the position. The office ran an investigation and then dismissed the complaint, which led Chan to bring her case to the tribunal in May 2010.

“I was disappointed all along the way. I think one of the most disappointing things … would be the UBC Equity Office’s way of handling the whole thing.”

Chan alleges that the VP equity at the time, Tom Patch, had hired a friend of his to do the Equity Office review which dismissed her case.

UBC made multiple attempts to have the case dismissed, but in January 2012, the tribunal ruled that Chan’s case would go to a full hearing, which was originally scheduled for September 2013.

In March 2012, UBC applied to the B.C. Supreme Court for a judicial review of the complaint on the grounds that the case had already been dealt with by UBC’s investigation through the Equity Office. The Supreme Court ruled that the tribunal had not considered whether UBC has sufficiently dealt with the complaint and their decision not to dismiss the complaint “was based on a misapprehension of the evidence and on irrelevant factors.” The court directed the tribunal to reconsider its decision.

Chan asked for the tribunal to include in its reconsideration evidence that she had obtained after filing her original complaint, and UBC said it should not consider materials submitted after that point. The tribunal sided with UBC.

Chan said that, had the case gone to hearing, the additional information would have helped her case.

Chan has no plans to continue pursuing this case.

“In terms of the legal realm, it’s really over,” she said.

“Dr. Chan is a respected scholar and a valued member of the UBC Faculty of Education,” wrote UBC director of public affairs Lucie McNeill in an emailed statement. “UBC took her complaint very seriously and investigated her allegations thoroughly under the procedures set out in UBC’s policy on discrimination and harassment.

“The tribunal’s findings in December concur with our own, and that is gratifying.”

Although the complaint was dismissed, Trerise did decide that UBC’s Equity Office investigation was not a proceeding in the legal sense.

“There, we won, and it’s extremely important in the sense that even though this case is dismissed, this part … is going to set a legal precedent for future complaints,” Chan said.

Chan hopes that her case has drawn attention to greater structural issues. In August 2012, only eight per cent of 110 education faculty members belonged to a visible minority. Chan said inexperience in the legal realm, high legal fees and mental health issues caused by stress affected her and may impede others from who file similar complaints.

“We’re talking about a huge structural gap in the Canadian equity scene here. There’s no effective and efficient system for any equity complaint, and for me that is very serious. Canada tends to project this image: we’re a multicultural country, we take equity seriously. I walk through this process — no. This, for me, is a mirage.”

Read More: Ubyssey

Aboriginal rights forum Dalhousie U #idlenomore #edstudies #bced #ubc #ubced #bcpoli

IDEALaw: Aboriginal Rights in the Spotlight

Canadian Civil Liberties Association–January 25, 2014–On January 24th-25th 2014 academics, practitioners, community members, and students have been gathering at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University to discuss and examine the state of Aboriginal rights in Canada. The biennial IDEALaw conference has never seen a comparable response in numbers and media interest. The line up of speakers, cultural events, and discussion focus of the conference has created a buzz in Halifax.

Organized by students, the conference attempts to address a number of pressing issues facing Aboriginals. Environmental concerns, poverty and criminal law issues, and police and institutional responses to protest are all on the bill. The conference was develped to encourage discussion and openness to new approaches, different perspectives, and engaging the public in legal and political action in response to community concerns. While the conference is ongoing, all talks thus far have addressed the chilling effects of organised and concerted rights abuses on the civil liberties and human rights of Aboriginals in Canada and abroad.

The conference opened with a fascinating and rousing talk by Sheila Watt-Cloutier on human rights. Her experience as head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and own experiences as an advocate for Inuit in Canada and overseas gave a fascinating and “on the ground” perspective on alternative ways to perceive climate change. Her commentary on and analysis of the success attached to the ICC’s Petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Seeking Relief from Violations Resulting from Global Warming Caused by Acts and Omissions of the United States set the tone for continued discussion into the night. Of particular interest to most was the role of democratic and social rights and their protection in communities facing significant and overwhelming changes due to environmental impact.

Read More: CCLA

January 28 National Day of Teach-ins focused on First Nations Education Act #idlenomore #ubc #bced #bcploi #occupyeducation #edstudies

IDLE NO MORE + DEFENDERS OF THE LAND
TEACH-INS
JANUARY 28, 2014

Idle No More— As we begin a new year, we invite Idle No More groups to organize local teach-ins on January 28th based around the First Nation Education Act and the broader Termination Plan that it represents.  We recognize that every Nation and community has their own unique stories, struggles, and practices and we hope that every teach-in is rooted in the on-the-ground realities that are the heart of the movement. When we include our local allies and supporters to attend, help, and promote local teach-ins we believe this adds strength to the bundle of arrows we continue to build through education.

As a support to teach-in organizers we are developing educational tools to use at local teach-ins that will focus on the  First Nation Education Act and the broader Termination Plan of the Canadian government.  Please feel free to use these tools, or to develop your own!  We are also hoping that each teach-in will create a quick list of local struggles or issues and that we can share these lists to help guide the Idle No More movement.

We need to support one another as we continue to fight for our lands, water, sovereignty, and our future generations.  We hope that these teach-ins help to deepen and strengthen our roots and prepare us for the work that lies ahead.

Read More: Idle No More

#IdleNoMore “Got Land? Thank An Indian” truth-telling protest Jan 28 #ubc #ubced #bced #bcpoli #criticaled

Idle No More + Defenders of the Land
Day of Action
January 28, 2014

Idle No More, For Immediate Release– Idle No More and Indigenous teen who wore “Got Land? Thank an Indian” shirt call on people everywhere to wear it as act of truth-telling protest

Tenelle Starr will appear as honorary guest at Neil Young concert in Regina on Friday

(Turtle Island/Canada ) – A 13 year old Indigenous teenager, Tenelle Starr, prevented initially from wearing a sweatshirt at her school in Balcarres near Regina that read “Got Land? Thank an Indian” is now calling, along with the Idle No More movement, for people everywhere to don the shirt as an act of truth-telling and protest.

Now and up to a January 28 Day of Action, Tenelle and Idle No More and Defenders of the Land are encouraging people across the country to make the shirt and wear them to their schools, workplaces, or neighbourhoods to spark conversations about Canada’s true record on Indigenous rights. They have created a website (http://www.idlenomore.ca/got_land) where people can get stencils to make a shirt, to buy it, and upload photos of themselves wearing it.

“Everyone can wear the shirt.  I think of it as a teaching tool that can help bring awareness to our treaty and land rights. The truth about Canada’s bad treatment of First Nations may make some people uncomfortable, but understanding it is the only way Canada will change and start respecting First Nations,” says Tenelle, an Idle No More supporter who has participated in many Idle No More rallies with her mother.

Tenelle will also be appearing as an honorary guest at the Neil Young Honour The Treaties concert in Regina on Friday night. Chief Allan Adam and the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation have gifted her and her mom with tickets to pay respect to her courage.

Since the media started reporting on Tenelle’s acts, she has has been attacked on her facebook page by an online hate group that has threatened her safety, forcing her to disable her facebook account.

The January 28 National Day of Action is also a day of Teach-ins to raise awareness about the federal Harper government’s attack on native education through the First Nations Education Act and his continuing agenda to “terminate” or abolish Indigenous peoples rights, sovereignty and status as Nations and dispossess them of their lands and resources.

Read More: Idle No More

Henry Giroux | Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Challenging Casino Capitalism’s Punishing Factories # criticaleducation #occupywallstreet #occupyeducation #idlenomore

Henry Giroux, Thruthout, January 13, 2014– The Gilded Age is back, with huge profits for the ultrarich, hedge fund managers and the major players in the financial service industries. In the new landscapes of wealth, exclusion and fraud, the commanding institutions of a savage and fanatical capitalism promote a winner-take-all ethos and aggressively undermine the welfare state and wage a counter revolution against the principles of social citizenship and democracy. The geographies of moral and political decadence have become the organizing standard of the dreamworlds of consumption, privatization, surveillance and deregulation. For instance, banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and other investment companies including Barclays, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and UBS prosper from subterfuge and corruption. They also have been transformed into punishing factories that erode the welfare state while pushing millions into hardship and misery and relegating an entire generation of young people into a state of massive unemployment, debt, and repression.  The profits seem endless and the lack of moral responsibility unchecked as the rich go on buying sprees soaking up luxury goods in record numbers. The New York Times reports that dealers of high-end luxury cars cannot keep up with the demand. Indulging in luxury items is no longer a dirty word for the ultrarich in spite of living in a society wracked by massive unemployment, inequality and poverty. One example provided by the Times, without either irony or criticism, points to “Matt Hlavin, an entrepreneur in Cleveland who owns seven businesses, mostly in manufacturing, bought three Mercedes last year: a $237,000 SLS AMG and a $165,000 S63 AMG for himself, and a $97,000 GL550 sport utility vehicle for his wife.”[1]  This example of shameless consumption reads like a scene out of Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street, which portrays the financial elite as infantilized frat boys out of control in their unquenchable craving for greed, sex, power, and every other debauchery imaginable.[2] At a time when the United States has descended into forms of political and moral amnesia, massive inequity and high levels of poverty, coupled with narratives of excess and over-the-top material indulgence, have become normalized and barely receive any critical commentary in the mainstream media.

It gets worse. As the zombies of casino capitalism rake in unprecedented amounts of wealth, they appear to take delight in mocking and humiliating the poor and disadvantaged as if they are not only responsible for their suffering but deserve such hardships in spite of the fact they are not accountable for the difficulties in which they find themselves. Those with little power or wealth are now seen not only as morally degenerates but as disposable, subject to the whims of the market and outside any consideration of compassion or justice. Yet there is more at work here than a moral deficit or the kind of pathological daring and willingness to remove oneself from any sense of compassion for others. There is also a culture of cruelty willfully reproduced by a rabid form of casino capitalism that measures human worth in cost-benefit analysis and accrues and consolidates power in the interests of the top one percent of the population.

The new extremists balk at extending unemployment benefits or providing food stamps for young children. Yet, they have no trouble offering millions in subsidies to corporate interests or lowering taxes for the ultrarich corporations. Obscene wealth couples with the arrogance of power as billionaires such as the Koch brothers make 3 million dollars an hour from their investments while simultaneously calling for the abolishment of the minimum wage.[3] CEO salaries reach into the financial stratosphere, while the middle and working classes increasingly face impoverishment and misery.  In 2012, the “top 10 percent took in half of the country’s total income” while the top 1 percent took more than one-fifth (22.5 percent) of the income earned by Americans. [4] In the midst of the upward redistribution of wealth, misery proliferates, and the commanding institutions of society are increasingly more divorced from maters of ethics, social responsibility and social costs. This is evident as the ranks of homeless children grow exponentially, while corporate fat cats fund various groups to lobby against health care policies and social provisions for the poor. It is also evident in the growing ranks of people on food stamps, an increase in the homeless population, especially among children. Moreover, 46.2 percent of the American population lives in poverty. [5]

Republicans claim they are now concerned about addressing poverty, especially since the general public rightly views them as heartless, cruel and indifferent to the hardships experienced by people who are unemployed and lack food, shelter, health care and any sense of hope. Yet, the hypocrisy of the apostles of casino capitalism is on full display in a commentary by The New York Times which states: “But at the same time that the party is shifting its focus to poverty, many Republicans are pushing for deep cuts to food assistance programs and unemployment insurance, while 11 million Americans are jobless and poverty rates remain elevated in the wake of the recession.” [6] For the right-wing extremists dominating government, the courts and cultural life, talk about choice and agency is divorced from social responsibility and the emphasis on individual responsibility is nothing more than a cheap trick to divert the public’s attention away from larger structural and systemic problems facing the United States.

We now live under a form of casino capitalism that revels in deception, kills the radical imagination, depoliticizes the American public and promulgates what might be called disimagination factories and punishing machines. Idealism has been replaced by a repressive punishing machine and a surveillance state that turns every space into a war zone, criminalizes social problems and legitimates state violence as the most important practice for addressing important social issues. Racism now fuels a mass incarceration system that expands the reach of the punishing state to those viewed as excess and excluded from American society. The carceral state and the surveillance state now work together to trump security over freedom and justice while solidifying the rule of the financial elite and the reigning financial services such as banks, investment houses and hedge funds, all of which profit from the expanding reach of the punishing state. The drug war has become a war on racial minorities just as the war on poverty has become a war on the poor.

Chris Hedges is right when he argues that “any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through [the] control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian.” [7]  While Hedges is aware that this disciplinary culture of fear and repression is rooted in a political economy that treats people as objects and makes the accumulation of capital the subjects of history, he underestimates one important element of the new authoritarianism produced by casino capitalism. That is, what is novel about existing registers of discipline and control is that they operate in a new historical conjuncture in which the relationship among political power, cultural institutions and everyday life has become more powerful and intense in the ability to undermine the radical imagination and the power and capacities of individuals to resist repression and make the crucial decisions necessary to take control over the forces that shape their lives. The machineries of public pedagogy and consent have taken on an Orwellian presence in the age of digital technologies, and when challenges to authoritarian rule emerges, the state resorts to the overt and unapologetic repression of critical thought and dissent.

The anonymity of the corporate state becomes invisible as historical and public memory are erased and the American public is increasingly infantilized. Stupidity is normalized through a consumer/celebrity culture, and where that does not work, the machinery of state repression, with its endless culture of fear, punishes those willing to question authority. Authorities try to blind people to the courage exhibited by whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden, painting them instead as traitors. Courage is now under attack by the sterile and dangerous call for unchecked security. Fear becomes the only value left in the arsenal of the machinery of surveillance, control and social death. David Graeber is right in arguing that the call for public dialogue, dissent and critical exchange in order to hold power accountable no longer provokes informed judgement and outrage among the public or thoughtful responses from politicians and popular pundits. On the contrary, he writes:

Objections to such arrangements are to be met with truncheons, lasers, and police dogs. It’s no coincidence that marketization has been accompanied by a new ethos where challenge is met with an instant appeal to violence. In the end, despite endless protests to the contrary, our rulers understand that the market is not a natural social arrangement. It has always had to be imposed at the point of a gun . . . The question to ask now is not, how do we bring it back. That’s impossible and quite undesirable. The question is what new forms of genuinely democratic self-organization might rise from its ashes? To even begin to ask this question we must first of all get rid of the police. [8]

American politics and culture have been handed over to the rich, lobbyists for the corporate elite, and now function largely to produce a state that offers the ultrawealthy and powerful all of the benefits they need to accumulate even more capital, regardless of the massive inequality in wealth, income and suffering such policies produce. In spite of being discredited by the economic recession of 2008, unfettered casino capitalism remains a dominant force and continues to produce runaway environmental devastation, egregious amounts of human suffering and the reinforcement of what Charles Ferguson has called “finance as a criminalized, rogue industry. [9] And, yet, while resistance to such measures is growing, it is far too weak to offer a significant challenge to the new authoritarianism.

All over the world, the forces of casino capitalism are invoking austerity measures that produce a kind of social and civil death as they dismantle the historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, defining profit-making as the essence of democracy, expanding the role of corporate money in politics, waging an assault on unions, augmenting the military-security state, overseeing widening social inequality, promoting the erosion of civil liberties, and undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy. The script is not new, but the intensity of the assault on democratic values, civic engagement and public service has taken a dangerous turn and provides the ideological, political and cultural foundation for a society that seems unaware it is in the midst of an authoritarian stranglehold on all of its most cherished institutions, ranging from schools and health care to the very foundation of democracy. Austerity has become the weapon of choice, an economic poison designed to punish the middle and working classes while making clear that casino capitalism will administer the most severe penalties to those who challenge its authority. The police have become the new private armies of the rich, designed to keep the public in check hoping to make them fearful of being exposed to police brutality, state violence or the expanding mechanisms of the multiple surveillance apparatuses that now collect every piece of information that circulates electronically. Conformity has become the order of the day and fear the new norm, reinforced by a disimagination machine and the punishing state now mutually informing each other.

Within the last 30 years, the United States has been transformed from a society that included a market economy subject to the rule of the state to a society and government that are now dominated almost exclusively by market values and corporate power. We now live in what Robert Jay Lifton once described as a “death-saturated age.” [10] Political authority and power have been transformed into a sovereignty of corporate governance and rule. The United States has moved from a market economy to a market society in which all vestiges of the social contract are under attack, and politics is ruled by the irrational notion that casino capitalism should govern not simply the economy but the entirety of social life.  With the return of the new Gilded Age, not only are democratic values and social protections at risk, but the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger of disappearing altogether.

Public and higher education, however deficient, were once viewed as the bedrock for educating young people to be critical and engaged citizens. Schooling was valued as a public good, not a private right. Many educators in the ’70s and ’80s took seriously Paulo Freire’s notion of problematizing education, in which he called for students to be taught modes of critical literacy in which they could not only read the word but also read the world critically. [11] According to Freire, young people should be taught to read and write from a position of agency.  This meant learning how to engage in a culture of questioning, restaging power in productive ways, and connecting knowledge to the exercise of self-determination and self-development. Freire’s notion of critical pedagogy and education for freedom denounced banking education because it viewed students as passive containers into which knowledge was endlessly deposited. Rather than allow students to develop their own meanings, banking education assigned meanings for them, largely to memorize and spit out on intellectually bankrupt forms of testing. [12] Banking education is back with a vengeance and ironically parades under the name of educational reform, common standards and race to the top.   Public education has become a site of pedagogical repression, robbing students of the ability to think critically as a result of the two political business parties’ emphasis on education as mainly a project of mindless testing, standardization and the de-skilling of teachers. In addition, school reform has become a euphemism for turning public schools over to private investors who are more concerned about making money than they are about educating young people.  On the other hand, low-income and poor minority students increasingly find themselves in schools in which the line between prison culture and school culture is blurred.

Higher education, especially in the post-World War II period through the ’60s and ’70s, was, however ideally, considered a place where young people were taught how to think, engage in critical dialogue, and take on the responsibilities of informed and critical citizens. Now such students are subject to a technically trained docility, defined largely as consumers and told that the only value education has is to prepare them to be workers and consumers ready and eager to serve the ideological and financial interests of the global economy.  Critical thought and the radical imagination have become a liability under casino capitalism and for a growing number of institutions the enemy of public and higher education because they hold the potential to be at odds with the reproduction of a criminogenc culture in which greed, unchecked power, political illiteracy and unbridled self-interest work to benefit the wealthy and corporate elite. Under such circumstances, education becomes simply a business, developing an obsession with accountability schemes, measurable utility, authoritarian governing structures, and a crude empiricism for defining what counts as research.

How else to explain the following comment made by the president of Macomb Community College in Michigan: “Macomb is working with the federal government and other community colleges to better prepare students for the world that exists, not the world they want to live in.” [13] Or for that matter the blatant anti-intellectual bias imposed on colleges in Florida where Governor Rick Scott wants to push students toward business-friendly degrees by lowering tuition for academic fields and subjects that “steer students toward majors that are in demand in the job market.” [14] Of course, those areas such as philosophy, sociology, music, the arts, and other mainstays of the liberal arts would be more costly and their demise would intensify. Graeber argues that this assault on higher education has now become an object of intense state violence. He writes:

Make no mistake: to threaten someone with a stick is the ultimate anti-intellectual gesture. And if one thing has become clear in recent months, this is the first – really the only – impulse of the current government when faced with challenges to their vision for higher education. Police infiltration, surveillance, elected student leaders banned from political activities on campus, the arrest of students for simple acts of expression like chalking slogans on sidewalks, send a clear and constant message. There can be no reasoned discussion on these issues. There is no longer anything to talk about. Certainly, democracy has absolutely nothing to do with it. The pursuit of knowledge and understanding have been declared nothing but a consumer product, or else a form of technical training to increase overall economic productivity; these are the only way these matters can be discussed; if anyone wishes to gather to object to this, to gather in places of learning to insist that knowledge and understanding are not mere economic goods but something precious and valuable in their own right, they can only do so by permission of those who are telling them otherwise; otherwise, they can expect to be physically attacked. [15]

Similarly, higher education has become a dead zone for killing the imagination, a place where ideas that don’t have practical results go to die and where faculty and students are punished through the threat of force or harsh disciplinary measures for speaking out, engaging in dissent and holding power accountable. Faculty in most universities have been reduced to part-time jobs and function as indentured servants with no benefits, shockingly low salaries and no power to shape the conditions under which they work. With over 70 percent of faculty now holding the status of contingent labor, they are increasingly becoming one of the largest groups of professionals that qualify for food stamps to survive. These contingent and debt-ridden faculty live in a culture in which time is a burden rather than a luxury and have few opportunities to research, write and engage important social issues. At the same time, they live under both a survivalist mode and a culture of fear knowing that they can be dismissed arbitrarily at any time for the slightest infraction. Even tenured faculty are feeling the heat of a business-oriented de-democratizing university. For example, the Kansas Board of regents recently drastically curtailed tenure and academic freedom by claiming that both tenured and non-tenured faculty who used social media in ways that were not in the interest of the university, decided exclusively by the CEO of the university, were subject to dismissal. Speech that now impairs or reduces the university’s “efficiency” overrides the right of faculty to exercise free speech or address issues they deem socially and politically important.  For all intent and purposes, this signifies not only the end of tenure but academic freedom. Moreover, as William Black points out, “in both substance and dishonesty of presentation, the Regents’ policy is literally Orwellian.” [16]

Read More: Truthout

How far is too far when it comes to religious accommodation?

Matthew Coutts, Daily Brew, January 9, 2014– Is it appropriate to allow university students decline to participate in a class assignment because it would force him to interact with female students, or should they be expected to set their “firm religious beliefs aside” in their search for higher education? And how should technology play into the decision?

That question is at the centre of a debate ongoing at Toronto’s York University, where a sociology professor and university brass have clashed over whether a student’s religious belief should allow him to skip class assignments that bring him into contact with women.

The debate stems from a decision made by Professor Paul Grayson in September, when a male student in an online sociology course asked to be excused from an in-person assignment that would bring him in contact with female students. The students claimed “firm religious beliefs” as his reason for not wanted to intermingle with female students.

Grayson denied the request on the ground that it marginalized and punished female classmates. York University officials, however, approved the student’s request for religious accommodation and ordered Grayson to allow the student to remain absent from the session.

The student acquiesced and ultimately completed the project. In the meantime, however, the professor and university have locked into a battle that could write the playbook for future arguments around religious accommodation.

“If for religious reasons you exempt a student from interacting with females, there are religious reasons people could advance for not interacting with blacks, Jews, gays, you name it,” Grayson told SunNews Network. “In the bible and in religious practice you can find a basis for that kind of appeal.”

University Provost Rhonda Lenton retorted in a statement that every accommodation request is considered on its own merits. She said the circumstances of this case led the university to conclude the accommodation could be made.

“A deciding factor in this case was that it was an online course where another student had previously been given permission to complete the course requirement off-campus,” Lenton announced. She later told CBC’s Metro Morning that, “Had it not been an online course, it is my view that … the advice that would have been given to the professor and to the student is that this is a course that is being delivered on campus and in person, and part of the assignments are to work with other students in the class.”

Lenton notes that another student was allowed to skip an in-person assignment, suggesting it was an accommodation the professor was willing to make under some circumstances. Grayson said in interviews that a student taking the course from Egypt had previously been shown leniency due to his or her distance from campus.

Indeed, details published in the National Post suggest that the student at the centre of the debate enrolled in the online sociology course out of a belief that it would allow him to finish his degree without intermingling with other students – specifically females.

If that is the case, then it could be seen as an attempt by the student to work within the framework of York – accommodate the university and its inclusive environment, you could say – to balance his religious beliefs with his desire to complete his degree.

It is not clear what religion the student holds, and Grayson has said he consulted several religious leaders before coming to his decision. It should be noted, however, that when the professor denied the accommodation request, the student agreed to participate without further complaint. He even thanked Grayson for the way he handled the situation.

Lenton said that while the student and teacher were able to come to an agreement, “the broader issue of religious accommodations in secular universities remains an important societal concern that warrants further discussion.” The Ontario Human Rights Commission is reviewing the case.

Part of that review should be the role technology has played in all of this. Is it truly reasonable to expect religious accommodation through online courses? Should such a course allow members of society to harbor personal beliefs that will surely come to a head later in life?

Regardless of whether the course is online or not, the student in question will graduate with a degree from York University. Is the school comfortable attaching their reputation to a student who may, upon entering the job market, beg out of meetings because female co-workers and bosses will be in attendance?

York University should have one set of standards across campus. Accommodation is important but reason should still be a factor, whether the student is logged on from home or sitting in a classroom.