November 17th Day of action

OWS is calling for a national day of direct action and celebration to mark two months since the start of the Occupy movement. It began this morning with a march at Wall St. at 7am, and is continuing with "Occupy the Subways" actions at 3pm--including the Fordham Road station in the Bronx and several in Manhattan. For those interested in knowing what's planned, here's a link. 

On a more straightforwardly analytic and scholarly note: the movement, however leaderless and de-centered, has produced some striking images. Below, for instance, is the poster for today's actions.  Some of the signs and images in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere have also been notable. I'm wondering if anyone has started working on a visual analysis of the movement, or has come across any good such work online or elsewhere. 

Berkeley and Penn State

I've been trying to come up with a good way of articulating my intuition that there's something significant about the fact that the police violence against Occupy Cal (on the UC Berkeley campus) and the pro-Paterno riots (on the Penn State campus) happened on the same day...but I haven't really found a way of doing so that doesn't come across as stunned outrage. My best draft of a posting started with the sentence: "I wonder what those Penn State students will think about themselves years from now when they realize that--whatever their intentions--what they really did was riot in defense of child-rapists and the people who protected them." But it was hard to figure out where to go from there.

Fortunately, Dave Zirin just posted a piece in The Nation that says pretty much what I wanted to say, and more eloquently than I ever could have. I hope readers of this blog--especially students--will go and read the whole piece, but to give you a small sampling, here's how it concludes:

November 9 was a generational wake-up call to every student on every campus in this country. Which side are you on? Do you defend the ugliest manifestations of unchecked power or do you fight for a better world with an altogether different set of values? Do you stand with the Thugs of Penn State or do you stand with Occupiers of Berkeley? It’s fear vs. hope, and the stakes are a hell of a lot higher than a BCS bowl.

New York City Students in Support of Occupy Wall Street

There is a sizeable group of New York City students who are organizing in support of Occupy Wall Street.  I recently received this information from a colleague at another institution in the city:

The NYC all-student assembly meets on Saturdays in Washington Square Park at noon and is composed of students (high school, college, and postgraduate) from NYC and universities in NJ, PA, CT, VT, etc. This group has called for a student strike on 11/17 in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street (on its 2-month anniversary). There will be rallies, marches, and other actions across the city organized by trade unions, students, and activists. More info: http://studentweekofaction.wordpress.com/

I wanted to share this information to keep our Fordham students in the loop on the activities of their peers across the city.

Fordham and the Bronx

Why is it that there is only ONE student from the Bronx among the 45 students in my Rock and Roll to Hip Hop class?

Shouldn't Fordham be working harder to recruit students from the working class and immigrant neighborhoods outside the gates of it's Bronx campus?

Should Fordham adopt Roosevelt High School and the 5 academies inside it and do intensive programs with its students to assure that at least 50 students each year end up going to Fordham?

What do you think?

Does it matter how you're taught...economics?

Here's a link to a story about a group of students at Harvard making a connection between the way they're taught introductory economics courses and the economic policies that led to our current economic problems.

Student readers of this blog: are you being taught in ways that help you understand the ongoing crisis? Or do you feel, like these Harvard students, that you're being taught, without question, the same ideas that caused the crisis in the first place?

I am asking this question hoping not for criticism or praise of individual professors; I'm more interested in comments about, and critiques of, the ideas in your classes. Feel free to reply in the comments section below.

Police State, or the Halloween State of Exception

Last week my downtown neighborhood geared up for the the annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. Usually that entails a couple of police barricades along Sixth Avenue for crowd control, a number of parade vehicles staging on side streets, and an influx of ghosts, goblins, and vampires.

But this year was different. This year whole streets were blocked off hours and hours before the parade began. After 4pm there was no traffic on Spring Street. I had to pass through three police blockades to walk home from a doctor's appointment. Still, that was no big deal: I had my identification with me.

Unfortunately it was a big deal for my daughter. She attends a school for children with special needs; she has a disability that requires that she take a yellow school bus home. Typically she arrives home around 3:45. But on Halloween she got home at 5pm, after her frantic father retrieved her from the bus that was mired several blocks from home. Her school bus had been driving round and round and round the neighborhood trying to find a way into our block to no avail. 

When I arrived home and learned about this after just having navigated my way through three police blockades, one of my seldom-deployed subject positions emerged: indignant mom of special needs child. When I called the police community affairs number they referred me to the desk of local precinct. There the desk sergeant told me that he was awfully sorry and yes there was more security in the neighborhood this year than usual.

When I countered that the neighborhood had been made less secure for my disabled minor child by the actions of the police, he conceded that perhaps they had gone overboard and that he'd look into it. He was sorry, he said. Maybe, he said, I should call them in advance when they're going to close down the neighborhood streets to let them know about my daughter.

But how would I know that you're going to close down the neighborhood streets when you haven't done this before? How am I supposed to know how your unannounced actions are going to affect my daughter's well-being?

I don't know, he said. There is a lot of security this year, he said. He'd look into, he assured me, and we concluded our deeply unsatisfying conversation.

One of the reasons that I keep my child-avenging indignation well-contained is that once it's out of the box, it's not all that easy to put it aside. With plenty of steam still coming out of my ears, I put on my shoes and headed out to find the police supervisor on the street who had prevented my daughter from getting home. As I closed the door behind me her dad called after me, Don't do it, don't go out there. I know you. You're going to get arrested. 

A blue shirt on the corner told me there were no supervisors around, but then I spotted a Community Affairs Officer over at Thompson and Spring. I walked over and told him what had happened and he was all apologies. Wow, he said, that's terrible. And it's a yellow school bus? Yes, it's a yellow school bus. You know, he said, there is a lot of security this year. I repeated my concern that preventing a yellow school bus from driving handicapped children home did not seem like a big improvement in neighborhood security.

You know, he said, there is a lot of security because of Occupy Wall Street.  They're going to try to march in the parade.

And that would be a problem because . . . ?  It's a public parade, right?

Well, they might take over the parade, he said.

And so, I said, the police think that protesters from Occupy Wall Street are going to sneak into the neighborhood on a yellow school bus carrying disabled children home from school?

No, no, they should have let the bus in, this was just a mistake, he said. I'm going to tell you something, he said, leaning in and lowering his voice in a conspiratorial tone . . . I'm going to tell you something. You're not taping me, are you? he asked.

No, I said.

Reassured, he continued.

You know, the police are a paramilitary organization.  If someone gives an order, the guys below just follow it. They don't think. They just follow the order. Someone should have opened the barricade to let the school bus through, but no one wanted to get in trouble. He paused.  Are you sure you're not taping me?

Yes, I said, I'm sure I'm not taping you.

I wish, of course, that I had been taping him. I have a very good ear for conversation, but there's nothing quite like having something on tape.

And so we read here my memory of the dialogue, in which the police community affairs officer first tries to put the blame for the disruptive neighborhood policing on the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Finding no sympathy for this tactic, he quickly switches gears and third-parties the police department (I'm with you, I'm not one of them, I don't know why they're so stupid.)  The police, he lets the secret out of the bag, are a paramilitary organization.

There was little more to say. I could have continued my harangue, but to what end? He was good. He was very good. He was very, very good at his community affairs job. He gave me his card. He urged me to follow-up with him.

So I went home, knowing that the ghouls, and goblins, and witches haunting my neighborhood that evening are not nearly as scary as the state of exception that allows the police to shutdown our neighborhoods because peaceful protesters might join in a parade.

Occupying Manhattan's Public Spaces, 1776 and today

An interesting historical commentary from the New-York Historical Society blog,  noting that the Sons of Liberty struggled with British authorities for control of public spaces.

As Eric Robinson notes on the blog, one of those battles culminated with the rebels tearing down and decapitating a statue of the King. Interestingly (to me) the head ended up on a stake "just outside Fort Washington in Upper Manhattan," which means it may have been right in front of my apartment building!