Youth

CUNY Wars: Petraeus, ROTC, Student Center Closing & Police Conflict

December 18, 2013 Peter Rugh, www.alternet.org Resist! CUNY, Petraeus, Student Activism, Youth

The trouble started this semester when the school enlisted Petraeus, the disgraced ex-commander of U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and former CIA chief, to teach a class, “The Coming North American Decades,” at its Macaulay Honors College. Course materials included literature espousing the virtues of hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, but no mention of the general's ties to Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts, a private equity firm with millions invested in the controversial oil and gas extraction method. Yet demonstrations against Petraeus's presence mainly focused on his role as an architect of U.S. wars abroad—part of an ongoing challenge to what critics describe as the increasing militarization of the university. The protests quickly turned violent, with police beating students in the streets this September.

Parents and Families Against Police Brutality Condemn DeBlasio’s Police Commissioner

December 18, 2013 Occupy the Bronx, www.facebook.com Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Police abuse, Youth

We are all outraged over Mayor-elect DeBlasio’s choice of William Bratton for police commissioner and furious with Al Sharpton for allowing Bratton to speak at the National Action Network, knowing Bratton is not for the good of the Black community. At an inaugural press conference on October 3, 2002, newly appointed LAPD Chief William Bratton was quoted by the LATimes as saying: Where you have guns, you have drugs. Where you have drugs, you have youth. Where you have youth, you have gangs. Why treat them like four different diseases? When you go to a doctor, he treats the totality of all that are affecting your body. L.A. is not doing that in any way, shape or form. What can we expect from a cop who considers youth as a disease?

America’s Child Soldiers

December 16, 2013 Ann Jones, www.tomdispatch.com Educate! Wars and Militarism, Youth

Too bad for the young -- and the future -- of those countries. But look at it this way: Why should Washington help the children of Sudan or Yemen escape war when it spares no expense right here at home to press our own impressionable, idealistic, ambitious American kids into military “service”?It should be no secret that the United States has the biggest, most efficiently organized, most effective system for recruiting child soldiers in the world. With uncharacteristic modesty, however, the Pentagon doesn’t call it that. Its term is “youth development program.” Pushed by multiple high-powered, highly paid public relations and advertising firms under contract to the Department of Defense, the program is a many splendored thing. Its major public face is the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps or JROTC.

Undercover Police In Schools Entrap Students On Drug Charges

December 16, 2013 Tony Newman, www.alternet.org Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Drug Policy, Education, Police abuse, Youth

Here we go again. Undercover cops pose as students, make friends, build trust, and then arrest teenagers for selling mostly small amounts of marijuana. Yesterday nearly two dozen students were busted at two southern California high-schools, according to Riverside County Sheriff officials. Two undercover cops, a woman and a man, had been posing as students since the beginning of the year. The majority of the drug buys were small amounts of marijuana, but there were some other drugs seized including cocaine and prescription pills. The campus was shaken yesterday, according to a story in the Press Enterprise. Students were shocked to see their friends arrested in class and left wondering who they can and cannot trust in their peer groups.

Video: Street Politics 101: The Story Behind The ‘Maple Spring’

December 13, 2013 Staff, www.roarmag.org Resist! Canada, Student Activism, Youth

In the spring of 2012, a massive student strike in opposition to a tuition hike rocked the streets of Montreal for over six months. Protests and militant street actions became part of the daily and nightly reality of this Canadian metropolis. Several times during this tumultuous spring, the numbers in the streets would reach over one hundred thousand. Police routinely clubbed students and their allies, and arrested them by the hundreds. Some were even banned from entering the city. But every time the cops struck, the student movement got bigger and angrier. This is a story about how the arrogance of a government underestimated a dedicated group of students, who through long-term organizing laid the foundation for some of the largest mass demonstrations in Canada’s history. But it’s also a story of how a crew of determined anarchists educated a new generation of students on the importance of owning the streets. In Street Politics 101, subMedia.tv features some of the best footage from what has been referred to as “the maple spring”. The documentary also features interviews with students, teachers and anarchists involved in one of the most militant rebellions in Québec.

Police Violence Won’t Stop Alliance Of Students And Workers

December 12, 2013 Laurie Penny, www.theguardian.com Resist! Police abuse, Student Activism, Worker Rights and Jobs, Youth

It's kicking off on campus again. Almost three years since nationwide college occupations, marches and strikes against tuition fee rises led to the first wave of crackdowns on student protest, undergraduates are mobilising, and meeting unprecedented retaliation. Last week in Bloomsbury, central London, students organising for fair wages for workers at their institutions said they were beaten bloody. There were mass arrests, and the sort of court injunctions banning all further protest that wouldn't be tolerated in any country that valued freedom of speech. "We are facing a concerted attempt to silence a nascent student movement before it gets off the ground," said Michael Chessum, president of the University of London union. However, despite the clampdown on protest, students, lecturers, service workers and their allies are planning to rally in their thousands tomorrow afternoon.

London’s Biggest University Bans Student Protests

December 10, 2013 Staff, www.channel4.com Resist! Police abuse, Student Activism, Youth

The University of London - a body representing London universities including University College London, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Birkbeck and the London School of Economics - has banned protests on its campus for the next six months. Students who hold sit-in protests in an area in Holborn, central London, including the Senate House, the student union building, and the buildings of SOAS and Birkbeck, can be imprisoned. The president of the University of London student union, Michael Chessum, told Channel 4 News it was a "draconian" reaction and "a sign that the university had lost the argument". The court order obtained on the 4 December by the University of London bans "occupational protest" in the area for the next six months. Anyone breaching the order can be charged with contempt of court.

Driving While Black,” Now “Waiting While Black”

December 2, 2013 Neetzan Zimmerman, www.gawker.co Educate! Police abuse, Racism, Student Activism, Youth

A police officer arrested three teens last week as they were standing outside a store in downtown Rochester, New York. Their crime: Waiting for a school bus. The three boys — Raliek Redd, 16, Deaquon Carelock, 16, and Wan'Tauhjs Weathers, 17 — are star athletes at Edison Tech high school, and were waiting to be taken to a basketball game when they were spotted by an officer. It seems the store adjacent to their pick-up spot was being monitored by police due to past complaints from the owner of teens loitering outside. The officer asked the teens to disperse, but they explained that they were waiting to be picked up by a bus. The officer again asked the teens to disperse. "We tried to tell them that we were waiting for the bus," Wan'Tauhjs told WHEC. "We weren't catching a city bus, we were catching a yellow bus. He didn't care. He arrested us anyways." While they were being handcuffed, their coach, Jacob Scott, arrived at the scene and attempted to reason with the cop. "He goes on to say, 'If you don't disperse, you're going to get booked as well," Scott recalled. "I said, 'Sir, I'm the adult. I'm their varsity basketball coach. How can you book me? What am I doing wrong? Matter of fact, what are these guys doing wrong?'"

Finding Power in Occupy

November 28, 2013 Kirin Kanakkanatt, www.inthesetimes.com Resist! Occupy, Student Activism, Youth

'There is a general unrest in my generation. We are the most diverse and the most underrepresented; we are the most educated and the most unemployed. Our values are not reflected in the systems that govern our lives.' I came to Occupy Ohio University as an environmentalist. I played my part, I answered questions about fracking and mountain top removal. I even spoke on greening urban space. I came angry and hungry. Occupy was about rethinking the spaces we inhabit. These spaces are beyond parks and lawns and state capitols. These spaces are in leadership in history books, in racial profiles, in standardized tests, in pre-existing conditions, in credit scores and loan distributions. Occupy was about shifting the conversation to make people understand that we are many and they are few. They have leveraged the resources they had at hand to gain control. It is up to us to do the same. Occupy was not about hope. It was about power.

A ‘Historic Moment’ for Campus Solidarity

November 25, 2013 Rebecca Burns, www.http://inthesetimes.com Resist! Solidarity, Student Activism, Worker Rights and Jobs, Youth

'Solidarity between campus workers in different sectors is really central to changing the power relations at universities so that their operations actually reflect the interests of the majority of the people who work and study here.' In a labor action rarely seen on university campuses, graduate student employees in the University of California systemannounced on Wednesday that they plan to strike alongside university service workers walking off the job next week due to allegations of illegal retaliation against members of their union. After members of UAW 2865, which represents 16,000 UC graduate teaching and research assistants, voted to authorize a strike last week, the union pledged Wednesday to join the picket lines when service and patient care workers represented by AFSCME 3299 stage a one-day walkout on November 20. Graduate student organizers call the decision to stage a sympathy strike alongside other campus workers a “historic moment” for campus solidarity that comes in the midst of contentious contract negotiations between the university’s largest unions and the UC administration. “Academic workers standing in solidarity with service workers will send a clear message to UC management that its employees will not tolerate intimidation from bosses or the decline in working conditions,” says Marco Antonio Rosales, a union steward and graduate instructor.

Global Activists Hold Their Own Climate Justice Summit

November 23, 2013 Amy Goodman, www.democracynow.org Resist! Climate Change, Youth

"We Can’t Take Crumbs from the High Table" Activists from around the world have been meeting in a convergence center in downtown Warsaw, holding their own meetings to strategize about how to address climate change. Many of them also attended the U.N. climate summit, but walked out in frustration for the first time in 19 years on Thursday. Democracy Now!’s Amy Littlefield and Hany Massoud visited the activist center to file this report. "This has been a beautiful, valuable space," says Kenyan activist Ruth Nyambura. "If nothing comes out of this COP, what the youth constituency of the UNFCCC has done has really, really changed the game." For the first time in 19 years, hundreds of members of civil society walked out of the United Nations climate summit Thursday. They wore T-shirts reading "Polluters talk, we walk," but they also said "volveremos," "We will return." One of the spaces where these activists from around the world have been meeting is a convergence center in downtown Warsaw. Democracy Now!’s Amy Littlefield went there and filed this report. AMY LITTLEFIELD: We’re not far from the United Nations climate change summit here in Warsaw, Poland, but there’s a very different kind of summit taking place in this building. It’s become a hub for activists who are organizing for climate justice. It’s on New World Street, and they play around with the name.

Blaming the Victims: Media Bias Against Struggling Millennials

November 23, 2013 Michael Corcoran, www.truth-out.org Educate! Media, Student Activism, Youth

The Globe's worthless offerings on the subject notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that the issue of the economic plight of young people is worth examining. But to do so requires a serious look at the real economic conditions young adults face and the reasons these conditions exist. Graham's article, and many others like it, generally fail to consider the context in which young people are struggling to find decent jobs, including the long-term economic impacts of deregulation and neoliberalism pushed by state managers and wealthy elites for some three decades now, which have kept wages stagnant for people of all ages, including young people; the impact of the 2008 economic crisis (mostly caused by people born well before 1980); the college affordability crisis; and the fact that low-wage service-sector jobs tend to be where job growth is. To understand why millennials are facing such perilous economic conditions, one must first understand why people of all ages are suffering massive economic struggles. For some three decades, under leadership of both political parties, the policies of deregulation, privatization, neoliberalism and the globalization of finance have been disastrous for working-class people.

Chile’s Ex-Student Leaders March Their Way To Congressional Victory

November 18, 2013 Staff, www.Reuters.com Resist! Chile, Democracy, Student Activism, Youth

Camila Vallejo, who helped spearhead Chile's student uprising in 2011, leapt from the street protest to the ranks of Congress alongside three other former university leaders on Sunday, underscoring a generational shift in local politics. The 25-year-old communist shot to international fame as one of the most recognizable faces of a student movement seeking free and improved education in a nation fettered by the worst income distribution among the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's 34 member states. The massive student protests of 2011 rocked incumbent President Sebastian Pinera's government and helped shape the 2013 electoral campaign, with Bachelet running on a platform to implement a tax reform to finance an education overhaul. Independent candidates Giorgio Jackson and Gabriel Boric and fellow communist Karol Cariola, former comrade-in-arms in the student movement, also gained seats in Chile's lower house on Sunday.

The Post-Employment Economy Should Get Students Angry

November 17, 2013 Sarah Kendzior, www.aljazeera.com Educate! Finance and the Economy, Student Activism, Worker Rights and Jobs, Youth

What must be made clear is that this is not a crisis of individual choices. It is a systemic failure - within higher education and beyond. It is a crisis of managed expectations - expectations of what kind of job is "normal", what kind of treatment is to be tolerated, and what level of sacrifice is reasonable. When survival is touted as an aspiration, sacrifice becomes a virtue. But a hero is not a person who suffers. A suffering person is a person who suffers. If you suffer in the proper way - silently, or with proclaimed fealty to institutions - then you are a hard worker "paying your dues". If you suffer in a way that shows your pain, that breaks your silence, then you are a complainer - and you are said to deserve your fate. But no worker deserves to suffer. To compound the suffering of material deprivation with rationalisations for its warrant is not only cruel to the individual, but gives exploiters moral license to prey. Individuals internalise the economy’s failure, as a media chorus excoriates them over what they should have done differently. They jump to meet shifting goalposts; they express gratitude for their own mistreatment: their unpaid labour, their debt-backed devotion, their investment in a future that never arrives.

Another Reason For Students To Organize & Mobilize

November 17, 2013 Todd Wallack, www.bostonglobe.com Educate! Education, Student Activism, Youth

When Brandeis University president Jehuda Reinharz stepped down three years ago, he moved back into his old faculty office. But unlike most history professors, Reinharz does not teach any classes, supervise graduate students, or attend departmental meetings. He did not bother posing for the department photo. The chairwoman for Near Eastern and Judaic Studies said she did not even know whether he was officially a member of her department. Yet Reinharz remains one of the highest paid people on campus. He received more than $600,000 in salary and benefits in 2011, second only to the new Brandeis president, according to the school’s most recent public tax returns. And that’s on top of the $800,000 Reinharz earned in his new job as president of the Mandel Foundation, a longtime Brandeis benefactor. “There is puzzlement from faculty about why he gets paid at all” by Brandeis, said Gordon Fellman, a sociology professor at Brandeis. “His term as president ended.”

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