[News] Behind the Privatization of UC, a Riot Squad of Police
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Nov 24 12:10:39 EST 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/maher11242009.html
November 24, 2009
Behind the Privatization of the UC, a Riot Squad of Police
Occupy Everything!
By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
Berkeley.
This was bound to be a big week in California
regardless, as the threat of a 32 percent tuition
and fee increase across the University of
California system made a crashing entrance into
reality with Wednesdays vote by the UC Board of
Regents. Perhaps the Regents and UC President
Mark Yudof expected that their diversionary
tactics--lament the crisis and direct blame to
Sacramentos budget cuts--would pay off. But this was not to be.
Aided in no small part by the explosive exposé
published by UC Santa Cruz Professor of Political
Science Bob Meister, the student, faculty, and
workers movements the length and breadth of the
state were no longer willing to accept
privatization disguised as crisis-imposed budget
cuts. As
<http://www.cucfa.org/news/2009_oct11.php>Meister
explained in no uncertain terms, the proposed
(and now passed) tuition increase has nothing
whatsoever to do with budget cuts, but the cuts
merely provided the pretext for a long-planned
drive (and Reaganite wet dream) to privatize
public education in California once and for all.
Anti-Capital Projects
A statewide day of action on September 24th
generated mass walkouts and sporadic occupations,
both successful (at UC Santa Cruz) and not
(<http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/09/25/18623229.php>at
UC Berkeley). A UC-centric assembly called for a
month later yielded mixed results: a plan to
build for a
<http://takeastand4publiced.org/>March 4th
action, but only the vaguest of decisions
regarding what such actions would entail. This
sporadic guerrilla struggle, however, would yield
a full-scale war of maneuver once the stakes of
the November 18th UC Regents meeting became clear.
A coalition of organizations at UC Berkeley
endorsed a three day strike in which the third
day, contingent upon the expected Regents
decision, called simply for Escalation. On
Thursday the 19th,
<http://occupyucla.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/an-occupation-statement/>UCLA
protestors seized Campbell Hall (now renamed
Carter-Huggins Hall after the slain Black
Panthers who lost their lives between those very
walls in 1969). Across campus, protestors
confronted the Regents themselves as they voted
for the fee hikes, with the militarized
atmosphere <http://ow.ly/DBSO>sparking first
clashes on Wednesday and then a veritable state
of siege in Thursday from which
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM4sl7WZkcw>the
Regents were forced to flee the angry crowds.
Just a few short hours later, UCSC students
marched from the already-occupied Kresge Town
Hall to Kerr administration building, gaining
unexpected access to and holding the building
until Sunday. Also on Thursday, hundreds of UC
Davis students
<http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/20/18629531.php>occupied
the Mrak administrative building on campus,
clearly touching a nerve and prompting 52
arrests. Less than 24 hours later, students again
occupied: this time in Dutton Hall, where they
remained until being dispersed by police. As this
goes to press, Mrak is again in the crosshairs.
At Berkeley on Wednesday afternoon, after a rally
and march of some 1,000 students, workers, and
faculty at UC Berkeley, a group of more than
thirty surreptitiously gained access to the
diminutive Architects and Engineers Building,
nestled between Sproul and Barrows Halls and
which hosts UCBs capital projects. Responding in
part to Meisters revelation that it was capital
projects rather than budget cuts that were
driving the cuts and fee increases, activists
responded with
<http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/no-capital-projects-but-the-end-of-capital/>a
communiqué and website aptly entitled Anti-Capital Projects:
The arriving freshman is treated as a mortgage,
and the fees are climbing. She is a future
revenue stream, and the bills are growing. She is
security for a debt she never chose, and the cost
is staggering
No building will be safe from
occupation while this is the case. No capital
project but the project to end capital.
The occupation of the Capital Projects Building,
however, would be short-lived, as police soon
gained access and occupiers negotiated a
strategic withdrawal on the promise that they
would not engage in any other unlawful activity
for a week. But a week is a long time at moments like these.
Lines of Force are Revealed
At around 6am on Thursday morning, UCPD became
aware that Wheeler Hall, a
<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Wheeler_Hall--UC_Berkeley--Panoramic.jpg>prominent
and massive building at the very heart of the
Berkeley campus, had been occupied by more than
40 protesters. Police quickly gained access to
the lower floors of the building, arresting three
occupiers, who were immediately and vindictively
charged not with trespassing, but with felony
burglary. By 6:30a.m., an already surprising
number of supporters, in the dozens, had received
word of the occupation and gathered on the west
side of Wheeler to show their support. By
mid-morning, the number had increased to
hundreds. As the crowd grew, UCPD responded with
a mutually-reinforcing combination of aggression
and fear: aggressively smashing into the growing
crowds to install metal barriers where caution
tape had proven insufficient, and calling
desperately for backup first to Berkeley PD, then
to the Alameda County Sheriffs Department, and finally to Oakland PD.
Around 1pm, the skies opened up in a downpour
that might have, in other conditions and other
situations, dispersed the crowd entirely. But
instead, umbrellas popped up like mushroom caps,
tents were erected, and plastic bags distributed
as makeshift ponchos as the crowd of hundreds
persisted. Had the police gained access to the
occupiers during the storm, the day would have
ended much differently. But as it turned out, the
occupiers held strong, the skies cleared, and as
evening fell, the crowds began to swell further.
One demonstrator confessed nostalgia at the sight
of the umbrellas, and the reminder they offered
of another seminal moment in trans-sectoral
unity: that of the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations
in Seattle that sparked the alter-globalization movement.
The occupiers,
<http://picasaweb.google.com/prglazer/Nov20OccupationOfWheeler?feat=directlink#5406593263164443618>visible
through a series of windows on the west side of
Wheeler,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qODFzQTGjaY>relayed
their demands to the gathering crowds by megaphone:
* Rehire all 38 AFCSME custodial workers recently laid off;
* Drop all charges and provide total amnesty
to all persons occupying buildings and involved
in student protests concerning budget cuts;
* Maintain the current business occupants of
the bears lair food court and enter into
respectful and good faith negotiations;
* Preserve Rochdale apartments leased to
Berkeley student cooperative for $1 a year in perpetuity.
It became clear that the police and university
administration were in no mood to negotiate on
these terms: this much they communicated
non-verbally with their pepper spray under the
door, with their battering rams and wedges, and
verbally with their promises of violence, as
occupiers were told to get ready for the
beatdown. Some of the occupiers, overtaken by
the unmistakable candor of such threats, sought a
last-minute compromise that would allow them to leave unscathed.
For a while it seemed as though such negotiations
had failed dismally. Demonstrators outside could
hear the police making a final offensive to smash
down the door, and
<http://lh4.ggpht.com/_6HzhEJ5_YiY/SwgYM5ocbRI/AAAAAAAAAZI/02YuYctjwVM/s640/IMG_2586.JPG>the
occupiers could be seen as dusk fell, back to the
window, visible only in outline with their hands
raised to be arrested. But the atmosphere was
tense, and the swelling crowd had no plans to let
the police carry the arrestees out without a
fight. Hours earlier, tactical groups had been
preemptively dispatched to all possible exits
from the network of underground tunnels that
connect Wheeler to the neighboring buildings.
Students who, by all outward appearance, could
have been members of sororities or fraternities,
demanded to know where bodies were most needed to
maintain a strong and impermeable perimeter.
Let this be clear: if the students were arrested
and carried out, there was going to be a fight. A
riot? Perhaps (this much depended on the police). A fight? Mos def.
A Victory?
As with all massively important political
moments, the rancid stench of opportunism was
never far off, emanating from some student
leaders and faculty alike. While many faculty
members performed admirably during the standoff
(some, like
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W5XK1enBeY>Professor
of Integrative Biology Robert Dudley even being
arrested for their efforts), some skillfully
substituted their own voices and their own
demands for those of the students engaged in the occupation.
Particularly egregious in this respect was
Democratic Party framing strategist and
self-styled movement guru George Lakoff. Visibly
angered by the occupiers refusal to leave
Wheeler voluntarily (without any of their demands
having been met, of course), Lakoff seized the
megaphone to spew the morally bankrupt argument
that since the students knew they would be met
with police violence, they would themselves be
responsible for creating that violence if they
chose to remain. No more repulsive a phrase was
uttered that day. And were this not sufficient,
Lakoff was even heard lying repeatedly to the
occupiers, insisting that there had been no
police violence, no rubber bullets, and no
injuries outside the building, all in an effort
to manipulate those inside into abandoning the occupation.
In speaking with more than a dozen of the
occupiers, one sentiment above all was expressed
regarding the role of many faculty that day: a
deep sense of betrayal. As one occupier told me:
we asked the faculty to mediate and to negotiate
with the administration as a way to get our
demands out, but apparently they interpreted this
as a call to negotiate with us so that we would
leave the building. In fact, many of those
mediating--be they faculty, ASUC officials, and
leaders of student organizations--were
self-appointed and drawn almost unanimously from
the ranks of those who had opposed the tactic of
occupation to begin with. And this would show:
according to many of the occupiers, these
mediators, in focusing their attention on calming
the crowds outside and encouraging the occupiers
to leave, had effectively performed a policing
function that protected the administration from the protesters.
Ali Tonak, a UC Berkeley graduate student,
summarizes the feeling that many expressed:
They have a warped understanding of how power
works. They think that calming people outside was
keeping the people inside safe, when it was
really the opposite: the only thing that was
keeping the folks inside safe was people being
rowdy outside. In the end, the negotiators were doing the job of the state.
And this opportunism was not limited to faculty.
As word came down that a deal had been struck to
allow the students to walk out the front doors of
Wheeler with nothing but misdemeanors, those who
had spent the day attempting to calm the angry
crowds shifted their demobilizing efforts into
full gear, shutting down any and all possible
debate regarding what had transpired. The crowd
was urged to sit (ironically, while chanting that
they were fired up, and that students should
stand up for their rights), and self-appointed
student leaders, most of whom had opposed the
occupation plans from the very beginning, set
about explaining that the day had been a victory.
Of course, in a sense it had been a victory of
sorts, but not in the sense that it was presented
to the crowd. It was no coincidence that all
interruptions from the crowd, from those who
wondered aloud, What about the demands? What
about the layoffs? What about the fees? were
quickly and summarily dismissed and silenced by
self-appointed mediators whose only common
feature was their previous opposition to occupations.
<http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20091120163523853>A
recent statement from the UCLA occupation of
Carter-Huggins Hall sets its sights on student
body president Cinthia Flores, a junior
politician careerist bent on control, and in so
doing provides an acute diagnosis of the more
general danger of political opportunism, a danger
which must be fought tooth-and-nail if the movement is to move forward:
These people thrive on the status quo, its their
realm, and they always want to drag back those
who escape. There are CINTHIAs everywhere who
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHOnIJ2W1R4>make
up and direct the movement-police to be
encountered at any site of struggle. Occupation
takes power and immediately destroys its
concentrated form. Beware of bureaucrats, occupy everything!
A Peaceful Ending?
And the claim that the occupiers had emerged
victorious erased more than their unfulfilled
demands. It also concealed the aggressively
violent response that UCPD and its imported
proxies had unleashed that day. As mentioned
above, this violence began early on, as UCPD
attempted to install metal barricades by
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOI5l2_RghQ>wading
into the growing crowds and
<http://ow.ly/Ehjx>attacking anyone standing
their ground. As the day progressed,
<http://www.ktvu.com/video/21684405/index.html>police
from various forces were seen ruthlessly
<http://twitpic.com/qb6qu>pounding any and all
protestors who disobeyed the momentary
absoluteness of their sovereignty, with one such
protestor being
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWGCnVjWRd0>shot
in the chest with an unidentified projectile.
The pettiness of such sovereignty and the
repulsiveness of its executors were in no case so
clear as that of UC Berkeley graduate student
Zhivka Valiavicharska.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6q0ebKT-QU>As
this video shows, an unidentified member of (what
appears to be) the UCPD suddenly found his
authority called into question by the fact that
Zhivkas hands were on a police barrier, and
found it necessary to threaten her and strike the
barrier with his baton. What the video does not
show occurred just a minute later, when the
officer again approached the barrier and smashed
Zhivkas hand with full force, breaking two
fingers and nearly reducing one to pulp so that it was hanging by threads.
As Zhivka herself describes the attack:
I was holding on to the barrier with one of my
hands, and this cop came up and started rudely
shouting at me, telling me to take my hand off
and threatening me. My hand remained there. The
cop made me withdraw my hand by hitting the rail
right next to it. When I leaned it again on the
rail, he smashed it with full force. It was very
deliberate, very skillful, and extremely
excessive, since no one was challenging the
barriers where I was at that moment.
Who was the officer that maliciously and
intentionally attacked a member of the student
population with the intention to do serious
bodily harm? What of the witnessing officer, J.
Williams, Badge #93, who is clearly identifiable
in the video? Will UCPD and Chancellor Birgeneau
immediately begin an investigation into the
officers identity, suspend him immediately, and press criminal charges?
Former Berkeley undergraduate Yaman Salahi was
present to witness the police violence, and
immediately penned
<http://www.yamansalahi.com/2009/11/21/current-events/chancellor-birgeneau-must-be-held-accountable-for-violence-against-students/>a
thoughtful and necessary letter to the UC
Berkeley community in which he heaps
responsibility, quite rightly, onto the shoulders
of Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, for not only
loosing these various police forces onto the
campus community, but also for attempting to
cover up the violence he himself had unleashed in
an email dispatch later sent to the entire campus
community. Despite the many instances of
documented violence by police, the Chancellor
nevertheless insisted that the situation ended
peacefully and thanked the police for playing a positive role.
Salahi demands a statement against the
deployment of non-UCPD personnel against students
on this campus in the future, adding that In
addition to students limbs, something has been
broken, and Chancellor Birgeneaus cover-up will
not fix it. But while I agree with Salahis
general concerns, it is worth noting that it was
not OPD, BPD, or the Alameda County Sheriffs
Department that smashed Zhivkas fingers. It was
UCPD, a force which remains as alien to the
university community as OPD is to East Oakland.
When we challenge their privatizing efforts, they
will meet us with whatever force is at their
disposal and with whatever violence is deemed
necessary. As I write this, however, it appears
as though Salahis call is meeting some receptive
ears, and a group of prominent faculty members
have begun an investigation into the police
brutality deployed against students all across the UC system.
Remembrance the Past, Realizing Our Power
Remembering and reinscribing the violence of this
police response into our collective memory of the
occupation is of more than historical interest,
however, and consists of more than merely
remembering the pain inflicted upon our comrades,
however necessary this may be. It is in this
violent police response that a strategically
correct interpretation of events lies, and this
fact makes efforts to conceal the conflict of the
day more than merely an effort to prevent further
violence. The police response showed precisely
what was at stake in the occupation, and what
remains at stake in the movement more generally.
The police response showed exactly how far the UC
Regents, President Yudof, and the local
administrations are willing to go in order to
drive the privatization of public education down
our unwilling throats. It showed us, in short,
that we were doing something right, and we can
expect more of the same if we ever hope to win.
And thats not all: the final police and
administration response--that of opting to let
the occupiers walk out of Wheeler of their own
accord--tells even more of the story. It tells us
just how powerful our collective presence was on
that day. There can be no doubt that every single
occupier would have been arrested, likely beaten
and abused to some degree, and hit with the
trumped-up felony charges, had the crowd not been
assembled outside. And this was not merely
because the crowd was bearing witness to
injustice or expressing its verbal non-consent.
It was not moderation and negotiation that
created and sustained this pivotal moment and
generated its outcome: it was the unmistakable
show of force that the students gathered
represented, a force that was not merely
symbolic. As the great revolutionary CLR James
once put it: The rich are only defeated when
running for their lives. The same could be said
of todays privatizers of public education, and
those running things more generally. Oaklands
Oscar Grant rebellions
<http://www.counterpunch.org/maher02032009.html>taught
us this much in January, as it was only the
threat of continued rioting that put BART officer
Johannes Mehserle behind bars. The Berkeley
occupation movement teaches us the same lesson today.
And we have late word of a library occupation at
Cal State Fresno, and more are on the way, at
Berkeley and elsewhere. Earlier today, marchers
occupied the UC Office of the President in
downtown Oakland to demand a face-to-face with
Mark Yudof. Further, the contagion is
international, as the students who have held
Austria in a constant state of occupation for
weeks on end
<http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2610022>descended
en masse<http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2610022>
yesterday onto the US embassy in Vienna as a
demonstration of solidarity with the California
occupations and outrage at the images of police
violence that have been broadcast across the
globe. This is a force that is expanding as we
speak, and will do so as the months pass and
contradictions become more acute. The university
struggle has turned a crucial corner on the UC
Berkeley campus, and a qualitative leap in
consciousness has occurred, by weight not of
peaceful entreaties but of forceful demands.
George Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D. candidate in
political theory at U.C. Berkeley. He can be reached at gjcm(at)berkeley.edu.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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