This blog has outlived its usefulness. I don't really have the energy to write anything worthwhile here, i feel like its taken over my lack of a life, and i really have better things to do. So this is my final post. I thank everyone who has actually read this thing and linked to it.
Meanwhile, the YCC is going to expropriate massive amounjts of money from student tuition for... CLUB SPORTS? Ek-fucking-scuse me? You're funding the fucking polo team? (no offense, Cat.) $158,000=five full scholarships for two semesters at yale.
Are those Gesistas on the GSEU picket line? That's some solidarity!
¶ 11:45 AM
Your help is needed to stop three hideously cruel experiments on monkeys at Columbia University! Please join PeTA's Stephanie Corrigan & Michael McGraw, singer-songwriter Nellie McKay and lil' ol' me for an important protest at Columbia University this Tuesday, April 20th from 11:45 am ^Ö 1 pm as a part of World Week for Animals Used in Laboratories!
WHERE? Outside the Columbia gates (Broadway at West 116th Street)
WHEN? This Tuesday, April 20th, from 11:45 am ^Ö 1 pm
¶ 11:25 PM
The hordes of high school seniors slouching towards sigma nu waiting to be drunk have descended upon Yale's campus yearning for liberation from their greenwich parents in their stately manses and shiny beemers. It all makes me so cognizant of just how much i hate this place and want to get the fuck out of here. I have learned what i came here to learn, barring future enrollment in other educational institutions, and most of it happened either outside the classroom, or in the classrooms of one of maybe four or five professors. The rest was a crash course in power, privilege, and empire and someone else's expense. I think i'm not going to go to graduation. If there's a bush protest other than the one a bunch of seniors are trying to put together, but which i'm not down with (people are saying Kerry stickers... fuck that,) then i may go to that, but i've seen what that ceremony looks like and i want no part of it.
I keep having recurring dreams. I'm not going to discuss them here, though, because apparently Mike Morand is still reading Josh's blog, and Phoebe's blog, and so unless he finds my ramblings about Beatles/Metallica hybridization inconsequential (what do fascist sellout scumbags listen to?) (and given the events of last semester's aldermanic race) i will, as usual, be pretty careful about what i post here.
¶ 11:19 PM
Communiversity Day is a Joke. Yale's continuing exploitation of the New Haven Community is hardly mitigated cause some fratboys take time out of their busy schedule of peeing on the floors of their poor, tortured roomates to do something not involving beer or vomit. Let's really talk about the relationship between Yale and New Haven in a way that transcends the big balloons they put up once per year when its ok for black people to be on old campus (not wearing a uniform or apron) without the cops getting called. Let's talk about a university that makes 5 million bucks a day off its own endowment and a city that's 3.7 million dollars in debt, the fourth poorest city in the country, a city with one of the (ostensibly) best hospitals in the region and the highest infant mortality rate in the country. Let's talk about ONSHA's connections to folks like Boise Kimber and what they did in certain aldermanic political campains this summer. Let's talk about 39 gratuitous layoffs, Plantations Redux, lets talk about those strikebreakers yale brought in in september and what they tried to do to this city to stop the movement. Let's talk about what "community service" REALLY means. Let's fight for a new social contract and a new vision of what this city's relationship with this university can be.
And let's keep in mind also the words of Vincent J. Sirabella:
“Yale’s alleged concern for the poor of New Haven is a farce. The employees of the university are the working poor of this city.”
¶ 9:26 PM
In other news, if Yale really had "Right Management," they wouldn't be laying people off in the first place as some lame anti-union tactic which will probably culminate in strike number 14, now would they?
YaleSHAME "Chief Executive Officer" Naasiha Siddiqui '05 opened the ceremonies by reading a prepared statement about the group on Beinecke Plaza. The statement explained the members were "high-network student activists who put investment of profits above all else." Siddiqui engaged the audience by leading interactive cheers, such as "Let's hear it for lead pollution!" Siddiqui characterized Farallon's money management tactics as "General Sherman-style investment strategies."
Ok, "Got To Get You Trapped Under Ice" is pretty amazing too.
Graduate Students at Columbia begin an indefinite walkout today to force their university to count the ballots from an NLRB election conducted over two years ago.
¶ 11:47 AM
yesterday's entry neglected to mention the new modest mouse, which i didn't want to like, but do. largely because it doesn't sound like a modest mouse CD.
Also, I want to call everyone's attention to the best thing since they grey album: BEATALLICA
BLACKENED THE U.S.S.R
Flew in from Miami-Krk, Larz, Kliff, and me Whipping dance of dead last nite On the way the paper bag wuz on my knee Couldn't even hit the lightz
We're blackened the U.S.S.R. Krk, Kliff, me, and Larz-ohhh! Blackened the U.S.S.R.
Been away too fuckin' long so we trashed the place FUCK YEAH!! It'z good to be back home! Death to Mother Earth and the human race Just as long the beer'z got foam
We're blackened the U.S.S.R. Krk, Kliff, me, and Larz-woah-ohhh! Blackened the U.S.- Blackened the U.S.- Blackened the U.S.S.R.
Well, the Ukraine booze really knockz me out All you see iz in obscurity And Moscow vodka makes me scream and shout And Georgia'z got the d-d-darkest p-p-p-p-potency!-NEVER!!
WOO-OA-AH! Decadence remainz and there is no doubt That we'll cauze your hearing harm Let me hear the flying-Vz a-ringing out Oh, FUCK NO! My beer is warm!
OHHHHHHH, LET ME TELL YOU, LEMMY!! YEAH, I'M BLACKENED!! BLACKENED!!
Music I'm Listening To: Iron&Wine;: Our Endless Numbered Days Franz Ferdinand: Self Titled Danger Mouse: The Grey Album Replacements: Sorry, Ma; Forgot To Take Out The Trash and Hoootenanny Reliving my childhood: Nirvana: Nevermind, Pixies: Doolittle
¶ 2:15 AM
And don't think its a coincidence that this happened days after Bush publicly comes out in support of continued occupation of the territories by settler-colonialists.
I'd comment more but i'm too disgusted. Fuck the IDF and Fuck Sharon and Fuck Bush for urinating on "the peace process" once again.
¶ 6:43 PM
Evan and Phoebe both take on the ever ridiculous Yale Herald. While i agree with Evan that the YDN's totally obnoxious, lately the Herald hasn't been too much better. Their coverage of the second strike was absolutely horrid.
Right wing Yale student Keith Urbahn joins Alex Hetherington in demanding that those of us who took part in the Cocal Cola protest a few weeks back to publicly apologize for our "heinously rude and ignorant actions." All this because Douglas Daft pays thousands of dollars to get the YDN to tell us that niether colombia's notoriously corrupt government, nor the Miami judiciary, nor a company union, nor an "independent investigation" by Coke have revealed any wrongdoing. Yeah right. Maybe Urbahn should do some research of his own. I reccomend Deborah Levenson-Estrada's Trade Unionists Against Terror, which talks about Coke's activities in Guatemala in the 80s during the horrific US-backed regimes of dictatorship, terror and death squads.
My senior essay complete, I now have my life back, and can once more attend UOC meetings, organize, blog, hang out, and be happy, not necessarily in that order. In honor of me finishing my essay, I give you a few choice quotations I came across in my research:
“Yale’s alleged concern for the poor of New Haven is a farce. The employees of the university are the working poor of this city.” - Local 35 Business agent and New Haven CLC President Vincent J Sirabella, 4/30/1971
“Yale workers hardly constitute a normal union. In fact, they’re not really a union at all. They’re a movement.” - Sherman Chickering in The New Journal, October, 1971
"Local 35’s strike suggests a strategy for all New Haveners. Unions could together lead our fight. The strategy, to begin with, would simply be a commitment by all organized labor to support for mayor, aldermen, etc. only those candidates who agree to tax Yale – one way or another-without letting Yale pass the burden to its workers. The political base furnished by organized unions might then carry this tax Yale campaign to the rest of New Haven’s people. Unions can strike politically as well as economically. The solidarity backing local 35 can also make a solid front to relieve New Haveners tax burdens. And besides the unions, are there really any other organizations of working people so well set up to win against Yale? At the very least, it’s worth trying." - Richard D. Wolff, Modern Times, 5/15/1971
"DON'T MOURN, ORGANIZE! ...How much education have you been cheated out of? How unhappy has your experience in graduate school been? Are you learning what you came to learn? If you’ve got a problem, we’ve all got a problem. Together we can solve it.” - Flyer for the Teaching Assisstants Organization, (TAO) April, 1972
“They can beat us on the streets of New Haven, but they’ll never beat us at the bargaining table,” - Sirabella, after a police riot at a union protest at Yale's commencement hospitalizd one worker and put twelve in jail.
¶ 10:37 PM
Barring Richard Levin's resignation based on a visitation by the ghosts of Yales past, present, and future, or something of similar import and/or urgency, I won't be blogging at all between now and Friday. Email checking will be sporadic at best.
¶ 9:42 PM
