Room for the Poor

By  Morrigan Philips

Solidarity means that even if you win, you stand with everyone until everyone wins.

Poverty is, as the most basic definition states, the lack of resources sufficient for someone to live comfortably in society. For many, credit cards and loans have kept them in reasonable enough comfort that they have been able to put off acknowledging the grim realities of our economic system. Much of this myth of comfort and stability has fallen apart in recent years as the economic crisis has pushed more people into the uncomfortable position of realizing how close they are to a financial crisis of their own. Meanwhile, according to new poverty measures and census data, rates of poverty, particularly in rural communities and urban communities of color have risen to a 52 year high.

Complicated financial games and double speak mask much of what has been fueling the financial crisis. But as more and more people have found themselves with no work, no money and mounting debt problems, the financial tricks and gimmicks that have been keeping this wreck going seem more like smoke and mirrors.

Fueled by outrage over economic gluttony and seaming impunity on Wall Street, the Occupy moment took hold of a piece of anger lying deep in the hearts of masses of people. The proverbial pinch was being felt by too many. Pop! A would-be movement sprang forth representing those whom the promise of prosperity in exchange for hard work had been made and broken.

It should be made clear that Occupy Wall Street and the multitude of Occupies that have come alive around the US are not orchestrated nor primarily constituted by financially comfortable, gainfully employed, resource rich individuals. Plenty of unemployed, underemployed and broke ass people are taking on roles of organizers within Occupies. There are also those who rely on various forms of public assistance, both safety net programs like public housing and social security programs like unemployment. Further, the camps drew many from those forgotten and neglected corners of our communities: the houseless, those with mental health issues and substance use problems. Where camps remain these communities members also remain.

But to be clear – Occupy is not a poor people’s movement.

Inside the Student Movement: Undeterred by Crackdown, Activists Around the Country Gear Up for Bigger Actions

originally published on AlterNet

by Manissa McCleave Maharawal

Today, Monday, is not only a day of action against university budget cuts in New York City but also around the country, at places like UC-Davis, where last week students were violently pepper sprayed during a peaceful protest. Here these same students are courageously calling for a student strike that will shut down the campus and in which rallies and teach-ins about budget cuts, police brutality and non-violent action will replace normal campus activities. At UCLA there are planned protests at the Board of Regents meeting in order to force that body to change their agenda to better reflect student concerns like increasing tuition and decreased funding for the entire UC system. These actions will be done with the solidarity and support of students around the country, from Tufts University in Massachusetts to the rural Kentucky-based Owensboro Community and Technical College. These actions also occur in the context of a global student movement: for weeks in Chile protesters, spearheaded by students demanding more affordable education, have been expressing dissent against President Pinera’s capital market reforms. In solidarity with these protests students around Latin America, in Argentina, Columbia, and Peru have come together to demand education reforms and stand in support of the Chilian students. Earlier this month, students in Ireland, Italy and the Phillipines staged massive protests and walk-outs over increased tuition.

Let me start by being very clear about who I am and what I do: I am a graduate student at the City University of New York in the Anthropology Department and I teach Anthropology 101 at Baruch College twice a week on Monday and Wednesday evenings. My students are younger than me and older than me. They are impressively diverse, they are mostly women of color, they work all day long and then come to class in the evening. They are tired by the time they sit down in my class and I respect this tiredness, I respect and understand that many of them have to leave early or get there late because of their job or their family and because I, just like them, am a student and a worker in a public university system.

The public university system that we are in is the third largest in the country and one that has had  values of free education, accessibility and inclusivity in its inception and embedded in its history. I want to be very clear about this because in many ways our histories create our visions for the future and the history of CUNY is a history of struggle that gets to the core of what we think higher education is as well as who we think higher education should be for. Founded in 1847 as the Free Academy, the City University of New York was explicitly created to educate the poor and working class of New York City. Students fought for open admissions in 1969, a struggle that was about forcing the University to accept more non-white students and create Black and Puerto Rican Studies Departments. This struggle was won. In 1976 the University, amid years of student protests against it, imposed tuition for the first time since its foundation. Since then almost every year has been punctuated by protests over increasing tuition and proposed budget cuts. This year is the same.

But this year is also not the same. In the context of the Occupy movement, the student movement has taken off. Our movements are connected and stronger because of these connections. They are connected because they are fighting to articulate the same disconnect between power and people and to show the same connections between where our money is spent and where we want it to be spent, they show the connections between dissent and the way this dissent is violently repressed around the country and the world. In New York City and the United States Occupy Wall Street has provided the student movement with inspiration and supportIn this way Occupy Wall Street has, as Zoltan Gluck writes here:  “already begun to shift the very terrain of other struggles. For student organizing it has provided a whole new framework through which to organize collectively and horizontally.”

Dear New York, Welcome to the Student Movement

Editor’s note: We are posting this article about the student movement because we believe that the connections between student struggles around debt, tuition increases and budget cuts are integrally connected to what OWS has been about.

By Zoltan Gluck

We could hear the hundreds of students outside, students who had come from across the city to show support, cheering for us as CUNY campus security surged forward and began to shove us with their clubs. There were only about sixty of us assembled inside the lobby on the ground floor of Baruch College where, fourteen floors above us, the Board of Trustees were convening to discuss the latest round of widely unpopular tuition hikes. Again these hikes will likely pass and, again, when they do, higher education will become even less accessible to the poor and traditionally marginalized communities of New York City. Last Monday night we stood non-violently in the lobby of this school where an undemocratic process with direct bearing on our future and the future of our city was taking place. We stood and spoke and we were met with violence. When the police tried to disperse the crowd students were jabbed and struck with batons, four were arrested, fifteen students were detained and charged with disorderly conduct and “trespassing” on their own campus. We left bruised and battered but far from demoralized. As one of my friends aptly observed: “This is just the beginning.”

A student movement is blossoming in New York City. While police violence against peaceful protesters still loudly dominates public attention, a silent revolution is afoot in the universities. Spurned and inspired by Occupy Wall Street, General Assemblies are now meeting at most major university campuses in the city, active working groups are building for future events, and an All-City Student Assembly has begun to facilitate dialogue and coordination between the campuses. It seems that the era of students struggling in relative isolation, fighting losing battles against insulated and invisible trustees who run their schools like hedge funds, is beginning to give way to something new.

For the past seven weeks students from across the CUNY system, NYU, Columbia, the New School, Rutgers, Pratt and Juilliard have been meeting and organizing. One fruit of their collective efforts has been the “Student Week of Action in Defense of Education.” By November 14th the calendar was full with over sixty events happening on campuses around the city. Corporate walking tours elucidated the connections between university campuses and Wall Street. A faculty speak out at the CUNY Graduate Center linked the struggles of the previous generations to those the present. A group of students occupied a New School Study Center on 5thavenue and 14th street declaring the space open to all and proceeded to run a series of high-octane lectures, teach-ins, workshops and general assemblies that filled the weekend with a sense of collective struggle. An ambitious Student Debt Refusal Pledge was launched at Zuccotti Park. And then last Monday night hundreds of students from across the city joined together to protest CUNY tuition hikes, the gutting of public education and to rebuke the Board of Trustees that hid behind a wall of armed police.

Financing the world’s most enormous war machine

By Prachi Patankar

As Obama has announced the plans for US withdrawal from Iraq, the anti-war movement can perhaps claim a small victory. The future of Iraq still remains to be seen but there is hope in the growing Iraqi protest movement inspired by the Arab Spring. The Afghanistan war still continues into its 11th year. However, this decade of wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan has not only cost us countless human lives, of both Iraqi and Afghan civilians and of US/NATO troops but also trillions of dollars of taxpayer money.

“Tax Dollars At War,” directed & animated by Chris Fontaine is a great accessible video that breaks down the lopsided budget priorities of the US government that has funded decades US wars abroad at the cost of public services for the American people. It is clear that more than 50% of the yearly federal discretionary spending on the wars combined with the tax cuts to the rich and the corporations has greatly affected the recent budget deficit. As the Occupy Wall Street movement gains momentum with more diverse racial and economic justice groups joining all over the country, there is a need to strategically link military spending and domestic economic justice targets.

Statement in Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street

Editor’s note: We received this statement of solidarity from the Pakistan Solidarity Network and are grateful for their support. We are re-printing their statement as the organization’s anti-imperialist analysis is crucial for this movement to heed and acknowledge.