Forum Post: Berkeley: Occupy Cal
Posted 12 years ago on Nov. 10, 2011, 2:12 a.m. EST by FHampton
(309)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Public Forum
2 comments 4 weeks ago by gsw
1 comments 4 months ago by factsrfun
5 comments 1 year ago by agkaiser
6 comments 1 year ago by grapes
15 comments 1 year ago by gsw
12 comments 1 year ago by BrentWeirick81
30 comments 2 years ago by ChicagoCitizen
48 comments 2 years ago by factsrfun
16 comments 2 years ago by factsrfun
2 comments 2 years ago by ChicagoCitizen
2 comments 2 years ago by ChicagoCitizen
8 comments 2 years ago by agkaiser
7 comments 2 years ago by agkaiser
1 comments 2 years ago by agkaiser
1 comments 2 years ago by grapes
6 comments 2 years ago by haightashbury98
51 comments 2 years ago by agkaiser
5 comments 2 years ago by agkaiser
14 comments 2 years ago by agkaiser
7 comments 2 years ago by agkaiser
1 comments 2 years ago by agkaiser
1 comments 2 years ago by agkaiser
6 comments 3 years ago by agkaiser
Disgusting police brutality at the University of California, Berkeley today:
http://youtu.be/buovLQ9qyWQ
"Police to Occupy Cal protester, after cracking his rib with baton blow: 'You have no rights'"
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/12/police-to-occupy-cal-protester.html
http://youtu.be/cEcqsLyX-vI
http://youtu.be/NSat-nRefXY
livestream from occupy cal:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/09/1034915/-Occupy-Cal-Livestream
http://youtu.be/xc1F2ZE1dOw
"Dozens of police in riot gear descended on UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza on Wednesday in two violent confrontations with student protesters that prevented them from building an Occupy encampment on the campus."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/09/BA861LSR8G.DTL
http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2011/11/administration-tries-desperately-to.html
And in Los Angeles, at UCLA:
"After a march by about 200 protesters from the UCLA campus, several of them sat down in the busy intersection of Westwood and Wilshire boulevards and refused to move for about an hour."
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/education-protest-blocks-westwood-intersection-snarls-traffic.html
The time of crisis:
http://occupyeverything.org/2011/the-time-of-crisis/
"This week the Occupy movement drew thousands of California college students to protests on at least 10 campuses, including UC Irvine, UCLA and UC Berkeley, where police forcibly removed students and arrested 39 people. The University of California system faces some of the steepest budget cuts and tuition hikes in the nation. Tuition and fees could increase by 81 percent over the next four years. This fall, students saw tuition hikes just a few weeks before their classes began. Here is the full report from John Hamilton, part of which was featured in today’s Democracy Now! show."
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/11/11/full_video_39_arrested_with_occupy_cal_in_forceful_crackdown_on_student_protest_at_uc_berkeley
Open Letter to Chancellor Birgeneau, the UC Berkeley administration, and the UC Regents:
"We, the undersigned faculty, lecturers, and graduate student assistants—all of whom teach at Berkeley and are invested in the educational mission of this university—are outraged by the unnecessary and excessive use of violence by the police and sheriff’s deputies against peaceful protesters at UC Berkeley beginning on Wednesday, November 9, 2011."
Read the rest of the letter here:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/uc_berkeley_teachers_condemn_violence/
The response by the administration was truly grotesque indeed. This seems to now be getting the national attention it deserves. And it looks like Occupy Cal has called for a strike at UC Berkeley, set for Tuesday.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/10/MNH21LT6ND.DTL
The board of the Davis Faculty Association has voted to endorse the strike called for by Occupy Cal to occur on November 15:
http://ucdfa.org/2011/11/11/dfa-endorses-occupy-cals-call-for-strike/
Occupy Cal is getting quite distorted coverage in the New York Times, which is only to be expected. But the article is on the front page of the website right now. Flood the comments section and write in, folks!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/us/occupy-wall-street-protests-shifting-to-college-campuses.html
Read more at Occupy CA:
http://occupyca.wordpress.com/
Video of Occupy Cal calling for a strike at Berkeley:
http://youtu.be/z9Zr6ir-iqw
Calformia http://occupywallst.org/forum/forum-topics/#comment-328603
News from UC Davis:
"Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood."
http://bicyclebarricade.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/open-letter-to-chancellor-linda-p-b-katehi/
More from the letter:
"I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately."
[Removed]
Good summary of the chronology leading up to Occupy Cal and the fight over public education in California:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/12736956288/seize-the-ponies
"[A]s a tenured professor (and tenure can be defined as a right granted to occupy a position on campus without threat of eviction for expressing dissent) I wanted to express my concern about the double threat posed to the ideal of liberal education by the rising cost of tuition and, more generally, the burden of debt."
http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-i-got-arrested-with-occupy-cal-and.html
Coming to a jail near you..
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/09/news/economy/california_jail/
They should rename the place hotel california
Pampered millionaire rich kids...forced into protesting by their parents..."get out there son...get arrested like you daddy did"!
This is about the funniest of all. The elites pretending to protest the elites. Unless these kids self-inflict and blow up their own lives, they're destined to be in the 1%. It's just too funny seeing them protest themselves. It's like that Sprint ad. "It's just my little way of sticking it to the Man". "But sir, you are the Man." It's amazing how stupid you can be when you're in college.
I don't think you have a very good idea about who goes to the University of California system. There are a lot of working class kids putting themselves through college there. There are a lot of formerly middle class kids as well, the children of professionals. None of whom are immune to the current crisis, hence the very good analysis encapsulated by the slogan "We are the 99%"
In any case, recent data have shown that economic prospects, even for the children of the very well-off, are quite terrible. So there is actually a class dimension to age, with younger people of all classes suffering.
Berkeley has a long history of being a loon-bin. Nothing new here. But it is pretty funny to see college kids at elite universities pretend to be part of a social protest to end elitism. Harvard is doing the same thing. It's just another reason not to listen to anyone younger than 25 when it come to politics. Our capacity for stupidity while we're college age is boundless.
You do realize that Berkeley admits people based on merit, right? That's what makes it "elite." You obviously have no understanding of the actual class character of the student body, which is largely middle and working class.
You need to respond in kind. If the cops show up throw rocks, bottles and if necessary cocktails, make the know you mean business. It is time the facist cops go what they give.
I really don't think the movement is in any position to meet the militarized police forces of this country with counter-force. Therefore, the only practical option is a strategy of non-violence, and a struggle waged at the register of politics. At some point, the police and military may begin to defect, once a series of overwhelming political victories achieved through non-violent means has taken place.
You berkley students can bite shit, and swallow. Retarded little ass wipes. Did your hippie parents send you to that fucked up liberal shithole?
You're hilarious. Also, it's spelled Berkeley.
Sorry. I've been sipping Pinot tonight. Getting a little careless.
They don't call it "Berserkely" for nothing.
Because police officers beating peaceful students who are trying to save high quality and affordable public education means those students are out of line?
Define "affordable".
Free.
[Removed]
You kids in the UC system are so clueless it's pathetic. Don't you realize why those tuitions keep going up?
That's your argument? Maybe you would benefit from an affordable college education yourself.
That's your answer? Sigh....
Yes. You haven't objected to anything I've written or posted, so how else can you expect me to respond? The reality is that administrative expenditures have increased, educational services have been cut, and fees have been raised exponentially. All of these destructive policies are formulated by the UC Regents, many of whom are investment bankers and real estate businesspeople, not educators; they use their control over the UC system to shift business towards their private ventures, whether it is capital-intensive building projects or student loans. It's a corrupt system and it is protected by vicious police violence whenever it is peacefully challenged by these heroic students who are out there trying to preserve a great university, whose mission it is to be accessible to all residents of California.
They will keep raising the costs to create the need for bigger student loans. You can't get out of repaying a student loan it is a debt for life. Get together and refuse to pay, refuse to take out a loan. There aren't enough people who can pay cash like that up front. The costs will come down or the schools will close. Why are kids doing this to themselves? According to the math, how many years would it take to pay off the loans and actually benefit from being educated? With the debts you will incur you'll be paying loans until you are too old to have children. And there is no guarantee you be imployed for the amount of promised in the brochures. So really students are insane to take out loans in the first place, its just a way to ensure the people are debt slaves who do not even own shelter.
Regardless of not objecting to your previous posts ( Christ what an ego) but heroic students? Really now? The little idiots can't understand that education in this state is a racket designed to pump money into a massive bureaucracy. They are too stupid to see that and expect the government, more excessive bureaucracy, to save them. Wake up you Marxist retards!
My point was that your attacks on what I'd posted had zero substance. Now you seem to hint at something resembling an argument--but unfortunately it has no basis in reality. The bureaucracy (administration) of the UC is indeed growing, but faculty and educational services are being cut--while tuition is raised by leaps and bounds. The Board of Regents is an unaccountable body made up of bankers who are gauging students. They are from the private sector.
The goal of the protesters is to maintain fidelity to the 1960 Master Plan--to provide a free education to all Californians who pass into the UC system (the top 10% of the graduating high school class. The rest are guaranteed admission in the Cal State system). Nobody is calling for "more excessive bureaucracy." People are demanding a reversal to the exorbitant tuition hikes and a reinvestment of funds into education. Right now, those funds are being wasted on capital-intensive projects run by companies politically connected to the Regents.
See this excellent letter from 2009 by Prof. Bob Meister for an overview of the situation:
http://cucfa.org/news/2009_oct11.php
As one striking example of the mentality of the people who are running the University, see this article from the New York Times. It discusses how the President, Mark Yudof, has been using University funds to make improvements to his personal residence:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/education/22bcyudof.html
How disgusting was it?
How do you mean?
I mean is it really really disgusting or is it just like a little bit disgusting? I mean in Berkely? Violence against protestors? You've got to be kidding me...
Still don't understand what you mean. Did you watch the video from Berkeley?
This was not police brutality or even excessive force. The police officers were merely doing their job. The students were thoroughly warned not to set up tents on campus property, and yet they did so. They were then notified that officers would remove the tents, so they linked arms in an attempt to prevent officers from doing their job. The jabs were necessary in order to break up the crowd and clear the area.
On whose authority are tents prohibited? Police batons are "necessary"?
Last I heard the police backed down, so they didnt do their jobs very well...
There must be something about beating protesters that is bad press.
People have to realize, that once an action is deemed necessary, that physical harm is no longer a consideration.
Not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that this is the way things are, or the way they should be?
In any case, surely you must understand that there are legal constraints on the use of force by police departments in this country. Hence the legal category "excessive force."
I am very well aware of the legal contract that permits them to raise the bar once action is deemed necessary. Under law, they are not permitted to ever lose.
So what's your point?
The world needs people who are not permitted to ever lose. They exist for a reason.