Allison Kilkenny | The Nation

Cooper Union in New York’s East Village. (Flickr/CC, 2.0)

The occupation at Cooper Union has continued for twenty days with little public or media attention—certainly nothing on par with the profiles written on Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011. Part of that lukewarm reception has to do with the Cooper occupation’s modest numbers (the occupation is sustained by a group ranging between fifteen and twenty-five students), and another part with their mission, which is more specific and less sexy than an anti-capitalist revolution. Cooper Union students are protesting the school’s decision to charge undergraduate tuition for the first time in 150 years, and they’re doing so out of the public’s view, between the walls of president Jamshed Bharucha’s office.

The occupiers quickly gained support from nine full-time members of Cooper Union’s art faculty, who signed a petition and released a statement:

Out of deep concern about the direction of the Cooper Union under President Jamshed Bharucha, the full-time faculty of the School of Arts adopts a resolution of a vote of No Confidence in President Jamshed Barucha.

A Village Voice investigation revealed that the board of trustees have been less than forthright about the dire situation at Cooper Union. While alumni trustee Peter Cafiero claimed a shutdown scenario was never taken seriously, the Voice obtained a transcript from a trustee meeting that paints a different picture.

“[A shutdown] is a real option and I will only recommend it if we do not have a constructive, positive way for that particular school, in which case I will say I don’t see a light at the end of this tunnel, let’s begin to close it down,” a trustee said during a meeting in September.

The transcript also shows that trustees reviewed an option to shutter the entire institution for five years with plans to reopen it in 2018 when group rent on the Chrysler building, Cooper Union’s primary asset, would jump.

Former trustee Stanley Lapidus appears indifferent to the idea that a faculty turnover could bust the staff union, calling the jobs “cushy” and “un-economic.”

That casual indifference continues when trustees refer to the process of closing the school, forcing current students to transfer to other schools, as “flushing.”

Check out Democracy Now!’s debate on what caused Cooper Union’s financial woes and whether charging tuition will fix the problem:

Saar Shemesh, a Cooper Union occupier, expressed her and her fellow students’ frustration at the board of trustees when they announced the school would start charging tuition.

“We were beside ourselves,” she writes. “The board of trustees had dropped this big news on students just as the semester was about to end, catching us at the onset of finals (arguably the most stressful point in our semester). We hugged the Foundation building and held a candlelight vigil where we shared memories of a free Cooper Union. But again, we were trudging along, shocked that the administration had finally dared to announce tuition, our worst-case scenario, after we had been campaigning for transparency in Cooper’s operations for the last two years.”

Shemesh describes an initial period of sporadic actions and poor planning by unexperienced protesters that eventually culminated in a cohesive blueprint for resistance:

As an insider, it’s hard to tell what came first: our plans or our actions. As an organizer, I crave particular structures (albeit loose ones) with which to run a campaign, so the smattering of unplanned actions at Cooper would typically worry or frustrate me. However, this style of organizing seems to work for us here, like no other group that I have organized within.

The majority of us are not versed in direct action tactics or organizing strategy, and have somewhat of an allergic reaction to structure-heavy organizing. However, we have a certain type of loose structure that lends itself well to action-heavy organizing, and that has made both the lock-in last semester and the current occupation very successful.

She goes on to describe the formation of a spokescouncil that they hoped would ideally function like that of Occupy Wall Street in which working groups would meet regularly and report back to each other via representatives once a week, or through meetings coordinated on an as-needed basis.

“Good strategy is important to me because without it even well planned actions fall flat. Without some form of escalation, campaign, or action sequencing we don’t build power,” says Shemesh.

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That “good strategy” includes having clear goals (a free, accessible and transparent Cooper Union), identifying allies and constituents, targeting someone who can give protesters what they want (in this case, President Bharucha and the board of trustees), then deploying tactics that can get protesters close to their goals (petitioning the student and faculty bodies for a vote of “no confidence” and an open, rolling occupation).

It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of the Cooper Union occupation since, as Shemesh notes, many of the students were hesitant about strategic organizing or even disdainful of it:

Only a few of us have experience from Occupy or other social justice movements. We’re college students who believe in our school and the sanctity of free higher education. And we’re occupying because we think it will help us protect that. But that doesn’t mean that long-term strategic Organizing will come naturally to all of us.

As for their progress, Shemesh notes, “We’ve so far been able to get by on our antics and actions.”

“It took me the better part of a year to adjust to the Cooper ‘style’ of organizing,” she adds, “but I continue to learn more about myself as an organizer (and an Organizer) in the process of helping to sustain, with the rest of my classmates and fellow occupiers, a budding student movement.”

Since the students are shielded from the public in the president’s office, their presence is largely online, where the group posts updates on their Twitter feed and Facebook page.

It was there that the occupation announced their plans for a free school and salon to coincide with the college-wide end-of-year show, an open space dedicated to free and accessible education and liberating institutional resources. (Photo via @FreeCooperUnion)

“The exhibition will facilitate open space for dialogue through daily Open Forums and Free University classes visioning and remaining new cooperative structures for higher education in the form of free performances, dialogues, screenings, classes, workshops, and more,” Free Cooper Union announced on its Facebook page.

Walmart workers across the country plan to strike from now until June 7. Read Josh Eidelson’s report.

Over the course of the past week, actions by offshoots of the Occupy Wall Street movement have brought attention to the issues of student tuition hikes and food sovereignty.

In New York, a group of students at Cooper Union took over the college president’s office last week to protest a decision to begin charging tuition for the first time in at least a century. The trustees’ decision caused an uproar at Cooper, previously one of the last remaining free colleges in the country. The school claims it has no choice as it faces a $12 million annual deficit and, as a result, has decided to reduce its financial aid to 50 percent scholarships.

Activists believe the decision will lead to dire consequences, including limiting access to education. Occupy Wall Street states at its website that Cooper Union is by far the most diverse of all elite colleges: “white students are a minority here and two-thirds of the student body attended public high schools.”

In response, fifty students took over President Jamshed Bharucha’s office on the seventh floor of the school’s Foundation Building in Manhattan and signed a statement of no confidence in the president. Nine full-time members of Cooper Union’s art faculty signed onto the petition.

“Out of deep concern about the direction of the Cooper Union under President Jamshed Bharucha, the full-time faculty of the School of Arts adopts a resolution of a vote of No Confidence in President Jamshed Barucha,” the statement reads.

As of Tuesday, Bharucha’s office is still occupied.

“In case you were wondering if last night was the end the office is STILL occupied. Twenty-four students beginning to wake. #BharuchaStepDown,” Free Cooper Union tweeted.

“Institutions funded by philanthropy and real estate earnings are clearly unsustainable as foundations for a quality education, but the school’s economic problems and its board’s regressive solutions mirror the situation currently taking place at countless other universities, both public and private,” OWS states. “From CUNY tuition hikes to the torpedoing of Medgar Evers College to NYU’s unprecedented land grab, students across the city are fighting back. As student struggles continue across the globe, Cooper Union is a flashpoint for something much larger than itself.”

“The ongoing fight at Cooper Union is but one part of the broader struggle against austerity, debt, and all other symptoms of capitalism,” the group states.

Occupy could have also included Buena Vista High School in its list of austerity consequences. The Michigan school was closed six weeks early because the district—comprising 400 mostly black, mostly poor students—doesn’t have enough money to continue operations. The district has laid off all its teachers and all but three employees.

On the West Coast, another offshoot of the Occupy movement, Occupy The Farm, experienced a resurgence this week when activists returned to a plot of land owned by the University of California where a few of them had been arrested earlier in the day.

The activists had moved in over the weekend in order to plant crops.

Last spring, I wrote about Occupy the Farm’s efforts to highlight the issues of food sovereignty, climate change and the overall health of society. At the time, OTF activists had moved onto the Gill Tract, a patch of land along the San Pablo Avenue in Albany, California. The location was chosen because Gill Tract contains the last acres of Class One soil left in the urbanized East Bay. According to the group, ninety percent of the original land has been paved over and developed, irreversibly contaminating the land.

“We envision a future of food sovereignty,” OTF stated, “in which our East Bay communities make use of available land—occupying it where necessary—for sustainable agriculture to meet local needs.”

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Food sovereignty is really an issue of food security, which is why this movement has been embraced at a global level. La Via Campesina, an international movement that coordinates peasant organizations of small producers, agricultural workers, rural women and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe, defines food sovereignty as “the right of people to define agriculture and food policy, including prioritizing local agricultural production, access of peasants and landless people to land, water, seeds and credit.”

A healthy society eats good food and ensures the sovereignty and dignity of the people growing its food.

OTF activists have returned a year later to Gill Tract in order to fight the same battle. “This space is really important,” said organizer Lesley Haddock. “We’re not going away.”

“We feel that as public land, we all have a stake on what happens to it. We like to see it turned into an urban farm and we intend to see that happen,” said Haddock.

The university plans to develop the lot into a senior housing complex and a national chain grocery store.

University police officers have warned the activists they could be arrested for trespassing, but thus far the standoff remains peaceful.

While Congress dallies on immigration reform, groups are calling for the Obama administration to stop deporting people who are set to gain documented status. Read Aura Bogado’s take.

All photos by Allison Kilkenny.

This year’s May Day events featured the familiar tableau of union members marching in matching T-shirts and carrying their banners, while an insane number of police officers crept along the perimeters of Broadway, monitoring the peaceful procession. But this year also included an especially reenergized contingent of youth supporters and immigrant rights activists.

Of course, that’s not to say young people and advocates of immigration reform haven’t turned out in prior May Days. Certainly, Occupy Wall Street injected the worker-led event with a ton of youthful energy, but this year definitely possessed a different, more serious note. For many immigrant rights activists, they feel they’ve reached a critical moment, and if real reform is ever going to come, it will be now or never under President Obama’s leadership.

For youth, they have never lived in a world in which workers have held the upper hand. All they have known is the decline and bottoming out of unions, and the young people I spoke to cited non-unionized workers’ actions as sources of inspiration, particularly the fast food workers’ organizing recently seen in New York City.

Gregory, a student at Rutgers and delegate of the Young Workers Committee, a project of the Transit Workers Union formed to get youth more involved in the union, said he joined the protest because it’s important youth become engaged in workers’ struggles.

“Youth are the future. If they’re not involved now, then they’re not going to be involved later, and then they’ll get steamrolled when it comes time to the companies making decisions. If they haven’t been involved from the beginning, it’s going to be easy for companies to take advantage of them,” he said.

“The entire service industry isn’t unionized—banking isn’t unionized—but in a lot of other countries, they are. Bankers in Korea are unionized,” he added.

Angela Cassie, a member of TWU, said she was attending the event to support young activists.

“Youth do care about workers’ rights,” she said, emphasizing TWU’s commitment to supporting and training youth who may have no prior experience with, or exposure to, organizing the workplace.

“There’s always strength in numbers. We need to build that because people deserve a voice in the work place.”

And if any union knows the struggles of workplace negotiation, it’s TWU.

“Our contracts have hit mediation and we kind of went into a stalemate when it comes to negotiating with the companies,” said Cassie. “Another issue we face is union-busting firms in terms of organizing.”

Which is precisely why the morning event at Bryant Park was, in part, a tour of companies TWU accuses of being union-busters, such as the law firms Ford & Harrison and Jackson Lewis, and the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority. Protesters charged into lobbies, shouting slogans like, “Union busting is disgusting!” before security inevitably asked them to leave. At the MTA protest, a particularly overzealous security guard got in the face of activist Jeff Rae, screaming at him. The protesters left without further incident.

Activists inside the lobby of Ford & Harrison.

The only arrests happened later at the anti-capitalism march departing from Tompkins Square. As is the custom at wildcat marches, youth clad in black led the police on a chase throughout the city, oftentimes, but not always, outrunning officers, and the march culminated in eight reported arrests. While some of the youth were undeniably rowdy and furious with police, I did witness one young man being arrested for the crime of telling a police officer to stop harassing a female photographer.

Officer arresting a protester from the anti-capitalism march.

In the evening, thousands of activists gathered at Union Square for the traditional march down broadway. At the front of the march, immigrant rights groups proudly carried banners that read “People Power” and “Stop Deportations,” while chanting in Spanish, beseeching President Obama to listen to them.

“We’re here because we are demanding legalization,” said Gonzalo Venegas, a 28-year-old member of a hip-hop activist group from the Bronx, who performed in front of the crowd during a rally in Union Square. “For us, the idea of immigrant rights and workers’ rights goes hand in hand.”

That “hand in hand” relationship is especially evident in the restaurant industry, where undocumented workers might account for more than 700,000 of the industry’s 12.8 million employees, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

An aerial view of the protest at Union Square.

Though they account for a huge part of the workforce, and ultimately contribute enormously to the overall productivity of the United States, undocumented immigrants have never been in more jeopardy.

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In four years, Obama’s administration has deported as many undocumented immigrants as the administration of George W. Bush did in his two terms, but many immigrants’ rights activists still believe Obama is their best shot at a path to citizenship.

Will Obama live up to his Guantánamo rhetoric? Read the Editors’ take in this week’s issue of The Nation.

José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, at the European Development Days in Brussels, October 16, 2012. (Flickr/EU Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection)

In the past week, political officials and economic experts in several countries have indicated they believe austerity is not, and indeed never has been, the answer to pulling the world’s economies out of recession. First, everyone found out Paul Ryan is super bad at math (shocker). As it turns out, the paper the House Budget Committee chairman has been using to make the case for austerity was discredited after it became known that essential data was excluded from the study, leading to “serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and growth.”

The Harvard professors who produced the paper have acknowledged their grave error.

Of course, Ryan’s quest for austerity was never really about accurate figures or projections. His was an ideological battle that might as well have been waged by plucking random numbers from the ether for all that “facts” actually figured into the debate. The people at the bottom rungs of our society know austerity doesn’t work. They’ve known that for years. After all, it is the people relying on public services like schools who see the direct impact of austerity in their day-to-day lives.

However, it seems as though at least some societal elites are finally waking up to the fact that budget cuts don’t work during recession.

Bill Gross, manager of the world’s largest bond fund for Pimco, and widely considered one of the most influential voices in the bond market, launched a harsh attack on the euro zone’s severe austerity measures.

“The UK and almost all of Europe have erred in terms of believing that austerity, fiscal austerity in the short term, is the way to produce real growth. It is not,” Mr Gross told the Financial Times. “You’ve got to spend money.”

This week, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said the bloc should place a greater emphasis on policies that stimulate growth in the short term and less on cutting government spending. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Barroso’s statement is only the latest in a series of public statements that indicate a “shift in European economic policy is under way.”

The International Monetary Fund last week point-blank said the bloc should ease back on austerity, while a number of governments outside the EU have already made that call, noting budget cuts are hindering economic recovery. Spanish Finance Minister Luis de Guindos said over the weekend that his country’s new budget plans that will be presented later this week will emphasize economic growth and reduce spending cuts.

Oh, also, austerity has led to widespread protests, societal collapse and agony for the poor masses, but entities like the EU and IMF shy away from laying out things in those kinds of stark terms.

Recent austerity protest in Spain:

As the WSJ notes, the euro-zone economy has contracted for five straight quarters to the end of 2012 (most experts agree official figures for the first quarter of 2013 will show six quarters of decline), and austerity has contributed to declines in spending by households and businesses and a rise in the unemployment rate to a record high of 12 percent.

Though spending cuts and tax increases have helped reduce deficits across the seventeen EU countries that use the euro, the region’s overall debt rose because the countries’ economies have flat-lined and fewer companies and households are paying their taxes.

The Seattle Times reports that, of the four countries that have accepted outside financial assistance by the end of 2012, Portugal and Spain saw their deficits swell—Portugal’s deficit increased to 6.4 percent of the country’s annual GDP from 4.4 percent the year before, and Spain’s jumped to 10.6 percent from 9.4 percent. Meanwhile, Greece’s deficit rose to 10 percent of GDP from 9.5 percent, and the country remains mired in deep recession. As a result, these are also some of the countries where we have seen high unemployment, the greatest social unrest and most terrifyingly, the rise of right-wing extremism in the case of Greece.

Der Spiegel reports on Greece, “The worse the financial crisis gets and the harsher the budget cuts imposed by European creditors are, the worse the terror gets on the streets. Foreigners have been attacked, homosexuals chased and leftists assaulted. Some were beaten to death. There are parts of Athens in which refugees and minorities no longer dare to go out alone at night, and streets are echoingly empty. Foreign merchants have had to close their doors, while journalists and politicians who criticize these developments receive threats or beatings.”

Euronews on the rise of the extreme right wing in Europe:

But one would have to be in the streets, living among the people, to notice these developments. For academics and politicians, largely shielded from the realities of austerity, these kinds of cuts have always ranged from the ideological to the theoretical.

In America, unless politicians send their kids to public schools, the reality of an epidemic of school closings in Chicago and Philadelphia probably doesn’t hit close to home if they send their kids to private schools.

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The Guardian and Bloomberg have said “austerity is on trial,” but we already know the outcome of this trial. Budget cuts during recession only worsen the economic realities for billions of citizens. If elites needs a refresher on that reality, they need only walk outside and talk to the people reliant on public services and stagnant (and declining) wages.

For communities of color, acts of “foreign terrorism” stoke race-based fear and violence. Read Aura Bogado’s interview with Sohail Daulatzai.