The Nation

Students march through Milwaukee. (Credit: Michael Macloone, Journal Sentinel)

E-mail questions, tips or proposals to studentmovement@thenation.com. For earlier dispatches on student and youth organizing, check out the previous post. Edited by James Cersonsky (@cersonsky).

1. Amid Rising Protest, Napolitano Agrees to Meet With Opponents

On September 8, California’s Statewide Multicultural Student Coalition released a set of demands for Janet Napolitano, the new president of the University of California. The coalition calls for Napolitano to make the University of California campuses sanctuary sites for all undocumented communities, pressure Jerry Brown to sign the Trust Act and prohibit the use of riot police on campuses. Napolitano, who entered office with no background in education, oversaw record deportations as Secretary of Homeland Security and has already received students’ votes of no confidence, has answered our request to meet. On October 1, at her office in Oakland, coalition representatives will present our demands and make it clear that undocumented students and students of color in California do not support Napolitano’s presidency. This meeting is just the first step in ensuring our most vulnerable student populations are top priorities.

—Statewide Multicultural Student Coalition

2. Post-Occupation, Florida’s Dream Defenders Return to the Capitol

September 23 marked the first day of legislative committee in the Florida legislature. After sitting-in at Governor Rick Scott’s office for thirty-one days this summer, the Dream Defenders, a group of youth organizing for racial justice and community power, returned to the capitol to train Tallahassee residents and students from throughout the state on Trayvon’s Law. Prior to the training, ten Dream Defenders met with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to discuss the FDLE’s policies on bias-based—that is, racial—profiling. Come October, the group’s legal and policy director will travel to Geneva to present a report on Stand Your Ground to the UN Human Rights Council, which will be reviewing whether the statute violates promises the United States has made as a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

—Dream Defenders

3. Resisting TFA in Minnesota

On September 18, the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development officially announced that it will partner with Teach for America to create an alternative pathway to licensure for corps members. This announcement came despite significant opposition from CEHD graduate students, faculty and the wider Twin Cities’ education communities who argue that TFA will contribute to the casualization of teaching labor across all levels of education in Minnesota while it profits off the perpetuation of education inequity. Soon after CEHD’s May announcement of the proposed partnership, a group of students drafted a letter of opposition, which garnered more than 300 signatures from students, faculty, local educators and alumni. Despite TFA’s and the administration’s attempts to repress critical dialogue and dissent, CEHD students are continuing to oppose the decision and connect to broader resistance efforts locally and nationally.

—CEHD Graduate Students Against TFA

4. Resisting TFA Everywhere

On October 1, Students United for Public Education will be launching its first national campaign, Students Resisting Teach for America. The goal is to raise awareness in prospective TFA corps members about the problems surrounding TFA; elevate the voices of students and TFA alumni whose stories are often overshadowed by TFA’s message; put pressure on TFA as an organization to change its ways; and, through this, resist the broader neoliberal movement in education. What started as a nonprofit dedicated to solving teacher shortages has become a highly political organization that threatens to perpetuate inequalities in low-income communities both through its teaching model and its connection to the corporate education reform movement. SUPE chapters and other college students across the country will be leafletting, holding teach-ins and panels and raising critical questions and consciousness about TFA to college students and campus communities.

—Students United for Public Education

5. In Bridgeport, Students Trump Machine Democrats

In the September 10 Democratic primary, challengers Howard Gardner, Dave Hennessey and Andre Baker, Jr., overwhelmingly defeated the slate of party-endorsed candidates for the Board of Education. The challengers’ message was simple: they will answer to the community, not the Democratic machine run by the mayor and corporate-friendly superintendent Paul Vallas; support policies that encourage parent and student involvement; and spend Bridgeport tax dollars on children and public schools. As a high school senior, I worked with teachers, parents and community leaders throughout the city and state to build neighborhood power by talking with people about why a change on the board would strengthen local control. As those most affected by the board’s decisions, students will continue organizing for an accountable board come November’s general election.

—Diamond Allen

6. In Milwaukee, Thousands March for Public Education

On September 21, forty students from Wisconsin’s Youth Empowered in the Struggle, the youth arm of immigrant rights organization Voces de la Frontera, joined a 2,000-strong, three-mile march across Milwaukee under the banner, “Public Education is a Civil Right.” YES spoke on the importance of bilingual education, free and public education and teachers’ right to bargain collectively. This action built on increasing grassroots momentum against the attacks on public education. On September 12, students, teachers and allies gathered at the Milwaukee school board to fight the attempts of St. Marcus, a local pro-voucher institution, to purchase Malcolm X, a Milwaukee public school. On September 17, a crowd gathered outside the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce to speak out against the company’s push for a state law that would restructure dozens of public schools and put them in the hands of a privatized district. At the Milwaukee Student Power Summit on November 2, students will plan further organizing for educational justice.

—Valeria Cerda

7. At Occidental, the Fight Against Sexual Assault Rages On

Despite the silencing of survivors who filed suit this summer, the Occidental Sexual Assault Coalition continues its fight to promote just and equitable policies for survivors of sexual assault at Occidental College. During the 2013 spring semester, OSAC organized protests and sleep-ins to raise awareness and demonstrate student and faculty commitment to a safer campus. In light of the administration’s continued mishandling of sexual assault cases under President Jonathan Veitch, OSAC filed Clery Act and Title IX complaints in April; the school is currently under investigation by the federal government. To date, the administration has made only superficial progress on OSAC’s 12 Demands for a safer campus. OSAC maintains that rape and sexual assault cases continue to be handled illegally. With strong faculty support, OSAC and other student groups will continue to push for an improved campus climate on all fronts this school year.

—Occidental Sexual Assault Coalition

8. Insomnia Cookies Hit the Light

On August 18, workers at the Insomnia Cookies in Harvard Square went on strike—and four were fired. They were responding to poor working conditions: drivers delivering cookies on their bikes often made less than minimum wage, and bakers in the store weren’t always allowed their legally mandated break time. As college students are Insomnia’s target market, Harvard’s Student Labor Action Movement is marching on picket lines and coordinating a student boycott of Insomnia until the company agrees to higher wages, healthcare, better job stability and the freedom to build a union. SLAM is also reaching out to students at other colleges near Insomnia stores to organize solidarity actions.

—Student Labor Action Movement

9. Deferred Action Double Jeopardy

The Arizona Dream Act Coalition has been helping DREAMers apply for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, so education becomes more accessible. As we continue to educate the community by reaching out to high schools and public officials, the Maricopa County Community College District has received backlash for granting DACA recipients in-state tuition. In June, in an effort to overturn the district’s decision, Maricopa County Attorney General Tom Horne went as far as filing a lawsuit against the community colleges. Meanwhile, this semester is the first for many DREAMers since receiving DACA. On September 24, ADAC gathered at the MCCCD board meeting to thank board members for their support. Following the meeting, we are working to strengthen awareness in support of tuition equality.

—Jhannyn Rivera

10. When Will the CUNY 6 Be Freed?

(Video: RT America)

—Ad-Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY

(Flickr/timothykrause)

I recently moved to New York City from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Its long been my goal to move to NYC, and while I’m aware that’s just another cliché I’m fulfilling in my young writer handbook, it’s the only place I’ve ever been that has felt like home. The city moves as fast as my mind, which helps me feel less anxious and alone. There’s a community here that makes my idiosyncrasies appear normal, my neuroses not unfounded, and allows me to indulge one of my favorite pastimes of drunken political debate. I love New York City, but I also know I’m not truly welcome here.

Reality is, I’m young, broke and black, arriving in the city at a moment when the young, broke and black are being pushed out. The Bloomberg years in particular have made the city attractive to corporations and gentrifiers, squeezing out the poor and working class, the communities of color that have always given New York its identity. I came with open arms, but it wasn’t long before the city responded, “There is no place for you here.”

In my naïve haze, I didn’t even consider it until an odd encounter with a stranger on the subway, someone whom in the past I’d probably have dismissed as crazy New Yorker. He struck up a one-sided conversation with me about undercover police officers riding the train into neighborhoods of color and said, “New York City is very racist. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they’re lying.”

I read/write about racism in America on a daily basis. I know it’s in this country’s DNA and will follow me wherever I go. Not just the structural but the visceral racism that painstakingly reminds you of your place. But I came up from Virginia. How bad could it really be?

I’m from a place where I was called a nigger for the first time in the sixth grade. Our elementary school classes romanticized the relationship between Native Americans and the settlers at Jamestown. Then they took us on multiple field trips to these historic grounds and barely mentioned it was the site where the first Africans arrived to the “New World” to be enslaved. I lived a two-hour drive away from the former capital of the Confederate States of America. In a tiny town in the western part of Virginia, where my grandmother was born and raised, my cousins and I once ran from two white men holding shotguns. The bloody history of racism has been ever present in my life. To my mind, whatever NYC had to offer, it wouldn’t be able to faze me.

But there isn’t much difference between the feeling one gets driving past their neighbor’s Confederate flag bumper stickers and standing next to an NYPD officer on a crowded F train, causing your muscles to tense up to the point the only thing you can move is your eyes, for safety reasons. My friends and I were kicked out of a cab and the driver actually told us, in so many words, he believed we were going to rob him. NYU students take tours of the neighborhood where I moved, gawking at the working-class brown people who may soon no longer be able to afford to call this home. And I’ve only been here three weeks.

It’s this form of racism that makes one paranoid, angry and frightened all at once. It puts you on edge in a way that, especially for someone like myself already living with anxiety disorder, is dangerous. It monitors your every step, alters your intuition, and makes you cynical before your time.

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So when people say that because I talk about race in my work I’m “keeping racism alive,” I honestly want to ask: do you think people enjoy living this way? Does anyone truly believe it’s healthy to feel that, no matter where you go, your life is in danger? No matter what some silly tournament bracket at Gawker says, no one feels any moral superiority being part of an oppressed and marginalized group. Be it racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism or any other system of oppression, people share their stories and fight back because the slow toll of oppression is torture. We need others to hear us and do something about it, before it swallows whole our genius and compassion. We just want some relief.

I wanted to find that in New York City, but it had other plans. As I exited the train, that same stranger advised me: “Keep your eyes open. Stay sharp.” I’m trying, but it’s exhausting.

Michael Denzel Smith previously blogged about the folly of respectability politics.

(Reuters/Luke MacGregor)

Early Thursday afternoon on the West Coast, Governor Jerry Brown tweeted a message: “Today, I signed a bill to help California’s domestic workers.”

Just sixty characters, the governor’s announcement brought Ai Jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance to tears: “Cannot stop crying tears of joy & pride. After 7 years of hard work & two vetoes, finally a victory for domestic workers in CA”, tweeted Poo.

The California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights will make California the third state in the nation with a bill of rights for domestic workers. (A similar law took effect in New York State in November 2010. Hawaii’s Governor Abercrombie signed a domestic workers bill of rights this summer.) Enforcement is always an issue, but should it be implemented as intended, California’s new law will finally provide overtime pay to an estimated 200,000 California housekeepers, child care providers and caregivers when they work more than nine hours in a day or forty-five hours a week.

“Domestic workers are primarily women of color, many of them immigrants, and their work has not been respected in the past,” said Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), who wrote the bill. “Now, they will be entitled to overtime, like just about every other California working person.”

A slightly broader version of Ammiano’s bill passed last year, only to be vetoed by the governor. What made the difference?

“Last year was hard. Getting up the next day was really difficult,” said Laphonza Butler, president of the SEIU United Long Term Care Workers, about the governor's veto last September. The SEIU ULCW was part of the broad coalition that worked with the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the California Domestic Workers Coalition both years. This year's bill was known as AB 241.

For all the tweeting on announcement day, it wasn’t short-form social media so much as hard-slog footwork and long-term coalition building that turned things around in 2013, Butler said. “What made the difference was a lot of community and worker activity that made the governor realize we’ve got to do something about an economy that keeps workers in poverty.”

Finances came in too. A year ago, Governor Brown was focused on solving the state’s deficit. Frustrated as they were by the vetoing of their bill, the coalition behind the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights put their person-power behind passing Proposition 30. Officially, “Temporary Taxes to Fund Education” Proposition 30—to increase taxes—was approved by California voters by a margin of 55 to 45 percent in November 2012.

“The work that the coalition did on passing Prop 30, created better revenue for the state and that opened up space for the governor to think about other issues,” said Butler.

The domestic workers’ bill was also weakened. Stripped out of Ammiano’s 2012 version were meal and rest breaks and part-time babysitters.

A federal ruling providing minimum wage and overtime to home healthcare workers was announced last week.

For why passage of AB 241 is such a big deal, see what Ai Jen Poo and Lourdes Balagot-Pablo, a California home health worker had to tell me when we talked at the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles earlier this month. Or take it from comedian Amy Poehler, one of the many celebrities that got behind the campaign.

Notable among the bravos flying around the Twitter-sphere immediately after Governor Brown’s message was one from Hand in Hand, a domestic worker’s employers’ group: “Employers join domestic workers in celebrating!!!!! Yes we did!!!”

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Butler praised the governor, the legislators who were willing to take up the bill and push it a second time and the workers in two states:

Getting up and dusting oneself off [after defeat]. There’s nothing harder than that, but the voice of those workers said to all of us that we didn’t have a choice, that we had to move and go at this one more time. The success we all saw in New York, that gave us the hope that this actually could be done.

For her part Poo (reached after her tears had dried), praised the organizers: “I’m just so proud of our members and organizers in California who—from a statewide caravan to cookies—ran such a fantastic campaign. It’s a testament to the dedication and incredible capacity of the women.”

Watch out Massachusetts, Poo says that state’s next.

Today’s bill contains a three-year sunset provision: a committee will be set up to review the success of the bill, and lawmakers would have three years to make it permanent.

Take Action: Fight for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in Your State

Wall Street sign outside the New York Stock Exchange. (Press Association via AP Images)

When Senator Elizabeth Warren addressed members of the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington on Thursday, she began by recounting the first time she spoke to the trade group, representing the country’s largest banking and financial interests, in 2010.

At the time, the Dodd-Frank bill had just been passed after bruising battles with the industry, and she was in the process of setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which the financial sector and its allies in Congress loathed and would repeatedly try to defang. “When [Chairman] Richard Davis introduced me, he said that in the interest of safety, all knives had been removed from the tables,” Warren recalled. “It was a joke—or at least I hope it was.”

Indeed, Warren is very familiar with Wall Street’s awesome power to influence the policy process in Washington. Which is why she came to them with a plea: please do more to avert a debt-ceiling breach and the potential calamity that would result.

You protect your interests every day in Washington. Ending this destructive notion of politics by hostage-taking is in your interests. And preventing an actual default—a self-inflicted wound that could cause a spike in interest rates and a freeze in our credit markets—is clearly in your interests.

I know that many of you have already spoken out, and I’m grateful for that. But please keep at it. For those of you who haven’t, please start now. Speak up publicly and write op-eds and give interviews. One conversation won’t get this done. Think of it this way: it took years of effort—press conferences and op-eds and town halls and hearings—for the debt-ceiling hardliners to raise this issue in the public consciousness, and now almost half of the country thinks that Congress should not raise the debt ceiling. It will take that kind of effort to reverse the tide.

What’s odd is that she had to say anything. One would think the financial sector would be applying a full-court press to stop a devastating fiscal meltdown that would wreak havoc on the Street (and most everywhere else). But implicit in Warren’s plea was that bankers haven’t been doing nearly enough.

Sure, some have spoken out, as she noted—like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at the Clinton Global Initiative yesterday. But the pleas have been soft, and virtually no pressure is actually being exerted in Washington. There’s nothing like the coordinated campaign that almost stopped the CFPB from actually having a director.

Why? The most obvious explanation is that Wall Street as a whole simply doesn’t believe the country will default. As always, the financial sector lets its money do the loudest talking, and the markets clearly are not anticipating a default. Goldman just released a report that found no discernible reaction in the S&P 500 to a potential debt-ceiling breach. “Complacency is even more pronounced on stocks with high government exposure,” wrote Goldman analysts. “Fear priced into options on these stocks dropped over the past few months to new lows.”

This all seems to be based in a belief that lawmakers will find their way to a deal—that the risks are so high, it is just a foregone conclusion. “DC always gets very close to the edge and then in the end finds an eleventh-hour solution,” Goldman’s chief economist told Politico last month. Another analyst told Business Insider this week that “I tend to think Wall Street has gotten numb to the antics out of a very partisan DC process.”

This attitude was more colorfully described by a trader in another Business Insider story: “I’m just here looking at my charts minding my own business you know what I’m saying? I don’t have time to worry about debt ceilings and the government. These people are a hot mess. I can’t…. You got a bunch of clowns reading each other Dr. Seuss. Why should I worry about what they’re doing, or not doing?”

Wall Street should care, however—a lot. As Ezra Klein noted earlier this week, the dynamics of this showdown are uniquely dangerous, much more so than what happened in 2011.

Then, at least both sides agreed there had to be a deal on the debt ceiling. Now, Obama is refusing to negotiate on it (much to his credit, of course—the country can’t keep playing chicken with calamity) and Republicans not only want to negotiate, but many members insist on pie-in-the-sky demands Obama cannot and will not honor even if he wanted to negotiate. That’s alongside the non-trivial number of members in the House who want to vote against raising the debt ceiling almost regardless of any deal, just to teach the country a “lesson” about debt.

If John Boehner can’t put together enough votes to make all these members with wildly disparate imperatives by October 17—at the latest—the country really might default. And the damage would be catastrophic.

The country did actually default briefly once before, by accident, due in part to a word-processing error. As Pema Levy wrote this week, that brief blip cost investors about $12 billion. A prolonged and purposeful default could create a real calamity in the financial markets. “I disagree incredibly strongly with the notion that breaching the debt ceiling would not have major, catastrophic consequences,” economist Mark Zandi told Levy.

Warren informed the Financial Services Roundtable’s guests, in case they didn’t already know, that it would be quite bad. “If the government’s borrowing costs go up, your costs will go up. And if consumer confidence drops, your customers will spend less. The debt ceiling isn’t a Washington problem; it is an American problem,” she said.

But it could be worse. Much worse—the sort of disaster on Wall Street that sees CNBC footage traders clutching their belongings in a box outside their firm, which just went belly-up with no warning. Then a domino effect of failed financial institutions and a global economic crisis.

Former Representative Brad Miller, a Democrat who served on the Financial Services Committee until retiring last year, persuasively sounded that alarm in Politico this week in a piece titled “How Congress Could Blow Up the Economy.”

He observed that Wall Street’s shadow banking system is particularly vulnerable to a default. It’s a system based on so-called “repo lending,” which is short-term lending outside the commercial banking system. Basically, a financial institution sells an asset to another institution with a contract to repurchase it the next day.

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The lender keeps that asset as collateral, and as long as that collateral exists and is trusted by all the market players, everything might be fine. Which is good, because the Federal Reserve estimates $4.6 trillion changes hands in repurchase agreements every day, and it touches most all corners of the financial system.

But the most common form of collateral in these arrangements are US Treasury notes—and their value would naturally be called into question if the Treasury stops paying debts because of a default. Their value could be called into question even if that prospect suddenly appears real. Lenders would start asking for more collateral, on a scale that many institutions might not be able to meet.

Miller warns that a sudden flood of demands for more collateral is the stuff of massive institutional collapse—it could destroy this massive shadow banking system. A sudden demand for collateral is largely what created the 2008 financial crisis.

More recently, Miller notes, it’s what sunk the infamous MF Global, which bought a bunch of Italian sovereign debt through repurchase agreements, at low prices, and gambled the debt would be repaid in full eventually. The firm would make a killing in that case. But doubts were then raised about the stability of the Italian financial system, the firm’s shadow bank lenders demanded more collateral, and boom—the firm went under.

Miller charges that Congress simply doesn’t realize how real, and dangerous, this possibility is. “MF Global’s failure to anticipate demands for more collateral was perplexing, since they were thought to be smart and to have a sophisticated understanding of the financial system,” he wrote. “Does anyone think that about Congress?”

Few do. So here is a situation with the debt ceiling where members of Congress are blasé about risks to the financial sector and world economy, while meanwhile people in the financial sector are blasé about the very real chance Congress can’t reach a deal. And a economic calamity awaits.

That’s why Warren made her plea today—there isn’t much hope that the Ted Cruzes of the world will suddenly wise up. So Wall Street should probably stop fiddling.

John Nichols wonders if they House GOP forgot who won the election in 2012.