Sunday Noon Downtown: From Miami to Montreal No Tuition Hikes

In Quebec, Canada students have gone on strike fighting against tuition increases, a struggle that we in Florida can understand. As covered in a recent Huffington Post article, Occupy FIU has called for a rally at the Canadian consulate downtown to protest the repression of the infectious student movement in Montreal and against the tuition increases here in Florida.  Below is from the Occupy FIU facebook event:

“The purpose of this rally is to show the Consulate, local officials, and residents of Miami that we are watching. We are aware of a the strike and of the brutal police tactics being used in an attempt to quell dissent. We are aware of the draconian laws which have been put in place which resulted in the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Not only are we watching. We are taking notes.

The time has come to begin building our power as students, to take a stand against the ever increasing tuition while funds for education drop. We do this in solidarity with the students of Quebec because we understand their struggle”.

Crime

Today we feature two contributions on crime. The first is from the blog Morelli84 called Crime and Crimen: do they intersect? The piece explores crime literature, the drug war, media, and terror & calls for looking at crime that goes beyond the spectacle reproduced daily around us. The whole piece is reprinted below. Second, we share the episode of radio program Against the Grain on the Mexican Drug War making headlines increasingly. The program seeks to understand the role of the Mexican state, international capital, and the relation of power in broader society to the drug industry and violence.

1º de Mayo: Después de la Primavera Se Viene un Verano Caliente

(traducido por Monica Kostas)

Crisis Global; Pesadilla Americana

La crisis económica mundial trajo una nueva Gran Depresión a las puertas de las familias de la clase trabajadora. Mientras que las corporaciones, funcionarios del gobierno y las burocracias reciben beneficios y compensaciones que baten récords, los menos afortunados se ven forzados a asumir la mayor parte de la carga económica [1,2]. Este colapso se coloca sobre las espaldas de los trabajadores, y más aún en los más oprimidos de las comunidades de la clase obrera, por ejemplo: mujeres de clase trabajadora, inmigrantes, negros y latinos [3,4]. A pesar de las promesas del Congreso demócrata y del presidente, las deportaciones de inmigrantes indocumentados han aumentado dramáticamente desde que Obama asumió poder, destruyendo comunidades y criminalizando poblaciones enteras. Si no luchamos, la crisis puede provocar una disminución permanente en nuestro nivel de vida, profundizando a la vez la dominación de los oprimidos, y aumentando las diferencias económicas en la sociedad estadounidense.

May 1st: After The Blossoms of Spring, a Hot Summer

by Miami Autonomy & Solidarity

Global Crisis; American Nightmare
A global economic crisis has brought a new Great Depression to the doorsteps of working class families. While the corporations, government officials, and bureaucracies are experiencing record profits and compensation, those who are least able to pay are expected to shoulder the majority of the burden [1,2]. This collapse is placed upon the backs of workers, and even more to the most oppressed in working class communities, for example: working class women, immigrants, blacks, and latinos [3,4]. Despite the promises of a Democratic congress and presidency, deportations of undocumented immigrants have dramatically increased since Obama took office, tearing communities apart and criminalizing whole populations. If we don’t fight back, the crisis may drive a permanent decline in our standard of living, deepen the domination over the oppressed, and widen the gaps in American society.

But people are coming together and finding ways to support and struggle alongside each other in ways that haven’t been seen in generations. The potential of a mobilized, conscious, and active movement frightens those in power, and they are pouring money, resources, and repression into diverting potential movements. People all over the world are building new struggles: turning vacant foreclosures into homes, resisting tuition hikes and worsening education in universities, fighting cuts and injustice at work,  resisting ICE deportations and challenging second class status for immigrants, launching fare strikes on transit against service cuts and fare hikes, and resisting racialized police brutality and violence against oppressed communities. Attempts to coopt these potential movements are coming out of the unions who fear changes in the comfortable relationships they have with management, from the NGOs who are funded by and keep their jobs through all those who profit off our suffering, and from the political machinery that wants to channel our anger into their careers.

The Monster of Unemployment

by Monica Kostas (MAS supporter and guest-author)

It’s been a solid three and a half months at least. In the scope of unemployment, it’s not that long of a time period but three and a half months can feel like a lifetime; I’ll even go to the extent of saying that I can’t remember what the routine is like, that I sometimes miss “hanging out” with my co-workers (and by hanging out I mean working and feeling stressed out and getting yelled at by the boss …“together”… awww…?). I may even sometimes miss my supervisor (uff that was hard to type out), but let me explain. She was the most genuine definition of a workaholic, but not the type that works because she’d be cornered into working long hours by the main boss but because she actively offered to stay long nights and come in on weekends. It was always beyond me why she would do this week after week; I could never understand how a human could actively give up nearly their entire life to work a job that wasn’t even that amazing—actually, it was very far from amazing. Maybe she internalized the masochism of our work environment, maybe she thought she deserved all the screaming and yelling from the boss, I don’t know. I figure maybe, she really, really needed the money.

Who Dismisses the Teacher: On The Work that Follows You Home and Steals your Sleep

by Barbanegra

(cross posted to Recomposition blog) I stare up at the computer’s clock on the right hand side of the screen, the numbers blaring at me, “10:45 pm.” I’ve finished the PowerPoint presentation for one class, but have nothing prepared for my other class. Luckily for me, tomorrow I have a planning period between 2nd period and 6th period (where I teach we have 90 min block classes, 4 blocks a day), so I can use that time to put something together for the class I wasn’t able to plan for the night before. The “even days” afford me such a luxury, the “odd days” don’t. On the “odd days”, my reaction to this nightly routine is much more irate. Immediately the panic and anxiety sets in. I feel a pain in the side of my stomach, sometimes accompanied by nausea. My girlfriend asks me from the couch if I’m calling it a night, to which I respond with an annoyed, “No!” followed by grumbles about how I’m probably only going to get 3 or 4 hours of sleep that night. She understands that my tone and somber mood have nothing to do with her or her question. She immediately springs to her feet, walks over to the computer, and asks me, “Is there anything I can do?” Some nights, I can ask her to finish downloading a movie for me to show in class, or type up some notes, or impute some grades, but most of the time there’s not much she can do, and I’ll be in this shitty mood for most of the night, which often times carries over into the morning.

Occupy by the occupiers part 2

We feature these two articles written by a participant of occupy who was newly radicalized, and an observer of occupy who did interviews with occupy Miami members. MAS doesn’t endorse these articles, but offers them as an insight to the moment of occupy in South Florida.