On Thursday, March 4th, California's college students staged statewide protests that were the epicenter of an international day of action against the mindless bipartisan war on public education. The actions were called for coming out of student protests last November, and were joined in by teachers and staffs from K-12 as well as all three branches of California's higher education system, along with student-lead actions in 30 other states and some countries overseas. At Democracy Now, Juan Gonzales reported:
Students and teachers held hundreds of demonstrations on Thursday as part of the National Day of Action to Defend Public Education. Hundreds of thousands took part in what was the largest day of coordinated student protest in years.
Much of the day's focus was on the university and state college campuses of California, where students face a 32 percent tuition hike. Thousands of California students staged a one-day strike and took part in rallies from San Diego to Sacramento to Humboldt County.
At UC Santa Cruz, students blocked both entrances to the school before 7:00 a.m., essentially shutting down the campus for the day.
At UCLA, 300 students staged a five-hour sit-in outside the chancellor's office.
The blog StudentActivism.net, written by Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism and student government, offers a great wrap-up of the day (not that things are necessarily wrapping up). California -- not to mention the rest of the country -- saw a ton of activity today. A huge day for students.
But the real challenge is what happens tomorrow. As Johnson writes --
Today was more about activists talking to each other, working with each other, than it was about talking to or working with -- or working to overthrow -- university power structures.
At Calitics, Courage Campaign Public Policy Director Robert Cruickshank (aka "Eugene" or "Robert in Monterey")--also a speaker at one of the protests--reported:
From Anger To Action
Yesterday's outpouring of protest against the deliberate decision to destroy California's public education system was characterized by one dominant emotion: anger. And that was exactly as it should be. If you're not angry at the collapse of our schools, colleges, and universities, and the stealing of an entire generation's future, then you're really not paying any attention.
I spent the day at Cal State Monterey Bay, hearing student after student take the microphone to express their anger at what has happened to their dreams. This was not a violent anger, but instead the kind of deeply rooted anger that anyone would quite rightly feel when they have been betrayed. The state of California has betrayed these students, having asked them to work hard to succeed in school and promising an affordable quality education, only to yank that promise away from them in order to deliver tax cuts to huge corporations.
On other campuses, anger was clearly the dominant emotion, such as the students at UC Santa Cruz who shut down the campus, or the students at UC Davis who tried to block Interstate 80 in order to show the rest of the state what it feels like to have your life disrupted by forces beyond your control.
Anger can be a very healthy emotion. It focuses the mind, and can create a sense of determination. That too was on display at the events I attended - a belief that this anger was being expressed in order to build a mass movement of students, faculty, staff, parents, and other Californians who know that this state has no chance whatsoever at prospering in the 21st century if these cuts are not reversed. It is further evidence of how effective and valuable the March 4 actions were.
Students now understand what is happening to them and why. Their education is being gutted and their already meager financial resources are being stolen from them by a state government that believes corporations matter more than students. That propping up the failed status quo matters more than building California's future. Most of the speakers I heard understood this very clearly, almost instinctively. It has been beaten into them these last two years.
The student protests of the 32% fee increases approved by the University of California Board of Regents this week are notable for many reasons, not least because they are one of the few mass responses to widespread applications of the "Shock Doctrine" in the wake of massive budget cutbacks at the state and local level. First a quick review of how massively irresponsibility in drafting the stimulus set the stage for this event--and many similar cutbacks that have gone relatively unnoticed. Then, on the flip, a look at the fee hikes in historical perspective as part of a long-term process of privatization.
As I argued back during the stimulus debate, the failure to use federal dollars to help close state budget gaps was a terrible mistake. First off, every dollar taken out of state spending roughly offsets the stimulative effect of every dollar spent by the Federal government--meaning that until you've closed the state budget gaps (either actually or virtually), every dollar of stimulus spending accomplishes roughly nothing. I say "roughly," because the stimulative effect of spending a dollar can very tremendously, as shown in this chart from a Feb 4 diary:
So, $100 billion to extend the Bush tax cuts forever instead of assisting state governments would cost the economy roughly 700,000 jobs. If the $100 billion were used for temporary across-the-board tax cuts, it would "only" have cost about 230,000 jobs.
But making matters even worse than the massive loss in jobs saved or created alone, the state budget culs have wrecked havoc with all manner of state and local agencies and the services they provide. In many cases, the loss of continuity of service is itself quite costly, although ways of measuring these costs are partial and pimative at best. But one thing is quite clear--when the cost is cut-backs in higher education, that cost will continue to be paid for years, if not decades into the future in the form of lost productivity in a less educated and less cretive workforce--at the every least.
During the 2003 recall campaign, Arnold Schwarzenegger promised he would "fix" the budget. He fixed it, all right, his first day in office he repealed the vehicle license fee (VLF), leaving the state liable for an addition $6 billion of local spending annually. He then used all kinds of "creative financing" as it's known in Hollywood, to maintain the illusion that everything was just fine. This January, he dropped the act.
"For several years, we kept the budget wolf from the door, but the wolf is back," he said, as he announced an 18-month budget shortfall of $14.5 billion, a figure that the non-partisan Legislative Analyst soon upped to $16 billion. The Democratic legislative leadership managed to trim that by $9 billion with some creative financing of its own, before the Governor announced on April 24 that it was up to $10 billion, and still climbing as California's economy continued to worsen, along with the rest of America, and the world.
For some idea of what this means, in March, the California Budget Project reported that the Governors proposed budget would hit children, seniors, the poor and disabled especially hard. In Los Angeles County alone, this would include cuts of $670 per student for all 1,544,710 students served by the county's public schools. In the past, conservative Republican governors like Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson agreed to balancing budget cuts and tax increases to fill budget gaps, but so-called "moderate" Arnold Schwarzenegger is dead set against raising taxes-Republican legislators are even more adamant.
All of which means we need to "think outside the box."
Mandatory Blood Donations
Because education cuts account for such a large chunk of the budget gap, it seems only natural to think creatively about how these cuts in particular might be made up. Some have suggested instituting a system of mandatory blood donations for all students, and using the proceeds to help fill the budget gap. At first blush, it seems like a promising approach.
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