OCCUPIED CAL JOURNAL | Issue 2 | pg.

DEMANDS of OCCUPY CAL

The following demands were discussed and voted on by the Nov. 12 General Assembly.
LocalDemands Respect Free Speech, Including the Right to Set Up Tents. Immediate Resignation of Robert Birgeneau, George Breslauer, Harry LeGrande, and Mitch Celaya. Democratic Election of their Replacements by Students, Faculty, andStaff. - Charge the Police Responsible for Brutalizing Protesters. No Use of Force AgainstProtests on Campus. -Amnesty for All Protesters. -Make UCBerkeley a Sanctuary Campus for Undocumented People. Pass the UC-wide Dream Act. -Equal Benefits and Retirement Security for UC Union Workers. StatewideDemands -Reverse the Fee Hikes, Cuts, and Layoffs To At Least Their 2009 Levels. -Refund Public Education and Public Services: Tax the Banks and Billionaires. RepealProp 13. -Full Implementation of Affirmative Action. Overturn Prop 209. NationwideDemands - Stop the Privatization of Public Education. -Bail Out Schools and Public Services. Redirect Military Funding to Education. -Immediate Forgiveness of All Student Debt. -Repeal Race to the Top. -Stop the Attacks on Teachers Unions.

OCCUPIED CAL
November 15th 2011, | Issue 2 bit.ly/OccupyCal | ReclaimUC.blogspot.org | BerkeleyCuts.org email: OccupiedCalJournal@gmail.com

This is an ongoing discussion that will continue at our General Assemblies.

Journal

HISTORY WILL HAVE TO RECORD THAT THE GREATEST TRAGEDY OF THIS PERIOD OF SOCIAL TRANSITION WAS NOT THE STRIDENT CLAMOR OF THE BAD PEOPLE, BUT THE APPALLING SILENCE OF THE GOOD PEOPLE. - MLK

OPEN UNIVERSITY

FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT 1964

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! - MARIO SAVIO

WE ASK THAT ALL CLASSES BE CANCELED OR HELD AT SPROUL PLAZA.

8am-5pm Noon-2pm All day open university activities (teach-outs, workshops, public readings, installations, etc.) at Sproul Plaza and surrounding areas. Formal inauguration of day-long open university. 2pm Teach-outs in Sproul Plaza. Rally against police violence and other, related forms of violence, including Mass convergence at Sproul Hall

OCCUPY CAL 2011

2:30pm 5pm

General Assembly at Sproul Plaza.

March to Berkeley High and Berkeley City College.

dispossession, privatization, and debt.

Following the General Assembly, we will set up our encampment, and Professor Robert Reich will speak on the Sproul Steps.

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OCCUPIED CAL JOURNAL | Issue 2 | pg. 7 She started firing off questions, and I politely told her that wanted to know my rights at this point in the process and when I would be able to speak to a lawyer. She responded, You have no rights, to which I responded Thats impossible. In one of many disturbing moments of the night, she informed me that I was wrong and wrote me down as a non-cooperative arrestee. That simple request will earn me extra harsh treatment in the student disciplinary process, she assured me. Throughout the night, we were referred to as bodies not people. I was never Mirandized. - Graduate Student

CALL FOROPEN UNIVERSITYSTRIKE AND SOLIDARITY ACTIONS ON NOVEMBER 15TH

Adopted by the Occupy Cal General Assembly on Nov. 12 th 2011 After a mass rally and march of over 3,000 people, and repeated police assaults on the Occupy Cal encampment, the general assembly at UC Berkeley decided on the night of November 9th -- with over 500 votes, 95% of the assembly -- to organize and call for a strike and day of action on Tuesday, November 15. We ask that all classes be cancelled or held at Sproul Plaza. The Open University strike is both a response to the Universitys violent raid on the encampment, and an action against the defunding and privatization of public education in California. We will strike to reassert our collective right to freely assemble, both at the University and elsewhere, so that we are able to build public spaces where we can discuss and counter the various crises affecting our communities. We stand in solidarity with the Occupy movement, and especially with Occupy Oakland, which has been, and may again soon be, repressed by the city of Oakland and the Oakland Police Department. We will also strike to reaffirm our determination to fight for a truly public and free University, and for the refunding of all levels of public education and public services. Since the crisis of 2008, the UC Regents have accelerated their push to privatize the University, subjecting students to unsustainable levels of debt, excluding increasing numbers of students, and further resegregating public education in California. The policy of privatization also subjects workers to layoffs, work speedups, and drastic benefits reductions. All these regressive transformations are forms of structural violence, which the police enforced against the assembled students, faculty, and workers on November 9th. We call upon all sectors of public higher education in California to take actions on Tuesday, November 15 th, up to and including strike actions, and to join the mass convergences on November 16 th at the UC Regents meeting and the CSU Trustees meeting. We also call upon workplaces and K-12 schools to join us, either by taking actions at their sites or by converging on UC Berkeley and helping us to open up and transform the University from which most Californians have been systematically excluded. We do not think that property destruction is a useful tactic and we ask those who join the Open University to respect this sentiment.At the same time, we do not think that it is a good strategy to use physical force against those who might engage in such acts. Please join us on November 15th as we stop business as usual at our University in order to open up and transform our campus, and as we reestablish the Occupy Cal encampment. Endorsers: Occupy Cal, UC Berkeley Faculty Association, UCSF Faculty Association, UC Davis Faculty Association, UC San Diego Faculty Association, UC Council of Faculty Associations, AFSCME 3299, ACCE, California Nurses Association, Communities for a New California, UAW Local 2865 (UC), UAW 4123 (CSU), UC-AFT.

NOVEMBER 9th TESTIMONIES

If you haven't already seen the countless YouTube videos from your fellow students: I would like to say something with a much different tone. What occurred on the 9th was truly an event with two different sides and stories. On one hand there is the police violence. However, on the other hand there was the immense amount of support from the campus and the community shown. It was truly a beautiful moment. When students and strangers come together for a same cause and do all they can to support one another is a touching reminder of the power of humanity, something the cold bureaucrats and administrators of our UCs seemed to have lost. - Undergraduate who was beaten by police depicting Wednesday's events, here are some testimonies 'I was part of the chain of people in front of a row of bushes on the night of Nov. 9. I was struck by batons in my arm and chest as the officers shouted Move! but I was literally trapped between my fellow students being beaten, the large bush, and the wall of Sproul Hall. Even though I was screaming I CANT move! the police kept trying to advance and hitting us with their batons. They were beating the arm of the man next to me because he was trying to pull me away. An officer yanked hard on my scarf three times to try to drag me away from the crowd, which had the effect of choking me. When that didnt work, the officer grabbed my ponytail and dragged me by my hair over the bush, threw me face down on the ground, and arrested me. - Graduate Student

WHY STRIKE?

Throughout the years the public education movement has frequently called for walk-outs and strikes. Some members of the campus community perceive this tactic as a degradation of the existing education by missing and disrupting classes. However, the act of refusing the decreasing quality of our classes for one or two days a semester has the long-reaching effects of confronting the administration and the state to redirect resources and improve our education in the long term. The criticism that the organizers do not value their classes and their education is unfounded as the exact motive for the strike is a recognition and a refusal of the degradation of our public education. A strike is a mass action in which people from all sectors of the campus community workers, students, teachers, and faculty. join together. By not going to work or school and refusing to participate in the oppressive system, the people united can shut down the University's ability to function. Strikes are a powerful tactic to stop business as usual, to refuse the daily acceptance of the continual privatization of our University. It is a small sacrifice for the greater good. We frame this strike as a prefigurative shutting down of the privatized, exclusionary UC, and the opening of the free, democratic and open university including students from other schools to converge on the Berkeley campus to protest their exclusion. Stopping the campus' normal activities draws attention to the vastness of supporters for an improved UC and Public Education System. It enables the creation of an "Open University", facilitating spaces for productive conversations and actions which push for change according to the people's needs and visions. Our main organizing space for this movement, the General Assemblies (GA), are always open and democratic. The GA on the night of November 9th passed the proposal--with a 95% majority of 500 votes--to organize a strike and day of action on Tuesday, November 15. We encourage everybody sympathetic to the public education cause to organize in their respective communities and spaces, but to participate in the greater actions which demonstrate our unity of purpose and our collective power as the participants and future of this society.

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Why I Got Arrested with Occupy Cal --and How

By Celeste Langan, Associate Professor of the Deparment of English I participated in the Occupy Cal rally on Sproul Plaza on November 9 (my sign, "We're Afraid for Virginia Woolf," made it to the Daily Cals top 10) and stayed for the general assembly. The organizers of Occupy Cal asked those who were willing to stay and link arms to protect those who were attempting to set up the encampment; I chose to do so. I knew, both before and after the police gave orders to disperse, that I was engaged in an act of civil disobedience. I want to stress both of those words: I knew I would be disobeying the police order, and therefore subject to arrest; I also understood that simply standing, occupying ground, and linking arms with others who were similarly standing, was a form of non-violent, hence civil, Cal Student is arrested on Wednesday resistance. I therefore anticipated that the police might arrest us, but in a similarly non-violent manner. When the student in front of me was forcibly removed, I held out my wrist and said "Arrest me! Arrest me!" But rather than take my wrist or arm, the police grabbed me by my hair and yanked me forward to the ground, where I was told to lie on my stomach and was handcuffed. The injuries I sustained were relatively minor--a fat lip, a few scrapes to the back of my palms, a sore scalp--but also unnecessary and unjustified. I do plan to file a complaint with UCPD, less because I desire particular police officers or their supervisors to be reprimanded or penalized than because I want to initiate a review of the police action. They could have taken the time to arrest us without violence for refusal to disperse, but instead seem to have been instructed to get to the tents as quickly as possible, regardless of the consequences to the protesters. Since the tents posed no immediate threat to public safety, the officers haste and level of force were unwarranted. They could have led me away by my proffered hand, rather than by yanking my hair. As to why I was there: as 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. On the one hand, as many have pointed out, rising costs limit access. On the other hand, the debt students incur as they pursue a liberal arts education also poses a threat to free inquiry, that central value of democratic society. Students are so concerned about their economic futures that they sometimes feel constrained in their choice of courses and majors, too anxious about acquiring the proper credentials for employment to explore areas of intellectual inquiry that might interest them but don't appear to have an instrumental value. When I was teaching Walden last month, I couldn't help but notice how incisively Thoreau diagnoses the effect of "insolvency" on the capacity to think and live freely; the time people spend reading and thinking, he suggests, is increasingly regarded as time "stolen" and "borrowed" from wage-earning. I note the same narrowly pragmatic thinking in the haste with which the police acted and Chancellor Birgeneau's justification for his decision to authorize the police action: "We simply cannot afford to spend our precious resources and, in particular, student tuition, on costly and avoidable expenses associated with violence or vandalism." No one wishes to "waste" resources in this climate. Yet if one follows this logic one can see the looming threat: lawful assembly, peaceful dissent, and free inquiryeven so-called breadth requirements--can all entail some cost. They interfere with getting and spending. Dissent, like free inquiry, is sometimes inefficient. Dissent doesn't always have a "deliverable." But it takes time to determine a just answer to What is to be done?. In my opinion, time to think is exactly what gives liberal education the value that it has. It appears that Chancellor Birgeneau does not always recognize this value. At the very least, his (unwarranted, unjustified) assertion that linking arms "is not non-violent civil disobedience" suggests that he has not taken the time to engage in a conversation with Berkeley scholars in various departments who have thought long and deeply about the nature of violence and non-violence and the difficulty of making such a distinction. The police, who are given the impossible mission of using "minimal force"--a concept with similar conceptual ambiguity--in the pressure of the moment, also did not take time to think, to consider a response appropriate to the circumstances. But I noticed that after the arrest, they took sweet timesomething like four hoursto write reports and book us, and then, after another four or five hours, to release us from jail. The delay was caused in part by the initial haste: the officers trying to write the reports had no idea who the arresting officers were, and therefore no idea of what we should be charged with. According to the ACLU, they then violated procedure by not releasing us immediately after issuing the misdemeanor citations. There was another delay in releasing my bookbag, which had been confiscated at the arrest; when I tried to retrieve it on Thursday morning, I was told that it had to be processed as evidence and wouldnt be released until Monday; only after members of the Faculty Budget Forum complained on my behalf did I get a call from the UCPD saying that I could pick up my bag on Friday. (The students who were arrested were still unable to retrieve their belongings.) The contrast between the haste of the arrest and the delay of the aftermath suggests that the problem isnt so much a lack of time as one of its distribution. A solution to the global crisis of insolvency may depend on a similar change of perspective: from "lack" to the distribution of resources like time, land, water, wealth, and education.

[Linking arms] is not non-violent civil disobedience.

- Robert Birgeneau

ere we are, struggling against the injustices created by the 1%. Unfortunately, the interests of the 1% have become the law of this campus. The system has been broken for years, and the university's response is to silence progress to this ongoing international struggle. Tuesday before the launch of Occupy Cal, a student was arrested for chalking. What followed early the next day was police patrolling the campus and handing warnings to those who looked like they might set up tents or try to bring down police barricades. Later in the day, the whole world witnessed the use of force and brutality against peaceful protestors. Everyone, from your mother who probably called you to see if you were safe, to Stephen Colbert who devoted a segment on UC Berkeley's day of action during his show, found out what took place Wednesday at Cal. THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. Indeed. They watch as the University shuts down our right to free speech and our attempts to begin the dialogue of this crisis on the steps of our own campus. A few of us approached a group of Alameda police on Wednesday amidst the protest. We asked, what is the problem with encampments Why are you beating down on us? They claim they are following orders to protect the face of the campus. They referenced the situation at Occupy Oakland and campus officials do not want our lovely campus to turn into an eyesore. Apparently, controlling the beauty of our campus is more important than free speech and the current crisis that we are in today. We stand in solidarity with the Occupy Movement, and tents are a tactic that, frankly, works. It works for us: an encampment allows us to have a space for us to live in, to protect each other, to care for one another, and most importantly, a place to call our own. We want to create a safe space for ALL to come and join our discussion. We did not elect our administrators. We did not elect the Regents. With the dismal amount of student participation in our campus's decision making process, we defend our encampment as a response to the increasing control of our campus by the 1%, and as the medium that will allow for student expression. It works as a legitimate form of Free Speech, and this been professed in thousands of protest encampments around the world, not only today, but throughout the course of history. During the protests against the Reagan administration, a Boston Superior Court Judge ruled that tents were a legitimate expression of the constitutional rights of free speech and free assembly. According to the University, you have the right to assemble, as long as you don't cook, sleep, or set up tents, and you have to have a Cal ID after hours. Our encampment welcomes all students, whether or not you can afford to pay this unaffordable tuition. In October, Orange County's City Council voted unanimously to allow Occupy tents as a form of Free Speech. We insist that the university administrators adhere to our rights in the same manner. Do not blatantly disrespect our First Amendment Right in the way Mayor Jean Quan has. Dan Siegel, Mayor Quan's top legal advisor, quit Monday morning and expressed on his twitter at 2am, Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators. At a protest, Siegel stated that Oakland has been "the most hostile city to the Occupy movement. Where else are they having 600 police officers take down some tents?" Do we want UC Berkeley to be known as a hub for activism and social change, or police repression? This is a crisis, we are the 99%, and we finally have something for ourselves. Do not take this away from us. Although this movement has gained a lot of popular support, there are still many that attempt to defame it, particularly the media. They choose to call us hippies, dirty, scum, nave, etc. They forget that we are students, scholars and academics, professors, parents, colleagues, workers, etc. Many of us come from marginalized communities, only to be further marginalized at our school campuses by the 1%. We must work hard to support one another against divisive language that will only bring this movement down. We are the 99%. We are family, and we should not be divided. If you do not agree, or would like to see a different approach, please voice your concerns at our daily General Assemblies, where we give time, discussion, and an 80% vote to pass every proposal. UCPD and administrators, instead of shutting us down, join us. Protect us. Help make public education what it was originally destined to be: FREE FOR ALL!

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OUR UNIVERSITY

An Open Letter to the Administration of the University of California at Berkeley

Dear Chancellor Birgeneau, Executive Vice Chancellor Breslauer, and Vice Chancellor LeGrande, You should all resignnow. On Tuesday, you sent a message to students informing us that we would not be allowed to set up encampments or occupy campus buildings. You quoted a passage from the student code of conduct that prohibits [a]ny activities such as pulling fire alarms, occupying buildings, setting up encampments, graffiti, or other destructive actions that disrupt or interfere with anyone's ability to conduct regular activitiesgo to class, study, carry out their research etc. In this same message, you claimed that UC Berkeley shares many of the highest principles associated with the OWS movement and aims to provide a model of the right to free speech, assembly and activism. We could not agree with you more: UC Berkeley does share the principles of the OWS movement. In fact, we were instrumental in sparking the wave of occupationsyes, occupationsthat is now sweeping the globe. Recall November 20th, 2009: the students who occupied Wheeler Hall that day were not fringe radicals or outsiders, they were students who cared so deeply about the university that they were willing to be dragged away in handcuffs for it. They spoke for all of us, and now we are answering back.The model of activism you refer to: its us. We're all occupiers now. Dont patronize us, then, by telling us how we ought to behave. Time and again, our protests have been met with batons and guns and admin-speak about protecting us and obeying the limits of protest. After three years of brutality, we now know exactly who is being protected, and from what. The police force you sent to disperse us beat and maimed several dozen students, faculty, and staff. When UCPD requested reciprocal aid, they were reinforced by OPD and the Alameda County Sheriffs Departmentthe same officers who shot a young Iraq veteran in the head with a tear-gas canister last week at Occupy Oakland, in violation of their own rules of engagement. He still has not regained the ability to speak. This is how you would protect us: with blood and fear. We are appalled, but not surprised, that your police beat an English Department graduate student so badly Wednesday that he was rushed into urgent care. This is how you would uphold the legacy of the free speech movement. Let us remind you: we are the free speech movement. We are speaking, and you are beating us to the ground. About the regular activities of students at UC Berkeley: we do not agree that these activities can be limited to going to class, studying, and doing research. First, because this school is the center of our lives, which are richer and more meaningful than is allowed for by the student code of conduct. Second, because there can be no regular activity in a time of crisis. We are not blind to the world; we know that it is falling apart, torn to shreds by the profit-hungry elite of the the 1%. We know that you have been tasked with operating the university in crisis mode; we know this means ensuring that the 1% do not lose their financial stake in the university and its affiliate industriesthe student loan racket, for example. We see right through you. It is you, on the other hand, who mistake our purposes: when we occupy buildings and set up encampments, these are our regular activities. The only people interfering with the business of the university are the police; for that, they should be banned from campus permanently and immediately. You describe UC Berkeley as a place where the best and brightest youth, staff and faculty from all socioeconomic backgrounds work collectively to solve world problems. We wholeheartedly agree. However, by this definition, it is you who have violated the code of conduct; you are the ones who should be driven out of Sproul Plaza, not us. Make no mistake: there can be no regular activity when a militarized police force is allowed to brutalize students with impunity, nor can there be any peace so long as you remain at the helm of the university. Take a lesson from history (Egypt, for example) and step down now. Signed, Daniel Marcus

we are the

99%