Category: Under the Perfect Sun

Missed the opening of the San Diego Free Speech Centennial Exhibition in the Centro Cultural de la Raza on January 6th?

Not to worry. The celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the San Diego Free Speech Fight continues this Thursday, January 26th at the Saville Theatre (where 14th Street meets C in downtown) on the City College campus from 7:00-9:00 PM.

This event will feature music by Gregory Page and the Proles; a reading from my IWW novel Flash; a special Voices of Peoples’ History presentation focused on the free speech fight by City College students; and the premiere of a short documentary on this important piece of local history. Before and after the performances you can view Golden Lands/Working Hands, the California Federation of Teachers’ mobile labor history exhibit. This event is free and open to the public.

For many of us the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life is, for better or worse, inextricably bound to the yuletide season. Growing up I was subject to the annual revisiting of the film and, surreally, it was even running on the hospital TV the Christmas eve that my wife went into labor with our son who finally graced us with his presence on Christmas day, forever transforming the holiday into a celebration of life itself in my family.

Of course, the part of the film that always makes people cry is when George is saved by the incredible generosity of his neighbors in Bedford Falls who flood over to his house bearing cash to keep him from being arrested for bank fraud after his Uncle Billy loses all the money from their building and loan business on the way to deposit it.

As cultural historian George Lipsitz has pointed out, It’s a Wonderful Life, is part of a postwar film wave that began to redefine American freedom as free enterprise: “the freedom to own more commodities, to experience upward mobility, and to form nuclear families built upon male authority and female domesticity.”

As we head toward 2012, there are a number of tax initiatives being proposed for the ballot next year. What separates them? Two of them, being put forth by activist millionaires, are largely regressive in nature aiming to bring in revenue by increasing income, sales, and other taxes on the majority of Californians in order to help fund education and other services. The Governor’s plan is a combination of progressive taxation (starting with earners who make $250,000 and above) and regressive (a sales tax that will hit everyone).

Only the “Millionaires’ Tax to Restore Funding for Education and Essential Services” keeps its aim on the 1% and only the 1% by imposing a 3% tax on all earnings over $1 million and 5% on all earnings over $2 million.

by Jim Miller and Jonathan McLeod / Special to the OB Rag

Last week the California Community College Board of Governors met here in San Diego to address the results of their task force on “student success.” While much ink has been spilled detailing the ongoing efforts to impose corporate style “reforms” on education at the K-12 level (see Diane Ravitch’s fine work , little attention has been paid to the reform efforts in higher education.

There is a kind of creeping academic Taylorism that comes with the movement toward “student learning outcomes” in higher education that can only be understood if one recognizes the long history of American corporate interests seeking to discipline and, in turn, profit from institutions of higher learning, whether it be plutocrats railing against “dangerous” ideas in the academy or business leaders seeking to transform American colleges into narrow job training factories that provide them with skilled workers without the accompanying bother of having to foot the bill for this service in the form of paying their fair share of taxes.

Every year I spend Thanksgiving and the weekend after it with my family and friends in the Anza Borrego Desert. On hikes with my seven-year-old son, we are grateful for our chance encounters with roadrunners, jackrabbits, coyotes, beetles, and the occasional lucky sighting of a big horn sheep. We have a friend who is a birder who can tell us what kinds of birds we are near from the sound of their calls. When we go back to eat, we break bread with another friend who beat cancer and whose presence reminds us that life is short and precious.

More than anything else, it is the beautiful stillness of the desert that brings us there—the way the landscape seems to listen. At night you can still see stars and think about the vastness of the universe in a way that reminds you of your smallness and your connection to the largeness of all that is. It is humbling and enlarging at the same time.

Last week Adbusters, a publication that was important to the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, put out the following:

TACTICAL BRIEFING #18
Occupy the High Ground!

Hey you creatives, artists, environmentalists, workers, moms, dads, students, malcontents, do-gooders and aspiring martyrs in the snow:

The last four months have been hard fought, inspiring and delightfully revolutionary. We brought tents, hunkered down, held our assemblies, and lobbed a meme-bomb that continues to explode the world’s imagination. Many of us have never felt so alive. We have fertilized the future with our revolutionary spirit … and a thousand flowers will surely bloom in the coming Spring.

But as winter approaches an ominous mood could set in … hope thwarted is in danger of turning sour, patience exhausted becoming anger, militant nonviolence losing its allure. It isn’t just the mainstream media that says things could get ugly. What shall we do to keep the magic alive?

Last Tuesday citizens of the bellwether state of Ohio handed Republican John Kasich a crushing defeat as they voted overwhelmingly to repeal Senate Bill 5 that would have undermined collective bargaining rights for public sector workers. This and other Republican losses across the country last week has excited many Democrats who are hoping these elections are a signal that the Tea Party wave has crested and the gloomy horizon for President Obama and his party may be brightening.

We are weeks into the Occupation of America and, despite struggles with police in numerous cities the public discussion of economic injustice and inequality persists. At the nation’s paper of record, The New York Times, the debate continues with David Brooks furiously trying to belittle and dismiss the message of Occupy Wall Street. In his latest column he bemoans that we are focused on “the wrong inequality” and tells us:

That’s because the protesters and media people who cover them tend to live in or near the big cities, where the top 1 percent is so evident. That’s because the liberal arts majors like to express their disdain for the shallow business and finance majors who make all the money. That’s because it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns and educational attainment. That’s because many people are wedded to the notion that our problems are caused by an oppressive privileged class that perpetually keeps its boot stomped on the neck of the common man.

As we watch the Occupations from New York to San Diego fight for the right to exercise free speech and occupy public space, it is worth noting that we have been here before. Recently, it was my pleasure to do a small teach-in at Occupy San Diego with the OB Rag’s own Frank Gormlie on the history of civil disobedience in San Diego. For my part, I outlined the story of the San Diego Free Speech Fight in 1912 when the Industrial Workers of the World and other local labor and community activists struggled against the San Diego’s elite for the right to speak on a soapbox at the corner of 5^th and E downtown. As the homepage of the San Diego Free Speech Fight 100 Year Anniversary website notes:

2012 is the 100-year anniversary of the San Diego Free Speech Fight, one of the most important moments in the history of the city of San Diego. During the winter and spring of 1912, members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and their allies in labor and the community engaged in a pitched battle against a city ordinance that banned public speaking in the area around 5th and E Streets in downtown San Diego.

Recently, Clare Crawford of the Center on Policy Initiatives noted that, “Even three full-time minimum wage jobs don’t make enough to make ends meet in San Diego County.” Crawford was responding to the release of a report by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development that documented how it now costs a family of three nearly $63,000 to make ends meet in San Diego.

This is according to the 2011 California Family Self-Sufficiency Standard and the grim news is that more than one million San Diegans are living in households earning less than that threshold. That’s close to a third of all San Diegans, much higher than the fifteen percent of San Diegans who fall under the official poverty line.

While it remains to be seen whether the Occupation of America, from Wall Street to San Diego, will be able to sustain its amazing initial momentum, it has unquestionably struck a nerve and sparked a national discussion about class, power, and politics. The heavy weights at the New York Times have recently staked out an interesting range of opinion on the occupation movement.

You have Paul Krugman, the paper’s reliable progressive, observing the panic of the plutocrats and astutely noting that, “The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.”

With the economy in the tank and prospects of a recovery looking dim, everybody knew that the grocery workers were going to lose. They would either accept the gutting of their healthcare benefits and pensions or they would go out on strike and lose big. With so many people unemployed and with aggressive union busting in the air, they might as well surrender. At least that’s what lots of smart folks were saying in the local media and Southern California political circles. Everybody knew.

So much for the prevailing wisdom.