"Just Gathering Statistics," Alabama's Kristallnacht for the Undocumented

I grabbed this story from Tex(t)Mex blog,which points to a similar logic behind the recent changes to Alabama's racist new citizenship laws. The response by many undocumented families in the region was to flee:

"Hispanic students have started vanishing from Alabama public schools in the wake of a court ruling that upheld the state's tough new law cracking down on illegal immigration.

Education officials say scores of immigrant families have withdrawn their children from classes or kept them home this week, afraid that sending the kids to school would draw attention from authorities."

 While panicked administrators have "distributed to schools sample letters that can be sent to parents of new students informing them of the law's requirements for either citizenship documents or sworn statements by parents.

In an attempt to ease suspicions that the law may lead to arrests, the letter tells parents immigration information will be used only to gather statistics."

Mass deportation is not a new story when it comes to undocumented laborers in the United States. It is a standard means of producing labor control even if the move is garnered by grossly nativist sentiments (see "Operation Wetback" for example). At the same time, their rate is accelerating and expanding, additionally seeding a set of subcontracted companies of incarceration and control that are exorbitantly profitable.

Obama Seeks More Deportations than His Predecessor

From ImmigrationImpact.com:


"According to the report, Latinos (both native-born and foreign-born) accounted for half (50 percent) of all individuals sent to federal prison during the first nine months of Fiscal Year 2011. Of these 28,468 Latinos, 16,964 (or 60 percent) were sentenced for immigration violations. Non-U.S. citizens (of any ethnicity or race) accounted for just under half (48 percent) of people sent to federal prison. Of these 28,648 non-citizens, 20,303 (or 71 percent) were sentenced for immigration violations. Overall, immigration offenses accounted for one third (33 percent) of all sentences handed down."

The Koch Empire and Venezuela

You may remember the Koch brothers from the recent outbreak of popular outrage over the liquidation of public employee bargaining rights by the current governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. The Koch brothers spent over $34 million dollars trying to undermine workers rights particularly of public employees seemingly in collusion with Walker. What you might not know about them is that last October they saw the fertilizer plants they owned in Venezuela nationalized by standing President Hugo Chavez.

You might think this would be a story ripe for Fox News or various rightwing pundits to pounce upon. Here's why they kept the nationalization hush hush, from eXiled:

"The Kochs made hundreds of millions on every end of this deal…and even more surprising, bond markets cheered the nationalization. In other words, the free markets championed by the Kochs gave a big thumbs-down to Kochs’ negative influence on the value of the business, while at the same time, the free-market Kochs earned huge windfalls doing business with socialists. No wonder this story hasn’t made the rounds.

Here’s what happened: When Chavez’s nationalization of the plant took Koch Industries out of the picture, bond investors responded by driving up the value of the company’s bond debt by a whopping 33 percent. That means they had a lot more confidence that the debts would be paid back AFTER the free-market Kochs were out of the picture. As every business school flunky knows, price fluctuations of bonds are very much like those of stocks: the more they cost, the higher the confidence in a given company. And that means investors had less faith in the ability of the Kochs to run a tight business operation than they did in a bunch of Venezuelan socialist bureaucrats.

[...]

So for all the enterprising Americans out there wondering “What’s the secret to the Kochs’ success?” The answer isn’t pretty—especially if you’re one of the gullible Tea Party libertarians who believe the Kochs practice the free-market libertarianism that they preach. Their ability to reap billions and billions in profits year after year isn’t about buying low and selling high, but about buying subsidized-by-the-state, and selling subsidized-by-the-state. Using taxpayer money to cover the costs and ensure profits every time—that’s the simple formula to the Kochs’ success."

What's more is now the Koch's appear to be taking Chavez's government to court over the nationalization, before a investment dispute body in the World Bank. Check out this article from the Latin American Herald Tribune for more.

Explaining Cultural Capitalism

How to Radicalize Graduate Students:

From Academe's July-August Issue:

Take these simple steps to intimidate, alienate, and agitate your own flock of graduate students.

By Heather Steffen

As the recession, budget cuts, endowment losses, and Republican governors gut university funding, campuses across the country have become host to occupations, union actions, and demonstrations.

Except for yours. When you gaze out on the quad, all that greets you is a file of book-bagged undergraduates nose deep in text messages, a few graduate students hauling books and lab equipment, and that weird squirrel with the crooked tail. What’s wrong with your corner of the ivory tower? Why aren’t your students marching shoulder to shoulder with the others? You included a three-week unit on Marxist criticism in your fall syllabus and proudly display your Obama ’08 poster, and last month you tacked a strip of Jorge Cham’s comic critique of academia over the photocopier, but your graduate students stubbornly look only to their reading, teaching, and the lab.

If this sounds like your campus, it’s time for a change. The steps below offer simple ways to rile up and radicalize your university’s graduate student population. Why target graduate students? Because they live and work at the crux of the university: when they’re not bothering you, these people are teaching undergraduates, giving conference papers, and living lives entwined with the community. Radicalize them and your university’s troubles will be broadcast where it counts—the classroom, the hotel bar, the statehouse. (And you can be assured, doctoral students will protest with abandon, having already demonstrated an underdeveloped sense of self-preservation by considering academic employment in the first place.)

But before we get to the steps you need to take, one caveat administrator: the things that radicalize are the same things that enervate. Your graduate students, appearances to the contrary, are intelligent adults with adult responsibilities and concerns. Those Chuck Taylor sneakers carry them home at the end of the day to support partners, care for children, feed pets, and call aging parents. Pressures and duties of that magnitude, on top of the commitments they’ve made to your university, are what make each turn of the screw worth two. But if you push too far, you’ll exhaust your most capable rabble-rousers and wind up with nothing but a bunch of broken-spirited, careerist brownnosers in your program.

On the upside, they’ll probably improve your program ranking, but walk this tightrope carefully. If you follow these six steps and keep a sharp eye out for signs of the tipping point between insurrection and burnout, your campus, too, can ring with the tones of disaffection, discontent, and incipient democracy.

Step 1. Build on graduate students’ existing strength: worrying. Depending on your region and Carnegie classification, you may be well on your way to creating a culture of anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt among your graduate students, and lord knows they arrive with plenty of that already on hand. But no matter how competitive and intimidating your campus is, the first step to fostering a vibrant radical population of graduate students is getting their hearts beating faster. These three tactics are sure to give any grad student’s pulse a jump-start:

A. Evaluation Assassination. When you evaluate a graduate student’s work, do you treat it like that of a future colleague, engaging with its ideas and style as if you were reading a friend’s article draft? If so, you’ll need to relearn your approach to grading. every seminar paper and dissertation chapter represents an opportunity to shake a graduate student to the very core. An offhand “This is not doctoral-level work” will more than suffice in most cases. (Nota bene: The probability of a demand for rationale decreases in inverse proportion to the time between submission and return of work.)

B. The Draft-and-Switch. Prospectus, research performance evaluation, thesis overview, dissertation: the merest whisper of any of these words makes graduate students curse having lapsed (“It was only one slice!”) on that irritable bowel syndrome diet. The draft-and-switch takes advantage of their inevitable prostration before the task of defining an academic identity. Advisers, perk up your ears.

A prospectus draft hits your inbox. Open that sucker up and give it a skim—does the lit review or the original research get more airtime? Whichever it is, fire off a response within hours apprising your student that she’s failed to incorporate the other. Include a list of at least six monographs against which the student has not adequately positioned herself, and request a total rewrite within three months.

Revision in hand, warm up your reply button, because you’re about to drop a bomb: the document must again be completely recast, and you are concerned about the project’s viability: “This reads like a review essay; what is your argument?” Before closing, recall to the student’s mind that her standing in the program depends upon swift approval by multiple entities and reveal that you are not at this juncture certain of her ability to meet the deadline. Will the student think she’s lost her mind? Will she spend the next two hours combing through her e-mail for your previous comments? Yes, all the while shaking like a leaf. Give yourself a pat on the back, open a celebratory diet coke, and wait for draft three.

C. The HPT Meeting. Around the Pentagon, HPT stands for “high-payoff target,” and that’s exactly what you’re aiming for, so use this tactic sparingly. Here, HPT is a mnemonic you can use to plan meetings with overconfident graduate students.

A few days after a friendly interaction (drinks at a reception, a chat in the hall about good news on the publishing front, or some similar light conversation), casually request a meeting with your student to check up on his progress. Be sure to say something personal in the e-mail to maximize the sense of informality (“I was glad to hear that your cat’s surgery was successful!”).

Meeting set, the HPT agenda proceeds as follows: (1) Humiliate the student immediately by asking an exam-style question tangential to his area of knowledge. After he stumbles through an answer, inform him that he is devastatingly wrong (for proper affect management, imagine he’s just farted audibly while speaking). As he tilts toward the abyss of his self- doubt, (2) patronizingly offer an olive branch to help him out—a task useful to your own research that also happens to be the only thing capable of saving him from his overwhelming wrongness. You’ll either get a domesticated free research assistant or he’ll resist, declaring that that is not what his project is about at all. If the latter occurs, (3) bring out the threats: “It will be very hard for your thesis to gain my approval if this is not accounted for.” As fear enters your student’s eyes, open the door, extend your best wishes to the cat, and tell him you’ll look forward to seeing how his work progresses. If you’re not naturally coldhearted, the HPT meeting might shake you up a little, but keep in mind that as you’re sipping your evening pinot, your student might be getting in touch with his inner Wobbly at the bar down the street.

Step 2. Practice nepotism and lack of transparency in policy and decision making. Experienced administrators will roll their eyes at this one: “I already do that. I wasn’t promoted because of my sterling teaching record, you know.” But for the sake of faculty readers new to the managerial rim of the labor divide (that’s you, Ohioans), a few words on nepotism and obfuscation are in order.

Nepotism in regard to graduate students is easy, and chances are you’re already better at it than you think. Have you ever invited a couple of friends to present on a panel because writing a call for proposals would take too long or given the nod to a mediocre job candidate whose thesis happens to be signed by your college roommate? Congratulations, you’re half-way there! Now just turn the same principles to the assignment of plum classes and jobs to your favorite graduate students.

When they start to notice the repetitions in the course catalog, it’s time to shut the window on your decision-making process. Remember that graduate students are heavily invested in meritocratic and democratic ideals, so if they see perks accruing where they aren’t deserved and program requirements becoming a moving target, they’re going to want to nose out the culprit. By keeping the decision-making process tightly under wraps, you’ll not only increase its efficiency but also help your graduate students hone their investigative research and networking skills while they close read the handbook and compare notes with their comrades in other departments. Suppression of information is the agar in the petri dish of revolt, after all.

Step 3. Raise tuition and fees. Graduate students don’t pay tuition, do they? But why not? Take a look at your department’s budget sheet—how many of your hard-earned FTEs are wasted reimbursing the university for graduate credit hours? No one’s even teaching those classes, what with the pack of dinosaur ABDs you’ve got hanging around. A refresher on accounting and some well-timed hints about counterbalancing the athletic director’s fall spending spree will not only unify students across the two cultures, it might even get your name on the CFO’s go-to list next time a spot opens up in administration. To preview the results you can get from this one simple tip, look no further than California and Illinois, where just the threat of tuition increase spurred months of strikes, insurgent dance parties, and the authoring of manifesto upon manifesto.

Step 4. Pay them below the living wage. Choosing to starve your students might sound distasteful, but if they’re getting PhDs in late-thirteenth-century barley farming or the morphology of south Bolivian musk gnats, they must come from well-to-do backgrounds, right? These pampered savants need a reason to identify with the working man, and there’s no better way to foster identification than to make sure they’re standing behind him in the Shop ’n Save checkout line instead of flipping through a Dwell at Whole Foods. It might make them less entertaining dinner companions, but the gains in class consciousness will more than compensate for any lack of fluency in microgreens and manchego.

Step 5. Cut centers, programs, and departments. Even—if you’re as daring as the Minnesotans were—dissolve the graduate school. For maximum impact, go for the arts and humanities first. Donors and corporate partners are unlikely to register the loss, and students on the softer side of campus are already steeped in leftist theory, jealous of their profs’ glory days in the sixties and convinced of the need to enlighten the masses, so they’ll take the dissolution particularly hard. (And when was the last time you saw video of stomatology students getting arrested for failure to disperse?)

Step 6. Keep that tenured head buried in the sand. Are flyers about a graduate student union showing up on the bulletin board across the hall? Did the administration just announce that graduate tuition and fees are going up? Who cares? You’ve already got fifty-two hours of research, peer reviewing, committee work, and lecturing to do every week, so going to bat for your grad students is the last thing on your to-do list, and you should let them know that—loud and clear. If a wild-eyed graduate student idealist asks you to talk to your faculty senate or to advocate for the union, blink confusedly, mumble something that intelligibly includes the word “busy,” and remember to keep your office lights dimmed next time you come in for a meeting. Knowing they’re on their own encourages graduate student self-reliance and solidarity with organizations that really can help them out.

Follow these six easy steps, and pretty soon your campus could join the lucky ones already garnering the attention of police and Fox news anchors. Then you can sit back and let your grad students and the exasperated public take it from there. As one effectively and efficiently radicalized student at the University at Albany put it last January, “A lot of people who are supposed to be protecting us aren’t doing that. So unless we turn a little wolfish on them, they’ll just eat the sheep.”

Al Jazeera's Fault Lines on Ciudad Juarez

Documenting the extreme disparity in exposure to violence between El Paso, Texas with the lowest crime rate in the U.S. and Ciudad Juarez, now the murder capital of the world.

Internships, Immaterial Labor Anyone?

Internships are becoming common requirements for graduation in many colleges and they are moreover are becoming standard (which is to say calculated into saved costs) budgetting at many US corporations



From Ross Borlin's Op-Ed in the NYT:

The uncritical internship fever on college campuses — not to mention the exploitation of graduate student instructors, adjunct faculty members and support staff — is symptomatic of a broader malaise. Far from being the liberal, pro-labor bastions of popular image, universities are often blind to the realities of work in contemporary America.

[...]

Far from resisting the exploitation of their students, colleges have made academic credit a commodity. Just look at Menlo College, a business-focused college in northern California, which sold credits to a business called Dream Careers. Menlo grossed $50,000 from the arrangement in 2008, while Dream Careers sold Menlo-accredited internships for as much as $9,500.

To meet the credit requirement of their employers, some interns have essentially had to pay to work for free: shelling out $2,700 to the University of Pennsylvania in the case of an intern at NBC Universal and $1,600 to New York University by an intern at “The Daily Show,” to cite two examples from news reports.

Charging students tuition to work in unpaid positions might be justifiable in some cases — if the college plays a central role in securing the internship and making it a substantive academic experience. But more often, internships are a cheap way for universities to provide credit — cheaper than paying for faculty members, classrooms and equipment.

Honduras: Continuing Unrest, Naked Statements

I really appreciated a recent article from the associated press that revealed the current Honduran president's sense of ownership over the current government of the country, responding to widespread protests and strikes lead by students, teachers, and healthcare workers.

He claims:

"They are trying to destabilize my government," Lobo said at a news conference. "All of this is part of an ideological strategy to provoke difficulties, especially now that there is the possibility of returning to the OAS at the next general assembly in June."

This reveals again the clientelist nature of politics in Honduras with its electoral power-sharing between liberal and conservatives and the way in which the changing of the guard always results in the reinforcement of the oligarchy's control of the nation.

Comments by the opposition support this analysis:

A coalition of Zelaya supporters called the National Front of Popular Resistance has called for a general strike Wednesday, threatening to escalate the conflict in the polarized and impoverished Central American country.

"Porfirio Lobo is once again revealing the fascist character of his government, which is trying to destroy popular organization and the gains of the people to impose an economic system that only benefits the oligarchy and multilateral companies," the front said in a statement.

Rubber Stamps I Wish I Had When Grading Student Papers

I'm not in love with McSwenney's the way most people seem to be these days, but this entry is consonant with a lot of the feelings I have about marking papers in general.

Rubber Stamps
I Wish I Had
for Grading
Freshman
Composition
Papers.

BY KATHERINE PERRY

- - - -

1. RUN-ON

2. DANGLING MODIFIER

3. WTF?

4. TRANSITION?

5. I CAN'T TELL IF YOU'RE REALLY BAD AT THIS OR JUST NOT TRYING AND AM THEREFORE UNABLE TO MAKE CONCRETE STATEMENTS ABOUT YOUR ESSAY AT THIS TIME.

6. "ESCALADE" IS A KIND OF VEHICLE; DO YOU MEAN "ESCALATE"?

7. THIS IS AN INTERESTING OVERVIEW OF YOUR TAKE ON ZOMBIES/VAMPIRES/LEGALIZATION OF MARIJUANA, BUT IT HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH THE ASSIGNMENT. PLEASE GO OVER THE HANDOUT AND LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS. I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT DESPITE THE FACT YOU WERE TEXTING FRANTICALLY UNDER THE TABLE AND MAKING LEWD GESTURES WHEN I EXPLAINED SAID HANDOUT IN CLASS TELLS ME IT'S A WASTE OF MY TIME TO READ OR THINK ABOUT YOUR ESSAY AT ALL (LET ALONE FOR HALF AN HOUR ON A SATURDAY NIGHT ON WHICH YOU ARE CERTAINLY HAVING MORE FUN THAN I AM), I HAVE GONE AHEAD AND MADE CAREFUL COMMENTS ANYWAY, WHICH MAKES ME HATE MYSELF A LITTLE, WHICH YOU WILL SEE REFLECTED IN YOUR PARTICIPATION GRADE AT THE END OF THE TERM.

8. THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID.

First Book Review Published

My first publication is here, at Reviews in Cultural Theory, a new online journal.

Edu-Factory

Check out Jeff Williams' review of education based left movement Edu-Factory:

Edu-factory is a new group trying to revolutionize higher education. It is a relatively small, web-based collective (around 500 on its list) but casts an international net. It began as a listserv of those doing radical criticism of higher education and has since published a book (Toward a Global Autonomous University), developed a journal (see Edu-factory.org), and sponsored occasional “days of action,” calling for strikes among students and faculty in universities. Its organizers are largely European-based, intellectually coming out of the Italian autonomist movement and historically spurred by something called the Bologna Process.

The Bologna Process sounds as if it might be a political thriller at your local theater, but it’s an agreement of forty-six European countries oriented toward standardizing college degrees. It’s not an act of the EU, but it arises from work issues in the EU. In many ways, its goal sounds reasonable—European universities have a cacophony of regulations and degree requirements, in contrast to the U.S. system, which is more uniform and translatable, particularly after the credit hour was formalized in the early twentieth century. But Edu-factory sees the Bologna Process as instrumentalizing higher education, operating in the interests of capitalism rather than learning, particularly in its focus on assessment and “outcomes” and its orientation toward the vocational use of a degree.

Supermarket Ideologies

So two useful lessons to my mind on ideology from your local grocery store:

1) The simplest first: I was thinking the other day how the air pumped into bags of potato chips is a useful metaphor for considering the function of ideology. Althusser in his famous, if incomplete essay (apparently there is a yet to be translated book on the subject, still in French), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" discusses the function of ideology thusly,"the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life." Ideology for Althusser is the necessary element that contributes to the reproduction of conditions of production under capitalism (the division of labor, extraction of profit from labor already in the world, etc.). Instead of being a "mistake" made, a blocking of "real" consciousness, for Althusser ideology was more of a practice. "Ideology," He writes, "represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence." Thus ideology, not only "distorts" or misconstrues the social relationships that undergird the persistence of capitalism (more than just the economic state, but also a social and political condition, a social order) which is actively reinforced by institutions, the family, etc. It is a practice of life and a kind of preliminary, limited, knowledge of life and the world, not generated by some malignant cabal working in an unmarked office somewhere, but an active framing by subjects in relationship to an overall order, thus it is a process of life, not the mere negation of truth as others may have argued in the past.

If we can consider potato chip bag, a finished commodity (fetishism aside), as a good model for this understanding of ideology, where on the one hand the air allows the transport of the bags of crisps/chips without much damage to the chips themselves seems logical, and well motivated, people certainly prefer whole chip slices to the debris left over from crushing and being tossed around, and at the same time the air produces the illusion of quantity, we can see the practicality, commonsensical qualities of ideology as well as its status as that which withholds, whose absence is productive but nonetheless some form of misappropriation.

Our reaction to just how many chips/crisps are inside the bag once it's been opened I think speak to this very problem of ideology, we feel slightly cheated by the reduced quantity than we had expected. As much as we know there will be a certain ratio of air to food content in the bag we are nonetheless disappointed by how this ratio actually plays out when we see the bag is less than half full of chips.

2) The Self-Check-Out Lane as Middle Class Ideological Practice

I think all of us have had a moment in the past where we've been in a rather slow checkout lane somewhere and thought to ourselves, "how hard can it be to scan and cash this stuff out. I could do this more efficiently!"

Any cashier of course would tell you that this is never the case, an experienced, and battleworn cashier is easily the most efficient as her/his job and those who tell themselves that somehow they would be more effective or could more rapidly take care of the cashier's job are deluding themselves. Anyone who has ever had a customer service job could easily tell you that there are a number of things that could go wrong, need attention, knowledges that need to be obtained (what to do if something goes wrong, if an item rings up incorrectly), skills achieved etc. before one becomes proficient at these skills.

The self-check out lane at your local grocery store is therefore an ideological practice oriented at precisely the class most fixated on efficiency, and the ostensible "unskill" of service oriented work, the middle class. What is really going on here is the casualization of paid positions that tap into precisely this ideological fallacy, that an unskilled middle class person can best handle the supposedly simple tasks of a cashier without much knowledge or skill.

From my experience, the reality of this change highlights precisely the problems with this attitude. Self-check out lanes always seem to take forever, and are packed with people, but instead of becoming frustrated at particular employees we are frustrated at the other patrons, if only they could be as skilled and efficient as we in accomplishing their purchase. Moreover, labor that was once a single persons position gets distributed to the customers, so hell bent are they on efficiency, and to a singular cashier who deals with all of the frustrations and problems and receives much of the blame and malign of irate, irrational self-check out users. So you've eliminated multiple jobs and redistributed labor whilst playing into middle-class delusions about its competence to run a register and its further delusion that it runs the society.