protest

• Check out this interesting blog post on Whitehouse.gov about Obama's talk to students in Turkey.
• Young Moldovan students use Twitter to organize government protests.
• High school students work to put school board meetings online using Mobilize.org grant.
• Twitter traffic has exploded, but among older - NOT younger - users.
• Mike Lux on why "A New Way Forward" is important.
• 22 year old Justin Nickels is elected mayor in Manitowoc, Wisconsin by a very slim margin.
• Democratic Strategist explores the question: "Do demonstrations and protests need a narrower focus?" Interesting question considering the upcoming New Way Forward protests.
• WireTap/The Nation profile young climate activist May Boeve. Give it a read!

Over at Campus Progress, Ned Resnikoff, an NYU sophomore, has a thorough rundown of the fiasco that was the Take Back NYU! protest:

The TBNYU! protest was one of the strangest farces in NYU’s 178-year history. By the end of the 40-hour occupation, only 10 protesters remained, which NYU security* unceremoniously removed from the building. Each one was suspended and kicked out of campus housing, and NYU did not meet a single one of the group’s demands. Nevertheless, the official TBNYU! blog, with characteristic detachment from reality, insisted that the occupation had “made a difference.”

And perhaps it had, but not in the way they expected. The group had managed to unite the NYU Democrats and Republicans in denunciation of the occupation. And as Jessica Roy, another friend and NYU Local staff member said, “The administration will most likely now be more tight-lipped, dodgy and suspicious of the idea of discussing these important issues than they ever were before.”

In other words, the protest was an unmitigated fiasco, and a solid model of how not to effect positive change on your local campus.

Go read the whole piece.

So I haven't yet said anything about the Take Back NYU!. It's not something I've followed, but from what I can tell it was an epic FAIL all around. Exhibit A is this video, which is basically every stereotype about lefty protest rolled into one:

Exhibit B is the list of demands made by the students:

2009 occupation demands:

* Amnesty for all parties involved.
* Full compensation for all employees whose jobs were disrupted during the course of the occupation.
* Public release of NYU’s annual budget and endowment.
* Allow student workers (including T.A.’s) to collectively bargain.
* A fair labor contract for all NYU employees at home and abroad.
* A Socially Responsible Finance Committee that will immediately investigate war profiteers and the lifting of the Coke ban.
* Annual scholarships be provided for thirteen Palestinian students.
* That the university donates all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza.
* Tuition stabilization for all students, beginning with the class of 2012. Tuition rates for each successive year will not exceed the rate of inflation. The university shall meet 100% of government-calculated student financial need.
* That student groups have priority when reserving space in the buildings owned or leased by New York University, including, and especially, the Kimmel Center.
* That the general public have access to Bobst Library.

Huh? A few of these might actually make for good student campaigns, and indeed some of them have at other schools. Tuition stabilization, socially responsible endowments, TA unionization - these are all individually worthy campaigns that might garner huge support among the student population. But support for the Islamic University of Gaza? Public access to the NYU library? And the kicker: amnesty for all parties involved in the protests. As the #1 demand, really? Not only is this the ultimate muddled message, it's also one that the students obviously don't have the courage of their convictions to fully support.

I think this shows. If you look at the website for TBNYU, only 781 students have signed a statement of support, and only 831 people have joined the Facebook group. This is at a university of 50,000 students. It also shows in the comments of the TBNYU website, where the student "activists" (yeah, I use that in quotes) are catching major flack from fellow students and alumni in the comments, and are responding in an increasingly irrational and defensive manor.

This pretty much the ultimate case study in how not to run a protest. As a colleague of mine noted, this makes all youth activists look bad.

Today, all across the country, thousands of young activists will be protesting Prop 8 and the other anti-gay marriage propositions that passed last week. These protests are being organized in a decentralized fashion via Google Groups, Facebook, and wikis.

While most of the organizing is decentralized, the initial impetus for the protests came from a 26 year-old Millennial - Amy Balliet:

Seattle activist Amy Balliett, founder of web-spawned phenomenon “Join the Impact” realized that the site ‐ at that point, only a two-day old project ‐ had reached a certain critical mass, logging 50,000 hits per hour. The “impact” was crashing servers.

Little did she know how viral this thing would become.

“Join the Impact” began as a blog post and email template by Willow Witte, a friend of Balliett’s who had sent the missive to inspire friends after the passage of California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8.

The success of similar propositions in Arizona and Florida, as well as an anti-gay adoption measure in Arkansas, only added gravity to the situation. Witte encouraged contacts to forward the note to their local LGBT groups to solicit plans of community action. Balliett responded to her friend’s email saying, according to a post on the site, “We shouldn’t wait, we need to mobilize now, and we need to on a national level, at the exact same moment, throughout the country.”

And mobilize they did: this past Friday, Nov. 7, ‘”Join the Impact” hit the web. Five hours later, the site logged 10,000 visitors. Apparently a lot of other people shared the young women’s desire to turn despair into resolve.

By midnight, 20 cities’ worth of young volunteers had signed on to organize protests against the discriminatory propositions.

The next evening, Nov. 8, the site had tripled its hits.

By Monday morning, a plan had emerged: Cities around the country would organize their own efforts to coordinate a synchronized protest for Sat., Nov. 15, 10:30 a.m. PST. The movement became officially global with hits from the UK and France, and by Nov. 11, over one million visitors had come to the site.

A friend of mine in California who is following all this said that most of the organizing going on around Prop 8 is being driven by young people, who were the only age group in California to oppose Prop 8.

I don't have time at the moment to go into anything near the detail this deserves so I recommend that you go and read Nancy Scola's reporting on it at Tech President. Calitics will also be covering Join the Impact protests throughout the day.

This is probably the most significant example of young people using technology to organize around a specific issue (not a candidate) since the pro-immigrant rallies organized via MySpace and Text Messaging in 2006. This is an important development in itself and for the LGBT community, and it's something that all activists should be watching and learning from whatever their issue.

I'll try to give this more coverage via a post-mortem when I get back online tomorrow.

It's Getting Hot in Here is live blogging from the Clinton Global Initiative conference, and they note that Al Gore is calling on young people to practice civil disobedience to stop climate change. Now, I don't know exactly what he said because I'm getting this second-hand, but Al Gore has made these claims before and they kind of piss me off.

For one, last time he made such comments he implied that young people weren't doing such things, which is patently false. If you read It's Getting Hot in Here at all, you've certainly encountered stories of young people doing exactly that.

Second, it's not at all clear to me what that would accomplish. Protest requires a novelty and element of surprise, as well as the complicity of the media, in order to be effective. The reason anti-war protests were ineffective in preventing the invasion of Iraq is that they were totally unsurprising, and the media didn't care one bit about them. Contrast that to the student immigration marches - they caught the media completely off guard and were thus "a real story." That meant good coverage and a higher level of efficacy.

It's not at all clear to me that kids blocking bulldozers or protesting a power plant meets the threshold required for successful action via the protest model. Gore's comments are somewhat insulting to me as part of a generation doing quite a bit to raise awareness, alter our lifestyles, and prevent climate change. They also strike me as terrible strategy advice.

Graduating students at Yale did not take kindly to a speech delivered this weekend on "Class Day" - one of the many events involved in the Yale commencement weekend. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered the address, and his presence was protested by a number of students due to his support of the war in Iraq:

Mr Blair's arrival was met by a small but vocal contingent of protestors waving placards that read "No to Blair" and "Yale! Don't Support a War Criminal", but police held them back from the ceremony, which was held in a large gated garden.

But as he took to the podium, Mr Blair, 54, was met with dozens of red signs that students had hidden under their graduation robes, reading "Peace Now" and "No War".

One student, a young woman wearing a headscarf, stood throughout the ceremony, holding a "Peace Now" sign above her head just 10ft in front of the former Prime Minister, who appeared to be doing his best to avoid looking at her.

Mr Blair also avoided referring to Iraq by name as he talked about the rise of India and China as future world superpowers, the problem of climate change, and the threat of "terrorism fueled by religion".

Normally I'm skeptical of student anti-war protests. While throwing a pie in Tom Friedman's face might be emotionally satisfying on some level, it accomplishes very little in the way of real change. In recent years, students have achieved far greater success on campus when their protests were directed at their college or university. Over the past half decade, student protests have helped establish a living wage for workers at Harvard, many campuses, bowing to student pressure have divested from regimes involved in human rights abuses, and many more campuses have made strides toward becoming carbon neutral thanks to the pressure of students. The same cannot be said of student anti-war efforts.

That may be changing. Over the course of the last year, a number of high-profile war supporters have found less than hospitable environments on the campuses of America's high schools and universities. Earlier this year students at the elite boarding school Choate successfully protested plans to have Karl Rove deliver their commencement address, and Alberto Gonzalez, the disgraced former Attorney General, has found it quite difficult to raise money for his legal defense fund via speaking engagements on campuses.

One of the great traditions of politics is that after you work your ass off in the White House or some appropriately high-level government position for 5 - 8 years, you get to retire, write a book, teach or consult a little, and deliver speeches all over the country. All of these tend to pay pretty well, compensating the writer/teacher/lecturer admirably for their many years of service for which they were compensated well below their earnings potential. For a select few - most recently President Clinton who earned millions on the lecture circuit after his retirement - it's the cherry on top of the pie of a career government service.

Denying government officials like Rove, Gonzalez, and even Tony Blair, lucrative speaking engagements and high profile awards like honorary degrees won't stop the war. But at least it effectively hits those who supported the war where it hurts - in their pocketbooks and reputations. That's a whole lot better then just some pie in the face.

Yay on the students at Choate, who are calling on their headmaster to rescind his offer to Karl Rove to deliver the school's 2008 commencement address:

The News deeply objects to the appointment of Mr. Rove to speak this June. At Commencement two years ago on June 4, 2006, Headmaster Shanahan asked graduating seniors to think of their responsibilities to themselves, and to others. He lamented how “responsibility to others and for oneself has been all but forgotten in certain circles.” Mr. Shanahan alluded to various public figures who have been exposed for scandalous activities, noting that in spite of their lack of ethics and sense of responsibility they were all found to be “not guilty.” At that Commencement Mr. Shanahan posed a very important and pressing question: “How can so many moral, ethical and legal laws be broken and still no one is guilty, no one assumes public responsibility for having chosen to do wrong?”

It is ironic that the man who issued those words two years ago has chosen a commencement speaker who has gained infamy in many circles for less-than-ethical decisions and actions.Thus far, Mr. Rove has not been indicted for any major crimes. But, many would argue that he is as culpable for the compromised situation the country finds itself in as any other figure of the Bush administration.

This is becoming something of a pattern. Former Bush Administration officials aren't finding the lecture circuit to be as lucrative or welcoming as they'd hoped. Last month, the Washington Post reported that Alberto Gonzalez was having a hard time booking speaking gigs at colleges and universities, a situation that has put a crimp in his fundraising efforts to pay off his extensive legal bills.

There's a great (and scary) article in The Nation today about how homeland security has invaded our higher education system and altered the face of political participation on campus through the use of "free speech" zones, tasers, hidden cameras and data mining techniques. It's pretty scare and well worth a read.

Two comments on this. First, this goes directly to what I've said in response to statements by Boomers like Al Gore and Thomas Freidman that young people today aren't political enough and aren't radical enough, and generally fail to live up to the legacy of the 60's. As this article thoroughly details, campuses are a very different place now than they were when Boomer were growing up, and the consequences of radical political action are MUCH higher. The Boomers have completely disincentivized the kinds of activism they use a a yardstick for measuring political action.

Second, government interference on campus isn't necessarily a new thing. When I was studying Russian in college, I heard many stories from my professors about how, at the height of the Cold War, the government had plants in graduate programs, keeping an eye out for potential "Reds." Also, let's not forget that the United States Student Association started out with funding from the CIA. What's different now is the degree of interference and the consequences brought down on students who fail to abide by new guidelines.

Recently, there have been an extraordinary number of dismissive, sneering media attacks on America's young people and the utility of the internet in politics.  This website has tried to correct the condescending, disdainful narratives time and time and time and time and time and time again but yet the haters persist.

One fine example, The New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman recently put on an album of Captain Beefheart, got sentimental, then in turn, regretful; and so he lashed out at whippersnappers, his infernal computer, and those geeks who like infernal computers. 

"But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms."

Bobby Kennedy didn't travel between farms or factories by horse-drawn carriage  - and there was no teaching of songs! Would journalists who also covered the AFL's growth in the 1890s or of California's Wobblies in the 1930's have rolled their eyes at RFK's silly methods?  Martin Luther King always made sure to have newfangled mechanized-photo-graphic picture-illustrators present at his heavily stage-managed lunch-counter sit-ins.  No planned riots and not a single engraver was invited! 

Absurdly, Thomas Friedman's beef with the do-gooding college children of the millennial generation is that they're just all too Facebookey. "But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good." Really? Online equals... quiet?  What then would Rip Van Friedman think about this:

Youths silent rally met with force in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Ahsan Pirzada and his high-school buddies spread the word via Facebook, e-mail and cell phone text messages: Let's meet at McDonald's after school on Monday.But not to hang out.

About 100 students pulled out banners, taped their mouths shut in symbolic protest and marched silently toward the office of President Pervez Musharraf. Before they had gone 1,000 yards, truckloads of police, including an anti-terrorist squad, swooped in and dispersed the threat, hauling about 50 teens to a police station.

Using facebook, twitter and cell phones they did a flashmob protest.  (That alone is enough politics 2.0 to literally blow Friedman's head off his shoulders.) 

"We know that many people cannot afford to join us," said Samad Khurram, a Harvard University student who stayed home this semester to work in the pro-democracy movement. "At least 30 percent of Pakistanis are surviving day to day on their wages. They can't afford to take off a day to protest" or to risk indefinite arrest.

Thomas please note, an undergrad organized a political cause using the internet's free tools, such as online petitions, emails, webby gizmo for cell phones "twitter" and the dread facebook...  the result of this online organizing: offline action for thousands. 

"This is how people are really networking, expressing themselves," said Adnan Rehmat, who heads Internews Pakistan, a Washington-based media watchdog group. "People are sending messages of solidarity, relaying information about protest sites, that sort of thing."

So I have just one more thought to add on the now infamous Diamonds vs. Pearls incident. This website has featured multiple articles in the last three days attacking CNN over this piece, now I want to look at the flip side for a second.

As many have noted across the blogosphere, at the end of the day, the student did have a choice. In fact, she had three choices.

1. She could choose to ask the fluff question.
2. She could have refused to ask the fluff question.
3. She could have agreed to ask the fluff question, but then screwed CNN and ask a more substantive question anyway.

Obviously the student chose #1. If she had chosen #2, she would have maintained her integrity, and CNN probably would have had 5-10 other people with similar fluff questions lined up to take her place. Shame on CNN for that, but also shame on the student a little bit for being complicit along with CNN in this whole debacle.

Number three is the most interesting choice the student faced, and in everything I've read doesn't seem to have occurred to her at all. In this instance, she was offered a perfect opportunity to perform a small act of media protest/civil disobedience, which she failed to act on.

But of course, it's not quite that simple. She may have signed some sort of agreement with CNN that would make her liable in some way were she to deviate from the pre-approved questions. If so, then this whole incident is a confirmation of what Professor Matt Lassiter writes in his essay Apathy, Alienation and Activism, namely that the stakes for civil disobedience and protest are much higher for today's youth than they were in the 60s, and yet another reason why protest as a vehicle for activism is less effective and less-embraced today among Millennials than it was in the 1960s. However, if there is no such agreement/contract/waiver with CNN, then it's not unreasonable to suggest that Maria Luisa Sandoval lived up to the low-expectations of Thomas Friedman. Both cases are problematic, but it would be interesting to know which one is the more accurate before we use up any more ink on this story.