Ok, so this is weird. YCSD wants to help "rebuild" Iraq. They're mad at Yale because the university's travel restrictions mean they can't get Yale fellowship money to go there. Who'da thunk that yale would be interfering with a colonial project!  ¶ 8:31 PM

  It's Tuesday night, and that means that the new village voice is on the stands. There's a great article this week about Del Monte's murderous parctices in Guatemala, which everyone should read here

"Soon after the occupation began, Del Monte sold the Lankin land for perhaps a tenth of its market value to a group of notorious local thugs. Called ganaderos, or cattle ranchers, these gunmen have often served to control dissent in the steamy Izabal region. Local advocates say what happened when Del Monte turned its back on its former workers was predictable: Since the occupation began, they claim, the ganaderos have shot and killed eight Lankin farmers—three in the last six months. "...

..."Several policemen soon arrived. "Without saying a word, the police began shooting at us," reported Lankin resident Gregorio Vásquez Vásquez. Lankin farmer José Benjamín Pérez González, just 21 years old, was shot in the back. He fell to his knees. Then, Vásquez testified, "One of the Ponce family came near him, took his pistol out of his belt, and gave him a tiro de gracia"—a killing shot—"in the head."  ¶ 7:54 PM

  CNN is reporting that Styx has a new bassist. And we care because....  ¶ 2:10 PM

  Faculty in Greece are on strike, and have been for two weeks. The government is attempting to bust the strike in Larissa by trying to bring in profs on charges that they broke the law in another protracted strike last year. Interestingly, professors are still getting paid - ostensibly because they're still researching even though they aren't teaching.

Meanwhile, the Daily Pennsylvanian, UPenn's student newspaper, reports that president Judith Rodin snubbed AFL-CIO president John Sweeney when he came to speak to her about graduate student unionization on behalf of GET-UP, Penn's Grad student union with the best acronym since FRACAS. GET-UP wants Penn to agree to count the ballots and recognize the results of last year's election. Penn, whose president Judith Rodin used to be the Dean of the Yale Grad School (and, some longtime GESO members claim, was brought in to crush the union,) is following Levin's leadership in trying to get the NLRB to overule the 2000 NYU decision which said that graduate student teaching assistants and researchers are employees and have the right to organize unions and bargain collectively with their universities.

MEANWHILE, CNN reports on the strike at Miami of Ohio. You can find the union's webpage here. In addition, you can contact these officials via email (their phone numbers are in yesterday's post.)
President James C. Garland garlanjc@muohio.edu
Vice President Richard M. Norman normanrm@muohio.edu
  ¶ 12:34 PM

  After a 19-day strike, faculty at C.W. Post College in Brooklyn voted unanimously to ratify their new contract. You can read the full story here. Meanwhile, workers at Miami University Of Ohio are on strike. Workers have a giant inflatable skunk they're using to pressure the university administration. Students are sleeping on the lawn in front of the administration building. The strike is already disrupting business as usual. A telecast of the football game between University of Cincinnati and Miami was canceled.

You can contact President James C. Garland at 513 529 2345,
VP for finance and business Richard Norman at 513 529 8338,
and provost Ronald A. Crutcher at 513 529 6721  ¶ 6:36 PM

  "Has Yale Cured Lung Cancer?" asks the New Haven Register today. A team of researchers led by a guy who's either really arrogant or into 80s swedish bands seems to have discovered a way to create T-Cells that can kill infected T-Cells. This is obviously pretty momentous. (Although i can't resist wondering if Phillip Morris is gonna wind up making billions off of this shit.) Still, you gotta be pretty full of yourself to make a statement like this:

Edelson likes to compare cancer research to deciphering the Rosetta stone, a fragment of ancient rock bearing passages of hieroglyphics, Greek and another language.[the other language is Egyptian demotic -- zsw]

Efforts to translate hieroglyphics were futile until a British physiologist made a key observation that others had overlooked, Edelson said.

"You must look at the correct details. Life is full of ‘a-has!’ Life belongs to people who can see ‘a-has!’" he said.


I recognize how important this may be. No one should have to die of lung cancer, it's great that Yale researchers may have found a cure, and i hope they make it available to everyone who needs it -- availaible and affordable. It's worth pointing out that underneath the aura of benevolence which the Yale Medical Center is shrouded in on the front page of the Register, though, that there's a lot more sinister shit going down. We could examine the elitism of the phrase "life belongs to people who can see ‘a-has!" We could talk about the ways that thios plays into the way Yale sees all those folks outside its walls whose lungs it tried to pollute excessively this summer. Maybe in addition to asking wgether Yale's cured lung cancer, we need to be asking whether yale causes lung cancer. Sure, the plan to burn lower grade fuel in the hill got sidetracked by massive opposition, but they've still got half a million in fines to pay to the DEP for trashing New Haven's air quality. How can there be light and truth when the smog's choking out the sun?

Or, as Axl Rose put it, "I'd have another cigarette, but i can't see. Tell me who you're gonna believe."

How's that for an a-ha?  ¶ 6:18 PM

  I am so bored.  ¶ 8:07 PM

  What is this, 1984? A press release from the Yale Office of public affairs reports on an editorial written by Med School/EPH faculty and law students. The first line of the press release reads

Universities are in a unique position to draft licensing and patent strategies for development of life-saving medicines and technologies that benefit low-and middle-income countries

here's the clincher, though:


The report recommends that to make drugs universally accessible, universities should not patent their discoveries in targeted developing countries. The report also states that universities could negotiate clauses in their licensing agreements that require the products be available in low- and middle-income countries quickly, in sufficient quantities, and at an appropriate cost.

The editorial, written by Michael Merson, M.D., Dean and the Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health at Yale School of Medicine, along with recent Yale Law School graduates Amy Kapczynski and E. Tyler Crone, points out that in 2001 alone, universities were granted over 3,000 patents. Merson stated, "They [patents] not only bring revenue, but controversy, when they ensure power over commodities that are the very currency of life itself."

The editorial refers to the discussions between Yale University and Bristol-Myers Squibb that resulted in the first patent concession on an AIDS drug and a 30-fold reduction in price of the patented drug in South Africa. "Such actions should not hurt universities' bottom line, diminish their ability to strike licensing deals, or discourage innovation because there is little profit at stake," Merson and his colleagues write in the editorial.

Don't get me wrong. The BMS-Yale patent concession was a really great thing. And it's highly possible that the folks who worte this report (probably the Law students did most of the work -- this is, after all, Yale we're talking about here, the nation's most prestigious laboratory of experimentation with new forms of casual labor -- have their heads and or hearts in the right places. What i'm interested in is the way in which the actual facts surrounding the patent release are erased. Much as Yale has taken credit for other things GESO has forced it to do over the past 13 years, the patent release was not an act of benevolence. Yale has made untold millions of of the royalties from d4t. The massive new Anylan Center was built with the royalties earned off the drug. In 2001, yundergrads and grad students, many of whom were members and organizers of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, fought to get BMS and Yale to release the patents on d4t in South Africa. The outcome, which this press release lauds as if it had occurred by benevolent fiat, in reality followed months of organizing. Yale, it seems, must obscure the facts, ut veritas non veniat in lucem (i.e., so that the truth doesn't come to light.)

We have to wonder how many of those other 3,000 patents were Yale's, and how many the university's acquired since. We have to wonder how much money they are making from these patents each year, and how many are dying because they cant afford the medication they need.

(which brings us back to the question of hospital debt.)  ¶ 7:48 PM

  The Gap, one of the cornerstones of Chapel Street, Joel Schiavone-cum-Bruce Alexander style gentrification, is closing. Combined with the recent press fallout over the closing of Barrie Ltd. Booters, and the implications of YNHH trustees involvement with the controversial plans for the demutualization of the New Haven Savings Bank, (see here for CCNE's hard hitting report and here for a great Paul Bass article from the Advocate) this higlights the extent to which Yale's much propaganda-ed model for "contributing to a stronger new haven" is in crisis. We seem to be witnessing the collapse of this trickle-down economics of unequal partnership. The consequences for working (and unemployed) New Haveners will be dire unless we invent a new way of envisioning the way this city works. Whether that entails making Yale pay, or fundamentally remaking Yale, or just smashing Yale, the state, and the New Haven Lawn Club too, you can decide for yourselves.

The YDN reports that Bobby Proto plans to convene a subcommittee of workers to investigatre fining non-strikers. Shinzong Lee, who wrote the article, and Jessica Feinstein, who contributed to it, confuse readers (or maybe are themselves confused) about whether this is something that is being done by 35 or by both locals. The story also wasn't reported by either the register or the herald, so i'm not quite sure what to make of it.
  ¶ 3:23 PM

  Remes raises an interesting point about Joe Lieberman's relation to Marvin Lender.

Well, how's this for a twist? The chairman of the board of Yale-New Haven Hospital--the notoriously union-busting, poor-person-exploiting affiliate of Yale where 140 union members just went back to work without a contract, and where 1800 workers are struggling to form a union in the face of employer threats and coersion--is none other than Marvin Lender, Joe Lieberman's national finance co-chair. (And apparently long-time fundraiser.)
What is the supposedly pro-union (at least at Yale) Joe Lieberman doing associating with anti-union Marvin Lender? Does Lieberman's health care proposal include financing through foreclosure on patients' homes?

Glad Remes is back. Time to start the worldwide crappy bagel boycott.  ¶ 10:07 PM

  So i made some dumb comments to a YDN reporter when i was sick and they came back and bit me on my hairy Jewish anarchist butt.

You can, however, read a great op-ed from the register from some Harvard guy that details just how "Yale killed the vibrant city economy." Here's a breath of fresh air:
The destruction of New Haven's commercial and manufacturing economy
was no accident. It was a result of the growth of Yale and other
tax-exempt institutions on what had been a flourishing
free-enterprise economy.

here's another:

Yale was not being targeted by unions because it is the only game in
town. It was targeted because its labor relations, like its property
management, are based on the university's failure to grasp its
responsibilities as the city's largest employer and property owner.

I don't agree with Dobkin hall's assertion that we can move to some kind of "vital free enterprise based economy" based on Yale's potential stimulation of local businesses instead of massive corporate chains like J. Crew and Urban. The Levin-Alexander plan for downtown New Haen understands that the moment of "free enterprise" never really existed and probably never will. Capitalism's much too dependent on monopoly and corporate welfare (which is a fundamental aspect of how Yale works, as Rick Wolff points out)

Edit:According to YaleInsider, Dobkin Hall is a Republican, which explains why i disagree with him. Still, when the even the republicans are attacking the capitalist plutocrats, then you know Yale's in trouble.  ¶ 1:12 PM

  Apparently, my little brother has a hidden past. It seems he won the bronze medal in the 1952 juegos olympicos for his Stalinist motherland, la URSS. Very interesting...  ¶ 9:41 PM

  Contract summaries are online here and here. Read em and weep (for joy.)  ¶ 4:57 PM

  Check out this letter to the register today about across the board raises which talks about why merit pay (like YNHH is offering the dietary workers) puts us back where we were in 1984, when you could work at Yale as a C&T for 30 years and still be making less than $12,000 a year because pay scales, promotion, and raises were all dependent upon managerial whim and control. Also worth noting is this rare editorial which is actually mildly critical of the University Properties Broadway gentrification agenda in the wake of Barrie Ltd. Booters' announcement that they are being forced to close due to Yale's 70% rent increase and mandated extended business hours. Pretty interesting to see the editorial board of a paper that's always been slavishly in favor of the ONHSA line to publish something that makes Yale's actions as a landlord look less than benevolent. The cracks in the facade are showing.  ¶ 11:56 AM

  Katie sent me this link from Mexico. I just wanted to pass it on to all y'all.

Eidelson blogged me. That's the first link this new site has recieved, so i just wanna say thanks.

Anyone else find it bizarre that the YDN website is still asking us whether we think there'll be a strike at the beginning of the school year? Have they been too busy publishing insubstantial and badly written editorials, or soliciting more arrogant filler from Krugeristas (which blithely and dishonestly accuses Ben Healey of saying things which were in fact said by me -- someone with no involvement in Ben's campaign, who does not live in ward one, and does not believe in electoral politics --) to update their freakin site?  ¶ 12:16 AM

  Some kid published an op-ed in the YDN actually claiming that Alyssa Rosenberg, who knows more about the micro and macropolitics surrounding last spring's domestic partnership vote in the board of alders than anyone else on the face of the planet, didn't understand that in fact the real reason the vote failed was because heley failed to cram the room with enough Yalies. This is pure arrogance. When all the DP shit was going on, where the hell was this kid? Working for the office of New Haven and State Affairs like his chosen candidate? Hancock's arguing that instead of organizing aldermen to support DP, which both Healey and Rosenberg busted their asses doing, what Healey should have been doing was polarizing the issue, making it into the Yale-New Haven split, a sort of brazen colonial project, that it's opponents (and maybe Mike Morand) wanted it to become. This is deeply deeply porblematic, as is the way that Healey's opponents envision the Yale-New Haven relationship. The cooperation not conflict for which they demonstrated on July 7th outside city hall is very much a plantation model of town-gown interaction. And, in the words of the Rev. James Lawson, "Yale, we won't be your plantation anymore."

Making domestic partnership the axe with which they grind their own credibility demeans those for whom, this issue is in fact crucial. Claiming that what they want is a "partnership" renders the word meaningless, or else necessitates the addition of an adjective like "silent", or a phrase like "one-way" or "unequal." The claim that a right-wing puppet will succeed where Healey failed is laughable. And if any ward 1 alder is going to pass this resolution, it's Ben. (But only if Alyssa's organizing it.)

Interesting interview in the Times today. Dr. Sheldon Krimsky, a senior research scientist, discusses the corporatization of science in the academy and its effects for the public which universities are supposed to serve. The times writes,
"In medical schools, dozens of faculty members may be earning significant sums as corporate consultants. At the same time, universities and their professors are plunging into the business world themselves, creating companies to sell products discovered in academic laboratories. "
Krimsky says:
"More generally, we see commercial effects in the evaluation of toxic chemicals such as lead, pesticides, dioxin. Also, the commercial interests are manifest in atmospheric science related to the global warming controversy, biotechnology and even in criminology when for-profit prisons were first introduced."
Yale has historically been and is now a leader in the kinds of processes that Krimsky's talking about -- and the consequences, both for those who do the research -- and for those who will suffer from its results, are really terrifying.

Meanwhile, the YDN reports that the focus has now shifted to the hospital, where the 150 unionized workers in the dietary unit went back to work without a contract. The hospital's offer is unacceptable and hinges completely on merit-based raises -- a cost-cutting method of paying workers less in the name of "increased efficiency." Yet Katie Krauss is claiming that they're keeping "constracts unsigned as a leverage tool" so that the union can organize the rest of the 1800 workers at YNHH. This claim is laughable - workers gain nothing from not having a contract -- what the hospital gains, however, is one more means of intimidating the workers and trying to break both the dietary union and the larger union drive at the hospital. "Our next step," in the words of Bobby Proto, needs to be "Joe Zaccagnino's doorstep."   ¶ 3:20 PM

  Yale New-Haven Health Systems:Bad Debt on The Move?
Last March, 1199SEIU Researcher Grace Rollins wrote a report which focused national media attention on the debt collection practices of Yale-New Haven Hospital. The report, "Uncharitable Care" both investigated individual cases of fraudulent and inhumane debt collection practices on the part of the hospital and looked at the hospital's debt collection practices in a more systemic framework, revealing that the New Haven Advocate's "Hospital of The Year had in fact put 11,000 people in debt and taken out 925 liens on poor people's houses since 1994. Bridgeport Hospital is part of Yale New- Haven Health Systems. It uses the same collection law firm as YNHH and the Yale Medical School- the now notorious Tobin & Melien. The Connecticut Center For A New Economy's new report, Coming To A Town Near You, also by Rollins, describes what happened to Bridgeport Hospital after Yale New-Haven took over. Since the merger in 1996, BH has taken out 88% more liens than in the comparable period before the merger. Sound familiar? In the past three years, they've also been increasingly using the law firm Tobin & Melien for collections, and they outsource collections from uninsured patients to Yale New Haven Health systems. The report details the difficulties of applying for free care at the hospital, and notes that while the other major hospital in Bridgeport, St. Vincent's, only filed 1 collections case in superior court between Jan '01 and July '03. Bridgeport Hospital filed 421. The disparity in the number of liens each hospital has taken on patient's houses is similarly staggering. St. Vincent's free bed funds are less than three percent the size of Bridgeport Hospitals, yet St Vincent's Hospital generally spends far more in free care, according to the report. The research, done by Senior SEIU field Researcher Jane Hunter together with Rollins, situates Bridgeport Hospital's unconscionable behavior in it's takeover by Yale-New Haven Health Systems. Rollins writes,
"Community leaders and advocates for the uninsured should be wary of the Yale-New Haven Health System’s
expansion until thorough and transparent charity and collection reforms are enacted and mechanisms of accountability are in place. And, in any context, health care advocates should carefully scrutinize the charity record of hospitals that
seek new network affiliations, mergers or acquisitions." In June, the Association of Yale Alumni named Joe Zaccagnino (CEO of Yale New Haven Health Systems) the most distinguished alumnus of the Year. It's great to see that my university not only exploits poor people, but pats itself on the back for doing it. This is exactly what we are fighting against.  ¶ 5:09 PM

  Woke up an hour late, but wound up getting to my library session for my senior essay on time anyway because it was half an hour later than i thought it was. Found some cool leads - essays in Radical America, Labor History, and Social Policy, as well as articles and essays by folks from 34 and GESO that i didn't know existed.

The YDN has an extended musing by Josh Eidelson today that's definitely worth reading. The article is a perfect counterpoint to the Herald's irresponsible article last friday. Meanwhile, the mighty Alyssa Rosenberg makes some salient points about the Ward 1 aldermanic race, refuting the oppositional candidate's pretensions to Independence and examining the flimsy nature of his arguments as well as the problematic nature of his relationship to the Yale administration. Meanwhile, the candidate curiously has posted a letter on his website supporting the agenda of Respect Line, an organization of homeless people and Yale students fighting for change in the city's homelessness and housing policies. The candidate isn't likely to win Respect Line's support. Healey's been a strong ally to the group 0ver the past two years. Nor am i convinced that the opposition candidate (whose name i'm not mentioning because i don't particularly want him to find this site) believes what he's writing or would in anyway adhere to his promises if elected, given the disgusting statements he made at the debate about "poor kids" giving him a run for his money, "literally and figuratively." This is politics of a sordid and sultry variety - exploiting the plight of the homless, not to mention subverting the hard work and organizing that many have poured into Respect Line, in order to make oneself look more progressive.

EDIT:Last week, the City of New Haven sent yale a (somewhat symbolic) bill for $102,000 in police overtime due to the strike. The New Haven Register today published an editorial claiming that the bill should fall equally on the coffers of the "International Union" to which 34 and 35 belong. Quoth the register:
"But City Hall could do better than reflexively send a bill just to Yale. The union international's pockets may not be as deep as the university's, but they are deep enough."
This statement is both profoundly anti-union -- indeed, it utilizes much of the same rhetoric of the union as vast outisde political and financial conspirator which one might find in the tirades of GESO-busting professors (see, for instance, Nancy Cott's 1996 defense of Levin's GESO-busting before the American Historical Association, or Corey Robin's account of Levin's "Nuremburg Rally" in Steal This University -- but also fails to understand what a union actually is. Unions like 34 and 35 are collective associations of workers. To saddle the union with the massive costs of police overtime which was used orimarily to "protect" the university from the very people who allow it to function in a daily basis would essentially destroy the right to strike guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act. Guess that's why they call it the Yale-New Haven Register

34 and 35 members are back to work today. In typically elitist fashion, the YDN and herald both brand the strikers as 'outsider' by sensationalizing the divisions between those who struck and those who didn't. The colonial gaze of the YDN reporter does not end when picket lines disappear - though the real story is the perpetuation of Yale's own coloniality. We won a major, major victory last week. People will now be able to quit their second jobs, and ultimately retire with dignity. But Yale's power and avarice remain evident in full force in the daily interactions we have with eachother, in the hallways and back rooms of YNHH, in the New Haven Savings Bank's profit-driven demutualization, and in the continued anti-union campaign against graduate teachers and researchers.

Our work makes Yale work, and our work ain't over yet.  ¶ 11:53 AM

  Well, i'm blogging here now, i guess. I'll try to be more careful about who I do or don't mention. Let's see if certain fascist proxies of fascist yale administrators can find me this time.

The strike is over. 93% pension increases. The return of Sprague and the Anylan Center to union workers. Job security for local 34's 3000 members. It's a good contract, but it's only a step. There are 4,000 workers on Yale's campus who are being systematically denied the right to organize. There is a colonial relationship between the university and New Haven which this strike has made apparent, and which the organizing of the New Haven community has in fact disrupted, but this dynamic is not yet overthrown. Finally, to be a student at yale still means to study the mechanisms of domination and repression through which the university has become, in the words of university president Richard Levin, "Globalized," rather than work towards the tearing down of walls, borders, and constructs. Our mission, as we bring our education into the streets=, must be to create and instantiate this new vision of what it can mean to be a student.  ¶ 11:05 PM