Private cloud-based data monopolies threaten to undermine not only our access to information but the very fabric of our social ties. The personal becomes public, the public becomes personal. The process is already unfolding before us at the continuing expense of liberty and privacy. The fact is, most of us need various levels of privacy; we don’t mind our information being public to our friends, we shy a bit away with our bosses, and we find ourselves somewhat disgusted to think of the relationship our data enjoys with the data oligarchs (of which Google represents only the most aggressive and most notable early accumulator).

Cloud computing marks the beginning of a new strategy on the part of the enemy. Along with the outward movement away from centralized servers is the inward movement of data onto the private clouds. We must recognize in this process the tendency toward a total private appropriation of information. This is nothing but an affront to the producers of the world.

Yet, in shifting to the cloud, the information bourgeoisie is already acknowledging our greatest strength. We are many, and our resources are wide. Capitalists will always be able to outproduce us in material terms, so long as our struggles remain alienated. The struggle for information, though, is the struggle for the public appropriation of the new capital. The bourgeoisie has long sensed that it can only maintain its grip through the development of new forms of production if it is prepared to carry out Enclosure-Without-End.

Far beyond our needs for processor cores and storage space, information is the resource we lack now. Yet this very real lack is not the result of a single Enclosure Act, it is the product of an ongoing process of appropriation. Information is the primary means of production of information; and thus, the bourgeoisie must constantly struggle to maintain its iron grip. Make no mistake, this is class war, with implications remarkably similar to those long-faced by workers in every other sector experiencing cutbacks and restructuring:

While the current global recession has certainly cut deeply into many IT budgets, it also makes many businesses more willing to pursue new lower-cost computing alternatives. The massive scale of consumerized cloud suppliers has brought with it very different business models. A typical large enterprise data centre might require one IT administrator for every 20 to 40 servers. However, at leading cloud computing firms such as Amazon, the ratio is more like 1 to 2,500 – or more. Thus cloud computing can move labour down the list of data centre costs from first position to fourth (after power, hardware and facilities). (Cloud rEvolution: A Workbook for Cloud Computing in the Enterprise)

The DMCA was a qualitative shift in some ways, but it was a mostly defensive maneuver. In fact, patents had already long since been used as a weapon against producers. Every day another Information Enclosure; every day another dream foreclosed.

This is a nightmare, but all dreams are real. We, the producers of information, do not have to dream of different conditions. The information we create is the primary input into the production of information. This sounds paradoxical, but as the General Intellect becomes the driving force of production, it becomes doubly so the motor for production of information.

Our access to the information needed to produce is limited by the system of private property. We can, however, struggle defensively to maintain access to sections of this information–this they call “piracy.” We can struggle to prevent the Enclosures of Information by building open, collaborative frameworks with conscious design.

The effect is not one such as the Marxists may desire. No single new subjectivity is opened up, and no ‘revolutionary consciousness’ unfolds. Rather, the free use and production of information is a revolutionary mode of being. We cannot speak of ‘ideology’ or ‘false consciousness’ because all consciousness is false, and nothing illustrates this better than the vast collective unconscious currently accessible via the Internet.

With or without a system of ownership, no one has total access to information–whether under the worst fascist or Leninist totalitarianism, or in a post-property world. Information is limitless by nature, slipping through the fingertips, bits are so many grains of sand.

If information is sand, we its producers must aspire to an avalanche. The production of information must be accelerated, not feared. Through this acceleration we must destroy limits on the pathways for information’s production and distribution (which are not at all disparate processes). This is the struggle against what can be called “Facebook consciousness”–that is, a struggle against the nondesiring subjectivities produced by the centralized means of communication. We must aim not to substitute the limitations of a given subjectivity for those of the dominant information monopolies. Instead, our methods should be those which enable the production of cascading subjectivities–those which are themselves productive of more subjectivities (perhaps this process is fractal-like–at the least, Deleuze and Guattari’s comparison of fractals and rhizomes should be reconsidered in connection).

The widespread affective drain resulting from the proliferation of Facebook and similar information-traps is already ingrained with the truth of experience in the lives of the producers. Life is boring between status updates. Is this chilling effect necessarily a byproduct of increases in connectivity and communication? What prevents these technologies from being used to create new social realms, to reshape in a more social direction the everyday lives of participants? We must answer: only the monopolization and enclosure of the information thus produced prevents us from observing the real effects of our alienated production. We are blinded by the spectacle of social media; we are as oblivious to the flows of value as we are isolated from the flows of information.

New social media are means for counterattack, for allowing the free production of subjectivities and the free subjectivities of producers. Those factors of the existing social media which give rise to alienation and state intervention must be identified, defined, and replaced. As demonstrated by attempts like Facebook’s foray into email or Google’s foray into operating systems, the enemies are diffuse and deterritorialized. We must also be, but we can only begin by channeling our productive energies into efforts which can give rise to increases in our own free production. In the realm of social media, the implication is clear: we must build a new social network, capable of preventing the commodification of the information it contains and we produce. It must be at least as impervious to infiltration by agents of the state as are our own egos (which may prove insufficient). Its data must be stored in the cloud formed by its users, and this data must be secured between and among sharing groups.

There may come to be a tension between data security and anti-commodification efforts. While this conflict reflects none other than that between private and public property, the battles which constitute it are not so simply defined. The mitigation of the conflict, however, indicates not a fundamental resolution but a tipping of the broader balance of power in one direction or the other. For now, perhaps, the competition of information monopolists still presents the opportunity to move forth with our own development efforts. This is the starkest means of resistance to the enclosure of the new social media. But while the opportunity still exists, it dwindles as technology and subjectivity change daily. Hitherto existing efforts at such a development have been hindered by limitations in political perspective, limitations in scope, and limitations in productive energy. These are the primary obstacles facing a new, freer social networking medium. These are the obstacles which must be overcome to smash the emergent Facebook consciousness which depresses us so.

4 pm Friday, March 19, 2010
2 Broadway, Manhattan, New York, NY 10004

Stop the cut to student metrocards!

Students are the lifeblood of public schools and have the power to shut down not only their own schools but the entire city. Join with us as we rally on Friday to continue building momentum to stop the Metrocard cut and school closures. Come out and fight, not because one more demonstration will suffice to stop the cuts, but because each rally and march can be an essential part of building a broader, escalated and sustained fight against all of the cuts to public education and transit!

Reposted from March4NY.

the comedy of all manner of guevara worshippers indicting anyone as an ‘outside agitator’ does not escape, but the implications of invoking this ever present counter-revolutionary watchword are sincere. in such an invocation a real division is made clear:

on the one side: those who represent spectacular conflict, who play the approved role of a “social conscience,” who side with the police when sedition belongs to desire, not party functionaries. this reformist bloc is committed to maintaining the reign of specialists, of even the school administration, for to question one hierarchy would counterfeit them all. their role is essential in the mystification of progress. “moralizing the marketplace,” wherein the world is delivered back into the hands of the same bosses who’ve decimated it, is the realm of this permitted resistance.

on the opposing side: those who would not separate revolution from daily life, those who refuse to be executed under the weight of “objective conditions,” but prefer to disrupt the continuity of the probable, the routine, the expected, & explore the possible, who recognize that there is no dialogue in hierarchy/no democracy under bosses, who extend their critique to every wing of the commodity life & refuse the lure of “causes,” who recognize that there is no ‘outside’ because of this totality, who realize poetry in the lyricism of action, who accept no revolution but the revolution of all creative life.

THE PARTY OF PACIFICATION & THE ASSEMBLY OF REVELERS

at kronstadt, in catalonia, in budapest, in canton, in the paris of may, we have seen what happens to revolutionaries who dare to think they might speak for themselves, to think that they are best suited to quench their own passions. the stalinists, maoists, trotskyists, & every other missionary of ideology revealed themselves as mouthpieces of the police in every instance.

the student organizer’s every word now serves authority in doing the work of isolating, identifying, & slandering those who actualized their critique.

PRIESTS AMONG PRIESTS. COPS AMONG COPS. THE TROTS & ADMINISTRATION ARE HAND IN GLOVE

the establishment & defense of fiefdoms is inherently reactionary. the attitudes of territory are the attitudes of capital, of separation, that we must abolish within ourselves as well as without. does a potato chip factory worker have only the right to seize the production of potato chips? is he resigned to be a specialist of snack foods in revolt as well as under capital? all space is social space. its seizure & use is for all to realize as roles break down & separation disintegrates. the university, then, is not exclusive to those allotted the title of student (or student of a particular institution) any more than the factory is exclusive to the factory worker. for a ‘radical’ to protect his/her turf is to put each of us in our place the same as any boss or leader.

every monument to reification, to alienation, to boredom, to oppression, to submission, is rightfully & artfully destroyed. the alienation of capital does not limit its borders to one school, to one city, to one country, to one class, or to one race. its domination, its submission evangelism, is necessarily extended to every element of the social life. thus, its sabotage, too, knows no borders.

A sealed note to the communards of March 2010

From The Brilliant

Thanks to you the world has opened up, again—tired folks were reminded that energy is generative, not finite, and the size of your ambitions has been shown to exceed the University. There is a beginning of a twisting road, without a foreseeable end, with beautiful vistas and shadowy cul-de-sacs.

In the past the brilliant attacked capitalism at its strongest, pointing out that even the upper and middle classes – the people who were supposed to benefit from the system – even those people led lives of misery and impoverishment. The school occupations are the latest chapter of that story. And the communiques, full of toothy poetry, point out that debt is the only consistent product of a university education, that the university – the gleaming icon of personal betterment and fulfillment – is no longer good for either the “creation of a cultured and educated citizenry,” nor for the economic benefits that used to go with a degree. That the university becomes just one more way of categorizing people, defining one more type of inmate, a different control group for the experiments that are constant, ubiquitous.

The communiques (fed by the fresh blood of people newly come to the brutality of police, the burst illusions of a prosperous future, the shocked exhaustion from retail and data entry jobs) reject mediation, representation, reconciliation, and the idea that any demands could encapsulate the students’ desires; only stopping — stopping traffic, stopping flows, stopping business, stopping normalcy — can address the issues at work here, the communiques .

‘We are the crisis’ inscribes the ‘we’ as both symptom and prescription, without attempting to evade their entanglement.There. Nothing else needs to be said. This is brilliant! Momentum

There is an expiration date to this moment, March 4th. The next moment could be many things but a tension will have been relieved. The piece will have been played. We hope that the following thoughts on the board, the pieces, and how to expire this moment as elegantly as possible are a contribution. We start by sketching out some goals and then move on to specific recommendations for the next week (and beyond). The only hope we offer is to continually reinscribe tension into successive moments.

Lead an interesting life

It is better to go down fighting than bow your head and follow the path of misery. If happiness or satisfaction is the goal, then it is a simple matter to trim your hopes and desires to fit the possible. But an interesting life is neither one-size-fits-all nor predictable. It may momentarily fit expectations (as, for example, of friends and family), but only long enough to lull onlookers in to a false sense of security. It may, on occasion, look like obeying orders but only for new perspective, or to restart conflict from a different position.

Suffer habits firmly

Twenty years ago, and in a few moments since, dressing in a uniform manner and militantly engaging with spectacular protest was interesting. This tactic has long since become circumscribed, as have lock-downs, “masses”, “mobs”, and (symbolic) occupations. We believe that the only experiment worth undertaking is transformation of the world. Our work has been tentative, conservative, up til now as we feared taking ourselves seriously enough to state our goals clearly. As makers of the future we must abandon our preconceptions (and leaders) and experiment wildly!

Never Compromise

You are worth more than compromise. When you split the difference between what you desire and that which constrains you it always looks more like constraint than desire. It is better to act with your heart, engage with the others who share your wandering, and defeat the politicians (of every stripe) who would have you settle (for more or less).

Goals established we will now share specific tactical ideas about the Commune of March. Terms of Engagement

Counter-surveillance

In an era in which every event is recorded, every face a future defendant, every textual-conceit an hour of court time, their strategy of containment is very simple. They will circumscribe your events with electronic eyes and ears. They will keep a permanent record of your behavior as an implied threat against your future and present unfettered action.

You should have a strategy of counter-surveillance that includes the technical ability to remove recording devices and MOST IMPORTANTLY a set of process to limit illegal activity (discussion and act) from records. History can tell you what are the levels of pain that will be inflicted by administrations and riot cops. Plan for this and prepare.

Electronic surveillance is done best by the participants. If you are going to have one clear rule it should be about the self-recording of events. Either totally decenter your own surveillance (which may be your only option any way) OR keep really clear processes about what is appropriate to record and what is better left to experience and story telling.

This will be on your permanent record

It may be naive to believe that the Commune will be successful enough to consider such matters but if it is we cannot resist the temptation to state a specific way in which you can destroy what destroys you. Destroy any official paperwork, material, and resource that you get your hands on. If the seizure of towns by resistance fighters of the past can be of any use in our post-modern exo-burb present it is that tax, birth, and social records have always been destroyed when the town hall is seized. Remember the brilliance of Letino and Gallo.

Today this means bringing to the party magnets, paper shredders, and tools to remove copper.

A kid who tells on another kid

This may be a challenging discussion to have as it predicates failure but it is worth repeating an axiom that should be obvious. If you do not tell on each other neither of you will lose. If one of you does you both do. Learn about the Prisoners Dilemma and discuss (within the Commune itself) how to act beyond its logic. This is not a black and white problem but one about successful action.

Allies and adversaries

It is easy to be distracted or enamored by the people who are drawn to the tension of the environment of the Commune. These people may not share your goals or desires. The more popular or energetic the Commune is, the wider the array of reasons people will have to hang out, get involved, and talk it up. Here are some types you will find to look out for…

The becoming-middle class: notoriously folks who will write books, dissertations, newspaper articles and/or songs about their experiences in the front lines. The people who will attempt to capitalize off of the events as a (perhaps outré) way in to prosperity and/or respectability.

The becoming-apparatchik: neo-politicians, people who have or want jobs in NGOs, who make it their business to be (or seem to be) experts in change, people who will use their interpretation of this experience to build a reputation and/or a career in decision-making.

The becoming-bravado: the fuck shit up kids, the ones who believe that the Black Bloc is the answer to all of life’s questions, the ones who are holier than thou about everything, from being straight edge to being not straight-edge, from being a good feminist ally to not being a good feminist ally. Every question is moral, and moral always means black and white.

This becoming-taxonomy must be fleshed out in the field and can help us all evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our participation in the events. We look forward to future additions. The End of the Cycle

The end of the Commune is not coming because our energy is infinite. At some point soon there may be broken hearts, dreams and if authority has anything to say about it, spirits. It is not appropriate to intend on this end but it is better to speak to how we increase tension prior to a release, rather than later. It might be a good time to understand just how much the terms of engagement should change.

Incarceration

Know that you will do time. You may not, but if you know you will, you will be prepared. The system is notorious for moving slowly, and at times randomly. You cannot know when it will happen, but if you know that it will happen, you can make decisions based on this. You can make sure you always have someone to take care of your child(ren)/dogs/plants. You will be prepared for the interrogation. You will not be caught flat-footed with shock because the allegation is for something that happened 5, 10, 15 years ago. It will not matter that you are no longer friends with the people you did stuff with. And you will treat other people who are imprisoned with love and concern, because they will be you. You will be ready.

Healing

Authority does not heal. It destroys, conquers, and purchases. We have different needs (one of the ways you can tell the brilliant apart from authority) and should give each other space to heal differently. This can look lonely, shallow, or like a retreat. Be kind to each other while you heal so that we don’t become destroyed, conquered or bought.

There is no going back

The break from the present reality is already happening. The center cannot hold. This can be seen in more than just high unemployment rates or the lack of future employment for humanities majors. It can be seen in the thinness of all contracts from above and the poverty of those below. What is great about the Commune of March is that it is this break made real. This is not a promise of a generalized Commune but a brilliant whisper to the future.

We are coming. Get ready!

“The non-symbolic nature of the S.F. State strike was likewise reflected in the tactics, which carefully avoided the usual ritual seizure of buildings and planned confrontations with police. Instead of “living the revolution” inside an occupied building for a brief apocalyptic period culminating in a Big Bust… the TWLF [Third World Liberation Front] opted for a “protracted struggle,” closing the campus and keeping it shut down not by simply impairing normal campus activity, but by making it totally impossible.”
—James McEvoy & Abraham Miller, “On Strike…Shut It Down” in Black Power & Student Rebellion: Conflict on the American Campus (1969)

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
—George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense

Suggested Points of Unity Towards Action on March 4th
On March 4th we hope to use the high points of the 60s and 70s revolts as points of departure so that we do not start from scratch and repeat their historical mistakes. There has been too much criticism of the building occupations last November and December and not enough discussion of how we can take their militancy and push our next actions even further, hopefully beyond the campus to draw in other working class people affected by the crisis. Some proposals even ignore the strikes and occupations that have occurred so far and suggest “going slow” and refocusing our efforts on the politicians in Sacramento through lobbying, petitions, letter writing campaigns, vigils and symbolic marches. We find this caution to be based on an obsession with top-down leadership that distrusts the imagination and potential for radical action from below by ordinary students and workers. The following points attempt to visualize how a statewide general strike on March 4th would unleash the creativity of the mass of the participants.

Universities, schools, public buildings, workplaces, and offices should be occupied at the start of the movement to serve as bases of operations.
While we are advocating a strike, occupied space can serve as a place for assemblies to be maintaining and defending the strike, as well as coordinating its extension beyond the campus to other public sector workers, and hopefully to private sector workers, the homeless and everyone in the working class. The occupations and campus shutdowns must be defended through mass action and control of physical space and expropriated equipment.

Only a general strike has the power to achieve our most basic goal, which is the defensive demand to stop the cuts to education and public services.
We should be operating by the principle “Everyone needs to be out on strike” and “Statewide problems demand statewide solutions.” Student occupations and strikes should not be seen as ends in themselves, but as a way of creating a basis for others to act. When strikes spread off the campuses to public sector workers, the class nature of the struggle will draw in others to help prevent the strikes from being defeated in isolation. Class consciousness will also draw in private sector workers, the unemployed and homeless, all united around the slogan: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

Control and maintenance of the action should remain in the hands of the strikers and occupiers themselves.
We must refuse delegating decisions and control beyond the autonomy of those involved; we must push for the active participation of the greatest number. Issues and concerns of the strike should be debated and decided by all the strikers. Those engaged in various support and solidarity activities should meet regularly for collective discussion of the significance of their work and its political basis; these meetings should be used for reports to all the strikers of the work of the smaller groups, such as task-oriented action committees, for political discussion of the strike, and invitations to participate in specific actions, etc. Each site, whether school, public building or workplace, should have its own strike coordinating committee, like the city-wide committees we now have to plan for March 4th. Committee members should be elected by the strikers, subject to instant recall, with new elections every few days–as long as the strike continues. City or regional coordinating councils should represent the elected strike committees for the purpose of information exchange over a wider area. This type of structure will prevent the emergence of a strike bureaucracy, which destroys the collective energy of the strike. The mass participatory nature of our actions will show the emptiness of parliamentary democracy, the way it mediates our power away from us, and how it alienates decision making into a hierarchy with power over us. As the Situationist International said, “You can’t fight alienation by alienated means.”

The goals and demands of the strike should be made universal.
Different groups should be encouraged to join the strike to press for their own demands. For example, working class users of public transit should be able to advocate for a “social strike” of the public transit system (meaning the system continues to operate, but drivers and station agents refuse to collect fares) when fares are raised, as BART and San Francisco’s Muni are currently planning to do. If immigrants continue to feel threatened, as they did with the Sensenbrenner Act in 2006, they should be supported in solidarity should they organize another general strike. With the continued escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we could imagine that longshore and port workers would call a strike in support of student demands and against these imperialist wars much like they did when they shut down 29 ports on the West Coast on May Day 2008.

This is merely an approximation of what we might do to be prepared for an indefinite strike on March 4th. All too often, the day of action comes and no forethought had been given to organizing ways to maintain the strike and to find means of spreading it further. Our greatest strength is going to be our militant imagination and willingness to reach out to other workers to show them it is in their class interest to not only support our strike, but to join it in solidarity.

G.H. works as an adult education teacher in the non-profit sector and participates in the San Francisco March 4th Strike Committee, which can be contacted through SFM4.org

WHICH RESOLUTION IS BETTER?

RESOLVED, that the UFT mobilize the membership in all schools to provide support for schools fighting educationally unjustified closure decisions.

UFT Delegate Assembly
16 December, 2009

RESOLVED that through a united mobilization of all workers and students regardless of status we can win free federally funded education at all levels, increased jobs, a halt to foreclosures and a better life for all; and be it further [. . .]

RESOLVED that the resources of organized Labor in California be used between now and March 4th 210 to build support among the members of its affiliated Unions, the communities in which we live and work, and among the youth for a successful and united statewide strike against the assault on working people and our families.

AFSCME Local 444 General Membership
17 December, 2009

Starting Points for Struggle

• WHEREAS the UFT bureaucracy’s strategy of leaving closing schools isolated in struggle is failing to stop the attacks; and
• WHEREAS the student Metrocard cut accompanies other cuts to vital public transit which must also be stopped:
• WHEREAS the struggles in K12, CUNY  and SUNY against closures, layoffs, transit cuts falsely appear as separate struggles:
• RESOLVED that we should continue to build a united front and support escalating demonstrations against all school closures, layoffs, and transit cuts; and
• RESOLVED that militant action like walkouts, strikes, blockades and occupations will be necessary even for partial victory.

Immediate Methods for Action

• UFT DELEGATES, live up to your promise by mobilizing the UFT and endorsing the March 4th National Day of Action to Defend Education!
• TEACHERS and WORKERS, fight for a strike against all school closures, layoffs, and transit cuts! Smash the Taylor Law!
• STUDENTS and TEACHERS, walk out from class, build picket lines and strike committees, occupy schools to spread struggle and shut the city down!

SPREAD WIDELY: ALL-SCHOOL WALKOUT MARCH 4TH!

March 4th NY Site

New York Call to Action

The communiqué and some of the other texts associated with the autumn occupations link up with what is often referred to as the “communization current” – a species of ultraleftism and insurrectionary anarchism that refuses all talk of a transition to communism, insisting, instead, upon the immediate formation of “communes,” of zones of activity removed from exchange, money, compulsory labor, and the impersonal domination of the commodity form. Communism, in this sense, is neither an endpoint nor a goal but a process. Not a noun but a verb. There is nothing toward which one transitions, only the transition itself, only a long process of metabolizing existing goods and capitals and removing them from the regimes of property and value. Judged in relation to such a project, the occupations of the fall are modest achievements – experiments with a practice that might find a fuller implementation in the future. There is an exemplary character to the actions – they are attempts to generalize a tactic that is also a strategy, a means that is also an end. But can the tactics elaborated within the university escape its confines and become generalized in the kinds of places – apartment buildings, factories – where they would become part of an extensive process of communization? In a sense, the byline of the movement – occupy everything, demand nothing – is prospective; it imagines itself as occurring in an insurrectionary moment which has not yet materialized. This is its strength; its ability to make an actual, material intervention in the present that fast-forwards us to an insurrectionary future. Beyond such a conflagration, there is really no escaping one’s reinscription within a series of reforms and demands, regardless of the stance one takes. Only by passing into a moment of open insurrection can demands be truly and finally escaped.

[PDF of poster]

The unified actions on March 4th have the potential to link up all of the various groups and disparate struggles in education right now, but large unified demonstrations will not win the change we need. We must build momentum now so that we pass the March 4th litmus test and begin March 5th with continued militant actions. Walkout and occupy to build a general strike! This is the way to continue, escalate and spread the battle for education which appears now as so many smaller fights.

Check out the call from Grassroots Education Movement:

GEM fights against school closings period and opposes the privatization of our public schools via charters.

It is the responsibility of the DOE to fix, improve all schools to the highest caliber possible.

We want equal quality democratic public schooling and not private corporate run private charters that will be selective and exclusive

• of the poorest,
• the English language learners,
• special education needs,
• and those unfortunately subjected to other higher social needs (e.g. homelessness, disease).

To convert all public schools to charters is the ultimate goal of the corporate profiteers behind Bloomberg and our city government. They are Wall St. Hedge Funds who seek to turn our students into profitable commodities.

These corporates (such as Waltons, Gates, Broad) will ensure profits in the long term

• by skimming over time on all educational services to our children (just as they have done with private prisons)
• by expelling those students not conforming to their arbitrary school criteria,
• & by downsizing the social wages (e.g. pensions, medical, salaries) & labor rights (e.g. grievance, seniority, organizing) of all their school employees.

School closings & the privatization with charters ARE setting the stage for these aggressive and unscrupulous charter venture capitalists.

We’ve got to fight citywide against this racist drive to privatize which primarily right now target our communities of color. The ultimate corporate DOE goal is to shut down all public schools and to charterize them all. This semester it’s your neighboring school; then next year it WILL BE yours!

Many school workers will be displaced and will lose their union rights & privileges. The majority of charters exclude union and fight viciously to keep them non-union.

Many educators will be displaced into the ATR pool where they will not be guaranteed a permanent job placement. Bloomberg’s goal is to ultimately displace this ATR pool to the unemployment lines. AND ….Unfortunately, our UFT is a compliant partner to this charter privatization Bush/Obama agenda!!

Thus, the UFT thus can not and will not put up an effective fight back strategy which requires militant bottom-up organizing at each school and citywide.

Sounds like a conspiracy??? Our research and the actions of the Education Departments of NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other US major cities attest to these corporate privatization schemes. Check our sources. Check our websites. Post your experiences and opinions at our websites. Don’t wait for the Klein hatchet to be swung down on your school.

Organize aggressively at your schools NOW and join GEM’s citywide fight back. Push the UFT but expect only feeble support and ineffective strategies.

NO TO ALL SCHOOL CLOSINGS! FIX OUR SCHOOLS! NO TO PRIVATIZATION WITH CHARTERS!

SHUT DOWN THE DOE THAT IS SUCCEEDING ONLY IN DESTROYING OUR KIDS AND PUBLIC EDUCATION.

Angel Gonzalez, GEM