How SUNY students won system-wide South African divestment
Introducing Jane McAlevely, (then) student president and SUNY trustee who organized the effort. In our time, the foundational issue is trust. How much of sexuality is really about projection?
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As students raise the issue of transparency and ethical investing by the university, Planet Waves FM revisits the era when students won divestment from South Africa’s apartheid regime for the entire SUNY system.
The Spectrum’s May 7 editorial
Jane McAlevey on Democracy Now! See second player for longer interview.
As usual, thanks for a great program, Eric. I have made it to the two hours mark.
I have to disagree with some of what you said in the first segment, while agreeing with much of it. Yes, the digital disembodiment is playing a huge role in messing up the consciousness, both the society's as well as that of individuals. But it's a chicken/egg matter. This is playing in the context of social structural factors.
Humans over the last 50 years have been rendered increasingly unable to think outside boxes because what they're being fed via the "education" system and the mass media which reinforce it amounts to ever more constricted boxes.
And this is deliberate, designed as a counterinsurgency in reaction to the cultural insurgency of the :"Sixties" which made the very idea of collage students being politically active acceptable in any way. Andre Gregory talked about this with Wallace Shawn in "My Dinner With Andre," 1984." New York as a self-managed prison and insane asylum portending the future.
This kind of social environment has made it more possible to implement the digital conditions to their fullest ramifications. We're losing the very notion of what it means to be a thinking human participating in society. We're becoming incapable of doing anything except receiving instructions from experts and making sure everyone we know goes along with them. And this reinforces the ongoing clampdown.
Incredible story of what happened at SUNY Buffalo, 100 cops from 7 departments used to violently subdue 15 demonstrators. Same place where events were happening on campus at the time of the crackdown, same place where much later protests had been allowed recently. Like at New Paltz, like at Purchase, it's all about the TOPIC.
This ties into the third segment, what Jane McAlevey and the whole crew of you did re successfully pushing for SUNY divestment from South Africa. I listened to her interview on Democracy Now yesterday, have comments right below.
But i was struck but how much had changed. With modern surveillance technology, sneaking chains and locks into a campus building just doesn't fly. Indeed, over the last 40 years, the entire idea of involvement in anything bigger than your career ambitions has been attacked into oblivion. "Idiot" used to mean "a private person" in ancient Greece, someone uninvolved in the affairs of the polis, the community. Now, "idiot" is used to describe anyone who IS involved in the affairs of the community, in any but the most sanitized and conformist of ways.
From my Substack post of today.
[McAlevey] went on to become a union organizer, working especially with the UAW. She was interviewed recently by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, and revealed that she had terminal cancer and was in the hospice stage of her life. VERY sad. What a spirited person, great heart. It is with total respect that i still say i have fundamental problems with her notion that capitalism can be overcome via the system with some direct action pressure. And the UAW has made a series of choices over the years which have aligned it with the power structure on many basic matters, including the entire "Pandemic"/"COVID-19"/"SARS-Cov-2” disinformation narrative which has enable;mega-fraud, mass murder and global tyranny.
Got through the rest of the program. First three Alphaville tunes were OK. The last one, Lassie Come Home, i really *liked*. Maybe because it sounds a bit Pink Floyd-ish?
Your story about the models, learning how to be around them and give them space while still perceiving them fully, reminded me of something i experienced as well, to a leaser degree. Did over 36 years of tutoring in math and stats at UC Berkeley, a lot of it on a drop in basis, with many of the students of course being women (i think over half the student body is female). And it was a skill i had to learn. They have to feel comfortable for tutoring to be effective. And lots of them were really attractive. Some i only saw once or twice, others i kept seeing through the semester. And similarly with my fellow tutors, the women ones. More than a few in fact seemed to make an effort to get me interested. Very vivid memories.