How to Film a Demonstration: A Tutorial

"An introductory tutorial for aspiring citizen journalists to consider before next entering the field. You are needed more than ever, to bring the people direct truth, taking out the middle man in the archaic mainstream media. Each camera is a new set of eyes we all share in near real time - no one can take this from us, so it is imperative we refine and develop new skills
and strategies to capture the missteps of power. "

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Fault Lines: Chile rising

"Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets

 in the largest protests the country has seen in decades."

"These actions are causing a political crisis

 for the country's billionaire President, Sebastian Piñera."

"The students are demanding free education, and an end to the privatization of their schools and universities. The free-market based approach to education was implemented by the military dictator Augusto Pinochet in his last days in power."

Unfettered Capitalism: Chris Hedges & Michael Moore

"I think it comes from being an imperial power...
and all imperial societies end as we end."
"The tyranny they impose on others 
they finally impose on themselves."

Michael Moore on Student Debt "Debtor's Prison"

"Michael Moore is talking about student loans,

and how students start their lives with a financial handicap."

"Education a way to talk about class and labor"by Malcom Harris

"At the core of contemporary liberal ideology is the idea that education, done right, could solve all the nation’s major economic problems. Education is supposed to remedy the nation’s sundry inequalities and prepare a generation to become involved citizens. This is one of the few areas where the center-left has won over the wider public. "

"But if education really were the silver bullet, we would have hit something by now. Instead, as Penn State professor John Marsh argues in his forthcoming book Class Dismissed, we have an increasingly unequal country hiding behind the flimsy twin excuses of equal opportunity and personal responsibility. Marsh makes a convincing case that no amount of reformist tinkering can make higher education an engine of egalitarianism, because schools were never meant to reduce inequality in the first place. As long as we credit the education system with the ability to fix labor problems, Marsh argues, it is doomed to failure."

"Marsh, who comes from a union household, sees the decline of labor organizing as the central source of high and rising inequality. As workers have lost bargaining power, he insists, the gap between classes has increased. Through a series of statistical correlations, he traces the “great divergence” between rich and poor incomes to the early ’80s and President Reagan’s union busting and supply-side tax cuts, and uses data from economist Emmanuel Saez, to show how the U.S. has become less and less equal ever since."

"Unlike union organizing, which by its nature distributes benefits, the education cure functions through exclusivity. A diploma may offer a better place in line, but it doesn’t guarantee anyone a job commensurate with their skills."

"Education has become the way to talk about class and labor in an American political system that is profoundly uncomfortable with both. In the hands of reformist technocrats, inequality is a matter of nuanced social engineering rather than a conflict between two unequal and opposed sides – those who profit and those who only work.

"If society wanted to reduce the growing discrepancy between rich and poor, we would worry less about tweaking the educational system and simply pay or give the poor more money. Marsh writes, “Given the political will, whether through redistributive tax rates, massive public works projects, a living wage law, or a renaissance of labor unions, we could decrease poverty and inequality tomorrow regardless of the market or the number of educated and uneducated workers.”"

Insolvent Workers of the World: Interview with Andrew Ross

"Spontaneous political events are always “possible,” it’s just not easy to predict when and where they will get traction. I myself have been in the US for 30 years and have never seen anything like the momentum or sense of destiny that this movement now has. Those 30 years have belonged to Wall Street, the next 30 years could and should belong to us if Occupy maintains its energy and creativity."

"There are many tributaries that have flowed into the Occupy river – the global justice movement being the most important. On the labor side, I think the capacity of the urban unions to embrace the academic labor movement has been a significant backdrop. As for the new elements, surely the burgeoning consciousness about debt is a primary factor. Responding to debt bondage has been a way of life in the global South countries for the last 30 years. In the last few years, the consequences of living in a debt trap has hit the countries of the North. It’s an example of the chickens coming home to roost, as Malcolm X once put it."

"For example, some of the city’s high schools have replaced their representative forms of student government with the horizontal mode of the GA. It’s proven to be an infectious set of cultural norms. And, since any group can generate its own GA (there are many throughout New York City), it is an organizational structure that encourages and generates autonomy. So, too, the face-to-face nature of this form of decision-making complements the widespread use of social media to disseminate information. In fact, I’d say that the balance between the face-to-face meetings and use of social media is a key element."

"From the outset, the agony of student debt has been a constant refrain at OWS and other Occupy locations... The central recognition was that U.S. colleges and universities are increasingly dependent on the debt bondage of the people they are supposed to serve. So we crafted a campaign that resonated with our political principles (the act of refusal, the threat of a debt strike, and the justice of a debt jubilee) that was designed to give debtors an opportunity to act collectively rather than suffer the torment and humiliation of debt and default in private."

"Our campaign is framed as an action initiative, not a set of demands, since we share the Occupy ethos that demands cannot be adequately addressed by the current political system, not when it is under the baleful influence of corporate dollars."

"Actions taken to re-appropriate wealth and power are not only empowering in themselves, they are also constituent, as you put it, of a new kind of political culture. Most Occupy participants will testify about their feelings of personal transformation–the language is often one of radical innocence, a manifest symptom of the birth of a new “structure of feeling” as Raymond Williams once put it. For sure, the political class will try to co-opt some of this, and, unlike some folks, I don’t see that as an unwelcome response–you cannot erect a nonporous boundary between a movement and the political establishment."

College Debt? Where is your Sugar Daddy?

"Back in 2006, when the website first started, 25 percent of the sugar babies were college students, we have seen that number increase to about 35-40 percent just in the last few years alone"

"An anonymous Ivy League college grad RT spoke with, is facing tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt. With no job and financial aid, she wants a sugar daddy."

“Given hikes in tuition, and the current state of the economy, more and more people are looking for alternative ways to finance their educations. There are plenty of young men looking to date older women."

Mike Konczal on the Submerged StateSurrounding Student Debt

"One of the Occupy movement’s major objectives is combating the privatization of public higher education and its replacement with a debt-fueled economy of indenture."

"This is an example of what Suzanne Mettler calls “the submerged state,” a pattern where the government has, as she says, “shunned the outright disbursing of benefits to individuals and families and favored instead less visible and more indirect incentives and subsidies, from tax breaks to payments for services to private companies. These submerged policies…obscure the role of government and exaggerate that of the market.” Instead of directly providing public options, we subsidize the purchasing of private goods, often using the tax code."

"Let’s take the case of student debt and the tax code. How much would it cost to make public colleges and universities free? Rough estimates (quoting Jeffrey Sach’s latest book) put the price of free public higher education at $15-$30 billion, which fits other estimates I’ve seen.

"$22.75 billion we are paying through the tax code to make college tuition and student debt more manageable. This amount is in the middle the range of the cost of just making public high education free. Now these aren’t equivalent — much of what is spent through the tax code will be biased more towards private and professional schools, which are more expensive. But this also isn’t anywhere near the full extent we subsidize student debt (a government creation from 1965)."

"But there is a choice in how to provide mass higher education. We can either use resources to reduce the price of the good upfront — make college free — or to subsidize the purchase of the good — here through the numerous hoops of the tax code. The amount of money we take from the tax code to try and make student debts and runaway tuition more bearable could be used instead to just provide free public colleges."

"There are winners and losers in each case. When we subsidize through the tax code, people who are well off and pay more taxes benefit more. People who can afford support staff, such as accountants and lawyers, are also more likely to understand how to take maximum advantage of these benefits. These subsidies benefit private educational institutions over public ones, as they’ll make private education feel more “natural” while obscuring the role of the government in setting up these markets. They give public college a nudge towards corporatization and privatization."

"Much of these subsidies are likely captured either by the higher education institutions themselves or the debt lenders. These subsidies will make tuition and debt easier to deal with, but providing colleges free as a public option would likely do far more to contain costs (also here)."

"Most importantly, it breaks the link between citizenship and education. The subsidy approach replaces the claim of a citizen to a necessary good to be full, participating person in our market economy with the claim of a consumer, whose claim is ultimately one of willingness to pay either through wealth or debt, with a “nudge” from the government. The first kind is the place where progressives have the stronger argument about freedom, as opposed to those who see the market as the only source of freedom available."

Chile: Student Protests Spread Throughout Region

"José Barrera, a civil engineering student at the Catholic University, said that what is happening in Chile "is an example of what education is like when it's privatised, when it is no longer defended as a right of everyone.""

"An education law enacted by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet set off a process of decentralisation and privatisation that gave private schools free rein to pursue profit and use entrance exams to select their students. The Chilean system is not just divided into paid private education and tuition-free public education, but is split into three: municipal schools run by local governments, which are publicly funded and free, state-subsidised private schools, and private schools that charge tuition. Within the sphere of state-subsidised private education, students get free tuition at some schools, while at others families pay monthly fees, an arrangement known as "shared financing.""

"The protest movement is calling for an end to the freedom of private schools receiving state subsidies to levy fees at will. Instead of the current system, under which administrators of these institutions rack up profits, the demonstrators want school fees to be invested in under-funded public schools."

"They also want public primary and secondary schools to be directly managed by the Education Ministry, instead of by local governments, because the decentralisation accentuated the inequality in education quality between rich and poor districts."

"Countries that see the Chilean model as an example, and that are moving towards privatisation, have to realise how harmful this kind of system can be for education in general," he argued."

"Capitalism is profits, business, buying and selling, and that is not what educators are about," said Garrido. He added that the movement in which teachers and students have come together is demanding a "social transformation.""

"[T]he student protests have become a broader social movement that will continue to fight for structural changes above and beyond the educational system, such as reforms to the free-market, neoliberal economic system inherited from the dictatorship."

"We need a more democratic country, where the voices of society are really heard. It can't just be the same old political class reaching decisions between four walls."

Michael Moore on Student Debt: 'The Boot on Your Neck'

"Filmmaker Michael Moore argues in support of Occupy Wall Street protestors angry about high student loan payments. "What a wonderful thing to do to twenty-two-year-olds," says Moore, sarcastically. "Send them out into the world with crushing debt.""

George Carlin on American Owners and Education

"I'll you what they don't want... They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking... Well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking... that's against their interests."

Sex workers in higher education

“I started stripping when I was 19 because I had huge debt. I was in a private college and I had student loan and credit card debt, and I decided that what was going on was ridiculous,” said Jane Doe, 32, a doctoral student at USC. Doe’s story is not atypical; according to a recent study on discussing sex work by Widener University’s Sarah Elspeth Patterson, M.Ed. The study notes that “10 percent of students know of students who engage in sex work in order to promote themselves financially, with 16.5 percent indicating that they might be willing to engage in sex work to pay for their education.”

"Sex workers, as defined by the Sex Worker Outreach Project (SWOP), are those who earn money by providing sexual services. This includes prostitution, erotic dancing, pornography, phone sex operators, fetish modeling and any other “transactional erotic labor.”

"For Jessie Nicole, 25, sex work was the only employment option that allowed her to make ends meet and remain a full-time student. “I was broke,” Nicole said. “I had a scholarship that paid my tuition and 70 percent of my books, but that doesn’t pay your rent, that doesn’t give you food, and you still have 30 percent of your books.” Nicole, now the director of SWOP’s Los Angeles chapter, began dating “sugar daddies” when she was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Florida State University, but turned to escorting when she moved to Chicago for graduate school."

"Though sex work helped pay for both Doe and Nicole’s schooling, the cost of education left each of them in an incredible amount of debt." Nicole said, "I’m still using sex work to pay off my student loans." Doe, who took a break between earning each of her degrees added, “(Sex work) was about school debt, even when I wasn’t in school. My student loans were $800 a month.”

"Though Doe has the ability to set her own schedule as both a stripper and a “sugar baby,” between her schoolwork, and participation in Occupy Los Angeles – where she was arrested during the police raid – the money she makes when she works does not allow her the ability to save."

"According to Doe, there is a class and racial disparity between sex workers."

“(Student workers are) mostly white, as far as I know,” Doe said. “There’s a really disturbing class divide amongst women who do sex for pay, between indoor and outdoor workers, and between whose bodies are most criminalized. And we aren’t. Very rarely do we go to jail for it. Black women and Latina(s) in particular, a lot of them are not going to have stories like (ours).”

EU summit: tales of fiscal union and financial adulteryby Jérôme E. Roos

"On Friday morning, a crucial EU summit — touted as the last opportunity to save the euro from collapse — ended in a dramatic split between the UK and the rest of Europe... The break-up marks yet another tectonic shift in European history. But it also reveals the extent to which financial interests have corrupted the minds of our leaders and soured their mutual relations."

"This was never a clash over the European interest versus the British interest, as both continental cosmopolitans and British euroskeptics like to portray it. Behind the veil of ideology lurk powerful financial interests dictating the choices of our double-crossing elites."

"More specifically, Cameron demanded that: (1) “any transfer of power from a national regulator to an EU regulator on financial services would be subject to a veto”; (2) “the European Banking Authority should remain in London”; (3) “banks should face a higher capital requirement”; and (4) “the European Central Bank be rebuffed in its attempts to rule that euro-denominated transactions take place within the eurozone.” Sarkozy rejected Cameron’s demands outright."

"The reasons for this are really quite simple: (1) Sarkozy doesn’t want UK-based banks to get a competitive advantage by dodging the European-wide financial transaction tax; (2) he wants the European Banking Authority to move to Paris; (3) he knows French banks are in a much weaker position than their UK counterparts; and (4) he wants euro-denominated transactions to take place within the eurozone so they will be routed via La Défense instead of the City."

"The bottomline is that this is a battle of banks; a clash of capital — it has nothing to do with the general European or British interest. If the eurozone were to break up, many German and French banks would collapse, hence the Franco-German push for fiscal union. Yet such a fiscal union would impose continental-style regulations on the free-for-all City of London. Fearing its competitive position vis-à-vis New York, the UK therefore strongly opposed participation."

"So whenever they tell you “there is no alternative”, don’t believe them — it’s a lie. As a European Central Bank official recently told Reuters, “what I think is important at the moment is not showing politicians that there might be an alternative, because in their mind that might be less costly than the options they have.” The attempt to naturalize and depoliticize this crisis is an ideological smokescreen meant to keep us firmly in a state of financial prostitution."

"The task is upon us to disseminate the truth and get organized. Another Europe is possible!"

The Higher Education Wealth Gap

"You've probably heard about the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. We now rank 45th in the world in terms of income equality, sandwiched between the Ivory Coast and Uruguay. And the way America funds public education is no exception to this trend. According to a new study from a Washington think tank, higher education has never been more stratified."

"Experts across the country are blunt about their fears. "Eighty percent of college students are enrolled in public schools," Hartle says. "College has never been totally free, but in the past, the United States was fairly committed to help students who couldn't afford college. That commitment is eroding."

"College enrollment is at an all-time high because of the recession, especially at community colleges, which enroll a high percentage of young people who can't otherwise find a job. Eventually, many families will decide they can't pay for college at all, and they're going to continue altering their choices based on the price of the school. This means fewer degrees for working-class people, a less educated workforce, and a cycle that perpetuates the already egregious wealth gap in our country."

Students as the New Public Intellectuals by Henry Giroux

"Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics, a new set of values, and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part, this means educating a new generation of intellectuals who not only defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, but also frame their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research, teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public spheres available that can provide the educational conditions for students, faculty, administrators, and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated questioning, imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life and the common good. "

"The corporate state cannot fight any longer with ideas because their visions, ideologies and survival of the fittest ethic are bankrupt, fast losing any semblance of legitimacy. Students all over the country are changing the language of politics while reclaiming pedagogy as central to any viable notion of agency, resistance and collective struggle. In short, they have become the new public intellectuals, using their bodies, social media, new digital technologies, and any other viable educational tool to raise new questions, point to new possibilities, and register their criticisms of the various antidemocratic elements of casino capitalism and the emerging punishing state."

"At a time when higher education is increasingly being dominated by a reductive corporate logic and technocratic rationality unable to differentiate training from a critical education, we need a chorus of new voices to emphasize that the humanities, in particular, and the university, in general, should play a central role in keeping critical thought alive while fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unraveling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and prevent that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished. Corporations and the warfare state should not dictate the needs of public and higher education, or, for that matter, any other democratic public sphere.

"Inhabiting the role of public intellectuals, students can take on the difficult but urgent task of reclaiming the ideal and the practice of what it means to reclaim higher education in general and the humanities, more specifically, as a site of possibility that embraces the idea of democracy not merely as a mode of governance but, most importantly- as journalist Bill Moyers points out - as a means of dignifying people so they can become fully free to claim their moral and political agency."

The Euro Crisis by the numbers

"Slowly, painfully, the world is coming to grips with the realization that the Euro, as we know it, is entering its last days, and what consequences we are likely to see."

"Many people, especially those that trade stocks, have been having trouble believing that the Euro will die. After all, just a few years ago the Euro was considered the alternative reserve currency of the world. So much work and money has been spent on this unproven endeavor, not to mention the complete lack of a "Plan B", that few could picture its demise. Yet, just like the inability of so many to foresee the end of the housing bubble, reality is intruding again. The farther we get down the road of failure, the more clear the picture becomes."

"European banks have found themselves in the same position that Wall Street banks were in back in the fall of 2007 - with Trillion of assets that no one wants. Just like Bear Stearns, Wachovia, and Washington Mutual before them, European banks can't price their assets to what the markets will bear because it will mean instant insolvency if they did. So they "mark-to-myth" instead, hoping against hope that the asset markets will turn around before they are forced to declare bankruptcy."

"Probably the most disturbing event of the past week happened at the core of Europe. Germany's bond auction was an outright failure. To put this into perspective, recall how so many policy-makers and economists are calling for Germany to "save" the Euro. Germany is the most credit-worthy member of the union. So if Germany can't find enough investors to buy its own debt, how could it possibly borrow enough to save the rest of Europe? The answer is obviously: it can't."

"I got news for you: credit is already freezing in western Europe. Eastern Europe depends on western Europe for credit, and Austrian banks are already pulling back from the region by order of the Austrian government."

"That's just Europe. What do we have to worry about in America, right?"

"Well, consider that the derivatives market (Remember the derivatives market? That thing that caused AIG to fail, not to mention Enron and LTCM. That huge market that Congress refused to regulated after the 2008 economic shock. Remember that?) is between $250 Trillion and $707 Trillion in size (depending on who is counting)."

"Those numbers hopelessly dwarfed the GDP's of Europe and the United States combined."

"Consider that 94.4% of that $250 Trillion in derivative contracts were sold by just four banks: JPM with $78.1 trillion in exposure, Citi with $56 trillion, Bank of America with $53 trillion and Goldman with $48 trillion. Those are Trillions with a T. Their exposure to the derivatives market increased $5.3 Trillion in just the first quarter of this year. The overall derivatives market increased a record $107 Trillion in the first half of the year - more than the GDP of the entire world."

"You read that right: $107 Trillion in just 6 months."

"The bankers are absolutely bat-sh*t insane! In the face of an economic crisis they've doubled down their bets. They've gambled the entire world's economy for bigger bonuses, as if their bonuses will be worth anything if they crash the world's economy and bring down the Euro."

"Because this is as much a political crisis as an economic one, it is impossible to make accurate long-term predictions. The size of the problem is almost beyond comprehension. After all, we are talking about multiple countries going bankrupt and the failure of the second-largest currency in the world. To think that the problem could be even larger than the 2008 crisis, when the only sector of the economy that has recovered is corporate profits, leaves one thinking "This can't be true. They can't have done this to us again." And yet the numbers speak for themselves."

The UK and the neoliberal transformation of higher education by James Vernon

"Why has the idea of publicly funded higher education crumbled so quickly in England? James Vernon explores the origins of an academic culture that has internalised market rationalities and traces the concept of education as a personal investment back to the playing fields of Eton."

"Never before has the idea of the university been so feverishly debated in England, and for good reason. The restructuring of the country's higher education sector around a student-debt-financed, fee-driven model is a fundamental recasting of the university's place and purpose in society. But this process did not begin with the government's higher education White Paper or even with the Browne Report that laid the ground for it. And neither is it confined to the UK."

"The neoliberal transformation of higher education is a global phenomenon. In the Americas, Europe, Russia and its former colonies, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Australasia, higher education is being rebranded as a private investment and the university repurposed to generate profit and economic growth. As a consequence, academics and students are confronting very similar conditions across the world: the escalation of fees and student debt, the expansion of management and administrative systems for measuring the efficiency of services, the quest for a plethora of new types of fee-paying consumers, and the casualisation of academic labour."

"Is it any wonder then that, despite the continuing protests, the majority of students and their teachers are resigned to the privatisation of higher education in England? Many, it seems, have accepted the logic that the public funding for higher education was only possible when the system educated only a privileged elite. It is as if the public value of higher education somehow mysteriously evaporates when it is more democratically available."

"Preventing the headlong rush to a new idea of the consumer-orientated and profit-centred university requires more than outrage, protest or even the publication of alternative White Papers, necessary as all of them are. We must first try to understand how we arrived at the point where a redirection of public funds to support sub-prime loans for student-debt-financing of higher education seemed natural and inevitable. It is no longer sufficient to nostalgically invoke a better idea of the university, of a golden age of public funding, without understanding how it became so vulnerable to a critique that has eventually eviscerated it."

"While the words "access" and "fairness" are abused by ministers, these terms speak to a continuing belief among the electorate that universities are powerful engines of social mobility. It is this idea we must appeal to if publicly funded university education, which enriches not only the lives of individuals but our collective life as a society, is to be a civil right for all."

The $1 Trillion Student Loan Rip-Off by Alex Pareene

"Some people have noticed that “student loan debt” comes up a lot among the Wall Street Occupiers and the members of the 99 percent movement. Often, older people, who either attended school when tuition was reasonable, or who didn’t attend college at all in an era when a high school diploma was enough of a qualification for a stable, middle-class career, tend to think this is all the entitled whining of spoiled kids. They don’t understand that these kids accepted a home mortgage worth of debt before they ever even had a regular income, based on phony promises, and that the debt is inescapable, regardless of life circumstances or ability to pay."

"The impossibility of escaping student loan debt is why an industry sprang upto foist useless, overpriced degrees on vulnerable people. It’s a scam, but a profitable one, and respectable enough for major establishment players to feel comfortable making a killing on it."

"So we have incredibly rich and powerful elite institutions joining forces to bleed youths and minorities and poor people dry. And people wonder why there’s marching in the streets."

PBS: Are we slaves to debt? with David Graeber

"The debate over what to do about debt is nothing new, according to anthropologist David Graeber. Alison Stewart talks with Graeber about our misconceptions about debt and why it plays such a large role in history."

Al Jazeera: Meltdown, The men who crashed the world

"Meltdown is a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that brought down the financial world. The show begins with the 2008 crash that pushed 30 million people into unemployment, brought countries to the edge of insolvency and turned the clock back to 1929."

"But how did it all go so wrong? Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place. Also, London was competing with New York as the banking capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time, introduced "light touch regulation" - giving bankers a free hand in the marketplace."

"Meltdown moves on to examine the epidemic of fear that caused the world's banks to stop lending and how the people began their fight back. Finally, it asks how the world can prepare for the next crisis even as it recognises that this one is far from over."

"We hear about the sheikh who says the crash never happened; a Wall Street king charged with fraud; a congresswoman who wants to jail the bankers; and the world leaders who want a re-think of capitalism."