Fantastic interview on austerity at the UC. Covers all the bases: Bob Meister's "They Pledged Your Tuition," construction bonds and rating agencies, pepper-spray cop, the Davis Dozen, student debt...

These days, US Bank is retreating on multiple fronts. First and most immediately, protesters at UC Davis recently won an important victory in the battle against the financialization of public education when the bank decided, following a blockade that lasted an entire quarter, to close its on-campus branch. While it remains unclear whether the new ID cards that UC Davis students were forced to obtain, which double as US Bank ATM cards, will be phased out ("Your Aggie Card. Your ATM Card. All in one."), the bottom line is that a central and high-traffic space on campus has been stripped from the bankers' hands. The administration and the Regents will continue their search for "new, fun sources [of revenue]," as UCD Associate Vice Chancellor Emily Galindo described the US Bank deal (at approximately minute 2:30 in the linked video), but this space is ours -- it belongs to the students, workers, faculty, and community -- and we won't let them sell it off (or, for that matter, sell us off) again in backroom deals to their fellow 1%-ers.

Second and in the bigger picture, it's being reported today that US Bancorp (the parent company that owns US Bank) is exiting the private student loan market. According to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, the corporation held about $4.66 billion in student loans at the end of 2011. JP Morgan Chase also decided recently to "sharply reduc[e] its lending." For these lenders, dealing in the student loan market is apparently not worth the risk. (It's worth noting that this trend is by no means absolute. Other lenders, like Discover Financial Services, are "ramping up their participation in the [student debt] market" just as US Bank is pulling out. Similarly, according to UCD spokesman Barry Schiller, other banks have "informally expressed an interest to step in" to replace US Bank.)

All of this is taking place in a context of increasingly apocalyptic discussions about the possibility that the student debt bubble is about to burst ("This could very well be the next debt bomb for the U.S. economy"). We don't want to get into that debate here. All we want to do is offer some brief thoughts on the possible intersection of the parallel retreats of US Bank/corp we identified above. The imbrication, that is, between two levels of scale: the blockade and subsequent decision of US Bank to abandon its Memorial Union branch; and the strikingly coincident decision of US Bancorp to abandon its financial position in the student debt market.

In a recent op-ed in the California Aggie, UCD professor Joshua Clover argued that "The university is selling students to the bank because it’s the only way to generate more income from students who don’t otherwise have it." He continued:

This is why shutting down the bank of campus is not just a sensible idea but an obvious first step in reclaiming education. The bank is not only profiting, but it is also the emissary of the profit motive; it does nothing else. Perhaps the closing of this small branch is purely symbolic; it won’t end global capitalism, after all.

But perhaps it’s something more. Everybody starts small. You fight where you can. The fact that there are ten thousand banks doesn’t mean you don’t begin with one -- it means you do. Closing a single recruiting center wasn’t going to end the military, but one by one, such closings helped end the war. The bank is fighting a war on your future, and for the moment the university is collaborating -- on the wrong side.

While there's no question that the bank blockade directly caused US Bank to withdraw from the campus of UC Davis, it would be absurd to suggest that the same blockade was responsible for scaring US Bancorp into deciding that student debt was no longer worth it. It's not just a question of scale. For the bank's financial managers, student debt simply wasn't generating enough profit to justify the expense. And with defaults rising, those same profits may appear increasingly risky in their speculative eyes.

In other words, US Bancorp's withdrawal from the student debt market was a result of the crisis. That crisis, however, takes many forms: it is a crisis of profitability, of course, but it also appears as precarity in its multiple economic and affective senses; as austerity and the regime of state violence on which it depends; and as the global waves of outrage, protest, and insurrection that more than anything characterize our historical moment. It is out of this last formation of crisis that the slogan emerged during the California student movement in the fall of 2009: we are the crisis. If the bank in Memorial Union is "the emissary of the profit motive," as Clover suggested, then it also constitutes a localized, concrete form into which this abstract phenomenon had congealed. We should understand the blockade, likewise, as a small but significant drop in a much larger wave that not only forced US Bank off campus but also pushed US Bancorp out of student debt.

A little over than a week ago, the UC Davis Faculty Association circulated a petition in opposition to the decision of the UC Davis administration to forward information about its students involved in the highly successful US Bank protest to the District Attorney. The petition quotes from an official statement regarding the bank closure:

As of today (March 16), UC Davis police had forwarded six cases to the Yolo County district attorney’s office, recommending prosecution for violating Penal Code sections that make it a misdemeanor to ‘willfully and maliciously’ obstruct the free movement of any person on any street, sidewalk or other public place, or to intentionally interfere with any lawful business.

Mike Cabral, assistant chief deputy district attorney, said March 15 that the district attorney’s office had not yet completed its review of the case files—and that a decision on whether to prosecute is likely to come Monday or Tuesday (March 19 or 20). If the decision is made to go forward, the district attorney’s office will notify the suspects by mail, ordering them to appear in court.

Today, we find that not six but 12 protesters will likely face criminal charges [Update: more from the Davis Vanguard here]:

Misdemeanor charges will likely be filed against 12 people connected to the on-campus U.S. Bank protests, according to an email circulated among UC Davis administration Thursday evening. The protests were part of an effort to get US Bank off campus, which is eventually what happened.

We have a call out to the Yolo County District Attorney's Office and will update when we have more information. Here's the email:

Yolo Co. D.A's office public information rep has confirmed that misdemeanor charges have been filed against 12 individuals in connection with the U.S. Bank protests. Letters are in the mail.

The Yolo County District Attorney's office has notified UC Davis that the D.A.'s office today mailed letters to 12 individuals, ordering them to appear for booking at the Yolo County Jail and then to appear at a later date for arraignment in Yolo County Superior Court on misdemeanor charges related to their alleged activities earlier this year at the U.S. Bank branch at UC Davis.

Starting in January of this year, these individuals frequently obstructed access to the bank branch, located in the Memorial Union at UC Davis. The bank chose to close during many of these events, and, in a recent letter to account holders, announced the campus branch to be "officially closed" as of Feb. 28.

As we've seen recently at UC Berkeley, with the filing of criminal charges as well as stay-away orders against a number of prominent student protesters, UC administrators willingly collaborate with the offices of their respective DAs. In order to do this, the administration sends UCPD to actively search out information ("evidence") against student protesters, which is then forwarded to the DA. At times, this evidence has come from the medical records of students who had sought treatment at University Health Services after being assaulted by the police themselves.

What this means, it appears, is that the Office of Student Conduct (OSC), which from 2009-2011 was charged with the quasi-legal repression of student protesters, is being superseded, its work passed off to the criminal (justice) system proper. This move, of course, is part of a broader trend that is becoming apparent at universities across the country: the militarization of campus space and of university life at large.

(Above video from yesterday's protest at the UC Regents' meeting at UCSF Mission Bay. Police arrested three protesters.)

From the Bicycle Barricade:

On March 12, the parasitic US Bank notified its hosts customers that, as of Feb. 28, it had officially closed its UC Davis branch.

The bank’s closure was the result of a quarter-long blockade, in which an autonomous direct action group effectively prevented bank operations.

Despite sustained efforts at intimidation by bank managers, private security guards, UC Davis police and administrators, the bank blockade stood its ground, even when faced with arrest threats, student judicial sanctions, and physical confrontations.

The successful blockade is clear proof of the efficacy of direct action, in which a committed and organized group, willing to place its “bodies on the gears, . . . upon all the apparatus” can achieve victories against the capitalist system that transforms our classrooms into spaces of exploitation and forces us to sell our lives, our futures, to bankers and profiteers.

This action was part of an ongoing campaign to free the university from the grip of capital. Every space we retake from the managers, the bankers, the administrators, and the self-elected résumé polishers of ASUCD represents a step towards the autonomy required to transform this corporate university into the people’s university.

We celebrate this victory by planning our next action and restating our intention to remove the chancellor and police from our campus as a necessary step towards liberation.

Needless to say, the UC Regents aren't happy with this development. Their lawyer recently sent off a letter describing in detail the many efforts they made to get US Bank to stay. They really want the banks on campus. Above all, the Regents were hoping for US Bank to help them deal with the protesters -- as the letter states, "The Regents repeatedly asked for the Bank's assistance and collaboration in addressing the problems created by the protesters, and the Bank has either refused to provide such assistance or has delayed responding in a manner that has caused reasonable suspicion that the Bank was not genuinely interested in maintaining a long-term presence at the Davis campus." The bank, apparently realizing this was a losing battle and recognizing the potentially disastrous PR implications, was "unforthcoming in dealing with the Regents' representatives in Davis."

Pobrecitos, no one to bail you out this time...

[Update 6:01pm 3/18]: For a more detailed analysis of the Regents' letter as legal argument as well as a related statement from US Bank and the original contract, see this pro bono legal advice for the UC Regents.

The following statement was given by Professor Joshua Clover during the rally at UC Berkeley campus on March 1. From there, approximately 200-250 people marched down Telegraph to Oscar Grant Plaza in downtown Oakland where they converged with students from Laney College for another rally. Later in the day, a small group broke off to begin a 99-mile march to Sacramento.



I was asked to speak about banks and education and I will get to it swiftly without any fancy language. We are here in part to begin a march. It is a march on the seat of government, against intolerable austerity programs that are being imposed by force. This has become a familiar, almost a common event of late. The most dramatic such recent episodes that we have seen have been in Greece, in Athens, a place from whence we draw our farthest histories of education. But we must also draw our nearest histories of the political. Our history of the present also comes from Athens.

In Greece right now, intolerable austerity is being imposed by the economic state and its armed wing, immiserating the people so as to pay an unpayable debt to a global array of financial institutions. There is, in short, a collusion between the state and the banks. The people are being increasingly indebted to the banks even as they cannot afford food and shelter, and this is being done through the militarized mediation of the state.

This is precisely what is happening here as well. Rather than the sublimely dispiriting rain of facts and figures, I want to sketch the process, the mechanism, in five easy steps.

1. The banks have a bunch of money sitting around with no profitable route for investment, because the real economy is in its death throes.
2. The public university wants to raise its price of admission much faster than any increase in people’s ability to pay. Over the last four decades tuition has increased 650 percentage points more than inflation — this is the so-called “rip-off index” — and it’s only accelerating.
3. Economic collapse means that young people are effectively compelled into higher education to compete on the job market — even though they don’t have enough money to keep up with the rip-off index.
4. Did I mention those banks really need new suckers for their loans, especially once the mortgage market blows up?
5. The university and bank thus enter into an alliance through which the bank makes staggering profits from the university’s huge fee hikes.

So I will make the most obvious point: banks don’t make it easier for people to go to school, they make it harder, by enabling massive fee increases. Banks make school more expensive.

But that’s only part of it, of course — the front end, you might say. They get you coming and going. Not only do banks drive up costs, they now on the back end own a trillion dollars worth of the future lives of students. That’s what debt is — they own your hours, period. And that decides your life for you. They know what you’ll do next summer. And the one after that. And the twenty years after that.

If the university’s purpose is to help people move from necessity to freedom — be it political, intellectual, or economic freedom — their collusion with the banks actually and obviously makes you less free. So: the university and you: more expensive, and less free. This is the outcome of the university’s lying down with capital. It preserves itself by selling your and your families’ lives to the bank — by enabling financial profits. As in Greece, so in California: this is the state now.

But here’s the thing I want to say before I go. This problem I have just described is not a false problem. It is not some free decision made by misguided people who can be convinced to see the light and change direction. It is a consequence of objective conditions of the economy and the political situation. Whether we accept that the money finally isn’t out there and isn’t coming back — or whether we accept that one cannot ascend to the seat of government without being irrevocably beholden and committed to this program of exploitation and profit — either way, I do not believe that the situation I have just described can be in any way changed via demands for redistributing the present budget, by demanding a kinder and gentler capitalism.

And this carries me back, as we so often find ourselves carried back, to Greece, to Athens. I say to you today, those of you burning with anger and love and desperation who will commence the long march to the seat of government and those who will stay here, burning just the same, I say to you, MAKE IT GREEK. MAKE IT GREEK. In Greece they have understood, just a few moments faster than we have, that the money isn’t coming back. That the banks and the state are not going to release the people from beneath the boot-heel of austerity. That debt to the banks will be carved from the hides of students, of those who labor, and of those who cannot find jobs. That there is no rescue within this system, within the shock doctrine of austerity capitalism.

So when they march on the seat of government, they do not do so to issue entreaties for a better deal. They do not march to petition for redress of grievances. They do not march to seek out an idealistic equality that simply is not and cannot be a feature of this disaster that is capitalism. They march to burn it down. They march to burn it down. Along the way they pause at banks — in memory of the fact that every revolution has featured, among its earliest acts, the destruction of debt records, because debt is the financial form of unfreedom. And they burn down the banks.

And I say they are not mistaken. I say that their analysis of the real situation is lucid. Inarguable. Perhaps even obvious. Let us enter this history, let us illuminate it, let us make it present. I say: we are all Athenians: MAKE IT GREEK, BURN IT DOWN.