And this is actually how politics has been evolving, over the last 30 years in particular. More and more money buys influence and buys political power. It also structures the media. Increasingly we find it dominates what’s going on inside of universities. It dominates our educational system, so that universities increasingly become places where all you learn is neoliberal ideology. Where all you learn is corporatist manegerial techniques. And those corporatist manegerial techniques are about actually how to squeeze more and more money out of those who can least afford it.

David Harvey at Occupy London / November 12, 2011 / International Day of Solidarity from Elaine Castillo on Vimeo.

Get the full transcript here.

Confronting the crisis and seeing clearly the way it is being managed by the current political system, young people populating the various encampments are, with an unexpected maturity, beginning to pose a challenging question: If democracy — that is, the democracy we have been given — is staggering under the blows of the economic crisis and is powerless to assert the will and interests of the multitude, then is now perhaps the moment to consider that form of democracy obsolete?

The government is set to ram through a new set of electronic surveillance laws that will allow authorities to access private information of any Canadian, at any time, without a warrant. You’ll be forced to pay for this online spying scheme.

The government has failed to inform Canadians about the privacy and data security implications of this scheme, but Canadians are stepping up to the plate. Share these important citizen-made videos with everyone you know before it’s too late—let’s stand together and make our voices heard.

53. An elector who has received a ballot and returns it to the deputy returning officer declining to vote, forfeits the right to vote and the deputy returning officer shall immediately write the word “declined” upon the back of the ballot and preserve it to be returned to the returning officer and shall cause an entry to be made in the poll record that the elector declined to vote. R.S.O. 1990, c. E.6, s. 53. [emphasis added]

et tu Grauniad?

I wonder why they chose that route, seeing as the protest had been going on for hours before they set of for the Royal Variety Performance. Would have made sense to avoid driving through such a potential dangerous situation. Not very chivalrous I’d say, putting yourself and your wife in “the line of fire” like that. Though I suppose it helps shift the headlines…

The performance is a benefit for the Entertainment Artistes’ Benevolent Fund, which “cares for hundreds of entertainers throughout the UK who need help and assistance as a result of old age, ill-health, or hard times, and Brinsworth House, in Twickenham, Middlesex, is the Fund’s dedicated nursing home, caring for elderly members of the entertainment profession.” The EABF looks like it will need the help, since the same austerity regime that is now forcing students to pay for the irresponsibility of the rich will also require the same of the aged.

EDIT An hour later the CBC and BBC lead pages are the same, and others have followed suit:

The Paper of Record

No surprise here:

Egregious:

These are largely people concerned with the future of education. And contrary to reports that have errantly suggested that these students simply do not want to pay higher fees (which on its own is not entirely a bad goal), in fact most of these students would be unaffected by higher fees as they will have graduated by then. It is extraordinary how unfathomable it is to so many that young people actually can and do show compassion and concern for others.

Guardian coverage.

Today in the United Kingdom thousands of students are marching once again to protest the unprecedented cuts to higher education proposed by the Browne Report. It is expected that more occupations will begin today, as many did after last week’s march. There’s lots of coverage out there on the webs.

LibCom

Channel 4 Live Blog

Twitter: #dayx2

Twitter: #demo2010

The Leeds Student

NOTE: As I was writing I found out that Rob Ford has been elected mayor of Toronto. This man is a buffoon, and is a perfect example of the triumph of preferences over right. The most telling feature will be the total number of votes cast, which at the time of writing was only around 600,000. The lack of turnout in elections raises another crucial point, which adds fuel to the above admonition about getting out to vote, which is that these figures are hardly representative of the number of dispossessed and marginalised, people who feel, legitimately that they’ve been sold out by a system that does not have their best interests and those of their fellow citizens at heart, and feel that change is beyond their power.

I submit Badiou’s thoughts for your assessment.

Badiou, Alain. 2002. “Philosophical considerations of the very singular custom of voting: an analysis based on recent ballots in France.” Theory and Event 6:3.

Says Badiou:

The only reasonable conclusion is that when decisive political transformations are at stake in a country putting them to a vote will ensure that nothing happens because they will have been submitted to the principle of the homogeneous. And it is interesting to note that, in general, a partial but large mass of opinion, whether it be “democratic” (in defence of free existential comforts) or directly bourgeois (in defence of property rights and earnings), serves to guarantee, on the street, the principle in question. That is, it guarantees our continuing just like before.

[...]

Paradoxes of the vote

This thinking oneself heroic when in reality one is simply conservative furnishes us with a good introduction to examination of the paradoxes of the vote. For example:

1. That the vote is a free formalism, indeed, some say, the formalism of political liberty itself, yet it is also obligatory. It is,as one knows, juridically obligatory in a number of countries. But as we witnessed this time in the violent diatribes against abstention for many it is also subjectively, or morally obligatory. (That is, let it be said in passing, for any intellectuals and students, but not so much for the essential people. For they abstained in still greater numbers in the June legislative elections. Little by little, “democracy” is taking the turn of a minority ritual).

2. That there is equality of number, such is the law of suffrage. Yet, as we have said, the decisive places are coded according to norms which transcend numbers.

3. That there is a flagrant asymmetry between “yes” and “no”. The consequence of a “no” is elimination and it is effective. On the contrary, what is played out with a “yes” could not be more elusive. What commitments are elected members held to? Nothing of worth, in any case, which holds even more today as the notion of “program” had been practically discredited. Thus, for the voter there is, a real of the negative sanction, but no real foreseeable effect of success — except that of the conservation of the principal parameters of existence. At least, that is, of those ones over which elected representatives exercise some authority. Such is the secret of lukewarm politics: the only way to stay in power is to do nothing.

[...]

The reason for the paradoxes of the vote are well known: its technical rationality means the result is gotten from a pure count, which authorises the infinite attentions of sociologists and political scientists — as concerned with numerical details and variations as the specialists of climactic history — and works to cover over massive irrationality. For why would number have political virtue? Why would the majority, modifiable at will thanks to the ruse of infinite modes of balloting, be endowed with the attributes of a norm? Such approximations are simply not tolerated in other domains where human thought is at stake. Great scientific creators and innovative artists have been right contrary to dominant opinion. Even violent amorous passions affirm themselves against mediocre social judgement. Is politics, and it alone, to be condemned to the conservatism of numerical means? Everything indicates that this is not the case. Since each time a capital political decision is to be taken, by everyone in their own name, the partisans of the just and the true are initially entirely in the minority, indeed, electorally insignificant. The résistants of the 1940′s, those of the 1950′s opposed to the sordid colonial wars, the “leftists” of the 60′s and 70′s: all of them were absolutely in the minority just as are those who today see imperialistic ambitions and the spirit of servitude hide beneath the mask of “humanitarian interventions”, or the “war against terrorism”. And, basically, everyone knows that number, the majority, won as it is from blind lists upon leaving the ballot box, has no real meaning.

[...]

Rousseau knew it well: “Individual will by nature tends to preferences, and the general will to equality”. The manifestation of the return of a general will, were it on a single point, will necessitate sacrificing preferences. This is where philosophy can help. Since, in its most general inspiration it teaches us that the universality of truth is preferable to mere preferences. And it is then that one is fortunate–beyond the market.

Read the whole thing here.

The video seems to be a testament to the notion that if you just put a few sappy piano chords behind images of sad faced children you can pretty much rally people to any cause no matter the content. Here we have the now standard cliche that children must be prepared to become “global 21st century learners”. This goal is somewhat nebulous. However, the overarching meaning circulates around a variety of other cliches that almost all have their basis in workforce discipline. Why must students become global 21st century learners? The answer, no matter how it is dressed up in nice sounding jargon about connectivity or creativity, always seems to come back to economic competition. Education is thus reduced to a chess piece in a global labor war between American kids and India and China. Who are the internal villains in this war? The teachers. How do we win? Through technology, of course. Our educational dilemmas can be solved if we just get those anachronistic teachers and their professional knowledge and stupid books out of the way and “empower” kids to push around text and video on their Ipods. Then we can then give them a test and if they get most of the answers “right” then we will know that they have done something that we can call learning.

Read the rest.