Universities!!

         Universities, seats of learning, places where you go to develop  your ability to be rational and critical, to allow your imagination and intelligence to flower, for the greater good of humanity, ah, the dream. In fact universities have become factories for turning out the nuts and bolts to further the corporate world, nuts and bolts in the shape of conditioned human beings. What is more, universities make money from these nuts and bolts, universities have become part and parcel of the corporate world, they are now just another factory supplying the needs of the profit driven capitalist system. They are dependent on corporate money, they are an integral part of this economic system of insanity.

        The hope is that the students grasp this and decide it is not what they want, and decide they don't want to be programmed to be profit making units for the rich and powerful corporations. Let's hope they decide to take control of the universities and shape them into those desired seats of learning for the benefit of all humanity.  Encouragingly, some are already going down this path, and deserve our full support and solidarity.

The following extract from It's Going Down: 

 

          Statement from group of students occupying the arts building at McGill University in Montreal. 

 

          For the past week, students have been occupying the arts building at McGill University in Montreal. Dozens of tents block the corridor and the atmosphere is festive. These different people occupying the building are clear in their position: they are not asking for anything, they are building, independently, the democratization of their university. We share here their manifesto.
        We are tired of demanding change from those who never intended on listening. We will no longer be deceived. We will prefigure a democratically-led university for ourselves.
       We are occupying McGill to create a festive, autonomous space for learning. A space which belongs to all rather than to the corporate elite. At present, McGill University, as controlled by the Board of Governors, serves capitalist, white-supremacist, settler-colonial and imperialist structures of power.
       When we say McGill is capitalist we mean that it upholds the market’s senseless production, consumption, and environmental exploitation. Under this inflexible model, students, staff, and faculty suffer from exhaustion and mental health issues. Just this semester, in pursuit of profit, McGill prioritized a return to in-person classes over the safety of community members, forcing many to go on strike or to unionize.
       This negligence is not surprising; Capitalist McGill is busy with other things:
It is a high-cost, exploitative landlord, charging many students over $1500 for a one-bedroom.
       It is a stockholder, managing an investment pool of $1.4 billion across the military industrial complex, banking sector, and fossil fuel industry
       We, as students, pay this private entity, the university, to train us for professions that serve human and environmental exploitation. Any other purpose for the university has been deliberately rendered unimaginable. The continuity of corporations relies on the commodification of knowledge, wherin education becomes an instrument of profit.
       McGill is controlled by Senior executives from the Bank of Montreal (BMO), Power Corporation of Canada, the National Bank of Canada, Metro Inc., HSBC Bank Canada, and Redbourne Properties Inc. They all sit on the Board of Governors and represent its single largest voting bloc.
       The university’s structure mirrors the exploitative and hierarchical logic of corporations. By forming an industrial complex of grants, research, public relations campaigns, and donations, McGill has become University Incorporated.
       When we say this structure is also white-supremacist, we mean that, in a white supremacist society that thrives on the exploitation of racialized communities and entire nations, McGill’s education is not revolutionary but reformist and complacent.
       For two years, White-Supremacist McGill has refused to #TakeJamesDown as demanded by Black and Indigenous students, faculty and staff, choosing instead to protect the university’s slave-owning founder and his public statue. Scholarships, prizes, and buildings continue to bear the name of James McGill and the legacy of slavery. University administrators have also failed to meet the Black Student Network’s demands regarding the funding of Black History Month and a Black Canadian Studies Department staffed by Black scholars.
       Financed by James McGill’s colonial enterprises, the university was founded on, and continues to operate on, the unceded, traditional lands of the Kahnistensera from the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. The land acknowledgements that Settler-Colonial McGill boasts on its brochures and at its public events are empty words as it refuses to meaningfully engage with the Kahnistensera and their demands. The university demonstrates no comittment to upholding Indigneous soveignty. McGill finances colonial projects like the Coastal GasLink pipeline trespassing on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory and refuses to repay the money it received from the Six Nations Trust Fund in 1850, totalling $1.7 billion today.

Read the full article HERE: 

 

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Profit V Lives.

 

 

    Spikes of covid19 cases in Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen  and Liverpool universities, as well as in many schools. What a surprise, how could that possibly be, our lords and masters told us that they had got this beast under control and now was the time to start getting out there and get those tills ringing.
             The duplicity of our lords and masters is so disgustingly obvious, it shocks to think they would even go ahead with their greed driven plans to get their buddies tills again ringing loudly. They stand before you with phony sincerity draped across their faces, talking of the welfare of the people, then, encourage people to eat out, get back to the work, open pubs, schools and universities, drawing crowds from across the world into small confined spaces, fully aware that Covid19 is a disease that is transmitted by close contact. Then shock and horror when the infection rate shoots up, as if by magic, or because the naughty and stupid public did not obey their hotch-potch, patchwork quilt, vague, arbitrary instructions.
        Obvious evidence that their first priority is to do what they can to help out their corporate friends to start earning cash again. The brakes only go on again when it becomes too obvious that in doing so they are killing off sections of the population.

   I will repeat my call, it is time we demanded that full control of this Covid19 pandemic be taken out of the hands of our political ballerinas, with their vested interests, and full control be given to those experts in this field, the scientific and medical specialists, whose only priority is the welfare and health of the population, and not tainted by the neo-liberaism, greed driven political shenanigans, of those steeped in their own selfish ideology of, profit and economy are sacred. 

 

     While all this duplicity is going on, the masters of capitalism seem to have forgotten their own rules. You start a business and exploit others to get rich, that's success, if your business can't make money you go bust. However, now that some of the big boys are losing money, then you don't go bust, your raise the sacred image of the economy and wave it in front of every bodies eyes and forecast doom for all. That means it is now time for the taxpayers to pour billions into the corporate coffers to keep them in the style to which they have become accustomed. Again I will repeat, screw the economy, and let them go bust. If what they do is essential to the welfare of the people, than take it into public ownership, and let the shareholders an CEO sign on at the local jobcentre. You know it makes sense, so what are we waiting for?

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

   "EXTREMISTS" AND UNIVERSITIES. 

       Recently the Cameron/Clegg millionaire cabal have been shouting there mouths off about universities not doing enough to crack down on extremists. To most people in this country, this is interpreted as meaning violent Muslim extremists, but however that is not how it will unfold. It will encompass all “extremists” as defined by that narrow band of pro-establishment public school thugs. If you advocate radical change to society away from the profit motive and towards a sustainable, needs based society, you no doubt will come under the heading of “extremist”. We should be very vigilant when we hear those in power talking about clamping down on “extremists”. Who draws the line between acceptable view and “extremist”, how narrow should acceptable be defined?

ACCEPTABLE AND UNACCEPTABLE EXTREMISTS???

 

       The other point that is very important, is that if universities are suppose to be at the cutting edge of research in all fields, how do you do that if you exclude those views that don't fit the mainstream acceptable views of the establishment. In forbidding “extremist” views, you neuter any debate and confine it sterile ground and the future is barren. Of course for a number of years universities have been moving away from that position of, the centres of cutting edge debate and research and moving towards being factories that turn out units needed for “the economy” (big business).

       If your accepted ideas can't hold up in open debate, and to defend them you ban all those who disagree with those ideas, then I believe you are an “extremist”. Then we already know that the Cameron/Clegg millionaire cabal and their cohorts are indeed, right wing “extremists”.

 

 

 

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