>Listen to the full podcast here<

RMIT students and staff started Blazing Textbooks in 2007 in response to anti-student union legislation. We saw this as a political attack on the radical voices coming out of student organisations, and vowed we wouldn’t let the bastards shut us up!

So we began on the 1st of December 2007 with a feature on the complexity of teaching issues of sexual assault —to coincide with the International Day of Action for Community Responses to Sexual Assault. Since then we’ve covered a whole range of issues, including radical alternatives to institutions like universities, Youth Allowance dramas, the exploitation of international students, the state of student unions, the hidden links between universities and the nuclear industry, student strikes overseas, and pretty much anything else you can imagine that’s related to education, learning, and students anywhere in the world.

We’d like to thank everyone who has been involved or helped out with the show over the years, presenters, guests, 3CR (a big big big thankyou) and YOU the listener!

>To listen to an archive of recent shows, check out our podcasts<

Happy birthday to us!

This week James and Sharne provide an update on what’s been happening with Occupy Melbourne since the eviction of 21/10, and OM’s upcoming events, including a public forum in the Treasury Gardens on 2pm, Sunday 6/11, by the Melbourne Free University on ‘What would happen if education was free?’. James reports on Occupy San Fransisco’s call out for a rally in support of free higher education in response to further planned funding cuts and education privatisation in California. And Sharne gives the run-down on Noam Chomsky’s talk in Melbourne on 4/11 on US power in the 20th Century, as well as the awkward introduction by his hosts from brand-Deakin University. Listen in at: http://www.3cr.org.au/podcast

As the waves of shocks and crises in the global capitalist system have moved closer and closer to the core zones of the global economy in recent decades of global neoliberalism, the answer to ‘shock capitalism’ has finally landed in the core: a nascent movement against the power of capital has sprung up in what many people see as the core of the global financial system, Wall Street.

We are witnessing the birth of a new social movement that is charged with potential, inspired by new forms of solidarity and unity based around the notion that ‘we are the 99%’ and it is the 1% who control and dominate us, our communities and our supposed democracies. People are becoming inspired to unite, form new alliances, bridge differences and find strength in what unites us against a common enemy.

In this context, Naomi Klein – famous for her involvement in the 90s global anti-corporate movement and her groundbreaking works No Logo and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism – visited the protestors in Wall Street to speak to them about what they are doing right this time around.

Klein was also interviewed recently for Democracy Now where she drew parallels between the Chilean student movement and the nascent, emergent movement we are now witnessing. And we are witnessing this not just in Wall Street, but in hundreds of other cities across the USA, and other continents including Australia, where a handful of solidarity Occupy actions are scheduled to kick off on a global day of solidarity next Saturday, 15 October.

The Chilean student movement is holding strong five months since students across the country first launched their broad-platform, national campaign for a free, quality public education system for all but also for the structural and economic transformations to Chile’s political-economy that would help bring about their vision. At the crux of the new national conversation these empowered and organised Chilean students have brought a profound questioning of the logic of neoliberalism to the fore of their country’s consciousness. They have managed to universalise what conservative forces would seek to isolate as a ‘specialist’ issue, and garnered the support of the Chilean people behind their cause. Their cause – of this the vast majority of the Chilean people are certain – is the cause of everyone. It is the cause of all humans.

While there has been a lot of attention paid to the dramatic and at times violent student protests and marches (violent thanks to police repression, mandated by a government which at the same time claims to be negotiating with students and singing praise for student dissent on the global stage) this campaign has also been heavily characterised by strikes and school occupations which have paralysed the Chilean education system for the year. The students – like Occupy Wall Street is now doing – have been targeting their actions not just on building awareness, solidarity and generating a conversation but also on the very material basis of the prevailing order.

One amazing example is of the students from one of Chile’s most prestigious girls’ schools Carmela Carvajal, who have barricaded themselves inside for 5 months now after their first democratic decision to occupy and withstood countless attempts at repression by the authorities by organising and utilising the resources of allies that they have built around their cause.

So it is that #occupy now becomes a theme that unites the students of Chile with not only students all around the world tired of an education system that is instrumentalised to service the capitalist economy and a non-unionised labor market increasingly devoid of opportunities for a secure future, but also with people and communities tired of the corporate interests of the 1% dominating the 99%.

‘Student leaders’ met with the government on Wednesday in Chile for another round of negotiations but with the government still fundamentally committed to an ideology of profit that contradicts the will of the people, it would be foolish to think that negotiation is going to result in the lasting, fundamental change that Chile has been clamouring for.

With calls for global solidarity actions against neoliberalism in education policy in mid-November through the International Student Movement platform we are inspired, energised and hopeful about the global moment we are all living. We hope that students of Chile and the world find a way to #ocupyeducation and connect their struggle with what is currently spreading from Wall Street throughought the world.

Keep up with the campaign at ballertmooroop.org and look out for the fundraiser gig coming up at UC Hall in Northcote Fri 16th September with Kutcha Edwards.

And check out the podcast at: http://www.3cr.org.au/podcast

Morrissey article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/sep/03/morrissey-race-taboos-tom-clark

<– morrissey article

on chimps:

http://www.theage.com.au/world/in-science-v-ethics-its-the-chimps-in-the-sandwich-20100902-14rlz.html

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-alamogordo-chimps-20100903,0,5905193.story
<– la times article on animal testing

on Peta

http://vegansagainstpeta.blogspot.com/ <– vegans against peta
http://vegansofcolor.wordpress.com/ <<– anti-racist vegans

Thanks to Douglas Leith for the following links on animal testing:

‘A critical look at animal testing’ – http://mrmcmed.org/Critcv.html

Humane Research Australia

http://www.aahr.org.au/index.html

And links to the music of “The Thaw” – whose tracks ‘Bovine University’ and ‘This is your bystanding deffect’ we played on the show:

more info at http://migrantlaw.blogspot.com

www.abc.net.au/am/content/2010/s2843775.htm

Controversy has erupted throughout the USA after a raqcist email written by 3rd year Harvard Law student Stephanie Grace went viral. The letter attempts to argue for a genetic basis for intelligence and suggests white people may be moe intelligent than African Americans. On the show we investigated a series of similar scenarios at Harvard University. Including the suggestion by Larry Summer, president of the University in 2005, that women were not as good at the hard sciences. In 1994 ‘The Bell Curve,’  a book which argues for intelligence as genetically heritable and inscribes it into the category of race, was published by two Harvard psychologists.  On Blazingtextbooks this history prompted a discussion of how the position of the scientific expert, the rhetoric of rigorous research and the sanctity of the elite academic institution can be used to smoothly articulate racist and sexist claims.

if you can bear it check out Stephanie Grace’s full email  at http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/04/30/042010_original_email_harvard_law/

a really interesting intervention into the debate from Harvard graduate and rad feminist can be found at http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2010/04/30/the-racist-breeding-grounds-of-harvard-law-school/

creation+destruction skillshares forum

the full manifesto

email createanddestroyskills@gmail.com

we also heard music from Chilean girl hip hop star DADAYU with sokio!   dadayu on myspace seriously she sounds SO GOOD, check it out

++ what’s on this weekend!

the “I am an international student” exhibition by may song closes on 5pm saturday!  the exhibition.  it’s at first site gallery, rmit swanston st campus.

sunday is the “Where the Wild Things Are” forests fundraiser!  it’s a mini-festival from 4pm till late

sunday is also anzac day.  we invite you to join us in taking a minute’s silence for women victims of war crimes.  sexual assault and other forms of violence against women are a strategy of war that is often swept under the rug.  they are not just part of the “fog of war”, but are intentionally used to break down resistance.

on tuesday the 27th of april, you should head down to the “What’s Wrong With Anzac?” forum at New International Bookshop in the Victorian Trades Hall, featuring Marilyn Lake and Joy Damous.  “What’s Wrong With Anzac” is a new book being brought out by Lake and Damousi (as well as two other historians, Henry Reynolds and Mark McKenna) that questions the militarisation of Australian history.  6:30-8:30 pm, free.