Student activists are preparing for the biggest wave of university rent strikes in four decades amid growing frustration at heavy-handed hall lockdowns, the prospect of paying for empty rooms and little face-to-face teaching when they eventually return in the new year.
There are at least 20 rent strikes currently under way or being organised on campuses, with activists at both Oxford and Sussex universities this week signing up hundreds of students ahead of the new term. Other institutions also preparing action include Goldsmiths, University of London, and Edinburgh and Cambridge universities.
Matthew Lee from Rent Strike, a grassroots group that is coordinating many of the campaigns, said students were fed up with being treated as cash cows for universities, especially in the midst of a pandemic when in-person teaching and campus life was so limited. “This is the biggest wave of student renter militancy in over 40 years,” said Lee. “The last time there was resistance on this scale was in the mid-1970s.”
Activists across the country are hoping to emulate a successful mass rent strike at Manchester University, which last month led it to cut rent in its halls by 30% for this term. However, the first-year students, who organised the campaign, are determined to join other universities to force rent cuts for the rest of the academic year.
The number of students pledging to withhold rent has tripled, with almost 600 ready to strike in January.
“We are going to keep withholding our rent,” said Ben McGowan, one of the Manchester organisers, who hasn’t had any real face-to-face teaching yet. “And we are helping other universities set up their own strikes because every student in the country deserves a rent cut.”
The movement in the city has been growing since hundreds of hall residents tore down fences erected to prevent them moving freely around the campus last month, intended, according to the university, as means to stop the spread of the virus.
McGowan said students are expecting rent cuts to cover the government’s staggered return, which will see students on non-practical courses come back across a five-week period. “Students should not be paying for halls when they are not there,” he said.
Nearly 200 students have pledged to withhold their rent in Sussex. “In 24 hours, we got 198 names,” said Ellie Concannon from Sussex Renters Union. “Students are getting desperate because money is going to very tight over the Christmas period.”
President Trump wants to ensure his pro-corporation, anti-environmentalist, climate change-denying legacy before President-elect Biden is inaugurated and is making moves to allow mining of natural resources on federally-protected lands, the New York Times‘ Eric Lipton reports.
In his last days in office, Trump is moving forward on projects in numerous states that would grant energy firms access to lands that were previously off limits.
One project in Arizona would transfer federally-protected forest land to build a gigantic copper mine. Local Apache tribes considered the land chosen for the project as sacred, as they believe it is “a place of profound religious, spiritual, and cultural importance,” accordinng to the National Register of Historic Places.
In Twin Bridges, located in Utah, the Trump administration wants to open up wilderness land for a helium drilling project. A coalition of environmental groups is now suing the administration to block leasing of the land to a drilling company.
“It’s truly stunning how brazen the Trump administration has been these past four years in serving up our pristine, iconic landscapes to industry,” Josh Axelrod, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Salt Lake Tribune. “Its race to secure this project’s approval for the helium industry’s benefit is flatly illegal, and we’ll defend this special area at every turn.”
Another project in northern Nevada, which is close to obtaining final approval, is planned to build an open-pit lithium mine near the site of a prehistoric volcano. And the administration wants to build a natural gas pipeline through Jefferson National Forest in Virginia.
And there are more, including a uranium mine in South Dakota. The Oglala Lakota Nation is suing to stop that from moving forward, as they claim the land was illegally taken from the Sioux tribe by the United States government.
Signaling he will move in a different direction, Biden has selected Native American Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) as his Interior Secretary nominee. And thankfully, Biden will have the power to stop at least some of the Trump administration’s last-minute attempts. But, the Times reports, other projects like the Nevada lithium mine might not be reversible.
While in office, Trump has all but declared war on our public protected lands, shrinking national parks by record amounts. As a former San Carlos Apache tribal leader told the Times of the Arizona copper mine project, “This is a disaster.”
A second lawyer heading up Donald Trump’s legal challenge to the election has tested positive for coronavirus, according to multiple reports, two days after his lead lawyer Rudy Giuliani was taken to hospital with Covid.
Jenna Ellis, 36, has spent the past few weeks criss-crossing the country with Mr Giuliani, 76.
Both are almost invariably without face masks, indoors for hours on end at hearings claiming election fraud.
Last week they were in Arizona on Monday and Tuesday, Michigan on Wednesday and Georgia on Thursday.
On Friday night she was at an East Wing Christmas party, Axios reported, giving rise to fears that yet another “super spreader event” would be traced back to the White House.
So far around 60 people within the president’s orbit are known to have contracted the virus since October.
Ms Ellis has not confirmed the news, and instead mocked Axios for its reporting. ABC News has also confirmed her diagnosis.
Axios said they gave her ample time to deny their report that she had tested positive.
She reportedly attended the party as a guest of Peter Navarro, the hawkish White House trade advisor.
“She had the nerve to show up at the senior staff Christmas party knowing everyone was furious with her for constantly stirring Trump up with nonsense,” one source told Axios.
Ms Ellis and Mr Giuliani have been noted for their brazen disregard of CDC guidelines.
In Atlanta, Mr Giuliani was pictured hugging supporters and shaking hands in a break from his 11-hour hearing inside a packed room inside the state government.
In Detroit, he asked his first witness, Jessy Jacob, to remove her face mask so that people could hear her better. She refused.
In Phoenix, he spent two days meeting and greeting state politicians. The Arizona state legislature announced on Sunday it was closing for two weeks as a consequence of the possible exposure to Covid.
“A ‘job’ that leaves you homeless & on food stamps isn’t a job. It’s a scam,” she said on Twitter.
Ocasio-Cortez referenced a Bloomberg News report detailing how many Amazon warehouse workers struggle to pay bills, with as many as 4,000 on food stamps.
The report said Amazon has turned logistics work from a professional career option to “entry-level” work for many. As Amazon’s workforce has soared during the pandemic, safety conditions in its warehouses have failed to keep pace, according to the report.
“This is why ‘Amazon jobs’ aren’t it & we should instead focus our public investments + incentives on small businesses, public infrastructure, & worker cooperatives that actually support dignified life,” said Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter.
“Bloomberg’s conclusion is false – it violates over 50 years of economic thought, and suspends the law of supply and demand,” an Amazon representative told Bloomberg.
The daily lives of the workforce in Amazon’s warehouses has long been a point of interest on Capitol Hill. Earlier this month, a group of lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren called for greater transparency into injuries in warehouses.
“We are now at the beginning of another dangerous season for Amazon warehouse workers, and the company’s responses to repeated Congressional inquiries have only escalated our concern about Amazon’s unwillingness to value worker safety above corporate profit,” the group said in a joint statement.
Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
The US National Labor Relations Board this week said it had found merit in the claims that Gerald Bryson, who worked at Amazon’s Staten Island fulfillment center, was fired in retaliation for protesting health and safety policies in the warehouse.
Ocasio-Cortez has taken aim at Amazon repeatedly, often calling into question the amount of corporate tax it pays. Taxes from corporations could help pay for schools, hospitals, and other public infrastructure, she has often said.
In 2019, she called into question why Amazon paid zero in federal income taxes on more than $11 billion in profit.
“Why should corporations that contribute nothing to the pot be in a position to take billions from the public?” she said at the time on Twitter.
In a recent interview with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Mackey said business bosses need to more aggressively push back against progressives’ increasingly popular critiques of capitalism, a system he called “the greatest thing that humanity’s ever created.”
Asked whether the business world’s culture needs to change, the grocery tycoon replied, “It needs to evolve. Otherwise the socialists are going to take over, that’s how I see it. And that’s the path of poverty.”
“They talk about trickle-down wealth, but socialism is trickle-up poverty,” he said. “It just impoverishes everything.”
“We’ve told a bad narrative, and we’ve let the enemies of business and the enemies of capitalism put out a narrative about us that’s wrong, it’s inaccurate and it’s doing tremendous damage to the minds of young people,” Mackey added. “We have to counter that.”
The 67-year-old Whole Foods co-founder made the remarks while promoting his latest book, “Conscious Leadership,” during a Nov. 24 virtual event with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank that supports free-market policies.
Mackey — who was worth more than $75 million when Amazon announced its purchase of Whole Foods in 2017, according to Forbes — complained that entrepreneurs have been “universally vilified” as greedy when many of them start businesses mostly because they’re “passionate about something,” not just to get rich.
While Mackey said some progressive ideas are valuable, he warned that fully rejecting capitalism would cause society and the economy to stall and eventually start to decline.
“Socialism has been tried 42 times in the last hundred years and 42 failures. It doesn’t work,” Mackey said.
“They’re trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle, and if they stuff it back in the bottle, we will stagnate,” he added. “We’ll begin to regress. I’m not saying the whole technological civilization will collapse, but it will not progress and it will begin to stagnate.”
The Republican establishment, despite being unfairly advantaged by the skewed composition of the electoral college, by over-representation in the House due to partisan gerrymandering and in the Senate due to equal State suffrage, has been in no hurry to reject Donald Trump’s ludicrous allegation that the American electoral system is rigged to favor Democrats. Sweating the make-or-break Georgia runoffs, the party’s leaders are apparently frightened to cross the mad king, who owns their voters, lest he cause their ratings to plummet as he is doing with Fox News. But Republican complicity with this unprecedented attack on American democracy is not a matter of short-term expediency or fear of reprisals. It is much worse than that. Mitch McConnell and the others are not merely humoring the president until his mania subsides. Trump’s voters are the Republicans’ voters and the Republican party cannot easily cut them, and their deranged conspiracy theories, loose even after 20 January.
This has important implications for how Biden should respond to the incalculable damage Trump has inflicted on the country, including how his Department of Justice approaches the restoration of the rule of law.
The Republican party is deeply committed to the outrageously tilted playing field that allows a minority of voters to choose a majority of senators and, indirectly, a majority of supreme court justices, not to mention the occasional president as in 2000 and 2016. They are an unabashedly anti-democratic party in that sense alone, even if we set aside their brazen efforts at voter suppression and voter intimidation. This is perhaps the main reason why its leaders have proved so reluctant to dissociate themselves from Trump’s specious allegation that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. They know that the system is rigged. It is rigged to favor Republicans. And they relish not only the irony of Trump’s audacious reversal of the truth, but also the way it distracts attention from the genuinely unconscionable rigging that gives an American minority the power to impose its will on the American majority.
Republican officials are slowly distancing themselves from the embarrassingly delusional president’s refusal to accept the reality of his defeat. But the fact that it is taking them so long reflects a deep truth about the country’s politics, namely that Americans are still fighting the civil war. When Trump and his madcap surrogates cry “voter fraud”, they do not mean fraud in the technical sense of ballot stuffing or the miscounting of legal votes. What they mean is that Democrats have debased the composition of the electorate by making it easier for African Americans in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, the most reliably Democratic voters in the country, to register and vote. Trump would have been elected in a landslide, they imply, if only “real Americans”, meaning exactly who you think, had been allowed to vote.
Nixon’s famous “southern strategy”, crafted with the support of Strom Thurmond, the infamous South Carolina segregationist, suffices to remind us that Republican pandering to white fears of demographic inundation did not begin, and will not end, with Donald Trump. Key to the historical origins of Republican acquiescence in Trump’s efforts to wreck American democracy is his last-ditch and doomed gambit to convince Republican controlled state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to replace the pro-Biden delegates to their state’s electoral college with a pro-Trump slate of electors.
