Sunday, December 18, 2022

The news that not every UC graduate student who went on strike is thrilled about the “breakthrough” tentative agreement hardly comes as a surprise to me. As I said in my last post, I was hoping that some graduate students would take a close look at the fine print of the proposed contract and realize that just because their union’s leadership claims that the new contract represents an “historic” moment in the labor done in the education industry, they must accept what they’ve been offered.

I hope that the vote is close enough to send a message to the union’s leadership that next time they had better do a better job negotiating on behalf of those they represent.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-18/dissension-brews-among-striking-uc-graduate-student-union-members-over-tentative-agreement

Dissension brews among striking UC union members over tentative agreement
By Teresa Watanabe. Staff Writer Dec. 18, 2022 5 AM PT

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-18/dissension-brews-among-striking-uc-graduate-student-union-members-over-tentative-agreement

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16

The L.A. Times and the Long Beach Press-Telegram have reported that the grad students who are striking at the University of California will vote next week on whether to accept a tentative agreement in which they would get less than half of what they were demanding when they went on strike. My guess is that the agreement will be confirmed. I also bet that those who urge the students to accept this agreement won’t point out how inflation by the year 2025 (when the agreement expires) will eat into around 15 percent of these gains. The raise the strike has won is significant, but it would only truly be meaningful if it were tied to the rate of inflation.

The lack of any accountability for inflation in the contract the California Faculty Association agreed to is what makes the contract recently agreed to so disheartening. As I noted back when the CFA held a binding referendum on that “team-friendly” contract, I voted “no,” and one of the reasons is that I knew the professors could have gotten more if we had first demanded arbitration and then voted to strike. The union’s betrayal of those who were planning on retirement in the next three years was especially egregious.

I applaud the grad students for this minor victory, but if they continued the strike and demanded an inflation adjustment clause, I would applaud them ever more fervently.

Onward!

Striking workers reach tentative deal with UC

Monday, December 5, 2022

Donald Trump’s latest example of J.L. Austin’s “speech act theory” showed up on Twitter the other day as a self-fulfilling Q&A:

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“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!
10,987 Reposts 30, 444 likes

7:41 a.m. December 4, 2022

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Trump’s claim of “fraud” is based on Twitter’s refusal in 2020 to condone a misinformation campaign about a laptop owned by President Biden’s son, Hunter.

Debating with someone who is delusional risks succumbing to a fool’s errand, and yet Mr. Trump came perilously close to having his followers succeed in an insurrection against the Constitution of the United States a mere two years ago, so one must address this latest attempt to instigate rebellion.

It is almost infinitely unlikely that Mr. Trump would be able to perceive the contradictions in his statement, but let us humor a madman for a moment. Assuming that over 81,000,000 voters are willing to hand over the White House to someone who only got slightly over 74,000,000 rates, what exactly does Mr. Trump think will be the first thing he will be asked to do? He would be expected to place his hand on a Bible and say, “”I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Of course, maybe he’s planning to revise that oath: “”I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States to the best of my ability.” As in the days of telegram: STOP.

Perhaps Kevin McCarthy should shore up his chances of being elected Speaker of the House by promising to introduce a bill revising the oath of office as his first bit of business? After all, what’s the point of the last ten words of the current oath of office if it has been eviscerated by a man who cannot seem to remember that he himself suppressed information in the 2016 election? Did Donald Trump not have his lawyer convey “hush money” to an actress named Stormy Daniels? What was the point of that “hush money” if not to deceive the electorate? By Trump’s logic, should not an entirely new election have been immediately held, with that knowledge included in the discussion of the public sphere? How likely is it that a “new” election in December, 2016, would have resulted not just in Hillary Clinton once again winning the popular vote, but scoring a massive electoral college victory?

The saddest part of all this reprehensible behavior on the part of Mr. Trump is that there will be a new election in 2024 and that several million people will vote for him in primaries held to determine the final candidates for the office of the President of the United States in a term to begin in 2025. The question of the wording of the oath of office on January 20, 2025 remains up to debate. The “loose ball” theory of speech acts is bouncing higher than ever.

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

I remember a Major League Baseball season where the unthinkable happened: the World Series was cancelled because of a players’ strike.

I believe that final exams are scheduled to start this coming Saturday, December 3, at UC San Diego. Will they be cancelled if the strike is not settled soon? Even if it were settled tonight, what kind of exam could be given that would be fair to students?

My sympathies are with the grad students. I worked as a teaching assistant at UC San Diego between 1997 and 2004. I also graded huge stacks of papers for large sections of other classes, too. Dr. Stephen Potts, who taught a class in adolescent literature on a regular basis, was one of the professors who provided me a way to make a little extra money. I needed that extra money because T.A.s were paid a pittance for the work they did, which was considered 50 percent employment by UCSD, while working as a grader was considered a 25 percent increment in one’s work load. I was supposed to be working on my dissertation as much as possible, but in reality the dissertation took a back seat to work that was very underpaid and always demanding my immediate attention.

I recollect that about twenty years ago the graduate students formed a union and threatened a strike, but a new contract was negotiated before anybody had to walk off the job. I’m glad I wasn’t faced with a choice about crossing picket-lines because I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the leadership of the union and its failure to communicate with rank and file members. It’s hard to feel solidarity when you feel disrespected by your own leadership. There was no sense of anyone in charge of the union being willing to listen to its membership.

Despite my lingering skepticism that anything has changed in the union’s culture, I’m pleased to see that the union is finally holding the chancellor’s feet to the fire. This is week three of the largest academic strike to ever take place in the United States. The California Faculty Association (CFA), the union I used to belong to at CSU Long Beach, could learn a few things about how to improve the economic conditions of its membership. Instead, as I pointed out in a blog post several months ago, the union went for a quick deal and a token raise, which has since been obliterated by inflationary pressures. Essentially, we ended up with a pay cut.

In the meantime, at least, I am somewhat consoled by the knowledge that younger academic workers are not backing down or settling for a token improvement in their conditions.

Onward!

“President Drake, it’s getting late, UC needs to negotiate.”

UAW Strike Enters Third Week: UC Responses, Negotiation Updates, and A.S. Support

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Hundreds-of-striking-UC-student-educators-17617082.php

The “Silver Lining” to the War in the Ukraine

I suppose there are situations in which no one benefits, but the horror in the Ukraine is not one of them. One would think by now that the James Bond film franchise would have reached its limits of enduring popularity, but Bond appears to be on a roll that will exceed even the longevity of The Rolling Stones.

Come to think of it, that might be a potential in-joke down the line. Whoever the next Bond is finds himself (or herself — “Bond. Jessica Bond.”) stalking a villain who has purchased choice aisle seats near the front row to enjoy the umpteenth live performance of “Sympathy for the Devil.” As Bond works his way through the crowd, as the culmination of yet another spectacular chase scene, the audience includes quarter-second glimpses of all the living actors who have played Bond enjoying the show.

In any case, both the novels of John LeCarre and the James Bond franchise will benefit from Vladimir Putin’s nefarious endeavors in the Ukraine, which hasn’t exactly gone according to plan in the past nine months.

Hollywood’s facsimile empire aside, the war between Russia and Ukraine is a catastrophic policy decision on Putin’s part. There is no chance of long-term domination of Ukraine as a subjected country in a new Cold War. Nevertheless, Putin will fight on, even as a certain Tsar refused to concede during the Russo-Hapanse war of 1904-1905. Putin may manage to regroup during the coming winter and even gain the upper hand in Ukraine, but what Europe and the United States, and China, too, have learned about Russia’s military capacities will profoundly affect the next quarter century of global power struggles.

The Ukraine War is merely the opening act of a massive “skirmish” over nascent polar naval routes as the North Pole’s ice cap shrinks. Bond has never had an “adventure” at the “top” of the world. Get your parkas out before you head to the movie theater. It will be a chilly evening out.

Sunday, November 6, 2022

“Daylight Savings and Loan” filed its annual bankruptcy papers this weekend. “Fall back an hour.” Supposedly a rainstorm is on its way from Northern California to celebrate the shift to the sky going dark at 5 p.m. This is a bit early in the rainy season in Southern California to get a big storm, but this could mean that November is taking the place of December last year, after which things went dry and the reservoir levels began to get drastically low. Just knowing that rain is on the way put me in the mood to read something both entertaining and well written. I’ve heard that my colleague Charles Webb had a novel published by Red Hen a few months ago, but I’ve been too busy with various projects to go online and order a copy.

Fortunately, my mailbox contained a surprise a week or so ago: a novella (in a bilingual edition of German and English!) by Michael Meloan that is one of the most satisfying reading experiences I’ve had in recent years, in part because it handles a famous writer (Charles Bukowski) being one of its major characters with nonchalant deftness. It’s hard to classify Meloan’s slightly picaresque story, which is one of the things that makes it such a pleasure to read. Can a portion of it be read as a satire of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49? Meloan’s HighFrontier is certainly more believable as a send-up of Pentagon outsourcing. Of course, maybe I need to revisit the purlieu of Yoyodyne before passing judgement! It’s been a dozen years since I’ve been on their premises (in the full sense of that word), and maybe I’m a little too enchanted with Meloan’s protagonist, Ralph Hargraves, the first computer programmer narrator that I’ve ever found complex enough to care about his fate. In any case, Meloan has a gift for writing an unapologetically masculine prose that isn’t worried about how well it looks in the mirror. It’s flavorful without being exotic, and it doesn’t hurt that he has a fine ear for dialogue. He also keeps the backdrop of specific neighborhoods and locales in Los Angeles well in focus as the characters bicker, quarrel, and placate one another. My only quibble is that he spells “Marina del Rey” with a capital “D.” I suppose I could go through it with a felt tip pen and correct it myself when I read it a second time, which unlike most books I pick up I will most certainly do at some point in the near future.

Saturday, October 29, 2022

About ten days ago, I received a short note from Quentin Ring, the executive director at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, in Venice, that the National Poetry Coalition was convening in Long Beach this weekend and that a poetry reading was being held to celebrate the occasion. What exactly the “convening” entails or how it might connect to Long Beach and its long history of poetry scenes is not mentioned anywhere that I can locate.

The poetry reading tonight is free and is taking place outdoors.

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https://www.eventbrite.com/e/coalescence-a-poetry-reading-in-long-beach-tickets-443739465687

COALESCENCE: A Poetry Reading in Long Beach

“A poetry reading welcoming the National Poetry Coalition to Long Beach with Harryette Mullen, Peter J. Harris, Cathy Linh Che, and Jessica Kim.”

Welcoming the National Poetry Coalition to Long Beach

Saturday, October 29
7:00 p.m.
THE HUB
100 W. Broadway
Long Beach, CA 90802
Doors open: 6:30 p.m.