Students vs. Regents of University of California

The University of California's governing Regents' meeting this Monday was interrupted by protesting students against ever rising tuition and fees. 

The SFGate.com reported that 

Hundreds of students and faculty members chanted and shouted so loudly at a number of UC Board of Regents meetings Monday that the university officials had to move to different rooms to take up their business, including voting to ask the state for millions of dollars in new funding.

UC Berkeley social policy graduate student Megan Wachspress, 27, said the regents are part of the problem.
"We need to find a new way to pick regents," she said at the Mission Bay campus. "So many of them have conflicts of interest. They're on the boards of corporations. They belong to groups that oppose tax increases, and they keep raising the pay for top administrators."

Lawmakers have cut hundreds of millions of dollars from UC's state allocation over the past few years, including $650 million this year alone. Another $100 million could be cut this winter if state revenues fall short as expected.
At the same time, the regents have raised tuition and fees annually since 2006, when they totaled $8,323. Tuition and fees this year amount to $13,218.

UC President Mark Yudof said afterward in San Francisco that he sympathized with the protesters' plight.

"I wish they wouldn't interrupt a public meeting," he said, but added "the students have taken it on the chin for the past decade ... I definitely understand the students' position."

However, he and several regents said - reiterating what they have said before - students should direct their efforts to restore funding to higher education at state leadership in Sacramento rather than at UC's administrators.

It is understandable that UC's administrators were just as frustrated and upset as the student when the State has failed them repeatedly.

However, UC Regent's plea for the students to protest at the door step of the state legislators instead of their schools sounded rather like shrugging their collective shoulders.

The students live and study around their campuses and they should have the right to speak out and protest in their home turf.  It was the Regents who imposed the fee and tuition hikes, and they have the right to protest against the Regents.

In turn, if the Regents feel the urgency and the pain the students are suffering from, they ought to camping out in Sacramento themselves, and demand tax increase from the super rich, the rich and even the middle class to support our once great educational systems in California.  Our Regents ought to occupy Sacramento themselves.

Perhaps, Wachspress hit the nail on the head.  If our Regents could or would not fight to solve the problems, then they are part of the problems.  Then they ought to be replaced.

Military Budget Cuts

President Obama makes a statement at the White
House afterthe congressional debt supercommittee
failed to reachan agreement. Photograph: Pablo
Martinez Monsivais/AP- via Guardian.co.uk

Apparently, the ill-conceived "Super Committee" is to fail to reach budgetary compromise and that would automatically trigger a huge cut - read, cut only, no tax increases - including military cuts, the only incentive for the Republican to compromise in the whole "Super Committee" enterprise.

With the cuts looming, guess what, the Republicans are trying to take that cut out of the whole deal and President Obama has voiced his strong opposition.

If the Republicans are so concerned with the military budget cuts, they could have prevented it by compromise on tax increases in the "Super Committee".  Failing that, if they really want to prevent the military budget cut, they can try to negotiate with tax increases to offset all those agreed upon military budget cuts.

After all, our nation's huge military spending, is largely to protect the commercial interests of large corporations and the super-rich.  The Republicans love to lecture people that there is no free lunch.  Suck it up then!

Occupy Wall Street and Super Committee

There are many charges against the movement of "Occupy Wall Street" and one of the major one is that the movement lacks a clear and executable agenda.

Due to the democratic nature the movement, it is inevitable that there have been many ideas floating about without a central core but it is indeed high time for ideas and organizations to congeal and make a clear, reasonable and executable demand.

As this nation is in a crucial juncture, it is disheartening to see that President Obama once again, sits on his hands, and let the so called congressional super committee to come up of a scheme to cut the deficit and put it for a vote in the congress; and if the plan failed to pass, an automatic drastic budgetary cut would be enforced.  How brilliant this idea is.  Since the result of failing to pass any plan the "Super Committee" might put forth is a large budget cut, the Republicans - who have been calling to starve the beast (government) for decades - have all the incentives not to pass any plan.

Since the ill conceived and all powerful "Super Committee" is to dictate the direction of the nation for a long time to come, it is vital for the "Occupy Wall Street" to demand to scrap such "Super Committee".  I call it "ill conceived" because it didn't demand an automatic tax increase on certain group (along side with some large budgetary cuts), therefore creating a balanced incentives for both leading political parties to reach an agreement.

Without that threat of automatic tax increases, it is a good bet that the consequence of any plan from such "Super Committee", or the failure to pass such plan, would only exacerbate the bottom 90% or 99% of the population, meanwhile protecting those on top, sitting on piles of gold and refusing to lift a finger to help the underprivileged and the nation they claim that they love, and the nation has done so much for them - deregulation and tax cuts after tax cuts and still more to come.

To replace such an ill-conceived super committee, the movement of Occupy Wall Street ought to demand a new committee, seating people from all economic spectrum, in proportion to the demographics, so as to come up with a plan to reduce deficit and correct the income inequality, and then put the plan to a national referendum, instead of a congressional horse trading.

President Obama, it's high time for you to lead and please lend your support to Occupy Wall Street.

Domesticity © Matthew Felix Sun

Note: Below is National Public Radio (NPR)'s summary of the Super Committee:

How Super Is The Deficit-Cutting Committee? Twelve lawmakers. More than $1 trillion to shave off the deficit. One Thanksgiving deadline. Can they do it?

The debt-ceiling deal struck this summer created a panel of six Republicans and six Democrats — dubbed the "supercommittee" — to find ways to reduce the deficit. If they can't, "sequestration" — a slew of automatic spending cuts — kicks in. While there are high hopes in Washington for the committee's success, skeptics have trouble seeing how the chosen lawmakers will navigate around the main sticking points: Democrats seem set on protecting Medicare and Medicaid and see increasing revenues as essential.  Republicans would prefer to lower taxes if anything and want to make cuts to the big entitlement programs.