———- Forwarded message ———-
From: LRDP-Resistance Media
Date: Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 10:44 AM
Subject: [counterlrdpcoalition] From the UCSC Tree Sit: Statement on Feb. 24 Incident

To all those concerned,

As you may have heard, on February 24th, some kind of protest took place at the home of a UCSC researcher who experiments on animals. Hyped-up news articles and administrative messages on campus have led
some people to associate this protest with the Tree-Sit on Science Hill. We wish to take this opportunity to make it clear that the tree-sit is NOT affiliated.

The tree-sit uses civil disobedience as a way of drawing attention to the issues of expansion, and physically preventing trees from being cut down. While many of us are concerned with the University’s plan to replace animal habitats with animal testing facilities, we are focusing on the long term impacts that the university’s planned construction will have on life in Santa Cruz and the forest in upper campus.

Yours in resistance,
Science Hill tree-sit organizers and supporters

Thank you for this clarification. I look forward to seeing a public condemnation of the events that took place on the 24th from you, preferably with a list of names of people for whom you are speaking.

Dave Kliger

Dave,
Thank you for your comment. I will pass on your gratitude to the people who wrote the statement, as well as your suggestion. In the mean time, I look forward to seeing the University administration publicly condemn the use of pepper spray, pressure point pain-compliance, and baton-beating used by the UC Police against non-violent campus protests since 2005, preferably with a list of the law enforcement officers involved in those events.

Jennifer Charles

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

Since beginning its campaign against college students in February, the RIAA has sent out 4,157 prelitigation settlement letters to 160 different schools in ten separate waves.

The schools targeted run the gamut. There are large state schools like Ohio State University, the University of Texas - Austin, and the University of Tennessee. There are also a handful of small liberal arts colleges on the list, including Swarthmore College, evangelical Christian school Bethel University in Minnesota, Gettysburg College, and Carleton College. And the elite schools in the US are well represented, too: Stanford, Northwestern, MIT, and the aforementioned Ivy League schools have all received missives from the RIAA. But not Harvard.

There may be another factor at work here: hostility towards the RIAA’s campaign on the part of Harvard Law School professors Charles Nesson and John Palfrey, who run the law school’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Responding to the RIAA’s claim that its litigation strategy has “invigorated a meaningful conversation on college campuses about music theft, its consequences and the numerous ways to enjoy legal music,” the profs called on Harvard to not betray the “trust and privacy” of its students.

“The university has no legal obligation to deliver the RIAA’s messages. It should do so only if it believes that’s consonant with the university’s mission,” wrote Nesson and Palfrey. “[The RIAA seems] to be engaging in a classic tactic of the bully facing someone much weaker: threatening such dire consequences that the students settle without the issue going to court. The issue is that the university should not be carrying the industry’s water in bringing lawsuits.”

Should the RIAA decide to send prelitigation settlement letters to Harvard, chances are good that 1) the letters will not be passed on, and 2) some of the best and brightest at Harvard Law School will get involved in a big way. That doesn’t look too appealing, especially when the campaign isn’t going as smoothly as the RIAA would like.

Sen. John McCain, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Giuliani all stressed support for the war, at times even competing to show their commitment. “The surge is apparently working,” said Romney, referring to the increase in troops. That brought an instant rebuke from McCain, who said, “The surge is working, sir, no, not apparently. It’s working.”

Alone among the contenders, Paul, a veteran Texas congressman with a libertarian streak, made the case for withdrawing troops. That drew a sharp challenge from Chris Wallace, one of the debate questioners, who asked whether the United States should take its marching orders from al-Qaida.
“No! We should take our marching orders from our Constitution,” Paul shouted back, pointing his pen at Wallace for emphasis. “We should not go to war without a declaration” by Congress. Occasionally interrupted by applause, Paul doggedly stuck to his point. “We have lost over 5,000 Americans over there in Afghanistan, in Iraq and plus the civilians killed,” he said during his exchange with Huckabee. “How long — what do we have to pay to save face? That’s all we’re doing, is saving face. It’s time we came home,” Paul said.

The dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had counseled students applying to colleges not to try to “measure up to everybody else’s standards,†resigned from her post today after acknowledging that she had padded her own résumé.