Labor Struggle in Higher Ed: An Update from Loyola University Chicago SEIU 73 Faculty Forward Union

Everyone okay out there? Have you laid in a supply of necessities, just in case of disaster? All of us here in LA have earthquake bags filled with things that might be in short supply in an emergency: fresh water, water purifiers, first aid kit, matches, dry goods, abortion rights, voting rights, police accountability. The recent earthquake in Morocco, which killed about 3000 by current count as of this writing, brought all this to mind.

Ouarzazate City, if you can call it a city, is the capital of Ouarzazate Province in Morocco. The province is part of the area that most suffered destruction from the earthquake, though less so than neighboring al-Haouz Province, in which the epicenter in the High Atlas Mountains was located. I spent about a month in Ouarzazate thirty-four years ago. These are some memories.

Preceding that I enjoyed my set up in Marrakesh: a rundown shack on the rooftop of a two-story apartment building off Marrakesh’s Jemaa el Fna, run by a matriarch named Mina, which turned out to be a common name for Moroccan matriarchs. But a few annoying run-ins with locals, cops, and, worst of all, tourists led me to seek a less trafficked home base. This was one of those weird years when the Hijri calendar landed the beginning of Ramadan in early April, so I’d already endured a week and a half of the Islamic Holy Month and its effects on Moroccan psyches. Laborers in Marrakesh abstained from food and water from sunup to sundown, and from sex, alcohol, and tobacco all month, around the clock. Not a recipe for a contented working class in a busy city.

I decided to go southwest, over the High Atlas Mountain range, into the Sahara to Ouarzazate. I was told it was far less touristed there and very quiet. In Ouarzazate, the pace of life was supposed to be much more relaxed. Farmers walked almost imperceptibly slowly as they tended their fields. Most of the other business in town took place out of the sun, in shops, cafes, or administrative offices.

It was the year 1989. I arrived in Ouarzazate in mid-April. When I got to town I was immediately greeted by a friendly man who wanted to know where I was from, where I was staying, what was my good name, and what I planned to do there. I had often been greeted this way, and to my surprise it was rarely because anyone had something they wanted to sell me. They might of course have a relationship with a small hotel or... read more

Garbage seems to follow me everywhere. When you wash your shirt with some weird-colored cocktail napkin in the pocket, and for the next week you find little magenta dreadlocks in different pants pockets and socks. It’s the sneaky rightwing libertarian agenda disguised as neutrality and objectivity. And it is an infestation of crawling, nibbling, chittering vermin.

I started writing SuperTruth® items for this show as a way to comment on the mishmash of half-truths, misleading distortions, and flat out lies that have become the cultural currency of the steroidally pro-capitalist, regressive “sovereign citizen” movement. This movement, by my mapping, has given us such malignancies as anti-union Right to Work laws, the Clinton deregulation of media trusts, and the Tea Party lunatics, which have bled into diverse policy failures like Obama’s refusal to put a public option to health insurance on the table, usurious credit card interest rates, and the Golem of securities-dicing and debt-bundling which, joined with lax rules on bank capitalization, led directly to the cratering of the global economy in 2008. It’s the neoliberal discourse I’ve been fighting against since Chuck first asked me onto This Is Hell!

But I have to admit failure. I have failed in the sense that a drowning man fails to swim. In the sense that a prophet being burned as a heretic has failed to smoke a pipe or grill a hot dog. I am overwhelmed. The liars are too numerous and duplicitous for me to keep up with anymore.

Beware libertarian think tanks. They skew to the right. And many such larvae have hatched out of the nationalist anti-progressive movement that got Q-pilled and Trump-pilled in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic response.

Beware of new think tanks swarming from stagnant breeding ponds such as The Brownstone Institute, founded and populated by the framers of the Great Barrington Declaration, that screwball screed against the institutions struggling to manage a public health crisis after Donald Trump discarded the Obama Administration’s methodically developed pandemic response playbook. Trump is such an infantile character that he made it his mission to destroy anything with Obama cooties on it. The results of the orange windbag’s scorched earth policy toward Obama’s fingerprints were catastrophic for the public. The worst Covid case and... read more