Many orange ribbons in the
house!
Friday 5/14/10, 7:30 AM -- two groups were assembling before
the commencement ceremony for UC Berkeley Law's Class of 2010.
· Up at the stadium, World Can't Wait was
gathering around a 9-foot mobile "Abu Ghraib prisoner" with UC's gold "Cal" logo
emblazoned across his chest, setting up photo displays and posters dramatizing
the torture unleashed by Bush-Cheney and their entire torture team, including
Berkeley Law professor John Yoo.
 At the law school as grads and faculty put on
their caps and gowns, basketfuls of orange ribbons were circulated. By now everyone at Boalt knows exactly
what the orange ribbon means: constant protest, agitation and education everywhere Yoo goes
have made it clear: "No Torture In My Name" and you're saying it publicly. Some grads still don't think torture
has anything to do with their law careers, and ribbon distributors caught a few
disparaging remarks. But more
importantly, many more students took the ribbons and pinned them onto their
gowns. And so did many of the professors
- and several profs asked for handfuls, passing ribbons out to other faculty on
the spot.
The persistent work of World Can't Wait and other protesters
demanding that John Yoo be fired, disbarred and prosecuted has had an impact,
but much more than that has been affecting the climate at UC Berkeley lately. The campus has been rocked by student
uprisings against the fee hikes, and by the fight to divest UC from
corporations who arm Israel's war crimes against Palestinians. Then there's BP's $500 million campus
debut -groundbreaking for BP's new UC facility is this week, even as the oil
spreads across the Gulf of Mexico, outraging and terrifying the world. And just now, the inspiring 10-day student
hunger strike made headline news challenging the horrendous Arizona
anti-immigrant bill and more. So
this is a time when every which way Cal students look, eye-opening events are posing
the question: what kind of world are you going out into, and what are you going
to do about it?
editor's note: May 13th marked the 50th anniversary of the first major student protest, the one that really ushered in the era of student mass movements. On this day in 1960, students from San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and elsewhere flocked to San Francisco City Hall to protest hearings being conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Plus, an article in Tikkun online edition: Conscience is contagious - The growing opposition of UC law profs and grads to John Yoo's torture theories
 
This all leaves me wondering why the better solution is not to auction off the right to enter the country to work (a voucher system applied to visa's), and then use the proceeds to fund better border control. Visa's are just a way to ration the numbers of people who enter the country, but the way we do it, they are not distributed with any reason. Why not let the market perform this function rather than the government, which I don't trust to make the right allocation (for the same reason, I think education is better funded through vouchers rather than a public monopoly in schools -- same goes for health care too). In fact, those who enter the country legally would have an interest in making sure the border was controlled -- if it is not, then the property value of their visas will drop.