This March in Davis, California, eleven students and one faculty member
were issued letters from the assistant district attorney of Yolo County
charging us with twenty-one misdemeanors each: twenty counts of sitting
(“obstructing movement”) and one of conspiracy to sit (“conspiracy to
commit a misdemeanor”). The Banker’s Dozen are alleged to have caused
the permanent closure of the campus US Bank branch: earthly
representative of the university’s celestial bargain with for-profit
enterprise, and of the credit-fueled education bubble that weds students
to crushing debt burdens. The university, for the moment still led by
Linda “Pepper Spray” Katehi, had forwarded the charges; six of the dozen
were also recipients of the administration’s tender mercies last
November, when the chancellor earned her nickname.
Some see in this a war of maneuver between university and bank,
currently bruiting high-stakes countersuits against each other. Or a bid
for leverage against the civil suit, filed by students pepper-sprayed
in November, in which the university stands to lose big. Others express
disbelief that the peaceful political protest alleged at the bank should
be prosecuted in the criminal courts, on the county residents' dime.
And still others wonder at the suggestion that a dozen members of the
scruffy, do-nothing liberal elite put to flight an office of the
fifth-largest commercial bank in the nation.
Read on...
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