Statements

Heading into another school year, students and campus workers are told to prepare for even more budget cuts and tuition hikes. This time, state legislators are cutting all public services to the bone. Attacks on everyone’s right to an education are being waged. These attacks are not only in the form of service cuts and fee hikes, but also include the continued denial of undocumented students’ access to higher education, as well as the increasing efforts to resegregate and privatize K-12 schools.

On Monday, April 26th notable former U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo will return to UNC-CH. Since last year's failed attempt to speak on the campus, Tancredo has become an important figure in the so-called Tea Party Movement. Among the movement’s leadership, remarks including racist and sexist appeals are common, as are efforts to demonize hard-working immigrants. At the Tea Party National Conference in February, Tancredo put his bigotry on vivid display, proclaiming:

"Because we don't have a civics literacy test to vote, people who couldn't even spell "vote", or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House named Barack Hussein Obama."

Literacy tests have a sordid and overtly racist history in America, and this is just one example of Tancredo’s point of view. His view that the culture of "western civilization" should be taught in our classrooms, at the expense of learning about other cultures, is not consistent with democratic norms or notions of free inquiry. He argues not for intellectual discussion, but rather openly advocates for hatred and oppression. With arguments disturbingly similar to those of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis, his speeches seek to divide people against one another in order to advance his political agenda.
 
Tancredo is not only in the position to have his hate speech heard by millions of people, but he also has the connections and money to put his words into action. Tancredo has helped campaign for founders of the Minutemen, the vigilante group whose racist efforts include shooting immigrants at the Mexican-USA border. Tom Tancredo also has direct connections with the John Locke Foundation, a right wing think tank that has been crucial in the re-segregation of Wake County Public Schools. Tancredo is also the honorary chair of the Youth for Western Civilization, the white supremacist student group responsible for bringing Tancredo to UNC's Campus.

Letter to the Editor of the Daily Tar Heel about Budget Cuts Crisis

The university is finally taking a step in the right direction by “chopping from the top" and cutting 900 administrative positions across the UNC system. However, these cuts came only after job and benefit cuts for many workers, including housekeepers and groundspeople, for years.

The university should not raise tuition for anyone in this period. While in-state tuition rates are limited by law, out-of-state rates have risen close to $20,000 a year.

We believe that education is a right, just like it is asserted in the UN International Declaration of Human Rights. With the proposed tuition increases, UNC shuts the door to higher education for hundreds of current and potential students who will no longer be able to afford attending this university. These tuition hikes will hit those of us who depend on financial aid and those who work to pay for school the hardest. The university should find the money it would raise from these tuition hikes from the salaries of its richest administrative staff.

We are seeing skyrocketing tuition and dramatically fewer class sections needed to graduate, and at the same time the U.S. continues to spend hundreds of billions of failed wars and occupations, rather than fund education. On top of that the state government refuses to tax corporations, even though there is little real evidence that low tax rates keep jobs.To make things worse, there are fewer jobs for young workers to pay off their debt.

It is time for our generation to take back our education and declare loud and clear, "Education is our right!" But as history has shown, only those who struggle to defend their rights have any hope of attaining them in reality. We must organize to secure our right to an education and to a future.

UNC SDS stands in full solidarity with the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action coalition (MIRAc) and its allies who committed civil disobedience at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Bloomington, MN on May 6, 2009. Exposing and condemning the terror-tactics used by ICE to arrest and deport undocumented workers and rip apart families in the process is becoming more important than ever. The radical right is using the economic crisis as an opportunity to promote xenophobia and attack immigrants and multiculturalism. Actions like the one undertaken by MIRAc last week are an essential part of any strategy to counteract ICE’s secret raids and the racist anti-immigrant hate speech of the radical right that promotes them.

Having recently come under attack from the press and the police here in Chapel Hill for our role in a protest against racist former-Congressman Tom Tancredo, members of UNC SDS have had a taste of the kind of police harassment faced by nonviolent protesters in Bloomington. We condemn police harassment and brutality everywhere and stand together with MIRAc activists who are fighting to make our society safer and more accepting for immigrants and to stop the ICE raids that poison our communities and destroy families.

The daring action undertaken by MIRAc activists on May 6 inspires us to continue in the struggle to make our society more open to immigrants and to counteract the radical terror-tactics of ICE and the hate speech of its right wing supporters.

In solidarity,

UNC SDS
May 14, 2009

• National Day Labor Organizing Network Solidarity Statement
• LUCHA Solidarity statement
• Solidarity from Tuscaloosa SDS
• Solidarity from University of Central Florida SDS
• Solidarity Statement from the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Coalition (MIRAc)
• FIST Statement: Support UNC Students Against Anti-Immigrant Tancredo
• Statement from United Students Against Sweatshops
• Solidarity from SDS at University of Minnesota
• UNC Asheville's HOLA statement of solidarity
• Chapel Hill Prison Books Collective Statement
• Statement from Palante Action Network, Durham NC
• An Open Letter to Chancellor Holden Thorp
• Solidarity from Tuscon, Arizona
• Solidarity from Students Creating Radical Change in New York
• Solidarity with students & immigrants at UNC

UNC – Chapel Hill Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) stands in solidarity with the people of Gaza who are currently under attack.  We strongly support the right of self determination for the Palestinian people and their right to resist against Israel's illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.  The state of Israel is currently responsible for murdering over 1,000 and wounding over 4,000 Palestinians in under three weeks.  These numbers are grossly disproportionate to the 13 Israelis that have died since Israel began its ground assault on Gaza. We are appalled to know that the United States unflinchingly supports this genocide and continues to spend billions of our tax dollars to fund and arm the attack on Gaza. We also condemn the actions of Representative David Price, who voted for a resolution which blames the victim and does nothing to stop the massacre of Palestinians.

• We demand that the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert halt the bloody assault on Gaza immediately.
• We demand that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak open the borders between Egypt and Gaza and allow medical professionals to help the Palestinian people.
• We demand that Israel allow reporters and media into Gaza so that the world can view firsthand the terror it is inflicting on the people of Gaza.
• We demand that Israel immediately withdraw its illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories which have been built on top of bulldozed Palestinian homes.
• We demand that our tax dollars go toward furthering our communities in the US rather than be sent to aid in the genocide of an indigenous people.

Free Palestine- End the Apartheid Now!

US out of the Middle East!

Five years ago, George Bush, the Democratic and Republican Parties and the United States government committed what the Nuremberg Court called the “supreme international crime.” They waged a war of aggression against a sovereign nation, and they justified it with lies. They claimed Iraq possessed and was actively developing weapons of mass destruction. But it did not take long for the truth to surface: Bush and big oil interests had been planning this war for years. The real motives of this war are not defensive, nor are they altruistic; they are imperial. The U.S. aimed to ensure its domination of the region by striking down an anti-imperialist government in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East.

Five years later, more than one million Iraqis lie dead. Over four and a half million have become refugees. Entire cities have been reduced to rubble. Basic infrastructure destroyed in the massive “shock and awe” bombing campaign has left 70% of Iraqis without access to safe drinking water and millions without access to effective sanitation. Vast areas of Iraq lack sufficient electricity, with many neighborhoods in Baghdad receiving only 5-6 hours of power a day. Ten million Iraqis maintain a precarious existence through a sanctions-era food rationing system – which the Iraqi puppet government soon plans to eliminate. Unemployment stands at 60-70%. 800,000 children did not go to school last year. Hospitals lack basic medicines and staff. U.S.–sponsored death squads roam the streets. Religious sectarianism, an important tool the U.S. employs in its divide-and-conquer strategy, has led to tens of thousands of murders and kidnappings.

But five years of occupation has also meant five years of struggle. The Iraqi people are not passively standing by while their sovereignty is dismantled in the name of a colonial-style puppet government in the Green Zone, and while the United States and the giant multi-national corporations loot Iraqi oil.

Dear friends and allies at UNC,

This March will mark a grim milestone: the U.S. occupation of Iraq will enter its fifth year. After five years of war and occupation, over 1.2 million Iraqis and 4,000 U.S. troops have lost their lives, and more that $500 billion has been poured into the failing occupation, money that should have been spent making education more accessible to millions of young people in this country who cannot afford it, to provide healthcare, housing and jobs to all Americans, and to rebuild the Gulf Coast, which is still suffering from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina more than two and a half years later.

UNC-Chapel Hill Students for a Democratic Society is organizing a demonstration against the continued U.S. war on Iraq and military recruitment on November 15, 2007.

Since the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, more than 1.2 million Iraqi civilians and nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have died. More than $465 billion has already been wasted on this war and the Bush administration has just requested an additional $190 billion to continue the war. Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled Congress refuses to offer any real challenge to the war and fulfill the mandate to end the war that brought them to power back in November 2006. We are sick and tired of these games. While the people of Iraq continue to suffer under U.S. occupation, people here at home are suffering too. The Gulf Coast still isn't rebuilt, the cost of education continues to rise and become less accessible for millions of this country's young people, and many people don't have access to healthcare. This war has got to stop.

Last November, the Army opened a new recruiting station in Chapel Hill. This station, the first of its kind to open in town, gives recruiters easy access to the area's youth, high schools, and colleges. It is clear why this facility was built: in the face of the failing war on Iraq, the military is desperate for more young people to continue the occupation and be able to wage new wars on people throughout the Middle East and around the world. Military recruiters use deceptive practices, ranging from promises about money enlistees will receive to the length of enlistment, and specifically target youth of color and working class youth. If we refuse to enlist, the war cannot continue.

On the first anniversary of this station's opening, join us a we renew our call for military recruiters out of our schools and communities, and U.S. troops out of Iraq NOW!

We refuse to kill and be killed--No to military recruitment!
Iraq for Iraqis--U.S. Troops Out Now!
Shut the War Down!