PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Press Contacts:

Kelly Besherer
774-269-2856
Carnegie Mellon University student
Radical Student Alliance member

Sheila Hubbard
412-523-8851
University of Pittsburgh student
Students for Radical Change and Liberation member

Alex Lotorto
570 – 269 – 9589
lotorto@riseup.net
Students for a Democratic Society organizer
www.studentpowerinthefaceofempire.wordpress.com

STUDENTS AND YOUTH G-20 RESISTANCE DEMANDS ‘FREE AND EMANCIPATING EDUCATION FOR ALL’

Local and regional young people are converging this week in Pittsburgh to oppose the G-20 summit and demand accessible education as a human right.


In addition to participating as a student and youth contingent in marches and actions organized by Bail Out the People, Bash Back!, Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project, Three Rivers Climate Convergence, and the Thomas Merton Center, a coalition of student and youth groups have created their own messaging and demands for facing down the G-20 leaders. In solidarity with young people around the world, they are demanding key revolutionary changes for society.


The coalition of young people will have a march named “Free and Emancipating for All” along the sidewalk on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. starting at Carnegie Mellong University to Schenley Park Plaza. Once at Schenley Park Plaza, they will break out into small groups and have a teach-in to develop a proposal for alternative approaches to education called the Pittsburgh Model for Democratic Education.


The students will include three demands to initiate the discussion. First, they demand a society with just, healthy, and sustainable production based on mutual aid that does not allow poverty, the exploitation of workers, or the destruction of the planet. Second, they demand democratic institutions that include the active participation of everyone they affect through forms of direct democracy, especially through schools and community organizations. Third, they demand the right to a free, empowering, and “emancipating” education that emphasizes the importance of social movements, dissent, and combating forms of oppression personally and structurally. This includes practicing, in classrooms and in relationships, emotional support and attitudes that dismantle racism, abuse, homophobia, patriarchy, class oppression, and other oppressive behaviors that divide people from developing peaceful communities.


The students are drawing on the current model of the education industry, to show how schools and even the G-20 do not present a model of the society they would like to see.


Sheila Hubbard, a member of University of Pittsburgh Students for Radical Change and Liberation said, “Principals and college presidents lead authoritarian administrations that completely shut out all but a select few students from deciding policies and changes that affect students the most. Students are scuttled around like products in a factory, not young people with a conscience. Just like many principals and presidents abuse their power, we know that environmental and economic justice will never be imposed from above by elites like the G20. The current education system is a friendly pillar of support for the G-20, just like the corporate media, police and National Guard, and the Pittsburgh G-20 Partnership. To improve, the democratic society we want to see must be modeled in the world’s schools, by the students, without the dictatorships of administration figures.”


The students also claim that the public, private, and university school system is failing to empower its students.


Alex Lotorto, a member of Students for a Democratic Society and recent graduate of Muhlenberg College, said, “In high schools, students face armed police, disinterested teachers, military recruiters, inaccessible school boards, and segregating standardized tests. At colleges, endowments pay for prisons, wars, and genocide through mutual fund investments, students are indentured by student loans, and the factory-style production of education suits the demands of CEOs and various industries. The incredible rising costs of colleges that claim to be ‘not for profit’ are forcing more and more young people to pass up their human right to accessible education. This education industrial complex emboldens G20 leaders with confidence our generation won’t see the bigger picture or who’s behind the curtain. It is the G-20 and their International Monetary Fund who advocate the privatization of social services, especially in developing countries in the Global South through Structural Adjustment Programs that, among other catastrophes, decreases access to education and living wage jobs for young people who are left behind in the name of corporate profits.”


The final grievance of the students is that they are not taught how to dissent.


Jake Spezio, a member of Rochester Students for a Democratic society, also came to Pittsburgh for the week. Spezio said, “We must practice resistance through trial and error to get it right. In class rooms, students sit through biased lessons and lectures about how the world exists and came to be. At their first jobs, they suffer poor working conditions and are considered disposable laborers or interns. Young people are conditioned not to question, socialized not to dissent. In school, teachers brush over the history of social movements and ignore the domination of European colonialism, corrupt political parties, and the inequities of capitalist markets. In culture, board room marketing executives decide what’s hot, what’s fun and how young people should want to live. And most of all, we especially don’t learn that the G20 governments are the most violent, militarized, and environmentally destructive institutions in the world. If we can’t question them, what’s stopping them?”


In addition to Wednesdays’s march and teach-in, the youth coalition and the local anarchist Break Away Marching Band have coordinated a Radical Caroling procession starting at the intersection of Liberty and Commonwealth immediately after the United Steel Workers and Alliance for Climate Protection event at Point State Park. The coalition will have a contingent in the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project People’s Uprising march on Thursday and the Thomas Merton Center People’s March to the G20 on Friday.


Maria Lipschitz, a member of the New York University coalition Take Back NYU!, is in Pittsburgh to resist the G20. Lipschitz said, “We are struggling this week, in the face of immense police repression, in solidarity with oppressed people that are denied access to basic human rights around the world by the G20 nations.”

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STUDENT AND YOUTH EVENT FRAMEWORK

This site is all the info students and youth will need to prepare for the week of September 19-26 and the demonstrations against the International Coal Conference and the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh, PA. If y’all are coming, please be familiar with the links to the left!

Live stream is up! Will start broadcasting ASAP.
Streaming live video from Pittsburgh

WHY DO TWENTY VOICES MATTER MORE THAN 6.7 BILLION?

The economic disaster of the recent days needs no introduction: mass unemployment, skyrocketing inflation, and non-existent credit markets plague the developed world, while in the global south, the rising cost of food and fuel have led to hunger riots and increased poverty and destitution. According to the United Nations, the number of people currently living on the brink of starvation is nearly 1 billion, the large majority of the hungry being women and children. At the same time, wars for imperialism, immigration restrictions, environmental destruction, tuition hikes, and prison populations are exploding.

And how have global leaders responded to the demands of the people, to deadly riots for rice in the developing world and university and factory occupations in the global north? By spending billions of dollars buying up bad loans and bailing out transnational banks, corporations. Thus far, nearly $8 trillion of the people’s money has been spent supporting the global elite. Without transparency and without a voice, the global working class has been robbed to support the faulty investments of a privileged few.

Now, Obama has called another meeting of the twenty richest countries in the world in Pittsburgh, a working-class city that is intensely affected by the economic meltdown to discuss how best to continue failed policies such as neoliberalism, privatization, deregulation, and billion dollar bailouts. As their number one priority, this elite “Group of Twenty” leaders and finance ministers will be increasing the power and scope of the International Monetary Fund by trillions of dollars, an unaccountable institution that has imposed loan conditions, abject poverty, and environmental devastation on billions of people in the developing world to benefit corporate profits. It is time the G20 learned that capitalism isn’t in crisis, but capitalism IS the crisis. It is time that the G20 disband forever in shame.

WHAT IS OUR RESPONSE?

We oppose closed-door decision-making by the capitalist elite and their repression of dissent. We stand in solidarity with the global south, people of color, labor unions, workers without unions, women, queer folk, and other ultra-exploited groups that have been systematically shut out of the neoliberal New World Order so that the developed world can profit off their destitution. As students and youth, we demand free, accessible, and emancipating education as a human right, an end to the industrialization of our education. Most of all, we demand a voice and autonomy to make our own self-determined economic decisions on how best to provide for ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world.

We are calling upon all peoples to join us the week of September 24-25th to take to the streets of Pittsburgh to disrupt the summit and the institutions of capital that profit from its domination, including the education industrial complex that trains us to except the status quo. We will plant seeds of a better world inside the rotted shell of capitalism with diverse tactics and respect for the creative forms of resistance chosen by our friends. While we support the actions of all organizations planning to resist the G20 summit, including labor unions, the G20 Resistance Project, Bail Out the People, Three Rivers Climate Convergence, and Thomas Merton Center, we are organizing ourselves towards a powerful week-long student and youth resistance.

If you are unable to come to Pittsburgh to join us, plan local actions, disrupt schools and financial institutions, and educate your local communities on exploitive G20 policies. Also, one of the most effective ways to resist imperialism is through culture; make music, make art, and make trouble! The failed policies of the technocratic elite cannot continue to go unchallenged. This is our world, and we have the right to build it around human need instead of profit margins and corporate greed.

SEE YOU IN PITTSBURGH!

to endorse please email

Groups Endorsed by:
Animas SDS (Durango, CO)
The Dirty Hands Collective (Durango, CO)
Justice in Palestine- University of Pittsburgh
New School in Exile

Individuals Endorsements:
Michael D – American University
Jonathan L – University of Pittsburgh