Political middle ground needed in world of economics
by Nick Bahl

Nick Bahl

I think it’s safe to say that right now the economy is on everyone’s mind. A recent poll showed that 74 percent of registered voters are likely to vote on domestic issues and the economy in the 2004 presidential election – how selfish are we? Aren’t we at war? Where are the protesters? A majority of students are liberal, but how many of you know anything about the way in which the global economy works?

First of all, keep in mind that it’s the left that pushes for “living wages, employee benefits, national healthcare, environmental regulations,” and unrestricted free trade.

Businesses have large amounts of power over governments because of free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization. Read NAFTA Chapter 11 and you’ll soon discover that foreign corporations can sue governments if a government bans a company’s products. Do you want an example?

In California, the government banned a fuel additive because it was contaminating the water. The company that produced the additive sued the U.S. government; they won, and our government had to decide between paying the company billions of dollars and making California reverse its law. Still, the left screams about sovereignty! Our government paid the Canadian company. Is this good for the economy or for the environment? How does this correspond with what liberals claim to want?

We also hear complaints from the left about sweatshops and how American intervention prohibits countries from developing. NAFTA is a Catch-22 for developing nations. On one hand, if a country joins NAFTA they are able to sell their goods to other countries without tariffs or trade barriers. On the other hand, if they join NAFTA they have to allow other countries to do the same. Why is this so bad?

If developed counties are able to sell their products to undeveloped countries, there is no reason for the citizens of the undeveloped country to buy their own country’s goods – outside goods are cheaper. Soon, workers in undeveloped countries are working industrial jobs that produce products they can’t even afford to buy. We see this in the United States with Asian goods for the very same reason! Aren’t sweatshops a common theme for people on the left to complain about?

Developed countries also suffer. When manufacturing jobs go offshore looking for cheaper labor, exploiting the locals in the process, these countries lose the manufacturing jobs that allow for a middle class. As my Latin-American politics professor said, “Having a middle class really creates stability.” America is losing its middle class, and there are statistics available on this if you care to look.

Why do businesses go offshore? Free trade agreements allow companies to import goods back to the developed country and they can produce their goods at a lower cost offshore because workers in undeveloped nations are willing to work for drastically lower wages than workers in developed nations are. Any employment is better than none! Why else are companies forced offshore?

Remember when I told you to remember who it is that pushes for living wages, employee benefits, national healthcare, and environmental regulations imposed by big government? These things make it expensive for companies to produce goods in the United States. Why wouldn’t businesses pack up and move to a country where labor is cheap, dumping is legal, and governments jump at the chance to build infrastructure to support the needs of the company? Governments want new forms of technology and increased employment.

The only thing that keeps companies out of undeveloped countries is security. Without security there is no business, and the left thinks that freedom is more important than security — here’s why we hear complaints about the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. I completely agree with Benjamin Franklin who said, “Those who seek freedom at the expense of security have neither freedom nor security.” Do you agree?

My point regarding the left is that it is utopian when it comes to free trade versus security and freedom, while they also allow for environmental destruction, via dumping, in foreign nations! The right, although I haven’t mentioned it, is better justified, but still has problems; they claim to seek security, but ignore the environment, which provides us with a mandatory form of security. Obviously, the right is the lesser of two evils. Isn’t it both ignorant and naïve to imagine that you can have your cake and eat it too, no matter how much you want it? Wishes don’t come true simply by wishing!

Bottom-line: living takes money, money comes via economies, economies require security, and freedom isn’t really free without security; living takes security. Learn your global economics before you start talking about policy, because as NAFTA Chapter 11 shows us, policy is being created by economics in more than the traditional ways. Liberal economic policies are foolish and clash with their environmental policies; conservative environmental policies are irresponsible, and both are hypocritical – where is a middle ground that can work?

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The ever increasing problem of being in the horror we call parking at Metro
by Jacob Ryan
The Metropolitan

Every day, I drive my car to school, as do the majority of students at the three institutions here on the Auraria campus. And, to my never-ending frustration, every day I run into a line of cars spilling out onto the side streets waiting to get into a parking lot.

This is now the routine for all students who don’t have a class earlier than 10:00.
I have been a student at Metro since 1998, and every year I have seen the parking situation get worse and worse. When I first started coming to this school, parking was only $2.50, and I was able to pull up and get a spot right away.

Now, I pay $3.25, and I’m lucky if I can even enter the parking lot without waiting in a line for 30-45 minutes.

I have a friend who had to stop going to Metro two years ago in order to get a job to support his wife and child. He is now ready to pick up where he left off with his education. So, he attempted (attempted being the key word) to drive to the campus last week to see about re-enrolling, only to run into the monstrous line of poor souls just trying to get into the parking lot and go to class.

I called him that night and asked him how everything went, and he said, “Well, I probably would’ve signed up for next semester, but there was this huge f***ing line to park. So I said ‘f**k it’ and got out of line after about 20 minutes and went home.”

He was not used to a situation like this at Metro because he began attending the school at the same time I did, back when the lines didn’t remind you of waiting for a new roller coaster ride at an amusement park.

The fact is, this is an unavoidable problem for any student driving to school without a class at the crack of dawn. There have been several times when I have left for school over an hour before my first class starts, and I was still almost late even after virtually power-walking across campus.

As a graduating senior this semester, I’m not really up for being counted absent in class enough to hurt my grades thanks to a parking company that can’t grasp the concept of creating a supply to meet the demand. I need this like I need to get my feet run over or shins rammed into one more time by another rolling backpack half the students are blindly dragging behind them (honestly, aren’t we all getting a little sick of these idiotic inventions. There are only two reasons someone should have these things: pure laziness or their backpacks are too heavy to carry. If the latter of the two is the reason, perhaps it isn’t necessary to bring everything from your home aside from a small child to school in your backpack. Apparently, that’s why we call these things backpacks — they go on your back!).

According to an article in the Aug. 28, 2003 edition of The Metropolitan headlined “Metro tops 20,000 students,” the student population on the Auraria campus was 37,939, and they estimated about 5,700 available parking spots. When you work it out, this is a ratio of about 6.7 students for every one parking spot.

Knowing AHEC, they would probably defend that statement by saying it doesn’t take into account all of the students with alternative modes of transportation attending one of the three schools. However, just by the terrifying look of the lines, I would feel confident saying alternative transportation isn’t really putting a dent in the parking-spot-per-student ratio.
As for a solution to this dilemma, there are a couple of options. You can ride the bus, take the light rail, get a ride, or simply leave your house a whole hell of a lot earlier than usual for school.

Aside from that, there really isn’t anything else that I can see to prevent this situation. So, unless we all somehow grow wings and learn to fly, it looks like we’re all inevitably going to be stuck in limbo in the horror we call parking at Metro.

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Horowitz, Totalitarianism, and your education
by Joel Tagert

Joel Tagert

If Republicans can’t win the debate, they’ll do the next best thing: they’ll ensure there is no debate at all.

This strategy is exactly what’s behind the so-called Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR), a document that has lately gained currency among Colorado’s Republican leadership, in particular Gov. Bill Owens and state Senate President John Andrews.

Superficially, ABOR seems fairly innocuous. It is carefully couched in the language of free speech, using terms like “pluralism” and “intellectual diversity.” But actually, ABOR presents a vicious assault on academic freedom.

ABOR is set up like a con man playing a shell game: it distracts in one direction while moving in another. In the name of free speech, it seeks to limit speech; in the name of political freedom, it seeks to persecute left-wing professors; in the name of education, it seeks to keep students ignorant.

ABOR’s thesis (when you can finally root it out) is that a teacher’s central responsibility is to equally present all sides of an issue. If a teacher presents one side as superior to another, she is guilty of “indoctrinating” students; and indoctrination is grounds for dismissal.
This assumes, of course, that education is somehow separate from truth, and that a mere college professor need not concern herself with what’s true and what’s not. Please just follow the Party’s course plan, professors.

Liberal college campuses have long been a thorn in the Republican Party’s side. They can’t stand it that students and teachers so consistently vote Democratic. They’re especially infuriated by left-wing political science departments, whose professors advocate insanity like universal health care, just labor laws, and nuclear disarmament.

Now they’ve come up with a solution: Find out which professors are Democrats, and fire them.

Oh,ABOR doesn’t say so explicitly; it doesn’t need to. Right-wing ideologue David Horowitz, who recently pushed the plan to Republicans at the Brown Palace, is more than happy to say it to whomever will listen to his Wormtongue’s whisper.

ABOR is being pushed by Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), a group founded and supported by Horowitz. The SAF’s mission statement claims that “The institutional expression of partisan bias amounts to an attempt to indoctrinate rather than teach and creates a negative learning environment for students whose views are under attack.”
This is Horowitz’s basic contention: that liberal college campuses present a “hostile learning environment” for conservative students.

What Horowitz and the SAF doggedly ignore is that not all views are equal. Of course right-wing students’ views are “under attack.” It’s because many of their views are wrong.
The argument presented by the SAF is very similar to arguments presented by Creationists. Creationists argue that evolution should not be taught in schools because it disrespects the views of Christian students and “indoctrinates” students in “unchristian” views that they claim are incorrect.

Evolution is taught in schools despite these arguments. Why? Because it undeniably exists. The evidence for evolution does contradict Genesis and may indeed be offensive to Christians; but this does not change the evidence. Creationists are left with a simple choice: reconcile their views with the evidential truth, or seek to silence those who speak the truth.
Lamentably, it is the latter path that Horowitz and the Republican Party have chosen. Rather than accepting that a greater knowledge of history and politics may lead one to more compassionate — and Democratic — views, they seek instead to prevent students from ever acquiring that knowledge.

Don’t let them do it! This is the path of ignorance perpetuating ignorance, of the blind leading the blind. It leads to an abyss.

State minority leader Joan Fitzgerald rightly called Horowitz’s ideas of investigating professor’s voting records and party registration “1950s McCarthyism.” What else can you call this obsessive attempt to eliminate dissent? There’s a chill of totalitarianism in the Colorado air this fall.

Horowitz himself is coming to the Auraria campus on Sept. 30 to pitch his new McCarthyism to students. Maybe we should have a welcoming committee to tell him that while we support free speech, we repudiate his attempt to limit it.

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An Isolated military academy raising questions
by Bryan Goodland

Bryan Goodland

We have reached a point in our society, due to population growth and various other factors, where segregation and isolationism no longer have a place. We should have learned from the mistakes of the past, and realized that not only do these things not work, but they are also unhealthy and potentially dangerous.

There are, however, those in our society who would like to retreat from the world and live in a fantasyland of isolation and indoctrination. Problem is, those that remove themselves from society often promote ideals that we, as a group, would not agree with.

The Southern Military Institute will supposedly be opening its doors in the fall of 2004. They will be running an all male, private, four-year military college. The Institution will be located on a 450-acre plot of land in Shelbyville, Tennessee. I’m certainly not accusing this group of any wrongdoing, but I do question their motives for running this type of school.

For one thing, they will not be accredited by the state of Tennessee until three years after they open their doors, according to the Institution’s Web site. Along with that, they will have no commissioning authority for any of the branches of the military, so their graduates can become officers. So the question quickly becomes, why operate such a place?

The Institute was founded in 1997 by Dr. Michael J Guthrie, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, after which Dr. Guthrie is modeling his current school. On their Web site, the Institute claims to be a place where young men will be trained in engineering and the sciences, with a strong Judeo-Christian background. Along with this, they will learn about Southern tradition and history as they are trained in a military institute.

Also on the Web site, they indicate that along with the military atmosphere, there will often be official military ceremonies. Some of these will include the commemoration of the Southern Confederacy and Confederate Memorial Day. The site indicates that they will be trained as Southern officer gentleman, fit for duty in protecting our country.

The site provokes many more questions than it does answers. Why would they wait three years after opening their doors to be accredited? Why do they want to be located in a remote area, away from the watchful eyes of any oversight committee? Why is it necessary to have an all-male military academy? Why are they not training people to become officers in the military?

To be fair, one of the prerequisites to attending the Institute is to join either the Army or Air National Guard, and those interested can pursue an officer’s commission through one of the branches. One has to wonder why someone would want to go to the institute, even though the Web site claims there have been 100 applications so far.

There is nothing wrong with trying to educate people. What worries me is that the Institute is going to do it without any accreditation and on a plot of land far from the view of anyone interested in what they are doing. An alternative would be to become accredited first and then open their doors, or to work out some sort of deal with the military to commission officers. Another concern is the fact that this place has been operating with a very low profile, until the AP picked up on a story about them.

This place just has the smell of the “old boy’s” network. They will be operating with total autonomy and subject only to the authority of their own hand-picked Board of Directors. Without any governing authority that they must report to, I worry what will be done on that stretch of land in Tennessee. I know that sometimes I can be paranoid and maybe in this case that’s exactly what’s happening. I am certainly pro-education, but I worry exactly what kind of “education” those men will be receiving from the Institute.

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