SAS is right, Likins should end support of private prisons

We support the Students Against Sweatshops' campaign to divest the university from Lehman Brothers, the leading lender to private prison corporations. Lehman Brothers was responsible for bailing out Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country's largest for-profit prison corporation. In 2001, CCA's Florence Correctional Center made the news when it was discovered that a prison gang was effectively running the prison. Monitors reported lax security, widespread drug smuggling, assaults and rioting in the facility. In another CCA prison in Arizona, The Associated Press reported an investigation of numerous reports of sexual contact between guards and women prisoners from Oregon. [Read article]

Tuesday evening, after dragging their feet for weeks, student lobbyists released their counter-proposal to President Pete Likins' tuition plan.

Unfortunately, both plans share the same essential problem: They divert more than half of the increase to financial aid, ignoring the university's obvious budgetary problems.

In other words, we're raising tuition to pay for raising tuition.

Under the lobbyists' plan, in-state undergraduate tuition would be raised by $900, and out-of-state by $1,450. Likins' plan called for a $1,000 boost for in-staters and $1,250 for out-of-staters. Keen observers of Likins' plan will remember that approximately 60 percent of the proposed increase was to be funneled to financial aid. As a result, less than half of an average student's $1,000 would pay for his or her education. [Read article]

The student government's proposal was UA's first glance at the group's official stance on tuition. It also was the first time ever our student body president, Doug Hartz, came clean with his views on tuition.

Hartz was elected last March. He took office in May. It's now February 2003, nearly a year after he was elected, and he's just now saying what he thinks about tuition?

Granted, Hartz shouldn't have been expected to release an exact dollar amount last semester, or even last month. But Hartz and his lobbyists should have been vocal months ago about their general stance on tuition, and not waited until two weeks before the Arizona Board of Regents tuition-setting process to comment on the matter. [Read article]

In his State of the Union address last month, the president did an admirable job of placating a growing mass of citizens wary of the administration's ultra-conservative agenda. His promises were liberal and laudable (and to some, unbelievable).

However, the most telling part of his speech might have come at the very end: "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity. We Americans have faith in ourselves but not in ourselves alone. We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history. May he guide us now." [Read article]

The European Union's first draft constitution, unveiled by the Convention for the Future of Europe last week, is an ominous display of statist intentions ÷ embraced by France and Germany ÷ to usurp the autonomy of member nations and blitz the capitalist values that should have defended the individual rights of European nationals and the integrity of the euro.

The only positive aspect of the draft constitution, which defines the values, objectives and powers of the 15-member Union, is its omission of the word "God"; but even that separation of church and state may be derailed in the final draft. [Read article]