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Show Views&Opinion Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009 Page 12 Utah State University • Logan, Utah • www.aggietownsquare.com OurView AboutUs Editor in Chief Patrick Oden The cost of a life on USU students News Editor Rachel A. Christensen Assistant News Editor Catherine Meidell D ear Starks family, The university joins us when we say we are sorry for your loss. It’s been said there is nothing more painful than having to bury a child. We realize words can’t make up for your loss. But neither can money. The way to get over this grief is not by suing the university. The financial burden that would come of the lawsuit will not only affect those involved in your son’s passing but also others that weren’t involved, such as USU students and Utah taxpayers (because they help pay for USU to operate). USU has already been drastically impacted by the recession. Departments are merging and faculty and staff have been cut to a bare minimum. We’re operating under a skeleton of employees and resources. Lawsuits are expensive. Lawyers are expensive. Here’s the thing: We can’t afford it, and we shouldn’t have to. We realize you’re hurting, we realize you have a right to be hurting, but the majority of students at Utah State University realize they are not the ones to blame. Tuition has risen and a lawsuit will only push it further upward. It’s becoming more and more difficult to be able to afford tuition and the faculty and staff are aware they are among the lucky to still be employed. Your son made a choice to rush and what happened that night is horrible, but robbing uninvolved students of the quality of their education and the resources available to them will not reverse what has happened. Those students directly involved have been to court and are serving their punishments. The chapters of the involved Greek houses have been shut down. So please don’t punish us, don’t let your grief turn to bitterness. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that finding a scapegoat will make it any easier to swallow. The university is also not to blame for your son’s death. USU is a dry campus. Alcohol is not allowed anywhere within campus limits and those who choose to violate this code deal with the consequences. The party your son attended was located off campus. Those who attended and created the party must have been aware of USU’s dry campus policy and that’s why they moved it off campus. To suggest that the university must send baby sitters out with students when they leave campus to make sure they aren’t doing things they shouldn’t is chimerical. The university never promised to follow your son around town telling him to obey laws. Here’s what we suggest. You have a Web site and that can be a great tool for collecting donations for your cause. Use the money and time you save from the lawsuit toward educating on the dangers of binge drinking. This should help you feel better by doing something good for others. You can help prevent what happened to your son from happening to someone else’s child. But pretty please, with a cherry on top, don’t do it at the expense of students’ education at USU. It’s our future at stake. Sincerely, The Aggies Features Editor Courtnie Packer Assistant Features Editor Greg Boyles Sports Editor Assistant Sports Editor Graham Terry Copy Editor L Mark Vuong Photo Editors Pete Smithsuth Tyler Larson I Elections for sale? f we learned anything this last year, it’s that corporations must have government oversight. They are too big to fail, and powerful enough that corporate malfeasance, abetted by a lax government, can bring the global economy to its knees. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court has reached out to consider an argument to give corporations a free hand to influence electoral politics. A ruling accepting this argument would shake the very foundation of our republic, turning us from a government of “we the people” to “we the corporations.” In his historic run to the presidency, Barack Obama broke every political fundraising record, raising nearly $750 million from more than a million contributors in 2007 and 2008. Now consider a corporation such as Exxon Mobil. During 2008 alone, Exxon generated profits of $45 billion. With a diversion of even 2 percent of these profits to the political process, Exxon could have far outspent the Obama campaign and fundamentally changed the dynamic of the 2008 election. That’s what’s at issue as the Supreme Court takes on, for the second time, the case of Citizens United vs. FEC in a special hearing Wednesday, a month before the formal opening of the new term. The case involves a film, “Hillary: The Movie,” which sharply attacks Hillary Rodham Clinton and her presidential candidacy. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit advocacy group, to coincide with the 2008 presidential primary season. The Federal Election Commission saw the movie as no different from a standard-issue attack ad -- just longer -- and considered it subject to restrictions imposed under the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law as an “electioneering communication.” Citizens United began as a seemingly inconsequential case about the extent of the FEC’s power to regulate such communications, but that was transformed at oral argument in March into a much bigger deal. Citizens United pressed for a sweeping rejection of congressional authority to regulate campaign spending by corporations, and the court’s conservative justices were plainly sympathetic to this broad argument. Things got really scary on June 29, when the court not only ordered re-argument of the case but ordered the parties to brief and argue the supplemental question of whether it should overrule Austin vs. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and parts of McConnell vs. FEC, both of which uphold regulation of corporate spending in candidate elections. The case now turns on a simple but vitally important question: Are corporations differ- ent from individuals? Citizens United and its allies want the court to treat corporate campaign expenditures -- which have been declared a form of “speech” by a prior Supreme Court ruling -- identically to expenditures by people, which are unlimited if done independently and not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign. They argue, in essence, that corporate “speech” is entitled to just as much protection under the First Amendment as individual speech. In its Austin ruling, the court rejected that idea, finding that the “unique stateconferred corporate structure that facilitates the amassing of large treasuries warrants the limit on independent expenditures.” The line between corporations and individuals when it comes to constitutional protections is as old as the United States. The framers wrote the Constitution to protect citizens and the people and never once used the word “corporations.” Early Supreme Court rulings embraced this distinction, holding that the legal rights of a corporation derive from its corporate charter, not the Constitution. Since the nation’s founding, our constitutional story has been one of democratic progress, moving toward broader enfranchisement and more meaningful political participation for individual Americans. Regulation of corporate influence in elections has helped make this progress possible. Indeed, one of the animating concerns of the 17th Amendment, which secured direct election of senators by the people, was the outsized influence corporations were having on the selection of senators by state legislatures. The court’s ruling in Austin, in other words, is fully consistent with the Constitution’s text and history. If conservative justices on the Supreme Court overrule Austin, they will be guilty not only of unleashing corporate influence on elections -- in blatant disregard of the will of Congress and of the American people -- but of violating their own purported allegiance to upholding our founding document. Asked the type of government established at the Constitutional Convention, Ben Franklin famously quipped: “a republic, if you can keep it.” But what if the Supreme Court takes it from us? Kendall is founder and president of Constitutional Accountability Center, a think tank and public interest law firm in Washington. CAC filed an amicus brief in the Citizens United case in support of the FEC. Web site: theusconstitution.org This column by Doug Kendall originally appeared in the Sept. 8 edition of The Los Angeles Times. Down and Out: Low-Wage Workers and the Everyday Symptoms of Abuse ow-wage workers in American cities — busboys, child-care providers, textile workers, dishwashers, stockroom clerks, groundskeepers, security guards and the like — comprise an underclass seen practically everywhere but not much heard from. In many cities, large majorities in such jobs are immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. Their relative voicelessness contributes to a pattern of workplace abuse whose pervasiveness has nearly lost the power to shock. It shouldn’t. A new report by the Center for Urban Economic Development, the National Employment Law Project, and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment paints a disturbing picture of the treatment Tim Olsen to which those workers are subjected. Based on a survey last year of almost 4,400 low-wage employees in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the report describes workplaces in which violations of basic rights are the norm and where workers’ attempts to complain are met with retribution. Two-thirds of those surveyed had suffered some form of wage violation. Some had been paid significantly less than the prevailing minimum wage; many had worked overtime without being paid at the required overtime rate. Others were simply not paid at all for hours worked outside of their regular shifts. Those who were seriously hurt on the job often were given no recourse: Just 8 percent who experienced an injury filed a workers’ compensation claim, and workers’ compensation insurance paid medical costs for only 6 percent of the injured employees. The staggering gap between what is promised by law and what is delivered in fact is a national shame visited upon society’s most vulnerable and least educated. Women, immigrants and people of color suffered disproportionately from violations; undocumented Hispanic women reported the most frequent cases of workplace abuse. Employees unlucky enough to work in the garment industry or in a private home were subjected to more frequent violations than those who worked construction. Almost 70 percent of the socalled front-line workers surveyed in the study were foreign born, and more than half of those were undocumented immigrants. Their status invites exploitation from unprincipled employers, who gain an unfair advantage over competitors by stiffing their own workforce. The solutions for such injustice include updated legal standards and more vigorous government monitoring of workplaces. But until undocumented employees are granted equal status through wide-ranging reform in the nation’s broken immigration laws, equal protection under the law will remain a pipe dream for millions of workers. This column originally appeared in the Sept. 8 edition of The Washington Post. Web Editor Karlie Brand About letters • Letters should be limited to 400 words. • All letters may be shortened, edited or rejected for reasons of good taste, redundancy or volume of similar letters. • Letters must be topic oriented. They may not be directed toward individuals. Any letter directed to a specific individual may be edited or not printed. • No anonymous letters will be published. Writers must sign all letters and include a phone number or email address as well as a student identification number (none of which is published). Letters will not be printed without this verification. • Letters representing groups – or more than one individual – must have a singular representative clearly stated, with all necessary identification information. • Writers must wait 21 days before submitting successive letters – no exceptions. • Letters can be hand delivered or mailed to The Statesman in the TSC, Room 105, or can be e-mailed to statesman@aggiemail. usu.edu, or click on www.aggietownsquare.com for more letter guidelines and a box to submit letters. (Link: About Us.) Online poll Utah State is presently, but has not always been, a dry campus. Many universities around the country are not restricted in this way? Do you support Utah State’s policy maintaining a dry campus? • Yes • No • No opinion Visit us on the Web at www.aggietownsquare. com to cast your vote. |