From Tim Tebow to “Don’t Taze me Bro!” to its adoption of America’s first solar feed-in tariff program, Gainesville is no stranger to the national spotlight. But nothing in this town has set off a worldwide media firestorm like a local eBay furniture business with a congregation of about two dozen.

That outfit goes by the name Dove World Outreach Center and prefers that we call it a church, although most churches don’t fill their sanctuaries with lamp shades and shrink-wrapped sofas, or have their preachers castigate their congregations for failing to load trucks properly.

Then again, most churches don’t get denounced by the American Association of Evangelicals or scoped out by the FBI. But most churches also don’t have “outreach” programs that get featured on CNN and the Daily Show, or garner headlines from England to Indonesia.

In case you haven’t heard, Dove World has designated Sept. 11 “International Burn a Qur’an Day,” the latest in a long string of hate-filled publicity stunts that have driven away members of its congregation faster than its members can ship off antique end-tables.

Before this, Dove World had its “No Homo Mayor” campaign (targeting Craige Lowe, who was eventually elected Gainesville’s first openly gay mayor in a tight race in which students were the deciding factor).

Before that, it was “Islam is of the Devil” T-shirts (which got some of the congregation’s children sent home from their elementary schools).

Last year on 9/11, while many of the town’s Muslims were busy handing out food to homeless people on the Downtown Community Plaza, Dove World targeted them with another hateful protest. No holy books were burned, and the hatemongers got the attention they deserved. Everyone pretty much ignored them.

This year, Dove World’s congregation is shrinking. Former members have handed over damning documents to the Gainesville Sun. The bank has called in its mortgage, and Pastor Terry Jones has warned his flock that Dove World’s insurance policy may soon be canceled.

Meanwhile, the shock value of their T-shirts and sign-waving has worn away. Whenever they launch into protest near businesses owned by people who look Middle Eastern, only the TV news vans pay them any heed.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and what remains of Dove World’s membership has discovered that its salvation can only come at the hands of the news media.

So this year, on the ninth anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, they’re planning their most outrageous spectacle yet. So far the results have been, in the words of Dove World Pastor Terry Jones, “a blessing.” Headlines in many US papers, plus the UK’s Guardian and Daily Mail. Hits by the hundreds of thousands across the international blogosphere. Even a smattering of cable news segments.

Unfortunately, with all this attention, the jig may be up. Now film crews are coming from Turkey and Cyprus, and at least one plans to be rolling during an upcoming Sunday service. As Jones himself put it, it’s a shame that they’ll soon realize how few people support what he’s doing.

The flames of religious hatred can be fueled by so few only with the help of people like us. If you’re looking to do your part to extinguish intolerance, consider joining members of Gainesville’s Muslim community for the fasts, feasts and charity work they’ve planned for this September.

Leave the book-burners where they belong: alone, on a miserable plot of land sliding toward foreclosure, beneath the cold glow of the TV cameras.

This year on 9/11, I hope to see you downtown.

The video shows Professor Peter Waylen pleading for Kofi to open the door, and then pleading for more time as police prepare to break down the door.

It as the officers enter, Kofi can clearly be heard yelling “I’m OK!” Seconds later, an officer yells “Put your hands up!” All told, the Fine Print clocks 52 seconds between the officers entering and the final shot fired, and 5 seconds between the first bean-bag round and the final blast of the assault rifle.

On Friday, a recount confirmed that Gainesville citizens have elected Craig Lowe to be the next mayor of Gainesville. The runoff was tight – ultimately decided by just 42 votes, with a higher turnout than the general election. The student support Lowe cultivated clearly helped make his historic victory possible.

In an impromptu sidewalk press conference on election night, Lowe said negative campaigning, which he studiously tried to avoid, helped his Tea Party-backed opponent, Don Marsh, overcome much of his general election deficit.

“There was definitely homophobia and prejudice injected into the campaign,” he said, calling this the dirtiest race he’d ever seen in Gainesville.

Marsh found himself a handy foil this weekend, when Westboro Baptist Church arrived to tell Gainesville that “God hates fags.” In a blog post, Marsh condemned “The REAL Haters,” who ” rub salt in the wounds of the very people God has commanded us to heal and to whom we should show compassion.”

While the post was clearly intended to make Marsh look a bit more gay-friendly, his language likens homosexuality to a disease that must be cured, which is the basis for the “ex-gay” movement long associated with Pastor Rick Warren. In this line of thinking, God commands us to “heal” members of the LGBTQ community, not to love them as they are.

Like the anti-”big government” Tea Partiers who rely on public assistance, some people prefer to fixate on “healing” the perceived sins of others. As Jesus once said, “Hypocrites! For ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men, for ye neither go in yourselves (from Matthew 23:13, King James version).”

Lowe pointed out on election night that a city government can’t run on negativity. He also said Gainesville politics works best when students get involved. Hopefully this town can get past this ugliness and start focusing on the ways we can help the city develop a transportation infrastructure that doesn’t rely on cars, clean up our local Superfund site, care for the homeless, and grapple with budget problems that won’t disappear on their own.

The more students engage with local government, the less say haters or hypocrites will have in the future of this city.

The demands:
1. Drop all charges against Kofi Adu-Brempong

This ball is in the court of the State Attorney’s office. No progress yet.

2. Conduct an independent investigation into the shooting, or impanel a grand jury

The investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has been completed, but not yet made public. No grand jury has been impaneled, because the shooting was not fatal. Justice for Kofi has begun a letter-writing and phone-calling campaign against the State Attorney’s office.

3. Suspend the shooter, Officer Keith Smith, and fire him pending the results of the investigation

UPD’s agreement with the Fraternal Order of Police (a sort of labor union for cops) prevents officers from being suspended without pay or fired before an investigation is complete. Smith apparently has not yet returned to work, and remains on paid leave.

Misinformation has spread that Smith was fired from the Gainesville Police Department after cruising threw poor neighborhoods and throwing eggs at black people from a moving car. In fact, he worked for UPD at the time and cleared of egg-throwing, on the grounds that he was asleep in the back seat of the car while three GPD officers took part. According to his personal file at UPD, which has been reviewed by the Fine Print, Smith was reprimanded for witnessing wrongdoing (the egg-throwing) but failing to prevent it on three occasions in November of 2008.

4. Create an independent police review board comprised of students and community members

Justice for Kofi activists have said both UF and UPD officials seem receptive to this idea, because they believe it will help make campus police more credible to the public. UF spokeswoman Janine Sikes said the administration has been discussing it.

Kenneth Nunn, a UF law professor who has taught courses on police brutality, said that independent review boards can be effective at limiting brutality and improving relations between cops and their communities, but that to be effective a board must have legitimate investigative authority – including subpoena power and the ability to call witnesses to testify.

One police review board could potentially cover all local police departments, from the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office to GPD and UPD, depending on how it is structured, Nunn said.

5. A thorough evaluation and overhaul of campus mental health and counseling services

The UF administration appears to be complying with this demand in full. See the April issue of the Fine Print for details.

6. The elimination of UPD’s Critical Incident Response Team

Activists have said that in meetings, President Bernie Machen has seemed willing consider disbanding UPD’s SWAT-lite unit if UF’s internal investigation shows that it followed procedures and still injured Kofi unnecessarily. Officially, however, the administration is awaiting the completion of the investigation before it takes a position.

The Worker Rights Consortium (which I’ve previously written about here) issued a report in October describing the ways the factory closings were improper and illegal. Workers in the factories were owed more than $2 million in back pay, and UW decided its code of conduct for workers had been violated.

Coming on the heels of a major victory over Russell Athletic in the Fall, this lends new credibility to a student anti-sweatshop movement that seems to be finding its second wind. UW is big and so is its football program, so they just hit Nike where it hurts: its bottom line.

Two weeks ago, Gina Cano and Lowlee Urquia, former workers from the factories, visited UF and, through translators, gave an emotional presentation on their lives as sweatshop workers, and the devastation caused by the sudden closing of the plant.

Earlier that day, I took part in on a meeting with them, representatives from the national United Students Against Sweatshops, two fellow members of Gators for a Sweatshop-Free Campus, and representatives of the UF administration. After hearing from the workers, Ed Poppell, UF’s Vice President for Business Affairs and Anna Prizzia, director of the Office of Sustainability, said they intended to side with students in support of UF joining the WRC.

Cano and Lowlee are now on a USAS-sponsored tour across the United States, where they’re visiting college campuses to explain how students and their universities can support the fight for workers’ rights. We’ll have a story on their visit and UF’s ongoing progress toward becoming a member of the WRC in the April issue of the Fine Print.

And in a dramatic turn of events, the social rejects learned: no matter how much they cry and scream about Greeks, the rest of campus just doesn’t care

For most people, this was never about Greeks. Though the the scandal has revealed the suspicion some Greeks and so-called “independents” seem to have for each other, that’s not the real story. We’ve received plenty of comments and e-mails suggesting that people want to know more about the campus political machine and the role of Florida Blue Key, an honorary society for UF student leaders.

The fight between the political machine and those who vow to destroy it, like the feud between Greeks and non-Greeks, has long been a non-issue for everyone except a few obsessive extremists on both sides. But every so often, some scandal brings the matter to a head.

SG’s $14 million budget and access to the coveted resume lines conferred by campus leadership positions are controlled by a system of back-room deals. Perhaps more people would care if they could see how that system works. Thanks to court documents stored in the vault of the Alachua County Courthouse, we can.

In the mid-nineties, Charlie Grapski, by most accounts an anti-Florida Blue Key zealot, launched a campaign for president of the student body. FBK members working on behalf of the FOCUS party (the Unite Party circa 1995, its name an acronym for Fuck Off Charlie, U Suck), published fliers on campus with a falsified version of Grapski’s criminal record suggesting he was a child molester.

FBK has long sought to dispell the notion that it plays any role student government elections. Grapski sued the group, along with several of its members, for defamation. For the honorary society to be held liable, Grapski had to prove that FBK was materially involved in supporting the FOCUS Party. The ensuing sworn depositions and testimony lifted the veil of the campus political machine.

In one deposition, former Student Body President Howard Christopher Thompkins explained the way representatives of Greek houses and other organizations, such as the Black Student Union, banded together into groups. House representatives, group leaders would divvy up various leadership positions – including student government positions, but also roles in organizing Homecoming, Gator Growl and other functions, based on who was able to “get out the vote” in SG elections. This is where the “I Voted” stickers discussed during the Unite Party meeting come into play.

Like the leadership positions themselves, admission into FBK depends on an applicant’s support of the system, because the organization admits mostly students who hold leadership positions, and as Thompkins put it, “people obviously support the people who support them.”

Thompkins Deposition, Part 1

Thompkins’ description is now a little out of date. Houses and other organizations no longer form “super-groups” like Pi-Tau or Alpha-Delt. The four groups he mentioned have, in effect, united.

During cross-examination, Thompkins went into greater detail about the group and house system:

Thompkins Deposition Part 2`

Thompkins said he had been a member of the SUN (Students Unite Now) party, and explained that the party names are routinely changed and recycled from year to year. Hence in recent years, the Swamp Party became the Gator Party, which became the Unite Party.

So-called “House Reps” coordinated the negotiations between different groups, according to testimony by Jackelyn Lee Speer, herself a former house rep for Alpha Delta Pi sorority:

Speer Testimony

In the recordings of the Unite Party meeting, people disperse after Part 1. Parts 2 and 3 record discussions between house reps.

Caroline Montanus of Kappa Kappa Gamma corroborated the descriptions of Speer and Thompkins:

KKG Testimony

As the Grapski case progressed, the honorary society’s involvement in SG politics was asserted many times over, as in this affidavit by disaffected former FBK member Clay Martin:

Clay Martin Affidavit

Ultimately, the judge in the case issued the following notice, which remains controversial to this day, in which he ruled that FBK had historically been involved in student government elections, and declared that it was up to the jury to decide whether the honorary had supported the FOCUS Party in particular:

Judicial Notice

In its verdict, the jury found FBK guilty of both defamation and conspiracy to defame, which would indicate that the honorary did materially support the FOCUS party:

Verdict

However, FBK appealed the decision, arguing the judge was biased and, by issuing the notice posted above, had effectively decided the crucial matter of FBK’s involvement himself, instead of leaving it up to the jury. The honorary’s president-elect, J. Ryan Chandler, stated the case in an open letter posted on campus. He wrote that he was confident FBK would win on appeal, and warned “those who would tear Florida Blue Key Down, YOU WILL NEVER WIN.”

FBK Letter to Student Body

In a sense, Chandler was correct. No jury ever ruled on the appeal. Grapski settled for $85,000 and went on to press his case against the individuals who made the defamatory flier. As a result of the settlement, the case against FBK was dismissed:

Dismissal

We’ll never know how the case would have been decided if it had not been settled. For his part, Grapski had successfully generated a trove of sworn testimony supporting his contention that FBK actively manipulated student government elections, while the honorary society ended a multi-year legal battle that, according this letter to its members, had begun to deplete its coffers:

FBK Letter Seeking Funds

To this day, Chandler’s assertion holds true. The system has been reformed, to become more open and democratic and also more unified. The specific role of FBK in campus elections may not have been definitively established in court, but the organization’s involvement was beside the point. The Grapski case made the workings of the campus political machine a matter of public record, available from the Alachua County Clerk of the Court under case no. 95-4412-CA.

The real significance of the Unite Party recordings has nothing to do with a supposed feud between Greeks and non-Greeks. The recordings show that the political machine, run by Greek houses along with other groups, remains intact to this day.

Tonight at 8 p.m., the Civic Media Center will be showing “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” a documentary about the man who wound up on President Nixon’s enemies list after exposing secret documents that revealed many of the dirty secrets of America’s involvement with Vietnam.

Ellsberg became the ultimate whistleblower; once they were published by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the papers helped fuel opposition to the Vietnam War.

Apparently, the military is afraid of anything like that happening again, so they’ve released a 32-page report detailing the threat posed by Wikileaks, a site that allows for the anonymous uploading of government documents. Here is that report in its entirety, courtesy of Wikileaks itself (who else):

Wiki Threat

The Fine Print encourages everyone to head down to the CMC this evening, for what is now quite a timely screening. Ellsberg has become a hero to all of us who believe that in a democracy, there should be no such thing as government secrets.

Of course Greek students band together to try and steer Student Government to their own ends. It happens on campuses all over the country – especially in the South. As they say themselves in the transcript, they have the people, the resources, and the influence over their brothers and sisters to dominate elections. And of course they would spew all kinds of venom about their opponents during a halftime election pep talk. So why does any of this matter?

Some people complain that Greek students enjoy special privileges that they don’t deserve – extra parking, legacy access to plum gigs like head of the student traffic and honor courts, block seating at football games. But that stuff all comes at a price that includes going through pledgeship and paying dues. Anyway, there’s not much student government would ever do about it. As Student Alliance leader Jonathan Ossip put it, “The only things we’d have the power to take away are the lines on some of their resumes.”

But various voices in the tapes are hating on God Damn Independents – those of us who chose not to wear Greek letters – and accusing the Student Alliance of seeking to mount a massive anti-Greek conspiracy. As one shrill unidentified female put it:

Student Alliance, this is ridiculous, these people don’t have friends. Like you think I’m kidding, these guys don’t have friends. It’s not funny…

…They want everything gone for us. It’s not a joke, they want to see every letter that we have stripped away from us. They don’t want us to live the life that we have. I’m being serious, guys, like, you may not realize this now, you may not realize the impact of these elections, but this can alter every single way that we live.

Or as a belligerent unidentified male said later:

But tomorrow, when the results come out, and we lose, we’re going to be like, “Holy shit, we just lost our way of life.” And everyone is going to freak out and everything before you is gonna fall apart …You guys should be going to be tonight freaking out. I, I ,I don’t even know if I can sleep tonight, like, I’m shaking right now.

This kind of hateful nonsense is part of what motivated the anonymous tipster to hand over the recordings in the first place. It wouldn’t be surprising if it also drove many Greeks to vote for the Student Alliance, which never said anything like this about the Unite Party base, even behind closed doors. Most people – Greek or not – don’t see things this way. We don’t hate or fear people just because they hang out in different circles some of the time.

While the people in these recordings tried to rally the troops with scare tactics and stereotypes, their opponents in the Student Alliance were reaching out to strangers and explaining how SG could make their UF experience better.

It’s worth pointing out that this system is bad for most Greeks as well as GDIs. Most of members of fraternities and sororities don’t benefit at all, but they do have to deal with extreme coercion, which received praise during the meeting:

Kara Olesky was not happy to hear tapes that implicated her sorority, DPhiE, in withholding food from pledges.

DPhiE, I know you had your baby pledge class that they couldn’t eat until they went and voted. [Giggles] That’s amazing, that’s what you need to do. So I applaud you all for doing that.

Jordan Johnson told the Alligator that the [giggles] are evidence that the speaker was joking, though mood on the rest of the tapes is anything but jocular.

There’s also evidence of collusion between the Unite Party and the supervisor of elections, who apparently promised to change the color of “I Voted” stickers midway through the election:

…tomorrow, the [I Voted] stickers will be changing. They’re gonna be a different color, I’m telling you that right now. So you try and fuck with us, and you try and change the stickers, or keep the same ones and put them on there, we’re going to know.

Someone had stolen a role of stickers. It wasn’t clear whose side they were on (though it’s likely it was someone from a Unite organization looking to get their buddies out of having to trek to the polls). Greek houses, as well as other organizations like the Black Student Union, rely on the stickers to police their members and force them to vote. That’s why handing out fake stickers is considered a campaign violation. It’s also why last Fall, in voting down a measure to replace the stickers with stamps to save money,

Unite Party Sen. Josh Roberts, who represents the college of agriculture, questioned how the bill would help improve the election process. He said stickers are a matter of American pride.

The various organizations that make up the Unite Party (not all of them Greek) comprise the feeding system for Florida Blue Key, a “leadership honorary” that once dominated Florida politics (with famous alums from Bob Graham to Bill Nelson). Its clout has waned in recent years. Its political machine no longer runs Tallahassee, and the third floor of the Reitz Union is its last bastion. Both Andrew Guglielmo and current SG President Jordan Johnson, who star in the tapes, as well as all but a handful of UF’s past student leaders, are FBK members.

Why is this man not smiling?

There is always at least one FBK party. Right now it’s Unite (though it will probably change after this firestorm). Before that, it was the Gator Party, and before that, the Swamp Party. In the 1990s it was called the FOCUS party, an acronym for Fuck Off Charlie, U Suck. Charlie Grapski, that is, who successfully sued the organization for defamation and exposed their corrupt system in the process. The system has changed somewhat, but the real reason these tapes matter is that they prove that the FBK machine is still with us. The Fine Print will be making the Grapski documents public before we leave for Spring Break. We’re hoping the administration is willing to investigate, and bring this corrupt system to an end.

The transcript was produced by the Student Alliance and edited by the Fine Print. Please help us fill in the [inaudible] portions by commenting on this story (the audio files are available for download). For your convenience, evidence of illegal behavior, anti-Greek conspiracy theories, and other juicy tidbits are highlighted in bold.

PART 1 – The Pep Talk

[James Tyger]:

All right! Listen up! All right everyone, we are getting this meeting started. Apologies for being late, we’re at a meeting with fantastic news. Out numbers are down, and that is what the elections commission has to say to us. Which means, means we are not where we need to be, okay. We are absolutely not on par with where we’re gonna need to be in order to make this happen. Now I know there’s some of you who are out there all day today, busting your asses sun up to sundown, but that is not enough. I need every single person in this room out there making this happen for us, okay. I’m up. I’m barely sleeping. A whole bunch of us: Ashton, Marcus, Virlany. Up, not sleeping. Busting our ass to make this happen.

Now I don’t know if you’ve seen these fliers. They’ve been plastered all around campus and all around apartment complexes, and you know what they are? This is what Ben Cavataro is up to while your sleeping last night, okay. He and his party are walking around apartment complex to apartment complex at one, two, three in the morning and beyond to get this out there. They have candidates, they have volunteers, they have people on the ground willing to put the time in, to put them fliers in apartment complexes at four in the morning. Now I cannot stand here, and I did not take this position, to get schooled by Ben Cavataro and the Student Alliance party when we are so much better than them. All right. I, I can’t even begin to explain how frustrated I am about leaving that meeting and hearing what our actual turnout was, what our actual results are for today.

I will not feel this way tomorrow. So I need every single person in this room to understand that this is not acceptable. So what we’re doing tomorrow, this is not going to work. So with that, Googs.

[Andrew Guglielmo]:

I don’t know if any of you know me, um, I’m actually on the ticket with some of you all. I’m Andrew Guglielmo. And more importantly, uh, I’m pretty fucking pissed off. So, ladies excuse my language but it’s gonna be filled with this. This kind of shit, and the ratio of twos that I’ve seen this entire election. Every day that I’ve been walking around, if you guys haven’t seen me, but I’ve been walking from corner to corner to corner to corner of this campus and seeing each and every person wearing a Unite Party shirt outnumbered by two.

Two people in green shirts have been compared to the one in the Unite Party. Now what the hell does that say about us? Does it say that we don’t care? Does it? Do we care guys? Do we, do we care? Cause all I see is people with little giggles sometimes and they look away. A little giggle to their friends, and then look away at someone else. Go engage people, that’s why you’re here. You wanna be a student leader? Be one! I’m tired of people thinking that this is an excuse. It’s not!

The excuse is you all. You all are not trying hard enough.

Hear it again. You’re not trying hard enough. I expect each and every one of you to be outside, to be handing somebody a flier, to be engaging somebody, saying, “Hey, have you heard about the Unite Party?” and to get away from your little clusters, from your little friendships that you have with each and every single little person that your standing next to some gate, somewhere in the middle of campus. Get out there in the middle of it!

That’s why they’re more visible. That’s why people know their names and not yours. Now I understand that some of you are candidates, and some of you are volunteers, and some of you are house reps. Trust me, I ran the campaign last year, I understand.

But that doesn’t mean a damn thing.

All of you know the platform. All of you probably have a Unite Party shirt. All of you have no excuse but to be outside getting at least 10 votes per person, and those people should get 10 votes for them. It’s exponential. It’s easy. Do it.

We’re going to break up, right here, real quick. Now that you guys may have your tails between your legs and you see my face is probably a little red. When you guys get into your groups, candidates, I expect you to be talking to Thomas [Hilton] and Naadira [Renfroe] about each and every second of your day tomorrow. You have less than 24 hours until nothing else matters, but the count. This is your election. This means just as much to you as it does to Ashton, Marcus and Virlany. Am I wrong about that? And volunteers and house reps, are you going to be the ones to let them down? Are you going to be the ones to just say, “Eh, there’s, there’s two minutes longer”, “Don’t worry, I’m gonna do my philanthropy right now”, or uh, “Um, I’m just gonna, you know, go hang out with my friends at Yoga Berry?” That’s for tomorrow, that’s for the next day. Tomorrow is for the party. I expect all of you to be giving your blood, your sweat, and your tears for it, tomorrow especially.

We have houses and organizations that are less than 30 percent of where they should be! Last year we were at 60 percent. What does that say about right now? I hope your scared, cause I sure as hell am. So whoever is going to be organizing where you are going is going, they’re going to be saying where you’re going next. But house reps, you better get on the phone. Get on the phone to the older brothers, to the older sisters, to the older people in your organization. If your having such a problem getting their, their people out to the polls? Get your big brother or big sister to call them up for you. That’s why you have these people. There’s no excuse for us not to win by 60 percent. We did it last year, we’re going to do it again. It all matters how much you people in this room care right now. That’s all I have to say to you. Listen up to where you’re supposed to go.

[Jordan Johnson]:

All right, house reps go in the back corner back there. Candidates are staying in this room and volunteers are in this corner of the house.

[Chairs moving]

In a phone call Wednesday, Guglielmo said that he was not present for any of the discussions transcribed below. An earlier version of the transcript had attributed quotes to him quotes now attributed to “Unidentified Male 3.” The Fine Print is continuing to verify the identities of all the unnamed speakers.

PART 2 – The Anti-Greek Conspiracy

[Unidentified female 1]:

All right, guys so [inaudible] not ok. You guys, please be quiet. Be respectful. First of all, if we call you guys at 8:30 in the morning, please pick up. If we call you any time during the day, please pick up, like we’re doing that so we can communicate [inaudible] and obnoxious when I have to call presidents because representatives aren’t talking to me.

[Unidentified male]:

Hey can you all quiet down a little bit back there please.

[Unidentified female 1]:

Please be respectful. I know this is not our jobs. I did it last fall. It’s stupid, it’s annoying. I know it’s retarded, like, you have to call your sisters, call your brothers, all the times like will you come out, do this, go vote, like listen guys, literally right now, numbers at the polls, we are going to lose by a landslide. I told you guys this is where we have 4,000 votes as a Greek community. Over 4,000 votes.

If we cannot win this election, then we have [inaudible] these Student Alliance, this is ridiculous, these people don’t have friends. Like you think I’m kidding, these guys don’t have friends. It’s not funny, like these kids are the kids that want to take down the Greek system. They don’t want Sorority Row buses. They don’t want Fraternity Row buses. They don’t want block special [inaudible]. They don’t want parking privileges that we have on Sorority Row where you get your house parking, or [inaudible]. They want everything gone for us. It’s not a joke, they want to see every letter that we have stripped away from us. They don’t want us to live the life that we have. I’m being serious, guys, like, you may not realize this now, you may not realize the impact of these elections, but this can alter every single way that we live.

[Inaudible] elections this year.

The executive ticket, we need to go out and support, we need to support our Senate too, because how we run this campus is through passing bills and getting certain things pushed through, and we’re not going to be able to do that if half of their people are in there and half of us, ‘cus then we do have to have them have these bills passed that we don’t want that are going to hurt us.

Please step it up guys, there’s no excuse why tomorrow each and every one of you has to have 100 percent. Like, there’s no excuse. [Inaudible] If you are below 50 percent, that’s embarrassing. You should be saying to yourself, “It is not hard to get 50 people out and vote.” It’s really not. You go before dinner, you go before lunch, you go in between, you go real quick to class. If I can do it in five minutes and I have a meeting every single time, if I have classes literally scheduled every single day at every single hour, and all these other things, then every single one person that I know should be out there too.

Unacceptable guys. This is embarrassing to not have our Greek support right now. [Inaudible] Sigma Nu, um, Delta Upsilon, and, uh, Chi Phi, Lambda Chi, you guys have 100 percent. Like, that’s amazing. You guys all did well. I applaud you. Everyone else should applaud them. That’s amazing, get out every single one of their volunteers, their brothers and members out. The rest of you, you need to step it up, like honestly, we need to step it up. [Inaudible] There is no excuse. [Inaudible] if you guys want to win… [inaudible]

[Unidentified female 2]:

Um, also guys, with, like, polling locations, please keep using drivers tomorrow. Um, get some volunteers that drive people that haven’t voted to the locations. Like, not going on campus or, like, the polling location that they have to go to is too far is not an excuse. Like, you guys should have at least one driver at every time tomorrow volunteering to be able to drive people back and forth to the polling locations. They are scattered around a lot and we just don’t want to have that be a reason why people aren’t doing well.

[Unidentified male 2]:

Also, like, it’s also true, like, one of my brothers or somebody’s sisters might have leaked like, “Steal the stickers because like the lady they were talking to wasn’t looking.” That’s not the point of why we have you fill the board up. We have you fill the board so that we actually get the votes, so keep that in mind if somebody comes by and puts stickers on it, like, you know, just to fill it. That’s not why we’re doing this. We’re doing this because we need the votes, so the houses that already did that, you know…

[Unidentified female 2]:

We know that you guys aren’t doing it. Just be aware that you’re going to have members of your chapters that obviously don’t care as much as you guys and might be doing that, so really, really, really discourage that.

[Unidentified Male 3]:

All right guys, um, I want to start off thanking Delta Upsilon, and Lambda Chi, um, and the other two fraternities, Sigma Nu and, uh, Chi Phi. Uh, DU and Lambda Chi, you guys were done, you know, halfway through the day and you made my life a little bit easier. Uh, so that’s the good. There was more good. Uh, Theta, you guys had that incentive of getting your girls a bottle, not too many sororities do that, that’s awesome. Uh, DPhiE, I know you had your baby pledge class that they couldn’t eat until they went and voted. [Giggles] That’s amazing, that’s what you need to do. So I applaud you all for doing that.

Um, now, now we get to the bad news, okay. I woke up, you know, 5:30 this morning, not a big deal, walked up and down the row, nothing too serious, didn’t see anything out there. I went to Enclave, Canopy, Woodlands, uh, I went to Estates, and Gainesville Place, and those stupid kids fliered every single one of those cars, and of course I took them down. So one, they pissed me off already because I had to wake up at 5 in the morning and ruin my entire day. I look like a bum, I feel like a bum. I feel miserable and shitty, I’m getting sick. So first off, I hate these guys.

Now, if you guys, like, I mean, I feel like, you know, you don’t really get it. They stole a ream of stickers today, so that’s why I took all your boards, just, not because I don’t trust you, just because you never know [inaudible] your brothers [inaudible] and I marked all, on all the slots you guys haven’t voted, because, uh, tomorrow, the [I Voted] stickers will be changing. They’re gonna be a different color, I’m telling you that right now. So you try and fuck with us, and you try and change the stickers, or keep the same ones and put them on there, we’re going to know. ‘Cus we’re not retarded, you know, we have the numbers from today.

Um, and, if this, if that shouldn’t scare you enough, I kinda want to tell you a little bit about the Greek system. Uh, I looked at the numbers from last year and I was comparing them, we are 700 votes down from the first day of last fall. Seven hundred votes down. Um, if you guys were on the Google Doc, which you should have been all day, and you checked, you know, we had twenty four hundred people come and vote today. You think that’s pretty good? Well, fifty eight hundred people voted. Where the fuck did we get those other people? I’m literally freaking out, because I’ve never seen anything like that. Like, if you don’t think that that’s a bad thing, then you should walk out, because this could be a catastrophe. We have the potential to lose it all, and we’re not going to lose it on my watch. All right? I need you guys to step up your game, big time! Houses: I mean, I hate calling people out. DG: you guys have the largest sorority and you guys are at, what, how much percent?

[Unidentified female 3]:

Twenty-four.

[male voice]:

Twenty-four percent. Um, Phi Delt, where were you guys? You guys have the largest fraternity right now in active members, you guys have… [cut off]

PART 3 – Voting Board

[Unidentified]:

[cut off]…thirty brothers. I wanna tell you, DU doubled you guys and they have a third of your brothers. So to put it in perspective, that’s awful. Um, [giggles] ATO[?], Chi O, uh, Delta Chi, Tri Delt, I mean, all you guys are in red right now, because you’re so low and you’re way down from last year. I can’t explain it to you enough how bad that is. We have a couple sororities, I mean, the sororities are really carrying it right now. Um, you guys are leading the way. You have, you know, six houses with over 100 people, which is great. But then you guys have, you know, like, frat stars, [inaudible] fraternties. What are you guys doing? We need to get out there. We need to get our people to vote. I know it’s annoying, I know its hard getting your brothers to go vote, but we have pledges. Okay, they have cars. Stop everything what you’re doing tomorrow, and get them to go vote first thing in the morning. I do not wanna be running around Sorority and Frat Row. I have a midterm tomorrow at six o’clock.

Like, this is the last thing we need to be dealing with during this campaign, and the fact that we’re down over 3,000 votes is scary. We haven’t seen anything like this in a while. You know, I hate to be hard on you guys, but this is what it comes down to. Um, tomorrow, it’s gonna suck. They’re going to pull shit out of their ass like they always do. They stole those stickers. You know they are going to be doing something crazy tomorrow. Um, I, I don’t know what yet. I’m going to be up at five in the morning again, and it, you know, it sucks cause I got a social tonight. I know a bunch of you guys do.

And, and this is what it comes down to. I do not wanna lose our way of life. It’s not gonna happen on my watch. So with that being said, fraternities especially, you guys need to get on the ball. I’m sorry, there’s no other, like, no ifs, ands, or buts. You guys need to get on it. You’re dropping the ball, big time. And you know, it’s a shame, because, like, we should be killing right now. There’s absolutely no reason, we have everything in line, people are campaigning their ass off, we’re doing fine out there. The candidates are the most qualified kids. The Reitz Union thing is going great, and these people are cheating. They are straight up double voting. They’re getting their little freshmen and sophomores to go vote in different locations. And, yeah, we’ll notice that like a week later.

But tomorrow, when the results come out, and we lose, we’re going to be like, “Holy shit, we just lost our way of life.” And everyone is going to freak out and everything before you is gonna fall apart. And that’s the last feeling I want. I mean, I can’t stress that to you guys enough. You guys should be going to be tonight freaking out. I, I ,I don’t even know if I can sleep tonight, like, I’m shaking right now.

Just when I saw that text from Arianna, the Supervisor of Elections, and she said, you know, “Fifty-five hundred people went to go vote.” And I saw my Greeks only came out with twenty-two hundred. ‘Cus I know we can get out, you know, a thousand more people from the community. I know [inaudible], cause they don’t come out that hard. I know, like, those numbers are coming out from somewhere completely random, and cheat, and fake.

And if we lose this goddamn election, uh, on my watch, you know, it sucks, it’s on my back, I know that, but like, I cannot let the Greek system down. You guys cannot let the Greek system down.

This is what we live for, this is why we pledge. Um, everything about it. This is why we run this campus, and we have been for the last century.

And the fact that we are on the verge of losing it is freaking me out right now. So with that said, protect your boards. Be on the ball tomorrow. Um, if you guys need help, let us know. If you guys need rides, let me know. I can coordinate pledges. Um, Naviv[?] can coordinate pledges. We have people man, that’s what we’re known for is having people, and we’re not using them right now.

Um, I don’t care what older brother, if he’s being a dick. I don’t care what older sister is harassing you and yelling at you and being a complete bitch. Get on the leadership of your house. Get on the older people that you trust to help you out. You’re not doing this alone, okay. That’s the last thing that should be running through your mind. Like I said, this is a stepping stool for you guys. You guys want to get ahead, and we gotta kill this election tomorrow. We gotta win this election tomorrow. That way, we can continue dominating this campus, continue doing what we want, and continue living the life that we live. I, I mean, I cant stress that to you enough. Um…

[Unidentified female 1]:

Here’s a couple things. Some issues that I personally deal with when I come across these problems with older brothers or sisters saying things, “Oh, I can’t vote, I have class all day,” or, “It’s a different location.” I call every single person on that board and I go, “What time is your classes?” And if they are at lunch, I drive them personally to that location. As their house rep, you need to do that. I’m sorry, it sucks. You have to be doing this all day, but this is what we need to do. If we need to bring the older brother or sister there, that’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to take them anytime tomorrow. You need to be up tomorrow at 7:30 cause the polls open at 8 and if someone needs a ride at 8, then you need to be up. I’m serious guys, we’re calling at 7 to wake you guys up. Be up. Do not go out tonight. It will piss me off beyond belief. If I find out you guys are out and then tomorrow you happen to sleep in, it’s not acceptable. That happened yesterday and that pissed me off. When [inaudible] weren’t returned when I called ten million times. That’s not cool, because this is how we lose elections. It’s by dicking around and thinking that we have this election in the bag, because we don’t.

This could be the first time that we lose completely an exec ticket and, uh, Senate slate. If you guys are chill with that and wanna go rage tonight and think it’s all cool, go do it, see if you guys can go do that in a couple weeks when everything’s destroyed.

Literally guys, please, like, go [inaudible]. If you have rides, I know my house. I’m going to start talking to girls in the IFPC[?], I’m gonna start saying, “I’m going to be there for rides.” You have a computer, [inaudible], or you know other people who have computers. Come do shifts. Like, rotate shifts. Like, have someone drive them for a few hours. And bring those [inaudible].

All of you guys have the polling locations. Its online. It’s at sg.ufl.edu/elections. It’s simple. Show every single one where they are voting. You guys [inaudible], let them give you an excuse of why they did not vote. There is no excuse.

I don’t care if they are 25 or 17, they are going to vote tomorrow. Whether they like it or not. Whether you have to drive them there [inaudible] while they are screaming and yelling at you. You are going to have to take it for tomorrow, suck it up and get me [inaudible], ‘cus right now they are beating us 2 to 1.

So, like, guys, this is so scary, because I’m in Senate. I see what these people do. It’s horrible, literally horrible.

Also, if you’re below right now, we’re going to call out names. If you are down, we’re gonna personally sit down with you and talk to you about ways we are getting numbers up tomorrow. Other than that, if you have 100 percent, thank you so much, you guys are doing great, you guys should know…

[Unidentified Male]:

Um, but wait, those guys that did 100 percent, again, again, congrats. But you know, like I called you and said, the job’s not over. Uh, I know I’ve been talking to Sean.

Um, like houses, you know, get five more stickers, you know, from your little freshmen that live in the dorms and whatnot. And you know, talk to the GDI’s [God Damned Independents] in the dorms, and get them to go vote, and collect their stickers, put them on your boards. ‘Cus like I said, we want over 100 percent. Um, that was my goal, and you know, right now, I’m rushing to get 80, ‘cus I’m freaking out right now. But for the most part, um, so like I said, job’s not over yet. Make sure you guys keep getting people to go vote. Um, with that said everyone can leave except for:

[Unknown female]:

AGR, Chi O, Chi Phi, Delta Chi, Tri Delt, DG, KD, K Sig, Phi Delt, FIGI, Phi Tau, Sigma Chi, [inaudible].

[Unidentified Male]:

All right, if you weren’t one of those houses [inaudible] you guys can go, and I’ll talk to you all tomorrow in the morning.

[Chairs moving]

Disclaimer: This transcript should be considered a work in progress. The members of the Student Alliance who helped produce this transcript do not attest to its accuracy or the identities of the speakers. The audio quality is poor, and if you believe something was wrongly transcribed or a speaker was wrongly identified, please let us know or say so in the comments.

The Ballot Initiatives

The wording of these questions is opaque, so make sure you know what you’re voting for going in.

A New Student Body Constitution
Every 10 years, SG’s governing document comes before a committee that cleans up errors and changes other rules governing the rights of students and our elected representatives. Most of the changes are symbolic or semantic, and the wording is practically incomprehensible, but one change stands out: if this passes, ballot initiatives to amend the Student Body Constitution will require the signatures of 5 percent of the student body, instead of the current 10 percent.

Gathering some 5,000 signatures, plus enough to compensate for errors, duplicates and illegibility, is a nearly Herculean task. Just ask Students for Online Voting. Cutting that number in half will strengthen what democracy exists on our campus. Vote YES.

The Reitz Union Two-Parter
See our complete coverage of this issue, and this lucid but dated Gainesville Sun article, for more information.

Part One: Fee increase
SG President Jordan Johnson did the right thing and exempted graduate students from the fee. But what about the rest of us? The SG budget tells us little about how the Reitz Union spends its money, and the estimated $42.5 million in repairs comes from a single engineering firm. If the repairs are so urgent that students need to cough up money immediately, Union staff should have sought more independent evaluations and opened their books to public inspection to allow us to make an informed decision.

The new fees will not be covered by Bright Futures or Florida Prepaid. There are other ways to pay for these repairs, but students are being treated as a source of easy money. Vote NO.

Part Two: Expansion
Should the building be expanded? Perhaps. But before students vote on the matter, shouldn’t we know what the expansion includes and how much it will cost? Complete expansion plans have not been released yet (preliminary sketches aside), so the “entire floor of meeting space” and other goodies touted by the dubious Renew Your Reitz campaign are mostly speculative, and depend on funding constraints and other factors.

Again, students have not been given enough information to make an informed decision. Again, vote NO.

Sweatshop Referendum
This non-binding question will simply take the pulse of the student body to determine whether we support using UF’s enormous power in the athletic-apparel market to help shut down sweatshops that serve companies like Nike. The initiative has support from all quarters of the student body, and the administration is currently looking into whether joining the Worker Rights Consortium is in their best interests. Help make their decision easier. Vote YES.

Candidates

President and Vice President are a package deal. Someone should inform the Alligator.

The Unite Party’s Ashton Charles boasts a sterling resume with impressive titles that currently include President of the Student Senate. What she has actually accomplished in those plum positions is another question. Her recent actions include supporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in new “administrative fees” paid to the UF administration out of student coffers, and a bill supporting the proposed Reitz fee without the approval of the student body. She has said she intends to “drive a hard bargain on behalf of the students,” but her record suggests otherwise.

The Student Alliance’s Ben Cavataro, by contrast, began his SG career in the Fall of 2007 as the only member member of Student Senate from an opposition party. Ever since, he has been working against long odds on behalf of the student body. Where other members of his party have sometimes lost their nerve, at times resorting to acrimonious outbursts and extreme rhetoric, Cavataro has kept an even temper and been something of a voice of reason. He is currently head of the student arm of the state Democratic Party, which could strengthen his hand lobbying for students’ interests in Tallahassee.

Vice President has fewer constitutionally-mandated duties than Student Body President. That means the office is usually charged with special projects – and with managing to fifty-something members of SG’s cabinet. Unite candidate Marcus Dixon has alread served as cabinet director, and collected awards including Cabinet Member of the Year. The Student Alliance’s Sagar Sane, on the other hand, has a record of innovation that includes soliciting private donations to create a multi-million-dollar endowment to help fund the campus speaker’s bureau at the UNC Chapel Hill – something he hopes to repeat here, which will allow Accent to bring in better speakers at a lower cost. Compared to Sane, Dixon seems short on new ideas. Vote Student Alliance – Cavataro and Sane.

Treasurer

Unite’s Virlany Taboada landed a zinger during a debate sponsored by the Freshmen Leadership Council. When her opponents promised, if elected, to donate their salaries to the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Fund, she countered that she’s a beneficiary of the fund, which helps working-class students from the first generation in their family to attend college. She went on to argue that having grown up on a limited budget (something that’s rare for SG candidates in either party, who overwhelmingly come from privileged backgrounds) has prepared her for managing the students’ finances responsibly.

Before running for treasurer, the Student Alliance’s Rafael Yaniz may have been best known for backing a controversial Senate resolution as a leader of Gators for Israel. In recent months, though, he has emerged as a forceful critic of the Blackberries, Park Anywhere decals, unrestricted free printing and other perks SG officials lavish on themselves, and vowed to end the practice. He also plans to reduce waste and fight money-grabs by the administration, leaving more student money for things we want, like free printing all over campus. He also intends to help scrutinize the Reitz Union’s finances and make SG budgets more transparent, so we can see where our money goes.

If national politics and foreign affairs drove our decisions in SG elections, we’d have to go with Taboada. But in this year of tightening budgets, with the potentially millions of new, unaccountable dollars extracted from students as fees, we need a treasurer willing to fight the administration and dismantle SG’s sense of entitlement. Vote YANIZ.

The Fine Print has learned that Reitz Union officials are actively involved in funding and supporting the Renew Your Reitz campaign – the one with all those green banners and T-Shirts seen all over campus. They want us to “Vote Yes and Yes” for a Reitz Union expansion and new student fees that won’t be covered by Bright Futures or the Florida Prepaid Scholarship Fund.

It makes sense they would support a ballot initiative that benefits their organization. The problem is that they are a public agency, and Florida election law states:

106.113 Expenditures by local governments.–

(1) As used in this section, the term:

(a) “Local government” means:

1. A county, municipality, school district, or other political subdivision in this state; and

2. Any department, agency, board, bureau, district, commission, authority, or similar body of a county, municipality, school district, or other political subdivision of this state.

The Reitz Union and its board of managers appear to meet this definition.

(b) “Public funds” means all moneys under the jurisdiction or control of the local government.

(2) A local government or a person acting on behalf of local government may not expend or authorize the expenditure of, and a person or group may not accept, public funds for a political advertisement or electioneering communication concerning an issue, referendum, or amendment, including any state question, that is subject to a vote of the electors. This subsection does not apply to an electioneering communication from a local government or a person acting on behalf of a local government which is limited to factual information.

Members of the Student Alliance have filed an injunction claiming the campaign violates the law. They have asked the 8th Circuit Court to compell the UF administration and the Reitz Union Board of Managers to stop distributing campaign materials and to disclose how much public money they’ve spent to persuade students to vote for higher fees. “We’re not out to punish UF,” said Jonathan Ossip, a Student Alliance leader who helped submit the injunction.

Update: The 8th Circuit Court denied the Student Alliance’s motion to halt the Renew Your Reitz campaign. The case will continue after the election.

A recent e-mail from Jaleesa Joseph, the Student Chair of the Reitz Union Board of Managers to leaders of student groups in support of the same campaign raises questions about another Florida election law:

104.31 Political activities of state, county, and municipal officers and employees.–

(1) No officer or employee of the state, or of any county or municipality thereof, except as hereinafter exempted from provisions hereof, shall:

(a) Use his or her official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with an election or a nomination of office or coercing or influencing another person’s vote or affecting the result thereof.

Here is Joseph’s e-mail in its entirety:

From: “Center for Student Activities & Involvement”
Date: February 19, 2010 8:53:13 AM EST
Subject: IMPORTANT MESSAGE from the Chair of the Board of Managers

As the Chair of the J. Wayne Reitz Union Board of Managers, I am reaching out to you – students that are familiar with the concept of service – for your help and support for the upcoming Reitz Union referendum. The Reitz Union was built in 1967, and since that time, it has become outdated and deficient to the current students needs. Consequently, the Reitz Union now requires $42.5 million dollars in structural and mechanical repairs. Without this capital investment, it’s very realistic that the Reitz Union will not be able to keep the doors open. Thus, we need your help and support to repair and rebuild the home of the students – J. Wayne Reitz Union. In the next week, we have organized a marketing campaign focused on educating the student body on not only the deficiencies of the current Union, but also the future benefits of tomorrow’s Union. Tomorrow’s Union will truly be the tangible result of today’s students’ dreams. Some of the future benefits that student organizations specifically can expect in tomorrow’s Union include:

• An Entire Floor Dedicated to Individual Organizational Suites
including lounge space and conference Rooms
• Individual Storage Space for all Student Organizations
• New Multipurpose Meeting Rooms
including Performance and Dance Spaces
• 24-Hour Access to your Organizational Suite
• An Expanded Free Printing Lab
Including oversized banners and glossy flyers
• A 1,500 Seat Auditorium
• More Restaurant Selections
including More Ethnic Options and a Sports Bar & Grill
• A New Parking Garage (750 Spaces)
including 75 free 30 min. Parking Spaces

However, none of this is possible without your help. As leaders of your respective organizations, we need your support and feedback. We have an opportunity to come together as a student body, build our dream Student Union, and leave a lasting legacy.

I would like to encourage you and the members of your organization to visit our website at www.RenewYourReitz.com, where you can get more information on the Union and also sign up to volunteer. Most importantly, I would like to encourage you and your members to go out and vote “Yes and Yes” for the Reitz Union referendum questions on Tuesday, February 23rd and Wednesday, February 24th.

Leave a legacy and Vote “Yes and Yes” for a better student experience.

Go Gators!

Jaleesa Joseph

Never mind that neither Joseph nor anyone else is in a position to promise the “ethnic” restaurants or 1,500-seat auditoriums, since specific plans for the expansion have not been released yet. The real problem is that Joseph is acting in her official capacity to influence the outcome of a referendum.

The Fine Print is awaiting replies from Reitz officials (Executive Director Eddie Daniels was not in the office today). The Office of Student Affairs, whose name is attached to the following video promoting the fee, did not respond to two phone calls seeking comment and said a reply would come on Monday.

Update: As you can see, the video has been taken down.

Imagine Your Union Main from UF Student Affairs on Vimeo.

Here’s copy of the injunction filed by members of the Student Alliance:

SAinjuction

Check back for updates, and follow the Fine Print’s complete coverage of the Reitz Union expansion.

Non-functioning duct smoke detectors in the Reitz, which the SG executive branch estimates will cost approximately $150,000.

During the Fall of 2007, the business-friendly environmentalist Hunter Lovins cut herself off in the middle of a presentation she was giving in the Reitz Union Grand Ballroom and asked the audience to be quiet for a minute.

The room fell silent, save for the moan of a straining air conditioner.

“Hear that?” she asked. “That’s the sound of wasted energy.”

At the time, the building was almost exactly 40 years old. Eddie Daniels, the Union’s executive director, says that as additions were made to the building, its infrastructure was not upgraded accordingly, in part because of the way projects get funded. Funding for something like a new ballroom usually does not include money to expand electrical, air conditioning or other systems to accommodate the increased use, he said.

As a result, Daniels explained during a presentation before the Student Senate in November, the power and air-handling systems are over capacity. Between asbestos, dead smoke detectors and other problems, the building requires some $42.5 million in repairs and upgrades, according to an estimate by an engineering firm. A pipe burst in the basement last semester, ruining computers and carpets in the basement and reminding Union officials that not making improvements can also come at a price.

There are several ways to pay for these repairs. One option is money from the Capital Improvements Trust Fund, which is drawn from student activity fees and is already earmarked for non-academic construction projects. It only disburses every three years, so we couldn’t get money for the repairs until the 2011-12 school year.

Some of the repairs are allegedly too urgent for that, so the Union and Student Government have proposed a fee increase for students. President Bernie Machen did not want to raise fees without the approval of the student body, so the proposal will come before us as a referendum during Student Government elections on Feb. 23 and 24.

Asbestos in the Reitz Union piping.

Perhaps the most vocal opponents to the plan had been Graduate Assistants United, who argued they could not afford what amounted to a tax on their already low wages to pay for a building they seldom use. As The Fine Print headed to press, Student Body President Jordan Johnson published an editorial in The Alligator in which he wrote, much to his credit, that he would work to exempt graduate assistants from any fee increase. That will likely put a damper on much of the dissent against the proposal, but whether the rest of the student body supports the plan is hard to judge.

It’s hard to argue the outdated structure is not in need of repair. The question of whether it needs a “cultural village” or a new parking garage as part of a proposal that could cost as much as $60 million in addition to the repairs will have its day, as a second part of the referendum.

The specifics of the fee are still up in the air. Under most proposals currently up for consideration, the amount of

Asbestos in the Reitz Union piping.

money students pay for the Reitz each year will more than double next year’s total of nearly $5 million and will cost students more than $100 per semester.

The fees will not be covered by Bright Futures unless the Florida Legislature approves a funding increase for the scholarship – an unlikely prospect in what will probably be another year of budget cuts.

Rafael Yaniz, the Student Alliance’s treasury candidate, points out that students know almost nothing about how that money gets spent. The publicly available breakdown of the Union’s $5 million budget for next year consists of four line-items: Salaries, Programs, Facilities and Services.

Union Director Daniels says that for years, the Union’s annual budget has covered only operating expenses, leaving nothing to pay for long-term maintenance. Making matters worse, he says, when he first took his job more than four years ago, there weren’t comprehensive records of the building’s equipment or condition.

Daniels says he found out the age of most of the equipment after he commissioned the engineers’ report last Spring. Yaniz says that raises doubts about the Union’s past managers and underscores the importance of holding current managers accountable.

Yaniz resigned as Johnson’s chief of staff in late January, he says, in part because nobody in his office was interested in overseeing the Union’s use of students’ money, scrutinizing officials’ estimates or considering other funding sources.

“There’s serious questions that need to be asked here,” he says. “The only party that’s doing that is the Student Alliance.”

The expansion proposal has not been unveiled yet, but it’s due some time in February. There is no guarantee we will have time to evaluate it before we vote, so the referendum will only gauge whether the student body supports the general idea of expanding the Reitz. Which ideas are in, which are out, and how much it all will cost will all be hashed out later. That is why this year’s student government elections are the most important in a long time. Failing to elect leaders who hold the people who control our money accountable has cost us millions of dollars and could cost us millions more.

Current SG leaders have referred to a new Union as the legacy of this generation of students. Without proper oversight, Yaniz says, “the only legacy that the Reitz Union fee will create is a legacy of debt.”

Fine Print editor Lydia Fiser recently dug up an old Nation article about how a similar battle played out a few years ago at Florida State, a “campus known more for holding national titles in football and ‘party school’ rankings than for student protest activity (sound familiar?).” The FSU student body supported WRC membership, but activists had to wage months of protests. The ultimately set up a tent city on their version of the Plaza of the Americas, which they kept up for months:

The tent-city protest was intended to end a long debate with the administration, which refuses to join the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), a sweatshop monitoring agency backed by the protesters and faculty, which passed a resolution supporting the students’ position. Instead, the arrests marked the beginning of a long standoff between the administration and student protesters, who now find themselves living in tents and sleeping bags to protest both the sweatshop issue and the administration’s refusal to tolerate the earlier protest–well after their classmates have gone home for the summer.

FSU ultimately joined the WRC, only to leave a few years later. So what was true for them then may be true for us now:

Sit-ins, protests and campouts have been required at many of the 100 universities who have now joined the WRC, and in this respect, FSU is no different. But the consequences of Florida State joining the WRC could be much more substantial than those at many of the other member schools, which might explain why the conflict has become so protracted at Florida State. Pendas says the possible impact of FSU joining is “huge…. We’re such a big university…and we’re in the South, for Christ’s sake!” He predicts a “domino effect” that would result in several other Florida universities joining–perhaps most importantly, the University of Florida, another football powerhouse with millions in licensing revenue pouring in each year.

The fight on our campus is important, and to some extent, history is on our side. Other southern schools, including our SEC rivels at Tennessee – have joined the WRC. And UF recently decided to stop licencing with Russell Athletic, which just lost a long battle with workers and students over a closed factory in Honduras. We have no illusions that voting “yes” will gaurantee UF joining the WRC – itself only a small part of the efforts to end the “race to the bottom” that continues to drive down wages and working conditions in the world’s poor countries – but it will surely help.

Alligator, I’ve got a wager for you. I find it hilarious the Unite Party says it will be “conducting interviews” to determine its executive candidates. It’s common knowledge they have already chosen Marcus Dixon to run for vice president and Virlany Taboada to run for treasurer. Because I feel bad for the students who will come out to interview when Unite has made up its mind, I’m willing to put my reputation on the line. If I’m wrong then feel free to Dart me, Joshua Niederriter, when they announce their candidates. But if I’m right send a Dart at the party for misleading the Student Body. I hope you take me up on this offer because either way you win.

He’s referring, of course, to a system of succession that predates the Unite Party, in which students from Greek houses and various campus groups are rewarded based on loyalty, receiving everything from student money for their groups to leadership positions in SG.

This has been going on for decades, and for a while we at the Fine Print were content to throw up our hands and focus on things we could actually change. But as it turns out, the system of patronage and corruption Niederriter artfully alludes to has meant that over the years, nobody in Student Government was paying attention while the Reitz Union “managers” let the student-funded building fall into disrepair, which is supposedly going to cost us upwards of $40 million to fix.

It’s no exaggeration to say that by failing to give a shit about SG, by failing to pay attention to what our representatives are doing (or not doing), and by turning out in dismally low numbers (never more than 20 percent) to vote in student elections, we have cost ourselves and our successors tens of million of dollars, which could be paid for with increased activity fees. It’s high time we demolished the political machine that currently calls itself the Unite Party, and which has repeatedly failed to look out for our interests.

As for Niederreiter’s letter, it puts the machine in an interesting position: will they reshuffle their slate of candidates just to discredit his assertion?

Related: The Fine Print is seeking a talented, gutsy individual interested in becoming our SG reporter. E-mail web@thefineprintuf.org for more information.

I have a roommate who loves to give me shit for my “hipster wisdom.” He refers to an esoteric body of psuedo-knowledge bearing such dictates as Meat is bad for you; cigarettes are not – especially if the tobacco is organic. Now I don’t really identify with “hipsters” (I tend to be anything but hip) and I’d like to think I see through the hypocrisy of their tenets. But my roommate’s derision of “hipster wisdom” does bother me, and it took me a while to figure out exactly why.

He’s right about one thing: There is a kind of person who uncritically hands over extra money for all kinds of organic food, to which he or she ascribes all sorts of unsubstantiated health benefits. This kind of person is seduced by products bearing a green or eco-friendly hue, often helpfully emblazoned on the package. Related groups, like vegetarians in all their permutations, share similar motivations and are equally prone to resting their case on pseudo-science (unless they’re talking about factory farms, abstract and faraway monstrosities that, I’ve found, find their way into our dietary deliberations only rarely).

What really upsets me about my roommate’s derision of “hipster wisdom” is the trend it represents, in which our values derive identity-making, stoked by marketers looking to craft a sales pitch. Bill Hicks pretty much nailed it:

Of course the “environment dollar” is a pretty big dollar. The sustainability mavens have managed a coup, selling “green” and “organic” to hipsters and sorority girls alike – and probably their affluent parents to boot. The adherents of “hipster wisdom” tend to have privileged backgrounds and leftish politics. The former makes them the perfect target for any sales pitch, while the latter leaves them susceptible to appeals to conscience.

But behind the marketing coup is a real and growing anxiety about our mounting environmental calamity. People are driven to “organic” labels by well-founded concerns over the waste, pollution and adulteration that infect our food supply at every stage. Of course the solutions the marketers offer are mostly bogus, albeit highly profitable. A serious evaluation of our problems and the benefits of the products purported to solve them rarely fits their business model, so instead they wrap the products in emotional appeals to the customer’s as a person of conscience.

It took a while for me to figure out why I struggle to defend my purchase of organic apples (a fruit where pesticides are a considerable hazard – as opposed to, say, bananas) against attacks on my supposed identity. I’m not like them, I insist. I do the research. But Green has become a sales tactic, to which we’re either susceptible or not. So my roommate and I are at opposite sides of a divide that resembles the battle between “preps” and “skaters” in middle school. Where that social dynamic was largely orchestrated by Hurley on the one hand and Abercrombie on the other, there are huge piles of cash arrayed on both sides of the food debate. What ought to be a rational discussion of the science and economics of America’s approach to feeding itself has become a battle over the competing identities employed by marketers to sell us products – in this case, the utilitarian versus the conscientious.

So not a lot has changed since Middle School. Huge swaths of our identities – our values, our politics, and of course the superficial things like clothes – have been sold to us. It’s apparently possible to determine someone’s food preferences based on whether they identify as “liberal” or “conservative.” Support for Sarah Palin, and in many cases for Barack Obama, derives mainly from people’s emotional responses to the candidates’ brands: the long-unheard voice of the outsider who just can’t take it anymore, the transformative figure from a long-oppressed minority who will redeem our nation’s promise of freedom and equality. How can those opposing groups find a way to relate to one another – much less talk rationally about the problems we face and how we might solve them – when their beliefs are based mainly on emotions intentionally evoked and manipulated by marketers, and when they see in each other the opposite sides of a cultural divide?

Genocide, war crimes, social abuses, displaced refugees, rape: unfortunately these tragedies continue, and Human Rights Awareness on Campus strives to educate the public on the human rights violations that are caused by negligence, ignorance and the disconnection between resources and the means of acquiring them.

Concerning domestic issues, we’re raising awareness about the atrocities of the Afghan war and the current health care discourse.

Our theme this year is “Think Globally, Act Locally,” so we are kicking off a campaign to fight sweatshops. We are working closely with UF Amnesty International to initiate a Sweatshop Free Gators campaign that would demand UF acquire merchandise from factories that comply with workers’ rights. We are also involved with Project Downtown, fundraising to provide food to the less fortunate. Recently we have expanded our horizons by developing a committee centered on the National American Cancer Society’s event Relay for Life.

Human Rights Awareness on Campus makes great strides to inform students of human rights violations and what they can do about them. We have gathered and are gathering support to serve humanity, but it is by no means the end of the struggle. We, as members and human beings, must achieve piece globally. Everyone must take part. Speak out!

To ignore world suffering is to become its accomplice, and that is our motto.

For more information on Human Rights Awareness on Campus, join the Facebook group or e-mail us at hrac.uf@gmail.com.

Al Qaeda continues to harbor safe havens along the Pakistani border, our President declared. These must be destroyed. And how? Will these several thousand fighters finally allow our side to sweep from cave to cave, purging the terrorists from every crag and crevice, until the last America-hater is hanging from the ceiling of Bagram? His “clearly defined strategy” was murky on the details.

“The Taliban is gaining momentum,” he warned. This must be stopped. And the Afghani government must be strengthened, and purged of corruption. That same corruption our own forces rely on for protection in what remains a stateless country, as the Nation reported last month:

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.

The corruption is impenetrable, and even if the new troops allow us to protect our own instead of making extortion payments to our enemies, what then?

Obama mentions one truly frightening prospect: the collapse of Pakistan, and the yardsale of its nuclear arsenal. Nothing really defines Pakistan as a place, apart from a corrupt, feeble government that is basically ignored by many of its tribal peoples, including the Pashtuns – in whose lands the Taliban have assembled their strongholds. Robert Kaplan spelled it out in “The Revenge of Geography,” a treatise that tells the story of the twenty-first century before it even unfolds:

Indeed, the border going westward comes in three stages: the Indus; the unruly crags and canyons that push upward to the shaved wastes of Central Asia, home to the Pashtun tribes; and, finally, the granite, snow-mantled massifs of the Hindu Kush, transecting Afghanistan itself. Because these geographic impediments are not contiguous with legal borders, and because barely any of India’s neighbors are functional states, the current political organization of the subcontinent should not be taken for granted. You see this acutely as you walk up to and around any of these land borders, the weakest of which, in my experience, are the official ones—a mere collection of tables where cranky bureaucrats inspect your luggage. Especially in the west, the only border that lives up to the name is the Hindu Kush, making me think that in our own lifetimes the whole semblance of order in Pakistan and southeastern Afghanistan could unravel, and return, in effect, to vague elements of greater India.

Afghanistan will never be a stable nation-state, for the same reason Pakistan never has been. We can’t change the facts of geography. We can only hope to change the facts of human events – like the existence of nuclear arsenals, or most importantly, this war we’re fighting. We have a new president, a new strategy, a new shipment of young people ready to kill and die for nothing. But we carry the hubris that has destroyed every empire. I think it’s high time we drop it.

I encourage everyone who wants to see a peaceful Afghanistan to put their names next to mine on the Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s statement against the war, and to check out other groups that are working to bring this pointless bloodshed to an end.

Russell Athletic, a major maker of licensed collegiate apparel, reached an agreement to rehire workers it had fired for trying to form a union, and to allow workers to organize in its other Honduran factories.

The Times quotes WRC director Scott Nova:

“This represents the maturation of the universities’ codes of conduct. There’s a recognition by the universities of their ability to influence the actions of important brands and change outcomes for the better.”

He said the agreement was “unprecedented” in terms of scope and size and in “the transformative impact it can have in one of the hardest regions of the world to win respect for workers’ rights.”

Mr. Nova also praised Russell for changing course. “I think the executives at Russell recognized it was time for a new approach,” he said. “They decided it was important for the success of their company.”

But this is my favorite part:

“For us, it was very important to receive the support of the universities,” Moises Alvarado, president of the union at the closed plant in Choloma, said by telephone on Tuesday. “We are impressed by the social conscience of the students in the United States.”

Which is exactly why UF should join the WRC. As a marketing powerhouse in the world of collegiate athletic apparel, we have the power to ensure human rights are respected in factories everywhere. Right now we’re a member of the Fair Labor Organization – an industry-sponsored group that did nothing for the workers in Honduras.

UF actually cut ties with Russell after USAS contacted them during its campaign in solidarity with Central American factory workers. I’d say that’s a start, but I hope it’s only the beginning.

Officer Jeff Kerkau verified there was an accident and, with another officer, went to the restaurant and got Machen, according to the report. They returned to the car and Machen was issued a citation for failure to leave information to an unattended vehicle causing damage.

Sure hope it wasn’t some important business dinner…

Wish I had seen this sooner. Hats off to my roomates for bringing it up. The Alligator still has nothing on the story. I’ll be seeking comment in the morning.

Are you the parking attendant that was involved, or the driver of the Camry? Tell us your story.

Three quotes from a recent interview Foer did at Salon draw an important distinction between folks like us, who worry about the effects of industrial agriculture, and what I’m going to call the PETA crowd, who tend to dominate our side of the debate with emotional nonsense:

It’s a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people’s exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they’re the rule. So an animal running and getting beaten up or running around with its neck slit open: That is the exception, even on the worst farms it’s still the exception. But the rule that happens even on the best factory farms is animals are genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, animals that never see the sun and never touch the earth, animals whose cages are never cleaned. These things are not as shocking and don’t work as well in a video, but they’re something to be concerned with much more because they’re happening to billions and billions of animals every year.

I’m with Foer. I really don’t give a shit if someone injures a cow they’re about to kill anyway, or whether it’s a “clean kill” or not. But I do care about the underlying mentality, which, as I’ve written in the past, can wind up affecting the quality of the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breath.

“Is it right to eat an animal, is it not right to eat an animal?” That’s how most people talk about vegetarianism. But to me it doesn’t even matter. The truth is I actually don’t know what I think about that question. What I know is that it’s wrong to do it the way that we’re doing it. And we could sit here and argue about a perfect farm where animals are treated perfectly and slaughtered perfectly and whether that’s right. But if it exists at all it exists in a place that is impossible for us to find on any regular basis.

I’m not willing to follow Foer’s logic all the way to strict vegetarianism, for a simple reason: I like meat. Plus some types of meet, like beef from cows that eat grass, or venison shot by hunters, allow humans to consume calories in grass or forest foliage that we couldn’t otherwise convert to usable energy. But I realize that I – and everyone else – am going to need to get used to eating a lot less of it. The price paid by the planet is just too high. I’ve seen that elusive near-perfect farm Foer talks about, and he’s right: it can’t possibly be reproduced on a large enough scale to allow us to maintain our current levels of consumption.

The last one speaks for itself:

Factory farming supplies a demand for cheap meat. That’s it. It doesn’t taste good, it’s not healthy for us. The only good thing about it is that it’s cheap. But the thing is that it’s not cheap. It’s cheap at the cash register, and it’s sold as cheap — that’s the defense for factory farming, “Look, we’re making affordable food for normal people and all other arguments are elitist.” But in fact factory farming is like the ultimate elitism because it’s the most expensive food ever produced in the history of mankind. We pay very little at the cash register, but we pay and our kids are going to pay for the environmental toll, obviously the animals are paying, rural communities are paying. And for what? So that corporations can prosper. The huge agribusiness — companies make hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, not in the name of feeding the world, but in the name of making something that’s so cheap that people become literally addicted to it.

Japan

Percentage of GDP spent on health care: 8.1

How does it work?
Under the social insurance model, people get health coverage either from their employers or through non-profit cooperatives, contributing a share of the costs themselves. The government helps provide coverage to those who can’t afford it. The government holds down costs by continually negotiating ever-lower prices on treatments. The Japanese get twice as many MRIs per capita as Americans, but MRIs cost more than a third less because of government mandates. The lower cost puts the squeeze on Japanese MRI makers, but each time they figure out how to produce more efficient machines, they can profit handsomely by exporting them.

What’s good?
The Japanese system takes care of everyone and allows people to get all the care they want at extremely low prices without excessive bureaucracy. At the same time, the pressures of government price controls have helped turn Japan into a dominant player in the global market for health care technology — a potentially attractive benefit for American cities like Gainesville, where medical research and innovation are a major source of well-paying jobs.

What’s bad?
Nearly half of Japanese hospitals operate at a deficit. Many observers wonder whether the government’s strict price controls have gone too far, creating shortages that will only get worse as the population ages. But the Japanese spend half as much on health care as America does. It’s likely they will have to either curb health care consumption or spend more money, which could mean raising prices or increasing government subsidies.

Lessons to learn
With for-profit insurance companies out of the way, a social insurance system can take care of everyone and also be good for business. Another important factor that helps keep the Japanese healthy — and health care cheap — is their diet, which includes lots of fish and vegetables and a fraction of the red meat and corn syrup that clog American arteries. If the U.S. government is more invested in the health of its people, it will have an incentive to make healthy foods more affordable, rather than subsidizing the empty calories churned out by factory farms and sold at depressed prices by convenience stores and fast-food chains.

United Kingdom

Percentage of GDP spent on health care: 8.4

How does it work?
When people try to demonize government-run health care, there’s a good chance they refer to Britain’s National Health Service, a government-run, taxpayer-funded system that resembles the medical services American soldiers receive through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Patients have a choice of hospitals, which compete for patients by providing better service with lower wait times. Government funding is tied to the amount of patients treated by doctors and hospitals.

What’s good?
The system takes care of everyone, and patients don’t have to pay doctors’ bills because their taxes take care of the tab. As a result, doctors have an incentive to keep people healthy and prevent costly health problems from ever occurring, rather than trying to profit from expensive treatments.

What’s bad?
One word: bureaucracy. Like its American analogue at the VA, the British NHS routinely draws complaints from people frustrated with long wait times for major operations like organ transplants and hip replacements.

Lessons to learn
Britain’s answer to its bureaucratic inefficiency has been creeping privatization, which has drawn widespread protests. People like government health care because they want the guaranteed coverage it entails. Indeed, depending how the question is asked, polls show that between half and two thirds of Americans favor government-run health care for everyone in the country, even if it leads to higher taxes. But government-run systems like Britain’s continue to struggle with big-ticket and optional treatments.

Switzerland

Percentage of GDP spent on health care: 10.8

How does it work?
In 1994, the same year the last American attempt at health care reform fell apart in the Hillarycare debacle, the Swiss approved universal coverage by referendum. People are required to buy health insurance, and people who can’t afford it get government assistance. Insurance companies aren’t allowed to profit from basic care, but they can make money offering compensation for lost wages, nicer hospital beds and the rest of the perks you hear about on Aflac commercials.

What’s good?
The Swiss system proves that it’s possible to cover everyone with a system largely driven by market competition in a country with large pharmaceutical and insurance industries. The reform originally passed by a narrow margin but now is widely popular across the political spectrum in one of Europe’s most individualistic countries.

What’s bad?
The Swiss system is the second most expensive in the world in terms of GDP, surpassed only by the U.S. More than 90 percent of the Swiss were already covered when the reform passed in the ’90s, and many insurers were already nonprofit. These are some of the reasons the liberal Swiss government succeeded where the Clintons failed. Our entrenched interests are stronger and the transition will be more dramatic.

Lessons to learn
To cover everybody in America, politicians are going to have to shaft the insurance and pharmaceutical companies that fund their campaigns in a way the Swiss were never forced. The Obama administration’s back-room deal to prevent Medicare from driving a harder bargain with drug companies, combined with insurance companies’ recent threats to raise premiums if reform passes, illustrate the pitfalls of taking on powerful industries and raise questions about whether simple market-based reform like that passed by Switzerland could ever succeed in the U.S.

China

Percentage of GDP spent on healthcare: 5.6

How does it work?
China had a health care system run by the government after the Communist Party took power. In urban areas, the Chinese received health care at government-funded hospitals, and in rural areas, they received it from roving “barefoot doctors” and at village clinics run by the commune-based Cooperative Medical System. In the early 1980s, however, the system began to disintegrate. Once the government transferred responsibility to provincial governments, a domino effect of increased privatization has left the Chinese with an expensive health care system that few can afford. They are taking steps to help the uninsured, however, and by 2020 hope to once again have universal health care.

What’s good?
For the vast majority of Chinese, not so much. Many wealthy urbanites have access to modern medical facilities. However, China’s healcare spending encompasses less than 5% of its Gross Domestic Product.

What’s bad?
Today, only 29 percent of Chinese have health insurance. Information on the state of Chinese health care is sparse because of a lack of government transparency, but the system resembles those of other developing nations more than that of a growing economic powerhouse. The Chinese health care system now ranks 144 out of 191 countries ranked by the World Health Organization.

Lessons to learn
After the Communist takeover, China’s system provided its people with government-funded health care and dramatically improved the quality of medical care available in the country. Granted, Chinese life expectancy was in the mid-thirties at the time of the Maoist revolution, so there was plenty of room for easy improvements. Since the reforms of the 1980s, they’ve gone in the opposite direction of industrialized nations, as their fledgling health system disintegrated into a shoddy, decentralized, increasingly privatized system plagued by inequality. Sometimes, government-run health care just works better.

Canada

Percentage of GDP spent on health care: 10.1

How does it work?
Canada has a single-payer system, in which the government is the insurance provider for everyone, but people get health care from mostly private doctors and hospitals. Currently, healthcare costs encompass near 10% of the Gross Domestic Product.

What’s good?
Everyone is covered for almost all treatments deemed medically necessary. The combined market heft of 33 million Canadians allows the government to negotiate lower prices with drug companies, and because the government doesn’t have to worry about denying people coverage, selling people plans or making profits for shareholders, Canada’s insurance system has significantly lower overhead than the U.S. system, meaning more money is spent on actually keeping people healthy.

What’s bad?
Because everyone is covered for most services, there are long wait times to see a physician. The system is under attack for inefficiency and insufficient funding. Many Canadians think that they should be able to pay for better or faster health care if they have the money, but this is mostly not allowed because it could undermine the government monopoly that helps keep drugs cheap for Canadians. There is also a fear that the best physicians will leave for more lucrative jobs in other countries.

Lessons to learn
In a perfect world, people would not go without health care. That can’t be achieved by a free market system alone. Canada has the opposite problem: the lack of market mechanisms has left patients frustrated by a lack of choices and limited the incentives to become a doctor or develop new medicines. It’s hard to give patients the choices they want under a strict government monopoly. Still, the complaints of rich Canadians unable to get softer hospital bedding at any price ring rather hollow compared to those of poor American families who can’t afford to treat life-threatening diseases.

Read the whole resolution. I’ll take apart some of the most egregious portions:

Whereas, Israel was founded as and is a representative democracy, and is the only democracy in the Middle East

I’ll let the neoconservative Michael B. Oren, writing about “Seven Existential Threats” in the pro-Israel journal Commentary, handle that one (emphasis mine):

Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent. Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. If it chooses democracy, then Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist. If it remains officially Jewish, then the state will face an unprecedented level of international isolation, including sanctions, that might prove fatal.

Back to the resolution:

In light of Iran attempting to acquire nuclear capability, which poses an existential threat to the safety, security, and existence of the state of Israel and of all the nations of the Middle East and will severely affect the efforts made toward initiating a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement

What about Israel’s Nukes? Do they pose an existential threat to Arabs? Or to Iran? Israel has a record of attacking its neighbors, and does not abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and has said it never will.

Let it be resolved that Israel and its citizens have the right to exist, to defend themselves, and to live in peace

Fine by me. But not this part:

Let it be resolved that the University of Florida Student Senate on behalf of the University of Florida Student Body hereby exhorts the United States Congress to pass and adopt the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (H.R. 2194 in the US House of Representatives & S. 908 in the US Senate) to pressure the corrupt Iranian leadership, through peaceful means, to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

Cutting off vital energy supplies, namely imports of gasoline is not a “peaceful means” of resolving anything. It’s a hostile act that will threaten the wellbeing of all Iranians and only make things uglier. And Iran doesn’t even have a nuclear weapons program. They have a civilian nuclear energy program originally funded by the United States before the Islamic Revolution. Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” is about as real as Iraq’s.

And then we get to the crux of the matter:

Let it be further resolved that the University of Florida Student Senate on behalf of the University of Florida Student Body hereby urges the United States House of Representatives to pass and adopt the Ros-Lehtinen/Berman Resolution known as H.Res. 867 in order to assert the United States of America’s stance against the biased United Nations “Goldstone Report”.

The “biased” report accuses both sides of atrocities. Are the UN, Amnesty International and the rest of the international human rights community, and virtually all media outlets outside the us, including the Israeli newspaper Haaretz waging some massive conspiracy against Israel and its Defense Forces? Or is the Israeli government trying to deflect credible accusations, like the claim, now substantiated by multiple human rights organizations, that its forces were using white phosphorus? Honestly, which is more plausible? Let’s hear from Goldstone himself, who can never seem to find his way onto American television:

Oh, by the way, “our” views will be represented on the national stage:

Proviso: A copy of this resolution is to be sent to every Florida Member of Congress

If this factually sloppy, warmongering resolution doesn’t speak for you, let the Senate know tomorrow.

Are you, or do you know, the people circled below? Do you have photos, video footage or other information about what went down? Let us know, so we can get to the bottom of what happened. Stay tuned for updates.

Police haul off a handcuffed Ryan J. Carey, charged with assaulting an officer, as crowds look on following a riot on NW 8th St. Saturday night. Photo by Stephany Kaye.

Police taze Ryan J. Cleary as revelers swarm around them. Photo by Stephany Kaye.

There’s been a lot of talk in media lately about President Obama trying to learn the lessons from Vietnam (nevermind how they tend to describe that disastrous war as a “success”). Tomorrow evening, Fine Print blogger Scott Camil, who won two purple hearts while serving the in US Marine Corps during the war in Vietnam, will explain what those lessons ought to be.

The next two movie screenings will cover the genocides in Darfur and the Congo.

These days most dairies are crappy – covered in the feces of hundreds of cows, packed into industrial feedlots, injected with hormones and antibiotics, and engorged with chemical-laced feed, so they can’t help but shit themselves.

But Bubba runs one of Florida’s cleanest milk operations, with some of the state’s healthiest cows. In 2007, Kurtz and Sons Dairy won the prize for the cleanest milk in the state. Since he went into business on his own in 1991, Bubba has won the prize three times and consistently ranks in the top 20, out of hundreds of dairies. His relatively tiny herd has built a legion of loyal customers from Tallahassee to Ocala.

The majority of those customers seek raw milk, a product the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Protection considers unfit for human consumption.

Ever since the emergence of dirty urban dairies a century ago, regulators have required milk to be pasteurized. Pasteurization is a process of heating liquids, usually to 161 degrees or more – high enough to kill potentially harmful bacteria, including salmonella and E. coli. Pasteurization vaporizes nutrients in the milk, along with the enzymes that help humans digest it, which may ultimately contribute to problems ranging from allergies and autoimmune disorders to digestive problems including lactose intolerance.

“A lot of people don’t realize milk has Vitamin C in it,” Bubba says. That’s because Vitamin C is eliminated at roughly 116 degrees.

Bubba, along with a chorus of raw milk advocates, says pasteurization gives farmers an excuse to be less careful.

Raw milk is illegal to sell in much of the United States and all of Canada, but all over North America its evangelists are spawning black-market networks that attract government scrutiny. They insist the stuff is safe, even beneficial, and that it tastes better.

The emerging black market has triggered police raids and sparked legal battles. Last October, Canadian farmer Michael Schmidt asked for the maximum possible sentence after he was found in contempt of court for ignoring an order to stop selling raw milk. The judge didn’t give him jail time, saying he didn’t want to make him a martyr to the cause. Schmidt took a $55,000 fine and vowed to continue the fight, declaring: “When Gandhi picked up the salt, he kept marching, and when Martin Luther started the Montgomery bus strike, he kept going until the law was changed.”

People like Schmidt are motivated by more than a richer flavor and some extra Vitamin C. The government keeps industrial dairy farming alive by subsidizing corn-based feed that cows were never meant to eat, failing to require cattlemen to care for their immigrant laborers or pay decent wages, and setting minimum prices for milk sold in stores. The system creates incentives to produce milk deprived of some its most health-giving properties.

Meanwhile, despite multimillion-dollar ad campaigns (“Got Milk?”), milk sales in America have been declining for more than two decades. But the niche market for raw milk is growing steadily.

The acolytes of the raw milk revolution are questioning the way we feed ourselves. Is it fair, much less sustainable, for the public to prop up farms that consume tons of fossil fuel to grow millions of bushels of corn and soy to feed unhealthy cows that produce bacteria-laden milk that must be sapped of nutrients before it’s safe to consume?

Bubba Kurtz is hardly an outlaw or a revolutionary. He sells his raw milk strictly as pet food, in compliance with Florida law, though what his customers do with it is up to them. He started in the dairy business with a herd that numbered in the hundreds, but three decades working on dairies and immersing himself in the scientific literature gradually convinced him to change his ways. In recent years, curious UF students have made the 90-minute drive north to his farm near Live Oak, to see his radical farming methods up close.

Bubba says his milk is safe to drink raw because of the way he cares for his cows, which now number less than 30. Fewer cows means less stress – both on the Kurtz family and their herd. Less stress means less crap in the parlor during milking time, which means cleaner milk.

Cows produce the most milk right after they calf. Bubba's herd is fertile year round, which allows him to meet milk demand when it peaks in the Fall.

Bubba milks his cows to the sounds of Neil Young and the Beatles, maybe a little bluegrass or what he calls “good” country. Music helps keep cows calm, he says, citing a study by Purdue University. The kind of music isn’t important to the cows; what matters is that they get good vibes from the humans in their midst.

Unlike most larger dairy operations, his cows don’t eat feed. They eat the fresh green grass grown on his ranch, except during the winter when they eat silage and hay.

Cattle feed, made mostly of corn and soy, doesn’t allow the cows’ digestive systems to function properly, Bubba says. To produce the cleanest, most nutritious milk, they have to eat grass.

“One of the old adages in the dairy business is you don’t feed the cow. You feed the bugs inside the cow.”

Healthy cows store trillions of helpful bacteria in their rumens, 30-gallon fermentation vats that store the cud they chew. The bacteria thrive on the cellulose in grass, which the cows can’t break down themselves. A cow fed on fresh grass is a walking ecosystem in which good bugs keep out the bad.

Kurtz calls it competitive inhibition, and cites a test by a California farmer who added E. coli, salmonella and listeria bacteria to a sample of grass-fed raw milk. The germs died within eight hours.

“Chlorophyll is one of the best disinfectants nature has ever made,”  he explains in his deep-throated twang. “It’s anti-microbial, except when it comes to the good bugs.”

At the Gainesville farmer’s market, customers arrive early to line up for raw milk before Bubba sells out.

Anita Sundaram says she drinks his raw milk for her health and because it tastes better. Enzymes in raw milk help reduce lactose intolerance, she adds, and raw milk is easier for her to digest.

“I want cows that are ruminants, that eat grass instead of corn and wheat,” she says.

Noah Shitama, with two young kids in tow, says he likes raw milk for the same reasons, and his children also drink it from time to time. But he would never drink raw milk from what he calls “factory cows.”

“It totally depends on where it’s from,” he says. “Like all foods, if you know where it comes from, it’s usually safer.”

About a year and a half ago, Kurtz and Sons lost some customers after someone arrived at Shands complaining of liver problems after drinking his raw milk. The milk had been purchased at Ward’s Supermarket, so the store pulled that batch from the shelves.

“Now it was one person mind you, and I sold about 300 jugs in Gainesville alone that week,” he says.

The hospital was suspecting ungulate fever . But Kurtz tests his cows for the disease every year, and his whole herd was clean. The diagnosis changed to leptospirosis .

“That’s another funny one there,” he says. “Because I don’t necessarily test for lepto, but I have always vaccinated for it.”

Leptospirosis causes infertility in cows, and the females in the Kurtz herd were all getting pregnant on schedule. The disease infects the kidneys in humans, he adds, not the liver.

The patient recovered and the issue faded away. Nobody knows for sure whether his milk caused the illness.

But regulators and health officials tend to regard unpasteurized milk as suspect. Between 1998 to 2005, there were at least 45 outbreaks of food-borne illness traced to raw dairy products, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In those cases, more than 1,000 people got sick, 104 were hospitalized and two died.

Raw milk proponents say federal regulators, who caution against unpasteurized dairy products, are used to dealing with ranchers who operate on a much larger scale, with less care and cleanliness. Industrial ranchers, they charge, wield far more lobbying power than their smaller competitors.

Bubba likes to say that he is no longer in the “commodity business.” His family’s farm hasn’t been profitable in years.

But life is simpler, less stressful. There are no longer workers to manage, other than his wife and his daughter, Virginia. And the herd is healthy enough to care for itself.

His typical annual vet bill is less than $80, he adds, and that just pays for a routine checkup to ensure his beef is safe to eat. His methods yield between 6,000 and 7,000 pounds of milk per cow each year, compared to the Florida average of 16,000. But by reducing the stress on his herd, he keeps costs down by avoiding antibiotics or other chemicals.

His cows also live longer. The average life span of a Florida cow is four and a half years. Kurtz estimates his herd, which is young, is currently near that average, but he plans on keeping them much longer than that.

“Cows perform better on grass,” he says. “And when I say perform better, I don’t necessarily mean maximum milk production. I’m talking about staying healthy and living a long time.”

Healthy cows produce milk that’s healthier for people. Many raw milk drinkers are interested in feeding the bugs in their own guts. Our internal ecosystems have been losing biodiversity in an era of cheap, sterile food.

A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that the factory farms that produce less biologically beneficial but “inexpensive” meat and dairy relied on $35 billion in federal subsidies for corn-based feed between 1997 and 2005, as well as more than $100 million in annual “pollution prevent” payments since 2002. And these operations have suffered during the economic crisis, as commodity prices plummeted.

The current industry norm is not only destructive and unhealthy; it isn’t really economically viable. Meanwhile, farmers like Bubba Kurtz, who don’t benefit from such public largess, are validating the environmentalist mantra of less, but better. Better means cleaner, healthier, safer.

The raw milk revolution augurs an end to the era of more.

The cover of "Sincerely, Severely", the latest album from Gainesville's Morningbell

The first thing you’ll notice about Morningbell’s Sincerely, Severely is the face of it. The cover art is tasteful – classy and clean. In a no-nonsense manner, on a blacker than black background, you find the essential information in weathered calligraphic lettering and three smiling skulls.

At least initially, this all suggests death.

But the music places you somewhere else. The music drives you far, far away from the stillness of a burial mound.

Perhaps the artwork puts you in a Mexican desert, and just maybe the bright colors lapping at the album’s back cover are a side effect of cactus-derived psychedelics.

The psychedelia of Sincerely, Severely, Morningbell’s fourth full-length album, lies in the schizophrenic nature of the songs. Though the majority of the songs could be considered all over the place, the collection of tracks is steadfast in dance-ability and in the capability of the Gainesville musicians – Travis Atria on guitar and vocals, Eric Atria on bass and theremin, Chris Hillman on drums, and Stacie Thrushman on keyboard.

The album plays like a radio station that mixes the hits of yesterday and today. But Sincerely, Severely is more mature, more alive than most radio; it’s as cohesive as one band’s private pirate radio station could be.

What Morningbell accomplishes isn’t easy.  You can’t just throw every musical genre in the kitchen into a blender and expect it to be delicious. The band shifts lithely between the sound and sensibility of specific genres, or fuses them together into a mouth-watering pop pizza.

From an objective stance, it could be said that Morningbell’s method is akin to that of Naked City, or Mr. Bungle for that matter, but yielding a flavor entirely different. Sincerely, Severely is marked by movement, and little time is wasted.

The 14 songs clock in at just about 48 minutes.

“Let’s Not Lose Our Heads” opens the album strongly with its rich percussion. By the time you notice the hand claps, you know there’s a good time to be had. It serves to showcase their versatility and their ability to play or not to play (each when appropriate).

“Hello, Dali” has a dramatic string flourish like the theme of a foreign soap opera with some delicate slices of soul.

Immediately following, “Soul Ma’am” is a breakdancer’s dream with its feel-good refrain, a solid horn line and a little slide guitar. Then later in the second half comes “King Mango Strut,” something like a standard T. Rex boogie but injected with loads of soul.

Also notable is “Stay in the Garden,” which features some thrilling clarinet/trumpet interplay, a fantastic upright bass performance and some very tasteful organ work.  Mix in a bottle of gin and a few packs of cigarettes, and you have a song Tom Waits would tip his hat to.

The second half of the album, which contains the longer songs, becomes tinged with expansive synthesized sounds.

“Good Morning, I’m Here” has an angelic, watery soundscape about it, with its tight drumming and a refrain that would make Bruce Springsteen instinctively grab a Telecaster and wander on stage.

The album ends nicely with “It Was All Mondays,” where you may find yourself in the desert again, in a psuedo-western scene, watching the red sky drain as the sun settles in behind a distant chain of mountains. For a little while a sleepy cinematic scene, but the peyote poppers aren’t quite through; once again, you’re reminded of where you are, nicely parellelling the opening track.

But even if that’s not your thing at all, the production is exquisite.  The majority of the songs are richly layered sonically, often incorporating brass or strings, appropriately layered guitars, additional percussion – everything in its right place.  High fidelity, crystal clear.

During its printing run of a single school year (’68-’69), this alternative weekly was the mouthpiece of UF’s so-called radical students, who were dissatisfied with what they saw as the Alligator’s toothless and irrelevant coverage of campus events.

Many members of its staff had worked at the Alligator (Steve Hull, one of University Report’s ringleaders, had been an editor), but quit amid controversy and censorship by the administration. They produced the paper on an old-fashioned typewriter on their living room floor. University Report’s mission statement was, in part:

In response to the Faculty Position Paper presented to the Action Conference by Professor Corbin Carnell, a group of students has formed the University Report. This weekly publication intends to analyze issues significant for members of the University community as well as allow dialogue between students and faculty…

…There is a tendency on the part of university administrators to regard free expression of the students as a mere symptom of the student status, and to ignore it. If University education is not to become mindless mass-production, the student must not in this way become depersonalized. Student free speech must not be too easily discarded as the emotional intensity and fantasy of adolescents undergoing identity diffusion. Rather it must be seen as the validation of experience; the message–not that he is right or wrong but that he exists.

To that end, stories questioned the legitimacy of reforms touted by the administration (epitomized by the Action Conference, PR stunt orchestrated by UF President President Stephen C. O’Connell), exposed government spying on UF students (“Wee is Watching You” discussed an alleged informant named Palmer Wee), and tackled questions like campus race relations and the social acceptability of protests. One article explored why “The Third Floor Boys” – the Student Body President, the leadership of Florida Blue Key and the editor of the Alligator – seemed to lack the cajones to lead students in challenging the administration.

One issue featured a burning American Flag on the cover. Another featured shots of a nude co-ed strolling through what is now Library East, causing a stir that reached news wires around the state.

“We had a different idea of citizenship,” said Michael Abrams, who served as the papers second Executive Editor. “It didn’t occur to me that I would someday have to earn a living.”

In an editorial, UR took The Alligator to task for cutting its ties to student government. While the paper claimed the move helped preserve its freedom to print what it wanted, the UR editorial charged that rejecting student government funds (which came with some minor strings attached) took the publication out of students’ hands and placed it under the control of the Board of Student Publications, which was dominated by faculty hand-picked by the administration.

Less than four years later, the administration’s attempts at censorship forced the Alligator off campus, and students haven’t controlled their campus newspaper since.

The University Report may have been “radical,” and may have routinely criticized the administration in ways the Alligator never would, but it was published during a time when student protests would shut down University Ave. for days at a time and frats would drag couches onto the Plaza of the Americas for all-night parties fueled by kegs of beer and sheets of LSD.

As Abrams, put it in an e-mail this fall, “We were pretty small potatoes compared to everything else that was going on.”

A look at the paper’s supporters reveals a campus culture less socially divided than it is today. University Report was endorsed by the Student Senate, and its staff included members of Florida Blue Key. The Inter Fraternity Council was among its largest advertisers. Imagine half-page IFC ads in The Fine Print, urging our readers to come out for rush.

“It was a time of protest” Abrams said, “and our generation wanted to change the world and raise hell doing it.”

It’s no secret that times are tough right now for college graduates. With an unstable economy, rising unemployment and increasing uncertainty about the future, it’s easy for undergrads to get caught up in the doom and gloom. For many students graduating this year and in the near future, their original plans post-graduation aren’t playing out exactly as they anticipated. But Plan B isn’t the end of the world. After all, at the age of 22, there usually are no children to feed, no mortgages to pay and none of the traditional responsibilities that tend to tie people down. It’s a perfect time to experience life and figure out what you like and don’t like. So just because your Plan A didn’t exactly work out, doesn’t mean your life is ruined. Here are the perspectives of a few soon-to-be-graduates and recent graduates and their Plan Bs.

 Living Abroad

UF women’s studies professor Anita Anantharam first introduced Rob Kowalski to India.

“Anita opened me up to a whole host of issues that I’ve never known before like women’s rights, gender issues and environmental issues,” Rob said.

After his initial interest was sparked through books and class, Rob went with Anantharam to India on a study abroad trip to Navdanya Farm, an organic farm in northern India that acts as a research foundation for science, technology and ecology. Its main goals are to promote nonviolent farming and protect biodiversity, the earth and small, local farmers. The farm also aims to rejuvenate plants and traditional farming techniques that are at risk of going extinct.

“Once I went there, I realized that not only are those issues pertinent in an environment like India, but they’re also applicable to the U.S.,” he said.

When he graduates in fall 2009, Rob doesn’t plan on getting a traditional job with his bachelor’s degree in religion. Instead, he wants to work toward bringing home the lessons he learned from India and Navdanya

He’s going back to India to work on the farm for a year after college because he knows the people, and he thinks that going back to India will help him put his worldview and ideological positions into perspective.
“It’s pretty rewarding to take myself out of an environment that I’ve lived in my whole life and get a whole change of pace and perspective on the world and do some good,” he said.

When he comes back to the U.S., Rob wants to start a nonprofit that is based on the lessons he learns in India about sustainable, organic farming, local food, individual and farmers’ rights, and environmental protection.

 Just Living

More so now than ever, college graduates are under pressure to start their “adult” lives as soon as they walk off the stage of the O’Connell Center with their degrees. We are under pressure to have a plan, to have a job, to go to graduate school, to grow up. But whoever is putting this pressure on us, whether it’s parents or professors or society in general, they seems to neglect the fact that we’re still in our early twenties. This is the time when we are free from the pressures of real adulthood, and the time when we should be living. And that’s exactly what Liz Martin, 21, is doing after she graduates this spring.

“What’s wrong with living and exploring?” Martin asked. “I want to figure out what I want to do and what I don’t want to do. I want to live for a while.”

Martin, who is graduating with degrees in botany and women’s studies, is a twin, and her sister is going on to a prestigious graduate school with the next few years of her life mapped out. So she’s no stranger to the pressures of new graduates. But she doesn’t let this bother her because she sees the importance of valuing her personal happiness over what her parents and society inflict upon her.

“Our generation is going to have to work our whole lives, and we may not even retire,” she said. “So why not take some time to enjoy it now?”

Martin plans to stay in Gainesville, take a break from school and look for jobs. But while she’s certainly content with her decision, she is not completely comfortable with it. She constantly goes back and forth on her decision because of the pressures she’s facing, she said.

Either way, she’s down for the ride to wherever life takes her.

“Right now, all I want is a garden and a porch, and I don’t think that’s too much to ask for,” she said. “I’m taking a year off, God damn it. I’m going to live and be happy.”

 Peace Corps

For graduate student Laura Fonseca, the Peace Corps is something that’s been running through her mind since her years as an undergrad. In September, she and her husband will be heading to Eastern Europe to teach English as Peace Corps volunteers.

“It offers an opportunity to travel as well as to help communities around the world,” said Fonseca, who is a Latin American studies student.

However, Fonseca advises that a person shouldn’t enter the Peace Corps only because you couldn’t get a job due to the current economic conditions. The Peace Corps looks for people who want to help make a change in the world.

If you enter the Peace Corps for the right reasons, it could help your future.

“It’s helpful on a resume,” said Fonseca. “Not only is it good on paper, but it can give you the skills you need to achieve your goals in life.”

The application process normally takes a year and is in-depth, but the most important thing is the two-year commitment you make to the community you serve.

“If you are truly going to help a community then that community needs to trust you, so that two year period is needed to build a connection.”

As far as knowing when you are ready to go, Fonseca says you’re never ready.

“If you were completely prepared, you wouldn’t go. The experience is what makes you prepared. It’s a matter of knowing that’s what you want to do.”

Headed West 

Simon Fitz-William spent much of the past semester shopping his environmental science degree to local employers.

“The degree just gives you the general impression that the environment is going to shit, and that scientists use the scientific method,” he said.

Learning something useful about conservation would require him to step down from the ivory tower and look for a real job.

He applied to local parks and conservation agencies, a beekeeping position and greenhouse jobs at UF, figuring they might be interested in someone with a year’s experience as a biological technician, but no dice. Earning $12 per hour as something called “cow comforter” looked promising, but apparently that position was seeking applicants with advanced degrees.

Simon says he’s done with academia for the time being, so seeking an advanced degree right away is out of the question. He says he’ll consider going back to school when he has figured out a line of research worth pursuing.

As for his immediate future, the answer came in the form of a wedding invitation. One of his lifelong friends decided to get married in Alaska. Simon decided to look for volunteer positions with Alaska’s park service up there,
since he was going to have to travel there this summer anyway.

He wound up finding a possible paid position working on a trail crew in Chuagch State Park. Since the work is seasonal, he says he plans to save up a few thousand bucks, then bike through the Yukon, letting the cold weather chase him down the West Coast.

With experience under his belt and no requirement of job security, he says landing other temporary conservation jobs could allow him to see the western part of the country. He’ll gladly trade the stresses of the daily grind for exhilaration on the road.

“It’s a different kind of stress,” he says. “It’s like how am I gonna get water? Can I make it up that hill? It’s kind of refreshing.”

Simon says he hears barrooms buzzing casual talk of revolution and apocalypse. The radio crackles with mentions global warming and crop failures and economic collapse.

This is no time to settle down – especially not for someone who plans to spend his life working to restore and protect the earth. There’s mounting rejection of things as they are, as people are realizing that there’s so much that could be better, so much that needs to change.

“It just seems like these are wild times,” he says.

Teach for America

In the months Richard Gutierrez graduated in the spring of 2008, he didn’t know which direction his life was going to go in. He was anxious about what he was going to do, and he had a “huge fear of not getting a job.”

But then he found out about Teach for America, which is a national teacher corps of recent college graduates who teach for two years in under-resourced public schools.

“It was an opportunity for me to do something for social justice and something I could be good at, something I could use my degree for,” Gutierrez said.

Teach for America is a non-profit organizations aimed at eradicating educational inequalities in the United States, and it is not an easy program to get into.  It’s similar to a selective graduate school, Gutierrez said. In fact, he didn’t think he was going to get in, so he spent most of his time trying to find other jobs during his last months of college.

In the end, Gutierrez did get accepted into the program, and he left in the summer of 2008 for New York City for the six-week intensive Teach for America training session, where participants stay in dorms, take classes and participate in workshops.  

But after three and a half months in the program, Gutierrez started to question the tactics and teaching techniques of Teach for America. Even though he and his fellow future teachers were 22 years old or older, they were treated like children, he said. 

In one instance, he was written up for asking a touchy question about Teach for America’s claim of a dedication to diversity. They compared themselves to certain top-tier schools with predominantly upper middle class white students, claiming to be more diverse than such universities, Gutierrez said.

“I was written up for voicing a concern about diversity,” he said. “And I was written up for something like being anti-team-spirit or something. We couldn’t ask the questions we needed to ask.”

Gutierrez didn’t make it through the Teach for America training session.

“It just wasn’t for me,” he said. “There were also a lot of other personal circumstances that could have contributed to my experience. But it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.”

Instead, he returned to Gainesville in October of last year and plans to move to Chicago to attend Chicago Kent Law School in August.

In the speech, which he called “My Declaration of Independence,” he renounced his ties to the Gator Party, the current incarnation of the coalition that has dominated Student Government politics since the 1930s and helped recruit future members of Florida Blue Key, “Florida’s most prestigious leadership honorary,” the only non-SG-funded organization in a Student Government office in the Reitz Union.

For much of its history, Florida Blue Key controlled SG through a system of patronage. Greek houses and other organizations banded into groups that supported candidates and later sponsored student leaders when they applied to the honorary. Each group would have a Blue Key representative who helped negotiate deals that determined who would hold positions working on Blue Key-sponsored activities like Homecoming and Gator Growl, as well as within Student Government. FBK formally abolished that system nearly a decade ago, but in many ways the system it created continues to control campus politics.

The system survives in part because it is rarely challenged. In 2004, the St. Petersburg Times explained the trend in UF campus politics: “The idea is to combine block voting with low turnout.”

Ben Dictor, the Progress Party’s presidential candidate in this year’s election, says low turnout means SG isn’t held accountable, and the administration doesn’t regard it as the voice of the student body. A Student Government that doesn’t change anything encourages apathy on the part of the students, who tend to regard it as useless. This election, the Progress Party is looking to transform the system. Winning an election with unprecedented turnout would force the administration to listen to students’ views, Dictor says. Getting more students actively involved in university business can drive “progress through participation.”

Progress Party includes former members of both the Orange and Blue and Gator parties. Dictor says the party has been reaching out to groups that have traditionally been part of the block voting system, those who have opposed it, and most importantly, students who have never had a reason to care about SG before.

Florida Blue Key’s control of Student Government was exposed during the 1995 Student Government elections when members of FBK fliered campus with altered versions of a student-body president candidate Charles Grapski’s criminal record that made him appear to be a convicted child molester. Grapski sued FBK for defamation and won an $85,000 out-of-court settlement.

His lawyers took sworn depositions of Florida Blue Key members and FOCUS (Fuck Off Charlie, U Suck!) Party supporters while investigating the case. The court documents, available to the public at the Alachua County Courthouse, show FBK members were acting on behalf of the FOCUS Party in an effort to discredit him.
In his deposition, Chris Thompkins, the incumbent president during Grapski’s election, explained how the system worked. Representatives of student organizations – mostly Greek houses and cultural groups like the Black Student Union and the Hispanic Student Association – formed groups that supported candidates in Student Government elections and later sponsored them when they tried to join FBK.

“People obviously support the organizations that support them” in the Blue Key recruitment process, he said. “So the houses or organizations that support candidates generally do better than those who do not.”
To get elected, Thompkins helped form the SUN (Students Unite Now!) Party, resurrecting a name used by the FBK-sponsored party in the past, something that he said “happens a lot.” The Unite name has been resurrected again for the 2009 spring elections.

The Grapski case file also includes Blue Key documents, such as the group’s constitution as revised in 1992, which includes a statement of the organization’s purpose:
      

(a)To perform and encourage service to the University of Florida.
(b)To recognize, unify and demonstrate leadership.
(c)To promote participation in activities which enhance student life.
(d)To foster a greater spirit of unity among University of Florida students.
(e)To promote appreciation of and encourage loyalty to the University of Florida.

Before 1978, the group’s purpose was worded differently. But that year, an alumni committee held hearings with the goal of aligning the values stated in its constitution with what the group did in practice, according to documents now held in the Alachua County civil evidence vault. Items (d) and (e) replaced what had been the fourth tenet of the group’s purpose: “The fostering of a greater spirit of democracy among Florida students.”
The committee recommended “‘unity’ should be stated in place of ‘democracy.’”

In the wake of the Grapski case, the honorary claimed to have reformed itself. In 1999 the group system was abolished, and FBK inducted a growing number of independents. Grapski asserted those changes were meaningless; the system still worked basically the same way, and the reforms merely helped eliminate in-fighting.

“The system as they knew it then is dead,” countered FBK member Jared Hernandez in a July 2005 Alligator article. “Charlie is living in the past.”

Roger Austin, an FBK alum and adviser to Delta Upsilon fraternity, was quoted saying the organization still coordinated slating for SG elections with Greek houses and exchanged positions working on Homecoming and Gator Growl for political support. The only reason that system continued, he added, was a lack of involvement by independents.

The article went on to say that since 1923, only 12 UF student body presidents have not been confirmed members of FBK. That number hasn’t changed since the article was written.

The position of student body president had become a way to reward current Blue Key members, Austin said.
FBK has never had any official power. Its informal power is also in decline – especially beyond the UF campus. But events like the e-mail scandal from last Fall’s election have revealed the voting blocks it helped create remain somewhat intact and continue to reward members for loyalty. The scandal broke when an anonymous informant delivered printouts to The Alligator and then-Orange and Blue Party leader Sam Miorelli. Attached to one of the messages was a spreadsheet listing students and their organizational affiliations. Some were highlighted in green, and according to one message from Student Body President, Kevin Reilly, “Green means go.” Members of certain Greek houses and other organizations were being rewarded for their groups’ support of the system with seats in the Student Senate.

In his “Declaration of Independence,” Sen. White explained that he felt like he was treated as “a black man first and a qualified applicant second.” He said he had been told to represent the interests of his “community,” and not the student body as a whole.

Taking a stand against members of their party can cost members of their communities future SG positions.
Heshan “Grasshopper” Illangkoon was originally elected as an “independent” – a member of a party not supported by the system (though the word has also come to refer to non-Greeks). The block-voting coalition had traditionally struggled to include graduate students. As a well-connected Ph.D. student, he was recruited by the Gator Party, which he eventually joined.

He was eventually appointed to the Senate’s Allocations committee. He stayed on the committee and got re-elected with the Gator Party, and eventually rose to the rank of chairman. But he noticed that he was kept out of conversations among the party’s leadership. Grasshopper says the party didn’t seem to trust him. Other SG officials were slow to respond to concerns he raised on behalf of graduate students, who were often too busy to bother with student politics. At the same time, his party seemed unwilling to challenge the administration on several key issues.

“I think everyone’s heard how the senate doesn’t do anything,” he said.

Knowledge and advice are passed down through allumni networks, he says. Student body leaders are counseled not to challenge the administration. Concern over “letters of recommendation and membership in honorary organizations” encourages them “not to make waves.” SG officials are more concerned about their future goals than about actually representing the students, he said, which is only natural when most of the student body is apathetic.

Grasshopper said he was impressed when he saw Dictor, a member of the Orange and Blue Party, challenge the administration to demand a better deal on the university’s contract with Aramark. Dictor’s resolution condemning the no-bid process was defeated, in part due to partisan warfare and in part because members of the Gator Party seemed unwilling to want take a stand on
behalf of the students, while their opponents in Orange and Blue seemed more concerned with making them look bad. Jose Ortega, a Gator Party member of the budget committee, shared their view that partisan warfare and a lack of student involvement were making SG ineffective. The three joined together to form the Progress executive ticket, with Ortega running for treasurer.

Grasshopper’s time on Allocations helped him understand how students get involved. The committee is charged with funding new student groups and helping them grow. He said the process could be improved with simple changes, like improving the SG web site. In its old incarnation, the site was impossible to navigate, and the vice president’s office repeatedly pushed back the timetable on an overhaul. The new site is still not updated in a timely manner – some student codes are still out of date – and it’s still does a poor job of explaining to curious students how SG works or why they should get involved. As vice president, it would be his job to finally fix that.

In his “Declaration of Independence,” Brandon White expressed similar sentiments and said he decided he could not change the system from the inside. He lamented student leaders’ “chronic avoidance of tough decisions” and “the seeming inability of our current Student Government to tackle big problems.”

As the Florida Legislature continues to slash UF’s budget, there will be many big problems to tackle. Dictor said that will require a Student Government that can claim to speak for the entire student body and that is unafraid to challenge the administration and take risks. He wants to work in conjunction with the faculty, who often share students’ concerns. As educators, he said, they should have more say over budget cuts than the Board of Trustees, which mostly represents the business community. If students and faculty joined in solidarity, they could force the board to take bolder action to keep educational programs intact.

Dictor said he would use the president’s seat on the Board of Trustees to fight on issues where past administrations laid down, like socially responsible investing. Kevin Reilly took the administration’s side in opposing a ballot initiative approved by 80 percent of the student body calling on the Board of Trustees to make UF’s investments more sustainable and transparent. Recent losses on the endowment have proven that majority right, Dictor says.

That’s just one example of how a legitimate Student Government that challenges the administration could help drive the university to improve itself, he says. Instead of contracting private companies to provide services with SG money, he would tap into the ingenuity of one of the most academically diverse universities in the country. “Why pay some company $50,000 to install hand scanners in the gym?” he asked. “Sponsor $25,000 research grants and have engineering students compete. I guarantee you get the same quality product.”

The idea that giving students more of a role in building our university is what inspired his party’s motto, “Progress through participation.”

The amendment, he said, threatened the benefits of straight couples who depend on domestic partnerships or common-law marriages for a handful of rights, like prison and hospital visits or access to shared healthcare and retirement plans. Whatever our opinion on gay rights, he wanted us to join him in educating the public about the potential collateral damage of a ban on gay marriage.

“If we do this right,” the organizer said, “This won’t even be a gay issue.”

This amendment protects marriage as the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife and provides that no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized. 

There were just a few weeks to go before the election, and a Florida Red and Blue organizer started appearing at various meetings, looking for help to spread the word about the dangers posed by the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment, otherwise known as Amendment 2.

The amendment, he said, threatened the benefits of straight couples who depend on domestic partnerships or common-law marriages for a handful of rights, like prison and hospital visits or access to shared healthcare and retirement plans. Whatever our opinion on gay rights, he wanted us to join him in educating the public about the potential collateral damage of a ban on gay marriage.

“If we do this right,” the organizer said, “This won’t even be a gay issue.”

Whether the amendment was anything other than a gay issue remains in doubt, and by pretending otherwise, its opponents may have helped pass it. For the amendment to actually affect the benefits of straight couples, a court would have to rule that granting only a handful of rights in a domestic partnership constitutes the “substantial equivalent” of a marriage bestowing some 1,500 different rights and obligations. It was on that tenuous possibility that Florida Red and Blue and the rest of the coalition opposing Amendment 2 staked its campaign.

It’s not hard to see why. When the debate is about gay marriage, gay advocates have never won. Before this past election, gay marriage bans had passed by referendum in 27 states. But in 2006, a ballot initiative declaring that “no legal status for unmarried persons shall be created or recognized by this state or its political subdivisions that is similar to that of marriage” lost in Arizona, in part because opponents were able to mobilize the state’s large elderly population, who often rely on partnerships other than marriage to share rights like hospital visitation.

But the victory was short-lived. In the 2008 election, Arizona voters approved a measure with different wording, declaring simply, “Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state.”

The 2006 Arizona victory inspired the strategy used by anti-Amendment 2 groups like Florida Red and Blue. Since the 2004 elections, liberals worried gay marriage bans would mobilize social conservatives and provided political cover for restricting the rights that could be given to other types of households. As Lisa Duggan and Richard Kim wrote in The Nation in 2005, “We believe that by engaging in the marriage debate only in terms of ‘gay rights,’ both the gay movement and the Democratic Party have put themselves in a compromised and losing position.” After their victories in 2006, it appeared that skirting the issue of gay rights had given liberals a way to win again.

In fact, most Americans support gay rights. For years a narrow majority has even supported civil unions granting the same rights as marriage. Even 10 years ago, more Americans supported (48 percent) than opposed (43 percent) granting Social Security benefits to gay spouses. Most Americans are just wary of broadening the definition of marriage to include anything other than a union between one man and one woman.

The marriage debate came to a head in 2004 because conservatives seized on the fear that the likes of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom would start to redefine the institution of marriage against the will of the people. Rather than lead a much-needed national conversation about equal rights for gays and the growing importance of protecting family structures beyond marriage, liberals filed lawsuits in courts of appeal and showboating from the steps of City Hall.

Marriage is defined as the union between one man and one woman in four existing Florida statutes. Right-wing groups worried judges could overturn those laws, as they had in other states, so they started campaigning for a constitutional amendment some four years ago.

Amendment 2’s opponents were better funded but poorly organized. It was the right that ran a legitimate grassroots campaign. Florida Red and Blue and its allies reached out to firefighters’ unions and retired people – groups whose wholesome straight partnerships they said could be affected. Of course, those groups barely campaigned against the measure and have been mostly silent since it passed. It was the gay community, not any of those other groups, who staged protests like a candlelight vigil at Charlie Crist’s Dec. 18 wedding.

Advertisements denouncing Amendment 2 never talked specifically about what it would do or why it was wrong. They were filled with vague insinuations that the amendment did bad things like take benefits away from the elderly, promote the intrusion of Big Government into our lives, and restrict personal freedoms. Just about every ad, every press interview with an Amendment 2 opponent, and even UF’s Student Government resolution condemning the measure, emphasized that this was not just a gay issue.

The debate was never about using Florida’s Constitution to take away personal freedoms. It focused on whether or not the amendment would deny those freedoms to anyone other than “just” gays. It guarantees that no gay relationship, no matter how committed, will ever be substantially equivalent to a straight marriage.

We’ll never know whether groups like Florida4Marriage could have convinced voters to enshrine inequality in our state’s constitution after an honest debate. The numbers were not in their favor. The amendment was polling several percentage points below the 60 percent needed to pass in the months before the election. When it came to casting doubt on the claims Florida Red and Blue decided to make about Amendment 2, they had plenty of ammunition.

Florida Red and Blue and its allies emphasized the similarities between Amendment 2 and Michigan’s Proposition 2, which mandated that “the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose.” Michigan’s Republican Attorney General quickly interpreted it as a ban on any kind of partnership other than marriage, despite assurances by the right that that could never happen.

But Amendment 2 supporters pointed out that “similar” does not mean the same thing as “substantial equivalent.” They argued that the amendment wouldn’t change anything because Florida law already prohibits other unions, “which are treated as marriages.” The goal of Amendment 2 was to prevent judges from overturning those laws, as had happened in Massachusetts. Tellingly, a majority of voters approved the amendment in every Florida county except Monroe, which includes Key West, the city that regards a domestic partner as the equivalent to a spouse in its municipal code.

Court cases had already tested the effect the law has on domestic partnerships. In Lowe vs. Broward County, the 4^th District Court of appeals found the county’s Domestic Partnership Act did not violate the l
aw because “the Act does not address the panoply of statutory rights and obligations exclusive to the traditional marriage relationship.” In other words, the court ruled that domestic partnerships are not equivalent to marriages because they are much more narrow.

Besides, when Michigan courts decided Proposition 2 did bar domestic partners from receiving benefits, employers like the University of Michigan just changed their plans so they didn’t specifically refer to domestic partners. According to the AP, “New policies no longer acknowledge domestic partnerships but make sure ‘other qualified adults,’ including gay partners, are eligible for medical and dental care. The adults have to live together for a certain amount of time, be unmarried, share finances and be unrelated.

‘The university believes all current benefit offerings are in full compliance with Michigan law,’ said University of Michigan spokeswoman Kelly Cunningham.”

Since the amendment passed, various employers who respect domestic partnerships – including the City of Gainesville – have publicly stated no benefits will be affected. With a round of budget cuts on the horizon, there may be a flurry of lawsuits by employers looking to shirk financial obligations. Still, claims that Amendment 2 threatened existing benefits were nothing but speculation. As a result, Amendment 2’s supporters accused their opponents of using lies and scare tactics to manipulate senior citizens.

Proponents of Florida Red and Blue’s tactics were right about some things. American households are becoming more diverse. The graying population means more widows and widowers, who often move in with their children or others their own age without remarrying. At the same time, more children are being raised by single parents than ever before. Young adults are marrying later and cohabitating or living alone in the meantime. Extending the benefits that have been reserved for marriage to other household arrangements is becoming more necessary.

For that reason, the lost battles over measures like Amendment 2 and California’s Proposition 8 may be blessings in disguise. Now, there is no reason to shy away from a discussion about gay equality, something most Americans say they support in almost every way, except when it comes to the use of the word marriage. Perhaps with the election over and groups like Florida Red and Blue out of the way, Floridians can finally talk honestly about granting equal rights to gays.

Alachua County residents were eligible for more than $18 million in food stamps that went unused, according to Florida Impact’s Web site. Among Alachua County residents who meet federal income requirements to receive food stamps, only about 55 percent participate in the program, according to John Skelly, the county’s poverty reduction program director.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, which oversees the program, 59 percent of eligible Floridians participated in the food stamp program in 2005, compared to a national average of 65 percent. Increasing participation by just 5 percent could have generated nearly $103 million in new economic activity, according to a USDA report.

Budget cuts and staff reductions at the Department of Children and Families, which administers food stamps in Florida, have made applying for food stamps more difficult, he said.

Program administrators and poverty advocates said public assistance applications have been surging this year, perhaps spurred by a slowing economy. Cheryl Twombly, the Community Partner Liaison at the local DCF office said number of public assistance applications received in Alachua County has increased by more than 20 percent between August and September.

In 1996, the Department of Children and Families, which oversees applications for the federal food stamp program, began switching to a paperless system. A private contractor, Citicorp Electronic Financial Services, replaced paper stamps with Electronic Benefit Transfer cards that work like debit cards. Most other states also signed contracts with Citicorp, which was bought by JPMorgan Chase in 2003.

In 2004, the state was criticized for outsourcing call center jobs to India. Critics in the media and the legislature pointed out the irony of hiring overseas workers to administer unemployment benefits.

Bush responded, “The services provided by Citicorp have never been conducted by state employees, and did not ever result in the transfer of state jobs overseas.”

Under Jeb Bush, the state switched to a fully automated application system, ACCESS Florida, which reduced costs by $83 million by 2006. That same year, Florida had the lowest accuracy rate for benefits in the country, overpaying or underpaying federal aid recipients 9.37 percent of the time.

In September, Florida received a $5.4 million federal bonus for having the most improved accuracy rate in the country, but Skelly said the modernization has come at a price.

Before 2005, most applications were submitted on paper and the process included a face-to-face interview. Now, 85 percent of applications are submitted online. 

Skelly said every county used to have a food stamp office, but branch offices have been closed, especially in rural areas. Between 2002 and 2006, nearly 1,200 state benefits jobs were eliminated, according to the Palm Beach Post. Computers and understaffed call centers replaced the offices.

Now, the DCF relies on community partners, which include charitable organizations like churches and Haven Hospice and government agencies like the health department office and Alachua County public libraries. Partner organizations offer Internet access so people without computers can use ACCESS. Some provide assistance for the computer illiterate.

While the DCF staff was shrinking, the number of people receiving food stamps grew, from a monthly average of 882,341 in 2000 to 1,232,803 in 2007. Skelly said he and several program administrators tried calling the state hotline to request a paper application. After wading through prompts and recorded messages, even the experts reached a dead end.

Other states, like Missouri, have modernized their public assistance application process, while maintaining higher participation rates, he said, and local agencies are trying to learn from them.

Cheryl Twombly, the DCF’s local community partner liaison, said she and Skelly are working together to promote the programs in Alachua County. A plan is in the works to hire someone to handle questions from local residents about applying for public assistance.

An investment of a few million dollars to promote public assistance programs could potentially pay for itself by creating new economic growth. Economic stimulus programs can be most effective when they are targeted at the poor, who are more likely to spend the money they receive.

By comparison, the $80 billion economic stimulus package passed this spring by Congress generated only $20 billion in new consumer spending.

The minimum eligibility requirements are adjusted for inflation each October, so the benefits have just increased and thousands of families who weren’t eligible before can now receive help.

Skelly said poverty is preventable, but reaching the people in need of federal food aid will depend on the Florida Legislature giving the DCF the resources it needs.

“If we can just get organized at the state and local level,” he added, “we may not have a hunger problem at all.”

Aramark had the contract for a turbulent seven years, marked by fines and wrangling over budget cuts and profit margins. Now the department must find a new provider or figure out a way to feed inmates itself. Its challenges may shed new light on UF’s relationship with the company, which is set to continue through at least 2019.

Aramark won the DoC contract in 2001 as part of a larger drive by then-Gov. Jeb Bush to privatize government functions in Florida. “The state rushed into it, and like most shotgun weddings, the marriage has been pretty tortured,” Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, told the St. Petersburg Times.

Aramark secured the deal with the help of lobbyist Courtney Cunningham, who is now a member of UF’s Board of Trustees. Cunningham was appointed to the board in 2005 and remained registered as a lobbyist representing Aramark Correctional Services through at least October 2007, according to state disclosure forms. He does not appear in the lobbyist database for 2008. UF began taking bids on its food service contract in November 2007.

Aramark appears to have been driven away by a combination of budget cuts and food price inflation, which made it nearly impossible to turn a profit as the prison system demanded higher standards for quality of service. That means it’s unlikely Florida prisons will attract another private food provider. They’ll likely have to handle food service themselves, which a report issued last year by the department’s inspector general said will help cut costs.

The department might lack the in-house expertise because Aramark took over the jobs of state employees charged with feeding prisoners.

UF faces similar troubles: a shrinking budget, increasing demands for better quality and costly sustainability initiatives, and an overtaxed Business Services Division with limited resources. UF took nearly a year to finalize a new contract with Aramark, which had already been on campus for 12 years. Switching providers, let alone bringing food service back under university control, could have overwhelmed an already spread-thin Purchasing Department.

UF could have had to do without a food service provider on campus if Aramark decided to terminate its new contract. People have to eat, but we would only have a few months to work out an alternative. That’s probably why Aramark gets such favorable terms from the university: we need them.

But the American food economy is changing, and as oil gets more expensive, it will likely have to change more.

UF is in a unique position to help figure out how Florida can cope with a changing food economy. We’re at the heart of one of the most productive agricultural states in America, blessed with a 12-month growing season. The City of Gainesville boasts a wildly popular community garden program.

The Gainesville Sun recently quoted Stefanie Hamblen, editor of local gardening guide Hogtown HomeGrown, saying, “gardeners have begun calling their plots freedom gardens — as in freedom from oil.” Not to mention the freedom that comes with guaranteed access to tastier, more nutritious food that doesn’t depend on the whims of corporations without roots in our community.

We’ll likely need to develop a sustainable food program alongside Aramark or in cooperation with them, at least for the time being. With a few simple changes to the existing contract, student-run, sustainable enterprises can begin to compete with Aramark on campus, develop unique local concepts under its guidance, or help supply its food. We can guarantee a market for local farmers and provide them with cutting-edge research on sustainable farming methods.

Environmental writer Bill McKibben once pondered whether it was possible “that there’s something inherently destructive about a globalized free-market society—that the eternal race for efficiency, when raised to a planetary scale, damages the environment, and perhaps the community, and perhaps even the taste of a carrot? Is it possible that markets, at least for food, may work better when they’re smaller and more isolated?“

By rediscovering how to feed ourselves, universities like our own can begin to develop answers to those questions.

The bidding process was not competitive, and appears to have limited competition by design.

Many students haven’t even heard of the company, Aramark Ltd., which has run Gator Dining Services for 14 years. Its logo does not appear in dining halls or the Reitz Union.

The UF food service contract was worth nearly $24 million during the 2006-2007 school year, and its value tends to grow by more than $1 million a year, according to financial data included with the university’s proposal.

The new contract, which is being signed with only cosmetic changes as we go to press, will take effect in July of 2009. There are also two 5-year options to renew, potentially extending the terms until 2029, according to UF’s proposal.

Aramark promotes itself as an outsourcing company that provides “value-added services.” They made $12.6 billion last year handling things like food and laundry for stadiums, oil rigs, prisons and universities.

Whether these arrangements benefit anybody but Aramark is unclear. On our campus, upperclassmen overwhelmingly avoid meal plans, one of Aramark’s most profitable sources of business. Some 38.6 percent of meals purchased by students through meal plans go uneaten, even though they’re paid for in advance.

Some students have charged that the company is a parasite with an incentive to provide bad service – the more missed meals and the less food it serves, the greater its savings and the higher its profits.

The company lacks incentives to make the changes students demand. There will always be another class of freshmen to exploit the next year. They don’t find out what a bad deal meal plans are until after they’ve signed on to a meal plan, and can’t always cook in their dorms.

Meal plans at UF are voluntary, unlike at some institutions. But people who live, work and study campus depend on Aramark for food, a trend which will only increase as UF’s evolving parking plan makes it increasingly difficult to leave campus for lunch. Public institutions like UF provide a guaranteed market where the company enjoys an enforced monopoly.

Aramark’s business model revolves around captive customer bases. Some of company’s most profitable business comes from taxpayers, and it has a history of scamming Floridians.

In 2001, Aramark got an exclusive contract to run food service for the Florida Department of Corrections. Since then, audits and other internal communications have repeatedly shown the state may have been getting cheated.

In 2006 the department found that if it handled its own food service, it could rehire staff laid off by Aramark, increase the quality of food, and serve 5 percent more meals, all while saving taxpayers $7 million a year, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

In 2007, the department’s inspector general “found that Aramark had pocketed a $10.5-million windfall by charging for meals it never served and by substituting cheaper ingredients without approval,” according to a Times editorial.

In February, outgoing Department of Corrections secretary James R. McDonough wrote a letter to the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mark Rubio. He condemned Aramark’s proposed plan for dealing with budget cuts, which involved a 30-percent reduction in the calories it would serve inmates each day.

Aramark claimed the reductions would pose no threat to inmates’ health.

“This is a line of bologna that I find both unpalatable and not credible,” McDonough wrote.

Aramark was proposing new cuts that would be so bad for prisoners that McDonough warned the department could face lawsuits for violating the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which bans cruel and unusual punishment.

In prisons, hungry inmates start fights and riots. Bad food in the canteens can compromise the safety of prison guards and the general public, the letter noted.

But when Aramark proposed the feeding cuts, it had other concerns, McDonough wrote.

“The matter at hand here is Aramark’s profit margin,” he concluded.

Aramark is not in the business of providing real value to its customers – including students and taxpayers. It’s in the business of making as much money as possible, an aim that conflicts with the public mission of the prison system, as well as the University of Florida.

As The Palm Beach Post reported on March 29, “The company is paid not by the
number of meals consumed but by the number of inmates. If fewer inmates eat the food, Aramark can save money by providing less food.”

Substitute “inmates” with “freshmen who purchase meal plans,” and you get the idea.

Proponents of privatization say it can increase efficiency. The problem is that increased efficiency means more profits for contractors, but not necessarily better service. That’s especially true when private contracts aren’t subject to competition.

Under McDonough’s watch, the Department of Corrections re-negotiated its contract, opening food service to a second provider, Trinity Foodservice Inc. The new contract reigned in Aramark’s profiteering and made other improvements, like requiring the company to provide a greater variety of vegetables to juvenile prisoners, as recommended by the Department of Education.

Officials have said they are now getting a better deal, and that their concerns with Aramark have been resolved.
On the other hand UF’s new contract locks us into at least 10 years without competition.

Some students are concerned about their rights on campus under the contract. Aramark and its Classic Fare Catering enjoy the exclusive right to serve food in the Reitz Union and any other building with a Gator Dining Facility. Student groups can’t even bring outside coffee and doughnuts to meetings in those buildings.

In 2006, a group of students tried to start their own coffee shop on campus. A referendum on their efforts appeared on the ballot in Fall 2007 campus elections, and 75 percent of voters supported the measure.

In a letter to The Alligator, Skeet Surrency explained the project:

“As a nonprofit cafe, our services would be brought to students at-cost, meaning we will sell goods only to cover operating expenses – not for profits. This translates into lower prices for consumers and would allow us to source high quality fair-trade and organic products while remaining cost competitive with other coffee shops on campus.”

That sort of cost competition violates Aramark’s right to an on-campus monopoly guaranteed in its contract, so the company helped put the kibosh on the student-run cooperative.

There is no provision in the new contract to soften the ban on student entrepreneurship.

There is also no concrete requirement that Aramark reduce the number of meals missed by students on meal plans, though the university is working to help make using meal plans more convenient, by accepting the plans at Home Zone and looking into other options in the future, according to Gator Dining officials.

The bidding process for the new contract was not competitive, but it does not appear to have violated university regulations, which only require a response from a second company, not an actual bid.

A second company, Chartwells, responded to the initial requests for a proposal, but felt it did not have enough time to overcome the advantages Aramark enjoyed as the incumbent or other obstacles posed by the bidding procedure, according to company spokesman Jerry Bradley.

The university publicly announced it was soliciting bids on November 5, 2007, almost two years before the existing contract was set to expire.

Bidding officially opened on Nov. 19, and bids were due on Jan. 10, right after students returned to school. That time frame meant competitors would have almost no chance to survey the campus because the university would be closed for Thanksgiving and Winter Breaks.

The unwieldy bidding schedule seems to have stifled competition, a problem the university could have solved by re-submitting its request. Since the new contract doesn’t take effect until July 2009, there would have been plenty of time.

However, the university officials charged with handling contracts are spread thin. They do not have the time or the resources to ensure every bid is competitive, especially for things like food service, which can’t be interrupted while competitive bids are sorted out.

Privatization is now the way we do business in Florida. Rather than giving university officials the resources to do what’s in the best interest of students, Florida officials have decided they would rather pay an overworked, downsized staff to bring in private companies to work out the details at a profit, and pass the costs on to us.

The trend of hollow government, which began in earnest under Jeb Bush and continues to this day, is only good for well-connected companies.

The real problem isn’t the level of competition in the bidding process, but the limited scope of what the university was looking for in the first place – a private outsourcing deal. This comes at a time when other universities are abandoning privatized food service for something more sensible and sustainable. Bringing in a different parasitic corporation with a competitive bid would only have been a minor improvement, at a time when food service on other college campuses is changing dramatically.

Yale University began its Sustainable Food Project (YSFP) in 2003, while it was under contract with Aramark. When Aramark first arrived on campus in 1998, Yale Dinning Service’s budget increased by 50 percent.

“Students, dining staff, and Yale’s former food suppliers complained that the University was providing worse meals at a higher cost,” according to the Yale Daily News.

Since 2005 Yale has managed its own food service.

Yale’s 12 dining halls now serve sustainably produced, seasonal food from New England farmers. They avoid imports from far away, but make exceptions for fair trade coffee, bananas and chocolate, which students refused to do without.

In the early days of the YSFP, the dining hall at Berkley Residential College, home of the pilot program, had to turn students from the Yale’s other colleges away as they faked IDs and crowded around the doors trying to access the new sustainable fare, which achieved a level of gourmet previously unheard of in college cafeterias.

If Yalies can enjoy local food year-round in the harsh climate of New England, imagine what’s possible in Florida, where the growing season never ends.

Imagine if the states 11 public universities and 28 community colleges worked together to create economies of scale.

Here at UF, business and agricultural students could design and market new dining concepts on campus, as some had tried to do with the student-run coffee shop. Students from Santa Fe College’s culinary arts program could help create simple, sustainable recipes. Feeding students could become part of the educational process.

Right now, we’re in the middle of a global food crisis. In the near future, the global population will only increase and natural resources will become increasingly strained by climate change, soil depletion and increased scarcity of fossil fuels.

These challenges aren’t going away, and training our generation to deal with them in a way that allows us to eat tastier, more nutritious foods makes sense.

Yale’s program also helps local farmers by guaranteeing them a large market in advance and gives them an incentive to farm sustainably.

Universities around the country – including the University of Nebraska, a large public institution like ours – are using Yale’s model to reform food service on their campuses. As it tried to position itself as a sustainability leader, can UF afford to wait 10 to 20 years to follow suit?

Despite the vague rhetoric on its promotional brochures, Aramark’s way of doing business is anathema to real sustainability. The current dining system poses one of the greatest barriers to meeting a legitimate goal like UF’s Zero Waste by 2020 initiative.

Broward Dining, for example, is a logistical nightmare, almost guaranteed to produce mountains of waste.

In addition to the two featured dishes, every lunch and dinner includes the pasta station, the pizza station, the sandwich station, the salad bar, the wraps-or-melted-chesee-and-recycled-toppings-on-day-old-bread-station, the Latin section, Vegan Corner, the cereal tower and several self-serve aluminum vats of bubbling Lord-knows-what, before you even get to dessert.

>Whatever doesn’t get eaten gets tossed.

Some will argue that level of chaos creates jobs.

But so would a network of new and expanding organic farms and distributorships, with UF at the hub.

Picture simplicity: one or two delectable, nutritious main courses with a manageable assortment of attractive, seasonal sides; a worthy vegan option (as opposed to the typical dreary eggplant over crusty cous-cous); and something portable.

Yale has decided to use fewer but better ingredients. That’s responsible cost cutting, not to mention a better approach to waste reduction: if people eat the food, you don’t have to throw it away.

Yale has seen no trade-off between food quality and social responsibility. It has found the two go together. Outsourcing, mass production and the misguided desire to offer all things to all people all of the time – the principles that define companies like Aramark – have nothing to do with either of those.

For students who demand daily burgers and fries, there can still be Wendy’s and Burger King on a post-Aramark campus. It’s national brands like those (and the highly touted Moe’s) that help drive up Aramark’s high level of customer satisfaction on campus.

Among privatized campus food operations, UF’s is a model for the rest of the country. Lionel Dubay, head of UF’s Business Services Division, told me representatives from other colleges routinely tour our dining facilities for lessons in keeping them clean, modern and attractive.

But given the public mission of our university, and what is now a well-documented relationship between sound nutrition and academic performance, it may be time to ditch the middle man, keep its profits, and use them to finance a more sensible (and sustainable) approach to feeding ourselves.

The old contract allowed UF to reneg at any time with 90 days notice, so there’s a good chance we can get out of the new one without much trouble. For more on what a sustainable food program could look like at UF, as well as the specifics of the new contract and how we can break it, stay tuned for the next issue of the Fine Print.