The voice of the student left at St. Louis U. HighSLUH

Thursday, December 10, 2009Volume 1, Issue 1

The SLUH Progressive is a biweekly publication that seeks to inform and persuade the SLUH community on issues of local and global importance. We aim to be a strong and serious voice for the student left while avoiding the pompous language and clamor that often surround politics. Above all, we strive for accuracy and clarity and encourage participation from all class years and across the liberal spectrum. The opinions put forth by the Progressive do not represent the opinions held by the school or by any of its administrators and

are solely those of the author or authors. As much as we encourage feedback, compliments, and criticism, the Progressive cannot guarantee that any letter or article will be printed, and the editors reserve the right to bar the publication of any letter or article which advocates stances in direct opposition to our platform. We will make every effort, however, to communicate with the author or authors of a letter to help make the article suitable for publication. The editors will reply to any published letter that demands or merits a response or correction.

Platform: What is the Progressive?

Pfc. Marquest Smith said that it sounded like someone was making popcorn. In reality, it was one of the most dangerous moments of his life. “Just then, a round came through the fabricated wall,” he said, pointing to where the bullet had lodged in the heel of his tan boot. “Another second, and it would have been my spine.” At 1:34 p.m. on November 5, Nidal Malik Hasan began a five-minute shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, in which he fired over 100 rounds, killing 13 and injuring 30. After the initial confusion, accusations flew. This was pre-traumatic stress disorder, some said. This was a terrorist attack, argued others. The Army should have known about Hasan’s past as an Islamic radical. Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism characterized the attack as “a volatile mix of personal distress, psychological issues, and an ideology that can be sculpted to justify and explain (Hasan’s) anti-social leanings.” Regardless of one’s belief on the matter, several facts are clear: Hasan bore two pistols, chased and executed wounded and unarmed soldiers and civilians, and sought to inflict as much damage as possible—and our system enabled him to do so. Hasan, by all reports, bore two pistols: an FN Herstal Five-Seven semiautomatic, known to have been purchased at a local firearms dealer in August, and a .357 Magnum revolver. It

isn’t clear yet if he even used the second weapon, but it is known that he used the Five-Seven, and that he wasn’t intending to be finished when he was downed, as a medic who treated him reported that the pockets of his combat fatigues were full of pistol magazines, the type used by the Five-Seven. The Five-Seven (alternately, Five-seveN) earns its name from the bullet it fires, a 5.7 x 28 mm round. If you can imagine it, this bullet is rather skinny; it is over an inch long, and though designed to be used by military forces, it is much smaller than most pistol and assault rifle bullets. Here’s the rub: the 5.7 x 28 mm round is extremely lethal. Gel tests have had the bullet penetrate nearly a foot, but more important is its effect on human tissue; roughly two inches after penetration, it begins to “yaw,” which means that the one-inch long bullet literally flips, end over end, leaving a gaping wound, one that has powdered bone and split organs in half. On top of this wound is the even larger one produced by the fact that the 5.7 round is a hollow point, meaning the bullet “mushrooms,” increasing the area of the wound channel by a factor of roughly three. Though this is generally a safety feature that prevents bullet ricochet on firing ranges and increases stopping power, it also means that the wound channel is much larger than it would be on a jacketed bullet. However, in combat situations, hollow points have so frequently been fatal that they have been banned for the past century and across the

After Fort Hood:Another look at handgun control policy

Jack NewshamEditor

militaries of NATO nations—yet they are available under the loosest of circumstances to any civilian who could want them, a point supported by a recent revelation from the Government Accountability Office that showed suspected terrorists have purchased firearms or explosives over 865 times since Sept. 11, 2001. If anyone sought to do great harm in a short amount of time, he or she wouldn’t have to look much farther than the Five-Seven. The weapon formerly used the civilian-legal hollow-point SS192 round, demonstrated in tests by the Brady Campaign to be armor-piercing, contrary to the claims of FN Herstal; now, however, that round has been discontinued. Though the discontinuation of a “cop killer” seems like a sigh of relief, the new SS197 “sporting round” is a ballistic tip bullet; this means that it is also a hollow point, but with a polymer tip in the depression—advertised on the website of FN Herstal as a feature “for rapid expansion,” a guarantee that the bullet would not pass through its (human) target, but complete its yaw to ensure high lethality. This may be the bullet that fells our soldiers. So the question is, when are we going to learn? When are we going to seriously crack down on illegal gun sales and ownership? When are we going to call on our representatives and senators to keep pocket-sized WMDs out of the hands of any Seung-hui Cho, Eric Harris, Dylan

(continued on the next page)

2 1.1December 10, 2009

This Thanksgiving, we Editors ate. And ate, and ate, and ate. We’re pretty sure you did, too—the average American consumes over 4,500 calories and more than three days worth of fat on Thanksgiving alone, according to the Caloric Control Council. Turkey. Mashed, baked, and sweet potatoes. Pumpkin pie. Cranberries, if you’re one of those people. And it wasn’t until we were leaning back in our chairs, stomachs full, pants uncomfortably tight, that we asked ourselves: How many will be going to bed hungry tonight? While we’re at it, how many Americans go to bed hungry every night? The answers (gleaned from the U.S. Department of Agriculture) were shocking:

Of the 49.1 million people (up from 36.2 million in 2007) •living in food insecure households, meaning that they lack the basic food intake necessary to provide them with the nutrients and energy needed to live fully productive lives, 32.4 million are adults (14.4 percent of all adults) and 16.7 million are children (22.5 percent of all children).Nearly 200,000 residents in the St. Louis metropolitan •area—in Missouri alone—receive over $20 million in food benefits, and in over 21 Missouri counties, half of all children are on food stamps.In this recession, the numbers are growing—nearly 15% •of U.S. households struggled to get enough to eat in 2008, a massive jump from only 11% in 2007.

In an era of such high profile issues as health care reform, climate change, economic recession, and two concurrent wars, it is easy to forget that the United States has a pressing hunger problem. But it does. In the richest, most powerful country on earth, 14.4% of adults and 22.5% of children do not have a steady supply of food. Over seventeen million people go to bed hungry at some point this year, and over a million Americans will go an entire day without eating on several occasions this year. That isn’t to say that there aren’t those who act compassionately toward the starving. Most of us have parish food pantries, and many of us at SLUH have participated in canned food drives to help keep those pantries stocked. Throughout the year, many of us make a point to live our faith and to feed the hungry one day every week through CSP programs at places like

Karen House and Peter and Paul. But what about the other days of the week? What about the people who have too much to move into a shelter, but too little to make a meal every evening? The problem of hunger goes beyond what we can do through CSP or our church groups. The issue of malnourishment is a crisis of national proportions. To respond to this problem, there is government assistance for families struggling to feed themselves. Federal food stamp programs recieve around $35 billion annually in funding, and according to the USDA Food and Nutritional service, in 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, the food stamp program helped 24.7 million U.S. citizens put food on their tables. According to a recent piece in The New York Times, over 36 million people are currently enrolled. Food stamps not only directly benefit low-income families, they indirectly benefit the entire United States economy: Because food stamps cannot be spent on anything other than food, put in a bank, or used to pay debt, they stimulate economic activity very rapidly. According to economist Mark Zandi, Ph.D., each dollar in expanded food stamp aid contributes $1.73 to incremental GDP. And yet, the annual food stamp budget in the U.S. comes to less than one-thirtieth of the annual military spending budget, as reported by The New York Times, while many of our country’s most needy citizens—an entire third of those eligible—are left untouched by the program, according to the USDA. The question is, why isn’t this an issue? We gauge our nation by all sorts of measures—our GDP, our employment rate, our freedoms, our politics—but never by how many or few people are left hungry. How can we squabble, day in and day out, over fighter jets, the MLB, and internet regulation, but ignore the fact that a large part of our population is too cash-strapped to eat? When we discuss unemployment, we cannot forget what a good job means to the undernourished. When we eat our lunches, we cannot forget what a lunch means to a kid for whom lunch is the only complete meal of the day. When we run to the store, we can’t forget that two lanes over, someone could be swiping a food stamps EBT card. We cannot let the plight of the undernourished take the back seat to our political matters. We cannot let the hungry leave our consciences.

Klebold, Nidal Malik Hasan, or any of the many spree killers our country has seen? We need comprehensive handgun controls, and we need them now. There is no excuse for the ease with which a handgun can be purchased. Effective legislation, such as longer waiting periods and more comprehensive background checks available longer to law enforcement, combined with buyback programs and well-supported enforcement, could halt suspicious sales and cut down on illegal gun ownership. Our system is full of holes, and, as we have seen at Fort Hood, is, downright dangerous. We have to act now to fix it —lives hang in the balance.

Thanksgiving thoughts: Hunger in AmericaEditorial

Fort Hood: Gun control(continued from the previous page) Write for the SLUH

ProgressiveDo you have a liberal opinion to share?

Are you a progressively-minded individual?

Contact seniors Jack Newsham (M114) or Ben Min-den-Birkenmaier (M114), or sophomore Joe Klein

(M209) or submit articles and ideas to progressive@sluh.org.

31.1December 10, 2009

The Declaration of Independence, the document that defines the reasons for the very existence of the United States, opens with a passage stating “We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. Our country was founded upon the idea that all people have these rights, and that governments exist to secure these rights. Therefore, it is our duty as both a country and a people to welcome into our midst any who wish to become part of this country, and grant them the same protection of rights and privileges that all natural born citizens have. Currently, according to the Advocates for Human Rights group website, there are between 11 and 12 million undocumented immigrant workers in this country, most of whom arrived fleeing conditions of poverty and hunger in their former countries. The United States urgently needs immigration reform that will provide these illegal immigrants with a quick, easy path to legal citizenship. The alternative, deportation, is just not feasible. To deport all of these undocumented immigrants would have an immediate cost of $206 billion, as estimated by law professors at the University of California and the University of Louisville. Opponents of naturalization policies hold that the cost of naturalization would be far greater, and, to some extent, this is true: according to the Washington Post, Households of illegal immigrants impose more than $26.3 billion in costs to the federal government in services, and pay only $16 billion in taxes (illegal immigrants often have fake social security cards, which means that they must pay taxes despite the fact that they are not citizens). The Post estimates that this fiscal deficit of $10.4 billion would triple if the immigrants in these households were naturalized. However, the true impact of deportation, which is often overlooked by opponents of naturalization, would be far greater: law professors at the University of California and University of Louisville estimate a total loss of $1.8 trillion out of the United States economy immediately following any proposed mass deportation plan. The cause of this projected loss is that undocumented immigrants provide a huge consumer base in this country: like all other people, illegal immigrants need food, clothing, and housing at the bare minimum, and thus are a large part of the American economy. Removing a population that ranges from 11 million to 22 million, depending on whom you ask, from the U.S. economy would cripple the United States, a blow from which we would not easily recover. Critics argue that illegal immigrants take jobs which would otherwise go to Americans, and this argument is partly true. However, they also create many more jobs by providing a huge need for services such as housing, and consuming a wide range of goods. Mass deportation would destroy markets that rely on the consuming power of illegal immigrants.’ Furthermore, the vast majority of jobs worked by illegal immigrants are low-wage, highly physical jobs such as toilet cleaning or fruit picking—jobs that most Americans are unwilling to work, even if the alternative is unemployment. Like it or not, it

is simply not a feasible option to deport all of the undocumented immigrants in this country. A naturalization solution, on the other hand, is possible, and beneficial to the United States economy. Illegal immigrants, under the 1996 welfare reform bill, cannot receive food stamps, social security benefits, housing assistance, Medicaid, or Medicare assistance, despite the fact that about two thirds of illegal immigrants pay Medicare, Social Security, and personal income taxes, and nearly all illegal immigrants pay sales tax and property tax through their rent. By granting illegal immigrants citizenship and providing them with the same protections and privileges of other citizens, the U.S. would be giving them an important financial safety net. While this support system might seem costly in the short run, in the long run it will give immigrant families a solid financial base on which to build, so that they can become a self-sufficient part of the United States’ economy. The majority of undocumented workers are also currently being exploited by their employers—according to the University of California Los Angeles Center for the study of Urban Poverty, almost half of the day laboring population (the majority of whom are undocumented) have been cheated out of wages or denied food, water, or breaks by their employers. Naturalizing these workers would allow them to seek legal action against illegal treatment by their employers, ending their exploitation. A naturalization solution would also have the effect of requiring the workers to be paid the minimum wage ($7.20 an hour), a large step up from what the average illegal immigrant is paid ($5.45 an hour), and would provide immigrants with a chance to be promoted, almost an impossibility for someone who is here illegally. It would provide a hope of a better future for them and their families. Naturalization would therefore allow many immigrant families to reap the benefits of their hard work for themselves and their families, instead of being exploited by their employers as they currently are. This policy would also have the effect of closing the gap between what the immigrant population requires in government services and what it pays in taxes by helping immigrant families reach the point where they are able to contribute more in taxes, lowering the projected burden on the United States government and people. Naturalization is thus not only a humane solution for illegal immigrants. But also more fiscally responsible for the U.S. government and people. Contrary to the opinions of some, illegal aliens are not here to freeload off the government or steal our skilled jobs. They are here to work whatever jobs they can at whatever wages they can get in order to have better lives for themselves and their families. Instead of spending billions of dollars to deport these immigrants at a cost of trillions of dollars to the economy, the federal government should provide them with an easy naturalization path in order to help exploited, poverty-stricken workers become healthy, productive American citizens.

Ben Minden-BirkenmaierEditor

Naturalization: Immigration reform that works

The voice of the student left at St. Louis U. HighSLUH