Letters

PMA to blame, not workers

John Ly, in Tuesday’s Daily Bruin Letters section, takes
exception to Monday’s editorial titled, “Dockworkers
justified, Taft-Hartley biased.” Now I must take exception to
Ly’s exception.

He parrots L.A. Times’ Steve Lopez’s rhetoric about
how well-paid the Longshoremen are compared to some
“white-collar” positions. Ly completely sidesteps the
fact that the non-engineering positions the Pacific Maritime
Association will ram down the throats of working America are
temporary positions that they will be able to manipulate in order
to avoid paying decent wages to anyone, much less providing the job
security that port-workers deserve.

For some people, especially lately, President Bush can do no
wrong, but if he invokes Taft-Hartley while also unilaterally
making war on Iraq, he is basically damaging the trust he should be
building with American workers, all of whom would like to see the
nation more secure.

Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that it was the PMA who
locked the workers out for no better reason than because they
wanted to force Bush’s hand. If business is suffering, one
only has to look to management for the reasons.
Frances Goff
UCLA staff and alumnus

Casualties shouldn’t stop war

Eric Tang’s Oct. 8 letter, “Delshad needs to check
his facts,” contains inaccurate statistics, liberal naivete
and very little common sense.

The Marc Herold study of innocent casualties in Afghanistan is
not without its critics. Columnist Michael Walzer of Dissent
magazine has alleged that Herold’s statistics were padded by
Taliban propaganda. An Associated Press investigation of innocent
casualties revealed a number closer to 500.

But obsessions with exact statistics are immaterial. Murder and
accidental killing are not the same actions from a moral
standpoint: the former involves malice while the latter does not.
No one, liberal or conservative, supports the loss of innocent
life. But civilians will always be endangered during a time of
conflict, and we should not let this concern bring us to the point
of paralysis.

Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and other terrorists have
certainly proven they are not concerned with preserving innocent
life, and they are not interested in good faith negotiation. By
taking military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are working to
stop terrorism and and preserving countless lives that would have
been lost had these men remained unchallenged.
David Hackett
Fourth-year, political science

Americans do care about issues

Sharon Kim’s column “Disregard for national issues
troubling” (Oct. 8, 2002), provides no concrete examples of
“people’s unconcerned and unthinking state” that
exemplifies “no real interest in what this government
does.”

Moreover, she easily dismisses the “thousands that showed
up in Westwood on Sunday” in a parenthetical. I saw the
protesters along Wilshire Boulevard, and they directly contradict
her broad and unsupported assertion that “Americans are
spoiled and preoccupied” with “widespread
apathy.”

I’m not as convinced as Kim is about the American
public’s apathy.
Qumars Montazeri
UCLA law student