Tuesday, February 25, 1997Clinton shouldn’t have intervened
President Clinton’s intervention in the American Airlines
dispute is to be deplored as it is clearly to the advantage of
management and not the pilots.
Where is federal intervention to prevent huge increases in CEO
payments? Where is the intervention to stop wage cuts and job
losses? The pilots are right to use their power to try to stop AA
bringing in workers at a third of current rates. AA pilots are well
paid (though not as well as management). They deserve it. They have
years of training and have passengers’ lives in their hands. They
are not well paid because of management kindness, but because they
are well organized workers. A victory for the pilots in a strike
would show the power of organized labor and show how to stop the
attacks that have seen living standards decline for American
workers over the past 20 years.
Defeats for organized labor in the airline industry have meant
massive job losses and wage cuts, with the Valujet setting safety
standards. AA could have met the pilots’ demands if it had wanted
to avoid passenger delays  it has the money. Clinton knows
this but decided to bail the bosses out. The election of John
Sweeney to head the AFL/CIO and Ron Carey’s re-election as Teamster
president show a desire for change among American workers away from
the business unionism of the past. Hopefully, their verbal
commitment to organize will be translated into action.
It was mass action and defying unjust laws which built American
unions in the past, and it is only by reviving the tactics of the
CIO in the ’30s that they will be rebuilt.
Alexis Wearmouth
Fourth-year
History
Member – International Socialist Organization
Aborting gay babies
The recent discussion of a "gay gene" points to a more pertinent
issue: Abortion. Robert Lopez (Jan. 29, "Finding gay gene won’t
lead to holocaust of homosexual babies") doesn’t believe that women
would "recklessly choose an abortion at the slightest whim" if they
knew their child had a gay gene. However, perhaps Lopez is the one
who should do his research. Planned Parenthood statistics show that
75 percent of women having abortions said their reason for doing so
was the child would interfere with their lives; 66 percent said
they couldn’t afford the child; 50 percent said that they did not
want to be a single parent or that they had problems in their
current relationships; only 1 percent had an abortion as a result
of predicted abnormalities; and, less than 1 percent were results
of incest or rape.
Based on these facts, and the fact that the age group
responsible for the largest percentage of abortions is 18-24, it is
painfully obvious that women are having abortions for whimsical
reasons of convenience. If they’re aborting "normal" babies on a
whim, how much more will they rush to the clinic at the thought of
bearing a homosexual child? Not only does this point to the fact
that women would abort a child with a gay gene, but it also reveals
their irresponsibility as they refuse to face the consequences of
their actions.
Furthermore, whether the child is "normal," "deformed" or "gay,"
abortion has become a tool used by our society to define the value
of human life. I have met many mentally ill and physically
handicapped people whose quality of life far surpasses that of most
students of UCLA. What right does anyone have (doctor, mother or
father) to judge the value of life of an unborn child (normal,
deformed or gay)!
The value of life  thanks to Roe vs. Wade  has been
reduced to mere convenience, not unlike the nuclear bomb to war.
It’s a quick and easy solution! Perhaps science doesn’t have the
answer to all of society’s ills. Rather than our generation being
coined the baby-busters, we might be more appropriately named the
BABY-KILLERS!
Andrew Abdul-Ahab
Fourth-year
Political science