Severed New Era contract made with 'thought and consideration'

Rachel Wilson's letter on April 5 was interesting, however, not entirely accurate. The decision to cancel the New Era licensing agreement was mine, and I informed the president's office of the decision. The issue is not New Era's producing "a cap with an unauthorized design" rather it was New Era's production of a cap that was "DISAPPROVED." There is a significant difference in failing to obtain approval and producing what was disapproved. The relationship between a licensee and licensor is largely one of trust and good faith. For a licensee to produce a product that the licensor has rejected is a significant breach of that trust.

It is true that the New Era Company is engaged in a long-term labor dispute, and that serious allegations have been made. It is also true that NLRB and OSHA have been investigating allegations related to the union contract and safety violations. Both the Worker's Rights Consortium and the Fair Labor Association (the UA participates in both) are engaged in attempts to determine the accuracy of the claims. The university acknowledges the allegations, but has never been provided with a final report that confirms those allegations.

Also true is the fact that New Era did not disclose two factories in China. However, that fact does not provide grounds to terminate a licensing agreement. Our Code of Conduct provides licensees with adequate opportunities to remedy a breach. Once the disclosures were made, the breach was remedied.

Any decision to cancel an agreement must be well-founded and supportable. In this case the university severed an agreement based upon facts that can be supported and defended. It was not a decision that was made without significant thought and consideration.

Michael S. Low
director of Trademarks & Licensing
UA Department Of Intercollegiate Athletics

K-12 also needs state financial aid

Shane Dale says in his Tuesday commentary that what schoolchildren need most is capable teachers, and therefore the state budget for K-12 education need not be exempted from cuts, let alone increased. If Mr. Dale actually read the Wildcat, he would have seen repeated ads funded by the State of California enticing our education graduates to move to California with promises of high salaries, low-interest no-money-down mortgages and other financial incentives.

In Arizona, where salaries and benefits are meager, many teachers are either moving to other states or changing to other professions, and not being replaced. If we do not make teacher salaries competitive, "capable teachers" will become a scarce resource and a distant memory in our state.

Bruce Bayly
associate professor of mathematics

'Feminists,' 'Communists' dug their own grave

Caitlin Hall seems to be confused about why words such as "communist" and "feminist" are viewed as radical. I know she believes that the Republican Party MUST be responsible for it, but I doubt that. Seems to me that the left itself has perverted its own vocabulary. The one word she wants redeemed is "feminist."

Let us think back to the early 1990s when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bush Sr. The scandal was that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill. Every feminist in the United States began a mudslinging campaign against him. Then a few years later Bill Clinton had claims brought against him by Paula Jones. It also came out both prior to and after Jones that he had been sleeping around with women left and right. Gary Condit was also discovered to be a serial philanderer only, with his affair, the woman (Chandra Levy) turned up missing. Clinton and Condit taught America something valuable. So long as you support a woman's "right" to have an abortion then you are OK with feminists. If you are a Democrat who has affairs and then, when caught, turn your mistresses into nothing more than tawdry sluts, that is fine.

Feminists who defend Roe v. Wade also lack an important word in their vocabulary: abstinence. I asked them about that one day and that basically told me it wasn't realistic. Is it any wonder why the term "feminist" is viewed as a dirty word? It is synonymous with "hypocrisy," "double standard," "anti-family" and "irresponsibility."

The other word I would like to press is "communist," which Hall describes as, "nothing inherently sinister" about it. If only she would take the time to research communism around the world. China, U.S.S.R. and Cuba are all reason enough to believe "communism" is radical and dangerous. Look at the death toll of these countries.

For being a person who claims to stand for human rights, this extreme liberal seems to be a little backwards in her thinking.

Charles A. Peterson
history sophomore

Be aware of Mideast public relations misinformation

Many Wildcat letter writers seem to regard military PR as fact. I have read twice that most deaths on the Palestinian side have been "combatants." This is simply false: B'Tselem (www.btselem.org), Israel's premier human-rights organization, maintains a database of people (on both sides) killed in the conflict. A cursory look to its Web site will tell you that by far the most numerous group of people killed are Palestinian civilians.

It is also claimed that Israeli military, unlike Palestinians, do not intentionally target civilians, but only military targets. While suicide bombings against civilians are indefensible, Israel can not claim to adhere to rules of war either: B'Tselem, as well as leading international human-rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, documented a widespread and systematic pattern of grave abuses by the Israeli army, sometimes amounting to war crimes according to the Geneva Convention.

These findings are confirmed by the hundreds of Israelis who are now refusing to serve in the military (risking imprisonment): Their statements, (available from the Web site www.seruv.org.il) make it clear that their refusal to serve stems from the brutal illegalities (according to both the Geneva Convention and Israeli law) they are forced to commit while on duty.

Finally, there is the often-repeated myth that Barak made a "very generous offer" which was "refused by Arafat." While the talks were secret, the evidence we have shows that this is, at the very best, a gross oversimplification. This was confirmed by Robert Malley, Clinton's envoy at those peace talks (his op-ed, which appeared on the New York Times on July 8, 2001, is available at http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives.html or, for those preferring a Palestinian site, at www.electronicintifada.net/coveragetrends/generous.html.

For the record, I do not believe any side is particularly innocent in this conflict. But if we are ever hoping to achieve peace in the Middle East, we should at least try to shed the role as propagandists and question the reams of PR and disinformation to which we are continually exposed.

Giorgio Torrieri
physics graduate student

Open your eyes, America

America's foreign policy and all of the Bush administration's attention is based on the war on terrorism and yet they decide to take the support of a country like Pakistan based solely on the fact that Pakistan neighbors Afghanistan. Has America forgotten that Pakistan not only befriended bin Laden and Al-Qaida before Sept. 11 but also trained them and Taliban fighters to use them in cross-border terrorism against India? Does America choose to ignore the fact that Pakistan was the only country supporting the Taliban, supplying arms to them, aiding them to suppress their people with one of the worst forms of human-rights violations? And all of this based only on the word of a man who has made a living out of cross-border terrorism and turned a democracy forcefully into a dictatorship. General Pervez Musharraf himself admitted that by supporting the United States he was committing the "lesser of two evils."

Yet after all this evidence, the Bush government can be excused in taking Pakistan's help because no other country knows more about Al-Qaida and bin Laden than Pakistan and Pakistan's help would be a huge boost to the war on terror. But now Pakistan defies even the United States, refusing to extradite Omar Sheikh to the United States. Here is a man who masterminded the kidnapping and murder of journalist Daniel Pearl. This man has spent five years in an Indian prison and was released only on the demand of hijackers in command of an Indian airline flight in 1999 which was made to land in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

Pakistan will not extradite him as he is a man deeply connected with their intelligence.

Yet Colin Powell's state department decides to let Pakistan get away with this with the flimsy excuse that Pakistan has an unstable government and they cannot interfere much with their internal policies.

And even as all of this happens, Pakistan reaps in hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid given to them as a reward for joining the coalition against terror. Where will all this money go after the Bush administration has finished its war on terror? Pakistan spends nearly 60 percent of its revenue on its military and training young radical Muslims to be terrorists who infiltrate India.

Does the U.S not have enough evidence of Pakistan's activities to continue its support? I don't believe that. Barely six months before Sept. 11 Powell called Pakistan a "rogue state." How will the war on terror be successful if one of the major components of the coalition is itself a harbor for terrorists?

Rish Patel
undeclared freshman