THE 'BIRTHER' CONTROVERSY, Part II

By H. N. Burdett

War, it has been said, is God's way of teaching Americans geography and most certainly there are more of us able to locate Iraq and Afghanistan on the map than a decade ago. Similarly, obsession with President Obama's country of origin might logically point to a closer examination of Article II of the U.S. Constitution.

Clearly, in accordance with the above citation, had Barack Obama been born in Hawaii two years earlier than he was, 17 days before the Paradise of the Pacific became the 50th state of the United States, he would not have been eligible for the presidency.

That provision has been denounced by legal scholars as the worst provision in the Constitution and as "blatantly discriminatory" and the "flaw" embedded in that revered document by former Nixon speechwriter William Safire in a 1987 essay in The New York Times.

Two legal scholars, Robert Post and Randall Kennedy, independently reached the conclusion that the birth requirement as a condition for eligibility for the president is the stupidest provision contained within the instrument that organized the U.S. government.

In the February, 2006 issue of the Chicago-Kent Law Review, attorney Sarah Herlihy presumed that the Founding Fathers "feared" that someone "born abroad, in a foreign culture and with foreign influence, would come to America, become president and take over the country."

Herlihy posited, however, that "discriminating against naturalized citizens based solely on the fact that they were not born in the United Statees is not justified because globalization has lessened the differences between natural born and foreign-born citizens.

She cited the "increase in trade, the growth of international economic markets and the increase in the number of people who are multi-lingual contributing to making people more similar."

"Globalization is breaking down the differences amongst cultures because people throughout the world now have access to the same information, buy and sell the same products, and frequently travel or move out of their 'home' countries, during their lifetime. Accordingly, the natural born citizen requirement no longer serves the same purpose that it did in 1789 when travel was extremely limited and foreign cultures were, in many cases, very different than the cultures in America."

Herlihy's most compelling argument against the birth requirement was that many would agree that "a naturalized citizen who is born abroad and adopted by American parents at the age of three months and goes to American schools would have been better qualified to be president than a person who is born in the United States but moves to France at the age of three months, attends French schools, moves back to the United States at 40, enters politics, and runs for president at the age of 54." (The Constitution further requires that a person be a resident of the United States for 14 years in order to be eligible for president.)

Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, even went so far as to attempt to expunge the birthplace requirement, introducing a Constitutional amendment to allow citizens who had been naturalized for 20 years to be eligible for the presidency. In October 2004, a hearing was held on Hatch's proposal but no action was taken.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, offered a similar amendment in the House of Representatives, but one requiring the naturalized citizen to live in the United States for at least 35 years to be eligible for the presidency.

Under Article II, the list of Americans ineligible to be elected president includes two relatively recent Secretaries of State, Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, born in Czechoslovakia and Germany, respectively, as well as Austria-born former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who moved to the United States from her native Canada when she was four years old.

"It will never be known how many potentially great presidents have never even aspired to the office (of president) because of the Constitutional prohibition," wrote John Dean, legal counsel to President Richard M. Nixon. "Show me a person who believes that the natural born citizen qualification should remain in the Constitution and I will show you a bigot, pure and simple."

Thomas Jefferson was in France serving as the United States Ambassador when the Constitution was being written in Philadelphia. It would be interesting to know what the author of the Declaration of Independence who was to become the nation's third president might have thought about the natural born citizen requirement.

We do know what Jefferson thought of bigotry, which he called "the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds. . . free and buoyant education and free discussion are the antidotes to both."

Perhaps the controversy over the birthplace of President Obama, a natural born U.S. citizen, will lead to the "free discussion" that will lead to the long overdue repeal of the discrimination against naturalized citizens contained within the U.S. Constitution.

THE 'BIRTHER' CONTROVERSY, PART I

By H. N. Burdett

The release of President Obama's birth certificate by the White House should bury the silly distraction of where he was born forever more. It will not. You can wager the farm, the cow, the pigs, the silo and the outhouse that the lunatic fringe will insist that the document the Obama administration released was an obvious forgery.

Article II of the U.S. Constitution indeed states: "No person except a natural born citizen, or citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of the President. . ."

A recent New York Times-CBS poll found that 45 percent of adult Republicans believe President Barack Obama was born in another country, up from 32 percent just one year ago in the same poll. Another 22 percent said they did not know the president's birthplace. Thus, a mere one third of adult Republicans are convinced that their Obama's country of origin is the United States.

There's more. According to the same poll, only 50 percent of independent voters -- whom Obama heavily relied upon to win a clear mandate, 53 percent of the total vote, in 2008 -- accept the fact that he is a natural-born citizen.

In the last presidential election, the Obama campaign released his birth certificate, certified by the Hawaii Department of Health and posted it online, showing he was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.

Disbelievers predictably questioned the authenticity of that document, but never came up with a plausible refutation of two Obama birth announcements in Honolulu newspapers.

These notices appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, on August 13 and 14, respectively, listing the future president's parents' home address as 6085 Kalanianole Highway in Honolulu.

All of this was apparently insufficient evidence to satisfy congenital skeptics. It has been used to explain real estate mogul Donald Trump's sudden surge in the early polls of prospective GOP presidential primary candidates. Trump, a genius at self-promotion whose intentions to actually run for president are widely doubted, gave fresh legs to the issue when he questioned the president's birthplace.

When Fox News's Gretchen Carlson asked Trump several weeks back whether he believed the president was born in the United States, The Donald replied, "I am really concerned. . .And I tell you. . .Hey, look, you have no doctor that remebers, you have no nurses -- this is the President of the United States -- that remembers."

Trump asserted that the death notice "was placed in the papers days after he was born." Probably because it had not dawned on his parents until nine or ten days after he was born that infant Barack was definitely presidential material.

"So," Trump continued, "he could have come into this country and they did it for social reasons. . .They did it for whatever reason. There are a lot of reasons they could have put the ad in, but he could have been born outside of this country. . Why can't he produce a birth certificate? And, by the way, there's one story that his family doesn't even know what hospital he was born in."

Trump told Fox News, "Now this guy either has a birth certificate or he doesn't. And I didn't think this was such a big deal, but I will tell you it's turning out to be a very big deal because people now are calling me all over saying, 'Please don't give up on this issue.'

"The fact is, if you're not born in the United States, you cannot be president. He's having a hard time. . .he's spent millions of dollars trying to get away from this issue, millions of dollars in legal fees trying to get away from this issue." Trump did not tell Fox News the source of his allegation about money Obama spent to distance himself from the non-issue. Nor did Fox News think to ask.

The prospective Republican candidate who most forthrightly declined to buy into the birther argument is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who, in a CNBC interview, flatly stated, "I believe the president was born in the United States."

Tea party darling Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, was less certain until ABC's George Stephanopoulos recently showed her a copy of the president's birth certificate. "Well, then," she responded, "that should settle it. . .I take the president at his word."

The wiggle room created by GOP candidates who claim to take Obama "at his word," rather than accede to the documentation, allowed them to express disappointment and dismay should a vast left-wing conspiracy to elect a foreigner become uncovered at some time in the future. Before announcing that he was dropping out of the Republican primary race before it started, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour was among the latter.

A spokesperson for former Pennsylvania Governor Rick Santorum, a long-shot conservative GOP presidential contender, said he believes Obama was born in Hawaii and that the birther debate is "a distraction from the real issues."

Feisty and folksy former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who was surprisingly competitive in the last Republican presidential primary, referred in a radio interview earlier this year to the president as "having grown up in Kenya," the birthplace of Obama's father. Obama grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii.

"I'm not about to question the authenticity of Barack Obama's birth certificate," commented former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, a prospective dark horse GOP primary candidate. "When you look at his policies, I do question what planet he's from. . ."

The controversy may stem from Americans' astounding lack of knowledge of geography. A poll to determine what percentage of the population know that Hawaii is a state and not a county might prove embarrassing.

Hawaii, in fact, was recognized as the 50th U.S. state on August 21, 1959, 17 days short of two years before the day Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Therein may at least partially explain the confusion.

THE BARACK OBAMA CONUNDRUM

Commenting on "Notes on a Road Rally Revolution" (Potomac Digest, April 1), former Baltimore television news anchor Jack Bowden writes:

It saddens me that you, like most liberals, can't admit that Obama is a disaster. I proudly voted for him, but I, like a growing number of liberals (watch Jon Stewart) now admit he has been a major disappointment. His only motivation is to get re-elected and, he probably will, because the Republicans are as bad or worse.

Would George W. Bush have done anything differently in Libya? And where was the demand for intervention during the Rwanda genocide? Unfortunately, only black people were involved, instead of black oil, as in Libya. And what about the other Arab countries doing the same thing as Libya, but are our allies?

And wouldn't the U.S. have done exactly what Libya is doing if some other country had invaded us to stop our genocide of the American Indians, which by the way, Lincoln (as wrongly venerated by liberals as Reagan is by conservatives) continued during the Civil War. Captured Rebel officers were not imprisoned if they agreed to kill Indians. Until left-wingers stop making excuses for Obama, politicians like Obama, who has ordered the death of thousands of people, and whose administration has not prosecuted any of the people who caused the recession, right-wingers will continue to gain power.

To which H. N. Burdett responds:

You may be surprised to learn that I'm not quite ready to carve Obama's image into Rushmore and that I share many, if not most, of your frustrations. But I feel you've gone far overboard by labeling him 'a disaster.'

Our differences perhaps stem from our perspectives and expectations. I never regarded Obama as a liberal, but rather as a left-leaning moderate. And, yes, he has made mistakes. But providing airstrikes in Libya to save lives of those who most of us were convinced would have been slaughtered absent U.S. air cover was not one of them.

Furthermore, I think you're a little off base if you truly believe U.S. intervention in Libya was motivated by oil rather than humanitarian concern. It is my understanding that the U.S. uses relatively little Libyan oil and that most of it goes to China. If that is correct, I'm not certain why the U.S. would intervene in Libya to protect a major supplier of oil for China.

It is easy to dismiss your comment, "His (Obama's) only motivation is to be re-elected. . ." Of course he wants to be re-elected. Perhaps the reason for this is to carry through what he has begun: recovery from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and restoration of the respect the United States lost under his predecessor. In these two significant categories, he has hardly been 'a disaster.'

My heart sank, along with yours I suspect, when Obama doubled down on Afghanistan -- a war the U. S. was, and is, losing. After 9/11 an international police action, rather than two wars, was required. Had that been our approach, we might well have held together the so-called 'coalition of the willing' that followed Bush and the U.S. into the insanity of invading Iraq. Perhaps, too, we would have captured or killed Bin Laden (and, at times, I'm cynical enough to believe that neither Bush nor Obama really wanted this because it would have made Bin Laden a martyr for the ages).

You are absolutely correct in asking "where was the demand for intervention in Rwanda during the genocide. . ." But if memory serves the U.S. President at that time was Bill Clinton, not Obama. Clinton has since lamented that not intervening in Rwanda was one of the biggest mistakes of his presidency.

The inconvenient truth ignored by you and other disaffected liberals who have pronounced Obama a failure or worse is that you are forgetting that the president must deal with a sharply divided Congress. This may account for what seems to be far too many compromises and his reticence, for which he's getting battered from both the right and the left.

I'm as upset as you are that not one of the wheeler and dealers who precipitated the recession has been prosecuted. I also feel that the president might have been far more aggressive in fighting for true health care reform: single payer health insurance. But even the health insurance restructuring -- it is hardly health care reform -- is an improvement, in that more than 16 million Americans who previously had no health insurance will be protected and the 'prior condition' caveat has been lifted. I'll add the failure to close Guantanamo and foot-dragging on environmental concerns to my list of bones to pick with the current administration.

Overerall though, you've got to admit that few presidents have entered office with as much of a mess that Obama inherited and was expected to clean up. That he has done as much as he has in only 2 1/2 years is nothing short of remarkable -- most particularly from a novice politician/social worker/law professor when most of the garbage he had been handed was fermenting.

But Bowden has the last serve in this volley between opinionators:

[S]ince that note of mine we now know that U.S. planes are still bombing Libya under the direction of NATO, which we fund and run, so Obama lied about that, and there is no exit strategy. And the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) says the budget cuts are a sham -- almost all of the money was not going to be spent anyway. Both Obama and the Republicans were just playing to their bases -- it's all theater, make believe. Reagan and Bush took the deficit and the debt to record levels, but the Obama administration has outdone them. We're in a very deep financial hole and yet most economists, such as [Paul] Krugman [Nobel Prize economist and New York Times columnist] say keep digging.

NOTES ON A ROAD RALLY REVOLUTION

By H. N. Burdett

Television footage of Libya's civil war suggests a road rally where lethal weapons are fired at invisible targets more than it does an actual revolution.

Absent air support to knock out or at least slow down government troops intent upon quelling the opposition's advance towards Tripoli, the ragtag rebels have no viable option other than to retreat. Until NATO gets its act together or another nation unilaterally steps in to re-energize anti-government forces, the revolution can be charitably characterized as in a state of flux.

Meanwhile, there does not appear to be a no-fly zone for opinions in the United States Congress regarding the Obama administration's role in what history may recount as either a long-oppressed citizenry rising up to achieve their freedom, or a tragic farce, a firecracker that went unlit for lack of a match.

With yet another interminably long presidential election campaign gearing up, potential Republican nominees change their minds about what the United States should be doing in Libya as frequently as the rest of us change our socks. The only unity among the nominal loyal opposition seems to be that whatever course of action the Obama administration espouses is wrong.

For his part, the president is now chastised for a perceived multitude of missteps ranging from appalling lack of clarity to rank timidity in dealing with the uprising in Libya.

Obama is in a difficult position to say the least. Libya serves no direct national interest of the United States, which does not rely on that north African nation's rich oil resources. At the same time, the president feels a moral responsibility to prevent the horrific carnage Colonel Qaddafi can be reliably predicted to reap upon those who would depose him in the wake of more than 40 years of tyrannical misrule.

Beyond what the Obama administration calls a humanitarian mission for the protection of oppressed Libyan citizens -- one involving more than 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired at government forces, as well as bombing and strafing of government troops -- the White House would clearly rather defer further action to NATO.

"I don't know why the administration has not been honest with the American people that this is regime change," thundered Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colorado, who added: "This is just the most muddled definition of an operation probably in U.S. military history."

Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, Obama's GOP opponent in the 2008 presidential election, weighed in by calling the decision to call off U.S. airstrikes in Libya "a profound mistake with potentially disastrous consequences." Reminding us of the president's call for Qaddafi's ouster, McCain fervently believes that rather than hand off the assignment of taking down the dictator, the U.S. should be front and center in that effort.

Even as politicians second-guess Obama's policy in Libya, or lack thereof, CIA operatives are reportedly on the ground in that beleaguered land to cobble together an assessment of the situation, including what may be needed to finish the job of finishing Qaddafi.

The focal point of the evaluation is nothing less than the historic problem with virtually all revolutions: the kind of phoenix that might rise from the ashes. All too fresh in our memory is the painful fact that Osama Bin Laden and his followers were among the freedom fighters the United States armed in their effort to drive Soviet troops from Afghanistan some 30 years ago. Moreover, the United States is already quite obviously over-extended with its military interventions in two other Moslem countries.

Perhaps mitigating the harrowing prospect of Qaddafi's army gaining traction and pushing back the rebels hard enough to dispel their faintest hope for victory are the recent defections from the dictator's inner circle. The road rally revolution compounded with the strong man's former confidants forming a circular firing squad might indeed hasten the day of reckoning in Libya.

But the enormous question mark as to what will emerge from the Libyan revolution is not erased. Will there be a democratic government resolved to carry out the will of the people and ensure the freedom they have been denied by a brutal and corrupt despot for more than four decades? Or will the Tripoli palace be turned over to yet another incarnation of evil, perhaps no less vile or bloodthirsty than the current occupant?

In his renowned dissent in United States v. Abrams of November 10, 1919, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "Every year if not every day we wage our salvation upon some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge." Holmes's wisdom could hardly have been lost on the cerebral former law professor who is determined to renew his four-year lease on the White House.

BACKPEDALING ON GUANTANAMO

By H. N. BURDETT

There can be no plausible argument that there are those among the 172 detainees in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay who require imprisonment lest they become grave threats to national security. There are 47 prisoners in this category at that facility.

In his 2008 election campaign, President Obama pledged to shut down Guantanamo. Four months into his presidency in a speech at the National Archives, he declared: "Rather than safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American security." The president called Guantanamo "a rallying cry for our enemies" and ordered it closed within one year.

In May of this year, it will be a full two years since President Obama spoke those words. But less than a dozen of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo since it began receiving inmates from the war on terrorism in 2002 have stood trial.

The president has now signed an executive order establishing indefinite detainment for those who remain a significant threat to national security.

With the interminably long 2012 presidential election campaign gearing up, the president is doubtless recalling the Democratic party nightmare of the 1988 presidential campaign and the noxious Willie Horton episode.

While Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, was Governor of Massachusetts, Willie Horton, serving a life sentence for stabbing a boy to death, was granted a weekend furlough during which he kidnapped a young couple, tortured the young man and repeatedly raped his girlfriend.

Referring to Dukakis, Lee Atwater, Bush's campaign manager known for his bare-knuckle politics, vowed to "strip the bark off the little bastard" and "make Willie Horton his running mate." After that, Dukakis's 17-percent lead in the early polls vanished and Bush went on to a landslide victory. It is a lesson that can hardly have been lost on Barack Obama in his quest for a second term.

Human rights advocates, who had denounced the George W. Bush administration policy of holding Guantanamo prisoners without trial, hailed Obama's promise to close the prison. They are now crestfallen at the president's turnaround on his pledge.

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "It is virtually impossible to imagine how one closes Guantanamo in light of the executive order. In a little over two years, the Obama administration has done a complete about face."

On the heels of the president's announcement, Rep. Peter T. King, R-N.Y., chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, responded: "The bottom line is that it affirms the Bush administration policy that our government has the right to detain dangerous terrorist until the cessation of hostilities."

In a so-called "war" against terrorism, Rep. King or anyone else would be hard pressed to define when hostilities actually cease.

King's backhand compliment is one that President Obama might well have anticipated but finds far preferable to the possibility that a current Guantanamo prisoner once released perpetrates an act of terrorism and becomes his "running mate" in 2012.

The highest profile Guantanamo detainee, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, openly boasts of having plotted the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Obama administration abandoned its plan to have him him stand trial, following strong public and political outcries.

Five years ago, the Department of Defense reported that three of the Guantanamo Bay detainees had committed suicide with nooses made from their shirts and clothes. trial. Systematic disregard of the American tradition of due process is the shame of Guantanamo.

The United Nations, the European Union and Amnesty International have all requested closure of the Guanatanamo prison.

Obama's reversal of his pledge is somewhat mitigated by the requirement in his executive order of a regular review of prisoners by an independent executive panel, as well as to access to legal counsel throughout their incarceration. Together with adherence to international laws barring torture and other forms of inhumane treatment and contrary to Rep. King's boast, these are significant departures from detainee policy under the Bush administration.

Moreover, Obama's original goal to shut down Gitmo has been thwarted by a bipartisan congressional ban on moving the prisoners' trials to the United States, rendering it virtually impossible to release the prisoners - a prohibition the Washington Post calls "unconscionable" and the New York Times lambasted as "an act of notable political cowardice."

The Obama administration decision to continue indefinite detention rather than to push back hard against the congressional mandate reflects a president withering in the heat generated at the starting line of this nation's overlong presidential race.

Future presidents would be able to negate the executive order with a stroke of the pen; it is no substitute for passing a law requiring independent evaluations of the courts and the guarantee of legal protection of the prisoners. In a nation ruled not by monarchs or despots, but rather by law, nothing less is acceptable.

WISCONSIN AND BEYOND

By H. N. BURDETT

State governments are reeling from recession-driven revenue declines, but the impetus for protesting thousands to descend upon Madison, Wisconsin, and other U.S. capitals owes at least as much to a January 2010 Supreme Court decision.

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled that the government may not restrict political spending by corporations. Such limitations would be a denial of freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, according to the majority in that 5-4 decsion.

While the Citizens United ruling does not directly address labor unions, the implication seems clear enough that it applies to them as well. Labor unions and corporations have been among the more productive cash cows of the Democratic and Republican parties respectively.

GOP strategists see the crippling state deficits during the recession as an opportunity to severely weaken if not outright eliminate, the influence of unions during election campaigns, thereby tipping the scales in favor of corporation-backed Republican candidates.

The most convenient target for attacking collective bargaining -- anathema to big business and, therefore, to the GOP -- is organized labor in the public sector. It is hardly a coincidence that the service employees and teachers unions are among the largest and arguably most powerful in the country.

Brookings Institute senior fellow E. J. Dionne, Jr. recently wrote in The Washington Post that he was told by an unnamed pro-union consultant: "The game goes like this. Destroy private-sector unions, reduce private-sector health and retirement benefits, then say, 'Hey, how come these public employees get such [relatively] good benefits? That's not fair.'"

Dionne added that the anonymous consultant took exception to those claiming private-sector unions are all right but oppose public-sector unions: "Private-sector unions are only 'okay' once they are completely emasculated."

Under Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's agenda, it would not be sufficient to merely reduce state employees' benefits to help lower the state's $3.6 billion deficit. His plan would eviscerate most of their collective bargaining rights. Benefits and working conditions would be removed from the bargaining table. Only basic pay would be negotiable. But even that would have to be kept in line with inflation.

With public-sector unions having roles in electing state legislators who determine their wages, they have undue political influence, according to the GOP mantra.

Meanwhile, a progressive think tank, Policy Matters Ohio, challenges the validity of the contention that public-sector unions are responsible for a significant amount of state government deficits. For example, last year the nine states that prohibit such unions had average shortfalls of 25 percent, compared to 24 percent in the 14 states that allow them.

New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg reminded us in a New York Times op-ed article that taxpayers foot the bill for pensions, benefits and job security for public employees "that almost no one in the private sector enjoys." But Bloomberg contended that these costs, now growing at rates outpacing inflation, are simply unaffordable.

"Yes, public sector workers need a secure retirement," the mayor conceded. "And, yes, taxpayers need top-quality police officers, teachers and firefighters. It's the job of government to balance those competing needs. But for a variety of reasons, the scale has been increasingly tipping away from taxpayers."

Bloomberg noted that budget deficits are being used by several states to justify efforts to scale back "not only labor costs, but labor rights." He stressed, however, that unions "play a vital role in protecting against abuses in the workplace, and in my experience they are integral to training, deploying and managing a professional work force."

"We should no more try to take away the right of individuals to collectively bargain than we should try to take away the right to the secret ballot," the mayor argued.

He further observed that in Wisconsin, "proposals to rein in spending on labor contracts have included proposals to strip unions of their right to collectively bargain for pensions and health care benefits.

"Yet the problem is not unions expressing those rights: it is governments failing to adapt to the times and act in a fiscally responsible manner. . .Benefits agreed to
35 years ago that now are unaffordable should be reduced. Similarly work rules that made sense 70 years ago but are now antiquated should be changed."

Bloomberg concluded: "The job of labor leaders is to get the best deal for their members. The job of elected officials is to get the best deal for all citizens.

"Rather than declare war on unions, we should demand a new deal with them -- one that reflects today's econonmic realities and workplace conditions, not those of a century ago. If we fail to do that, the fault is not in our unions, or in our stars, but in ourselves."

As the situation now stands, the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling has overturned decades of limitations on corporate spending to influence elections. Parlaying this with stripping unions of much of their hard-fought rights would gift wrap for big business a decided advantage in determining election outcomes.

In the current contentious climate, it would be well to remember that it is to organized labor that working men and women owe virtually every major right they have achieved from the minimum wage and the 40-hour week to workplace safety and laws restricting child labor.

Mayor Bloomberg is on target when he insists that collective bargaining must remain as sacroscanct as the secret ballot. Governor Walker and other state governors attempting to dilute or remove this right are indeed treading on their own constituents.

SOMALI PIRATES EXTENDING OPERATIONS

By H. N. BURDETT

Somalia's statelessness, high fertility rate, large number of youths, its unemployment and poverty are all factors in the rampant piracy stretching across the Indian Ocean, says an authority on ship hijacking in the wake of four Americans killed by pirates on "Quest," a 58-foot custom-built yacht in the Gulf of Aden.

Lt. Cdr. Claude G. Berube, a reserve naval officer on active duty as a history professor at the Academy, says Somalia "has been a lawless state for the past twenty years" as piracy has grown, become more sophisticated and has spread far from the Somalia coastline. Berube has written extensively on piracy in academic journals as well as an unpublished novel.

Pirates in the area called "pirates' alley" generally release their hostages unharmed after collecting their ransoms. Two of the pirates who had seized the yacht with Americans aboard were negotiating for their release aboard a U.S. ship.

The motivations of the pirates who boarded the yacht of a Marina Del Rey, California couple, Jean and Scott Adams, for killing them and their crew, Phyllis Macay and Robert A. Riggle of Seattle, Washington, are so far "matters of speculation and conjecture," the professor said. Six of the pirates were also killed and 13 others were in U.S. Navy custody.

Armed with AK-47 automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades that Somali pirates "have been using for decades - weapons that can be found everywhere" throughout the region, Berube stressed, the outlaws have extended their search for prey to 50-100 nautical miles across the Indian Ocean and only about 40 nautical miles from India. "And they are now using satellite phones," he added.

Describing the pirates as "mostly young people, we're dealing with seventeen and eighteen-year-olds," Berube pointed out that they operate from skiffs launched from mother ship tankers and freighters.

Somalia's annual population growth rate is nearly 2.9 percent, the 16th largest in the world, more than 43 births per 1,000 population. Somali women have 6.4 births in their reproductive lifetime, the world's fourth highest fertility rate. More than 45 percent of the country's male population is under 15 years of age.

"The International Maritime Bureau classifies waters off of Somalia as some of the most dangerous in the world," Cdr. Berube says. Yet the shipping industry "has not seen (piracy) as a threat," he observes. Though President Obama has called piracy "a national emergency", he adds, "no one has taken full responsibility for dealing with the threat."

Betube stressed that there are three courses for dealing with piracy: private to public, nations hiring private maritime security; private to private, private sector firms hiring private security; and private ships with escorts supplied by national governments. Thus far, however, these options have been virtually ruled out as "too costly," the Naval Academy professor said.

The danger not being ignored is reports that the pirates have been negotiating with Al-Shabaab, a terrorist group operating in Somalia, with the latter receiving 20 percent of the hijacking profits for its cooperation.

According to New Yorker magazine writer Jon Lee Anderson, Al-Shabaab controls most of southern and central Somalia, including a large portion of the capital, Mogadishu, and has "declared war on the U.N. and on Western non-governmental organizations" that distribute food aid in Somalia. In the past two years, the group is believed to be responsible for killing 42 relief workers.

"Anywhere a state cannot control its own coastline, you're going to see piracy," Berube concluded.