Guest Editorial

          “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli” 

By Ed Koch

          There aren’t many Americans who have never heard those words, which come from the United States Marine Corps Hymn.  The words refer to the heroic role of the Marines in putting an end to pillaging and piracy by the Barbary pirates who in the early 1800s plied their nefarious trade in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.  England and other countries paid tribute to the Barbary pirates in return for the safe passage of their ships.  The American motto, however, was "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!"  Instead of sending tribute, we sent the Marines.

          For several years now, pirates off the shore of Somalia have been engaged in the same kind of criminal enterprise, hijacking ships in the Indian Ocean, many of them oil tankers and cargo ships going to or coming from the Gulf oil region.  As they round the Horn of Africa, they are attacked by Somalia militia or rebels operating from a lawless country without a functioning government.

          The hijacked ships, their crews and cargo are then held hostage until the companies owning the ships have paid ransom, running into millions of dollars.  The money is used in part to upgrade the pirates’ weaponry and to acquire ships that are employed in the boarding of cargo ships and oil tankers and the taking of the hostages.  I noticed for months that there were no news reports on the activities of the pirates and recently, I asked the question on my Friday night radio call-in show (heard all across the U.S. on Bloomberg Radio, as well as Sirius radio at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time), whatever happened to the pirates?  Serendipitously, on September 10^th, The New York Times reported, “Nairobi, Kenya – In a predawn raid with helicopters hovering nearby, 24 American Marines scaled aboard a hijacked ship in the Gulf of Aden on Thursday, arrested the nine pirates on board and freed the ship – all without firing a shot, the American military said.”

          The article continued, “Last year, Navy Seal snipers killed three pirates who were holding an American cargo ship captain in a lifeboat, after he had offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the safety of his crew.”

          However, the appalling news, as reported in the article, is this:  “Despite the intense international naval presence in the region, the pirates are on track to have another banner year with more than 30 ships hijacked so far in 2010 and tens of millions of dollars in ransoms.”

          So I was right.  There has been a media blackout on this story.  I, an avid newspaper reader, had not seen any reports on most of these ship and hostage takings.  What appears to have been going on was an example of businesses worldwide concluding it was cheaper to pay the ransoms than to wait for their countries to blow the pirates out of the water in their marauding ships at sea or in their refuges on the Somali coast.  But apparently, not so in the case of the U.S. and its Marines, who have been and continue to do what Marines do best: protect Americans under the most difficult and dangerous conditions.  God bless them.

          But what have the U.S. and other countries been doing with the captured pirates?  The Times article is not comforting, reporting, “It is not clear what will happen to the captured pirates.  They are in custody aboard one of the ships in the task force and the officers are awaiting orders from higher levels.  While hundreds of Somali pirates have recently been sent to jail in Kenya, the Seychelles or Somalia, and a few have even been taken to Europe and the United States, many more have been set free by Western navies in a controversial ‘catch and release’ approach because of the complications of prosecuting suspects arrested on the high seas.”

          If memory serves me correctly, not long ago, one pirate taken to the U.S. escaped punishment because he was allegedly underage.  In our crazy world, he’s probably now at Harvard, either as a student or an adjunct professor.  Remember the homeless woman, Billie Boggs, who was picked up off the streets during my mayoral administration and taken to the hospital for medical care, where she refused treatment, was defended in her positions by the New York Civil Liberties Union and was invited to and did lecture at Harvard?  A true story.

          What would Captain Bligh – remember him as portrayed by Charles Laughton in “Mutiny on the Bounty?” -- have done to pirates or mutineers?  We know.  He would have keelhauled them (Google it to find out what that means) or hanged them from the ship’s yardarm, or both.  By the way, Captain Bligh was ultimately recognized by the British navy as a good guy and the mutineers under Fletcher Christian (portrayed by Clark Gable) lionized by Hollywood turned out to be the bad guys.  Many Hollywood figures today like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn still exercise the worst of judgments in who they hang with and create fan clubs for:  the likes of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

Putting Women Back in the Debate

By Martha Burk

 August 26 is Women’s Equality Day. Most Americans don’t even know what it is, and aside from commemorations by a few female leaders on Capitol Hill, it is hardly noticed. But it marks one of the most important days of the last century for women -- the day the final state ratified the 19th Amendment in 1920 -- and women were granted the vote.

 That year also marked what suffragists of the time thought would soon be another constitutional milestone, the Equal Rights Amendment. With their newfound franchise, women believed they could convince legislators to put women on equal footing in the Constitution with men (white men from the beginning, black men since passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868). The ERA was penned by Alice Paul, the suffragist jailed for picketing the White House and nearly starved in Occoquan prison outside Washington.

 But it was not to be. Here we are, 87 years later – a lifetime in anyone’s book – and women still haven’t achieved equal constitutional status. First introduced in Congress in 1923, the ERA was not passed and sent to the states for ratification until 1972, with an artificial time limit of only seven years for approval by the states. In that brief time it was ratified by 35 states, but was stopped three states short by millions of corporate dollars backing Phyllis Schlafly's anti-woman storm troopers, who feared unisex toilets more than they valued freedom from discrimination.

 Most U.S. citizens don’t remember that fight, and many believe the ERA was ratified. The reality is that the legal rights women currently enjoy are not rooted in the Constitution, but in a series of statutes like the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, executive orders like affirmative action, and various rules interpreting laws such as Title IX, guaranteeing equal educational opportunity. Because we don’t have an ERA, depending on their origin, all of these can be revoked in the dead of night by any simple majority of Congress, bureaucrats in a hostile administration, or the president himself.

 George W. Bush and company know this very well. They have been systematically eroding the gains women have made since they took office. They have weakened Title IX through rule changes. A major one now allows schools to force girls, but not boys, to prove they are interested in participating in sports before they are given the chance to play, and so-called “separate but equal” single sex public schools are allowed for the first time since 1972.

 With the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, the assaults on women’s employment rights and legal abortions have begun in earnest. Wasting no time, the Court has already upheld the first federal abortion ban since Roe v. Wade, and severely limited women’s right to sue in cases where they’ve experienced pay discrimination.

 Recently renamed the Women's Equality Amendment by its chief sponsor, Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), the ERA is the essence of brevity: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." That’s the whole thing. A simple concept that had the blessing of both political parties until the Republicans struck it from their platform in 1980 and the Democrats followed suit in 2004.

 It’s high time the ERA was put back in the center of public debate, and this long election season is the perfect opportunity.

 Office seekers not remembering that right to vote we’re celebrating on the 26th do so at their peril. Women are now the majority of the electorate, and can control any election. Close to 80 percent of the public, both female and male, favor an Equal Rights Amendment. Candidates of both parties for the Congress and the presidency ought to be listening.

Burk is the director for the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations.

Copyright (C) 2007 by the American Forum. 8/07