I posted this once but clearly it needs re-posting


The Independent April 13, 2009 by Johann Hari

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?


Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his articles, click here. or here.

POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.

At the end of the day, americans are spoiled. We want our cake and eat it too. You can't have cheap goods and services on one hand and then expect to make a living wage.

It is a catch 22/20 and it does start at the top with big corporate business. Whose in real power want to make as much as possible in order to do this they look for the cheapest labor force.

Our government has been in bed with and or coddled Corporations. We give the tax breaks ans shelters, but that is not enough they say and the move their businesses off shore.

We the people are brainwashed into thinking that they are right to do such things, cause after all they help to keep our economy afloat.

Well folks look at what is happening now. There is such a thing as ENOUGH!

What ever happened to the notion that there is a price for doing business?

In my opinion it is time for our government to say, if you don't like our rule you will not be allowed to do business in our country regardless of where you hail. Go do all your business in India and then sell your goods and services to the Indians. See how many can afford it, or have actually fallen prey to the endless need to consume.

I can't even find a person to repair my shoes within 25 miles of me because our consumption of cheap shoes have driven that trade out of business.

surprise surprise surprise! If the ten gallon hat fits...

Right-wing extremist groups may be using the recession and the election of the nation’s first African-American president to recruit members, a Department of Homeland Security report contends.

Though the nine-page report said it has “no specific information that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence,” it said real-estate foreclosures, unemployment and tight credit “could create a fertile recruiting environment for right-wing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.”

The report, prepared in coordination with the FBI and published April 7, was distributed to federal, state and local law enforcement officials under the title “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.”

It compares the current climate with that of the 1990s, “when right-wing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers.”

http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/14/report-says-right-wing-extremism-may-be-on-the-rise/

This is a prefect example of how much in the dark Americans are about their government.

There is no such thing as the past in government. Laws and policies that W enacted will effect us and the government years into the future.

Here is what I have witnessed in my life as a former Californian and now Virginian resident about who is to blame for illegal immigration.

I grew up in an affluent area of Los Angeles. 100% of the homes of my friends had domestic workers in them. 99.9% were illegal. That .1% was in my house. My parents sponsored the women who worked for us. She fled El Salvador when the US sponsored terror happened there. She is now retired and collects Social Security after paying into the system her entire adult life. She also became a citizen.

The other workers in the other homes scrambled to make ends meet. They generally have three to four homes they work in. They are paid if they are lucky minimum wage. If they work in the restaurants, they have purchased a Social security # from some American citizen. Many of who don't work a documented job cause they have five or six illegals working under their name and paying into the system.

When I moved here to Virginia, I thought I would not see the same sort of abuse of the system by AMERICANS. I was wrong. I worked for a small cleaning and "landscaping" business. All the cleaning workers were Americans all the landscaping workers except one were illegal. Everyone was paid the same amount. The legal workers of course had their wages taxed, the illegal ones were paid everyday they worked cash. On the books this business looked fine. I was the one doing the books.

When I mentioned to the boss, that he was part of the problem he gave me two excuses I have heard all my life about how one person can rationalize their part in a mess.

"Those men have families to support back in their country", oh yeah the cleaning crew were all women, many single parents but some how they didn't have as much responsibility.

"I am providing people work and trying to get a small business started."

My sincere feeling it if you have a problem with illegals make sure you are not supporting those that hire them. That means, make sure that everything you put in your mouth, everything you put on your back, every service you receive is not provided by or does not profit by an illegal worker. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!

Don't know if you have been asleep for the past 9 years when the last president was taking away your right to privacy? Please supply the information you are siting and make sure it does not come from Fox, Limbaugh or any other right leaning organization. Maybe from a European, a more neutral party

Oh and just a reminder< we don't live in a dictatorship, therefore it is rather misleading to say "he".

maybe you can go ask W and his cronies for some of the trillions of dollars they sole in their little war. I think he is actually from Texass

Yes, that is a rational idea. Let's have every state secede. Then just watch as each state decides, "well I don't think we need to pay for the up keep our part of the interstate." or, "let's kick everyone that gets social services out of our state." maybe you would like to of course make abortion, homosexuality, oral sex, the practice of any religion besides yours and so on illegal and then sell gun at the corner liquor store.

Please, could someone list clearly and with some rational thought, tell us what exactly they think their state should not be responsible for that the "government" is forcing on them? What rights exactly are they being denied. It all comes down to money and I am sorry to say, each state has representatives that have been voting for whatever it is you are complaining about. People of this country are behaving like either crabs in a barrel or rats on a sinking ship.

PITIFUL PITIFUL PITIFUL

One thing is for sure, that dude was "Scared Straight", sorry I couldn't resist.

The Independent April 13, 2009 by Johann Hari

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?


Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his articles, click here. or here.

POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.

It is probably too much math for them.

The Fat Lady

adjusted her panties

and drew in an enormous

breath

and blew it out

her

ASS

with any

luck

YOUR

nostrils

are wide

open

YOU get

to smell

the FILTH

you have

spewed from

YOUR

sewer mouth!

Though

dressed so fine,

Your fragile

little EGO tucked

into your

chest pocket

where YOUR

heart should be.

YOU glance

sideways in the window

to see

YOUR bald spot!

Then remember your

shopping list

"JUST FOR MEN"

I hum

"You're SO vain"

The Aria

will shortly

END

So hard to be the one

Left out

Passed over

Messed over –

How you chose

HER

Over me?

I saw you together

Happy and

Plain!

Where did I fit in?

Was it,

You had no

Imagination

I knew my worth

How you picked at

My flaws, I laughed

So you compared

Her changing for you

To hurt when I

Demanded a place

Not just lying

Taking you in

Again and again and again

No – not plain

Not I

Not never

So sorry!

Aw lover

WHY?

Perhaps

I was to conquer, an object only?

Once taken my love was absurd.

Now

I believe you have no vision!

Why should I could I love

The ordinary you?

Cause a woman like me only love

The type of men

You dream to be.

Yet when you arrive,

Where will I be?

Mistaken

I did

I do

Love

But fading out

Alone

So hard to be the one

Solo

I am no longer

inspired

to write

about you

how appropriate

this

bitter barren

winter wind

no snow

to glisten

you did not

listen

to a single word

said

for if

you had

the numbness

of my soul

the cold

frigid

silence

you've dealt

ME

would be dusted over

with delights

of warmth

heat

passion

not the horror

of longing

for

the poison

you've left

to fester

so deep

an itch

that burns

I'm so

EMPTY

devoid

of caring

to care

how foolish

pathetic

pitiful a

sound

my sobbing

makes

what shame

to know how

my own heart

betrays me

as surely

as you

have

the moon is a crazy

blaze

tonight

all the stars

pretending not

to notice

where is the

devil

when you

need him

he must

he reserved for

horror

what of a

poet

i am ready

to bargin

what need of

a soul

do i have

isn't it my soul

that burdens

my flesh

it is

surely my soul

that cause me

to fall

against my

minds good reason

i'd gladly talk

to a minion

if the big

cheese

is occupied

i'll trade anything

to be rid

or it

not to be pulled

to the other

hoping to complete

self

that is

hell

why worry

of the physical

tortures

at least the source

of which

is form the outside

you see

the devil

is just as

elusive

as god

i fear they're in

a meeting

dealing us cards

double dealing

drawing from the bottom

with marked souls

whoever is in

control

of mine

keep it

perhaps then

i would

could

have some hope

for my

heart

thanks Bonny, nice to see you.

I live in a very rural area and let me till you this, if people don't get a break here you will just have as many homeless rural people as urban. Think about it this way, yes it may same like there are more urban people on the dole, but that is because the population is denser there. If you average it out you will find that there are just as many poor people, as you claim living off working people where I live ans in Hawthorne. I drive by two food banks out here in the middle of nowhere and the lines are getting longer every week.

Most of these people have no education to speak of, they thought they could do what there parents did for a living and get paid. They on average have 3 children per family and the wives often don't work. Oh yeah and they are 90% White.

So, I think people need to go take a trip to the rural parts of the country before they start pointing fingers at who is going to benefit from this awful situation we are all in.

So, you are saying that only people that own land are not brainwashed. That anyone that voted for Obama is an idiot. HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM let me guess you either Voted for mc Cain or no one or perhaps Ron Paul who is next to no one.

It is so funny to me that as soon as money is not taken from the poor, in the form of lower taxes for those that have not, it is seen as welfare of socialism. Whereas, if you give it to the wealthy, corporations and big business it is american, Please!!!

One of the greatest Presidents, a "republican" has been turning in his grave for the past 30 years seeing that the representative on both sides of the isle have been in bed with the corporate devils. His name Theodore Roosevelt.