I saw this piece about piracy at the HuffPo several days ago and wanted to link to it but didn't. Thankfully, Corrente Wire pointed me to it again and so here it is: You Are Being Lied to About Pirates.
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches,
paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in
restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes
– the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the
fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent
of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.
This is horrendous but par for the course. Oil companies have been doing the same kind of thing for decades. When Cheney's Hslliburton had the Unocal contract for a pipeline through Burma, the army started evicting farmers in its path. When they refused to leave their ancestral homes, the army massacred them en masse. It's unconscionable but it's invisible to the US press so who cares?
Posted by: mick arran | January 13, 2009 at 01:01 PM