Obama's Pirate Program For Redistributing The Wealth

Cross posted at PoliticalVindication.com

Where’s Jack Bauer when you need him? Though it’s not likely that our Dear Leader Obama would call for his services anyway - when asked yesterday about the hostage standoff with pirates in Somalia, President Obama blithely replied “Guys, we’re talking about housing right now.” Well, the pirates are talking about housing as well, as in new houses, new boats, new guns and new wives bought with the millions of dollars they’ve won through kidnappings and hijackings in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. The silence of the American administration is perplexing to many, but there might be an interesting reason for that. First let’s go through the details.

Pirating off the coast of Somalia has been going on for years now. Finally the United States last year asked NATO allies to face down the pirates who were attacking the sea lanes. NATO refused, probably assuming America would go ‘unilateral’ on them and solve the problem for free. NATO also worried, as John Bolton says, “that they would be accused of violating the human rights of the pirates if they took military action.“ Such gutless logic has spawned an industry, and piracy has blossomed into a successful business plan for many in the region. Nations are now protecting their own property, but since there is no law in the waters they’re in, those they arrest are quickly released. The boats, yachts and ships are hijacked with next to no violence or gunfire, a tactic used by the pirates to make any deadly force against them “disproportionate” and thus morally indefensible. Shipping Somalians back West to stand trial promises global recriminations about rich countries persecuting poor, destitute brown people…again. It’s become a game where the risk for the pirates is minimal and the imminent reward irresistible. For America, the only nation once willing to do anything about these oceanic marauders, it’s developed into a conundrum that translates into the scene we see playing out now with the kidnapped American captain. We have the most modern warships in the world floating impotently, as if they expect the sight of big guns everyone knows will never get Obama’s permission to fire is enough to persuade the Somalian pirates to hand back the captain gratis. They won’t, and as long as they don’t kill him, the pirates know that sooner or later they’ll get the cash they came for. They’ve called in fellow hijackers to join in the standoff, and those accomplices are bringing their own hostages to flaunt as a subtle message that there’s more than one life at stake. Once again the world’s largest and most feared military is flummoxed by a ragtag cadre waving AK-47’s.

It’s shouldn’t be hard to figure out who the good guys are here, but that counts for little anymore, and even more poignant, the answer may not be so clear to our new president. Consider that for the last year we’ve been hearing Barack Obama lecture us of the evil rich and the virtuous poor; on the need to redistribute the wealth because greed and hoarding by rich people is the reason we’re all poor. He’s also been traveling the world apologizing for and dressing down America, describing us as a derisive country driven by greed and prone to hoarding, and so naturally destroying the ability of the virtuous ‘others’ to rise from poverty (remember him arguing for climate policy by repeating that we’re 5% of the world’s population but burn 25% of its resources?). After months of campaigning (flag controversy?) and two and a half months of calculated snubs to Westerners before bowing to an Arabian dictator; would you be surprised to see President Obama on TV tonight reading from a teleprompter programmed to lecture Americans about endemic Somali poverty resulting from European colonization and imperialism? “Predictable voices want me to attack,” he’ll say, “but those pirates are heroes to their people, like our founder were heroes to us! In a nation without a government, writhing in misery and starvation; suddenly some men have risen up against their historical oppressors and taken back wealth stolen long ago.” It’s the classic Marxist Robin Hood story. It’s the template that every community organizer who has spent his life empowering the poor (and sitting 20 years in a church that paints America as the oppressor and the murderer) foists upon the world around him. Here he sees Somalians, neighbors of his ancestral Kenyan homeland, rising up as no African man has done in ages. So who are the good guys to Barack Obama?

The president hasn’t said anything about the mounting crisis in the Indian Ocean because he might be pondering the moral case he’s constructed for the hapless Somalians. A glimpse into his thinking might be found by asking ” What would Reverend Wright say?” It’s a gut-wrenching decision if you’ve come to believe that the nation you lead is the persecutor. How do you begin to reverse the trend of American theft of the African population and their resources over for 300 years? You might begin by allowing for a Pirate Program for Redistributing the Wealth. The pirate problem is actually not a problem but a cry against the evils of humanity. The pirates are demanding two million dollars - but in the long shadow of historical Western rape and plunder, two million dollars hardly covers the damage done by the Imperialist. And to pay it to a few pirates? Obama is not an uneducated man. He’ll know that it’s not the pirates we owe the ransom paid, it’s the whole nation of Somalia. Of Kenya. Ethiopia. Mozambique. The whole African continent. Why not invite all Western governments to join America in a reparations program aiming to pull Africa out of its imposed stupor. George Bush unilaterally raised the nation of Iraq from the chains of peaceful tyranny to a democratic outpost in a desert of dictatorship. President Barack Obama could lead a multilateral movement to redistribute the West’s largess back to Africa. He will lift a continent to its feet! And it all begins with convincing people to see the pirates not as envious thieves or wanton murderers, but as desperation personified, as good people driven to bad deeds just to feed their families. It will take an especially eloquent teleprompter to make the case.

But our president was elected on the power of his oratory skills, and inspired, he is a man come back home to reverse history. If anyone can convince the world that wrong is right, and that black is owedby white, it is our president and world leader, Barack Obama.