Thursday, November 20, 2008

It's Nice Work If You Can Get It

$25M for a day's labor.
Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Somali pirates are demanding $25 million in ransom to release an oil-laden Saudi supertanker seized off the East African coast, and called on the ship's owners to pay up ``soon.''
And just how did our little friends come to this number?
``What we want from this ship is only 25 million dollars because we always charge according to the quality of the ship and the value of the product,'' a pirate who identified himself as Abdi Salan, one of the hijacking gang, said in a phone interview from Harardhare.
Well, that sounds reasonable to me! $25M would go a long way towards getting at the root causes of piracy which, as we all know, are poverty and injustice.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, be fair. This isn't a day's work, these guys are going to have to sweat for at least a couple of weeks on this - plus they'll have to divide it, what, 12 ways? That comes to more like $150,000 a day for those poor, overworked pirates. Starvation wages, I tells ya!

K T Cat said...

This kind of poverty will only lead to more piracy.

Wollf Howlsatmoon said...

Hey KT, hope you're well.....Now to History and the way to end Piracy.

I had blithely thrown out mini guns and Blackwter in an earlier thread, but upon thinking, it seems we should take a strategy that worked in the past.....to whit,

The "secret mission" of 1805. 233 years ago, 10 November, Thomas Jefferson instituted the USMC...and sent them to Tripoli, the home of the Barbary Pirates.

It worked. You can't eradicate them on the high seas, you have to get them and exterminate them in their nests.

Destroy their bases, and you destroy them. 95 ships this year?

Time to send in a Marine Expeditionary Brigade...that's what we do.

Besides, the weather is better on the coast of Africa than in Afghanistan this time of year....

*only somewhat tongue in cheek*
Wollf

K T Cat said...

Can't we recommission a couple Iowa-class BBs and have some recreational gunnery practice instead?