Hostile Takeovers

Tags:: commerce

Pirates may be terrorists, but if one may make distinctions between different grades of terrorists, then the Pirates of Puntland might be just the fellows to make Somalia safe for democracy and the American way of life. Rather than whistling the Marine Corps Hymn and sending in the Delta Force for an encore performance of Black Hawk Down, we could establish a sort of Peace Corps for our white-collar criminals: Bernie Madoff could teach accounting, Rod Blagojevich civics. We could invest in infrastructure: 1,879 miles of undeveloped beachfront could fit the Atlantic City boardwalk and all the condos in Miami. Dubai would become a regional backwater. And there would be a museum to the heroic pirates who started it all, who finally persuaded the world to pay attention to the Horn of Africa. Maybe it is a modest proposal, but nothing else we have done for (or to) Somalia has worked.

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Published In

Crimes & Punishments

About the Text

Matthew Power is a freelance journalist and a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and National Geographic Adventure.

I thought that a Jewish state would be free of the evils afflicting other societies: theft, murder, prostitution…. But now we have them all. And that’s a thing that cuts to the heart.