Practical Pirates of an Improbable Penzance …

==originally published 5/22/16==

My mother, with whom I had a totally lousy relationship, always swore that half of my problem (refusing to adopt her paranoid and superstition driven “Tail Gunner Joe” mentality about things) was that she’d “allowed” me to read Atlas Shrugged at to young an age. Sorry mom, but no, that wasn’t what blew your cover (it was your panic over the US and the USSR standardizing the docking rings on their spacecraft did that, but that’s another story). Anyway.

Those who’ve read Atlas Shrugged might remember the name Ragnar Danneskjold from the cast of characters: John Galt’s third roommate in his college days and the least seen of the three lads through the bulk of the tale; Ragnar, the philosopher who turned pirate of the high seas in support of John Galt’s strike-of-the-mind against the parasitic of the political persuasion. He was the one who refunded the personal income taxes (yes, back when the story was written rich people actually paid income tax!) of those whose industries were essentially robbed at gunpoint by the “lib-tard” politicians of their world line,  a refund paid in illegally gotten gold acquired by hijacking “relief” shipments and then selling those shipments to the black markets of those very regions they were headed for in the first place to make sure the goods ended up in the hands of those who needed them rather than in the hands of the political parasites running that part of the globe. Ragnar,  a bit of an anti-hero to most folks’ understanding.

But still, a romantic vision: she’s armed to the teeth, two hundred fifty feet of cheetah sleek attack hydrofoil crafted from Francisco’s best metal and powered by Galt’s motor, hundred knot fast with a captain and crew whose nerve rivals the metal of her hull. Definitely the sort of thing to attract a twelve year old boy’s attention, particularly when he’s been fighting a running rearguard on both sanity and ethics for most of his life heavily, heavily outgunned by the manipulated minions of society being worked by his mother’s perverted secret insanity. Oh yea, no question, then as now I’d consider it an honor to sail with Ragnar.

Sadly, such a scheme would be all but impossible these days, what with the satellites and all, the long range patrol aircraft and the submarines. Just couldn’t pull it off for long no matter how fast your ship, not unless you’d fully perfected what they were trying for in “The Philadelphia Experiment” and your lady of the seas mounted the equivalent of a Romulan cloak. Back when Ayn Rand wrote the tale in the 1940’s you could, but not now.

I say sadly with cause, because I can see an absolutely perfect place for such piracy in our world, our times and our situations. Now Ayn, don’t get up out of your grave and come haunt me on this, just because Lenin’s solution failed does not mean that all of Marx’s observations were in error. You’ll like where I’m going with this, just be a bit patient.

IF (huge little word that one is!) there is one thing, one foundation point which must be included in any just and ethical global society it is this: one hour of one man’s life must be of the same value as one hour of another man’s life given that the two men are engaged in the same endeavor. If they are not then someone, somewhere, is defining what resolves as gross discrimination ranging from socially mandated bigotry running down into abject slavery just depending on the degree of difference in the value assigned the hours of their lives. That… is not a good thing. It really doesn’t matter if it is Kings or Corporations, the net effect is the same: war and suffering. Seen plenty of that across history to be very certain on that point.

One of the things Karl talked about was how capitalism would always be exploiting the poorest of the peoples. Of course it will, they’re the ones who will work the cheapest, they need the jobs. Why pay one bunch 15 an hour when you can find another crew of folks who will do the same job for 6.50 an hour and think they’re making good money? No-brainer, that one is.  Move the job where the labor is cheap, shipping doesn’t cost squat compared to the labor to work the job. (Were this live theater?  Enter the Pirates, stage left, quietly.)

(There is an answer for that, a good answer, but one that involves thinking well beyond the rather limited parameters of capitalism, particularly corporate neo-fascist capitalism. Here in this little pop-shot of an essay I’m not going to try for a formal exposé of that reason, I’d be beating this keyboard for ten years across three university degree programs, and frankly that would be a waste of time which is in short supply. I’m just going to proceed on as if everyone already knows that answer and just doesn’t know which question it fits.)

Point is, one of the first and best things that can be done to relieve the stress on civilization world wide is to take steps to assure that the hours of one man’s life are of the same effective value as the other man’s life. The world uses a great many currencies, but… the exchange values are known, as is the cost of a comparable lifestyle known in each currency… just a bit of arithmetic to establish a common denominator so things are being worked apples for apples. Not that hard to do.

What would be hard to do, but would be a very good thing to do, is to establish international treaties that acknowledge the equality of human life, that all lives are of the same value and as a consequence of that consensus establish a world wide minimum wage for each unique category of work. A good job for the United Nations.

I’d say, having been watching capitalism at work for over five decades, that you’d be fairly safe in setting that wage equal to 50% of the maximum wage ever recorded as paid, world wide, for any given type of work.  That would be break even to a raise for probably 80% of the folks involved in that kind of labor. 

I’d love to see a world wide minimum wage. I’d love to see the nations of the world agree to put a check and a balance on the growing power of the corporate neo-fascist (CNF) movement that exploits all nations, corrupts their laws, attempts to subvert their democracies with massive money and propaganda, the bunch who owns the dog whose tail wags him, the ones who start the brush wars to cover up the real looting going on in the market place.

I’d love to see the nations band together to erase the motive for the global CNF to loot one nation’s jobs to barter those jobs for political power in another nation.

How? Well, tariffs of course. But again, how? Answer is this: if any manufactured good crosses a national border, regardless if the ownership of the goods changes or not, the corporation making the shipment must pay to the nation of destination a tariff equal or greater than the negative difference in the value (between the two nations) of the labor required to produce those goods, that money by treaty to be returned to the nation of origin by the nation of destination, and again by that treaty said moneys MUST be used to compensate the defrauded workers. No difference in wages? No tariff. A true uniting of the nations to control the blatant usury of the CNF.

But how could it be enforced? By the nations equally agreeing to something never done before. One thing the CNF counts on is that the nations will do as they’ve always done and do their best to extend the full protection of the law to any and all who do business in their nation.  The larger nations maintain navies to extend that protection to include the freedom of the high seas. 

The truth is that the CNF blatantly exploits the laws of the various lands even while it is also totally dependent on them. The as-public-as-can-be-arranged revocation of that protection is the one thing they’ve never considered. It’s not that the nations are going to act against them, but rather that they would be fully and formally agreed to not act to protect any asset of any corporation convicted of violating the treaty by any form or fashion of subterfuge or concealment. (In theater: Pirates step forward with a stomp and a flourish, several pistols fired over the crowd).

We need Pirates. Dedicated Pirates who will consistently and for motives of their own greed double cross the CNF just as the CNF has double crossed the workers of every nation on Planet Earth to satiate the demands of their deformed psychologies. In short, Ragnar needs to be leading a fleet: sea, air, space and cyberspace, he shouldn’t be sailing alone. On a side note: has anyone seen Jack Sparrow recently?