[p2p-research] The War on (Somali) Pirates... and Italian Mafia

[Michel Bauwens]

thanks for your item on pirates,

here's what we have:

in our wiki


   1. Pirate Governance
<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Pirate_Governance>(2,534 bytes)
   7: ...ld go (pdf) to a man who lost his right arm.) The Pirates' Code
   mentioned in the "Caribbean" series ...
   9: ...t their whim, and treated dissent as mutinous. So pirates were
   familiar with the perils of autocracy.
   11: ...set down in writing, and it was relatively equal; pirate captains
   often received only twice as many shares...

and in our blog:

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?s=pirates

Who were the pirates?<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/who-were-the-pirates/2008/12/22>

Posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008

People who want to share music or videos or want to reform copyright are
often accused of practicing piracy, but the question asked by David Bollier
is: where pirates really so bad?
Excerpt:
"As the "piracy" metaphor has gained currency, its literal history has all
but disappeared from memory. But it's worthy revisiting that history because
it […]


On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:29 AM, marc fawzi <marc.fawzi at gmail.com> wrote:

> There are two sides to this story.
>
> The first side as about pirates having an egalitarian culture, which makes
> sense to me if you think of content pirates today. That's the part that
> relates to P2P.
>
> The other  side of the story is about people who manage hospitals,
> factories (somewhere in Europe it's alleged) making deals with Italian mafia
> to dispose off nuclear waste and toxic material cheaply.
>
> It's hard to tell if it's a true account but I thought I'd pass it on
> because of it's interesting context.
>
> "Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied
> against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working
> on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and
> made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what
> Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of
> resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in
> escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed
> "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the
> brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This
> is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves."
>
> "In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed.
> Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and
> many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great
> opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in
> their seas. Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone,
> mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia,
> dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken.
> At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then,
> after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up
> on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300
> died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is
> dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as
> cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to
> European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the
> Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. "
>
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
>
> By Johann Hari, The London Independent (newspaper)
>
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>
>


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