Pirates, loot and Lawyers
When we think of pirates we don't usually think of lawyers. We think of hard men with eye patches and peg legs. The basis of all piracy is high seas theft and private warfare. The two have always overlapped. We romanticize piracy because the foundation of many wealthy family fortunes is in piratical behavior. All pirates seek loot, wealth, power, and to fight enemies on the Seas. Privateers confine their piracy to enemies of their country. Pirates don't. But it's not that simple. The legalization of private warfare that enables piracy, makes an incentive to corrupt law, corrupt piratical behavior, and legalized theft.
Privateers are Pirates Too
And the irony is that pirates probably have more honor than privateers. A pirate who didn't behave within limits and treat his crew well could:
- receive a black spot,
- find himself with a mutiny &
- Lose control of his ship.
With privateers the full power of the law would come down on the rebels and victims, not the pirate captain. The difference between a pirate captain and a privateer pirate captain. Is that the man hanging the pirates, was often a Privateer. He would have a nice little letter saying it was perfectly legal, everything he did.
Fact is, private warriors (privateers) are pirates too.
Famous pirates in the USA include John Paul Jones, the Walkers, and Jim Bowie (of Bowie Knife fame). The technical term for private warfare on land is Filibustering. And Sometimes it has been done under the cover of "assisting" US Companies in "defending" their depredations. But it really is piracy. It turns out that the reason Santa Anna would not give quarter to Texas Rebels was that they were considered pirates. Indeed Privateering is an ideology of legalized piracy. For more:
Romanticizing Piracy
Pirates such as Henry Morgan, Sir Francis Drake, the Hawkins and the Morrises of our founding generation, and others, fielded fleets of ships, waged war on enemies. Some of them led armies into battle. Piracy gets romanticized. The men at the Alamo fought to the death because they were considered pirates. Sir Francis Drake was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and it was a fleet of pirate ships, warships otherwise involved in piracy, that defeated the Spanish Armada that had sailed to invade England. One Generation of Pirates, a few generations later they were noblemen and lords.
Privateers and Profiteers, Perfectly legal-like
The most pernicious pirates in the world, nowadays, wear expensive suits, carry brief cases, and use the law to protect their otherwise illicit acts. While at the heart of piracy is seizing property and seeking loot, modern pirates don't need to carry a cutlass or risk their own lives. They use the legislature and the courts to get their way. This is not particularly new.
Admiralty Courts and Running aground at the bar.
Classical pirates paid attention to the law too. When sailors became pirates, they often would seek ways to launder or legalize their activities. Aging Pirates would petition the King to hire them on to hunt their successors and former rivals. Pirates would shop "letters of Marquee." Our New Orleans Pirates would get letters of Marquee from the Spanish, from Mexico and take their ships to New Orleans only when they had the right letter justifying their theft. Buried loot was a temporary thing. The usual way was to launder the loot through legitimate sales or auctions at an Admiralty court. These auctions were essentially a form of money laundering, taking illicit or valuable assets and exchanging them for liquid and portable assets (Gold or silver Coin, treasure and debt money) that they could enjoy over a period of time. Successful pirates could tell their communities they'd been honest Sea Dogs, Businessmen and even heroic "privateers", no matter how blood thirsty they'd actually been, just so long as their were not witnesses.
Our Mafia: The Original Brotherhood of the Coast
When I first started looking into this subject I was struck by the fact that nearly every culture has had its Robin Hoods and Mafia's. At the time people were making fun of the fact that both George W. Bush and John Kerry had been members of “Skull and Bones” at Yale. It was at that point I realized that “The brotherhood of the coast” was our Anglo, Spanish, French, Dutch, etc... mafia. Laundering pirated, smuggled cargos, was an industry. The history of piracy in the West includes the Knights Templar, the Hospitaliers, and expeditionary piracy dating back to before the Romans invaded Britain. Much of it occurred in the Mediterranean dating back to the Minoans. Helen may have launched the ships, but the war between the Greeks and Trojans was a fight over pirate loot. The Vandals were Pirates. The Normans were pirates not that different from their pagan ancestors. From the 800s Mediterranean was the site of a proxy war between Christians and Moslems, and trade. In the 15th and 16th century it was a proxy war between Catholic, Protestant and Moslem pirates and navies. There was no clear separation. In North Africa the slave trade was fed by predation from Europe.
And lawyers and diplomats would try to sort things out afterwards.
Banking and Piracy
Banking originates in money lending and one of the favorite investments of money lenders was shipping. Shipping was dangerous, but lucrative, business. And banking has origins in laundering loot from piracy as much as in funding shipping and commerce. When the "Merchant of Venice" was funding an expedition it could have been a simple merchant, it could have been a pirate ship. It could have been a merchant ship that operated on the side as a pirate.
Insurance and Reinsurance
More Importantly, when Antonio loses his ship, it could have been to storm or to pirates. The origin of insurance was in this danger. Underwriting vessels, required people to pool many ships. A person could lose his ship from one ship. But with underwriting the business could be very profitable, as long as losses were kept down.
A Monetary System founded on Piracy
The loot generated by piracy made some great fortunes. People with holdings of gold and silver soon found out however, that notes were superior for trade. A letter of Credit could be brought on a ship. Even if the person holding it was captured, the losses from that incident could be minimized far more than if untraceable loot money (gold or silver) were used. Merchants soon found that they could make more money from guaranteeing that other merchants got paid than delivering goods. That is the origins of modern banking.
It wasn't just gold smiths. Retired pirates could make loans in the form of these notes, and letters of credit (private money notes), as long as they could redeem those notes if someone presented them, they could literally print money. Private banking proceeded from that. The bankers insisted on a standard of gold or silver, but they themselves never really paid in gold or silver, they usually paid in the form of bank notes. Sometimes a grifter would take the gold, flee town and leave suddenly useless notes behind. Pirates are first and foremost thieves and grifters. Especially the legalized kind, privateers. That spirit is alive and well today. The Federal Reserve lives by letting private banks print money as loans.
Business Cycle as a Pirate activity
The root of our business cycle is that our money supply is linked to the credit-worthiness of private borrowers, and local government has no power over its own notes. Those who own credit money have the power to seize or buy cheaply capital and other wealth and fire-sale prices when the economy is on its downturn. And of course they make money when things are going well too as people pay interest to them on printed money.
The ability to lend other people's money at interest is a form of piracy.
Seizing Property
Modern pirates don't need ships loaded with cannon to steal from their marks. Their wealth allows them to simply dry up the funding that keeps businesses afloat so that the businesses can't pay interest to them. Then they seize the assets backing the loan they made with public money in the first place. Modern pirates use the courts to take property from their marks. They call it "free market capitalism" but the markets are not free, they are clubs with membership fees.
The Scam of labeling Privateering Capitalism
And the Capital is owned by pirate captains and not the folks who are mixing their labor with capital to product things. The tradition of piracy is so broad and deep in our society that the pirates call themselves capital. Capital is supposed to be wealth used in production. But thanks to the Pirates grifting they redefined capital to stock portfolios, debt instruments, derivative instruments, financial instruments and wealth in general. The original definition of "wealth in the course of production" was so distorted that when Thomas Piketty wrote his book on "Capital" he considered Capital all wealth, including Natural resources which our own American Thinker, Henry George, excluded from capital because it is not a product of work or creativity. [See Piketty/Capital]
Modern Pirates are Trained As Lawyers
Modern Pirates are trained as lawyers, Accountants and Propagandists. They are experts at convincing people that their wealth is earned and somehow their pirate crews didn't earn any of it. But they are still pirates.
This is part of a broader narrative. I'm publishing it, though it is still kind of a draft.
- This follows the historical introduction in:
- An Ideology of Private Banking
- Related:
- An Ideology of Privateering
- Privatization Historically is a Tool of Privateering
- and is legalized Piracy!
- And:
- Privateering Smuggling and Piracy
- ... definitions
- Many Forms of Freebooting
- Pirates and Privateers of the Americas
- Two Generations of Pirates
- [http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/02/two-generations-of-pirates.html]
- Justice and Oligarchs Hightower talks about J.P. Morgan Chase
- http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/01/justice-and-oligarchs-hightower-talks.html
- The Pirates Dilemma -- Rogue States versus sovereignty
- https://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-pirates-dilemma-rogue-states-versus.html
- Freebooting, Vikings, Pirates and "it's just business"
- https://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2017/08/freebooting-vikings-pirates-and-its.html
- Many Forms of Freebooting
- https://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/12/many-forms-of-freebooting.html
- Privateers Versus Pirates
- Many Kinds of Privateering
- Many forms of Freebooting
- Pirates and Privateers/Privatizing History
- Origins of the East India Company
- Bretton Woods, NeoColonialism and the "Money Men."
- Origins of the East India Company
- Corrupt Court and Undue Influence
- East India Company and Islamic Jihad
- Utility Versus the Pirates
- Tribunals Admiralty Courts & Privateers
- Tyranny is bad process
- Related Sources and references
- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/voodooeconomics.asp
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ATexas_Revolution%2FTornel_Decree
- I'm going back and editing older posts so that I'm not saying the exact same thing over and over. There is a certain overlap however, but if I ever want to turn these posts into a book I need to reduce it so there is a coherent overall narrative. I started this post years ago. But the more I work on this the more I find and the more I realize I need to divide the arguments into manageable chunks.
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