Embracing the Possibilities of a Second Golden Age of Piracy

BY NICKY REID

 MAY 3, 2024

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

“Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant–the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past.”

-Hakim Bey

“What others see as chaos, a pirate sees as the perfect storm for growth and transformation.”

-Edward Teach aka Blackbeard

In case you haven’t noticed, things have been getting pretty lively on the high seas lately and all available indications seem to point to them getting much livelier long before slack tide sets in. After months of Houthi rebel attacks on international shipping linked to Israel and its western backers in the Red Sea, Iran has decided to get in on the action to avenge their comrades killed by an IDF airstrike on their Damascus consulate.

While the headlines may focus on Iran’s largely symbolic drone swarm into the bug zapper of the Iron Dome, the Islamic Republic kicked off this theatrical display of vengeance by launching a daylight raid on a Portuguese-flagged container vessel called the MSC Aries 50 miles off the coast of the UAE near the Strait of Hormuz. The ship, owned by Zionist billionaire and former Israeli Air Force intelligence officer, Eyal Ofer, was boarded by commandos of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp in a well-choreographed and conveniently filmed raid that involved the heavily armed men repelling on the deck from an idling chopper.

A visually stunning spectacle of propaganda of the deed uncannily similar to the Houthi rebel assault on the Galaxy Leader in November which also began in an MI-17 and ended with the nautical toy of another Israeli oligarch named Abraham Ungur being absconded to Hodeida where it has been turned into a sort of revolutionary chic tourist attraction.

The western intelligentsia will point to these similarities and announce them to be proof that those dastardly Houthi rebels are little more than IRGC agents doing the bidding of the Mullahs. I would actually argue the opposite. It is a well-known if poorly reported fact that in spite of the largely rhetorical support from the Ayatollah, the Houthi rebels have a long and illustrious history of going rogue and disobeying what little advice they receive from Tehran. This included calls to stand down on overthrowing a government in Sanaa that Iran was still attempting to make inroads with.

The Houthis launched their daring maritime spree on Israeli linked vessels during a time in which the rest of the leadership of the Muslim world seemed content to just sit on their hands as the Zionist State carried out the most brazen genocide of the twenty-first century. The result of the Houthi’s degeneracy wasn’t just a blow to international trade, it was boosting an internationally unrecognized militia to a place of ideological leadership on the world stage, and when Iran found itself in desperate need of a propaganda win of their own, they took a page from their alleged proxies’ playbook by launching a largely bloodless drone barrage kicked off by an act of melodramatic modern-day piracy.

The Mullahs aren’t the only swashbucklers getting in on the action either. After nearly a decade off from their last tare, the pirates of Somalia have been using the distraction of international naval forces up north to get back into the game, seizing at least two cargo ships and a dozen commercial fishing vessels in the last few months. In other words, the chaos is spreading like oil on water and the corporate overlords back home in Babylon are besides themselves. The very fabric of globalism seems to be under siege and every Navy on earth appears to be at the mercy of what essentially amounts to a bunch of toothless peasants with old fishing boats and nothing left to lose.

I would be a liar if I didn’t confess that I get off on this kind of karma. I mean, the specter of the Jolly Roger is literally mocking the glorious “rules-based order” of the Yankee maritime death machine as ancient history repeats itself. But could the world really be on the cusp of another Golden Age of Piracy? Perhaps, but perhaps we should consult the tea leaves of history before getting too carried away with ourselves.

The era frequently referred to by historians as the Golden Age of Piracy occurred between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when stateless bands of outlaws challenged the monopoly on force maintained by the Westphalian Nation State on the high seas. While most of these pirates were far more motivated by profit than the ideologues of the Axis of Resistance, the factors contributing to this era of lawlessness should ring strikingly familiar to anyone paying attention to current events.

The original Golden Age of Piracy was largely the product of the first signs of European imperial decline brought on by their own colonial overreach in the New World. Scores of seasoned sailors and privateers were left skilled but unemployed in the wake of the War of Spanish Secession. Meanwhile, the sheer quantity of plundered goods being shipped to-and-fro the colonies was becoming downright ungovernable as the colonies themselves devolved into corrupt rogue states in their own right and Europe’s navies were stretched paper thin attempting to contain it all.

Today’s pirates may differ somewhat in motivation and tactics but all the other ingredients for another era of lawlessness on the high seas are present and accounted for. Both the Houthis and the Iranians are veterans of America’s failed War on Terror, becoming experts in asymmetrical warfare battling Wahhabi jihadists that our nation created just to destroy. Meanwhile, neoliberal globalism has turned every ocean on the planet into a thousand lane highway too jam packed with ill-gotten booty to ever be sustainably policed, and the imperial powerhouse of America’s Atlantic cartel is rapidly losing control of increasingly reckless colonies like Israel while our bloated naval forces are busy trying to sabotage Asia’s assent to economic dominance with so-called freedom of navigation drills in the South China Sea.

Yes indeed, the pieces for a historical repeat are all there and so are the motivations. Big picture wise, the actions of the Mullahs, the Houthis, and the Somalians can all be seen as a sort of revolt against the machinery of state capitalism motivated by a totally valid thirst for revenge. Today’s global economy has absolutely nothing to do with free trade. It is a corrupt and totalitarian system operated from the top down by a conspiracy of multinational conglomerates and nuclear armed navies who have all but invited piracy by conducting their own crime spree on the high seas defined by acts of mass violence and brazen thievery.

Iran and Yemen are both the victims of brutal blockades just like the one being conducted against the Gaza Strip as we speak. These sadistic terrorist campaigns have subjected impoverished populations to gruesome acts of savagery just for attempting to access their own waters for trade and subsistence fishing. Between 2015 and 2022, the Houthi controlled nation of Yemen was bombarded by a genocidal onslaught at the hands of America’s proxies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Over 377,000 people were slaughtered and more than half of them died from starvation and disease as a result of a blockade made possible by America’s rules-based order.

Somalia has similarly been decimated both economically and ecologically by the Western Mafia’s fixed trade practices which have aloud massive corporate naval behemoths to deplete their fisheries with industrial trawlers and render the remains toxic by treating the Indian Ocean like a giant toilet for their industrial waste. Under these circumstances, it’s hard not to see modern piracy as an act of self-defense by a largely unaffiliated coalition of people under siege by a pirate empire in decline and, thank Kali, their tactics appear to be working.

The Houthi campaign off of their embattled coastline has effectively rerouted international trade, forcing no fewer than twelve international shipping conglomerates to suspend transit in the Red Sea entirely and delaying shipping times by up to nine days while raising costs by 15%. This has affectively implemented a tax on the global oligarchy for aiding and abetting the slaughter of over 30,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and America’s attempts to bomb the Houthis into submission over it have been an abject failure.

In case you haven’t noticed, I happen to be something of an unapologetic collapsitarian anarchist. This basically means that my entire worldview is defined by searching for revolutionary opportunity in inevitable crisis and I can’t help but to get a little bit giddy at the opportunities that a Second Golden Age of Piracy could bring with it. This may all start with rogue states taking potshots at empire but if that empire continues to collapse beneath the barrage of a billion potshots the oceans will be left wide open to a diverse ecosystem of stateless actors of every stripe capable of affecting truly free trade in the only place it has ever existed: the black market.

Amidst the last Golden Era of Piracy and its latter-day cousin off the Barbary Coast, thriving autonomous communities of proto anarchists emerged in which all genders were equal, most consensual transgressions were forgiven, and merchants were governed only by codes upheld by their suppliers in nautical syndicalist democracies.

Nobody would ever confuse Edward Teach with Mikhail Bakunin any more than you would the Ayatollah with Hakim Bey, but the chaos that men and women like Blackbeard ushered in turned the open seas into a breeding ground for revolutionary opportunities. With Uncle Sam now walking the plank, I see no reason not to hope for a sequel.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PIRATES 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PIRACY 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for BUCKY FULLER 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for ATLANTIC HISTORY 

How the US Constitution Fails to Protect the Environment

BY KATRINA FISCHER KUH – JAMES R. MAY

 MAY 3, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Pulp mill and export dock, Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

By Katrina Fischer Kuh and James R. May

Even a healthy U.S. democracy would struggle to respond effectively to the “wicked” problem of climate change. As humans, we would have to overcome innate cognitive limitations to accept the connection between everyday actions like driving and attenuated effects on climate. As voters, we would have to appreciate the importance of addressing a problem with limited immediate salience primarily for the benefit of future generations. Politicians would need the courage to fight for policies that would yield no visible benefits for voters in their political lifetimes.

Change would have to occur over the tooth and nail opposition of the fossil fuel companies—among the most powerful corporate special interests in the history of our country. We would need to be open to transformative change and a rethinking of values and priorities to develop a shared vision for a future radically different from settled expectations, all while reckoning with the ways that historical injustices—most notably colonialism and racism—produced and remain embedded in the systems that brought us to this precipice.

But our democracy is decidedly not healthy. Corporations pour money into elections virtually unrestrained and face no consequences for flagrantly lying to the public—most notably for present purposes about whether climate change is real and dangerous and what causes it—to maximize their profits. The right to vote is now more theoretical than real, with federal protections dismantled and many state and local governments adopting measures that make voting harder (especially for disfavored people, including communities of color).

The votes of those who make it into the voting booth are counted—our electoral system is sound. However, it is not perceived as such; ideological fantasies of voting fraud cause vast swaths of the public to reject legitimate electoral outcomes. And myriad pathologies in the information environment, from social media algorithms to purposeful disinformation efforts, have fractured our ability to talk to and reason with one another.

Nor is our climate system healthy or stable. We already limp from unprecedented crisis to unprecedented crisis—the Pacific Northwest heatwave in 2021, deadly fires in 2023, a hurricane that made landfall in Louisiana in 2021 and drowned 11 peoplein New York City basement apartments—with hardly a chance to catch our breath in between.

This rapidly changing physical reality adds further stress to our ailing democracy. We face the daunting task of attempting to transform our society, law, and economy to cease emissions and sequester carbon while also trying to adapt to ongoing and worsening dislocations from climate change.

In short, our democracy must somehow martial focus, purpose, and resources to address climate change’s long-term challenges to life and justice while enduring increasingly frequent and extreme climate-related events that take lives, exacerbate injustices, and put unprecedented strain on democracy and governance.

How the Constitution Obstructs Climate Policy

How and why does the constitutional status quo fail to meet the climate crisis? It begins with constitutional design. The Constitution grants the Supreme Court and such lower courts, as Congress establishes, “judicial authority.” Federal courts were thought to be the “least dangerous branch” and less prestigious appointments than, say, supreme courts in Virginia or New York—among the reasons some of the first appointed Supreme Court justices, John Jay and John Rutledge, quit the bench.

But the import of judicial review was transformed in Marbury v. Madison when then-Chief Justice John Marshall famously declared that it is “emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is,” as it has done in more than 20,000 decisions since its inception in 1789.

Since its inception to June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court has had 116 justices. Yet very few have acknowledged that catastrophic climate change is happening and has been caused by humans. Even those justices who acknowledge climate change believe that Congress, not the courts, should address it.

The U.S. Constitution’s 4,543 all but ignore environmental concerns. It was crafted to address separation of powers, federalism, and civil liberties. There is an extensive taxonomy of the sources and limits to federal and state authority to reach climate change. Virtually nothing is uncontested, giving rich context to former Chief Justice John Marshall’s maxim that “we must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding.” But, forget it or not, the Constitution has failed the climate.

Constitutional Omission

The Constitution presumes the existence of an environment capable of supporting a flourishing society but does not explicitly recognize or protect the environment. Indeed, it was historically uncertain whether the Constitution empowered the federal government to act to protect the environment at all. The textual silence of the Constitution with respect to the environment is mirrored by the judicial silence about how the environment supports other rights explicitly recognized in the Constitution.

Despite the obvious fact that life or liberty cannot exist without functioning ecosystems, courts in the United States do not recognize any federal constitutional environmental rights, even to the extent that an environmental right might be deemed appurtenant to explicitly enshrined constitutional rights.

The constitutions of many countries explicitly protect the environment, and in many others, the courts have interpreted nonenvironmental constitutional provisions to necessarily include environmental rights. That is not the case in the United States. The Constitution does not explicitly protect the environment, nor is the protection of the environment recognized as being required to protect other constitutional rights.

The absence of clear and broad constitutional authority to protect the environment—explicit in the Constitution’s text or understood by courts to reside within other enumerated powers—limits the scope of federal environmental law. One aspect of this limit is foundational. Finding constitutional authority on which to adopt our core federal environmental laws required judicial willingness and stretching of doctrine.

What might the laws coming out of our great public awakening to modern environmental problems in the 1970s—the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act—have looked like had they been adopted against a backdrop of clear and broad constitutional authority?

The dearth of constitutional authority limits not just the structure of our core federal environmental statutes but also how they are interpreted and applied. Internalized understandings of the limits of what is constitutionally possible constrain our policymaking imagination when it is imperative that we bring about systemic, transformational change to respond effectively to today’s environmental challenges.

One side of the coin is the absence of clear and broad authority to protect the environment. In addition to failing to give the federal government clear power to protect the environment, the Constitution also fails to impose clear limits on the federal government’s power to harm the environment, let alone impose a duty on the government to prevent ecological damage.

The Constitution’s failure to identify limits on government harm to the environment compounds the lack of express power to act to protect the environment. The Constitution is (at least as a matter of express text) silent when it comes to protecting individuals from government destruction of the ecological necessities for a healthful life. And, unlike in the case of constitutional power to legislate on environmental matters, courts have been largely unwilling to read such limits into the Constitution.

To appreciate how constitutional silence on the environment contributes to constitutional hostility to environmental protection, it is important to recall that the Constitution affords other values—private property, speech, and states’ rights—explicit recognition and protection. The constitutional omission of the environment thus diminishes the importance of environmental interests when considered relative to other interests explicitly protected by the Constitution. One-sided constitutional protection for private property, for example, hobbles adaptation policy by dissuading governments from restricting new development in climate-vulnerable locations out of fear of triggering an obligation to compensate private landowners.

Judicial interpretation could overcome the textual constitutional omission of the environment. For example, during the Progressive Era, scientists, attorneys, and politicians succeeded in persuading courts to interpret the Commerce Clause to give the federal government significant constitutional environmental authority.

There are many powerful arguments that—despite the lack of explicit text and a historical, doctrinal focus on the Commerce Clause—the Constitution can and should be understood to afford broader environmental powers and impose environmental limits and duties on the government. To date, however, courts have largely abdicated their institutional role in the development of climate policy.

The constitutional structure of our representative democracy thus creates an obstacle to mitigation. While courts withdraw from engaging on climate change policy, reasoning that it would be counter-majoritarian for judges to weigh in, the reality is that the political process that produces climate change policy is not, by design or in practice, majoritarian. In the context of climate change, the Senate and Electoral College resolutely skew against climate change mitigation, allowing a public and political minority to obstruct the adoption and implementation of robust mitigation law.

Moreover, it is not simply that courts decline to exercise their constitutional authority to engage with climate policy out of a mistaken belief that it would be “undemocratic.” Courts affirmatively exacerbate the obstacle that our constitutional structure poses to adopting mitigation law through interpretations of the Constitution that limit voting rights (thereby decreasing majority voice) and elevate the rights of corporations (thereby increasing corporate voice).

Judicial interpretations of the Constitution help to produce, sustain, and afford veto power to the minority public and political block obstructing federal mitigation policy. Fossil fuel interests, gifted a First Amendment right by the Supreme Court to make effectively unlimited donations to political campaigns in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, orchestrated a well-documented and effective campaign to convince a relevant swath of the American public and their representatives—the group with a smaller population but greater representation through the Electoral College and Senate—that climate change is not real, not human-caused, not dangerous, and or/not imminent.

In lawsuits brought by plaintiffs against fossil fuel companies seeking to hold them accountable for their lies, the companies, without shame, respond that they have a right to lie under the First Amendment, especially if they lie to influence public policy.

The constitutional status quo, defined by a series of judicial interpretations and decisions, fails on climate because it fails more broadly on democracy. It neglects to protect fundamental rights like the right to vote while enshrining new rights for corporate interests.

The Constitutional Status Quo Fails to Meet the Climate Moment

The Constitution, as presently worded, interpreted, and applied, is obstructing the development of a robust societal response to climate change, partly by failing to protect healthy democratic processes and advance real social justice.

We could, of course, amend the Constitution to explicitly support the protection of the environment, better protect democratic processes, and advance social justice. We could also encourage new understandings of existing constitutional texts that recognize the fundamental value of and right to a healthy environment, more effectively support healthy democratic processes, and go further to advance social justice. Any new approach will require an open-eyed reckoning with how and why the constitutional status quo is failing to meet the climate moment.

This is an adapted excerpt from Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, edited by David Orr © 2023 MIT Press. It is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 by permission of MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, adapted and produced this excerpt for the web.

Katrina Fischer Kuh is the Haub Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University and co-editor of Climate Change Law: An Introduction and The Law of Adaptation to Climate Change: United States and International Aspects. She is a member of the Environmental Law Collaborative and serves on the board of Green Amendments for the Generations. James R. May, Esq. is Distinguished Professor of Law and founder of the Global Environmental Rights Institute at Widener University Delaware Law School, former visiting professor and Haub visiting scholar at the Elizabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, and recipient of the American Bar Association’s Award for Distinguished Achievement in Environmental Law and Policy. He is the co-editor of Environmental Human Rights in the Anthropocene and Human Rights and the Environment, editor of Principles of Constitutional Environmental Law, and co-author of Global Environmental Constitutionalism. May is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the American College of Environmental Lawyers.