Vic Socotra

16 September 2008

Pirates

I was all over the BBC this morning, for reasons I'm sure you will understand. I was hoping against hope for a rally on the Nikkai Exchange, or some good news out of China.

Instead, I heard a Hong Kong chemical tanker with 22 crewmembers was taken by=2 0pirates in the Gulf of Aden, near Somalia. That makes it an even dozen ships that have been hijacked in the pirate-infested waterway since July 20, if you are keeping count.

You have to pass the gray-green mound of Great Socotra Island to get to the Red Sea, going north out of the endless blue swells of the Indian Ocean. That is where some of my ancestors came from, so I suppose there might be some pirate blood in me somewhere.

Accordingly, I had mixed feelings when the radio told me the Asian markets were in free fall, and that French Special Forces had made a dramatic rescue. Staged out of the Foreign Legion Bases in Djibouti, rescued a married couple from bondage and terror in the darkness.

The two had been held by the maritime criminals since Labor Day, when their yacht 'Four Aces ' was seized.

Why a nyone would intentionally sail from Tahiti to Somalia is beyond me, unless of course you had a battalion of Marines with you. I assume they were headed elsewhere, thinking Four Aces could sail up the security corridor in the Red Sea and enter the Med through Suez undisturbed. They should have named it after the houseboat detective Travis McGee lived on: The Busted Flush.

The ransom the Pirates demanded was $1.4 million dollars, and I don't know if that included the boat, or whether the Commandos even tried to get it back.

One Pirate was killed in the operation and six others captured. Almost a dozen of the bastards are in French custody at an undisclosed location. There is no word whether the ACLU is going to airdrop some lawyers in to ensure the Pirates are properly represented by counsel like the detainees at Guantanamo.

I am in favor of justice, of course, but like many of us, I draw the line at murderers who engaged in a fully disclosed war. The Pirates are in the same boat. They are not romantic figures from Penzance, just assholes who should be hanged on the spot.

I feel the same way about the buccaneers of Wall Street who have stolen our wallets as effectively as if they had brandished cutlasses. Those arrogant bastards, floating their creative financial vehicles and chortling all the way to the Lexus automobiles. It started with the theft of our homes, and now has lapped with the waves over the gunwales of the banks.

It is a complex situation, though. Where there are downs there are ups, and in the sliding scale of time and steep descent, I was hoping some pirate had removed eighty grand from my retirement account yesterday before the bell closed in the big hall on Wall Street.

Didn't happen. I ran the numbers after the lousy last half hour of trading. The Dow was down 500 points, right at 4.4% of total value. I applied the percentage to my pathetic retirement account and came up with the number. The shortfall against the agreed amount is significant.

It is not quite a paycheck, but it is definitely more than a mouth full.

Unless the order had cleared before close of trading, of course. I put the notepad away and went for a brisk walk away form Big Pink as the last rays of the sun flooded down Route 50, passing the pool.

The little men have not taken away the yellow aluminum furniture yet, and it looked as though Summer was still here. It is not, of course, the chill winds are coming.

That's why the first thing I did this morning was turn on the BBC. Not to hear about pirates, at least not directly, but to hear how the Asian markets were responding.

Then, still bleary, I checked the balance on the 401k. Damn. The Court-ordered Domestic Relations Order had not cleaned out the account, and the loss in the market was applied to the dwindling net worth.

I shook my head. The only thing I have learned in life is that patience is a virtue, and that panic is never good. The market will be back, over time, though I suspect that inflation will be too. Still, given time things will even out. The timing of the Order is such that I am forced to conduct one of the larger financial transactions of my life in the middle of the biggest market collapse since the Great Depression.

It is like having a yard sale just as the Pirate boarding party lands and begins the sweep through town.

Well, nothing to be done about it, and all the might-have-beens are just that. This storm, like the hurricanes will pass, even if everything is swept out to sea.

It does occur to me that when you are down to nothing, there is no reason at all not to hoist the Jolly Roger and go into business for yourself.

It is in the family, after all.

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