I've often thought that explosives and small arms fire can resolve most issues in life.  I mean, after you finish chatting, if you want want your own way, you have to blow something up or shoot it.  The US NAVY SEALS proved this past weekend that they are better at dirty work than the Diplomats are good at deliberate work.  Granted, the diplomatic approach would've probably worked but, we just got there quicker with the SEALS approach.  The pirates were always going to lose.  What the SEALS did was save us trial and jail time.  Kudos to Barack and his team for this shortcut.

I think we can take the same approach with the current fiscal crisis.  The bankers are pirates in a certain sense.  You have to admit that the Somalian guys had a good business model not withstanding the fact they missed out on Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy course at Harvard.  As an outsider, it looked brilliant:  You sit like a grizzily at a salmon run waiting for a big stupid tanker to amble by.  You ride up to it in a little boat with big guns.  You go on board, take over the ship, drive it to where you have 15 others parked like cruise time in Cancun and then you ask for your ransom.  When it's paid, you let the ship go, take another one, and repeat it until you get tired, really rich, or dead.

If you substitute "bankers" for "pirates", the same thing is going on in the financial services sector of our economy.  The bankers have figured out how to design a strategy that works really well for them in terms of income generation and loss mitigation.  They create a "domino falling scenario:"( if you don't bail us out {pay the ransom}) then the world will melt down {we'll kill everyone}).  As the SEALS showed us this weekend, if you shoot a few, the rest pay attention.  The Domino Theory of cascading repurcussions from single acts has always had some flaws with it. 

Now, career diplomats, secretaries of treasuries, and politicians who want to keep their jobs always fall back to "broader solutions and policies" to resolve issues like the capture of an American Ship.  This response reeks of cowardice and inaction and it causes more damage long term than simply eliminating the threat does now.  One has to remember that Pirates and Bankers are all from the same gene pool. Take the credit card companies for example. The fact that we've legitimized one and not the other is a legislative error and maybe even a political one..

Lest a SWAT TEAM show up at my house later on today, let me go on record as not advocating lethal force against any particular bank or banker.  I do want to go on record as saying that it wouldn't hurt to shoot more of the banks just to teach the others a lesson.