International rivalry - is much of it based on theft?

“The Great Brain Robbery”  was the most highly rated episode of 60 Minutes in seven years, about the systematic use of industrial espionage by China and others, featuring interviews based on the work of international tech-econ guru Mark Anderson, whose Strategic News Service is vital for you business-newsletter subscribers, and whose Future in Review” (FiRe) Conference is one of the most important and fun conclaves going. 

Of course the rapaciously insatiable raid on western inventiveness is a case of killing the goose that lays golden eggs. China's rise has been entirely funded by westerners buying stuff from Asian factories. Just as the same raising-up happened in exactly the same way to Taiwan and Korea, to Japan and postwar Europe and many other zones.

How have Yanks been able to afford 70 years of trade deficits that funded this huge project of uplift? By inventing new industries (rockets, jets, satellites, pharma, telecom, the Internet) to replace old ones we shipped overseas, en masse. Our inventiveness is the key ingredient - after Pax Americana peace - that increased wealth in the world, enlarging a positive-sum pie for all to share.

Chopping at the neck of that goose proves that Asian elites are no smarter than those of any other pyramidal-hierarchical, command society across 6000 years.  Here's a hint. Even if it were a smart move... we won't let it happen.

== How might the turnaround begin? ==

Not in Asia, I believe. Remember the “Helvetian War” from EARTH?  It was my forecast (fictional) that the 2020s might feature a consortium of angry developing nations finally getting fed up and declaring hostilities with… Switzerland.  

And other havens for kleptocratic thieves and other cheaters. Cheaters who are the ancient and recurring enemy of not only the poor, but any chance for flat-open-fair-creative capitalism. Now see why this flight of science fictional extrapolation is starting to look ever-more likely:  Follow the money inside the world's tax havens.

From an earlier article in The Guardian: “The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.”  According to one expert:

"If we could figure out how to tax all this offshore wealth without killing the proverbial golden goose, or at least entice its owners to reinvest it back home, this sector of the global underground is easily large enough to make a significant contribution to tax justice, investment and paying the costs of global problems like climate change." 

To be clear, this is a separate matter from tax rates! If you think taxes are too high, you should favor international wealth transparency!  Because tax rates on honest citizens would go down, if all the world's skull-duggerously secreted lucre were announced and tallied.  

Indeed, work it out. Those trillionaires would then join the fight for low rates, instead of (currently) chortling happily that you are paying for the roads they use and educating their workers and protecting them from revolution. Nicholas Shaxson discussed this disruption on our economies in his book, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens. 

They count on that service lasting forever. But even if money can stifle modest protest campaigns, like that of Bernie Sanders, in developed nations, there is always the chance of what I described in EARTH: 

“The struggles of the authorities in Egypt to recover the vast sums hidden abroad by Hosni Mubarak, his family and other cronies during his many years in power have provided a striking recent example of the fact that kleptocratic rulers can use their time to amass immense fortunes while many of their citizens are trapped in poverty. The world's poorest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, have fought long and hard in recent years to receive debt forgiveness from the international community; but this research suggests that in many cases, if they had been able to draw their richest citizens into the tax net, they could have avoided being dragged into indebtedness in the first place. Oil-rich Nigeria has seen more than $300bn spirited away since 1970, for example, while Ivory Coast has lost $141bn,” notes Heather Stewart in The Guardian. 

How long before some charismatically smart president in some developing nation discovers how much power he/she would have – legally – as a belligerent in an openly and honestly declared state of war against, say, the Cayman Islands? 

Actually look it up, the inherent rights of belligerent states.  Rights that - say - the Phillipines could apply to seize - say - Luxembourg or Cayman assets anywhere in the world, without a single shot being fired!

 What at first might sound ludicrous begins to sound ever-more plausible, the deeper into it you plumb.

== Theft of our chance to thrive ==

One of the surest signs of the treason called the War on Science has been the obstinate confederate religious doctrine that we must do nothing about improving our energy systems.  

If "climate skeptics" had been sincere, they would have said: "While the jury is out, let's improve efficiency and double research. 

"First: just in case 99% of scientists turn out to be right about the danger. 

"But also because efficiency and research are TWODA -- things we ought to be doing anyway, even if climate change proves false!"

That's what sane "skeptics" would have said. 

The fact that the Koch-Saudi-financed obstruction campaign never once said those things but instead always sabotaged efficiency and research proves that the goal was always to delay efficiency and alternative energy sources and to sell as much coal and oil as possible, till the world awakened. 

(After auto fuel efficiency standards finally passed in 2009, during the brief democratic Congress, every dire prediction failed and every single positive one came true.  We have better, cleaner, smarter, more efficient cars and automakers are selling them very cheap but making profits. Guys, does being wrong EVER change your minds?)

Now Paul Krugman weighs in that it's almost game over, amid low gas prices and American energy independence  - with Saudi political influence in the U.S. at a 60 year low - tech is accelerating, solar and wind and storage are now competitive and costs are plummeting. Despite treasonous delays, a transformation is pulling away from fossil fuels, faster than anyone imagined possible... and all of it despite the continuing-insane mania and anti-science, anti-future hysteria.

Imagine how much sooner and how much better a world, if traitors had not delayed this.

== Class warfare ==

I believe one of our problems is that the Rooseveltean reforms – which historians credit with saving western capitalism by vesting the working class with a large stake, (something Marx never expected) – were too successful, in a way. So successful that the very idea of class war seems not even to occur to American boomers. This despite the fact that class conflict was rampant across almost every other nation and time.  But as boomers age-out, is that grand time of naïve expectation over?

Forbes recently announced that just 62 ultra-rich individuals have as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. Five years ago, it took 388 rich guys to achieve that status.  Which raises the question, where the heck does this rising, proto-feudal oligarchy think it will all lead? 

To a restoration of humanity’s normal, aristocratic pyramid of power (with them staying on top)?  

Or to radicalization, as a billion members of the hard-pressed but highly skilled and tech-empowered middle class rediscover class struggle?

The last time this happened, in the 1930s, lordly owner castes in Germany, Japan, Britain and the U.S. used mass media they owned to stir populist rightwing movements that might help suppress activity on the left. Not one of these efforts succeeded. In Germany and Japan, the monsters they created rose up and took over, leading to immense pain for all and eventual loss of much of that oligarchic wealth.

In Britain and the U.S., 1930s reactionary fomenters dragged us very close to the same path… till moderate reformers did what Marxists deemed impossible – adjusted the wealth imbalance and reduced cheating advantages so that a rational and flat-open-fair capitalism would be moderated by rules and investments to stimulate a burgeoning middle class, without even slightly destroying the Smithian incentives to get rich through delivery of innovative goods and services.  

That brilliant moderation led to the middle class booms of the 50s and 60s and – as I cannot repeat too often - it led to big majorities in our parents’ Greatest Generation adoring one living human above all others: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

There are some billionaires who aren’t short-sighted fools, ignorant of the lessons of history.  Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and many tech moguls want wealth disparities brought down through reasonable, negotiated Rooseveltean-style reform that will still leave them standing as very, very wealthy men.

The smart ones know where current trends will otherwise lead. To revolution and confiscation. 

Picture the probabilities, when the world’s poorest realize they could double their net wealth, just by transferring title from 50 men. In that case, amid a standoff between fifty oligarchs and three billion poor, it is the skilled middle and upper-middle classes who’ll be the ones deciding civilization’s course. And who do you think those two billion tech-savvy professionals will side with, when push comes to shove?

See my earlier posting: Class War and the Lessons of History. 

== Follow the money ==

The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to the just-released  "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” by Jane Mayer, a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families whose meddling in U.S. politics and tax loopholes have netted them billions in returns.  

 Of course there is nothing new about feudal lord cheaters. What is new is our slim but real chance of repeating the miracle achieved by our parents in the Greatest Generation... preserving competition and freedom and a flat-open-fair society, despite every effort to warp it, by short-sighted would-be lords.

How has money warped the political process? In Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections, Richard L. Hasen analyzes the growing importance of campaign financing to modern elections, and three ways in which money has negatively influenced the democratic process, citing electoral outcomes, legislative influence and eroding public confidence.  Hasan proposes reforms -- involving vouchers for citizens to use for campaign contributions and caps on the what a candidate can spend on an election cycle -- that could result in a greater "equality of inputs".