Economic and Cyber Pirates

== Pirates among us! ==

In “Piracy on the Cyber Seas,” in The American Interest, Adam Garfinkle compares the wave of hacker exploits and attacks to previous ages of physical piracy. He systematically goes through the classic traits of nation states and discusses whether nations can even survive an era when malefactors can act freely, without being subjected to accountability.  It's an interesting read.

Alas, the word “attribution” is sorely lacking, though all of the intel and military guys I talk to are now obsessed with it. If you can attribute bad actions - not only to perpetrators but also to their backers - then you can deter.  Of course, this lies at the heart of Garfinkle’s quandary.

“As for obfuscating or causing to collapse the distinction between the criminal and the political, ransomware attackers illustrate a piling-on to the twin attack on the state ably described in the pages of The American Interest by Nils Gilman. In his 2014 essay, “The Twin Insurgency,” he shows how criminals and plutocrats unwittingly (for the most part) reinforce each other’s attack on the state, each creating forms of porosity the other can walk right through.”

According to Garfinkle, Gilman posits a third force in cyber-piracy, those whose anarchist or doctrinal leanings make them sincere in wanting to use cyberpunk methods and memes to bring down a decadent western establishment: “We may now imagine a triple insurgency, adding modern political pirates to the mix (along with plutocrats and predatory criminals). If it turns out, as I suspect is likely, that many would-be piratical hackers have a political agenda akin to the other well-known transparency saints of our time — Assange, Snowden, Manning—then we will see the concept of hostis humani generis come alive yet again before our very eyes.”

Picture the protagonists of the TV series, Mr. Robot. Indeed, a day may come when such people are right about needing to bring down a corrupt and oppressive and un-salvageable system. The problem is that romantic twits, steeped in generations of "suspicion of authority" (SoA) propaganda from every Hollywood film, tend to believe such things out of ego, self-flattery and outright delusion attributing tyranical traits to the gentlest, most tolerant and open society ever seen. This bizarre contradiction doesn't matter much, when the brave-or-foolish cyber hero aims for transparency and light shining in dark corners. Assange and Snowden -- one of them somewhat admirable and the other a jerk -- styled themselves Whistle Blowers -- and did trigger some moderate changes and reforms, but generally revealed almost zero information supporting the notion of American Dystopia.

Back to Garfinkle. In his list of attributes of the state, the author leaves out all of our recent, enlightenment innovations:

1- Protecting and enhancing the ability of citizens to take semi sovereign actions independently, under a loose state umbrella and utilizing shared infrastructure.

2- Ending the conflation of the state with its leaders, ensuring that leaders who are exposed as malefactors can be eliminated without harm to the state, and thus ensuring that light is hardly ever lethal to the nation, only to metastacized cells.

Alas, Garfinkle does not consider the weapons that won us the Cold War.  By maintaining moral high ground across the period from WWII onward, we were able to attract defectors from the ranks of the communist adversary. Luring and protecting them became an art as important as espionage.  This same method should enable us to gain attribution within the cyber-pirate communities.

At which point, what you do with pirates is sic on them agents that leave us with plausible deniability.  Privateers.

== The Unseen Revolution that was killed in its tracks ==

And now, on to economic piracy.

I have long been puzzled why not a single business theorist or economist seems to recall what had seemed the elephant in the room, back in the early seventies, which was the rapid rise of labor ownership of capital. During the 30 years after World War II, amid the flat social structure and rapid economic expansion wrought by the Greatest Generation’s Rooseveltean contract, by-far the fastest-growing accumulations of capital were rapidly-vesting union pension funds. 

By 1974, those funds had a portfolio of about $150 billion, compared with a total price for the stock market of under $500 billion, representing 30 percent of the total value of listed companies. In effect, it seemed that simply by getting a fair share of profits — something that Karl Marx proclaimed could never happen —workers were well on their way toward ownership of the means of production.

One author wrote about the implications of this trend, in “The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America.”  Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005) was considered the top management thinker of his time. He authored over 25 books, with his first, The End of Economic Man published in 1939. What Drucker probably did not expect is that – by pointing out a trend – he played a huge role in preventing its final realization. 

“The Unseen Revolution” made this trend very clearly seen. A youth at the time, I recall reading hand-wringing essays, especially on the American right, by those who dreaded this peaceful, incremental and entirely non-Marxist type of “socialism.” Beyond hand-wringing, the moguls demanded actions to prevent it from coming true. They crafted arguments for the Reagan Revolution, which soon had two effects.

(1) enhancement of revenue to the old, ownership-rentier castes, through major tax cuts justified by the new Supply Side theory and neo-liberal (Chicago School) economists. And

(2) systematic under-funding of pension obligations.

Sure, one could argue that some of number two was necessary to avoid bankruptcy. But number one - from the perspective of forty years of absolute and perfect disproof of an utterly mad incantation - has been a parasitical raid of vampiric proportions. To make the point plain: not once has a Supply Side prediction ever come true. At all. Ever. Even once.

But it succeeded in its hidden purpose. Today, pension funds have accumulated global value in the trillions of dollars, and yet hold a far smaller share of total equity than Drucker predicted. Indeed, they hold far less - proportionately - than in 1975. Of course there is a reason for this, rooted in Drucker’s book, which should rank high on the pantheon of “self-preventing prophecies.”

Want irony? America was defying every single prediction of the Marxists, demolishing their confident predictions by reforming and creating an ever-flatter, almost classless society while retaining vigorous, competitive enterprise-based markets. The Greatest Generation - idolized in vague, vaseline-smeared abstract by the Trumpites - adored one living human above all others -- FDR - and their social contract worked spectacularly well.  

We only started back down Marxian paths with Supply Side “reforms” that followed Karl’s description of oligarchic depredation, to a T.

No wonder Google searches for “Karl” and “Marx” have been rising rapidly, lately and young people can be seen reading works we had thought consigned to the dustbin of history. Those who most vigorously have claimed to despise Marxism have been most instrumental in seeing to it that his famous “spectre” is fast rising again, from the grave.

== The Arctic grows critical ==

The Arctic is is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. But amid rapid climate change, Vladimir Putin is setting Russia up to take advantage of new shipping routes and oil deposits.  “The scale of Russian military and economic activity—driven in part by a national mythology and pride rooted in its northern identity—means that, regardless of U.S. policy, there is competition for Arctic power and resources. Benefits accrue to early movers, and the U.S. is not one of them.”

Russian officials’ rhetoric about its Arctic presence, coupled with military re-entrenchment, has been less than diplomatic. “Dmitry Rogozin, deputy prime minister and director of Putin's Government Commission for Arctic Development Issues, has called the 1867 sale of Alaska a “betrayal of Russian power status” and has said that the Kremlin has a “right to reclaim our lost colonies.””

Yep. They're comin' for Alaska!  And you sourdoughs asked for it.

More than 4 million people live north of Earth's Arctic Circle, nearly half of them in Russia and the rest scattered among the seven other northernmost countries—the U.S., Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.  Have look at the distribution of Russian bases, including new ones, ringing the Arctic.  The U.S. Navy is deeply concerned. And there are no climate denialist cultists in the US Naval Officer ranks.  

== Miscellanea ==

Math proves that gerrymandering is deliberate cheating.

See the faulty numbers behind Trump's proposed border wall.

The horror… that hilarious send-ups should be so accurate: “Russian Officials Scrambling As Plan To Delegitimize Western Democracy Moving Way Faster Than Intended.”  -from The Onion.

Oh, and then, as the Vice-President tries to distance himself... "Pence began laying the groundwork for his own political future. On Wednesday, Pence filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to establish the Great America Committee, a leadership political action committee that will allow him to raise money for his political interests and make donations to down-ballot candidates."

I keep telling you folks. Pace yourselves.  Early impeachment would be a disaster!

The New Orleans mayor’s brave and moving speech about  the relocation, off of public squares, of four confederate monuments..Though a bit long-winded, he makes powerful points, especially that the Confederacy was wrong, wrong and wrong and we are all better for remembering just how wrong.  

I would quibble on one point. One particular virtue stood out from the general moral turpitude and awfulness of that atrocious “cause." That virtue was martial valor and ingenuity at war. Damn good fighters, them rebels. And I do not mind measures taken to note that one admirable quality, in the context of everything else. Sherman willingly acknowledged the fortitude with which Confederate troops battled for a cause: “though that cause was among the worst for which men ever fought.”

== Back to modern pirates! ==

It's still being fought. The new commandant of the US Air Force Academy can expect a rough reception from the surrounding hotbed of radical Christian fundamentalism – Colorado Springs. Indeed, it has long been known, even openly avowed, that such groups try to inveigle and suborn the service’s tradition of non-sectarian and adult secularity. But if any officer can ease the USAFA out of this trap, it will be Brig. Gen. Kristin Goodwin, former B-2 pilot and former commander of the Second Bomber Wing, who arrives soon with her two children and her wife. And yes, I put great faith in the stature, maturity and enlightenment-loyalty of our officer corps.

But of course, you will hear me remind you again and again: as redder political fortunes wane, they will seek distractions!  Even excuses for a clamping down. A Reichstag Fire. A Gleiwitz or Tonkin Gulf incident. What they really want is War with Iran. It would give the Saudis, the mullahs and Putin everything they want, along with all of those loving high oil prices. 

A blog commentator pointed out that back in 2001, Iran elected a moderate secular government and seemed poised to throw off the rule of the Mullahs. George W. Bush chose right then to start making noises about "the Axis of Evil" and sabre-rattling at Iran. The nation promptly retreated to the imagined safety of religious fundamentalism, a turtle pulling its head in.  And why shouldn't the GOP be secretly friendly to the mullahs and hostile to a democratic Iran?  Remember that the Mullahs destroyed Jimmy Carter and opened the way for Ronald Reagan. 

Today's GOP owes the Ayatollahs everything.