Is Russia triggering a cleansing surge against financial secrecy? And stuff about Crypto!

Sometimes it's the dog that didn't bark in the night. The expected thing that did not happen. 

For example, where is the Russian cyber war that everyone expected to be one of Putin's spasms, unleashed against the West when he grew desperate? Weren't all our banks and pipelines and power grids going to collapse, at the very moment he gave a nod? Is it possible that our nerdy protector castes and their tools - and even out utility companies - turned out to be better than expected? Or Kremlin basement-dwellers much less competent?

Moreover, has anyone else noticed a plummet in the number of trolls on social media, now that Moscow is cut off from most? Has the vast Kremlin agitprop machinery collapsed, as Wired suggests? 

"The Kremlin has spent millions in terms of dollars and hours in Europe alone, nurturing and fostering the populist right (Italy, Hungary, Slovenia), the far right (Austria, France, Slovakia), and even the far left (Cyprus, Greece, Germany). For years, elected politicians in these and other countries have been standing up for Russia’s interests and defending Russia’s transgressions, often peddling Putin’s narratives in the process." 

And even more important, networks of American Q-nuts and Fox-watchers who till now never questioned even Twilight-Zone-level absurdities and schism-ing previously verbotten things called ... 'facts.'

Interesting article and we can hope it is true. Though, even if the Kremlin's surficial agitprop webs are dissolving, that still leaves in place the part of the Kremlin's influence web that is most powerful at swaying big swathes of Western elite castes, and through them millions of our most gullible neighbors - a part that no one, anywhere, even slightly talks about. (Except me, duh.)

Going back to czarist times, Russian secret services always, always sought foremost to entrap and blackmail enemy elites getting them to then serve as agents and moles. If Borat could do it accidentally to Rudy Giuliani, how hard can it be? And do you have even a remotely-plausible alternate explanation for Lindsey Graham? Or Ted Cruz or (hell yes) Susan Collins?

Again, there is one thing that Jobee could do to overnight restore health and vigor to America and Western civilization, though amid a few months of painful, searing light. That would be to establish a truth and reconciliation commission charged with recommending clemency in exchange for folks stepping forward with revelations about bad-things. Especially turning tables on their blackmailers.

If I am wrong about that being a big problem, possibly a cancer on us all... (how can I possibly be?)... then where would be the harm? But if I am right?

A few dems - and a whole lot of goppers - would have to retire. 

We may see more women in Congress, as a result. 

So? 

We'll be saner, better... and clean.

== Is EARTH Coming True? ==

Are we seeing - as predicted in my novel - a Western Revival and push back against World Oligarchy? First came a landmark deal agreed upon by the world's richest nations as one of Biden's first endeavors - a global minimum rate of corporation tax placed on multinational companies including tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. Late last year, finance ministers from the Group of Seven, or G-7 nations agreed to a global base corporate tax rate of at least 15 percent.  Companies  with a strong online presence would pay taxes in the countries where they record sales, not just where they have an operational base.

And now, amid the furor over Russia's insane invasion of Ukraine, Western nations are hunting down assets like yachts and mansions set up in London and New York and Paris by Putin's fellow "ex" KGB agent oligarchs, billions stolen (with Bush-Cheney collusion) from Russian citizens by those former, sworn Marxist-egalitarian*) commissars and sheltered behind shell corporations. 

Will the U.K. and USA actually end that dismally vile practice across the board? No way! Not yet, that is. These baby steps are far short of the general transparency of ownership that came (fictionally, alas) out of my "Helvetian War." And far, far from enough! But at last some of my large scale 'suggestions' are being tried. 

Now to get all fifty U.S. states to pass a treaty among themselves, banning 'bidding wars' for factories, sports teams etc... with maybe a sliding scale tilted for poorer states or low populations. A trivially easy move that'd save citizens hundreds of billions.

And while we're at it, let's overcome the treasonous GOP resistance to fully funding the IRS to audit the rich.

== Other transparency news ==

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The results are stark. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.  

Over the longer run, what we need is the World Ownership Treaty. Nothing on Earth is 'owned' unless a human or government or nonprofit claims it openly and accountably. Shell corporations go only one-deep to real people.

Note that this would not be 'socialism'! No tax rates would rise, no confiscature. Just trillions in wealth cached out of sight by cheaters added to tax rolls while rates for law-abiding taxpayers would go down.

In fact, so much illicit property would likely be abandoned by criminals etc. that national debts could be erased and the rest of us could have a tax jubilee. Don't believe that? Do the math. Offer wager stakes.

== The Crypto era? ==

Is that proposal moot, in an era when ownership can be masked with digital, crypto-property?

Well, first, I actually know a little. I've consulted with a number of companies about the coming era and I speak at "NFT Con" in San Diego on April 9-10. 

All right, there is no way to "ban" crypto currencies in general! But there is an approach to making them much more accountable to real life law, though I see no one mention it. 

Let's start with an ironic fact. Blockchain-based token systems are not totally secret!  Yes, they use crypto to mask the identity of token (coin) holders.  But those holders only "own" their tokens by general consent of all members of a communal 'shared ledger' that maintains the list of coins and which public keys stand ready to be turned by each token's owner. In that sense it is the opposite of 'secret,' since the ledger is out there in tens of thousands of copies on just as many distributed computers. Attempts to invade or distort or corrupt the ledger are detected and canceled en masse. (The ecologically damaging "mining" operations out there are partly about maintaining the ledger.)

All of this means that - to the delight of libertarians - it will be hard to legislate or regulate blockchain token systems. Hard, but not impossible. For example, the value of Bitcoin rises and falls depending on how many real world entities will accept it as payment... and governments have been hammering on that, lately, especially China.

There is another way to modify any given blockchain token system, and that is for the owners themselves to deliberate and decide on a change to their shared economy... to change the ledger and its support software.... 

...and I'll elaborate on that in another posting. If the world lets us.

Meanwhile, hang in there. The enlightenment is fighting back. Be prepared for good or bad. Help those on the front lines.

Ongoing worries and concerns -- and some good trends

With the U.S. restoring itself as trusted leader of the West - also (at last) dealing with internal disasters like decayed infrastructure and inequality (fixes long delayed by the KGB-Foxites) - and especially as our protector castes no longer feel hampered at the top by Kremlin agents...

...we can now expect a series of desperation moves by those who have been waging all-but-open war against us for years, who know that a time of reckoning is coming. With oil prices up in ways that are sure to be temporary, Putin has a window, an opening, to take aggressive actions.

For example, we are seeing his puppet, Lukashenko, use Belarus to hurl innocent refugees at the borders of NATO, chortling as the west is caught between our compassionate laws and instincts, on the one hand, and the hard lesson taught by earlier waves -- that admitting great, bottomless tsunamis only winds up radicalizing European voters, triggering the backlash election of populist fascists who are just like Lukashenko and Putin and cozy up to them.  Short term, reflexive do-gooderism feels righteous but often does more long term harm than good.

Liberals are right to feel desperate discomfort from that irony! They are also fools to ignore what it means... that we cannot do everything at once. (We can help the poor of other nations both with aid and by pulling support from the local oligarchic oppressor classes that our own moguls propped-up, for a century.)

Now comes word that NATO has warned of Russian military buildups next to another victim-neighbor, Ukraine. Trump's betrayal of that brave country is now being corrected, though it will take time. This sets a clock ticking which may cause Vlad to rush his aggressor plans.

== And more evidence that this is war ==

Among ongoing worries and concerns... the mysterious Havana Syndrome: In late 2016, U.S. diplomats in Cuba experienced ongoing neurological symptoms, such as headaches, nausea and hearing loss, accompanied by a piercing, high-pitched sound. In the last five years, such symptoms have since been reported by more than 200 U.S. personnel in places as diverse as Bogota, Guangzhou, Vienna, and Hanoi. 

Is this due to foreign surveillance - or directed energy beams? The New York Times summarizes the range of possibilities: Is the Havana Syndrome an act of war - or mass hysteria? 

== Is transparency an answer to 6000 years of cheating? ==

The Pandora Papers are only #10 or so in a series of data spills that I predicted in The Transparent Society, that will - in agonizing fits and starts - strip away the shadows that aristocrats and oligarchs and kings and commissars have always used to cheat and maintain unfair power. This is why so many pools of oligarchy - from mafias, gambling moguls and "ex"-commissars to murder princes and "murdochs" straignt out of HG Wells - have joined together across the last two decades in a coalition - a putsch - to reinforce their influence and undermine the Enlightenment Experiment. 

Because if this counter trend continues, oligarchy - the great enemy of fair competition and enterprise and justice - might vanish forever.

This is why I feel one Great Treaty must prevail across all nations. (In Existence I refer to it as the Big Deal of the late 20s that forestalls revolution.) 

It would be a Transparent Ownership Treaty.

"If you own it, you must say, publicly: 'I own that!' 

"If not, then you don't." 

No shell corporations more than two deep and all must end in publicly named living persons, or governments, or accountable foundations. 

If this happened, then the world tax base might double, letting honest taxpayers get a rate cut. And the amount of abandoned property might erase all national debts.

== More attmpted, blatant cheats ==

And this....A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the Internet to a Florida company in January -- just minutes before D. Trump left office -- has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department this week retaking control of 175 million IP addresses.  At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6 percent of a section of the Internet called IPv4. 

'The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market. Adding to the mystery, company registration records showed Global Resource Systems at the time was only a few months old, having been established in September 2020, and had no publicly reported federal contracts, no obvious public-facing website and no sign on the shared office space it listed as its physical address in Plantation, Fla.'

Store and use these things to do jiu jitsu on your favority conspiracy theory nut-uncle. Ask em to ask Q about that.

And...   From The Atlantic on the powerful effects of social media networks on democracy: "It's not Misinformation. It's Amplified Propaganda, "Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is... ampliganda, the shaping of perception through amplification," writes Renee DiResta.

Can we predict tomorrow's threats? The German Defense Ministry is using SF stories to predict future wars.  Their Project Cassandra has already successfully predicted conflict in Algeria. University researchers would use their expertise to help the German defense ministry predict the future. I participate in similar things in the U.S. each year.

== Possible solutions? ==

See the latest IBM Watson X-Prize winners strategizing how humans can work with AI to tackle future global challenges. 

Scientists are experimenting with methods of lowering temperatures in urban areas. In particular, Phoenix is painting its streets gray, to increase reflectivity and lower surface temperatures.

One scientist is testing metal-eating bacteria - extremophiles - that could clean up contaminants and environmental waste from the mining industry. A French company is using enzymes to recycle single-use plastics. 

And a new, more environmentally sound method for the extraction and separation of rare earth elements, which are critical for technologies used in smart phones and electric batteries. And combine this with ectraction of the raw stuff at geothermal energy plants. A win-win-win?

Climate TRACE is tracking global atmospheric carbon emissions in real time, offering greater transparency -- and accountability.

A new vaccine for malaria (with modest efficacy) may soon be approved by WHO for children.

Essential to food security, urban farming doesn't have to be horizontal. The 51-story Jian Mu Tower to be built in Shenzhen (pictured to the right) will contain offices, a supermarket and a large-scale farm capable of feeding up to 40,000 people per year.

The U.S. Postal Service is trying out paycheck cashing at some branches - which could change how millions now access money via evil check cashing 'services' and pay bills (often with large fees imposed). 

AOC has pushed one of my own longstanding proposals - that we re-establish the postal saving bank that cheat cabals tore down in the 1960s, that would give the poor at least minimal services and would help them to stop being poor.

A "process" matter that is actually life-or-death for the U.S.... and the U.K.

Momentum is building for preferential voting (PV) systems, that let voters rank-order their preferred candidates or outcomes. This option is being forced on the Democratic Party, for example, by their flood of candidates who must be sorted-out in just a couple of 2020 primary months. 

PV -- or rank-choice voting -- would let a state's voters make multiple choices, maybe five in-order, so the election might stumble a bit toward actual consensus, instead of an insipid first-past-the-post that would leave the sane 70% of the country simmering with resentment, instead of enthusiasm.  Below I will talk about efforts to implement PV in the US... and why it's even more important... in Britain.

But first, something you really have to watch.

== The great failure mode of all democracies ==

An amazing video on staggering wealth inequality. Left out... the context of 6000 years, when this was the principle aim of princes. Only the recent enlightenment realized a core truth, that while property is a vital incentive for creative competition... it is inevitably toxic when too-concentrated. (Like any good thing: food, water, air.) When it concentrates too much, human nature rears its ugly head and cheating ensues. (And this is not "left-right"! Communist commisars behave in exactly the same ways as kings, sheiks and zillionaires.)

The video claims that Senator Warren's proposed wealth taxes are new. But I quibble. The American founders seized and redistributed up to 1/3 of all the land in the former colonies in order to stymie feudalism! (And it was feudalism, not 'bureaucrats' who Adam Smith denounced and the Founders rebelled against.) Especially the Greatest generation (see below) found ways to stimulate a vast middle class. 

The rich need to decide whether to follow their smartest peers (Gates, Buffett, Bezos) etc. and keep that social contract. It can be done without pitchforks and torches, tumbrels and guillotines. But there isn't much time.

=

== Democrats, this "mere process" means survival  ==

Lawrence Lessig and Equal citizen ran a campaign to bring ranked choice voting (RC) to the New Hampshire presidential primary. And it's on the verge of succeeding, with your help. RC voting - or preferential balloting - has been used by us super-wise and forward-thinking science fiction folks for the Hugo and Nebula awards for four decades and it is standard in Australia and a few other nations. 

RC/PV doesn't always come down to the best candidate. But it will always prevent the worst from happening -- a horrible monster squeaking by with 40%, though hated by a divided 60%. 

This potential reform in Iowa and New Hampshire takes on special importance given the vast field of Democrats attempting to run for president. The present system is simply insane at parsing out front-runners! What? Is a candidate who got a whole 16% the “front-runner” ahead of rivals who got 15%, 14%, 12% and 12%? Does that let a fringe constituency control the divided majority? Democrats could help themselves considerably and us, by arm twisting both of those states into trying a preferential ballot process just for that DP primary, to see how it goes.

BTW, Lessig will give the conference keynote at the Future of the Open Web conference n Friday, May 17,at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco hotel. 

Oh, as an aside: this article told about a similar time – 80 years ago - when an "American populist" threw giant rallies - under superficial patriotism - actually boosted the interests of foreign fascist plotters and divisive hate. "When Nazis Took Manhattan: In 1939, an event at Madison Square Garden was billed as a "Pro-America Rally". It was, in fact, a rally in support of Hitler and fascism." It tells of one brave fellow who infiltrated the rally in New York... as my father did when they threw a similar bund-fest in Chicago. And yes, the parallels with today are creepy. (Especially if you've been watching "The Man In The High Castle.")

While we’re historical… Extra History is one of the best things on YouTube. Quick, animated summaries of past eras that shaped our age. A 6-parter filled in my gaps about Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese Revolution. Another swept me across the end of the samurai era. This one about the Gracchi brothers shows how oligarchy undermined the Roman Republic, which was then torn up by radical populism. It all makes clear how fevered and harsh was "history" and why our present oligarchy plots against the new, modern, grownup ways of doing things.

The animations are way fun, but the narration is so good that I get everything while turning my back to cook or do busywork at the computer.

And now, back to those ranked voting processes that are essential, for democracy to get functional again.

== Perplexidus Albion ==

Regarding Brexit, sure, the blatant next move is for the UK to hold another referendum, with the following in mind:

* The British people were not aware, the first time, that Brexit was powerfully backed by Putin's Kremlin. Guilt-by-association is as valid a point as any other element in this argument.

* Both the Brexiters and the Conservatives know that their political careers are over, if a second referendum cancels the charade. Hence frantic resistance.

* Brexit showed the insipid absurdity of deciding complex issues with binary ballots.

Hence, any second Brexit vote should offer Britons  a multiple choice ballot:

1.  Hard Brexit with no deal.

2. Theresa May's deal.

3. Remain in the EU under the old treaty.

4. Remain providing the EU is willing to negotiate more state sovereignty over residency.

Blatantly, #4 would win the automated runoff, even if millions gave first preference to something else. Moreover, European leaders already know that universal residency mobility was a Bridge Too Far. They are already backpedaling on that and rule-complexity and would signal a willingness to oblige.

Some technologies and solutions are only tried once the old ways have calamitously failed. Preferential referenda weaken Parliament, which deserves it, and will exile a generation of obsolete politicians. That's not a bug, but a feature.

== Ties go deep ==

Trump’s deep Russian ties go at least to when a Putin ally-oligarch in 2013 paid DT $10 million to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow, and many stinking hijinks commenced.

In EARTH (1989) I portrayed a coalition of developing nations finally getting fed-up and declaring war upon the money-laundering mafias – like Zurich and the Caymans and the State of Delaware – that have helped rob trillions from poor populations across the globe. It’s still possible for one – just one – president of a small country to do something epic and historic and transforming, and I could map how. But you should read this article from The Atlantic by Franklin Foer that starts with showing 

Further: “The collapse of communism in the other post-Soviet states, along with China’s turn toward capitalism, only added to the kleptocratic fortunes that were hustled abroad for secret safekeeping. Officials around the world have always looted their countries’ coffers and accumulated bribes. But the globalization of banking made the export of their ill-gotten money far more convenient than it had been—which, of course, inspired more theft. By one estimate, more than $1 trillion now exits the world’s developing countries each year in the forms of laundered money and evaded taxes.”

In effect, this has meant the impoverishment of billions of human beings, higher taxes for you and me, and the outright deaths of tens of millions, making these thugs among the world’s worst outright murderers. And making all of this genuinely a “war.”  See also  British journalist Oliver Bullough’s Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back.

Don’t skimp. Read the whole thing! Because there’s items like this, toward the end:

“In her important history, Corruption in America, Zephyr Teachout, a legal scholar and liberal activist, argues that during the country’s first 200 years, courts maintained the Founders’ vigilance against corruption. For a good chunk of American history, a number of states criminalized lobbying in many forms, out of a sense that a loosening of standards would trigger a race to the bottom. That near-phobia now looks quaint, and also prescient. The political culture, the legal culture, the banking culture—so much of the culture of the self-congratulatory meritocratic elite—have long since abandoned such prudish ways.

“The defining document of our era is the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. The ruling didn’t just legalize anonymous expenditures on political campaigns. It redefined our very idea of what constitutes corruption, limiting it to its most blatant forms: the bribe and the explicit quid pro quo. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion crystallized an ever more prevalent ethos of indifference—the collective shrug in response to tax avoidance by the rich and by large corporations, the yawn that now greets the millions in dark money spent by invisible billionaires to influence elections.”

It’s not that it’s hopeless. Some real measures happened in 2001 and in 2007. And almost all of this would end – returning tens of trillions of stolen wealth and giving law-abiding citizens a huge tax holiday – if we had one simple, two sentence worldwide law:

“If you own something, say so publicly. Anything not claimed by a living person, government or accountable foundation is abandoned property.”

It is likely that all the world’s outstanding debt, acting as a lamprey on the arteries of all the world’s economies, could be erased by that simple measure, ending the masks and shells and laundering scams, allowing tax rates for all law-abiding citizens to be slashed, everywhere, and erasing most kinds of corruption, as I lay out in my  proposal for a Transparent Ownership Treaty.