One interesting stat from early modern England

This is one of those times where a single statistic can open up a wealth of insight, and yet it does not come from our present but our past.  This one is coming from the Open Yale courses, which are freely available for viewing and have some of the most interesting professors that can have a wealth of information.  The stat comes from the HIST 251: Early Modern England which covers the time period of the late 16th century to the early 18th century and is presented by Professor Keith E. Wrightson.  To understand the transformation of England during this period it is necessary to see where it started from circa Henry VII, just before all the major changes in England took place.  I've been watching these with my lady and our side conversations tend to make the simple presentation quite long as it is necessary to pause the presentation so we can discuss material.  Thus the insight comes from that discussion.

In the mid- to late-16th century there was a relatively stable social stratification that has the Nobility at the top, the Gentry of landed estates and 'gentle birth' next, then the Yeomen class who were not of 'gentle birth' and tended to be well considered in towns and cities running trades and businesses (as well as some farms which was necessary for the era, the Craftsmen and those earning a living via craft work, and then gradations through the poor end of the spectrum which ends in Unskilled Labor.  The Clergy are considered separate (remember pre-Henry VIII) and while they can have power, it is not by lineage (as in the Nobility and Gentry) but by appointment to position (such as Bishop or Arch Bishop) by the Pope.  Literacy was low outside of those who could afford such education or that required it for daily operation (like the Clergy).  Schooling was done at home and as soon as children could contribute in any way to a household, they did so via work, first at home and then, if coming from a poorer family, by paying a Master Craftsman to take on a boy as an apprentice or by going to a household to work in any of a variety of tasks for a one year term.

This society can be characterized as stratified and one in which survival at all but the upper ranks of society is a constant pre-occupation.  Mercantile capitalism tends to fall in to the Yeomanry and Craftsman realms of society, and while the Yeomanry were socially limited they could earn quite a lot of money and purchase land from plying business trades.  Across all strata of the non-Clergy is one particularly interesting phenomena and the statistic of interest: marriage tended to be put off until the early- to mid- 20's.  This was done because establishing a new household is a costly affair (even for the rich) and must be done with much due consideration.  At the upper ranks of society choices in one's class were limited, and matches between young men and women could take time but also required agreement between families.  Sliding down into the Gentry, Yeomanry and Craftsman realms of society, men and women had a bit more in the way of choices and leeway, but parental and family consent made marriage a multi-lateral agreement in which any single party could hold a veto.  This sort of concern lessened going down to the lowest levels of society, where there was a lot more freedom for couples, agreement tended to be limited to parents, but start-up costs of a new household was high in proportion to the income of the poor.

From that this society can be said to have a high overhead cost of maintenance to it: it costs a lot of time as well as funds to get a household going.  Child birth, statistically, would happen within 18 months of marriage and then be a cyclic affair every 2 or 3 years of the woman's childbearing years.  Added to this was the high rate of infant mortality, endemic diseases, pandemics of plague, plus the normal assort of death by accidents, and life expectancy, while better than in Neolithic times, tended to be in the mid-30's with rare individuals surviving past 60.

Why is this interesting?

My lady was startled because of the American experience with families up to the early 20th century: large families with marriage happening in the late Teens.  Many marriage laws for what society would consider 'children' today included age of consent down to 12 in some States.

There are important changes by the start of the 19th century for Americans, but the life expectancy had not increased much over the 16th century, and while the Industrial Revolution would begin to transform America after the 1820's, American family size continued to be large even with advances in medicine, public sanitation and better diet.  Taking these factors into consideration, there is one other major factor that is encountered in the US that sets it apart from its Early Modern English forbearers in the 16th century: it is a society of not much in the way of 'classes' and it is one with a low overhead for maintenance.

The first is relatively self-explanatory, and while there were major land and slave holders in the Southern States (an equivalent of the Gentry class circa 16th century England)  and huge differences between those living in cities and those in rural areas, these are not largely different from the share-cropper system and differences between city and rural folk of the 16th century.  Without the rest of the class structure to burden the system and plenty of wilderness to settle in what happened is that the Americans of the early 19th century gained a definition that stuck until the early 20th century: a Frontier Culture.

By now, of course, this has interrupted all viewing of the course as this is a vital topic but approached in an oblique way.  There are large differences between a 'Settled' culture and a 'Frontier' culture, most of which revolve around the cost of maintenance of the infrastructure necessary to sustain the culture.  It is difficult to think of Early Modern England as a 'settled culture' but it has natural geographic limits to it, even when you consider Great Britain or the UK as a whole: these are islands and have definite boundaries and no frontiers.  Once an island has undergone initial exploration and settling, that is it for new resources and to get claimed land one must purchase it, which requires capital.  If you live in a town or city you can rent space, of course, but in the villages and household settings to have a new household requires land either by purchase or lease, and then a home on it.  There are many records in England from the late 16th century onwards, which allows us to glimpse a bit of everyday life via the records of deaths and coroner's inquests.  Prof. Wrightson recounts the death of one young woman who was working as a servant in a household who, at her death, had a total of 3 Pounds, 3 cows, and a chest containing items of clothing, bedding, bowl, spoon and the like.  Indeed an average of all deaths can actually yield that individuals owned perhaps as many as 25 to 35 items, total upon death.  The savings of a young woman was that of hoping to find a husband, marry, and establish a household amongst the poorer ranks of society.  She was already bringing something to the table for a marriage: she was gathering necessary overhead capital and goods for the start of a future household.

This is a stark contrast to the American Frontier experience that included clearing land, marrying early, and settling that cleared land for little to no overhead cost beyond sweat equity.  Raw materials were readily available, land was anywhere from free to cheap (compared to Early Modern England, at least), and the idea of 'go forth and multiply' was something that was held near and dear to the heart in reverence to God.

What is the condition of America today?

Settled.

It has a high overhead cost of maintenance to start a household.  Even with politicians distorting lending markets no end, the cost of starting a household is high.  Those that learn the Trades in America, today, actually have a low overhead cost from education: there is less burden on them and a trade craft repays the cost of education in it quickly.  A distorted market in 'Higher Education' arising from the 'good deed'  in the GI Bill post-WWII flooded colleges and universities with people which then changed the requirements in the marketplace for what is a 'minimum necessary education'.  That 'Higher Education' no longer repays itself and is a debt burden to those who go through such education and have no useful job skills at the end of it.  It is a high cost that must be paid down before starting a family.  The result?  The age of marriage has increased, couples expect both parties to bring something to the new household, children are put off for a period of time after marriage, on average and yes there are exceptions to this just as there were in Early Modern England of the 16th century.

At the lowest end of the economic spectrum there is a payment of funds from tax receipts (or in added debt) to the poor to 'care for women and children' who happen to have children out of wedlock.  Women get payments based on number of children and husbands are no longer required to get support: government has taken on that role.  The result is a liquidation of the once solid poor family structure that was purposefully uprooted during the 'Urban Renewal' that started with the Truman Administration and the movement of poor families from homes they owned to tenements they rented from under the 'Great Society' programs.  Add in payments based on childbirth to women who are not required to be married and have a stable family situation, and you liquidate the foundations of the stable culture that was once a part of the urban landscape prior to the 1950's.  Although a Nation in which by any objective standard pre-1940 there is no poverty, at all, we still have the strange belief that the poor are a condition of poverty.  And yet the poor are always with us, as being poor is part of the condition of individuals within mankind. 

Poverty, as such, was transitional in America where anyone could aspire to be a 'rags to riches' story and maybe end up in the Middle Class or at least better off than one's parents in material goods and security.  What there also used to be was no support system for the rich who failed: you could go from rags to riches to rags and cycle back and forth between them.  The establishment of regulatory regimes to allow failing concerns to remain open (and even get direct government help via taxpayer funds) means that those who make poor decisions under those regulatory regimes no longer fail and they no longer succeed, either.  They become zombie concerns depending on the lifeblood of taxpayer funds and supported regulatory regimes to survive and exist.  Any comparisons between this and later English companies supported by the Crown and later found to be bankrupt is purely coincidental with the Modern England.  In the Early Modern England there was too much upheaval to allow for such things.

Thus there are similarities of type between the US of 2014 and mid- to late-16th century England, but not of kind.  There are entirely different sets of overhead concerns for starting a household, and yet they arise for the same reason of being in a settled and geographically limited society.  The Old West in America is just that: the historical Old West.  And while there are still unsettled lands in the US, no one can rightly call them a Frontier in the expansive way of the early 19th century.  Yes Alaska is still nasty, has a low population level and if you can gather the overhead costs to establish yourself there, it has a frontier-like feel to it.  Social stratification becomes more apparent in the modern US but not due to the gentleness of birth but the connectedness to corrupt government and those that serve and service its corruption.  Just as in Early Modern England this is not a stable situation.

The result in Early Modern England was the Industrial Revolution and the great colonization effort that spanned the globe.

America, today, is at the cusp of a similar sort of transformation, as well.  It is not a dour and bleak totalitarian one, that is if we don't work to counter it.  No, it is one that also had an antecedent in Early Modern England: a New Frontier.

America has tested its endless expanse and now is home to many private concerns that dream big dreams of endless expanses of territory and wealth to be made.  It can't be made just by the rich or even with robotic systems, as those are fragile to this new and hostile wilderness.  And in this wilderness children will learn from the earliest of ages how to survive, what to do and not to do, and the rest of 'education' as we know it will be geared to those concerns first and foremost.

What happened when the English had access to new territories?  Some people were banished to them.  Others fled to them because of the freedom they offered for a new life at great risk.  They were Frontiers.  No social stratification.  Relatively low cost of overhead compared to what was left behind. Great and terrible risk to eke out a new life together with those who also decided that this was better than being settled.  Vast populations from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy... they followed when the cost of transportation to the Frontier was cheap enough to escape the settled lands of their old homes.

As I've said before and say again: there isn't anything so wrong with America that a New Frontier will not cure.

Freedom and Independence will beckon to us, to all mankind.

No one from the time of Henry VII could have seen the rapid changes that would follow his death.

And we can compress those massive changes of centuries down to decades, and no totalitarian power will be able to stop it once the flood gates open.

All we must do is curtail the grasp of tyranny in the present, hold it off by all means possible, and a New Frontier will open to us.  Like Early Modern England seemed a strange place to look for such transformation in its stratified ways and settled lands, so, too, does America look like a strange place to expect the push for a New Frontier.  Yet Early Modern England was pre-adapted to such things by its history and America, along with a few other Nations, is pre-adapted to Frontier culture by its cultural heritage. 

It is easy to fight tyranny in space: open an airlock.  Nature plays no favorites, but you can.

Continuity or something else?

I watched a program last night on Discovery's Military Channel that  focused on the Continuity of Operations Plan or Continuity of Government Plan, which is something I came to know about working on the civilian side of an agency in DoD.  It is pretty serious stuff this trying to safeguard information and stand up some operations if the main sites of the agency get taken out.  This extends across the entire US federal government and all agencies have some variation of the COOP (as I came to know it).  It was an interesting program as it gave a couple of scenarios that would cause the COOP to be put into action and it pointed out that on 9/11 it actually was utilized and actually failed to keep the President informed during a crisis or re-establish communications between secure sites.  If this had been a more serious attack on the US, the COOP would have failed the federal government.

Although there are contingency plans in place for continuing government ever since this became a question and actually caused the creation of Amendment XXV which puts in an order of succession for the job of President in case the person occupying that job is incapacitated or dies.  That was ratified into being in 1967 during the Cold War when the possibility of having the entire top of government vaporized at one stroke was something to be considered.

Do we really need more than that?

The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (3 USC 19) is the Public Law created by Congress to add depth to the existing schema of President and Vice-President set out in the US Constitution and in Amendments XII and XX to clear up issues on elections and Amendment XXV put in place in 1967.  This ability by Congress to do such work is generated through Art. II,  Sec. 1, Clause 6 which provides for the power of Congress to establish such a succession and amended by Amendment XXV Section 3.  The top four people are the President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House and then President pro tempore of the Senate.  This act has been amended to then start in on the Cabinet with the Secretary of State, Treasury, Defense, Attorney General, Interior, Agriculture,  Commerce, Labor, HHS,  HUD, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veteran's Affairs and then DHS.  Would you consider a government headed up by, say, the Secretary of HUD to be legitimate?  How about Education?  Interior? 

I have problems with the Secretary of State but it is at least a major 'Hat' of the Presidential job requirements – foreign policy.  Actual those hats are Head of State, Head of Government, Commander in Chief of the Armies and the Navies, and Chief Pardoner, and if you went with just the 'Hats' then you would get State, Treasury, Defense and AG which is just about where it should end, as well.  Why?  Any government that has suffered the loss of the President, VP, Speaker and President pro tempore has failed in ways that you cannot even begin to imagine and, really, the actual legitimacy of the government falling into appointed and approved position holders is something that even in the Cold War was questionable.  You might get a 'continuity' of government, yes.  The legitimacy of that government, led by unelected officials is lost because this is a Nation that upholds a representative say in selecting our government.

Then there is the part that the program didn't get into: the States.  Each State has its own form of COOP in place and the actual legitimacy of the US federal government comes from the signatories to the US Constitution: the States.  The States had to get approval from their citizens to sign on to the Constitution, and it is those functional governments that are the actual ones who instituted the federal government to act as an arbiter amongst them.  If that arbiter and protector of all of the States cannot protect all of the States and actually has harm fall on to any State due to negligence, incapacity or inability to adequately supply protective measures to all of the States, then the federal government has failed in its main duty: protection of the States.  Each and every State gets a way out of this via the US Constitution and its something to consider at this point when we look at failure of the federal government to protect the States.  This is covered in Art. I, Sec. 10, Clause 3:

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

The Framers of the Constitution did not create a 'suicide pact' but put in this one vital clause which gives the State back its full Sovereign powers.  The ability to do these things, are indicative not of a State but of a Nation as they are the full foreign policy and military powers necessary for the backing of a Nation.  If the federal government cannot protect a number of States from, say, an EMP attack or, via neglect, allows a State or group of States to be invaded, then that State finds itself with its full powers returned to it.  All of the facets of what it takes to run and independent Nation re-appear for events that are so devastating to a State that any delay in response will mean disaster or that disaster has befallen a State and the federal government has proven and demonstrated its incompetence to the point where it can no longer be considered as the trusted arbiter of the powers granted to it.

With the three days to the return of barbarism seen after Super Storm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina and the general decay of infrastructure, the States and federal government must rely on having a population ready to respond to disasters.  A strong and prepared civil population is the greatest strength to the continuity of government, operations and the legitimacy of government.  Fly the elected and appointed officials around as much as you want, but it is the States that hold the cards in a disaster and the trump card is the return of the powers they granted to the federal government which is so concerned about keeping itself going that it has neglected its duties to protecting the States as entities.

Even the relatively lack-luster scenario of an eastern EMP attack shows that the amount of time it takes to get the COOP running is in the days to weeks category.  Talking about a President trying to impose martial law onto States that he or she has neglected, is no longer an act to restore civil order but an Act of War on those States.  A Governor is put into the foreign policy arena and while accepting help from such a COOP government may call for that, it is no longer in the capacity of a Governor of a State but a Head of State: that military arrangement is a treaty and should be treated as such.  At that point in time the Governor may already have had to call upon a civilian militia, utilize police forces and declare martial law, yes, but those are all internal and normal parts of a sovereign Nation to re-organize after a disaster. 

The reason and rationale for letting States retain this responsibility and the power to address it, is so that the federal government is not overburdened with a function it cannot fulfill in whole, in part or at all.  After no regular natural disaster has the US federal government proven to be prompt, efficient, or even capable of dealing with a catastrophe of wide ranging scope.  With FEMA the federal government insists it has a role.  With FEMA it is widening the scope of possibility for its own failure.  FEMA isn't capable of addressing disasters and may only serve as the nucleus for creating a disaster of federal legitimacy.  While it was created with good intentions during the Cold War, no one addressed the fact that the federal government doesn't have the power or capacity to actually deal with disasters, be they the nuclear one of that era or the wide-ranging problems of natural disasters and under-maintained infrastructure of the modern era along with man-made and natural disasters that can cause infrastructure to fail catastrophically.  That EMP burst has all sorts of protection for the military, President, various cabinet level officials, Congress, SCOTUS... you are left SOL and then are expected to go savage and have to be suppressed under martial law.

See how that works?

That is not a system to enhance liberty and freedom, but one created to maintain power over you, not look to you as the source of power and legitimacy.  The most chilling thing I heard was the director of FEMA saying it had the job of 'protecting our way of life'.  I'm sorry, but that is the job of the citizenry and the citizenry is the creator of a way of life, and when its government fails it then continuing on in the old way of life that led to disaster is a non-starter.  If the old way of life produces disaster, then any government seeking to sustain it is not legitimate and not dealing with realities and not seeking the assent of the people as the legitimizer of that power.  Stepping in after a wide-spread failure of government leading to disaster has one result: Sovereign States.  The legitimacy of government shifts to the more local government and if the State government fails then we are in Hamilton's Federalist No. 26:

Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature them for execution. An army, so large as seriously to menace those liberties, could only be formed by progressive augmentations; which would suppose not merely a temporary combination between the legislature and executive, but a continued conspiracy for a series of time. Is it probable that such a combination would exist at all? Is it probable that it would be persevered in, and transmitted along through all the successive variations in a representative body, which biennial elections would naturally produce in both houses? Is it presumable that every man the instant he took his seat in the national Senate or House of Representatives would commence a traitor to his constituents and to his country? Can it be supposed that there would not be found one man discerning enough to detect so atrocious a conspiracy, or bold or honest enough to apprise his constituents of their danger? If such presumptions can fairly be made, there ought at once to be an end of all delegated authority. The people should resolve to recall all the powers they have heretofore parted with out of their own hands, and to divide themselves into as many States as there are counties in order that they may be able to manage their own concerns in person.

You don't have to be a conspirator to create the conditions of an over-extended military or a government that seeks to impose its will into every facet of daily life.  In this case it is easy to substitute unbridled government in the place of the military and come up with the same formula and result and you don't even need a conspiracy to do it.  Indeed what you need is the belief that laws are forever, that government must continually grow and never recede, and that power devolves downward and is not granted upward.  All of this done out in the open, often with great fan-fare, claiming that government can take care of part of your retirement, or help you in finding that first house to buy, or watch over markets that you should be keeping an eagle's eye upon.   This claim can fairly be made and even demonstrated in our modern times.  Alexander Hamilton proposes that in the event of the disaster of government seeking to impose its will upon the people, that the power to deal with that is not at the State level, but at the county level, the local level.  The US Constitution holds the sweetened condensed version of this in Art. I, Sec. 10, Clause 3, but here Alexander Hamilton points out that if the government failure is wide enough, deep enough and thorough enough, that the only answer is to end the delegation of authority upward and reclaim it at the most local of level possible.

Still, if something like the scenario of an EMP destroying the electronic infrastructure of the eastern US did happen... you have a large number of States involved, at least 23-24 and possibly up to as many as 26-28.  Out of 50.  The federal government, by not helping the States and citizenry to prepare, by not informing the citizenry of what necessary preparations would be and what the likelihood of such an attack would be, would be delinquent in its responsibilities to the States and the citizens.  By not having effective counter-measures, interceptors (and the scenario really does posit something an AEGIS vessel should be able to handle) nor even being able to identify the actor(s) involved, has failed in other, subsidiary duties and directly granted powers to it.

How much has the US government told you about EMP attacks?  How has it helped you to prepare for them? I can name a list of things that can and most likely will happen to North America that the US federal government can't handle and they are just natural disasters.  Yet FEMA isn't prepared for any of them.  It can't handle a good sized large hurricane, yet that is its supposed duty, at which it fails even with small events like tornadoes ruining small towns.  And yet its job is to 'protect our way of life' and that way of life is currently in a dark, dismal failure mode because it refuses to recognize that you are the greatest mover and protector of your own life and that self-government is the most secure and best of all governments as it requires self-restraint.  It has failed on that score and continues to fail on that, continuously.

It isn't the people who are endangering the legitimacy of government at this point, it is the government, itself.  A COOP plan to continue a failure is failure and the promotion of failure as a good thing.  It isn't.  It will kill you if you don't prepare for it.  And failure on such absolute terms delegitimizes the concept: if it was restricted to just protecting the physical US territory then, yes, the President needs to be safeguarded.  The rest?  Elected officials and then appointed officials with an unelected bureaucracy.  The COOP plan for that sort of thing is damned simple: help the States as they request it, ensure that free elections can be held and then find out what the NEW way of life is from people who have gone on a 'back to basics' course across a wide geographic area.  If you can't do that, then you are not backing legitimacy of citizenship and the citizenry to guide their own affairs but seeking to impose a 'way of life' on them that bears little or no relationship to the actual real world circumstances.  Those people in such a disaster-ridden State not only deserve to be free and independent, they have earned it via the lackluster federal system that hasn't supported them and treated them as subjects or slaves and failed in essential duties granted to it.  If we ever got a CONUS EMP or a global CME, then the US just might not be a single Nation any longer but something much closer to a league of confederacies of Free States.

You can have a republic if you can keep it.

Doing that requires paring down the federal government and picking up the slack on your end.  That is non-negotiable to retaining freedom and liberty as well.  Want a United States to be preserved?  Then prepare for disaster and hold government accountable to its misdeeds as no one can do this for you.

Misrule and privacy

Do you have a fundamental right to privacy?

That is to ask: do you have the fundamental right to have freedom and liberty in your movement, your personal information, your associates,  and your transactions without being watched over by government?  In the US there is an exception for being suspected of a crime and requiring a judge to issue a warrant to gather information on you, and that is only for a criminal investigation.  Roe v. Wade ruled that a woman had a right to privacy and that came from the 'emanations' and 'penumbra' of the US Constitution, not solidly rooting it in Amendments IX and X.  Your privacy, which is to say your freedom to conduct lawful business without the scrutiny of government and to have liberty in your own lawful affairs, is rooted in Amendments IX and X, not on the SCOTUS ruling of Roe v. Wade

Today we have two major sections of the US federal government that does not believe in your fundamental right to privacy and feel free to intrude on your affairs, capture data about you and do with it what they please:  DoJ and NSA.  Actually, the IRS has now demonstrated its want for your medical information to run Obamacare and has already seized medical records of millions of US citizens without their knowing about it.  In collecting this information without due process procedures in open court available for public scrutiny, the US government has, in fact, decided that you are subjects and no longer citizens.  Eric Holder's positions as Attorney General of the US is that you have no privacy in your e-mail or online activities, and yet you don't see him ready to put forward the entire DoJ archives of e-mail and traffic records that flow through the Internet from all the parts of DoJ.  Not all of it revolves around criminal investigation and mere administrative e-mails, which is to say procedural and fiduciary e-mails, should be open to the public on demand if AG Holder really means what he says.

Instead you are supposed to be transparent to the government and the government is to be opaque to you, the subject because you have not done the things necessary to remain a citizen.

Now if you think the NSA capture of metadata is benign and can explain why the NSA needs more record space than can hold the entire history of mankind, to date, up to five times over then may I ask: why?  Are you made more or less secure by this activity?  More importantly, if and when government uses such information to malign purposes, say quelling political discontent by some power hungry group or cabal, is your liberty secured or threatened by this data capture?

Do hold that thought for the exact, same question can be asked about the domestic wiretap information garnered by DoJ and your financial and medical records held by the IRS.  Are you safer in your possessions, your effects, your ability to travel, which is to say your freedom and liberty to exercise it as you will with this or without it?  Not just for today, mind you, but in a worst case scenario of malign government deciding to prosecute past crimes that they decree illegal now, because they no longer feel restrained by the US Constitution and are going to be quite able to create ex-post facto laws and then pull up records to see who has to be rounded up.  Data collection is only about today when it is restricted to case work that must start from scratch and the public record.  Yet, in silence, the government has decided that we are all future criminals, and that no one is secure from its scrutiny, ever.

Let us change venue for a moment and go to the Google Glasses and HUD developments of other groups that is starting up in the last six months to a year.  This is Gen Zero of these devices which will augment your reality by offering you a computer display on the inside of glasses to help you better understand the world.  No matter how stylish they become, they are an artifact of on-line use and technology and there are good real world uses to them.  Add in a cell phone connection on-demand and there you have the NSA and DoJ ready to collect your data queries along with your GPS position, and timestamp.  What you want, when you want it and where you want it are now all available metadata to them, and you have decided to write it off.  Isn't that grand?

What would you want out of such a system?

High Definition overlays?  Easily done by installing a camera either at the bridge section over the nose or, if you want 3D object recognition, one each at the base of the arms so you get stereo vision and 3D capability.

Virtual Real World Synthesis?  This is where the cameras on your device begin to automatically filter resolution for re-display either with semi-transparent lenses or meshing up the virtual and real world together for display on the inside of the glasses.

Active object and face recognition?  Boy won't this be handy to call up the publicly shared data on individuals and items, huh?  Never a bad date... and that stalker will be able to figure out if you are armed or not.  Good job, that!  Always easier to target the unarmed than the armed, you know.

Active tracking of finances in real time?  Handy at the store and probably a Version 1 or 2 item to let you find out the UPC code information and maybe look for competitive pricing before you go shopping.  Add in an on-line inventory system and you can even know if you should go to a store or not, based on what you want.  Mind you, they capture that query information and may only make that available to their 'special customers' who agree to give up their shopping habits at that store chain to them.  Which is then sold in bulk to marketers who accumulate all your 'special' purchase information together to more readily target you with ads, on the fly, and to help you 'decided' in favor of certain products and services.  Handy, huh?

Photo and Video Capture?  Full HD resolution photos and video capture, at least locally to start but for those who love streaming this stuff to your FB or other social media account, now your friends will always know where you are, what you are doing, with whom, where you go and how long you stayed there.  Heck, a bit of hacking and they can know how much you spent, too.   Even create a full 3D image of your body, clothed and unclothed!  Just like the TSA!

Cellphone is a given.  Add in a couple of small aural conducting speakers to vibrate your skull so you can hear stuff and maybe wrap the arms a bit around the ears to get microphones close to the mouth with some data augmentation to clear up your voice, and you now have full data capture of what you do.  The cellphone system may become a bit strapped, but there is plenty of spectrum left over from the demise of the old broadcast TV just sitting out there.  I'm sure all of that can be pressed into service in no time at all, legally or otherwise.

Expect all of that in the 5 to 15 year time horizon.

You couldn't live without your cellphone, right?

And as you don't give a flying whoop about government data capture for them, then you certainly won't mind government knowing all of that information I've just outlined, right?

If you want a National Sales Tax, just imagine how easy THAT would be to implement and NOT even require the seller to get it: they can charge you on your purchases DIRECTLY without any of that messy privacy stuff because you signed it away.  Why bother with a middle-man when you can just grab that information DIRECTLY FROM YOU CONSTANTLY.  By giving the government the power to tax individual purchases it is given a reason to collect that data.  And why do it on the bulk side when you can get far more in revue AFTER the mark-up has been put in place?

And finances are not even the start of it.

Messy divorce?  Those details will now never go away because of social media.  Have a lover on the side... and how short a time is it until that is found out?  Paternity test shows that the husband is not the father?  Spend too much?  Spend too much time with friends and neglect your children?  Pregnant?  Every argument that is captured by these devices will be put up for constant reminder to you of your past.  They will not go away.

This will be wonderful for exercise!  Your doctor and the IRS can see just how much of it you do, when you do it, how often and what you do.  Sex, too, of course since that is mere exercise, you know?  What is your favorite position?  How often?  How much?  And if you forgot and kept those glasses where they can see what you are doing, then, really, its your fault, right?

Your private life?  Gone.  And that is if, and only if, you do nothing today to not just celebrate Independence but to BE Independent.

I have a couple of cellphones in the Faraday Cage.  Pay a fee to make sure I can get some connection in the case of a disaster if there are any surviving cell phone towers or at least ones that are powered up and working.  They are a few years old.  I don't use them for non-emergency purposes and I live without them.

Beyond these blogs and a couple of places I sometimes leave commentary, I have no social media connection or contacts.  Period.  No FB, no Twitter, no LI, and that is fully and completely intentional. I keep a public e-mail account by a compromised company, the same one you are reading this from, BTW.  Always glad to use the enemy's tools against them. 

Yes conservatives should be utilizing social media.  I am no conservative.

If you saw the movie Minority Report, you have a sense of how this is going, outside of the putative storyline there are the surroundings of the characters that must be taken into account.  Advertising that is always addressing itself to you as you go through malls, along sidewalks, indeed everywhere there is a camera there is a means to follow and contact you.  Luckily you will be carrying the necessary tracking devices with you in your brand new HUD Mark X!

I cannot live and get the necessary tools for being Independent without making on-line purchases.  You can spin-up real quickly by doing so.  Getting tools, fasteners, raw materials, equipment and the rest of it is done much faster via those channels and doing without them slows up a process that I do not have years to do.  Minimal exposure is about the best I can accomplish.  This isn't the 1970's or 1980's or 1990's, but the 21st century.   This is no longer an era where privacy can be assumed but must be protected actively, by you, against all intrusions no matter how seemingly benign they disguise themselves as for you to agree to them.

And if life extension continues on at its current rate, this sort of thing will not leave you, forever.  No matter if you turn over a new leaf, the moment you do that is recorded.  Your first instance of failure is recorded.  Everything you do, say, purchase, talk to, and every movement you make will be recorded.  At that point you are no longer a citizen nor subject, but a lab rat who is no longer a person, no longer an individual, but just a collection of data to be devoured by companies and government.  Your pluses and minuses as a person all get recorded constantly because you agree to it and actively want it.  You will even pay for it.

Yes, yes indeed you will pay for it.

Forever.

I will do my best to live to the attitude of The Prisoner:

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.

My life is my own.

I am a free man.

Are you?

What policy in Syria?

Lee Smith notes at The Weekly Standard that Obama's Syria policy is a mess.

I'll go further: Obama doesn't have a policy on Syria.

If we had a policy of doing nothing, we would be doing nothing and Obama would be saying a lot about it.  Instead there is silence.

We have armed the 'rebels' with MANPADs, of course.  Part of the Benghazi debacle that wound up with our Ambassador and 3 others dead was that the US was supporting the transfer of MANPADs from Libya to the Syrian 'rebels' via Turkey.  So there was that policy, which fell flat on its face.  That was the outcome of the Libyan 'policy' which spread al Qaeda and arms into northern Africa with predictable results.  Apparently no one has a real stomach for that sort of outcome with a WMD armed Syria. 

Imagine chemical weapons use spreading through the Middle East by an al Qaeda victorious 'rebel' faction if Obama follows the Libyan policy.

Grand, huh?

So Russia and Iran are backing the Assad regime.

Various others are backing the 'rebels', which are basically al Qaeda backed terrorists and a few renegade military regime members.

And Obama's policy?

You don't really want to back the WMD toting and using Assad.

The rebels aren't what you would call 'westernized' or seeking 'a modern democracy'.

Thus Obama has trouble saying who he would back and why.

So here's an idea that fits with the American tradition and lets you know we have done something, without having to put boots on the ground.

The regime is armed.

The 'rebels' are armed.

The general population is defenseless and unarmed by and large.

It seems that there is one group that really needs protecting that could do a great job on their own if only they had weapons...

The typical US solution?  Arm the population.

A well armed society is a polite society, no?  I mean after the petty tyrants and hot heads get killed off, things get real polite.

That is a viewpoint, of course, and biased on the idea that one's Natural Rights should be backed and that the right to Keep and Bear Arms is fundamental to a civil society, personal defense and liberty for the individual.

Using that the general policy would be: buy up every black market AK-47 on the planet (they go for about $150 used on the black market and are a loss leader), purchase all the surplus ammo (7.62 x 39) that you can get your hands on, photocopy Arabic instruction manuals (French and English to, come to that) and then start airdropping these in cases to every farmhouse, every village, every tent you can get off of satellite.  Leave an additional message that when an area declares itself OPEN and FREE OF THE REGIME AND THE REBELS that more arms and ammo will be airdropped when you leave a BIG SIGN on a nearby hillside or painted on rooftops of SEND MORE, PLEASE.  More or less weekly.

This will:

1) Drain the small arms black market of AK-47s, which has been a big objective of nearly every major power for decades.  Ask Ollie North for help, he can point you to black market arms dealers.

2) It will put a run on AK ammo.  Sorry, that is the way the cookie crumbles.  This is generally a good thing, though, as the regime will be well supplied with 7.62 x 39 and so will the rebels as the AK platform is Russian backed and ubiquitous to any insurgency.  The locals should be able to get more ammo with a few thousand rounds per weapon to start with.  It becomes self-sustaining when rebels or the regime attack such areas with boots on the ground.

3) It breaks up the logjam in Syria no end. The Kurds in Syria have been getting arms from someone (not the US as that would be a rational thing to do, and not the Iraqi government, either, as they are PO'd that this is happening), so with a lot of local reinforcements there should be some fracturing of Syria with a possible aim to creation of a Lesser Kurdistan or a Greater Iraq.  That will distract Iran no end as these areas are generally Sunni in nature, which will change the power balance in the Middle East.

4) It will horrify the Turks as they are backing the 'rebels'.  Sorry, that's payback for what you did with us before OIF.  Obama can point out he is saving them money because it costs a lot to be a part of NATO and the EU.  And sorry about the Kurds getting restless again in Turkey, but, you know, Post World War I treaties and all that.  International Law.  The US didn't sign on to shafting the Kurds.

5) The Left has been so hot about arming those without arms in so many Red areas that it isn't funny.  All under the verbiage of saving 'the people' of a country.  So when you do that directly they will COMPLAIN and it can be pointed out that this is what they have called out for in the past that it isn't funny.  Obama should be good at that, tweaking his old pals and saying that this is the sort of thing they ASKED FOR NOW ISN'T IT?  He's just being ideologically consistent... yeah, as if he had an ideology beyond screw everyone.  But the Left hasn't been well screwed yet and their time is just about here for Obama.  The Royal Shaft of the BOGU group.

6) Obama can jaw about how innocents need to be able to protect themselves against tyrants and terrorists!  And they are Islamic to boot!  America befriends Muslims! Heh.

No this will never happen as it would take a conniving, back-stabbing, double-crossing Lefitst to do this.

Say, wait, don't we have one of those in the White House?

Boy wouldn't that be a great distraction from the NSA, IRS, spy and intimidate YOU policy?  Now people would have something to complain about as he would be FOR gun control at home, but against it abroad.  What a commotion that would cause to try and distract YOU from the spying on YOU scandal and the Amnesty Illegals to Fundamentally Screw YOU legislation that the dipsticks Upon the Hill want to pass to screw YOU over Royally.

Pure and utter chaos would be the result.

Seems that is what Obama wants, no?

So just offering a friendly tip to the President on how to bring it about.

Get a new policy for Syria Mr. President.

Arm the general population.

The "Let Them Figure It Out" policy.

Or the "Lets you and them and those others fight" policy.

Relatively cheap, barely topping a couple of billion which is, what, all the vacations and golf trips the President has taken, combined?  Very cheap as these things go.  Probably has that floating around as excess in someone's budget.  Foreign policy is the President's domain and we aren't actually entering INTO a war, just supplying Humanitarian Aid.  Because the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is a fundamental Human right in need of aid now, isn't it?

This is better than the policy we have.

Because we don't have one.

And, really, do you want to arm al Qaeda backed 'rebels' who love to terrorize the people of Syria?  Haven't they suffered enough under the Assads?  How about letting them have a say in things for once? And you don't even need to 'Nation Build' as you're letting the locals figure out how to do that on their lonesome.  And we get to PO Putin, Iran, al Qaeda, Assad, Hezbollah... wouldn't that be fun?  And they couldn't even complain that we were supplying sophisticated arms, training or much of anything else beyond old fashioned 'vintage' and used AK-47s.  And the Black Market arms dealers will love you until they realize that the US has just made the AK-47 the most expensive small arms to deploy in mass quantities because we bought them all and redistributed them to Syria.  And I do mean every single one that can be purchased by that route: clean out the inventory.  Lock, stock and barrel.  Then start in on the AK-74s.

A well armed people form a polite society.

Want a good outcome in Syria?

Arm the people of Syria to the teeth so that when anyone says anything bad about someone else, the result is immediate and lethal.

Those that are left are polite.

And maybe a bit trigger happy, given, but that gets you that polite society.

Arm them all.  Let them figure it out as WE SURE AS HELL CAN'T.

Ideology of Tyranny

Recently I've looked at how Russia has moved from a Communist State to a Police State run by the secret police.  This shift from totalitarianism via political ideology derived from Marx to one derived from the pure use of power is one that is a direct flow, culturally, in Russia dating back to the early Czars all the way to Vladimir Putin.  The horror of such a regime isn't in its biased enforcement of laws to keep a regime elite in power, but in the violation of the social compact with those that merely try to enforce an equality of law upon all citizens.  That is the End Game Against Freedom article that centers on a film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Poisoned by Polonium.  Litvinenko attempted to simply put down a moral basis to do his job of law enforcement so that the law could be upheld in a neutral manner.  This was inside the FSB, the secret police organization that traces its roots directly back to the Cheka of the Czars, and he had an entire unit of men who also viewed with horror the things they were being asked to do to keep the regime in power: harass citizens, extort money from businessmen, plant evidence, use blackmail on judges, and even murder those who had the temerity to simply want a common law enforced for everyone.  Not only was the man they were going after inside the police, but he upheld an ideological point of view that Litvinenko's unit was in agreement with.  The men of the unit went on record as to what they had been ordered to do, who ordered them to do it, and why they thought they had been given such orders.  By revealing that the secret police, as individuals and units, had their own, separate funding garnered by extortion and blackmail of businesses, this unit had exposed how a secret police can act secretly even to its own budget to the enrichment of the police officers involved.  From Alexander Litvinenko:

Everyone realizes I don't know any secrets.  The only secrets I know are about organized crime and corruption, and they can't legally be considered state secrets.  Even if I wanted to work for British intelligence, I have nothing to tell them.  How can I be a traitor to my country?

Why are they so angry with me?

Because I have spoken about the one thing that is important, holy to them.  One officer said to me, "You can out all our agents, to hell with them.  We'll recruit new ones.  But you did one deadly thing.  You made public our system of earning money.  Do you want us to use the underground?"

That is why they hate me so much.

In any normal society this would be the activity of organized crime, but in Russia there is a political blending between the FSB and organized crime: between the State and criminals. I went over that in A taste of Oil For Food and its chefs, and it works out like this:  Marc Rich (the man who was on the run from FBI prosecution and who would be pardoned by President Clinton at the behest of Eric Holder) ran in a predatory investment environment so that he was willing to invest in places where there were either sanctions against investing or steep penalties for doing so, so that he could make money off of troubled regions of the world.  Russia, just in the post-USSR period, was very troubled in that it had no foreign cash reserves and its industrial base had no owners and no way to run things.  Organized crime in Russia had cash, and so did Marc Rich and together they were able to get legislation put in place that would allow criminal money to be used for purchasing ex-State run industries.  From that there were three types of owners for these businesses at the start of modern Russia: the State, Organized Crime, and corrupt outside investors.  This is a pattern from Marc Rich of finding raw materials concerns in foreign Nations that have limited access to markets via sanctions, purchasing those goods at a pittance, and then working those black market goods into the grey and open markets.  In Russia this was augmented by a process of 'tolling' which was exchanging goods from the USSR for cash, and not having any taxes to pay for the importation of any other goods.

When dealing with sums involved in such transactions the banking system must be used, and it was (and still is) relatively porous to criminal funds moving through the global financial system. In my article on the Red Mafia and its connectivity, I outline how the Bank of New York was penetrated by at least one organization of the Red Mafia (and because it still has not been thoroughly investigated, no one can say for sure just what the current extent of the penetration actually is nor how many organizations have penetrated it) that was moving $70 billion worth of funds and transactions over a period of years between other Nations and Russia.  Most of that was for Oligarchs, yes, but there are definite tracks that lead to an outfit run by the Chernoy brothers, who used the unique method of not being computerized and having one brother with an eidetic memory to remember where all the paper front companies were.  Literally no one working inside their main front organization actually suspected that the transactions that were taking place were between off-shore companies stood up just for the length of the transaction and then dissolved soon thereafter.  Without a paper trail, no one can be prosecuted, and that unique approach means that just how much illicit money through drug running, extortion overseas, white slavery and murder for hire went through the system is unknown.  What can be said is that one large swindle involving Semion Mogilevich in the YBM Magnex scandal netted $1 billion over its 4 years of operation in cornering the permanent magnet market via illegal trades.  Note that this was the Canadian market that was penetrated by a Russian operation started by a Red Mafia leader in Virginia, USA, with funds then being funneled through the penetrating group of the Bank of New York in NYC and then filtered out to Cypress, where Mogilevich had a holding company, and then filtered into Russia to support his organized crime syndicate that stretched all the way from Moscow to China.

This puts the life and times of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (from Khodorkovsky a documentary by Cyril Tuschi ), which I went through in End of the moral State, into fine focus.  The USSR had no banks, no one had a checking or savings account, nor credit cards, nor owned stock or bonds in companies.  Yet the Red Mafia had been dealing with capitalist regions for decades, faced brutal repression in the USSR and became far more brutal because of the repression.  Khodorkovsky saw the need for a banking system in Russia if it was to make a post-Communist transition, but knew little of what banks were, what they did or how they operated.  Those few with any cash standing up Menatap Bank had to go to Great Britain's banking industry for help on just the basics, and that also led to problems in those early days of keeping track of just where funds were coming from.  Surely funds coming from a well established, well known Western global banking system were secure, right?

Yet that was not the case and Menatap suffered because it was becoming known as a conduit for funds that was not transparent, did not keep open books and was suspected of helping to funnel organized crime funds into Russia.  This was the result as seen from Irina Yasina journalist who worked with Khodorkovsky to help establish his education works and who was the director of Open Russia:

At some point, Yukos was also a non-transparent company.  Minority shareholders were treated badly and no quarterly reports were submitted, like in the West.  That's what it was like in the beginning. After a series of scandals, Khodorkovsky understood:  If you make a company transparent, you attract investment.  He learned from his mistakes and knew this would also make money.  So it was actually a business project.

What happened is that Mikhail Khodorkovsky learned the basis for a capitalist system:  open books and transparency of accounts.  This would wind him up in Siberia, now having his sentence extended by the Putin regime for a third time because he was running an organization that could no longer be extorted for funds.  Both Menatap and Yukos would demonstrate that the fundamental requirement for a working capitalist system is open accounting, transparency and equal application of the law to all businesses with favoritism towards none.  This changed the course of Khodorkovsky's life and businesses from those that were not transparent with few willing to invest, to ones with open transparency and books and loads of investors.  Going from nothing to the richest man under 40 on the planet in less than a decade can be done legally, and Khodorkovsky proved it.  If he had not actually pushed back against the corrupt politicians put in place by the FSB, he would now be the richest man on planet Earth.

What did he run up against?

Again from the Litvinenko film:

In our country, the special services are, in fact, a secret political organization that uses sharp methods, secret methods, not against spies and terrorists, but solely to keep a ruling class in power.  In 1999, for example, to seize power, the FSB used secret methods that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.  If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns and fly in with jets maybe.  But everyone would notice. The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods, and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government and seized every organ of power.  If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party, then the FSB is the armed unit of – of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.

In the USA, Congress has been willing to hand over more and more policing powers not just to individual agencies (which they are allowed to do) but to larger police organizations which now fall under the Dept. of Justice rubric.  Further the tax collection system has also garnered not only its own policing powers but its own court system, which is run to the interest of collecting taxes, not protecting individual rights and freedoms.  Under the guise of 'financial penalties' Congress has empowered the IRS to use both jail time and punitive fines as coercement techniques and that has now spread via special 'categories' of companies to allow the forceful hand of the elite to put pressure on citizen political concerns.  If the IRS were to seize power by disenfranchisement of individuals through: suppression of freedom of speech,  suppression of freedom of association, intimidation tactics against not just those wishing to start companies but their families, donors and families of donors, discourage the citizen's protected right to directly address government, and then hold the penalty of perjury over any wrong detail... would you notice?

This coercion and intimidation did not start with the election of Barack Obama, no this had started long before that.  Long before Richard Nixon threatened to do this.  Coming from The Federalist #12 (Courtesy: constitution.org) by Alexander Hamilton we get this view on taxation after looking at wartime taxation:

But it is not in this aspect of the subject alone that Union will be seen to conduce to the purpose of revenue. There are other points of view, in which its influence will appear more immediate and decisive. It is evident from the state of the country, from the habits of the people, from the experience we have had on the point itself, that it is impracticable to raise any very considerable sums by direct taxation. Tax laws have in vain been multiplied; new methods to enforce the collection have in vain been tried; the public expectation has been uniformly disappointed, and the treasuries of the States have remained empty. The popular system of administration inherent in the nature of popular government, coinciding with the real scarcity of money incident to a languid and mutilated state of trade, has hitherto defeated every experiment for extensive collections, and has at length taught the different legislatures the folly of attempting them.

And then further on:

In France, there is an army of patrols (as they are called) constantly employed to secure their fiscal regulations against the inroads of the dealers in contraband trade. Mr. Neckar computes the number of these patrols at upwards of twenty thousand. This shows the immense difficulty in preventing that species of traffic, where there is an inland communication, and places in a strong light the disadvantages with which the collection of duties in this country would be encumbered, if by disunion the States should be placed in a situation, with respect to each other, resembling that of France with respect to her neighbors. The arbitrary and vexatious powers with which the patrols are necessarily armed, would be intolerable in a free country.

In the modern USA all attempts to garner more and more money for government by taxation has found that after a certain point the increases become detractions to revenue generation, as was demonstrated by Art Laffer.  Yet tax regulation has gone inexorably upwards, more and more power over personal information is vested in the IRS, and it now has an army of agents willing to roam the land to enforce its own form of political viewpoint AND use arbitrary and capricious audits against not just businesses but individuals as well to both garner revenue and suppress speech.  And as the IRS is the agency put in to the role of collecting your medical information under Obamacare, the inroads and reach of the US federal government into the lives of individuals is about to increase many fold.

This, too, was seen by Hamilton:

What will be the consequence, if we are not able to avail ourselves of the resource in question in its full extent? A nation cannot long exist without revenues. Destitute of this essential support, it must resign its independence, and sink into the degraded condition of a province. This is an extremity to which no government will of choice accede. Revenue, therefore, must be had at all events. In this country, if the principal part be not drawn from commerce, it must fall with oppressive weight upon land. It has been already intimated that excises, in their true signification, are too little in unison with the feelings of the people, to admit of great use being made of that mode of taxation; nor, indeed, in the States where almost the sole employment is agriculture, are the objects proper for excise sufficiently numerous to permit very ample collections in that way. Personal estate (as has been before remarked), from the difficulty in tracing it, cannot be subjected to large contributions, by any other means than by taxes on consumption. In populous cities, it may be enough the subject of conjecture, to occasion the oppression of individuals, without much aggregate benefit to the State; but beyond these circles, it must, in a great measure, escape the eye and the hand of the tax-gatherer. As the necessities of the State, nevertheless, must be satisfied in some mode or other, the defect of other resources must throw the principal weight of public burdens on the possessors of land. And as, on the other hand, the wants of the government can never obtain an adequate supply, unless all the sources of revenue are open to its demands, the finances of the community, under such embarrassments, cannot be put into a situation consistent with its respectability or its security. Thus we shall not even have the consolations of a full treasury, to atone for the oppression of that valuable class of the citizens who are employed in the cultivation of the soil. But public and private distress will keep pace with each other in gloomy concert; and unite in deploring the infatuation of those counsels which led to disunion.

The wants of any government can only be met by totalitarian excesses of control of all parts of the economy: and yet even that will not fund it nor will it guarantee security and, in failing that, it will lose respect and support.

In Russia the secret police (Cheka, KGB, FSB) gained control by infiltrating all levels of law, and then moving into politics to control all levels of the economy.  Taxation plays only a small role in Russia where the population has never had a democratic expression of the popular will without the influence of the elite or organized crime, when the two can be told apart from each other.  Vladimir Putin swindled St. Petersburg, Russia of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in what was supposed to be a goods for food arrangement with Western Europe.  The goods went out and he pocketed the cash, and formed a money laundering bank that then reached out to the Colombian cartels.  With that personal money he was then able to help push the FSB forward with political candidates directly FROM the FSB, so that the second generation of laws could be geared towards the FSB and the elite, with the FSB serving not only on the criminal apprehension and prosecution side of things, but also serving as 'advisors' to courts and judges, letting them know who to judge guilty.

In the USA we have a system of politicians using the laws to create an arm of government that reaches into the financial and now health concerns of every American and suppresses attempts by citizens to form organizations to cut all of government down to an accountable size, remove broad powers from unaccountable agencies and their agents, all while trying to keep out of a court system run by and for those same agencies and agents.  On the DoJ side there are abuses of power under the rubric of National Security to wiretap journalists without informing those organizations they are tapping of who they are tapping and why they are tapping them and how long such taps will be used, and for what purposes as is required by law.  Further the DoJ goes 'judge shopping' to find a judge who will sign off on such open-ended, clandestine wiretaps, all to try and find out who the sources for a journalist are when that journalist is exercising First Amendment rights.

That same DoJ is given oversight on running the BATFE and then abusing that privilege by sending unaccountable arms to organized crime across the border and even overseas, without using proper IMEX treaty controls to do so, thus contravening not just federal law but international law as agreed to by the USA and places like Mexico and Honduras.  Those arms then filter back into the USA via those criminal organizations, and has led to the death of Brian Terry and other federal agents inside the USA.  This is only surpassed by the State Dept. running arms to other organized crime organizations in Mexico, moving Libyan MANPADs to 'rebels' in Syria affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda and then not bothering to protect Ambassador Stevens when the same jihadi-based organizations we got to protect him then turned on him, thus obscuring just which arms were shipped into and out of Libya and by whom.

Apparently there is another group of elites in the world who see fit to use the government of the USA and its organs against the people of America and who then create disorder overseas via US federal agencies and organs to their own ends which are neither legal nor lawful in any way, shape or form.

Do note that this is caused by both parties in the USA, over a number of decades and slowly built to control not just the lives of American Citizens, but to bring to heel multiple Nations through different means via the utilization of corrupt politicians with the Ideology of Tyranny.

What is that Ideology of Tyranny?

Raw power for the elites in charge to terrorize the lives of the common man on all corners of the Earth.

You can see it in small scale in Russia.

It is about to be on your doorstep and the doorstep of billions of people across the globe.

The only thing to stop it is each of us being awake, pointing out the outlines of such Tyranny, and continuing the civil discourse until the Tyrants can't take it any longer.  Then comes our Natural Right to protect ourselves, our loved ones, our property and our society against the inroads of such Totalitarianism.

And, just so you know, the best form of attack to bring the Tyrants of the world up short: humor, derision, and just pointing out how damned stupid they are to think that power, control and force actually make THEM safe.  There are plenty of fine examples of elites with lopped off heads, spilled guts, sudden attempts to fly out of 10 story windows, and just plain old numbers on their backs so they can be worked to death by the thing they create.  In their attempts to make everyone heel to them, they always forget to heel themselves to any inner guidance beyond all consuming power.  All consuming power consumes all, including those doing the holding.  Laugh at them for their willful ignorance of history, deride them in thinking that a necessary evil can be given good things to do and not become a pure evil, and that societies are created amongst men and governments mere temporary things used to help sustain society and that when government attempts to become society it becomes its own enemy and will soon be attacking itself.

You can't ask Litvinenko about that.

You might get a word from Khodorkovsky.

And you might just want to physically write down that you will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.

Your life is your own.

And smile when you do it.

Tyrants hate those who smile in freedom.

It will make you a target, but soon, very soon, the targets will all be pointing in at the elites.  When everyone else is the target, then you aren't in a good situation because it is you that are the violent one and it is you that are in the 10 ring: target all others and you become the target.

And that day is also coming.

Obamacare train wreck and you

Commentary I left at Hot Air on Harry Reid suddenly realizing that the Obamacare system he helped to connive into being isn't solvent, needs way more cash and won't do what it was purported as its actual points of being... but it is a sinkhole of cash that is vast and black in the budget.  Just like SSA and the M&Ms and other entitlements.  The question is: what to do about it.

The answer is simple and I've repeated it often in many ways, but here it is, again for this question:

Same answer to Obamacare as to the rest of the federal government:

Start in the House… fund by agency… don’t fund some agencies fully or use funding towards other programs and leave Obamacare high and dry.

There are a ton of programs you can kill by not funding them.

Just because a prior Congress wants it doesn’t mean a current Congress is obliged to fund it. There is no law against not funding these things, none at all. This requires a wholesale change of the R party in the House, particularly the sclerotic leadership. Obama can’t stop the House from not funding items, only keep on sending the bills back TO fund parts of agencies. If he wants to kill off some government agencies by killing their funding: LET HIM DO IT VIA THE VETO.

And then THANK HIM to rub salt in the wounds.

Would he really not want to sign off on a downsized IRS? And to put the IRS FIRST to set the tone. Then HHS. Then FDA.

You want this to happen? Then the House Republican ‘we have to fund everything other Congresses started’ contingent MUST GO. There is no law that says they MUST DO THAT. One Congress cannot bind another Congress via legislation and since the House holds the purse strings, it is there that fiscal rectitude must start. Not the Senate. Not the POTUS. Not the SCOTUS. You want to get a smaller government? Start at the US House of Representatives. Want to blame someone for the deficit? Also the US House. And the Debt as well. Surely for $3.2 trillion you can run a minimal government… if the debt service payments don’t EAT IT ALL UP, of course.

That is the Obama goal to collapsing the Nation: create a debt so vast that even current revenue can’t support minimal payments.

Your Nation goes under, your currency becomes worthless, your savings disappear and no amount of POWER from DC can make that better because it CAN’T BE FUNDED ANYMORE. If we are very lucky there are two elections left before that happens. If we are unlucky there is only one. If our luck has run out, you have seen our last election as a free people.

Change doesn’t start in DC: it starts with you, holding DC accountable and telling them to ‘stop the spending’. Yes they aren’t listening there or on the compliant and submissive Left… they want a tyrant, a dictator, a despot… their freedom isn’t in question. Yours is. Act like a free man who expects government to be beholden to the people, live like a free man who expects to be held accountable for his misdeeds, and praise virtue whenever and wherever it appears and support it. You carry through the actions and you just might be able to protect your liberty and join with those who think like you to ensure them.

There is a cost to this, of course.

Your money: gone.

Your savings: gone.

Your property: ravaged and destroyed.

You: free to start over or die trying.

Remember I’m the guy in poor health who won’t survive for long if the system goes south. Yet I’m preparing for those losses as best as I can. Because my freedom is priceless beyond any value, and I am more than prepared to be impoverished to remove this system of petty tyranny of rules above law and those who think they are above any law making the rules for themselves. You can start now by pestering your Congresscritters. It won’t change them, but it will change you.

ajacksonian on May 3, 2013 at 7:11 AM

This isn't about Obamacare.

This isn't about our dysfunctional government of Progressive Elites.

It is all about you and how you live your life.

Want a better government?  Make sure you are a prepared to be a better person, first.  And help society to recover from the insane beliefs fostered by Marx and the Left for over a century about government being the source of your liberty.  It isn't.

Government is instituted amongst men.

Government does not exist first and creates man... sorry that isn't how it works.

And the best government is self-government.

Once you got that figured out, you begin to resent all these other governments trying to tell you how to live your life.  Then your choices start to become obvious and your path, simple.

End of the moral State

This is a follow-up to my previous post on End Game Against Freedom.

From the film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Poisoned by Polonium, Litvinenko in his own words:

Who is Putin?

We are told, "Wait till he's President, then you'll know."

Imagine someone becoming prime minister in Britain with people asking, "Is he a thief, or isn't he?"  The real issue here is human morality. 

And then:

In the Soviet Union, there were two ideologies: communist and criminal.  In 1991, the communist ideology died.  The criminal remained.

What did Alexander Litvinenko do to get assassinated like he did?  When an esotaric radioactive isotope is ingested then you are beyond a simple murder and now must have the resources behind you to actually plan such a killing and acquire such material which is not readily available.  That is not the hallmark of the Red Mafia, which would normally just leave you dead someplace, anyplace, perhaps in public to make an example of you.  If the criminals want you dead, you are killed.  If you are made to suffer, that takes personal and private malice above and beyond simple criminal affairs.  When you see material involved that only a Nation with nuclear capacity and the ability to get, purify and deliver a short-lived isotope is involved you are now into State-enacted murder.  That is called: assassination.

If this is the case then the crux of the matter is the knowledge he had, which everyone, even Putin, admits are not State secrets.  Litvinenko had no access to nuclear weapons or facilities and although he did serve in the military in Chechnya, he was not a high ranking officer in the command staff, but a low level tank commander.  So what is it that made him a target to be assassinated?

Putin:

Litvinenko knew no secrets.

No State secrets, true.  But there are that other sort of secret that involves the State...

Litvinenko:

Everyone realizes I don't know any secrets.  The only secrets I know are about organized crime and corruption, and they can't legally be considered state secrets.  Even if I wanted to work for British intelligence, I have nothing to tell them.  How can I be a traitor to my country?

Why are they so angry with me?

Because I have spoken about the one thing that is important, holy to them.  One officer said to me, "You can out all our agents, to hell with them.  We'll recruit new ones.  But you did one deadly thing.  You made public our system of earning money.  Do you want us to use the underground?"

That is why they hate me so much.

This system was to choose a series of private businesses and shake them down for money by threats of bringing prosecution against them.  As was explained earlier in the documentary, FSB officers are attached to courts as 'lawyers' and they serve as a conduit to inform judges what to do, either through bribes or threats of prosecution against the judge, or just through simple replacement of the judge.  Once you take a bribe, any bribe, a judge is then compromised to the FSB.  By outing such information to the public, Litvinenko became a threat and was tried for treason.  Although he had released no state secrets, only made public those things that the government officials wish kept private about how they shake down businesses.  The implication is that this goes beyond just the FSB, although that, alone would be bad enough.

There is another reason for why Litvinenko was on the hit list, and that isn't discussed in this film.  He apparently had information on the murder of Vladimir Petukhov  the mayor in Nefteyugansk.  Before his death, Litvinenko had visited Israel and Leonid Nevzlin:

Yeah, I think in a way he held the door open with us.  He visit me three months, I think it was, before he was killed.  And he left some papers about what was really, because of some blames on me, what was really under this blame.  Because he was part of KGB and, for instance, he knew from the people in the KGB of the real case of the mayor of Neftyugansk, Petukhov.  So he left his evidence, names and etcetera, and who killed Petukhov and why he was killed...

That is from Khodorkovsky a documentary by Cyril Tuschi and yet another film I recommend for those interested in liberty, freedom and morality.  A bit later in that interview Nevzlin would tell us that he passed that information on to Israeli police and Scotland Yard.  Here is an unexpected intersection between one of the oligarchs of Russia, the KGB/FSB, Putin, Litvinenko and the stark contrast between two sides of the suppression of liberty by State power.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, as the documentary examines, is an unusual case in the Russian post-USSR power struggle as he is not part of the functionaries of the State, in main the FSB, nor a part of the criminal class that infested the rule writing of the early Russian Duma.  In those early years there was a place for the type of people that Boris Berezovsky talked about with Nekrasov:

B – What a price humans have to pay for knowledge.  How hard it is to rise above the common wisdom.

N- Is it even more difficult for Russians, would you say?

B -  I know what you mean.  The Russian mentality is that of slaves. That's why the system of forced limitations is so welcome. So why then am I advocating liberalism in Russia?  Am I contradicting myself, advocating freedom for the Russians, going against the nation's character?  So, is Russia ready, which means her people ready to take up the responsibility of freedom? I think they are ready.  Because once the tyrannical dictate was lifted, millions of entrepreneurs appeared, a myriad of independent politicians and journalists appeared.  Russia turned out fully prepared for this crucial, historical step.  We only needed to move forward and consolidate that freedom.  And so my main conflict with the authorities today  is about individual independence.  All those stupidities – media controls, "vertical power" – have one result.  Destruction of freedom in the minds of Russia's citizens.

Of that new entrepreneurial class was a group that would start from the ground-up, and would attempt to actually put real capitalism into play in Russia.  Of those Mikhail Kodorkovsky is the most notable as he started with next to nothing to form a bank in Russia without even knowing how a checking account worked because there had been no banks, no checking accounts, no savings accounts, nothing like that in the USSR.  They had to ask experts in to teach them the basics of banking and they did make mistakes, but also made money as Bank Menatep was far more secure than anything else in Russia at the time, which is not to say that it was secure by Western standards as the scandals that came to it demonstrated.

Bank Menatep would also fund a bid for the Yukos oil concern, which had been a State run oil system in the USSR.  Bids from outside Russia were excluded, and while there are complaints of corruption about that it must also be asked what government would want to hand over such a large concern to foreign owners?  If a reasonable and reliable bidder inside Russia could be found then why not hand it over to them?  It was sold at a fraction of its value at $300 million, which was a huge amount in those days in Russia. 

Do remember that a few years previously there had been, effectively, $0 in Russia, and Putin's swindling of St. Petersburg via non-use of sold goods abroad was placed in its lower range at $92 million.  Yukos also had $3 billion in debt, so anyone who was purchasing it was getting a massive amount of debt and the responsibility to pay it off.  This was also in a period in which Saddam Hussein was effectively bottoming out the oil market by selling Iraqi oil far under market prices so as to depress the oil market.  Given that background and realizing that transparency was necessary for running the firm, one would have expected failure of Yukos.  Instead it succeeded, wildly, because it was a transparent, open organization that allowed public scrutiny of its affairs and transactions.

From Irina Yasina journalist who worked with Khodorkovsky to help establish his education works and who was the director of Open Russia:

At some point, Yukos was also a non-transparent company.  Minority shareholders were treated badly and no quarterly reports were submitted, like in the West.  That's what it was like in the beginning. After a series of scandals, Khodorkovsky understood:  If you make a company transparent, you attract investment.  He learned from his mistakes and knew this would also make money.  So it was actually a business project. 

And that made him rich, at one point the richest man under 40 on the planet and headed to become the richest man on the planet, period. 

If oligarchs are to be deplored, and oligarchies which they are a part of, then what about an oligarch who is setting up a template for breaking up the oligarchical system?  Khodorkovsky and the people that came to Yukos were embodying a spirit that did not see them spend on lavish estates, fast cars and the high life, but something far different.  They did live in good homes, yes, but Khodorkovsky also started funding scholarships and schools.  It is forgotten that in the early days of US capitalism there were more than Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, but also Carnegie, Ford and Westinghouse.  Even Rockefeller would start building foundations, charities and just give money away.

Cyril Tuschi:

On the advice of an American PR firm, Khodorkovsky establishes in 2000 Open Russia an organization to support education in Russia.  Khodorkovsky invests $100 million in universities, boarding schools, and training programs for journalists.

In Russia, which did not have such a foundation of moral philanthropy as we know it in the West, to find it suddenly appearing in the post-Soviet era in Russia is nothing short of astounding.  Khodorkovsky, even before he was charged with crimes under Putin's regime, had started that transformation by talking of the need for a civil society so that freedom can flourish. 

From Khodorkovsky's mother, Marina Khodorkovsky:

Education! Mischa's central idea was, that democracy doesn't trickle top down.  It has to become a necessity from the bottom up. When people start to broaden their horizons, they start to think and develop other interests.  That was his core idea.

There is a central dynamic in capitalism that is a moral one and it has to do not just with wealth but its uses.  Khodorkovsky writing from prison:

I must thank prison.  In a way I am freer here than when I was leading the company. I'm only responsible for myself, here.  Here I've come to realize that owning assets, especially large assets, does not automatically make a person free at all.  As a co-owner of Yukos, I had to expend huge amounts of energy to protect this wealth.  I had to abstain from anything that might jeopardized my wealth. I also had to impose limits on myself, because speaking openly and frankly could have harmed those assets.  I had to ignore a lot and put up with many things all for the sake of my personal wealth, to preserve it and increase it.  Not only did I control this wealth, it controlled me, as well.

These are not the words nor thoughts of a man in bed with a regime or criminal organization, but a capitalist with morals and ethics speaking about what acquired wealth does to one.  Unlike George Westinghouse, Mikhail Khodorkovsky hasn't learned the morality of ethical use of capital, but he has learned the basics that even Rockefeller had to learn: when you have so much wealth you are its prisoner as well as its owner and you are the one for your own sorry state of circumscribed freedom.  The only answer to this burden is to lessen it: Andrew Carnegie sold his entire company to J. P. Morgan, while Ford ensured of good worker pay so that they could afford to actually buy the products they made, and Westinghouse concentrated on improving the workplace, work hours, working conditions, and lives of his employees so that they could own the homes the lived in that had electricity and running water in them.

Capitalism is based on providing goods that are wanted by individuals at the lowest price possible to make a profit so as to not only sustain but increase production, while lowering costs.  If no one wanted the goods or services provided, a company would go under, and yet we, in the West, now have a corrupted banking system and industrial system where companies are supported by the State and must answer to its tune.  All in the name of 'saving' such companies that rightfully deserve to fail.  If Yukos was barely able to support itself and had huge debt, then what does it say when the company is turned around, opens its books and becomes successful?  In other words it stepped free of regime support, learned what it means to be accountable to shareholders and then did the right thing to increase its transparency to increase its business and attract more capital. 

At heart capitalism and companies are moral and ethical organizations of individuals while government is an organization of power.  When companies and governments work together it is to the detriment of the moral and ethical roots of capitalism and does nothing but make stronger the power of government over its citizens.  Contributing factory space, production time and other commodities at a low price to defend a Nation where a company resides is one thing.  To take orders from government in peace time on what to make, how to make it, how to produce it and then to kick-back money to campaigns and politicians is inherently immoral as it robs shareholders of their say in the company, and unethical as it puts those in charge of the company in the position of betraying shareholders for their own interests in a share of government power and support.  It is, in other words, fraud.

Yukos was a very wealthy company and one of the wealthiest in Russia when Putin came to power.  This from Aleksey Kondaurov, former KGB general:

The relationship between Putin and Khodorkovsky was in order.  They met regularly and discussed various issues. We had good relations with the government.  After all, the operation was really very powerful.  There was no other company like ours.  We were the country's biggest taxpayer.  We paid more taxes than Gazprom, who were bigger than us.  Which is why we had a good relationship with the secret service.

Via paying taxes, Yukos becomes something quite different than the other companies run by oligarchs who had non-transparent companies: a respected business.  Transparency, paying what you owe in taxes, paying off debt, gaining investors, and becoming rich are combined together and they cannot be separated.  Becoming rich is only a sin if it is your sole and only goal, and this was not the case with Mikhail Khodorkovsky who ensured that his business did the right things to demonstrate that it had responsibilities to attend to in the governmental affairs area via good relationships with government but also to support its civil duty to pay taxes like any good corporate citizen.  It was not there asking for special privileges, special monies, special projects or other such things in promises for political support from the company.  And the FSB, Putin's own organization, understood just who it was that was the largest taxpayer in Russia and appreciated that, respected it, save for at the very highest of ranks.

Former Yukos lawyer, Dmitry Goldlobov recounts what happened:

Putin told them: "Okay guys, stay away from politics, okay?!" And everybody agreed.  Everyone nodded and said: "Okay".  Khodorkovsky nodded as well.  He didn't say: "Dear Mr. Putin, I won't stay away from politics! I'll be just in the Duma" or something.  He agreed.  And afterwards he violated that deal.

Why?  That idea behind Open Russia: a better educated civil society with many interests and a bottom up democratic institution.  To have that sort of institution, to get to a democracy, there needs to be a competition in ideas and ideologies.  And Litvinenko already told us what remained after the USSR in the way of ideology: criminal ideology.  If Boris Yeltsin had tried to build something better but was overcome by the corrupt institutions that remained, particularly the FSB but also the infiltration of the criminal class into business and politics, then what did Vladimir Putin represent?

Litvinenko had outlined this, as well:

In our country, the special services are, in fact, a secret political organization that uses sharp methods, secret methods, not against spies and terrorists, but solely to keep a ruling class in power.  In 1999, for example, to seize power, the FSB used secret methods that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.  If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns and fly in with jets maybe.  But everyone would notice. The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods, and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government and seized every organ of power.  If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party, then the FSB is the armed unit of – of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.

If you are aware that to run an ethical concern, be it business or government, there must be transparency, and the man in charge and, indeed, the whole establishment of government, is not transparent but has a veneer of democracy on top of it, then what do you do?  Ethically you know that any agreement you make with such a government can be over-ruled by those in power at a whim.  In fact the FSB is particularly good at 'compromising' people and bringing false charges to conviction via a compromised judiciary process.  Without criminal, judicial or police help, just why would you stand by a corrupt government?  Even worse, what can you do to change it?  Khodorkovsky realized that any agreement he made with Putin was ephemeral as Putin had already been shown to be underhanded in his business and official dealings before coming to office.  A corrupt government does not gain the loyalty of ethical individuals be they citizens or corporations.

For doing this, Khodorkovsky's bank had a sanatorium, the RUS, seized by the State.  This was a good if not the best hotel in town and its seizure was rumored to be done on Putin's orders for his wife, who liked the place.  No real legal pretext was given: assets were seized without any indications of having done anything wrong.  Khodorkovsky did nothing, at first, as this was an act of raw power by the Kremlin.  Other business leaders approached Khodorkovsky to speak out about corruption in the Kremlin during their annual, televised meeting with Putin on 19 FEB 2003. Leonid Nevzlin was his business partner and summarized it like this:

Khodorkovsky was asked to bring up the topic of corruption at the Kremlin.  I remember he was unsure whether he would or not.  But it had to be done on principle.

And then Alexander Temerko, a former Yukos VP recounts:

Voloshin told Khodorkovsky: "TV will be there!  We'll instruct the stations to broadcast your speech about corruption! And Putin will definitely react in the right way."

That is charming naiveté, at best, as it must be remembered that this is the same Putin who deceived St. Petersburg, ran the KGB/FSB, worked to launder money for drug cartels in Germany and who had now taken offense that some business leader might actually be funding the opposition and responded by seizing assets using the power of the State to do so.  With those things known, and do choose just one or two before the seizure event, why would anyone expect Putin to act 'in the right way'?

From Aleksy Kondaurov, a security advisor:

At the meeting with Putin he said – and I think this sealed Khodorkovsky's fate – "We started the corruption process, so we should end it."

From Igor Yurgens, Economic Advisor to President Medvedev:

I was present at the meeting and I can tell you that, uh, uh, he handled that confrontation [?] in an arrogant manner.  To be objective I can tell you that sitting in front of the acting President accusing the President, practically, of covering up for the corruption in the State controlled oil company.  That was a little bit too much.  He could have chosen a more elegant way or less confrontational way, but what he said was true.

And part of what was said at the meeting:

Khodorkovsky - Experts from our organizations analyzed the extent of corruption in Russia and all arrived at the same figure: it is estimated at $30 billion.

Putin – You've mentioned the merger between Rosneft and Severneft.  I obviously feel that Rosneft's chairman should react to this and offer further explanation.  Although some aspects are immediately obvious: Rosneft is a state-run company which must increase its reserves.  Because these reserves simply aren't sufficient.  Some other oil companies, such as Yukos, have excessive reserves.  Yet how has Yukos achieved this?  That's a question we should discuss today. As well as payment or non-payment of taxes. We did discuss this with you previously, didn't we? Not long ago.  Your company also had difficulty paying taxes.  But respect is due to the management of Yukos – for coming to an agreement with the tax authorities – settling all claims and issues with the state.  But how were these problems created? Perhaps that is why so many people study tax law. Are you following me?  I'm hereby putting the ball back in your court.

So what is Putin's point?  Yukos, by his own admission, has paid up on its taxes and is, indeed, the largest taxpayer in Russia.  It has large reserves of oil, yes, but gained via commercial activity as he puts no other activity forward that can explain that.  Marginal tax rates are not enough to make or break expansion of reserves and if he has complaints about what prior administrations did in awarding Yukos, then why doesn't Putin want those administrations investigated?  Of course he was the head of the FSB under those administrations and if he had anything at the time, he should have spoken up.  Of course there is that matter of SPAG with Putin sitting on its board and being head of the FSB while the company was charged and convicted of money laundering for drug cartels... perhaps he had other worries at the time, eh?

What you see at work, however, is the head of a corrupt State, or soon to be head, dodging responsibility and transparency, while complaining that a transparent company that has done the right thing might be in the wrong.  If you bring up the Yukos reserves then what about Rosneft's inability to perform marginal expansion or just pay for oil on the open market, or purchase the rights from other companies to their reserves?  If there are any problems with Yukos on taxes then what about Rosneft and its main function of actually running its oil affairs competently?  This is how you cover up corruption at the State level: you blame the innocent or cast doubt on their legitimacy.  Any head of State that is pointing out all the wrongs in others, is in the process of casting them as not being upright while not addressing if he or she has the moral and ethical stature to actually accuse others of anything.  The more you hear haranguing, accusations, belittling, and bringing up past affairs that are ALREADY SETTLED, then you are hearing from someone who, themselves, have something to hide.

It is this that is the indicator of a corrupt State.  If Vladimir Putin wanted to have businesses stay out of politics then, really, the State must stay out of interfering with businesses.  The moment a State decides to wield its power to tell companies what to do or actually purchases companies to be run by the State, then the companies involved have a right, duty and obligation to protect the assets they have from their shareholders and have direct input back into the State.  This is the heart of the process of corruption and collusion between a State, any State, and its business community.  It is one thing to uphold laws of transparency of accounting, keeping good books, and being accountable to shareholders and quite another thing to impose the power of the State towards State ends on private concerns.  Russia, of course, has an entire history of just this problem, going back to the Czars and including the entire history of the USSR and now the post-Soviet era.

From this confrontation Khodorkovsky would attempt to get foreign companies, Exxon and Chevron, involved with Yukos not only to allow those companies into the Russian market but give Yukos a foothold in the American market.  He would establish a foreign outpost of Yukos in Houston, TX which would become the basis of such agreements and would also serve as a separate part of Yukos outside of Russian laws.  Of course this wouldn't do as it would make Yukos an independent, international concern.  This resulted in the arrest of Yukos leading official after Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev while he was in hospital and then whisked away to an FSB secret jail.  Isn't it wonderful when State run secret police have secret jails?  At that point Khodorkovsky started telling those close to him in the company and his family to get out of Russia because he didn't want any more hostages taken by Putin.

The State sent people to Khodorkovsky trying to extort money from him so that they would leave him alone.  But he had already seen that sort of trap: once you give money like that you are on the hook forever and they can reneg on the agreement at any time and jack up the costs on a whim.  Besides, Yukos was transparent, had regular outside audits and published those openly.  Yukos had no money to give that could not immediately be seen, and Khodorkovsky had already said that he wasn't running away from Russia as a political exile.  Yukos had paid its taxes, settled any arrears and was in good standing as a taxpaying company.  He was, in other words, not giving into the temptation of easy corruption, an easy life.  That isn't his goal any longer, but for that longer vision of an informed Russian civil society, and he knows that he will pay a price to be on that road.

Two days before his arrest giving a speech at Belgorod University, Mikhail Khodorkovsky said:

Elections alone won't build a civil society.  But it's a first step towards creating a normal state, in which it isn't merely pleasant to work, but also to live.  Let us build it together.  Thank you.

And then in a television interview on Belgorod TV the day before his arrest:

Interviewer - You were in America when your Yukos offices were searched. But you still came back to Russia.  Aren't you afraid that men with handcuffs might suddenly turn up?

Khodorkovsky – As long as our country isn't fully a civil society, nobody is safe from the people with the handcuffs.

The trial on tax evasion, itself, was a pre-determined affair run by the FSB and, ultimately, Putin.  Khodorkovky's denial for early release similar and hinged on missing a sewing class in jail, while otherwise being a model prisoner.  As his time in prison was running out Putin had him tried and convicted of other charges, stealing hundreds of millions of barrels of oil which, strangely, no one can find missing or hidden, anywhere.  Yet still he was convicted of doing the impossible.  The message was clear to those that followed Khodorkovsky's path in business or who hadn't thought that the State would reach out to seize any of the oligarchs: they fled Russia.  And who spoke out against this?

The silence from the West is deafening.

There were long standing groups working to free political dissidents in the USSR who dared speak out against the regime.  But Khodorkovsky, for all his insights into what it takes to have a civil society, gets no support.  A business man who has straightened up the ways of his company and himself, who supports a freer and more well informed society, who behaves with demonstrable morals and ethics can't get that.  Yet he did the right thing, by forming an organization with the goal of expanding the civil sphere, personally donating to schools and institutes, donating to a political opposition so that there could BE a political opposition that could get its ideas before the public.  Too bad it comes from a businessman and not some lowly transgendered artiste speaking in coffeehouses, huh?  The latter would get some press, at least.  An ethical businessman who happens to be the richest man under 40 on the planet?

Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister of Germany about what happened after the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky with respect to Khodorkovsky and then Yukos a bit later:

We had a vested interest in asking, can't we solve the Khodorkovsky issue –even after his arrest?  Can't we solve this, so that he might be released from prison? But Putin was highly emotional and totally rejected it.

[..]

It concerned the property right at Yukos.  In respect of which the international part of Yukos filed a lawsuit with a Texas court.  The question was: How can the property rights of Yukos be transferred? We had a meeting with former German Chancellor Schroder, Putin and myself – and the Russian Foreign Secretary.  And we met on this sailing ship that's permanently moored in Hamburg, "Rickmer Rickmers" or whatever that ship is called.  We sat below deck. Putin was quite cheerful –wel, yes, in a good mood, saying: "Tomorrow, you'll see how it works!".  Exactly that day Yukos was put up for auction and suddenly an investment group from Novosibirsk, or Irkutsk, or wherever, turned up out of the blue, made a bid for Yukos.  And was awarded the rights.  They immediately sold them on to Rosneft and disappeared into thin air.  And with this trick, the address, at which a civil lawsuit in America could have been served, simply vanished.  And Rosneft could say, "I don't know what the problem is.  We acquired it lawfully.  Any issues you have with this investment group that doesn't exist anymore are not our concern".  Therefore the whole issue, at least, regarding the legal aspects, was rigged.

That is what is left in the place of an ethical business situation: one in which a State-owned concern that can't manage itself well is given the assets via a rigged system that is opaque to all concerned in order to escape legal ramifications of seizure of property.  And those in power in the West who are elected officials and should be seeking to have other governments respect human rights?

Again from Joschka Fischer:

The world isn't what you imagine.  There are interests and values.  But the idea that there are human rights and we will enforce them by any means, is of course absurd.  Then you'd create the opposite of human rights.  That's not how the world works.

Tuschi – But you're still quite an idealist when it comes to the world in general.

Fischer – But I am also a realist.

T – No, you are not at all.

Indeed our rights are endowed to us as individuals and governments are creations of man, not Nature.  Human rights cannot be enforced by governments at all.  It is, however, governments that have the responsibility to respect human rights as they are the creation of men.  Fischer is quite right in that government is not the enforcer of rights as that would make it the granter of rights.  With that said it is not absurd for people to seek to have governments respect human rights, especially those of their citizens.

Milan Horacek, Human Rights Delegate in the EU government:

In all my human rights work, this is the first time I've defended a capitalist, but they are also entitled to human rights.  Which is why I said in my plennary speeches that, at the age of sixty, I have now decided to defend rich people.  One can't distinguish between human rights for the young, old, poor or rich. 

From Andre Glucksmann who covered some of this in the Nekrasov film:

Putin's regime is a regime of oligarchs who own Russia in its entirety, who sell their oil themselves making a huge profits while 50% of the population lives below the accepted poverty line.  So it's a regime of profiteers.  But you may call it what you like.  Of the many types of capitalism, this is one of the worst if it's capitalism.  If it's socialism, it's also very ugly.  So it's -

Nekrasov – It isn't socialism.

G – Well it does have many socialist characteristics.  There is the power of the police, the power of the army, the absence of freedom of expression. Virtually totalitarian.  I also think there are rich men who have become strong supporters of public freedom, that's to say, the rights of man, social security and so on, who find themselves in deepest Siberia.  I mean Khodorovsky.  So I think it's necessary to support both the unemployed who demand food and the capitalists like Khodorovsky, who may be called a capitalist, but he is also for freedom.  On the other hand, we must condemn all those who suppress and prohibit freedom of expression.  In my opinion, Russia has gone back to something it had under the tsars.  Always – At some points, the possibility of real reforms, efforts for reform.  But under the tsars, under communism and today, it was and is an autocracy.  What your Putin calls "vertical power".  That's the way things are now. In my opinion, that's dangerous.  Not only for the Chechens who are being massacred without anyone allowed to say how awful it is, and not only for Russia that is being stifled, but also for the West.

What we can get from these two films is that there is a deep sickness in Western culture as a whole as seen by the inaction of governments with regards to Russia.  But this goes further than just Russia or governments. 

Again from Glucksmann:

You know, France, among the elite, has always suffered from the morbid influence of a Russian mirage.  Later it was the Soviet mirage, bit it had been a Russian mirage.  In the beginning, the French salons of the 18th century were full of admiration for Catherine II and, before that, Peter the Great.  Peter the Great was received by the French Academie just like Putin now.  Together with Bernard-Henry Levy and Philippe Sollers, I wrote a petition to say it was shameful. But there is indeed a kind of innocent and inane admiration, that is to say ignorant admiration, for a state that asserts itself as rational and Western in its appearance.

Nekrasov – So what about Chechnya?

G – That's a scandal!  But even Voltaire knew that Peter the Great had killed his son under torture.  But he tried to hide this fact.  There were also some partisans of Russia at the time of the philosophers, like Diderot.  But he went to see Russia, and though he could no longer protest openly – since he was paid by Catherine II – he left some papers in his drawer.  When Catharine read them, she was appalled.  What did he write?  He wrote, "The Russia of Catherine II has rotted before it ripened."  Instead of ripening, it has rotted.  I'd say its not just the leaders.  There is something wide-spread, a wide-spread malady that exists.  When Hermann Broch, the great Austrian writer, was asked in 1945, "So you think all Germans were fascists? Nazis?" He said no.  "So?" He said, "Listen, there are Nazis, and then there are those who let them come to power, who stood by and let it happen." And that includes all Europeans, without exception. There is then a crime of indifference that is even more fundamental because it is the condition that permits the Nazi crime.  The Nazi crime itself was committed by the Nazis and the part of the population of Germany and also of Europe, but only a part.  Yet the crime of indifference that first authorized the Nazis to take power, and later to wield it in the known way, that is a general crime committed by the Europeans, the leaders and also the population. The crime of indifference consists of closing one's eyes when criminal behavior begins.

Do you see governments trying to pick winners and losers for technology?

How about bailing out banks and deciding which financial institutions need to go under and which should remain?

Have you ever seen a government bail out a failing firm for any reason beyond saving some section of it for defense related purposes?

The disease is socialism, and it doesn't matter if you call it International, National, Communism or 'The Third Way', it is a horror whenever it starts because it is utilizing the power of the State to bring society under its control via controlling its businesses either via outright expropriation (Nationalization, which means a bunch of bureaucratic cronies who don't know the business will run it) or via cronies and payoffs (which means a bunch of business people who don't know  how to run a business efficiently but do know how to grease palms is running it).

Cronyism starts via 'subsidies' and the State telling private firms and individuals what they can do through enticement.  Or via rigging the market via 'regulations', which tend to favor larger firms over smaller, since they can grease palms more thickly.  Those that point this out as corruption become the targets for well funded political attacks, which then turns into laws limiting what you can and cannot say about such activities.  Those laws are enforced by some National government police system, which typically is a Secret Service.  Power is thus transferred bit by bit from government to just a single organ of it: the Secret Police.  It may start as a form of Praetorian Guard or some such, but at some point the leader of the Guard becomes the head of State.

It is why the Red Guard was killed off by the Reds after the October Revolution: the State had the Cheka and it was far more efficient at finding threats to the State than the Red Guard was.  It is the reason the early Black Shirts in Italy were hunted down by the State.  And the SA by the SS in Germany.  Even the most fervent ideological supporters of the ruling caste found themselves on the outs when they were no longer necessary to grab State control.  In fact they were a threat to State control as they knew how to get up the rungs into power.

And the population as a whole?

Docile.  Not wanting to think about what the ends were of these means.  Lulled into poverty and then distracted by merely physical means, like hard drugs, sex, music and concentrating on frivolities while the State provided more and more of their lives until the State could decide who lived and who died.  That is the end-game of every Western terrorist group, and the object is to seize the State police power.  Mind you they never think that they can be destroyed by that same power once control over society is concentrated into the hands of the very few.  Men like Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky and Litvinenko are threats to this system as they tried to show the corruption at the heart of the State, did their best to educate themselves and then realized that the entirety of society needed to be educated as well.

Litvinenko was assassinated for speaking the truth.

Berezovsky fled and that gives him limited input into Russian society.

Khodorkovsky... he helped to set up the way the laws worked in post-Soviet Russia, and admits this and that they were as moral as they could be, those who did this, but that their society was unable to see what morality was.  Once awakened to what was wrong, he became transparent, funded education, pushed for a more open society and then funded the opposition movement.  He was no longer going to be playing the game he set up because it is corruptive, and continues past wrongs.  He subjected himself to a corrupt system with typical outcomes, which he knew.  He left Putin with a truly awful decision.

A dead Khodorkovsky is a martyr and can never, ever change how he thinks.

A live Khodorkovsky might be re-corrupted, but you also know that he knows exactly what the system can do to him and the more you make it bad, and the longer he perseveres, the worse you look.  Not manly at all for the manly Putin to have a businessman tortured because he refused to play ball.  But you can't lock him up forever.  And without him the economic system has lost its vibrancy, its ability to rapidly expand... and yet the very qualities that allow it to do that means that the State control is threatened.

As the man who spent time in jail with Khodorkovsky said: he is alive because he is standing in someone's way and they can't just kill him.  Yet, in unjust exile, his point becomes stronger by the day.  Strong enough to pierce the indifference of Russian society?

He is in jail for a reason.

Would you gladly submit to a corrupt system created by your own ignorance and indifference so as to change it?

That is the dilemma of The Prisoner and his answer still stands:

I will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.  My life is my own.

It is the only way to be free when the State seeks absolute control over you via society.

Don't think of Khodorkovsky as a man, just as #6.  And still he smiles in court a testament to the power of just one man.