International mafias and our struggle to survive

== Those mob connections ==

We all knew there were mob connections. Indeed, the thing the Trumpists fear most is release of the full swathe of documents from Deutsche Bank, proving that roughly a billion dollars of Russian oligarch mafia cash rescued the family from their multiple bankruptcies. Still, this book excerpt shows how far back it goes and a depth of mob links that swirl so thick you'd need more than a respirator... more like a spacesuit... not to choke.

Will the Deutsche Bank revelations ever “hit the fan” and save us? The exact correlations to the laundering through the Trump Co. of tens of billions in Russian oligarch cash are blatantly there, but will those powers succeed in keeping the flames concealed by smoke? Oh, but so much smoke! In his best-selling book Dark Towers, David Enrich, finance editor at The New York Times, chronicles the complicated history of Deutsche Bank and its entanglement with Donald Trump. 

Reviewing Dark Towers, Roger Lowenstein writes, 

"Enrich’s most tantalizing nugget is that in the summer of 2016, Jared Kushner’s real estate company (which received lavish financing from Deutsche) was moving money to various Russians. A bank compliance officer filed a “suspicious activity report,” but the report was quashed and she was fired. The suggestion that maybe the money was payback for Russian campaign meddling isn’t one that Enrich can prove. Similarly, we will have to wait to see if Deutsche can recover from years of banking malpractice that destroyed its capital and wiped out 95 percent of its stock price. In the meantime, Enrich has given us a thorough, clearly written and generally levelheaded account of a bank that lost its way." (Courtesy of Phil’s Stock World.)

And this is one more reason to wage open war not just on the reputation of the FBI and other law professionals, but all independent civil servants, especially inspectors general.

== Cyberwar - Cold War ==

  

Scary stuff re cyber warfare: “During the Cold War, opposing military commanders and national leaders spent decades figuring out how to posture and signal to one another so they could resolve disputes without fighting. In nearly every major depiction of an imagined cyberwar, the purpose of the attacks is obvious and usually involves cowing the United States into concessions. In his book “Glass Houses,” for example, former National Security Council inspector general Joel Brenner imagines China using a series of devastating cyberattacks to force the United States to back down in a confrontation over Taiwan.”

The real danger though comes in a second Trump term, when his hollowing out of the so-called "deep state" finally lets him hand over our intel agencies to the Kremlin

“Putin backs Russian constitutional amendment allowing him to stay in office till 2036.”  It's not just that these President-for-Life moves are boringly predictable aspects of despotism. Or that they show why delusional, macho-male leaders ruled so execrably in 99% of human cultures for 6000 years. 

On a more fundamental level, these actions by Putin, Xi and others insult their own people and nations! Doesn't the "indispensable man" justification imply the entire nation can't sift a vast pool of talent for one other... or several or many other... leaders just as qualified? What, not even one? So the lesson is that you are a fluke genius, without whom the entire, fragile edifice would collapse?

The never-mentioned silver lining to all of this mess - an oligarchic-confederate putsch that aims to demolish the Enlightenment Experiment? It is that the U.S. has been robust, so far, in the face of the very worst-case scenario, takeover of our executive, legislative and judicial branches by either moronic-maniacs or enemies, or both. The very thing that Vlad has aimed to prove - that democracy is a decadent failure - is exactly what we have disproved.

So far. In the short term.

But yes, 6000 years of history shows the odds were always stacked against any effort to rise above oligarchism. Indeed, each generation in this Great Experiment has had to show heroism to some degree. And the magical, almost godlike power of citizenship.

It's our turn.

== The great warner ==

As often the case, George Orwell had insights into what these monsters aim to achieve:

"For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”

  - O’Brien, speaking for the Party in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

== Worries and concerns ==

Yes, added to the long list of “he actually said that”: 

“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” Trump said during an appearance on Fox & Friends. Having to support vote-suppression is now a core matter of survival to a Republican Party that has been losing members – especially from the fact-professions – faster than leaves from a dying tree. 

New at the Evonomics site: “Saving Capitalism from Inequality: Robust middle incomes deliver the demand that businesses need to produce.”

Next. While this article contains loads of “stuff I never knew” about far-right hackers and their backers, it is also tendentious and untrustworthy at some levels, including especially the very notion that “facial recognition” is some sort of plot, instead of an absolutely inevitable aspect of technology, as natural and unstoppable as the tide. 

Yes, shine light on abuses or uneven distributions of access or power. But there are better ways to prevent all that and get positive sum benefits. This article ironically demonstrates the very process that can offer that path.  “The Far-Right Helped Create The World’s Most Powerful Facial Recognition Technology - Clearview AI, which has alarmed privacy experts, hired several far-right employees, a HuffPost investigation found."

“California proposes 3-day backup power for cell towers, communication networks.” A small step toward the kind of systemic resilience I’ve been pushing for decades. Still, towers are the most unreliable piece of infrastructure we’ve got. Vastly better would be to require the cell-cos to turn on the backup peer-to-peer text-passing capability that is already available on Qualcomm chip sets.  See other recommendations to make society more robust here… or copied into a chapter of Polemical Judo.