The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: October 2017 Page 2 of 4

How Our Everyday Life Creates Our Character and Our Destiny

We are what we do. What we experience during our daily lives creates our habits, both of action and thought and those habitual actions and thoughts are our character. The character of men and women, and the shared character of a society is destiny. It determines how we respond to what happens, it is as close to fate as exists in a world awash in choice, where we make the choices we are expected to.

The defining characteristic of growing up in the modern world is school. In school, we are taught to sit still, speak only when we are allowed to by an authority figure, and do meaningless work that is not suited to us. For the bright kids, school is stultifying. They sit there, bored out of their skulls by how slowly the class proceeds. For the active child, school is stultifyingly boring because they are told to sit on their butt for most of the day, when they’d rather be doing something physical. For the creative child (which is all children, till they have it schooled out of them), school is, yes, stultifyingly boring, as it is all doing what someone else tells  you to.

Outside of class, school is about nasty peer pressure and fitting in. Even if you aren’t a loser or a loner, even if you belong to a clique, you quickly understand what happens to someone who doesn’t fit in, who doesn’t do whatever it takes to belong to an in-group. Our society is rife with comments about how something is “high school all over again,” and we don’t mean anything good by that, we mean a horrible game of cool kids and jocks and geeks and fitting in or getting ostracized at best, or possibly beaten down, or worse for the truly unlucky.

By the time we get out of school, most of us have been trained to do what authority figures tell us, had the creativity taken out of us, lost all real intellectual curiosity (because intellectual pursuits are associated with the horrors of school), learned that nothing is more important than fitting in and that popularity matters more than virtually everything else. We have come to accept that we don’t make choices except those on offer to us: “You may write an essay from the following list of topics/you may select from the following list of electives.”

Our adult life is little different. We have some more choices, but most of us will work for someone else, and that someone else will tell us what to do, how do it, where to do it (at their workplace), and when to do it. Our consumer existence, in which we appear to have choices, mostly involves choices between Brands X,Y, and Z, and the choice between brands is almost always completely minor: The differences are not substantial. More importantly, again, we choose from choices offered us, we do not create our own choices.

This issue has arisen since most people have entered formal schooling as children and since people have moved into wage labor. Before the late 19th century, you did not see this type of conditioning (though they had their types) in the majority of the population. Mandatory regimented schooling, and wage labor, in which we do not decide what we do with our time, has made things very different from the previous society.

One of my uncles lived in, let’s call it, the pre-industrialization lifestyle. He was a farmer and a fisherman (and hunted on the side, for food for his plate). He had huge lists of work to do, but he chose when to do it and how to do it. He controlled his own life. This is how free farmers and artisans used to live. In the day-to-day detail of their lives, believe it or not, even many peasants had more freedom than most industrial and post-industrial workers do.

This has grown worse over the last three decades.

Free play time, as a child, was when we used to have choice. As a child, outside of school, I had to be home for meals and bedtime, otherwise I was my own boy. I had very few toys, and I and my friends made our games of make-believe. I created the rules to my own games, made my own pieces, and played them. I ran wild through the neighbourhood, living a hundred different imaginary lives from books and movies, but also ones I made up myself. My parents did not try to control the details of my life beyond making sure I got to school and got fed, so long as I didn’t cause (too much) trouble.

Oh, it was still a regimented life, but it was a much less regimented life than today’s helicopter children experience. The conformity of that late industrial society, oddly, was less than the conformity pushed on children for the last couple decades by their own parents.

The workforce has in some respects also become worse. The sort of micro-control that is commonplace in Amazon warehouses, with a supervisor electronically watching you every second, was almost impossible in the past. The sort of micro-measurement of productivity was also impossible in most jobs, though certainly, assembly lines were hell. In most jobs, your boss had to give you the work and check in later to see if it was done and how well. As long as it got done, you were fine.


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Again, to be sure, there were micro-supervised jobs even then, but technology has made it possible to micro-supervise the sort of work which simply could not be supervised then.

And when you left work, there were no cell phones, no pagers, no laptops. For the vast majority of workers, once they left work, work was done for the day. They were not, for all intents and purposes, on call 24-7.

High surveillance societies produce conformity, because we are what we do. What we do forms our habits, our habits form our character. If you are constantly under your boss’s thumb, you learn to act reflexively in ways that will satisfy your boss. Of course, we all rebel where we can, but the margins for rebellion are growing smaller and smaller.

We have created a society where people live regimented lives, doing what they are told, choosing from choices given to them, learning that nothing matters more than popularity, and constantly under supervision or at the beck and call of their teachers, bosses, and other lords and masters (including their parents; sorry parents).

This is not a society that makes people happy. There is good reason to believe (Diener) that rates of depression are about ten times higher than they were one hundred years ago. But more to the point, it is a society that creates people with the type of character that does not produce better futures, because they are conditioned to choose only from what is offered them, to sit down, shut up, and do what they are told, and to play popularity games. If you don’t, well, no good job for you, or no job at all, and in this society having very little money is very unpleasant. We do not think up our own options, create our own politics, choose options outside of the limited ones offered by our lords and masters.

We have been created this way, conditioned this way, trained this way, by the everyday experience of our lives, starting from a very young age. To be sure, this is far from the only reason our societies are dysfunctional and careening from disaster to disaster; there are very real material constraints on what people can do in this society, largely through control of who is given money and credit, but it is a major reason for our problems. We have been shaped into people our lords and masters sincerely hope are not fitted to freedom, not able to make choices outside what they offer, not able to challenge them effectively, and well suited to the trivial jobs they want us to perform, mostly by fighting over which billionaire is the richest.

If you want a free people, you must free your minds, but free minds come from the exercise of practical everyday freedom.

Originally Published November 11, 2013.


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China’s Economy, Freedom and the Threat of War

This article from NPR is useful for context.

The 2008 financial crisis hit Chinese exports. Approximately 20 million people lost their jobs, and had to go back to their villages, so the Communist party did a huge stimulus, but since China is vastly corrupt, that lead to vast corruption.

The Communist party, and Xi in particular, saw that the economy was unstable, and that scared them, so they started suppressing dissent even more fiercely.

For a long time my analysis of China has been simple, the Communist party stays in power as long as they keep the economic growth going.  If they don’t, the members of the party (and remember, it is a family affair, with high officials passing power to their incompetent children), are at risk of death.

The Chinese are very violent. There are riots all the time. Villages confront police and even the army, by which I mean, fight them, regularly. I recall one ethnic riot in a factory, where the workers ripped apart the beds in the dorms to get iron bars to beat each other with.

These people are on the edge, and they are still used to hard manual labor. They are not particularly scared of violence.

This is is also a great danger to everyone else. If China’s economy goes truly south, and the Chinese Communist party leadership is scared, they will use jingoistic nationalism even more than they do already, which is a lot.

And if blaming foreigners and going to war is required to keep Chinese minds from blaming who’s really at fault (their own leadership), well, they’ll do that. Millions of ordinary citizens dying, to the leadership of almost all countries in history beats the leadership dying.

This is exacerbated by two things: that Chinese leadership is about to run out of people who didn’t grow up powerful and comfortable, meaning truly competent people, and that China will be hit massively hard by aquifer depletion and climate change.


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For quite a while China has basically, despite rampant local corruption, been run more or less competently. But as the old leaders aged out, that became less true. It’s soon going to be almost completely true (as it is in the US and most of Western Europe.)

Russia is probably the country which needs to worry most. Yes, they have nukes, but they also have a vast amount of land right north of China which is virtually unpopulated, and when the Chinese think they might start to starve, nukes, exactly because it is mutually assured destruction if they are used, may not be a deterrent.

But other Chinese neighbours should worry as well, especially those that don’t have nukes.

It’s going to be an interesting time.

Note that China will be hitting incompetence about 5 to 10 years before Western demographic and political trends will give the West a chance to replace its incompetent leadership.

Not healthy for China, or for anyone else, really.


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Could Obama Have Fixed the Economy?

I want to revisit this. Obama was the last person who had a real chance to change and fix things. A crisis is an opportunity. FDR used the Great Depression to change the US. Reagan used stagflation to change the US. Bush used 9/11 to change the US.

Obama could have used the financial crisis to change the US. He did not. That was a choice.

His failure leads straight to Trump and various other pathologies. It is a straight line. Failure has consequences. Belief in the status quo (which describes Obama to the T) has consequences.

So, here’s what I wrote about this November 6, 2014 and many other times…

I’m hearing “Obama couldn’t have fixed the economy.  Wage stagnation is not his fault, it’s been going on for decades!” (For the record it’s been going on for at least 34 years, probably 39, and for some parts of the population, for 46 (that’s when wages for working class white males peaked. Which is why they’re pissy.))

This argument is, to give it more courtesy than it deserves, bullshit. I wrote about this back in 2010, and you can read that article, but let’s run through this one more time, because you will never get good leadership if you keep excusing your leaders for betraying you.

Part of the argument is that Obama couldn’t do almost anything because Obama only controlled the House, the Presidency, and didn’t quite have 60 votes in the Senate in his first two years. Because this is the case, I’ll deal with this argument in two parts.  In part one, we will discuss something that needed Congressional approval.

The Stimulus: Negotiating 101, people, is that you always ask for more than you want. Obama asked for too little, and a huge part of his stimulus was tax cuts. Worse than this, his stimulus was structured terribly. What you do with a stimulus package in a recession and financial collapse is you use it to restructure the economy. That means things like moving the entire federal package of buildings over to solar, and buying from American companies. (Don’t even try to natter on about trade deals, the US is more than happy to ignore trade rulings it does not like.) That means putting aside a huge amount of money to refit every American house to run on renewable energy, which are jobs which cannot be off-shored or outsourced; they must be done in-country.

That also means building high-speed rail, and using eminent domain to get it done. It further means moving money off the sidelines which would otherwise sit there by providing a clear direction for the economy so that private actors invest hire and invest.


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Note that, while Obama did not negotiate properly, he did include a huge amount of tax cuts (right-wing ideology), and he produced a stimulus which did not restructure the economy or get private money off the sidelines. I wrote extensively about this at the time. None of this is post-facto judgement:

January 5, 2009: The day the news leaked that 40 percent of the stimulus was tax cuts, I wrote it wouldn’t work.

January 17, 2009: The full details are out. I write: “For ordinary people however, there will be both wage deflation and real asset deflation…

Now, all the things Obama could have done which DID NOT require Congressional approval:

Prosecute the Bankers: This is an executive decision–entirely an executive decision. There was widespread fraud, and no senior executive on Wall Street could credibly claim to not know about it. Seize their emails, indict them under RICO statutes (i.e., take away all their money and force them to use public defenders), and throw them in jail. Do not let them get off with fines that are less than the profits made, effectively immunizing them. This means they will keep doing fraudulent and destructive things, because doing so made them personally rich.

Oh, also, there are now fewer, bigger banks.

Take Over and Break Up the Banks: The Federal Reserve had trillions of dollars of toxic sewage on its books which it borrowed at par, which could not sell on the market at par. But Ian, you cavil, “the Federal Reserve is independent of the President.” No. The President can fire any member of the Board of the Federal Reserve except the Chairman for cause and replace them. Letting the financial collapse happen might qualify as cause. Even if Bernanke refused to leave, he could have been outvoted on every issue by Obama’s people. Once you control them, you return all the toxic sludge to the banks. They go bankrupt. Which leads to:

Make Stockholders and Bondholders Take Their Losses: Yes. This will wipe them out. That’s the point.  The problem with the rich isn’t primarily that they are rich, it is that wealth allows them to largely control the government (I trust this is non-controversial. If it isn’t, I hope you’re on a payroll and required to believe such sewage.) Making them take their losses breaks their power. Once their power is broken, it’s a lot easier to get everything else done. This is also a popular move. (There are ways to fix the pensions which go bankrupt, another time on that.)

Using the Banks You Took Over and Broke Up, Lend! These banks are now under Federal control. They do what the President wants, when the President wants it done. They start lending to create small business, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, move to renewable energy, and so on and so forth. (Read THIS, for what the US needed to do at the time. Again, it was written at the time.)

This article is not exhaustive

There are many other things Obama could have done, that he chose not to do. It is entirely fair to judge Obama on the economy because not only did he never do what was needed to fix it, he did not even try. Everything he did that was supposedly to fix the economy was insufficient, and he was told so at the time by people who had been right about the oncoming financial crisis, in advance.

Even in small things, like aid for homeowners, the Obama administration chose to do as little as it could–even when it had both the authority and the money for it (which it did).

Obama is a Right-Wing President. That is all. He is a Reaganite, and to the right of Reagan, but somewhat to the left of the Tea Party, which puts him in spitting distance of Atilla the Hun (his record on civil liberties is, according to the ACLU, substantially worse than George W. Bush’s. He deported more Hispanics than George Bush ever did, etc.) Obama had plenty of power to make more of a difference than he did, and he chose not to. In the small things, in the big things, when it came to economic policies and to non-identity-based civil liberties, he virtually always did the right-wing thing.

Obama is the first President in post-war history (and maybe all of history) whose economy gave more money to the top 10 percent than the entire value of all productivity gains in his Presidency. Even George W. Bush didn’t manage that.

Yes, stagnation of wages and wealth, and even the drop of both in many sectors while money concentrated in the hands of the rich is something which has been going on for decades. It is hard to stop.

But, because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama had the opportunity. Calls against TARP were running, according to my sources, 200:1 to 1200:1 against. It failed to pass the first time. Nancy Pelosi said she would not pass it if an equal proportion of Republican House members would not vote for it also. They refused to do so.  It would have died except for one thing: Obama twisted arms to make it happen. As the Presidential candidate (and likely future President), he had the ability to do that, and he did.

Again, Obama did not fix the economy because he did not want to. Or rather, keeping rich people rich was more important to him. You can argue, if you wish, that he was not willing to break up the banks because it would have been catastrophic. That argument cannot be dealt with fully here, without doubling the length of an already long essay, but I will be gauche and quote myself, once more, from 2008:

Now, it’s the US. They can try and sweep this crisis under the carpet and pretend there isn’t a huge overhang of bad loans and worthless securities. If it does so, the best case scenario is that the next twenty years or so will be America’s Bright Depression (Stagnating economy). Best case.

I will tell you now that the best case has not happened. As the charts in this post show, the economy stagnated for ordinary people through the recovery and boom of this business cycle. During the recession, there will be job losses again. Most of them will not come back in the next recovery and boom, and neither will wages.

This is Barack Obama’s legacy. Those like Paul Krugman (what happened to Paul?), who pretend that Obama is a great president are laughable. History does not grade on a curve; “Well, we aren’t all chewing on our boots.” Obama had a historic opportunity to be the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Instead, he chose to save the rich, and let them eat everyone else. This was a choice. He could have done other things.

Nor is this a noble failure; he did not even try. He did not use the real tools he had at his disposal.

I note, finally, again, because I know most readers will have heard over and over again that Obama saved you from Armaggedon, that the US economy cannot be fixed until the wealth, and therefore power, of the very rich is broken. It cannot be done. However bad you think it would have been if that had been allowed to happen, this economy will continue to get worse because it was not done.

The Federal Reserve has printed trillions of dollars, and given them to the rich. Imagine another world, where it had printed that money and used it to restructure the economy for prosperity and growth.

That, my American friends, is the future Obama stole from you. Indeed, because the rest of the developed world would have followed his lead, he also stole the same future from all of us.


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Iraq Army Attacks Peshmerga Near Kirkuk

Peshmerga Flag

As seemed likely last week, the fighting has started. Kirkuk controls over half Iraq’s oil, and Iraq was unlikely to let them keep the oil. Both sides do need the revenue it represents.

Iraq claims to be attempting to take control of military positions around Kirkuk without entering the city proper. Whether that’s a viable strategy, we will see, but it makes sense: If this moves to city fighting, there will be a lot of civilian casualties and various atrocities will occur, making the rift (aka: hatred) between Iraq and the Kurds even more severe.

Understand that this rift exists on both sides: Many Iraqis feel that the Kurds betrayed them in the Iraq war, cooperating with the invaders, and want revenge. Kurds feel that Iraq has occupied them and committed atrocities against them. There is no love lost on either side.


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Update: I see that Iraq’s PM wants more than just control of Kirkuk, he’s now stating that he wants control of the Peshmerga. I can’t see the Kurds doing that unless they’re 100 percent sure they’ll lose an all-out war, and maybe not even then. Granted some could stand down and become effectively militia on-call, so all would not be lost, but a great deal would be.

Update 2: It looks like a some of the Peshmerga have withdrawn, rather than fight. Remarkable. Without Kirkuk, Kurdistan is not viable. Period. Looks like this may be turning into a non-battle, and the unwillingness to fight has emboldened Iraq to demand control of the Peshmerga.


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Corbyn Wants to Destroy the Current Economic System

Take it right to them:

Responding to Hammond’s warning in his speech at this month’s Conservative conference, Corbyn will say the chancellor is “absolutely right” to say that Labour is threatening to destroy the current economic model, adding that the current system “allows homelessness to double, 4 million children to live in poverty and over a million older people not getting the care they need”.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn

The reason the establishment hates him is that he threatens them. He will re-nationalize power and railways, institute rent controls and ownership limits on multiple homes and overseas owners, and build new council housing.

And there’s this:

Corbyn will say Labour is not opposed to technological advancement, but digital giants such as Uber and Deliveroo have built their success not on their technological advantage, but by “establishing a monopoly in their marketplaces and using that to drive wages and conditions down.”

“Imagine an Uber run co-operatively by their drivers, collectively controlling their futures, agreeing their own pay and conditions, with profits shared or re-invested,” he will say.

“The biggest obstacle to this is not technological, but a rigged economic system that favours wealth extractors, not wealth creators.”

This, by the way, is basic economic theory. Markets work for the benefit of most when they are competitive, and bounded by safety nets and regulations. They do not work for the benefit of all when they form monopolies or oligopolies. The latter have to be regulated to the max, broken up, or turned into public utilities.


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Or, perhaps, to change who owns them.

The current economic system is not good capitalism: It is not competitive or regulated or bounded by proper safety nets and guaranteed minimums, let alone proper high-end taxation.

To make capitalism, or rather, markets, work, requires strong government intervention and always has. Thatcher and Reagan were just wrong, and it shows up in virtually all the numbers.

Corbyn is the actual realist here, not those who celebrate the current mode of “capitalism.”

And this is going to be fun to watch.


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Four Laws for Protecting Capitalism from Itself

Right. So, boosters of free trade like to use Singapore as an example.

It’s a bad exemplar of the policies such people actually want for a pile of reasons, but Singapore does contain lessons for how to do trade and capitalism right (other than “be a city state,” which isn’t usually an option).

About 90 percent of the land in Singapore is state owned, and 85 percent of the housing is.

The point here is that trade is important to Singapore BUT the population is largely insulated from the effects of free money flows. Their living costs are stable because the state ensures that stability.

Likewise, Hong Kong, renowned for free trade back in the day, had a huge amount of the real estate owned by its government.


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Free trade is not free financial flow, and real-estate markets should not be subject to foreign money flows or the vagaries of an economy run through trade. You make trade work by sharply limiting what it affects, not by letting it affect everything.

This means stable costs for the native population and workforce and stable costs for people doing business in the country, which means that trade can do its work without destroying its own foundation.

This is true of capitalism in general. Capitalism, due to its inherent flaws, destroys itself in a number of ways. For capitalism to work, policies need to be in place for it to actively avoid these pitfalls:

  1. It must not be allowed to form unregulated monopolies and oligopolies.
  2. It must not be allowed to run bubbles; it must not be allowed to engage in mass fraud.
  3. The money gained from it must not be allowed to turn into power which controls government.
  4. Money must not, generally speaking, be allowed to buy anything that matters; from health care to a good education.

Capitalism, as the standard saying runs, is a good servant, and a terrible master. Only fools let capitalists actually control anything in their society that truly matters.


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Is There Going to Be an Iraqi-Kurdish War?

Peshmerga Flag

Iraqi Kurds voted in a referendum for independence from Iraq. Iraqi forces are now poised near Kirkuk, in position to attack, though the Iraqi PM claims they will not do so.

Kirkuk oil field was seized by the Kurds in 2014, and it produces more than half of Iraq’s oil.

Neither Iran nor Turkey want an independent Kurdish state. (This is a violent understatement, especially with regards to Turkey.)

Since Kurdistan has no sea border, Iraq and Turkey control its access to world markets, and the Iraqi government has been closing its exports, restricting its sales of oil.

And the Kurds have just moved another 6,000 Peshmerga to Kirkuk.

The Kurds were treated very badly under Saddam, and haven’t been happy with the Iraqi government since then either. They have also been firm US allies, and they have quite a bit of support in Congress and the US military as a result.

Is this going to blow?


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I don’t know, but I do know that Iraq is not going to let Kurdistan go independent and take over half the oil with it, and I know that Kurdistan would need that oil to be viable. Kurdistan also needs to be able to get that oil to market, and has few friends in the region.

I don’t see how Kurdish independence works, and I say that as someone who has sympathy for their aspirations. If they weren’t landlocked…but they are. To remedy the landlocked situation, they could take land from Syria, Turkey, or both, something that is unlikely at best, because Turkey just isn’t going to allow it and has a large enough military to have a veto.

Not sure where this goes, or where it ends, but the bottom line is Iraq won’t voluntarily let Kurdistan leave with all that oil, and Kurdistan won’t voluntarily leave without it, and if Kurdistan insists on leaving, the issue will probably have to be settled violently.

That doesn’t seem to be a war that ends well for the Kurds, but perhaps I’m missing something. (Lord help them if they are counting on serious US support to even the odds.)


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Gas Companies Manipulated Pipeline Capacity to Rook New England Customers 3.6 Billion

Shades of Enron:

The systematic withholding of pipeline capacity, particularly on the coldest days, has cost New England electricity consumers $3.6 billion…

On the worst days, including during the Polar Vortex of 2013-2014, up to seven percent of Algonquin’s capacity could be artificially constrained.

“When you relate that back to gas-fired generators, that’s about 28 percent of the gas that would be demanded,” Zaragoza-Watkins said.

This “capacity withholding,” researchers wrote, “increased average gas and electricity prices by 38 percent and 20 percent, respectively, over the three year period we study.”

These sorts of manipulations are always ongoing in any sphere where they can be done with a reasonable chance of success. This is similar to Enron’s price manipulation in the California market, yes, but it is typical of any industry where a few people can finangle prices. The LIBOR (London Interbank Rates) scandal was similiar: A few people could manipulate the rate and cost ordinary people billions of dollars.


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There are always key points in the economy where a few people have disproportionate power. Anything that people must have, that someone else controls, is a leverage point which can be used to extract disproportionate profits.

People must have heating during the polar vortex. People must have loans and credit (and money). People must have houses (during the housing bubble and, indeed, various housing bubbles happening right now.)

If people must, and there is a resource bottleneck, that bottleneck can be squeezed. A pipeline is an obvious bottleneck, but that only some people can create money out of thin air is also a bottleneck. That some people set effective interest rates and profit from them is a bottleneck, and so on.

Careful construction of an economic system limits resource bottlenecks, and assures that those who control the remaining resources can’t profit from squeezing them, if possible, and regulates and inspects the hell out of those bottlenecks that remain profitable to squeeze.

We do not live in such an economy. Rather, our economy has mostly been constructed to encourage such squeezing. Cases where it is genuinely punished are rare (as with virtually all the financial executives getting off in the financial crisis).

This pipeline squeeze looks like it might be the rare exception. But only maybe. Remember, if the executives come out clean, and richer than they would have been otherwise, any fines or punishments will not stop it happening again.


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