[daniel-cussen]

You just can't make enemies with everyone at that larger-than-life, history-affecting scale. You can't expect to solve all of the world's problems alone by denouncing every country on earth, even though you probably could construct the argument, for every single country on earth, that that country could be denounced for something. He's just one guy, he does what he can, and assassination absolutely on the table for activists who piss off the most powerful people on the planet enough.

Bill Browder talks about what happened to him when he pissed off the most powerful people in Russia. I don't admire the guy, basically he figured out every story he could get into the WSJ or Nytimes made them $41M in preventing stock shenanigans like massive dilution so that his shares actually could appreciate from the rapidly growing Russia economy, so that was his whole angle, shaming those guys in the paper. It's not clear it was truth, or whether it was slander, there was shady business going on, but he's no saint. When a news article is worth $41 million, like how much is that per word, and are you going to get a PR person to review the words, check if you can't get the article to be worth $42M in stock? Are you sure it's exactly $41M? Can't you just give it a little nuance, use a thesaurus maybe? Besides, damningly, he gave up his US citizenship to avoid paying taxes (like he obviously doesn't say that because tax lawyers tell you if you say that you are forbidden from ever setting foot in America for life), and that backfired because that means you are forfeiting America's protection and help because you didn't want to contribute back into the system. And he now can't make political contributions as a citizen, which I'm getting to.

He got kicked out of Russia, which makes perfect sense, like this guy thinks he milk American institutions, totally imperialistically meaning imposing American values on Russian companies, for no other reason but to make billions of dollars, and hoard that wealth with cunning tax evasion (guys like this absolutely don't pay taxes for ten years after you stop being a citizen, though that's the law, and to my understanding they literally value the money they pay in taxes 0%, or even negative). And USA actually is fine with you going to some banana republic and lording it over them, I mean it's perverse, but it's happened many many times in US history. And that's precisely why you still have to pay taxes if you're overseas if you're American, though in practice you only pay if you are upper class in a foreign country, which is by design. Or what, you expect the embassies to evacuate you after you caused a revolution, or you want American marines to force a country to redo an election you didn't like, that costs money that has to come from taxes, you don't want to pay anything for that?

And that guy is an activist now, he got some other citizenships, he lobbied all kinds of governments to punish a few of Putin's, like, he calls them henchmen or something, maybe they are, I don't know, it's always the same 7 guys and nobody else so they can't get bank accounts, they're the ones who seem to have beaten his lawyer to death. And he says, he's gotten 7 red notices from Interpol from Russia, it's a huge problem if you get just one.

It's realistic for him to expect to be assassinated, he says in his book he could have 1000 bodyguards and it wouldn't matter, Putin could get him anyway, and he has other strategies to protect himself. And several assassinations have been attributed to Russia in the last ten years, in London a few times, I think in London repeatedly, the nerve gas some years ago was attributed to them, some polonium in someone's tea, it's a realistic outcome if you're enough of a thorn in a powerful someone's side.

So one viable strategy is, piss people off less.

[midev]

So you're saying he betrayed the United States for a far worse, criminally oppressive regime? Everything in your comment makes him out to be a far bigger piece of shit. He betrayed the world for Russia, and now has far more deaths on his hands.

Damn you made me think even less of Snowden. You should tell more people about Bill Browder's story.

[daniel-cussen]

I don't know...well Bill Browder definitely betrayed both America and Russia, he was playing them off each other all the way. He was living in Russia and was actually married a Russian woman, and says he loves Russia, who knows. I believe the death of Sergey Magnitsky, a lawyer, was surely fucked up or countries wouldn't agree to pass a law called the Magnitsky Act, though in either case Russia would still both oppose the act and, according to Browder try to get it called something else. But I distrust his testimony.

He just spent too much of his life doing nothing other than serving his true nation, his pocket. So he grows up in America--that's already a privilege in my book. I think he went to Colorado, then Stanford for Business School. This was in the 80s, so Stanford was earning huge amounts of funding from the Department of Defense for all kinds of crazy cold war tech, and there was so much trust and mutual benefit in this relationship that the DoD...I don't know how to communicate it, but let Stanford charge "overhead" which went to the school in general. So the electrical engineering students in particular would make a breakthrough, and they'd get paid well, but then the money sloshed around the whole school. The Cold War was when Stanford went from a respectable, but second-tier school to a first-tier school, and it could really make its huge campus look like a billion bucks. So Browder goes to Business School in Stanford, and then the Cold War ends, so he goes to Eastern Europe and then Russia, like he himself said because his parents and grandparents were the most famous communists in America, he'd become the biggest capitalist in Russia. So, would he become Russian then? Would he stay in Russia and learn Russian? Will deriving a fortune, we're talking billions, from Russia, help Russia in some roundabout way? Because additionally, IIRC he gave up his US citizenship in the early nineties, like right away, he did not want to get caught dead paying taxes. And he didn't pay shit. He made billions, his fund was one of the fastest growing in the nineties, and apparently he flew from Britain, where he had become a citizen (I think you can't just not have a citizenship, I think you can't drop a citizenship without securing another one first). He flew to Russia all the time.

And I consider credible that Russia was a gangster-driven economy. This is actually not that surprising or, frankly even evil in the specific circumstances, it's just a consequence of the black market being the only market, so a return to market economics would have to come from the black market expanding and part of it getting split off into a gray and a white market. It's just not realistic to expect hard-line Communists to adapt to a market system they've been fighting their whole lives and expect them to have the combination of skills needed to address all the challenges that face a capitalist.

Whereas the black marketer actually has those skills right now, they're not meaningfully worse skills because he was selling Beatles's records or passports or rare books, the point is he's selling, he's bargaining, he's negotiating, he's in the market and getting a feel for the market, he's sometimes speculating, and you need that too, and that's a really tricky thing, and the market needs good speculators in order to smooth out the booms and busts. Keep in mind, under the thesis that Russia is run by gangster capitalists, it still puts a very high price on its national security and isn't selling itself out to other countries, it preserved a huge degree of autonomy and sovereignty to the point Russia could take in Snowden despite America's pressure against it. So at the very least, there's some patriotism. Moreso than Browder for sure.

Further, when the government basically collapsed people needed to eat, and the arrangement was they had all this stock, perhaps entitled to dividends, but nothing to eat, pretty much, really struggling. They were used to getting their rations (Socialism you get rations and you wait a long time in line), until they didn't. So my understanding is the black marketeers used their growing black market--and remember, because under Socialism pretty much any good an American could normally buy with money was sold in the black market instead, this was the seed from which the Russian economy was born, there was no other way for it to go but this-to make sure people could survive this catastrophe. And it sounds like it was fucking hard work, like can you imagine the logistics, roads must have been going to pot, exchanging goods using Vodka as currency, financing it all because those pieces of paper stock certificates were worth little at the beginning of Russian capitalism, and this is food we're talking about so you actually have to make sure everybody gets at least something, I'm not convinced gangster capitalism is really that harmful, well certainly it can be, but black markets are not inferior to white markets if at the end of the day you are actually acting in good faith. For sure black marketers can act in good faith. Black markets also have some built-in advantages over white markets, particularly that nobody asks you to sign demonic contracts in black markets (think arbitration clauses). No contract enforcement can be good to the extent contract enforcement of abusive contracts is bad. Plus, for privacy, you don't have to fill out nosy forms to participate, nobody ever asks you for your social like so many Fortune 500 companies do, they may know you by first name and face and that's it. Buyer and seller might have a remarkable affinity, because to have a desirable rare Rock and Roll record the seller would have to at least have liked the album enough to get it, and the buyer likes the album too, maybe they have something in common. On top of that, the seller is taking a big risk for the sake of the buyer. And I think the biggest thing that conditions markets of any type: what is being exchanged and why? That defines how the interaction will go more than whether the market is illegal according to this guy or grey according to an encyclopedia.