The Breaking Time

Law-less zones: when authority and anarchy shake hands

Just another Pirate Utopia. Photo by Laura K. Gibb.

Some interesting news out of Copenhagen, as the squat of Christiania just won long-sought autonomy:

"'It's not a perfect society, but one of the nice things about being here is that it doesn't have to be," says one resident, who calls himself only Vesinger.

Vesinger delivers his assessment of Christiania with obvious affection. He has lived here with his two little boys for six months, a recent convert to the Christianian way of life.

And it is not hard to see why this tiny enclave just south of Copenhagen's city centre is an attractive location for a family.

Trees and plant life thrive free from human interference and pesticides. It is more racially diverse, culturally open and creatively expressive than your average Danish neighbourhood.

Christiania has been a squat for nearly 40 years, ever since a group of enterprising hippies broke down the fences and set up in the disused military barracks.

And after a recent government ruling, this small society is celebrating its independence as a kind of semi-autonomous region. They call it Freetown Christiania.

---

Under the new rules, residents are allowed to buy their land at knock-down prices and the remainder will be put up for rent by the state.

Although this effectively turns a hippy haven into a local council for Ms Larson, it means for the first time they can exist in security as well as peace.

"It will be a new way of living," she says.

"We do not have to worry anymore about whether the government will throw us off our land. Hopefully now that we have won our right to own the land, then we will be able to feel more secure and start to deal with some of the problems that exist here."

Ah, "we won, now what?" the question would-be revolutionaries in every field have to grapple, specifically, Christiania's relatively lawless status has drawn increasingly violent drug dealers:

There have been outbreaks of violence including gun battles on the streets as rival gangs fight for control of Christiania's drugs trade.

On the notorious Pusher Street, skinheads with pitbulls glare menacingly from behind their stalls draped in camouflage netting at anyone who looks like they might be there to do anything other than buy drugs.

Society: never a simple issue.

Christiana's problems aren't new ones either. Back in 2008, I did a brief write-up on the history of the Kowloon Walled City for Coilhouse. Instead of hippie idealism, in that case the lawless zone was founded on a far more mercantile culture, but it faced many of the same problems. As I summed it up then:

Yes, the anarchistic types out there are correct when they say that the Walled City is evidence that humans can co-exist, and even thrive, without laws constantly piled on them. But it’s not that simple. After all, without massive police raids (government incarnate), the place would have probably become a mob-run tyranny. Its residents had a degree of freedom that anyone who comes home to piles of bills or endless forms can’t help but envy. They also had darkness, a lower life expectancy, filthy living conditions and huge numbers of drug addicts.

If the problems with the drug gangs keep building, Christiania will probably need police raids, ironically, to keep its ungoverned character. Anarchists, by ideology or default (as in Kowloon) have never been particularly good at handling organized violence. At the same time, while a hell of a lot greener than the urban labyrinth that was Kowloon, many of the other traits seem similar: functionally self-governing, relatively peaceful, ensconced in a niche and free of some of the surrounding society's ills.

This brings up a paradox: in both cases, lawless areas had their lawlessness preserved by, well, the law. So, what does one do with that particular contradiction?

The Ice Age is coming, Ctd.

As an epilogue to the last post on London's riots, I think it's fitting to add this map of London's impoverished areas overlaid with the riots. It handily illustrates both the underlying causes and the stupid tragedy of rioting, as the poor areas see the most destruction.

The furor's mostly died down, and MPs returned from their holidays for a basically pointless debate. Somehow I don't think Prime Minister David Cameron's insistence that the riots were "criminality, pure and simple" is exactly the approach needed to defuse a volatile situation and prompt a frank reassessment of the best way to prevent a repeat. Instead, expect more brutal tactics, more surveillance and more governmental cluelessness.

The Ice Age is coming.

Defanged metropoli

London! Culturally vibrant! Economically mighty! Politically impotent! Photo by Jason Hawkes

Cities! Over half of humanity now lives in the damn things. Naturally, the futurists are f'ing beside themselves over the wonders this portends. Why, here's prosperity prophet Richard Florida, writing in The Atlantic about how "giant city-states" will own your future: 

Gradually, our great complexes of cities and suburbs are being knit into mega-regions -- giant city-states that are home to millions upon millions of people and generate billions and in some cases trillions of dollars of economic activity. Driving this is not just our individual choices and preferences but the very logic of economic development. Geographic concentration and clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates powerful economies of scale.

He's got a point, of course, though for additional perspective you should read Nicholas Lemann's (paywalled, sadly) piece on the fight over urban identity. But there's one problem with dubbing this the new age of city-states, namely, the "state" part: most metropoli don't have a huge amount of say in government, often even in their own.

Why, for all their economic and cultural importance, are cities still politically impotent?

The Age of Splinters: More and more countries...

Thousands celebrate South Sudan's independence in Juba. Photo by Roberto Schmidt, AFP

On Saturday, South Sudan, after a long struggle, became the world's 193rd nation. While the country has a challenging path ahead, it's certainly an improvement after years of struggle against an oppressive regime.

Their break with Sudan also marks the latest in a decades long trend: nations splintering instead of forming.

Parag Khanna, writing in Foreign Policy, hails the trend:

Because of this wave of self-determination culminating in sovereignty, there are today more autonomous political units in the world than at any time since the Middle Ages of a millennium ago. Within a few decades, we could easily have 300 states in the world. Moreover, we are gradually returning to the medieval world of thousands of multilayered communities ranging from the supranational European Union to the magnetic city-states of the Persian Gulf to the indigenous communities of the Inuit of Canada and Greenland.

---

The coming partitions must be performed with a combination of scalpel and ax, soft and hard power. Above all, the world must recognize that these partitions are inevitable. Our reflex is to fear changes on the map out of concern for violence or having to learn the names of new countries. But in an age when any group can acquire the tools of violent resistance, the only alternative to self-determination is perpetual conflict.

Khanna mostly focuses on post-colonial states, admittedly a major part of the trend. In their haste to hack up the world, would-be overlords often drew boundaries with a complete disregard for local factors. So you get Iraq, Sudan, the Congo and plenty of others.

The medieval era ended with momentum moving in the opposite direction: nations encompassed broader identities, then took on colonies to become empires. For awhile, it looked like the whole world would end up under a handful of governments. The zenith — just after World War II — saw a rudimentary international structure in place.

Ironically, even the empires' opponents got in on the act. Communism sought to be the international replacement for nation-states, superseding their own identities into a grander ideology.

Even after it was clear that the UN would never govern the world, the competing power blocs still seemed a trend towards centralization, especially as the European Union started to knit a continent together.

But post-colonial states kept splitting up and the USSR acted like an old-school empire before promptly collapsing like one. It's not confined to the developing world either: the EU doesn't look so hot, nor does Italy.

When did we stop looking at the stars?

Into the wild blue yonder

Last Friday, the space shuttle Atlantis broke Earth's gravity, headed for the international space station. It marked the last space shuttle launch.

While this is not the end of the space program, Atlantis' final journey marks a major point on a long, downward trajectory, not least for the 25,000 workers who will suffer directly from the program's end. These days, the government spends more on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan than on NASA.

Appropriately, today is the 42nd anniversary of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," the classic lament of a doomed astronaut:

Let's not get too altruistic here, either. The space program's heyday came about in large part because Americans and their government viewed it as part of a greater war against the USSR.

Still, NASA's zenith proved something: we can go to space. We can send people to space. The resources exist. The technology is there. Hell, at this point the technology is old.

The only remaining question is: do we want to? When people look out at their society and think "what do I want us to do?" is "go to space, and keep going" on the list?

Not for a long time. People can talk efficiency all they wish, but governments have proven perfectly capable of spending larger sums on far more questionable things (remember all that air conditioning?). The program's death marked a deeper turn.

Partly, the shift came from space travel's birth, tied to the Cold War and '50s hubris. By the era's end, people were, rightly, tired of the damn struggle, and anything associated with it. "Space Oddity" was one early marker, the increasing skepticism of science fiction another.

"Fighting the commies" was never the whole reason, of course. Space exploration had real popular appeal for a long time, tapping into a primal grandeur, combined with humanity's explorational urge. But, forever tied to far-off dividends and the conflict that created it, the whole enterprise proved vulnerable to accusations that the only thing all that money created was "garbage floating in the sky," as Ursula LeGuin's infamously dismissed.

Defenders could even point to more immediate benefits, like the ridiculous amount of more down-to-earth devices spawned by space research. It didn't help. This is the kind of popular argument won in the heart, not the head.

The fact is, the populace at large decided space travel wasn't a priority. It lost its glamour, its war, its money and its support. There were other fears, other dangers. Everything that's followed, from the lack of cutting edge spacecraft to the shuttle's end, is all part of that downward spiral.

So here's the question: we decided to give up on space travel. What did we get instead?

Was it worth it?

Textbook racket attacks fair use

If you quote it, we'll shoot you

A good column by Quinn Norton highlights a fresh outrage:

In their ongoing quest to punch every puppy they can find, rights holders have turned to suing those most rapacious of pirates, professors. Academic publishers are asking a judge in Georgia for an injunction against Georgia State University for a liberal fair-use policy. What these publishers are objecting to is unapproved and unpaid-for book and article excerpts in class materials—essentially quoting and anthologizing. They want everything that can be paid for to be paid for. Specifically, professors couldn't use more than 10 percent or 1,000 words of an in-print book, whichever is less. That's about two pages. And it's campus wide—if I use two pages of Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes in my class, no student or teacher can use a third page without paying or getting sued by the publisher of Moral Mazes.

---

But that's not what fair use is about. It's a limit to copyright baked into the law. In the act itself, it cites a teacher making copies of classroom materials as a fair use. It's part of the copyright bargain; we grant these rights in exchange for material that improves our society as a whole, not so a group of publishers can get a piece of that mad college student money.

Absurd doesn't even begin to cover it.

Look, it's not like college textbook publishers don't have an extortion racket going on already. Hell, there's even recent legislation trying belatedly to curb the worse excesses.

I was somewhat fortunate: ASU was one of the few universities with a book rental system. While helpful, that didn't stop professors from assigning lots and lots of additional books, preferably expensive new editions. Barely having money for food, buying these was out of the question. I managed to pass my classes by borrowing, copying pages, taking copious notes, having a good memory and spending A LOT of time in the library. I was far from the only student in this situation, and I'll never forget the day when, after complaining about the price, a professor told a number of us to "just ask your parents for more money." Fewer things crystallized more clearly the assumption that education is the domain of the wealthy. This is one more move to worsening that divide.

Turns out xkcd was accurately predicting a terrifying dystopia

There's also a risk here I think rights holders still don't grasp. Ideally, when crafting a law, you want something that satisfies both competing interests: publishers get money, the public gets information. The point of this is while neither party gets completely what they want, they get enough that most people obey the law most of the time.

The increasing tilt towards rights holders is reaching such a ludicrous extreme that eventually people just cease obeying the law, consequences be damned. Determined students and professors will just make the copies anyway. What, are the publishers going to find all of them, much less sue?

The result is the equivalent of legal civil war: the occasional brutally sued defendant, but far more people who simply ignore the law. That this sort of scorched earth tactic never works never seems to stop companies from using it.

Financial innovation: The world's first black market stock exchange

I would bet on these guys over Wall Street stock traders any day

Fascinating news from the Wall Street Journal:

The world's first pirate stock exchange was established in 2009 in Harardheere, some 250 miles northeast of Mogadishu, Somalia. Open 24 hours a day, the exchange allows investors to profit from ransoms collected on the high seas, which can approach $10 million for successful attacks against Western commercial vessels.

While there are no credible statistics available, reports from various news sources suggest that over 70 entities are listed on the Harardheere exchange. When a pirate operation is successful, it pays investors a share of the profits. According to a former pirate who spoke to Reuters, "The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials. . . . We've made piracy a community activity."

Prototypes of this have existed since time immemorial — successful organized crime operation usually have a "bank" — this is a new variation. Keep in mind the sheer scale of the international black market and the role drug money played in bailing out the financial system, and it gets even more interesting.

In a suitably anarchic place, it's easy to see a larger-scale version of this taking root and even prospering, especially if it acquired enough tendrils into the "legitimate" financial system.

The column ends by calling for increased embargoes, sanctions and strikes, which will probably work as well as most of those sort of measures do. Historically, piracy ends through a combination of two factors: ordered government and harsher local scrutiny. When Somalia gets an actual government in place, with authority over most of its territory, piracy will rapidly decline.

Until then, keep those sanctions coming. For the people in Haradheere, it's the equivalent of a factory opening up and offering everyone a job: only a fool turns it down.

Belling the cat

The mice in council, illustration by Milo Winter

There's an old fable, traditionally attributed to Aesop, though he probably never told it. It goes something like this:

Once upon a time all the Mice met together in Council, and discussed the best means of securing themselves against the attacks of the cat. After several suggestions had been debated, a Mouse of some standing and experience got up and said, "I think I have hit upon a plan which will ensure our safety in the future, provided you approve and carry it out. It is that we should fasten a bell round the neck of our enemy the cat, which will by its tinkling warn us of her approach."

This proposal was warmly applauded, and it had been already decided to adopt it, when an old Mouse got upon his feet and said, "I agree with you all that the plan before us is an admirable one: but may I ask who is going to bell the cat?"

That story came back to me yesterday afternoon, as I was driving back to Asheville after a lovely weekend far from civilization. NPR had a good segment on the country's debt ceiling problems. It's likely the ceiling will be raised after some sort of compromise (how bad a one remains to be seen), but the underlying problems have built up for some time.

There's plenty of blame to go around, mind, and narrow interests have way too much leverage over the political system.

But I think the narrative often pushed, of an innocent and just "people" held hostage to nefarious cliques, is lacking something, and the above segment illustrates why. Notice that the current unsustainable setup — massive spending on the military, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, along with an utter unwillingness to raise taxes — is extremely popular. The unpopular programs that people want to cut actually make up a minuscule part of spending.

Yes, most Americans, like most humans, deserve way better than what they receive. Conversely, I don't buy the bullshit narrative that the average voter bears equal responsibility for the worst actions of those in power. But the current set-up got that way in part because millions upon millions of people voted for its advocates. Repeatedly.

After all, a better-equipped military sounds good, right? And grandma really does deserve her check (plus, her demographic votes in massive numbers).

When it comes time to pay for all that, no one wants to foot the bill, or even part of the bill. Raising taxes isn't popular because few people say "I want more money to go to the government" especially when you don't particularly like the one you have.

Politicians like to be popular; it's a job requirement. Aforementioned interests prod too (what else would you expect them to do?) to protect their own pet causes.

All of which makes the current situation understandable — as most disasters are. It also points to the thornier side of the problems it highlights, because when you factor in the popular demands that led to the current fiasco, it's not just a problem of replacing an elite or throwing out some nefariously influential power-brokers.

This isn't limited to governmental finances, of course. All those new, smart devices guzzle electricity, fueling a thirst for coal (or oil, or nuclear) power. People waiting for their shiny martial arts implants won't bother to exercise. Voting for decades of "tough on crime" politicians has spurred a massive prison population. There is always a price, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

Obviously, breaks in the wilderness make me quite ranty.

But there's something here. If we want to avoid this kind of clusterfuck in the future, it might be time to start asking not just about the benefits of today's plans for tomorrow, but about their consequences, and if we're fully prepared to accept them. Someone always has to bell the damn cat.

Under a different law: Jail for sending a child to school

Okay, this is really ugly:

Connecticut authorities have filed theft charges against Tanya McDowell, a homeless woman, alleging that she used a false address to enroll her son in a higher-income school district, The Stamford Advocate reports. If she's convicted, McDowell may end up in jail for as many as 20 years and pay a $15,000 fine for the crime.

McDowell is a homeless single mother from Bridgeport who used to work in food services, is now at the center of one of the very few false address cases in the Norwalk, CT, school district that is being handled in criminal court--rather than between the parent and school. Authorities are accusing McDowell of enrolling her 5-year-old son in nearby Norwalk schools by using the address of a friend. (Her friend has also been evicted from public housing for letting McDowell use her address.)

One of the unspoken stories of the recession is that many working class people who were just scraping by have ended up homeless after they lose their jobs. Now, apparently, even an attempt to get their child into a good school when they have no permanent address is... a criminal activity that can get two decades in prison (while it's doubtful McDowell will get the full brunt, for comparison, the average sentence for rape is 5-11 years).

Not only that, but her friend, still hanging on to a place to live, gets evicted for trying to help her. When I first read this, I initially remembered English juries in early 1800s opting to convict someone who'd stolen a handkerchief of manslaughter, because the penalties were less. This is disgustingly disproportionate to the point of barbarism.

Another tidbit:

"I am surprised that this is the case [Norwalk officials] chose to make an example of," Norwalk attorney Michael Corsello told the Stamford-Advocate.

It's not surprising. McDowell is homeless, so she has no resources to fight this, and given the amount of people in similar spots, the school district wants to maintain its high-income nature and discourage more of this sort of entry in the bluntest way possible. Add to that the general public stigma attached to homelessness, and McDowell makes an easy target.

At the root of the word "privilege" isn't the academic wibbling it's often buried in, but a more simplistically brutal observation. Privilege means "private law." For McDowell or her friend, there is one law, harshly enforced; witness the possible sentence, the fine, and eviction for what is, at worst, a minor fraud.

But let's take a much wealthier family who lives just down the road, and also wants to get into Norwalk's school district. Like McDowell, the written rules don't allow this, but it's more likely they'll know a sympathetic administrator or school board member who will find some exemption. If they don't have such contacts, they are far more likely to have the time and resources to make an introduction convincing one of the above people that their child deserves special treatment.

Even if their attempts fail, it's likely the school will simply say "no, you can't come" and that will be the end of it. There will be no criminal investigation, and prison is out of the question. If, for some reason, this family's attempt backfires badly enough to reach the public eye, it lacks the visceral backlash appeal of "homeless sneaking into our schools!" Their attempt to get a better education for their child might even attract some sympathy.

They are far too expensive to make an example of. For all practical purposes, that family lives under a different law. Meanwhile, the poor will always be with you, and suffer what they cannot avoid.

Big Black Market: The drug money bailout

Imagine this map in a Charlotte banking executive's PowerPoint presentation

An investigation from The Observer reveals that Wachovia, a major bank, laundered billions for Mexican drug cartels:

During a 22-month investigation by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and others, it emerged that the cocaine smugglers had bought the plane with money they had laundered through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo.

The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveller's cheques and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts. Wachovia was put under immediate investigation for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Of special significance was that the period concerned began in 2004, which coincided with the first escalation of violence along the US-Mexico border that ignited the current drugs war.

Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year's "deferred prosecution" has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine.

More shocking, and more important, the bank was sanctioned for failing to apply the proper anti-laundering strictures to the transfer of $378.4bn – a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico's gross national product – into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico, currency exchange houses with which the bank did business.

It gets better, mind you, with Wachovia hanging out the whistleblower who discovered the laundering out to dry. As a case of major financial malfeasance, this is bad enough. But this paragraph in particular struck me:

The conclusion to the case was only the tip of an iceberg, demonstrating the role of the "legal" banking sector in swilling hundreds of billions of dollars – the blood money from the murderous drug trade in Mexico and other places in the world – around their global operations, now bailed out by the taxpayer.

At the height of the 2008 banking crisis, Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said he had evidence to suggest the proceeds from drugs and crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to banks on the brink of collapse. "Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade," he said. "There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."

That's big news, revealing the metamorphosis of corporate finance into a creature with enough tentacles in both government and the black market to draw from both in time of crisis. This is not entirely unexpected. Remember how one of the major factors behind the housing bubble was "everyone else is making shit tons of money off it, why don't we?" The black market, after all, is a growth industry that accounts for 15 percent of the world's GDP. For an amoral organization looking for quick profits, it's a natural fit.

The problem of the cartels' drug trade is its own issue, but historically financial entities had to (mostly) stay away from the black market on any massive scale. For all their white collar crimes, banking institutions do rely on legal guarantees to operate, and so are structurally more vulnerable to the law than the "black collar" sector.

Now? The line is fading, and Wachovia escaped with little more than a slap on the wrist. For future joint ventures between the legal and illegal markets, few things could be more auspicious.

P.S. If you happen to have an account at Wachovia, this might be a good time to switch to a credit union. They don't rely on murderous drug gangs and don't treat their customers like shit.