The Outer Circle (The Counterpoint Trilogy Book 3) (14 page)

“No. I am not running as their champion. I am not looking for their money. I am aiming to break the cycle of money politics. I believe we are all damaged by unfairness, by the unjustified privileges of crony capitalism.”

“That leads me to the next question,” said Barbara. “You’ve been a fierce critic of inequality in this country. Some people argued that you are either a socialist or a communist, take your pick. That you are trying to impose a utopian equality, to eliminate freedom in our society.”

“I am neither a socialist nor a communist,” laughed Jeff. “I am trying to save capitalism. I am not trying to impose equality. But the kind of extreme inequality that we evolved – it can’t be tolerated any longer. In our country, the top one tenth of one percent have more wealth than the bottom ninety percent. No society can survive this for long.”

“And you’ve been trying to change this by advocating non-violent resistance?”

“As one American president said not too long ago,” interjected Jennifer, “
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
.”

“Umm, which president was it?” replied Barbara.

“John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

“Yes, JFK said this. It was true then, it is true now,” nodded Jeff. “We have to restore social trust, we have to break the vicious cycle where economic inequality leads to political inequality and to gaining further economic advantage through political means, thus farther enriching a few at the expense of many. This can’t be changed by reason alone.”

“So you justify active resistance?”

“I justify non-violent disobedience in some cases. We share common humanity. Secular power is not defensible if it contradicts moral principles.”

“Like John Galt, you want to stop the motor of the world?” asked Barbara mockingly.

“No, I want to change how the motor runs,” responded Jeff calmly. “We will have a better society if we stop leaving the majority of the population behind. We will have a better society if we put morality and fairness into equation. Jobs and good pay are the main mechanisms to support flourishing market economy. Drops in living standards makes people eager to turn to anyone offering simple – but dangerous – solutions.”

“Are you referring to your opponent, John Dimon?”

“I believe his message of blaming the external enemies is dangerous. Much of our predicament is of our own doing. Did the Chinese make us run up our debts? Did they force us into the perpetual expensive warfare we’ve been engaged in for decades? At what point did we assume the right to militarily intervene anywhere in the world?”

“Mr. Dimon referred to you as ‘the leader of Blame America First’ movement. How would you respond?”

“I would say that I want this country to be great again but that we won’t get there by leaving half of our population on food stamps and in minimum wage jobs. Nor would we get there by refusing to talk about our faults and labeling those who criticize the government as unpatriotic. There is a fine line between patriotism and nationalism and Mr. Dimon is on the wrong side of that line.”

Barbara checked the time.

“We have only a few minutes left. Jeff, can you tell our viewers what would be the most crucial imperative that you would pursue if you were elected the President?”

“Only one?” smiled Jeff Kron.

“Yes, only one,” smiled back Barbara Stanlon.

“All right. I would focus the government on protecting the mass market. I am a strong believer in free market, but left completely to its own devices the market concentrates wealth and income to the point of self-destruction, especially in an increasingly ‘winner-takes-all’ digital society, especially in a progressively automated economy where robots are cheaper than people. I’m not here to preach: extreme inequality is not just a moral issue, it’s a business issue as well. It destroys the mass market and the society itself. A hundred years ago Henry Ford famously doubled his workers’ wages so they would want to work for him and, importantly, be able to buy products such as his Model-T’s. That’s how we built the middle class in this country, the cornerstone of our democracy. Somehow, we forgot this lesson. Fifty years ago, more than a half of our households were in the middle class. Now, it’s about one third. When people at the very top take more and more for themselves, it impoverishes the society. When the CEO of a company fires a thousand people and gives himself a multi-million bonus, what do you think happens to the mass market? The CEO might buy himself five cars, but the thousand people that lost their jobs won’t buy any. And as the market goes, so does our economy: we can build most wonderful products but fewer and fewer people can afford them.”

“Thank you. That’s quite a response,” Barbara Stanlon exhaled, checked the time again.

“One quick last question: Jeff, what is making you run?”

Jeff looked down, gathering his thoughts.

“A famous writer said once that it’s our desire to belong to the Inner Circle that makes us do the worst things, the worst compromises. I run for all those that are not in the Inner Circle, those that are in a much larger Outer Circle. I want to be their champion.”

“And that’s the end of our program for today,” concluded Barbara Stanlon.

Los Angeles, USA

Maggie woke up later than usual. She remembered being wide awake at one in the morning, listening to David’s gentle snoring. What would her life have been like if two years ago he did not walk into the restaurant that she waitressed in? Whenever she wondered, she also remembered that morning at Balboa Lake when he came ready to sacrifice himself in order to save her, a virtual stranger. He could have slapped a handcuff on her wrist, that’s how resolutely he bound the two of them. Their fates were now tied, for better or for worse. She would do anything, give herself to anyone in order to protect him.

In her dream, she was back on the Black Rock in Maui. David handed her the little Seagate thumb-drive that could stop everything. She threw the drive into the ocean, but there was no splash. Instead, the drive was back in her palm. She threw it again and again, but the drive refused to leave. When she woke up, David’s side of the bed was empty. Maggie brushed her teeth, washed up and followed a sound of voices into the kitchen. Alejandro, Oleg, and David were talking to a burly man with a sun-beaten face, wearing a stained green shirt, brown canvas pants, heavy workboots and a dirty straw hat. Upon seeing Maggie, then man took off his hat and nodded:
“Ma’am.”

“This is Ubaldo,” introduced him Alejandro.

“Maggie,” she offered her hand, which he shook gently. Ubaldo’s hands were calloused; the man was no stranger to physical work.

Maggie poured a cup of coffee:

“What are you gentlemen plotting so early in the morning?”

“Ubaldo is explaining to me the basics of gardening,” laughed Oleg.

“What? Why?”
Are they treating this as a joke?
She wondered.

“Ubaldo and his crew do weekly gardening for Jeff and Jennifer Kron,” explained Alejandro.

“Excuse me, I have to go,” apologized Ubaldo. “I will pick you up in two days,” to Oleg.

“Do you want to explain?” asked Maggie after Ubaldo left.

“It’s all very simple, that’s how we will get Oleg in touch with Jennifer Kron,
née
Rostin,” clarified Alejandro.

“And you just happen to know and trust their gardener?”

“I know and work with many gardeners,” laughed Alejandro. “They are the backbone of the new ‘grey sharing’ economy.”

“
Grey sharing
what?” David and Maggie exclaimed in unison.

“Oh yes, the three of you have been out of the country, there have been some changes since you left.”

“Like what?”

“People have been increasingly sharing things using convenient phone apps. You need a ride, contact Uber. You need a place to stay in another town, use AirBnB. Then the government started taxing these services...”

“That started while we were still here,” pointed out David.

“Yes, and the government became increasingly more aggressive about taking their cut because it was grabbing business from other, tax-paying enterprises. In some countries they even outlawed cash so that governments can follow the money trail. They tried to do it here but have not been able to push this through. At least not yet. In any case, people started leaving these apps for un-taxed ones, like a grey market. That’s why we call it ‘grey sharing.’ I am dabbling in this. Well, perhaps more than dabbling.”

Maggie sat at the table across from Alejandro, sipped her coffee. Years of studying economics had her sense of curiosity tingling:

“Do explain. I thought you were in the... how shall I put it... recreational drugs business?”

“No, I got out soon after Oleg’s boss was killed and the three of you went on the run. It got too dangerous at that point. I was looking for something new to do. As I told you earlier, it was the identity that Javier performed on that inspired me to look into the privacy business. As I thought about it, I figured that just giving someone’s privacy, reducing his ‘gridprint’ is not enough because they still have to use services that require identifications, credit cards and such. That was my
Eureka!
moment.”

Maggie laughed, “OK, once you shouted
Eureka
, what did you do?”

“We now maintain platforms of apps where people trade goods and services in private,” explained Alejandro. “We use a token system. There are tokens for everything: babysitting, painting a house, cooking dinner, hosting a movie showing. For many people now these tokens are money, they store value and can be traded for stuff. The concept is not new, the scope is. Here, let me show you.”

Alejandro moved his finger on the phone’s screen and a 3-D image projected in the air just above the table. It consisted of multiple planes of two-dimensional tables of characters and numbers.

“See, Maggie, this is the top view of the database of our local neighborhood, roughly eleven thousand people, three thousand households. Almost twelve hundred participate in the program. So you have twelve tables of a hundred households each. The left-most column is the encoded identifier for each participant. With multiple levels of indirection, even I don’t know who these people are. Other columns show how many tokens they have, what services they are able to offer, what orders they have in the pipeline, and more.”

“Why do people move to such bartering systems?” wondered Maggie. “Because that’s what it is, old-fashioned bartering like in ancient times, except on very modern computer platforms. That’s why money’s was invented, to simplify and streamline this bartering.”

“I am not debating the benefits of money, but when the convenience of traditional electronic money carries the price of losing privacy, some people see it as a tradeoff where convenience doesn’t always win. Perhaps because they start valuing other things. And this is not a simple bartering system. The proof of each transaction is absolute and stored on multiple independent computers. We use the system not only as money, but for contracts and agreements as well. These tokens are based on a derivative of a D-coin technology, one of the bitcoin’s descendants. But unlike regular electronic money, D-coin is completely decentralized and not transparent to the government. The tokens are redeemable outside of our local communities because we blockchain them into a centralized ledger shared with other such systems. For a small fee, D-coin payment processors will exchange tokens for traditional currencies so people can transact outside of the system.”

“The government must hate this!”

“Of course. People are buying less, they show less income, they don’t show purchases. You have lower demand, lower income taxes, lower sales taxes. The government tried to tax legitimate point-based services so many went underground, into the grey market. Some are doing this as a matter of principle. They believe that they no longer have the power, that the government represents the monied interests, not them. What did they say two hundred and fifty years ago:
no taxation without representation
? This slogan is now all over the place. People are going ‘off the grid’ or ‘minimizing their gridprint’ as they call it: little to no official income, no bank accounts, no credit cards.”

“This actually sounds familiar. Where I was growing up, half of the economy was unofficial. But what’s your role? If people share locally, why would they need your help? Can’t they use this D-coin technology directly?” wondered Maggie. “And why are the gardeners a backbone of this ‘grey sharing’ economy?”

“Well, I may have exaggerated slightly about the gardeners,” laughed Alejandro. “Not all the business can be done locally. You may travel. And if you need your car fixed, not every neighborhood has a mechanic that can work on it. We provide wider reach, we ensure – by some old-fashioned methods – that the rules are respected. Most important, we provide privacy and anonymity. Regulated virtual currency is not opaque to the government. Remember, the government very much wants to control these activities. And they have cameras everywhere, even in your own TV, they have drones watching from overhead, they search your e-mail and texts. We secure our apps. All sensitive data is stored on servers outside of the country. Each transaction is broken into small pieces to make it indecipherable to interception. Everything is divided into local cells of a hundred people or so, each person knows only his or her codename and we keep identity tables completely separate from the apps. If someone breaks into a local cell, they get limited data and they don’t know who the people are. This is a decentralized autonomous system for people that want to tell the government to go screw itself.”

“Never knew you to be a computer person,” Oleg shook his head.

“I’m not. I don’t have to be. This is like a Gold Rush where I sell shovels. We use mostly an off-the-shelf software, especially the D-coin part. And people themselves are now sophisticated enough to avoid devices that spy on them. A year ago, the Feds tried to convict someone using data captured from a backdoor in his phone. In three days, that phone manufacturer’s sales collapsed. What’s important for us is to have discipline and to have systems around the software. If I can’t enforce the rules, does not matter how good the software is. If I can’t deliver the ordered goods outside of the official system, I can’t support the service. The bottom line is, any system must be underpinned by people trusting it. That’s what I do: use my resources to ensure the trust. By the way, that’s where the gardeners come in: they provide delivery and, if needed, an old-fashioned communication that can’t be intercepted electronically. Large digital systems are transparent because they have to allow new people in. To make ours non-transparent, we have to have some non-electronic connections built in.”