c/sneerclub · by sinedpick@awful.systems · 2y

The Honduran charter city is going exactly as well as you expected

https://theintercept.com/2024/03/19/honduras-crypto-investors-world-bank-prospera/

TL;DR: new regime in honduras is hostile to our dearest libertarian crypto bros, asserts sovereignty and tells them where to stick it.

A group of prominent international economists is applauding the recent move by Honduran President Xiomara Castro to push back against American crypto investors attempting to seize billions in public money from the Central American nation.

Background:

A group of libertarian investors teamed up with a former Honduran government — which was tied at the hip with narco-traffickers and came to power after a U.S.-backed military coup — in order to implement the world’s most radical libertarian policy, which turned over significant portions of the country to those investors through so-called special economic zones. The Honduran public, in a backlash, ousted the narco-backed regime, and the new government repealed the libertarian legislation. The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies.

[ image of cryptobros making the face Wil E Coyote makes after running off a cliff ]

The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies.

[Castro] has hit upon an elegant solution: She has taken steps to withdraw Honduras from ICSID. The crypto crowd is crying foul.

Among the dozens of signatories to the Progressive International praising Castro’s decision to exit the arbitration court are prominent South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang; Chilean Gabriel Palma, of the “Palma Ratio of inequality”; American economist Jeffrey Sachs; former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis; British economist Ann Pettifor; and Indian development economist Jayati Ghosh.

Predictably, the international community is going "LOL"

You may be asking, who's winning in all of this?

In its case before the ICSID, Próspera retained a top lobbying firm, employing former Democratic lawmaker Kendrick Meek, to pressure Honduras to pay up.

33 points · 21 comments · view on lemmy.world

21 Comments

sc_griffith@awful.systems · 16 pts · 2y (10 replies)

A conference Próspera held on Roatán last year signaled the company’s ethic. “Próspera aims to be the best jurisdiction for the crypto/web3 industry in the world, and we welcome the best ideas on how to achieve that with a sound legal framework,” said Chris Wilson of Próspera in publicity materials that described the confab as “specifically designed for legal hackers, crypto lawyers, jurisdictional polymaths, and businesses that want to create better laws to do business under.”

what is a jurisdictional polymath

YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems · 16 pts · 2y

You know I wanted to come up with a joke but I don’t think that term is even grammatically correct nonsense, even to do the joke I wanted you’d have to figure out how someone can be a polymath of jurisdictions and then riff on how that’s nonsense

Oh I get it, they mean accounting fraud

gerikson@awful.systems · 16 pts · 2y (1 reply)

Can launder money in multiple jurisdictions.

YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y

I like to picture it as somebody with a polymathic understanding of how to commit a variety of financial crimes crossing jurisdictional boundaries

bitofhope@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y

A guy who knows the age of consent in every country by heart, except for financial regulations. There's a lot of overlap too.

dgerard@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y

regulatory parkour

sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y

Extradition treaty memorizer

swlabr@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y

jurisdictional polymath

To borrow a term from the podcast "Scam Goddess", a "serial entrepreneur", which in turn is just a scam artist.

V0ldek@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y

Crime Rockstar

froztbyte@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y

“Excuse me, but this club is only for legislative arbitrageurs”

Soyweiser@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y

A lawyer with people skills.

cwood@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y

Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, came out against the effort by Próspera to exploit the dispute resolution system to undermine Honduran sovereignty. “In the case of Próspera,” they write, “a ZEDE located largely on the Honduran island of Roatán, investors have created a governing council where 44 percent of members are appointed by the private company and 22 percent are elected by landowners in a system where their number of votes is proportional to the size of their property.”

Why are they being described as crypto-libertarians when it turns out they are moving the electoral clock back two hundred years to before the abolishment of rotten boroughs? That's a significantly conservative political arrangement there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs

Soyweiser@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y (6 replies)

The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies.

Sigh. Would be shocking if this wasn't a regular policy.

E: Also this is not really sneerclub territory, as sneerclub is very specifically about a certain group of nerds, not just all libertarian nerds in general. We are the hipsters of the sneer. (So prob more techtakes/buttcoin)

dgerard@awful.systems · 16 pts · 2y

Funded by Thiel, so more on topic here than we might like

sinedpick@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y (1 reply)

I wasn't exactly sure where to put it, so I searched "charter city" and Lemmy threw up a few times but eventually showed me an older SneerClub post about prospera. I would have posted it in techtakes otherwise.

Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y

Doesn't matter that much, according to Gerard it fitted, and awful.systems is a weird algamation of all the different subs anyway (at least for me, as I directly use the site itself).

Architeuthis@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y (2 replies)

Model City Mondays is thing in siskind's substack, and Prospera is featured constantly.

It's seasteading that's the strictly libertarian thing where you fuck off to the ends of the earth to do drugs and marry twelve-year-olds. Despite the considerable overlap charter cities seem more of a rat/stembrained thing were you decide you're going to be the one to do a polis from first principles but get it right this time.

V0ldek@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y

Is there an equivalent of seasteading for me to fuck off to the ends of the earth to be as far away from libertarians as possible?

Sneersteading?

maol@awful.systems · 2 pts · 2y

I started (but didn't finish) a degree in city planning, and we literally spent a lot of the first year learning about why planned cities are usually a bad idea. Siskind's a schmuck

swlabr@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y (1 reply)

FWIW as far as I can tell, bears are not native to Honduras

jonhendry@iosdev.space · 9 pts · 2y

@swlabr @sinedpick

Maybe you go to the wrong bars.