*Texas Energy Grid Paid Bitcoin Miner $31.7 Million to Stop Working Amid Heatwave.*

One sign of US plutocracy is the idea that companies should be paid every time they do what the public needs, rather than be taxed or fined when they do not do it.

The poor are punished; the rich get rewarded.

The Tories have backed down, for the moment, on plans to scan users' digital communications, but the requirement is still in the law they are about to pass.

Perhaps they plan to make another try in a year or two.

UK enforcement of the registration rules is so lax that secret owners are in no danger of being punished or hassled.

This applies to ordinary tax evaders as well as Russian oligarchs subject to sanctions because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

The UK parliament passed laws a few years ago to require registration of the effective ("beneficial") owner of foreign-owned properties, but left a loophole that defeats the system: when the nominal owner is a trust, it can still conceal the identity of the effective owner.

This is plutocratism at work.

Private equity is investing in causing climate disasters, and profiting from the work to clean them up.