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Steps 1-4 sure seem like the Steemit interface. Did I not read that correctly?

"upvote my pawn each chance I get to feed the greed and rake in the steem."

In regards to how they could combat such abuse is by using their voting power to help protect the platform from bad actors or those trying to manipulate the reward pool via using their down-voting/flags. They have more than enough SP to eliminate rewards, but choose not to. Many other large stakeholders choose not to use their voting power for down voting either.
Steem Inc does not act as a willing participant in the Steem platform. As I mentioned they view the Steemit platform as a proof of concept and would rather have focus on bringing the Steem Blockchain to other entities via SMT's