Just to be clear here, so folks don’t buy the lie that DeSantis=Trump that the media are already pushing to sway the squishy. There are clear differences.
DeSantis is a very smart politician so he adapted to the Trump era. He also got COVID right by relying on science, and adeptly uses the culture war.
But if you look at his House voting record, he's like Pompeo: supports the foreign and economic policy which Trump 2016 rejected.
There's real and substantive internal division on the US right in both foreign and domestic policy. The early Tea Party and Ron Paul's relative success captured that before Trump used his celebrity, charisma and media attention to win with it. These debates don't exist with Dems.
And on DeSantis, what @ZaidJilani says is true. I'm not assuming DeSantis still advocates old GOP foreign policy. Many people evolve as they see more (smart people by definition do so). Just saying his House votes were aligned with traditional GOP policy:https://t.co/ZZfqmzvgbW
And here's @justinamash — always a consistent voice and vote against needless US wars and surveillance — on both DeSantis and Pompeo, with whom he served in the House. It'll be interesting to see how DeSantis positions himself now on foreign policy:https://t.co/6qcjn2f6u3
Time to upgrade your earlier door to one that REVOLVES.
Now that you’ve got programs at think tanks (and you should have expanded to academia as well, creating more of an echo chamber), and your GA program, you can start to cultivate “SENIOR POLICYMAKERS.”
Tom Emmer was running a Lincoln Project style sexual assault / harassment operation over at NRCC, he failed to deliver the red wave he promised and now he wants a promotion. pic.twitter.com/HxOYoGuwDn
Some mass shooters are more equal than others, especially if they don’t fit the media’s narrative.
It disappeared because shooter was black & that goes against narrative pushed by Media & the Left. Media never want to talk about shooter unless he’s white. This was black on black crime & since that’s not openly discussed because of fear of it being called racism it’s non story
Wild story by my colleagues @AP investigative reporters @JimMustian and @APjoshgoodman. A disgraced DEA agent said some former colleagues joined him in skimming millions from drug money laundering stings to fund luxury overseas travel, gifts, etc. https://t.co/SnB7ieIhFk
“José Irizarry accepts that he’s known as the most corrupt agent in U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration history, admitting he “became another man” in conspiring with Colombian cartels to build a lavish lifestyle of expensive sports cars, Tiffany jewels and paramours around the world.
But as he used his final hours of freedom to tell his story to The Associated Press, Irizarry says he won’t go down for this alone, accusing some long-trusted DEA colleagues of joining him in skimming millions of dollars from drug money laundering stings to fund a decade’s worth of luxury overseas travel, fine dining, top seats at sporting events and frat house-style debauchery.
The way Irizarry tells it, dozens of other federal agents, prosecutors, informants and in some cases cartel smugglers themselves were all in on the three-continent joyride known as “Team America” that chose cities for money laundering pick-ups mostly for party purposes or to coincide with Real Madrid soccer or Rafael Nadal tennis matches. That included stops along the way in VIP rooms of Caribbean strip joints, Amsterdam’s red-light district and aboard a Colombian yacht that launched with plenty of booze and more than a dozen prostitutes.
“We had free access to do whatever we wanted,” the 48-year-old Irizarry told the AP in a series of interviews before beginning a 12-year federal prison sentence. “We would generate money pick-ups in places we wanted to go. And once we got there it was about drinking and girls.”
All this revelry was rooted, Irizarry said, in a crushing realization among DEA agents around the world that there’s nothing they can do to make a dent in the drug war anyway. Only nominal concern was given to actually building cases or stemming a record flow of illegal cocaine and opioids into the United States that has driven more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths a year.
“You can’t win an unwinnable war. DEA knows this and the agents know this,” Irizarry said. “There’s so much dope leaving Colombia. And there’s so much money. We know we’re not making a difference.”
“The drug war is a game. … It was a very fun game that we were playing.”
Irizarry’s story, which some former colleagues have attacked as a fictionalized attempt to reduce his sentence, came in days of contrite, bitter, sometimes tearful interviews with the AP in the historic quarter of his native San Juan. It was much the same account he gave the FBI in lengthy debriefings and sealed court papers obtained by the AP after he pleaded guilty in 2020 to 19 corruption counts, including money laundering and bank fraud.”
Same DOJ conducting terrorizing FBI raids, hauling J6ers to political prisons, and prosecuting Indiana meemaws for walking into a government building now worried about "harassment" of public officials if depositions are released to the public: pic.twitter.com/tMbrwXR7Yc
DOJ desperate to prevent Chan's court-ordered deposition. Meta (Facebook parent company) sent a letter claiming officials did not name Chan as one of 2 FBI officials attempting to suppress Hunter Biden laptop story.
High School teacher Jeremy Adams describes a dystopian youth culture of cell phone addiction, isolation, and inability to sustain human relations or spirituality. Hollowed out youth. It’s chilling.”
“We cover education extensively, and how the left targets even the youngest grades for ideological grooming. But it’s even worse than that, we are raising a generation of hollowed out youth, and we can’t blame it on the teachers.
That was a theme in a presentation at the Parents United Conference I attended in Boston on October 28. I usually only post my own speech videos (there’s a psychological term for that, I can’t remember what it is). And not to worry, I will still do that.
But I want to present first the speaker who was immediately before me, Jeremy Adams, whose book on the subject is Hollowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation:
Jeremy is a high school teacher in Bakersfield, California, and he describes a dystopian youth culture of cell phone addiction, isolation, and inability to sustain human relations or spirituality. Hollowed out youth. It’s chilling.
How do you think those hollowed out youth will vote when they reach adulthood? That’s more depressing than the midterm results.
““The Next Warren Buffett.” That’s how Fortune magazine dubbed Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto wunderkind who wore shorts, schlubby socks, and sneakers on stage with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. But Bankman-Fried, worth an estimated $32 billion at his height, wouldn’t just be a financial oracle like Buffett. He would also be the second-coming of George Soros: By the end of this midterm election cycle, he’d become the second largest donor to the Democratic Party.
Over the past few days, all of that has come spectacularly undone.
Now, Bankman-Fried looks, at best, like the original storyline for Michael Saylor of Microstrategy during the Dotcom bust. Or, more likely, like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy. Or, with increasing plausibility, like a less civic-minded Bernie Madoff.
Tens of thousands of people who invested their savings on various FTX exchanges have likely been wiped out. FTX employees have quit en masse. And SBF? According to reports, he’s been taken into custody by Bahamian authorities after holing up at FTX HQ with his father.
Like everyone else in financial markets, I am glued to my screen.
If all you know about crypto are those Super Bowl ads with Matt Damon and Larry David hawking products and encouraging viewers to be “brave” and not miss out, the name Sam Bankman-Fried is probably new to you. Allow me to explain.
Born on the campus of Stanford University to two professors, he attended MIT, majored in physics, and from there joined Jane Street Capital, a noted employer of brilliant young programming talent on Wall Street. After three years, in 2017, Bankman-Fried was bitten by the crypto bug and founded Alameda Research, at the age of 25, to utilize the tools of traditional finance in the highly volatile crypto space.
As Alameda’s trading volume grew, Bankman-Fried apparently recognized the opportunity to monetize this volume by launching his own exchange, FTX. It first launched in unregulated Hong Kong to evade a tighter U.S. regulatory environment. Then, in 2020, FTX moved to the equally unregulated Bahamas as the political climate in Hong Kong deteriorated. (With both of his parents being Stanford Law professors, Sam was well positioned to understand the legal gray areas in which he was operating. But offshore banking is standard practice in the crypto world, so those geographic choices attracted no additional scrutiny.)
As FTX took off with the pandemic-driven crypto boom, so did a carefully cultivated Cult of SBF. Only two years after FTX’s founding, the company purchased naming rights to the NBA’s Miami Heat stadium in a 19-year commitment of $135 million. Deals soon followed for college stadiums. A Mercedes Formula 1 team. National Baseball League umpire patches. Partnerships with Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen.
In short order, profiles of the boy genius appeared everywhere. As cryptocurrencies soared in market value, SBF became the poster child for the libertarian ethos that crypto profits accrued to those most capable. He seemed to have access to the glitterati previously reserved for those with established connections within the intellectual elite.
As a critic of crypto and its marketing mania, I found myself unsure in my assessment of SBF. Unlike many of the other dubious characters in the space, he appeared to be genuinely trying to build something of note, and his provenance at MIT and a top-tier Wall Street shop was certainly credible. As crypto-related businesses around the globe tumbled in this year’s selloff, he appeared to be taking a J.P. Morgan role—the banker at the center of the system, trying to acquire the broken pieces and assemble an empire that might successfully navigate the transition to a more regulated digital economy and marketplace. And he was doing it all in the name of future charity, as the popular face for a movement labeled “effective altruism.”
The venture capitalists at Sequoia—the powerful investors behind Silicon Valley success stories like Google and PayPal—were certainly taken (or taken in) by him. Three months ago, one of the firm’s partners, Michelle Bailhe, offered a breathless take in a firm-sponsored story about SBF:
“Of the exchanges that we had met and looked at, some of them had regulatory issues, some of them were already public,” Bailhe wrote. “And then there was Sam.” FTX, Sequoia felt, was “Goldilocks-perfect.””
—-
“Over the last week, all those investments appear to have gone to zero. FTX, Alameda Research and 132 other related entities have declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Sequoia has written its investment down to zero. It makes the shenanigans at Twitter—which, incidentally, has been integral to the flood of information coming out on FTX—look like a cake walk.
The actual mechanics of what appears to have transpired are relatively straightforward and, at least initially, draw far more similarities to the DotCom cycle and MF Global than Bernie Madoff.
FTX appears to have raised capital beyond the venture capital previously highlighted by issuing its own “token” called FTT. Functionally, this is the same as selling unregistered, non-voting equity shares. It’s very similar to what Mark Zuckerberg did at Meta or Evan Siegel did at Snapchat: They issued super-voting shares that left them in control of the enterprise regardless of the views of shareholders. Self-minted crypto tokens, which is what FTX did, go one better. They fail to confer any governance or ownership rights to the holders. They exist only as prices on digital exchanges.
By simultaneously owning FTX, the exchange, and Alameda Research, the largest trader and market maker on the exchange, SBF was able to dictate the price of the FTT token and create the illusion that the value of the FTT token—and, by extension, FTX and Alameda—was substantial. He was able to use FTT like company shares, paying employees and vendors in FTT rather than U.S. dollars.
Unlike Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, SBF gained his power by issuing securities to the unfortunate (and unaware) suppliers and customers of FTX. Instead of asking for money, he was giving it out. Amazingly, he all but admitted to this in a Bloomberg interview earlier this year:
You start with a company that builds a box and in practice this box, they probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that’s gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing. It’s just a box…And then this protocol issues a token, we’ll call it whatever, ‘X token.’ And X token promises that anything cool that happens because of this box is going to ultimately be usable by, you know, governance vote of holders of the X tokens…And of course, so far, we haven’t exactly given a compelling reason for why there ever would be any proceeds from this box, but I don’t know, you know, maybe there will be, so that’s sort of where you start…And now what happens? Well, X token has some market cap, right? It’s probably not zero. Let say it’s, you know, a $20 million market.
This was a far more powerful approach, as it provided significant funds with which he could buy influence. And boy, did he try.
Naming rights to stadiums and celebrity endorsements were simply the start. There were partnerships with the professional e-gaming team TSM Esports for $210 million over a 10-year period. Bahamian crypto conferences with paid appearances by celebrity endorsers like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. And on and on and on and on. SBF donations to Democratic primary candidates helped to shape the emerging regulatory regime for crypto and likely facilitated meetings with top regulators like SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. Making sure to keep his supporters’ attention, he suggested he was prepared to raise the stakes to between $100 million and $1 billion for the 2024 election.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, SBF’s ambition proved his undoing. If you’re going to issue non-equity equity and control its price through various manipulation schemes that would make Jordan Belfort of “The Wolf of Wall Street” proud—Belfort’s another crypto influencer, by the way—you must closely control the supply. During the crypto boom of Spring 2021, as FTX began its public relations blitz, Sam made a miscalculation. Likely at the urging of new investors like Sequoia Capital, he chose to buy out his China-based partner, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder of rival exchange Binance. If FTX, and by extension SBF, were going to become the face of crypto in the United States, it simply would not do to have a partner under investigation for money laundering by U.S. tax authorities. But rather than pay with then-unwanted U.S. dollars, SBF chose to buy out CZ with FTT tokens.
As the crypto boom turned to bust, the need to support FTT amid unbearable losses across the crypto universe led FTX’s affiliated trading arm, Alameda Research, to buy far more FTT than it sold. That left its balance sheet composed almost exclusively of FTT tokens. On November 2, this closely guarded information leaked to the press. Within days, disaster struck, as CZ apparently saw an opportunity to take out his protégé by dumping his half-billion-dollar hoard of FTT tokens.
The dumping of the FTT token drove the token’s price down beyond the capability of Alameda to support it. Then, with market signals of distress rising, FTX faced its own crisis as rumors of distress led to an unsurprising run on the exchange, as clients withdrew funds. That’s when we discovered SBF’s real game: He had used the assets of clients of FTX to prop up Alameda’s balance sheet at some unspecified point and had built a backdoor into FTX’s accounting systems to evade detection.
It is an absolute no-no to tap into client funds for company activities, as John Corzine, former governor of New Jersey, discovered when he used such funds to prop up his commodities broker, MF Global, during a trade that went bad. Like time in jail bad. Except John Corzine managed to parlay extensive political connections into a lenient conclusion. Pay it all back, and don’t do it again. We have to wonder if SBF saw the writing on the wall and hoped to achieve a similar outcome with his donations to the Democratic Party by becoming Too Big to Jail.
As disaster approached, CZ again returned on November 8 to consider a bailout. He passed. The inevitable scramble to call in aid from real-money investors, previously enamored of SBF, immediately followed and fell on deaf ears. At approximately 10:30 a.m. EST on November 11, Sam Bankman-Fried and his associated companies, Alameda Research, FTX and all his other related entities, filed for bankruptcy. As you might expect, he released the formal announcement on Twitter.
In the days since that tweet, the situation has only gotten worse. According to Reuters, at least $1 billion and potentially up to $10 billion of client funds have gone missing. In an apparent hack, perhaps by a disgruntled insider, FTX’s bank balances have been drained. Not content with a simple bankruptcy and wipeout, rumors are swirling that FTX insiders have fled for Argentina. Amidst the chaos, Sam apparently still finds time to monitor Twitter and manage his account.”
——-
And he used his ill gotten deeds to bankroll Democrats across the US to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Amid all the jubilation and gloating by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and pals over the Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the midterms comes a disturbing story that may explain something about how they won such a curious election.
Biden’s second-biggest donor, cryptocurrency billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, a k a SBF, saw his business file for bankruptcy days after the election, but not before pumping $40 million into the Democratic Party to spend on “get-out-the-vote” and other shadowy ballot-harvesting mechanics for the midterms.
The shambolic 30-year-old whiz kid, once said to have been worth $16 billion, had spent $10 million helping get Biden elected in 2020.
SBF’s mother, Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, also is co-founder of left-wing political action committee Mind The Gap, which has raised a reported $140 million to help Democrats win elections through the same “get-out-the-vote” grift.
A more unlikely billionaire you could not find — and of course his money was built on thin air. A math genius with poor social skills, SBF reportedly lived in a “polycule” — a polyamorous relationship with multiple people — in a luxury penthouse with about 10 co-workers in the tax haven of the Bahamas, where his collapsed crypto exchange FTX was headquartered.
Otherwise, he was sleeping on beanbags in his office, eating vegan fries and, according to his own Twitter feed, popping amphetamines and sleeping pills to regulate his chaotic sleeping habits.
Now Reuters is reporting that between $1 billion and $2 billion of customer funds have vanished from FTX, conveniently after the Democrats safely spent his money.
At last report, SBF and his mysterious co-founder, Gary Wang, were being held “under supervision” by Bahamian authorities after reportedly planning to flee to Dubai, according to fintech publication Cointelegraph.”
—
“SBF certainly “impacted” the midterms, funneling his millions into the Democratic National Committee and Democrat-friendly PACs such as Protect Our Future and Guarding Against Pandemics.
He donated to committees aligned with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to help Democrats win races.
He lavished his largesse on “pro-crypto Democrats” like New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was sponsoring a bill to lock the Securities and Exchange Commission out of regulating the crypto market.
He also visited the White House, meeting with top Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
No wonder the Biden administration has been weak on regulating the crypto market. It was the goose that laid the golden egg.
“What’s the current timeframe these days of “conspiracy theories” becoming fact? Whatever it is, it sure seems to be accelerating. Heck, I’m old enough to remember when sharing the COVID-19 lab leak theory would get you banned from social media. Now even the “experts” have admitted that’s the most probable origin explanation.
It’s not just the pandemic, though. For years, conservatives proposed, after piecing together much evidence, that the FBI was somehow involved in the unrest that took place on January 6th, 2021. Yet, those calls for answers and accountability were met with condemnation. “How dare you question the impeccable reputation of the FBI,” they asserted while absconding from any critical thinking.
You can probably guess where I’m going with this. Despite well over a year of deflections and denials, it is now confirmed that no less than eight FBI agents were embedded in the Proud Boys organization during the period surrounding January 6th.”
The FBI had as many as eight informants inside the Proud Boys in the months around the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, recent court papers indicate, raising questions about how much federal investigators were able to learn from them before and after it took place. https://t.co/vfMPExBNW3
“The F.B.I. had as many as eight informants inside the far-right Proud Boys in the months surrounding the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, recent court papers indicate, raising questions about how much federal investigators were able to learn from them about the violent mob attack both before and after it took place.
The existence of the informants came to light over the past few days in a flurry of veiled court filings by defense lawyers for five members of the Proud Boys who are set to go on trial next month on seditious conspiracy charges connected to the Capitol attack.
In the papers, some of which were heavily redacted, the lawyers claimed that some of the information the confidential sources had provided to the government was favorable to their efforts to defend their clients against sedition charges and was improperly withheld by prosecutors until several days ago.
I’m sure you are totally shocked by this news. Who could have possibly guessed that Christopher Wray’s FBI, which ran an entrapment scheme involving Gretchen Whitmer prior to the 2020 election, would end up having been intimately involved in the lead-up to January 6th?
You have to admire the framing by the Times, though, pondering how much “federal investigators were able to learn from them about the violent mob attack.” Yes, I’m sure that’s a real mystery. Conversely, the FBI agents likely knew exactly what was being discussed the whole time, which would mean one of two things.
One possibility is that the Proud Boys weren’t planning an insurrection and that conservatives who have called it a spontaneous event have been right all along. That would nuke all the deranged attempts to suggest that Republicans, including Donald Trump, somehow orchestrated the entry into the Capitol Building. The other possibility is that the FBI knew a riot was going to take place and did nothing to stop it, instead letting it play out for political reasons. Wouldn’t that be something? Yet, I wouldn’t even begin to put it past them.”
Wandering Views 
This is what a shameless liar looks like.
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Suckers. 🙂
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Just to be clear here, so folks don’t buy the lie that DeSantis=Trump that the media are already pushing to sway the squishy. There are clear differences.
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This thread explains how the game is played in DC, and how the savvy game the system for personal gain and enrichment.
A good read, regardless of your political leanings.
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Replace. Them. All.
They’re damaged goods.
https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1592288552821608448
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Some mass shooters are more equal than others, especially if they don’t fit the media’s narrative.
Of course he was, and once again, police did nothing.
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Shocked if true?
Not at all.
—–
https://apnews.com/article/soccer-sports-la-liga-money-laundering-puerto-rico-38aed2da8cd0ac237aca28aa39321105
“José Irizarry accepts that he’s known as the most corrupt agent in U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration history, admitting he “became another man” in conspiring with Colombian cartels to build a lavish lifestyle of expensive sports cars, Tiffany jewels and paramours around the world.
But as he used his final hours of freedom to tell his story to The Associated Press, Irizarry says he won’t go down for this alone, accusing some long-trusted DEA colleagues of joining him in skimming millions of dollars from drug money laundering stings to fund a decade’s worth of luxury overseas travel, fine dining, top seats at sporting events and frat house-style debauchery.
The way Irizarry tells it, dozens of other federal agents, prosecutors, informants and in some cases cartel smugglers themselves were all in on the three-continent joyride known as “Team America” that chose cities for money laundering pick-ups mostly for party purposes or to coincide with Real Madrid soccer or Rafael Nadal tennis matches. That included stops along the way in VIP rooms of Caribbean strip joints, Amsterdam’s red-light district and aboard a Colombian yacht that launched with plenty of booze and more than a dozen prostitutes.
“We had free access to do whatever we wanted,” the 48-year-old Irizarry told the AP in a series of interviews before beginning a 12-year federal prison sentence. “We would generate money pick-ups in places we wanted to go. And once we got there it was about drinking and girls.”
All this revelry was rooted, Irizarry said, in a crushing realization among DEA agents around the world that there’s nothing they can do to make a dent in the drug war anyway. Only nominal concern was given to actually building cases or stemming a record flow of illegal cocaine and opioids into the United States that has driven more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths a year.
“You can’t win an unwinnable war. DEA knows this and the agents know this,” Irizarry said. “There’s so much dope leaving Colombia. And there’s so much money. We know we’re not making a difference.”
“The drug war is a game. … It was a very fun game that we were playing.”
Irizarry’s story, which some former colleagues have attacked as a fictionalized attempt to reduce his sentence, came in days of contrite, bitter, sometimes tearful interviews with the AP in the historic quarter of his native San Juan. It was much the same account he gave the FBI in lengthy debriefings and sealed court papers obtained by the AP after he pleaded guilty in 2020 to 19 corruption counts, including money laundering and bank fraud.”
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They continue to try and hide the truth.
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No Deep State here…
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Just like Dems, it’s their answer for everything.
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This one is just sad. 😦
“Hollowed Out Youth Crisis
High School teacher Jeremy Adams describes a dystopian youth culture of cell phone addiction, isolation, and inability to sustain human relations or spirituality. Hollowed out youth. It’s chilling.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/11/hollowed-out-youth-crisis/
“We cover education extensively, and how the left targets even the youngest grades for ideological grooming. But it’s even worse than that, we are raising a generation of hollowed out youth, and we can’t blame it on the teachers.
That was a theme in a presentation at the Parents United Conference I attended in Boston on October 28. I usually only post my own speech videos (there’s a psychological term for that, I can’t remember what it is). And not to worry, I will still do that.
But I want to present first the speaker who was immediately before me, Jeremy Adams, whose book on the subject is Hollowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation:
Jeremy is a high school teacher in Bakersfield, California, and he describes a dystopian youth culture of cell phone addiction, isolation, and inability to sustain human relations or spirituality. Hollowed out youth. It’s chilling.
How do you think those hollowed out youth will vote when they reach adulthood? That’s more depressing than the midterm results.
Watch the video.”
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He’s the Democrats’ Bernie Madoff.
“The $32 Billion Crypto Scammer”
https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-32-billion-crypto-scammer
““The Next Warren Buffett.” That’s how Fortune magazine dubbed Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto wunderkind who wore shorts, schlubby socks, and sneakers on stage with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. But Bankman-Fried, worth an estimated $32 billion at his height, wouldn’t just be a financial oracle like Buffett. He would also be the second-coming of George Soros: By the end of this midterm election cycle, he’d become the second largest donor to the Democratic Party.
Over the past few days, all of that has come spectacularly undone.
Now, Bankman-Fried looks, at best, like the original storyline for Michael Saylor of Microstrategy during the Dotcom bust. Or, more likely, like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy. Or, with increasing plausibility, like a less civic-minded Bernie Madoff.
Tens of thousands of people who invested their savings on various FTX exchanges have likely been wiped out. FTX employees have quit en masse. And SBF? According to reports, he’s been taken into custody by Bahamian authorities after holing up at FTX HQ with his father.
Like everyone else in financial markets, I am glued to my screen.
If all you know about crypto are those Super Bowl ads with Matt Damon and Larry David hawking products and encouraging viewers to be “brave” and not miss out, the name Sam Bankman-Fried is probably new to you. Allow me to explain.
Born on the campus of Stanford University to two professors, he attended MIT, majored in physics, and from there joined Jane Street Capital, a noted employer of brilliant young programming talent on Wall Street. After three years, in 2017, Bankman-Fried was bitten by the crypto bug and founded Alameda Research, at the age of 25, to utilize the tools of traditional finance in the highly volatile crypto space.
As Alameda’s trading volume grew, Bankman-Fried apparently recognized the opportunity to monetize this volume by launching his own exchange, FTX. It first launched in unregulated Hong Kong to evade a tighter U.S. regulatory environment. Then, in 2020, FTX moved to the equally unregulated Bahamas as the political climate in Hong Kong deteriorated. (With both of his parents being Stanford Law professors, Sam was well positioned to understand the legal gray areas in which he was operating. But offshore banking is standard practice in the crypto world, so those geographic choices attracted no additional scrutiny.)
As FTX took off with the pandemic-driven crypto boom, so did a carefully cultivated Cult of SBF. Only two years after FTX’s founding, the company purchased naming rights to the NBA’s Miami Heat stadium in a 19-year commitment of $135 million. Deals soon followed for college stadiums. A Mercedes Formula 1 team. National Baseball League umpire patches. Partnerships with Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen.
In short order, profiles of the boy genius appeared everywhere. As cryptocurrencies soared in market value, SBF became the poster child for the libertarian ethos that crypto profits accrued to those most capable. He seemed to have access to the glitterati previously reserved for those with established connections within the intellectual elite.
As a critic of crypto and its marketing mania, I found myself unsure in my assessment of SBF. Unlike many of the other dubious characters in the space, he appeared to be genuinely trying to build something of note, and his provenance at MIT and a top-tier Wall Street shop was certainly credible. As crypto-related businesses around the globe tumbled in this year’s selloff, he appeared to be taking a J.P. Morgan role—the banker at the center of the system, trying to acquire the broken pieces and assemble an empire that might successfully navigate the transition to a more regulated digital economy and marketplace. And he was doing it all in the name of future charity, as the popular face for a movement labeled “effective altruism.”
The venture capitalists at Sequoia—the powerful investors behind Silicon Valley success stories like Google and PayPal—were certainly taken (or taken in) by him. Three months ago, one of the firm’s partners, Michelle Bailhe, offered a breathless take in a firm-sponsored story about SBF:
“Of the exchanges that we had met and looked at, some of them had regulatory issues, some of them were already public,” Bailhe wrote. “And then there was Sam.” FTX, Sequoia felt, was “Goldilocks-perfect.””
—-
“Over the last week, all those investments appear to have gone to zero. FTX, Alameda Research and 132 other related entities have declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Sequoia has written its investment down to zero. It makes the shenanigans at Twitter—which, incidentally, has been integral to the flood of information coming out on FTX—look like a cake walk.
The actual mechanics of what appears to have transpired are relatively straightforward and, at least initially, draw far more similarities to the DotCom cycle and MF Global than Bernie Madoff.
FTX appears to have raised capital beyond the venture capital previously highlighted by issuing its own “token” called FTT. Functionally, this is the same as selling unregistered, non-voting equity shares. It’s very similar to what Mark Zuckerberg did at Meta or Evan Siegel did at Snapchat: They issued super-voting shares that left them in control of the enterprise regardless of the views of shareholders. Self-minted crypto tokens, which is what FTX did, go one better. They fail to confer any governance or ownership rights to the holders. They exist only as prices on digital exchanges.
By simultaneously owning FTX, the exchange, and Alameda Research, the largest trader and market maker on the exchange, SBF was able to dictate the price of the FTT token and create the illusion that the value of the FTT token—and, by extension, FTX and Alameda—was substantial. He was able to use FTT like company shares, paying employees and vendors in FTT rather than U.S. dollars.
Unlike Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, SBF gained his power by issuing securities to the unfortunate (and unaware) suppliers and customers of FTX. Instead of asking for money, he was giving it out. Amazingly, he all but admitted to this in a Bloomberg interview earlier this year:
You start with a company that builds a box and in practice this box, they probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that’s gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing. It’s just a box…And then this protocol issues a token, we’ll call it whatever, ‘X token.’ And X token promises that anything cool that happens because of this box is going to ultimately be usable by, you know, governance vote of holders of the X tokens…And of course, so far, we haven’t exactly given a compelling reason for why there ever would be any proceeds from this box, but I don’t know, you know, maybe there will be, so that’s sort of where you start…And now what happens? Well, X token has some market cap, right? It’s probably not zero. Let say it’s, you know, a $20 million market.
This was a far more powerful approach, as it provided significant funds with which he could buy influence. And boy, did he try.
Naming rights to stadiums and celebrity endorsements were simply the start. There were partnerships with the professional e-gaming team TSM Esports for $210 million over a 10-year period. Bahamian crypto conferences with paid appearances by celebrity endorsers like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. And on and on and on and on. SBF donations to Democratic primary candidates helped to shape the emerging regulatory regime for crypto and likely facilitated meetings with top regulators like SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. Making sure to keep his supporters’ attention, he suggested he was prepared to raise the stakes to between $100 million and $1 billion for the 2024 election.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, SBF’s ambition proved his undoing. If you’re going to issue non-equity equity and control its price through various manipulation schemes that would make Jordan Belfort of “The Wolf of Wall Street” proud—Belfort’s another crypto influencer, by the way—you must closely control the supply. During the crypto boom of Spring 2021, as FTX began its public relations blitz, Sam made a miscalculation. Likely at the urging of new investors like Sequoia Capital, he chose to buy out his China-based partner, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder of rival exchange Binance. If FTX, and by extension SBF, were going to become the face of crypto in the United States, it simply would not do to have a partner under investigation for money laundering by U.S. tax authorities. But rather than pay with then-unwanted U.S. dollars, SBF chose to buy out CZ with FTT tokens.
As the crypto boom turned to bust, the need to support FTT amid unbearable losses across the crypto universe led FTX’s affiliated trading arm, Alameda Research, to buy far more FTT than it sold. That left its balance sheet composed almost exclusively of FTT tokens. On November 2, this closely guarded information leaked to the press. Within days, disaster struck, as CZ apparently saw an opportunity to take out his protégé by dumping his half-billion-dollar hoard of FTT tokens.
The dumping of the FTT token drove the token’s price down beyond the capability of Alameda to support it. Then, with market signals of distress rising, FTX faced its own crisis as rumors of distress led to an unsurprising run on the exchange, as clients withdrew funds. That’s when we discovered SBF’s real game: He had used the assets of clients of FTX to prop up Alameda’s balance sheet at some unspecified point and had built a backdoor into FTX’s accounting systems to evade detection.
It is an absolute no-no to tap into client funds for company activities, as John Corzine, former governor of New Jersey, discovered when he used such funds to prop up his commodities broker, MF Global, during a trade that went bad. Like time in jail bad. Except John Corzine managed to parlay extensive political connections into a lenient conclusion. Pay it all back, and don’t do it again. We have to wonder if SBF saw the writing on the wall and hoped to achieve a similar outcome with his donations to the Democratic Party by becoming Too Big to Jail.
As disaster approached, CZ again returned on November 8 to consider a bailout. He passed. The inevitable scramble to call in aid from real-money investors, previously enamored of SBF, immediately followed and fell on deaf ears. At approximately 10:30 a.m. EST on November 11, Sam Bankman-Fried and his associated companies, Alameda Research, FTX and all his other related entities, filed for bankruptcy. As you might expect, he released the formal announcement on Twitter.
In the days since that tweet, the situation has only gotten worse. According to Reuters, at least $1 billion and potentially up to $10 billion of client funds have gone missing. In an apparent hack, perhaps by a disgruntled insider, FTX’s bank balances have been drained. Not content with a simple bankruptcy and wipeout, rumors are swirling that FTX insiders have fled for Argentina. Amidst the chaos, Sam apparently still finds time to monitor Twitter and manage his account.”
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And he used his ill gotten deeds to bankroll Democrats across the US to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
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Like I said….
“Cryptocurrency billionaire broke the bank for Dems”
https://nypost.com/2022/11/14/sam-bankman-fried-broke-crypto-bank-for-dems/
“Amid all the jubilation and gloating by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and pals over the Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the midterms comes a disturbing story that may explain something about how they won such a curious election.
Biden’s second-biggest donor, cryptocurrency billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, a k a SBF, saw his business file for bankruptcy days after the election, but not before pumping $40 million into the Democratic Party to spend on “get-out-the-vote” and other shadowy ballot-harvesting mechanics for the midterms.
The shambolic 30-year-old whiz kid, once said to have been worth $16 billion, had spent $10 million helping get Biden elected in 2020.
SBF’s mother, Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, also is co-founder of left-wing political action committee Mind The Gap, which has raised a reported $140 million to help Democrats win elections through the same “get-out-the-vote” grift.
A more unlikely billionaire you could not find — and of course his money was built on thin air. A math genius with poor social skills, SBF reportedly lived in a “polycule” — a polyamorous relationship with multiple people — in a luxury penthouse with about 10 co-workers in the tax haven of the Bahamas, where his collapsed crypto exchange FTX was headquartered.
Otherwise, he was sleeping on beanbags in his office, eating vegan fries and, according to his own Twitter feed, popping amphetamines and sleeping pills to regulate his chaotic sleeping habits.
Now Reuters is reporting that between $1 billion and $2 billion of customer funds have vanished from FTX, conveniently after the Democrats safely spent his money.
At last report, SBF and his mysterious co-founder, Gary Wang, were being held “under supervision” by Bahamian authorities after reportedly planning to flee to Dubai, according to fintech publication Cointelegraph.”
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“SBF certainly “impacted” the midterms, funneling his millions into the Democratic National Committee and Democrat-friendly PACs such as Protect Our Future and Guarding Against Pandemics.
He donated to committees aligned with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to help Democrats win races.
He lavished his largesse on “pro-crypto Democrats” like New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was sponsoring a bill to lock the Securities and Exchange Commission out of regulating the crypto market.
He also visited the White House, meeting with top Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
No wonder the Biden administration has been weak on regulating the crypto market. It was the goose that laid the golden egg.
Meanwhile, the media massaged his profile.”
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It’s not a conspiracy theory if it’s true, and it was.
“In Completely Unforeseeable Twist, January 6th ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Turns out to Be True”
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/11/14/in-shocking-unexpected-twist-january-6th-conspiracy-theory-turns-out-to-be-true-n659068
“What’s the current timeframe these days of “conspiracy theories” becoming fact? Whatever it is, it sure seems to be accelerating. Heck, I’m old enough to remember when sharing the COVID-19 lab leak theory would get you banned from social media. Now even the “experts” have admitted that’s the most probable origin explanation.
It’s not just the pandemic, though. For years, conservatives proposed, after piecing together much evidence, that the FBI was somehow involved in the unrest that took place on January 6th, 2021. Yet, those calls for answers and accountability were met with condemnation. “How dare you question the impeccable reputation of the FBI,” they asserted while absconding from any critical thinking.
You can probably guess where I’m going with this. Despite well over a year of deflections and denials, it is now confirmed that no less than eight FBI agents were embedded in the Proud Boys organization during the period surrounding January 6th.”
“The F.B.I. had as many as eight informants inside the far-right Proud Boys in the months surrounding the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, recent court papers indicate, raising questions about how much federal investigators were able to learn from them about the violent mob attack both before and after it took place.
The existence of the informants came to light over the past few days in a flurry of veiled court filings by defense lawyers for five members of the Proud Boys who are set to go on trial next month on seditious conspiracy charges connected to the Capitol attack.
In the papers, some of which were heavily redacted, the lawyers claimed that some of the information the confidential sources had provided to the government was favorable to their efforts to defend their clients against sedition charges and was improperly withheld by prosecutors until several days ago.
I’m sure you are totally shocked by this news. Who could have possibly guessed that Christopher Wray’s FBI, which ran an entrapment scheme involving Gretchen Whitmer prior to the 2020 election, would end up having been intimately involved in the lead-up to January 6th?
You have to admire the framing by the Times, though, pondering how much “federal investigators were able to learn from them about the violent mob attack.” Yes, I’m sure that’s a real mystery. Conversely, the FBI agents likely knew exactly what was being discussed the whole time, which would mean one of two things.
One possibility is that the Proud Boys weren’t planning an insurrection and that conservatives who have called it a spontaneous event have been right all along. That would nuke all the deranged attempts to suggest that Republicans, including Donald Trump, somehow orchestrated the entry into the Capitol Building. The other possibility is that the FBI knew a riot was going to take place and did nothing to stop it, instead letting it play out for political reasons. Wouldn’t that be something? Yet, I wouldn’t even begin to put it past them.”
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The line for apologies is quite long….
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I just watched President Trump’s announcement tonight. Love him or hate him this man spoke truth…
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