I do find it odd that almost all of the negative coverage of crypto, SBF, FTX, etc. has avoided his political donations. Unless I'm misunderstanding what happened here (and please correct me if I'm wrong), but it very much seems like FTX stole money from regular people to use for lobbying and influencing elections. I can't think of anything more anti-democratic than that.
Don't worry, some of the politicians who received money stolen from regular people have verbally committed to donating the same amount of money to their own nonprofits.
Yeah it's just reliably the top 1 or 2 comments on anything related to SBF as well as being discussed in no fewer than 10 articles in a small publication called the New York Times.
It's not so much that it's avoided entirely, just that the narrative has been about the corruption of the crypto industry and SBF himself and not what the money was used for and what that indicates about the political system as a whole.
Yeah, I get that it can feel "off," but practically I'd actually much prefer that we focus the money theft conversation on money theft and the campaign reform conversation on campaign reform.
I.e. the fraud isn't made worse by the fact it was turned into donations and, likewise, campaign donations of that sort aren't less troublesome when they're made with legitimately-earned money.
I.e. the fraud isn't made worse by the fact it was turned into donations
Not sure how that's true. If he scammed a bunch of people to buy a boat, that's one thing. If he scammed people and then directly influenced a very close election, that seems a little worse?
For example, imagine this was the test case that people wanted to push on campaign finance reform. Politicians finally give in and say "yeah you know you're right, this was really wrong. From now on, funding campaigns via dark money channels with stolen money is punishable by death."
Is campaign finance fixed? Did we make any meaningful progress on any actually meaningful problem?
Campaign finance reform is a popular issue with voters, not so much policymakers. Same as voting and election reform.
What it says is that industries can perform regulatory capture by funding the right people in office. Crypto just doesn’t have the same clout at oil and gas and other groups.
NYT ran stories making him out to being a victim, how his family was "caught on the middle," how FTX was simply a success story turned to bad luck. NYT effectively lead blocking PR
It would be more accurate to say that the NYT has been far too eager to positively misrepresent and run interference for crypto in general, so of course the face of crypto got his fair share of that for a couple of years.
This reads to me like run of the mill softball reporting on white collar crime. I don't get the impression that's what GP was alleging, but if it is, then yep, agreed.
If Madoff were stupid enough to take a NYTimes interview shortly after implosion, I don't think it'd look much different. (Edit: Actually, quite a bit more glowing, and not even an interview: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/nyregion/13madoff.html)
Not really. He gave $40M to democrats and $200k to republicans. [0]
If his aim was to influence crypto policy then he would have donated very differently. It appears he was lobbying for his own political ideology and not just to benefit his crappy company.
We don't really know what the split was. SBF has claimed he donated significantly more to the republicans. From your link above:
The GOP donations were "dark-money" contributions, making his claim difficult to verify. Such secret contributions, allowed by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens
United ruling, wouldn’t show up in the FEC disclosures used to compile MarketWatch’s list
What would he have to gain by lying about spending even more customer money? I see it as a boast of how well he was playing the game; and also an admission that he was trying to buy influence.
How is that irrelevant? Usually when someone is caught bribing politicians with billions of dollars of stolen money, it's considered kind of relevant where that money went?
Can you specify what exactly it is that you think is "irrelevant"? Because it sounds to me like you are contradicting yourself. First you say it's irrelevant where the money went, now you sound like it's relevant after all?
They will be positively distraught that the charges for campaign finance violations and conspiracy to commit bribery won't come to trial. Sadly that trial just wasn't in the public interest.
Yeah, I wouldn't consider myself much of a conspiracy person but this does not sit right. Even if there wasn't overt pressure to drop the cases the folks involved probably realized that in the course of litigating the case they would make a lot of important people angry (or at least irritable over being painted in a likely less than flattering light).