HOW DID NANCY PELOSI GET SO FILTHY RICH OFF ELECTED OFFICE?
How Do Politicians Keep Getting So Rich?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3U6rhWT-QE
Sam Bankman-Fried is not the only fraudster in America
Sam Bankman-Fried was shuffled off to his new digs in the Bahamas, where it seems likely that he will be spending a great deal of time. That his “mortal coil” might be shuffled off as well is an open question in the era of Jeffrey Epstein.
Who are the bigger fraudsters, though? A spoiled kid who bilked his investors for billions or a bureaucracy that prints and spends public money with reckless abandon?
It would take an eternity for SBF to graduate to the level of these government and quasi-government scammers. At the time of his bankruptcy filing, FTX’s liabilities were in the neighborhood of ten to fifty billion dollars. Compare that to the greater than $31 trillion in debt the U.S. government has rung up. That’s a big number. Though the current administration is not solely responsible for the dismal debt situation in which we now find ourselves, it has significantly accelerated the death spiral.
Imagine how footloose and fancy-free Sam would have been if he could have employed the same debt deferment plan as the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve. Printing money is a great way to bolster your financial situation. We could all be quite wealthy if that method of alleviating debt were widely available.
Unfortunately for us, only the feds can utilize the benefits of the printing press. If anyone else wants to try that route, they would quickly find themselves in the cell next to SBF because, of course, if everyone suddenly became wealthy, the economy would crash overnight. So instead, we get to witness a slow-motion crash born out of government irresponsibility and desperation. There are ways out of this mess, but there is no political will to employ them.
Image: Sam Bankman-Fried. YouTube screen grab.
So how is it that the Feds get to print as much money as they want? The short answer is that paper money is no longer tied to any “real” assets. It is only backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States government.” For those who no longer have faith in the credit of the United States, psychologically, your money is already at risk, and you’re probably looking for some alternatives to the dollar. The rest of us adopt a fragile and precarious wait-and-see attitude.
Those with political power can and do use the money supply to advance whatever goals they’re trying to achieve, whether they be economic or political. To achieve their goals, they have the government spend money it doesn’t have, and then they run the printing press to make up at least some of the difference.
The problem for the average citizen is that the more dollars put into circulation, the less each one is worth. Americans are making as much as they were before, but they now have less buying power. It’s a great political grift, at least for as long as it lasts.
As for that lesser grifter, Sam Bankman-Fried, when it comes to the details behind his money games, the reality is that he won’t be appearing before Congress anytime soon. With his testimony scheduled for the following day, government goon squads promptly sequestered him indefinitely.
Still, that SBF would be talkative while appearing before Congress seems unlikely. It would probably be a Fifth Amendment palooza. There would be nothing to gain by talking and almost certainly a great deal to lose. It might be wise for SBF to copy Elon Musk and announce publicly that he is not depressed and has no desire to harm himself.
If SBF ever does testify before Congress, it would be interesting to see just how deep this new rabbit hole goes. He was, after all, the second largest donor to the Democrat party in the just-completed election cycle, and all the money he distributed belonged to other people. Will the Democrats be returning the $40 million he donated in 2022? Don’t hold your breath.
SBF and other private market fraudsters must be a tad envious of the government’s money-printing operation. Perhaps that’s the reason they donate to Democrats. They all want to ride on the public money gravy train or, at least, they’re trying to get on board.
Frank Liberato is a pseudonym.
Handcuffed SBF Does a Final Favor for Democratic Allies
Washington Free Beacon Editors • December 14, 2022 5:01 amWhat a happy coincidence for Democrats that, hours before the alleged crypto criminal Sam Bankman-Fried was due to testify before the House Financial Services Committee, he was arrested in the Bahamas. That meant that SBF, the second-biggest Democratic donor of the 2022 cycle—behind 92-year-old George Soros—was able to evade questioning from Republican House members.
Bankman-Fried helped to bankroll President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and threw nearly $40 million behind Democratic candidates this year, and we have a feeling that questioning from Republican lawmakers would’ve been embarrassing for the Democratic Party. His testimony under oath would also have, presumably, been a boon for prosecutors who decided to arrest him on Monday instead. The timing is puzzling.
SBF was indicted by the Southern District of New York, which in the past few decades has served as the training ground for prominent political activists, including James Comey and Preet Bharara, and which is notorious for maintaining close ties to Washington. It is not hard to imagine that some behind-the-scenes negotiating saved SBF, and the Democrats, from an embarrassing and potentially self-incriminating performance. SBF hasn’t shut his mouth since his company, FTX, went belly up, and putting him behind bars may have been the party’s only hope.
Whatever the case, the FTX scandal, which the SDNY described on Tuesday as "one of the biggest financial frauds ever," should invite a much broader investigation. In a country with federal rules about what constitutes an onion ring, where have financial regulators been as more and more Americans were encouraged by a credulous press and their allies in the Democratic, tech, and Hollywood elite to put their savings into risky cryptocurrencies? We don’t recall warnings from federal officials, former prosecutors, or investment professionals indicating that crypto businesses—indeed, the entire industry itself—might be fraudulent.
Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler was busy rubbing elbows with SBF and negotiating a regulatory scheme whose blueprint originated at FTX headquarters, while most of the country’s major law firms, investing services, media companies, and politicians were on the crypto payroll.
For the unsuspecting Americans sold the pile of fairy dust known as cryptocurrency—or SRM, or FTT, or LOL—the machinations that allow Bankman-Fried's political allies to evade accountability are a final insult.
YOU CAN'T SEPARATE THE DEM POLS FROM THEIR BRIBES SUCKING!
Kilmeade: How could Sam Bankman-Fried sleep at night?
You don’t amass a net worth reported to be $10 million on a salary of $185,000 by playing it on the straight and narrow. Maybe the Financial Services Committee should forget Sam Bankman-Fried and subpoena her!
Judicial Watch investigated the scandal and obtained documents from the U.S. Treasury related to the controversial bailout. The famously remiss House Ethics Committee, which is charged with investigating and punishing corrupt lawmakers like Waters, found that she committed no wrongdoing. The panel bought Waters’ absurd story that she allocated the money as part of her longtime work to promote opportunity for minority-owned businesses and lending in underserved communities even though her husband’s bank was located thousands of miles away from the south Los Angeles neighborhoods she represents in Congress.
Have I Mentioned Lately Just How Corrupt Maxine Waters Is?
What Waters and her friends have been up to while “doing the people’s business.”
There’s a great line in the hilarious movie “History of the World: Part 1” by Mel Brooks, when he, as King Louie XVI of France, would do something that would get a normal person in trouble then turn to the camera and say, “It’s good to be the king.” In that movie, as with being that monarch in France at that time, it was only “good to be the king” for a while, then it was exceedingly not good to be the king, as Louis ended up losing his head. In modern times, it’s good to be the king again…as long as you’re the right kind of king who curried favor with the correct politicians – namely Democrats.
I’m speaking, of course, about Sam Bankman-Fried, for former CEO of crypto currency company FTX and either one of the largest rip-off artists in history or biggest morons who managed to swindle, one way or another, billions of dollars from a lot investors. The extent of his corruption and/or incompetence is not yet known, which is why there are hearings on Capitol Hill being put together right now. Most investigations will take place next year because, in part, the House of Representatives isn’t really interested in finding out what happened.
Why? Because it appears to have favored Democrats. Remember that “normal person” I was talking about? Bankman-Fried isn’t that person, he’s the one with the friends in high places who gets protected – the guy who calls in the chits he spent tens of millions of dollars spreading around.
The recipient of a big pile of those chits, and buckets of cash from Bankman-Fried is California Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters. She’s Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, exactly the committee that should be all over this FTX scandal. But Waters is an old hand at the DC game, and she knows the money Bankman-Fried and his cronies tossed around landed all over her fellow Democrats, including more than $300,000 of it on members of her committee. Waters is nothing if not a partisan hack; anything that makes Democrats look bad is bad for business. So it wasn’t really a shock this week when, after announcing her committee would hold a hearing on the collapse of FTX in the lame-duck session, it came out that she has no plans to subpoena Sammy. Honestly, if Congress doesn’t try to hold this guy accountable to some degree, what’s to stop others from being reckless themselves? Bankman-Fried may be an outlier but without accountability the entire market could lose the trust of the public and collapse, costing more people even more money. Don’t you think Congress would have a desire to at least try to prevent that from happening?
What’s the point of talking about someone when you can compel that person to talk, or at least take the 5th? Why talk to the mailroom guy when the CEO is available? The horse’s ass doesn’t care to hear straight from the horse’s mouth, apparently.
It’s probably because she doesn’t want to know what the CEO has to say when directly questioned by Republicans. More to the point, she doesn’t want the public to know what he has to say in response to direct questions from Republicans because it will be nothing good for Democrats.
If the hearing can be held without Bankman-Fried, when Republicans take over next Congress and hold hearings on the subject, as they will, with Bankman-Friend compelled to participate, which they will do, Democrats can dismiss it as “old news.” It’s right out of the Clinton playbook – delay as long as possible, then when finally forced to comply by a court order (or in this case a Congressional subpoena) dismiss everything as having already been covered, especially when it hasn’t been.
This ain’t “Auntie Maxine’s” first rodeo, she’s been corrupt for, well, ever. I’ve written about her grift before – representing a district she doesn’t live in (she’s far too rich to live in a district represented by her), she squeaks by with almost 80 percent of the vote. That means she has no need to campaign in any meaningful way, but still raises a ton of lobbyist money (especially from the banking industry she oversees) and uses that money to hire family members to “work” for the campaign she doesn’t need to run. And wouldn’t you know it, she pays really well…especially to her own daughter (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars). “Perfectly legal corruption,” as a named it back in 2018.
You can see why Waters might not want the world to know what she and her friends have been up to while “doing the people’s business.”
Maybe she’ll wise up and bow to the pressure from the people Bankman-Fried ripped off to put him under oath (he’s been talkative up to this point, but only with media types where there is no risk of perjury and the ability to later say he was lying when he implicated himself in criminal activities). It’s unclear if that kind of pressure can even be exerted over someone who has zero reason to give a damn, has no risk of being held accountable by their constituents, and has never been afraid to spit in the face of what’s right. You don’t amass a net worth reported to be $10 million on a salary of $185,000 by playing it on the straight and narrow. Maybe the Financial Services Committee should forget Sam Bankman-Fried and subpoena her!
That won’t happen, next year or ever, because it’s not only good to be the king, it not too shabby to be the queen either.
WATCH: DOJ Calls Crypto Crook SBF’s Scheme One of ‘Biggest Financial Frauds in American History’
Washington Free Beacon Staff • December 13, 2022 5:30 pmU.S. Attorney Damian Williams on Tuesday unveiled eight indictments against Democratic megadonor Sam Bankman-Fried, accusing the former CEO of crypto exchange FTX of running "one of the biggest financial frauds in American history."
"By anyone's lights, this is one of the biggest financial frauds in American history," Williams said after detailing how Bankman-Fried allegedly stole customers' money, committed fraud against investors and lenders, and violated campaign finance laws.
Williams hinted that more charges might come for Bankman-Fried, who was the Democratic Party's second-biggest donor in the 2022 midterm elections.
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