The second-largest (after George Soros) 2021-22 election cycle contributor to the Democratic Party is headed into bankruptcy of his cryptocurrency exchange, and exposure as the operator of a Ponzi scheme fraudulently claiming assets of nearly $30 billion. The owner of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, who contributed $39 million to Democratic candidates in the last Congressional cycle and claimed he might spend $1 billion in the 2024 cycle, issued a pseudo-abject release on Nov. 10 and slyly blamed his competitor, the Binance crypto-exchange, for pushing him under.
But FTX was a highly-leveraged fraud victimizing its investors. And isn’t it interesting that during the Biden Administration, officials like SEC chair Gary Gensler, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and leaders of Congress who once loudly threatened Facebook against attempting to introduce the crypto-global Libra currency, spoke of welcoming Bitcoin etc. into the “regulated” fold of financial instruments. And Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, in an panel event hosted by the Banque de France event at the Economic Club of Washington on Sept. 27, said there was no systemic threat involved with cryptocurrency and made this astonishing statement: “If you’re going to have private money creation across the country, really there needs to be a federal role [and] we think it really should be the Fed that does play that role.” In March, Powell had opined that if there was a cryptocurrency threat to stability, it would come from Russian players. Bankman-Fried, a Stanford graduate, is not Russian.
So a Ponzi operator and a British bankroller of foreign coups drive the Democrats’ car.
On the other-party side, Bankman-Fried’s top lieutenant at FTX, Ryan Salome, with $24 million in contributions, is just behind Steve Schwarzman and Peter Thiel as a bankroller of Republican candidates! The Stanford-Silicon-CIA financier Peter Thiel stood out as the big donor trying to shape the GOP. The candidates promoted and financially bankrolled by Thiel, several of them bought into completely by former President Trump, despite Thiel’s clear intent to become the shaper of “Trumpism beyond Trump,” did pretty badly on Nov. 8, however.
Recall that in April Thiel loudly denounced Warren Buffett as “a sociopathic grandpa” for doubting that—as Thiel asserted—Bitcoin would multiply 100 times over and eventually reach $4.3 million per coin. Bitcoin has actually divided by nearly four times since then, and now is in the $17,000 vicinity with the FTX defaults, liquidation and possible arrests.
An article, “Crypto Is Crashing. This Time, Blame FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried,” in Time magazine Nov. 9 inevitably cited “Many are already comparing FTX’s crash to that of the Lehman Brothers in 2008,” and quoted one: “‘I think it’ll be very bad: This is contagion to the maximum,’ says John Lo, managing partner of digital assets at the investment firm Recharge Capital. ‘We’re going to see household crypto names, lenders and funds go down completely. It’s going to get messy and protracted.’”
That’s what can happen when Americans back what should really be called crypto-candidates, and choose them in crypto-elections for a crypto-Congress.
