Citizens United and the FTX meltdown

The Keating Five were amateurs.

Cory Doctorow

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A vintage trustbuster cartoon depicting John D Rockefeller holding the Treasury building in the palm of his hand, peering at it through a watchmaker’s loupe. Rockefeller’s head has been replaced with Sam Bankman-Fried’s. His collar bears the Alameda Research wordmark. Image: Cointelegraph (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sam_Bankman-Fried.png CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

The collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its affiliated businesses has left a million creditors holding the bag for a chaotically managed, corrupt enterprise that created vast personal fortunes for the conspirators who ran it, even as it stole the life’s savings of retail investors who bought into its lies.

Could the unsuspecting public have been shielded from the FTX Ponzi scheme? Hindsight is 20/20, but there’s good reason to believe that FTX could have been brought down in a controlled glide, rather than a nose-first crash landing and ensuing fireball.

Earlier this year, the SEC sent a letter to FTX seeking answers about its business practices — a letter that sought to determine whether FTX was as scammy as it appeared. The SEC never got the answers it sought, thanks to the intervention of eight Members of Congress — the “Blockchain Eight,” four Dems and four Republicans — who wrote to Chairman Gary Gensler demanding that he back off:

https://emmer.house.gov/_cache/files/0/c/0c7fc863-7916-4b19-bc44-52bef772287e/9B0B9D1CA9B3C215DDC762DF5B0F6864.3.16.22.emmer.sec.letter.pdf

Five of Blockchain Eight received substantial cash contributions from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) or his employees or affiliated…

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

Written by Cory Doctorow

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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