Samuel Bankman Fried May Have Started The Demolition of the Deep State
19 November 2022 by Larry Johnson
I admit it. I am not a complete cynic. Like Don Quixote, I am tilting at windmills. The unfolding scandal and fraud surrounding the collapse of FTX, is not just some minor financial disaster. This is global and is going to ensnare many seemingly smart people who mistakenly believed that if you engaged in cyber currency transactions you could hide from law enforcement. Whoops!! They apparently did not take the time to understand block chain. The security of block chain will be their undoing.
I want to direct you to some articles that you should read if you want to understand the train wreck that is occurring with the bankruptcy of Bankman Fried’s crypto-currency trading platform.
First up is James Howard Kunstler. He gets you blood boiling and shows how this is connected to the Ukraine disaster:
Thirty-seven billion more dollars for Ukraine? (That’s thirty-seven thousand millions of dollars, by the way.) Bringing the total this year to a click-or-two over ninety billion (ninety-thousand millions), on top of whatever Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX company funneled through that sad-sack international money laundromat — soon to be the darkest backwater of a European failed state since Field Marshal Melchior von Hatzfeldt of Westphalia left Bohemia a corpse-strewn wasteland after the Battle of Jankau (1645).
It really doesn’t matter how much more money we pound down that rat-hole, you understand, because by the time various parties — the weapons-makers, Volodymyr Zelensky, sundry members of the US House of Representatives, the Biden family, the World Economic Forum — are finished creaming off their fair shares, poor Ukraine won’t have enough cash-on-hand to replace six fuse-boxes in Zaporizhzhia.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-smoldering-fuse/
Kunstler does an especially deft job of helping you understand the political and financial incest that is rampant in the United States:
The Bankman-Fried extended family is the quintessence of Woke aristocracy. Dad Joe Bankman and mom Barbara Fried are both law professors at Stanford. She also acted as a money-bundler for the Democratic Party and ran two non-profit “voter registration” orgs (against the IRS laws which only permit non-partisan organized voter registration). Brother Gabe Bankman-Fried headed a non-profit named Guarding Against Pandemics (funded by Sam), which lobbies Congress to construct new platforms for medical tyranny. Aunt Linda Fried is Dean of Columbia U’s Public Health school, and is associated with Johns Hopkins, which ran the October 2019 Event 201 pandemic drill (sponsored by the Gates Foundation) months before the Covid-19 outbreak.
Sam’s girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, ran the Alameda Investments arm of the FTX empire (that is, FTX’s own money laundromat). Her dad, Glenn Ellison, is chair of MIT’s Econ School. His former colleague on the MIT Econ faculty, Gary Gensler, who specialized in blockchains there, is now head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency that Sam Bankman-Fried was attempting to rope into a regulation scheme to eliminate FTX’s crypto-currency competitors. Caroline’s mom, Sara Fisher Ellison, is an MIT econ prof specializing in the pharmaceutical industry (fancy that!). Caroline Ellison is currently on-the-run.
The sum total of all this professional and academic accomplishment is also the quintessence of Woke-Jacobin turpitude in service to a political faction that seeks maximum moneygrubbing while acting to overthrow every norm of behavior in the conduct of elections, and perhaps in American life generally. That’s some accomplishment. It’s also a lesson in why the managerial elite of our country are no longer trustworthy. They have gotten away with crimes against the nation for years, which has only made them bolder and more reckless.
As investigators unravel this web of corruption do not be surprised if Hillary and Bill Clinton, and some of their acolytes, emerge as key players in the deception and fraud.
You think that Bill Clinton hanging out with Samuel Bankman Fried is just a coincidence? If you believe that, please contact me. I have a great investment opportunity for you. Just give me two million dollars and I will change the world on your behalf (legal disclaimer — I am not specifying the specific world that I will change but it is highly likely it will be mine.)
Political Moonshine has been prolific in writing about the corrupt finance linking Washington political players and Ukraine. It has been going on for years. I encourage you to read two recent pieces. Warning, you are going down a rabbit hole. The Moonshine folks, in my view, would benefit from a savvy editor.
The first article, The Keystone of Corruption: Ukraine and the FTX Scandal, lists what it considers to be key facts about the corrupt activities of FTX:
- Tens of billions of U.S. dollars have been funneled to Ukraine
- The money was laundered through FTX
- The laundered money now in the form of FTX cryptocurrency was funneled back to Democrats and the Bidens
- All of that money is now gone and FTX is bankrupt
- FTX gave at least $40 million to Democrats in advance of the 2022 midterms
- FTX funded congressional campaigns for members overseeing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), [oversees regulation of the cryptocurrency industry]
- FTX’s ex-CEO Sam Bankman-Fried aggressively lobbied the CFTC
- FTX is currently under investigation by the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
- The investigation was opened after Bankman-Fried allegedly moved $10 billion in client assets at FTX to his trading firm Alameda Research
- A liquidity crisis at FTX caused the company to file for bankruptcy
- FTX is directly involved with and related to Ukraine
- In March, the Washington Post reported that Ukraine was dealing in cryptocurrency
- The Ukrainian government gathered more than $42 million in cryptocurrency donations
- Approximately a week after Ukraine gathered the cryptocurrency donations, FTX engaged with Ukraine
- Respective to the Russian invasion of Ukraine FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried formulated a cryptocurrency donation project in Ukraine
- Bankman-Fried announced that FTX would support the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance and other communities in collecting cryptocurrency donations for the nation
- The Ukrainian government has received over $60 million in cryptocurrency donations globally
- Bankman-Fried cited humanitarian aid and access to global financial infrastructure as causes
- Bankman-Fried indicated that cryptocurrency exchanges should enforce sanctions announced by the government
- Bankman-Fried was the #2 donor to the Democratic party; George Soros was #1
- The money laundering circle was: Democrats vote to send funds to Ukraine, Ukraine invests in FTX, FTX cryptocurrency was funneled back to the same Democrats
The follow up post, The Keystone of Corruption: Ukraine, the FTX Scandal, PrivatBank, the National Bank of Ukraine and Ihor Kolomoyskyi, hones in on Ihor Kolomoyskyi. Remember him? He reportedly funded the AZOV Battalion and he played a key role in putting Zelensky in the Presidential “palace” in Kiev.
One final but important data point in understanding the FTX implosion, at least according to the New York Post. Mr. ChangPeng Zhao, CEO of Binance. According to the New York Post:
ChangPeng ZhaoEarlier this month, Coindesk published a report that Bankman-Fried’s investment firm Alameda Trading’s balance sheet was relying on FTX’s cryptocurrency token, known as FTT. Around this time, Zhao sold a massive trove of FTT, which ultimately triggered FTX’s bankruptcy.
“It’s not a coincidence he goes to the Middle East and comes back bankrupt,” the source speculated. “The trip created the unraveling of the fraud. There’s a direct causation between that marketing junket and Bankman-Fried’s downfall.”
https://nypost.com/2022/11/15/ftx-founder-sam-bankman-fried-triggered-downfall-by-badmouthing-crypto-rival-sources/
Since I am blessed to have an international community of smart people reading and commenting on my pieces, I am very interested to see what you have to say about this affair and eager to learn new insights you may have.