Molly White, at her substack The FTX Files, “Sam Bankman-Fried: guilty on all charges”:
It took almost as long for the judge to read the charges to the jury as it did for the jury to find Sam Bankman-Fried guilty on all seven counts. The verdict was delivered a year to the day from when CoinDesk published the leaked balance sheet that would ultimately lead to the collapse of FTX, exposing the crimes that had been happening just under the surface…
The five charges pertaining to wire fraud and money laundering each carry maximum sentences of twenty years. The securities fraud and commodities fraud charges have maximum sentences of five years. Federal sentencing guidelines also include enhancements pertaining to things like the total amount of monetary losses involved in the crimes, the number of victims, and whether the judge believes the defendant lied on the stand.
The actual sentence, however, remains up to Judge Kaplan.
When I was on a jury in 2009 for several months, we also held our verdict until after we'd gotten a nice lunch. Of course, we'd also been deliberating for 11 days. https://t.co/do3AlDJmS0
— Philip Bump (@pbump) November 3, 2023
it’s hilarious that SBF’s trial took exactly a month. federal trials for finance shit can take years and the require jurors to learn a ton of background information. in this case, he was just straight up sending emails like “lying about our reserves is ??”
— Lead Actor from Pixar’s Sodas (@ByYourLogic) November 3, 2023
Yeah, that’s typically more of a Hoover Institute thing. https://t.co/eZJkhK5qnD
— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) November 3, 2023
Sam Bankman-Fried’s conviction could have a chilling effect on future Stanford law professors’ law children’s ability to set up multi-billion dollar offshore cryptocurrency scams.
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) November 3, 2023
Elizabeth Lopatto, at the Verge, with an opinion about SBF’s parents that not everyone will share:
… I have been wondering since opening statements why Bankman-Fried didn’t simply plead guilty. Sure, he might not get a deal like his co-conspirators, Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh. But pleading guilty, showing himself to be sorry, and throwing himself on the mercy of a sentencing judge — well, it could have played. At minimum, it would have spared his friends and family the humiliation of this trial.
I suppose it’s possible that Bankman-Fried is delusional enough to believe himself innocent, to think he did nothing wrong, and to think a jury would agree with him. But given what else I know about him, I don’t think that’s what happened.
Sam Bankman-Fried loved risk, and he loved to gamble. He knew that if he went to trial, there was a chance, however small, that he might walk away a free man. Pleading guilty meant guaranteed punishment, and probably prison time. And so he chose to gamble, not only with his own life, but with his parents’…
There was a hypothetical he posited, where you could flip a coin: heads annihilated the world, and tails made it twice as good. Bankman-Fried said he would take that bet. For Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, I think that is no longer a hypothetical. Bankman-Fried’s loving parents suffered through a trial where his closest friends testified against him, with their every move watched intently by a gallery of reporters.
There is a reason most people won’t flip that coin: they aren’t selfish enough to gamble with other people’s lives.
Lopatto also wrote this, a week ago: “In the end, the FTX trial was about the friends screwed along the way”:
Sure, Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial has revealed that FTX was basically a seething mass of scams. But it has also revealed how Bankman-Fried blew up the lives of the people who are closest to him…
The problem with being told all your life that you are smart, smarter than everyone around you, is that you can come to believe it. Bankman-Fried is probably better at math than many members of the jury, but I don’t think they are dim enough to be fooled by the margin loan program. The prosecution’s case is fairly overwhelming and should rest today. Bankman-Fried is certainly arrogant enough to take the stand and try to explain it all away. The only question now is whether that will make the jury even less sympathetic.
I was right about SBF back in August 2022 https://t.co/Lpe4CNhwhj pic.twitter.com/FD3fpewDu3
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) November 3, 2023
True. TBF he was more obviously guilty of doing all the bad things than most. https://t.co/fNtqVQQTof
— Ben White (@EconomyBen) November 3, 2023
there was a significant number of people on here who were absolutely convinced for no reason that SBF was going to completely get away with it
like, not even an arrest or trial
here’s one of them https://t.co/R0Tkk5D4uw pic.twitter.com/3yHHCGGJwn
— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) November 3, 2023
Note the date on Cramer’s embedded tweet…
Fucking legend pic.twitter.com/ML3nnb3Bnb
— Not Jerome Powell (@alifarhat79) November 3, 2023
Lotta responses to this are basically "While it's true that he was charged within a few weeks of the FTX collapse, and was found guilty on all counts exactly a year after the Coindesk article, there was a possibility of some other scenario, so all of the cynicism was warranted" https://t.co/t4EnXAh9yR
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) November 3, 2023
From a predictably slurpy, smarmy, blame-everyone-but-the-(theoretically)-rich-dude NYTimes op-ed:
He’s going to have lots of time to read books now. pic.twitter.com/99CDHiBzL2
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 3, 2023
And in the end, the most effectively altruistic thing Sam Bankman-Fried did was pop the crypto bubble.
— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) November 3, 2023
Alison Rose
I already loathed you, Sam. Thanks for the extra nails in that coffin.
Shalimar
Waiting for Musk to get to testify in his own defense.
Urza
Sadly no matter how often its exposed as a scam the crypto bubble keeps reinflating. Probably won’t take much more than another year for NFTs to come around again.
wjca
Probably the best thing our parents ever did for us was teach us: “Being smart [which we all were] isn’t a virtue, it’s a tool. What matters is what you do with it.”
Not being impressed with yourself because of how smart you (think you) are also makes you a lot more pleasant for others to be around.
Martin
SBF didn’t do anything that investment bankers and private equity dickheads don’t do every goddamn day. He’s held accountable because crypto doesn’t keep Mitch McConnell in the Senate. We saw worse in 2008. We saw just as bad shit in the meme stock craze last year. It’s been going on in the subprime car loan market for a bit now. Shit, we have members of congress doing comparably shady shit with trading against information only they are privy to.
Glad SBF got taken down, but he’s also the bar getting set even lower for the conventional finance folks.
Sister Golden Bear
Back when I was a reporter, I covered a number of trials involving con artists. I think Lopatto’s take — SBF loved taking a gamble — was spot on. Also arrogance.
But at least some of them seemed to enjoy the challenge of trying to con the jury. In particular, there was one case where where the con artist — representing himself — claimed he was actually person he was posing as, and the prosecution actually had to fly in his father to identify him, and then the con artist cross-examined his own father trying to dispute the identification. After he was inevitably convicted, he shook the prosecutors hand and congratulated her for putting on a good case. (The kicker was that the prosecutor said afterwards that the con artist did a better job than some the defense attorneys she’d faced in court.)
Martin
I’ll add – this speaks volumes regarding Stanford Law’s Legal Ethics sequence.
Frankensteinbeck
The Luna stablecoin collapse was the day that Buy The Dip died. Before that the big cryptos like Ethereum and Bitcoin would have a crash and then zoom back up some more. After Luna, the recoveries have been anemic and crypto has been treading water ever since.
Kay
All of the (formerly) bold contrarians but now bitter middle age bros say the same things:
Glenn Greenwald is the worst celebrity internet lawyer, and that’s in a group that includes Jenna Ellis.
Kay
@Martin:
lol
Chetan Murthy
@Martin: and bond-rating agency shitbirds.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
Glenn was a dishonest, white supremacy sympathetic ratfucker in 2009, and somehow he’s deteriorated since then.
Kay
People keep confusing “smart” and “good” – they’re not the same.
Ken
What I don’t get is that his parents are law professors. I could understand if they were in the psychology department, and tried something… innovative when raising him. They could even be looking at a paper right now, something like “A Variant Skinner Box: Long-Term Results”. But they’re supposedly experts in corporate law and ethics, and Sam is the result?
dmsilev
@Kay: GG is consistent, I’ll give him that.
Consistently wrong.
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
I love how they all assured their idiot followers that SBF would never be prosecuted by the “Biden DOJ” and they never retracted or explained or admitted error.
Martin
@Frankensteinbeck: This isn’t going to go away until such time that we rebalance the economy in such a way that large sections of the population don’t conclude that go-big-or-go-home is the only route to the middle class. If the game is rigged, as 2008 sure as fuck proved, and there’s no enforcement or consequences for those rigging the game, then crypto or shorting GameStop or various other scams are going to be viewed as legitimate avenues.
I mean, part of how I got to retire early was watching Jim Cramer manipulate Apple stock on his show, profit from that in his hedge fund. One I learned how to spot him doing this, my options strategy almost never failed – almost always by betting against him. That was 20 years ago, and that guy is now a $600/yr sub on CNBC.
Normies don’t stand a chance.
dmsilev
@Kay: As any role-playing gamer will tell you, Intelligence and Wisdom are two separate and uncorrelated quantities.
BellyCat
This is why I only read Balloon-Juice.
Shakespeare lacked adequate competition.
Kay
He still doesn’t get it. He tried to convince the jury he was smart – although constantly rephrasing questions to show how clever you are is just annoying – but this wasn’t about whether he was “smart” – it’s about whether he’s a thief.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
Intellectual dishonesty and arguing in bad faith are Glenn’s hallmark, as far back as when I first encountered him in 2009. He was whining about targeted assassinations and some guy (Al-Alwari? Something close to that.) being executed without due process. He quoted a judge that said he was very bothered by these executions.
Then I looked up the rest of what the judge said and the context, and the judge was saying he personally found the whole thing troubling, but the terrorist had been given due process and it was 100% legal. There had been two separate trials in court deciding that yes, this guy had deliberately and according to long precedent waived his right to a regular criminal trial by hiding where he could not be arrested.
EDIT – And the thing is, Glenn had to know all that. The guy got due process. Glenn was leaving out the truth that he knew made his argument bullshit.
Chetan Murthy
@Frankensteinbeck: Anwar Al-Awlaki [I’m guessing]
Fair Economist
That’s kind of like the joke “Hitler wasn’t all bad; he did kill Hitler!”
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
He does it all the time. He’ll say something passed “Congress” – trying to leave an impression that Obama or Biden were holding up something or other, but what happened is something passed one chamber.
Apparently his followers either never check his work or don’t know how a bill becomes law.
Ken
Molly White was on the latest Crypto Critics Corner, which I think was recorded on the day of the jury deliberations — after Bankman-Fried testified but before the verdict. They briefly touch on the conspiracy theories (around the 40 minute mark), and note that SBF and FTX gave about the same amount to both Democrats and Republicans — it’s just that the donations to Democrats were public, and the ones to Republicans were largely “dark donations” (as Molly puts it).
Frankensteinbeck
@Chetan Murthy:
That guy. He GOT due process. There were trials! There were judges saying it was all legal! Glenn pretended those things didn’t happen. That was my introduction to his bad faith arguments, and it never got better.
Oh, like his great response to being criticized for praising Ron Paul. He said that liberals didn’t like Ron Paul because they didn’t want to admit they like blowing up babies.
trollhattan
In critter news…
1. I’d like anybody who travels a lot, to consider a travel badger. Don’t leave home without it. There could be a pet surcharge.
2. Awww, cute li’l otter! “No, no otters, nooo, noooo, nooooooo!” In which I learn the word natator.
Those fuckers know what they did. The squeamish might not want to click through to admire the post-ottercide bite marks.
sukabi
@Ken: they probably had regular dinner parties where the topics of discussion involved how to exploit tax loopholes, how “ethics or lack thereof” could be used to your advantage, and what emerging trends in finance were in gray areas of the law….
Martin
@Ken: Yeah, SBF even admitted that he gave more to Republicans but couldn’t be seen doing it publicly because it hurt their image, so it was given as dark money donations.
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIoQGs8lvxk
”
Otter Family Defeats Caiman in an Incredible Fight”
BlueGuitarist
Some of you may enjoy Professor Rep. Jamie Raskin’s corrections to a note from George Santos.
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000018b-9653-da71-a98f-b7f7e89d0000
dmsilev
@trollhattan: An emotional-support badger, I trust?
catclub
??? Lose customers money- while claiming to have industry leading safeguards? Have non-existent accounting- while claiming to have industry leading safeguards? Loan customers money to affiliated business with sweetheart connections and no security?
Go on podcasts and admit their criming? Not seeing it.
Martin
@Ken: I don’t fault them for Sam being the result – parents don’t have that kind of control over their kids. But they accepted a $16M home in the Bahamas from the company. That’s entirely on them. I’m sorry but if someone offers you a $16M property, even if its your kid, you do your due diligence.
BlueGuitarist
The Hill claims this is a typo, though it looks like MAGA Mike told the truth unintentionally
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4292489-people-over-politics-speaker-johnson-fundraises-typo/
Frank Wilhoit
@trollhattan: Good Christ, look at the claws on that thing.
Martin
Apart from going on podcasts and admitting it, yes. Hell, Wells Fargo alone has done most of that. Multiple times, actually.
trollhattan
@dmsilev:
Hard to say, but a fine travel companion I’m sure!
Really, after all the fuss about biting German shepherds, isn’t it time we restored the noble badger to the White House as official pet? Archie Roosevelt votes yes!
catclub
@Martin: ummm. Wells Fargo is neither an investment bank nor private equity.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: How did he and Matt Taibi become such darlings of lefties? They were also taken in by Snowden and Assange. I would say that ideologues are just not good judges of character.
Suzanne
LAWL.
Don’t worry, dude, we can tell you don’t read books. It’s, like, evident.
BellyCat
@BlueGuitarist: Perfessor Raskin is a treasure. Not sure why he omitted a grade though. C-
ETA: D+?
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t know how anyone found Greenwald persuasive. He’s clumsy – I feel as if the misdirection is blatant and easy to spot but that may be because I see a lot of that behavior in lawyers.
He really believed that Biden was going to intervene on behalf of SBF and insulate him from prosecution, although Joe Biden has never, in his very long career, done anything remotely like that.
They’re bad at…politics, these people. They have basic misunderstandings about how any of it works.
Death Panel Truck
At his sentencing the arrogant fuck will tell the judge in which Club Fed he’d prefer to do his time.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
Biden just isn’t corrupt. He’s been in public service forever and if he were corrupt it would have come to light by now- there would be SOME indication. The whole “Biden corruption” theme on the Right and among the horseshoe bros is nonsense. They can dislike Biden or disagree with him but they haven’t been able to convince people he’s corrupt for a very good reason – he isn’t.
wjca
But it will give them a dramatic type case example of unethical behavior. Which they can use for years going forward.
Kay
@Death Panel Truck:
I always, always feel a little pang when they’re found guilty – it’s just gut sympathy- and I did for him too.
He looked like he was trying not to cry. They’re going to hammer him. He is going to do a lot of time. He had that realization, standing there.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Agreed. I think some of the horseshoe bros were Ron Paul supporters who latched on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016.
mrmoshpotato
The Sun rises in the east, and Jim Cramer is still a fool.
prostratedragon
@schrodingers_cat: They were one-issue guys at a time when the respective issues — the mortgage disaster in Taibbi’s case, the general awfulness of GWB as President with Greenwald, the Iraq War in the other cases — were not getting a serious hearing in mainstrem media, while other streams of discourse on the internet were just taking off. Even since ’08 or ’09 most people’s access has probably greatly increased.
Ohio Mom
Being driven to take ridiculous risks, that’s very ADHD. Attracted to excitement.
From ADDtitude magazine: “Specifically, adults with ADHD are more likely to over-estimate benefits when weighing a decision, leading them to relatively riskier behaviors, the research suggests.” (https://www.additudemag.com/why-do-people-engage-in-risky-behaviors/#:~:text=Researchers%20suggest%20that%20adults%20with,%2Daversion%20and%20sensation%2Dseeking.)
I’m not excusing SBF, just saying his behavior fits
Ohio Mom
@Ohio Mom: I will add that ADHD is considered a developmental disability and that jails and prisons have a disproportionate number of people with DD.
Again, not excusing SBF, just pointing out that he fits in a larger pattern.
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom: In SBF’s case I think his parents failed him.
karen marie
@Ken: His mother teaches ethics.
@schrodingers_cat: 2000 to 2004 was a very different time in America.
@Kay: He’d have had to give it real thought to believe it. He’s just throwing shit at the wall in the hope that something sticks.
@Kay: You are far nicer than I am. I cheered when I heard the news. Can’t be bothered to look at his stupid face to see his expression when the verdict was read.
Adam L Silverman
What’s missing is that his parents were beneficiaries of his crimes. They actually profited from it in terms of real property and money. They’re not innocent here and should also be prosecuted.
Gvg
@Kay: I think he was predicting what would get his followers outraged, what they would prefer to believe, not caring at all what Biden would actually do.
He is just a liar, not an analyst. Fox News type pretending not to be, except I think he is paid by Russia.
I never found him believable. He was always to something even when he first appeared on my radar and was criticizing Bush for Iraq and I agreed with him. He started by saying things we agreed with and then tried to lead some percent of the left into being more extreme so that later he criticized democrats. But he pinged my experience and common sense right away. At first I wasn’t even sure what was wrong.
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan:
@dmsilev:
@Frank Wilhoit: This is taking being a Wisconsin fan way too far.
trnc
Fine with me if they all wind up sharing a cell, but is there evidence that they actually participated in his crimes? If not, my guess is that a lawsuit to reclaim that money and property is all they have to worry about. I haven’t kept up very closely, so maybe there is something to nail the parents with.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Gvg: The Bush administration was not friendly to Russia. GG collecting Russian checks and slagging administrations not friendly to Russia makes sense.
dmsilev
@Adam L Silverman: Who among us hasn’t gotten a $16 million house from their child?
Ohio Mom
@schrodingers_cat: It’s not one or the other. I don’t think his parents could squash his risk-taking side. They probably took him to be diagnosed and started on Ritalin but if you are a sensation seeker, always looking for that thrill, well, that’s who you are.
Now something doesn’t add up with his very accomplished attorney parents not giving what their adult son was doing a second look. That is where they failed him.
Obvious Russian Troll
@Alison Rose:
It gets worse!
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.“
The stupid fuck thought he could talk his way out of this.
Ken
I think that if the only thing the customer funds had been used for was to cover trading losses, there might have been a chance of the jury deciding the company was badly managed, but without fraudulent intent.
But taking the money, and at the same time buying expensive properties for his parents, and making big donations to universities and politicians, and buying TV commercials and naming rights to stadiums — there’s no way they could think it was anything but fraud.
Poe Larity
It’s almost like Innovators have become the anethma of the masses.
Where would we be if we’d just locked up all the Morgans, Carnegies and Rockefellers?
HumboldtBlue
A labrador explains why he was arrested.
Chetan Murthy
@Ohio Mom:
His parents were very involved with getting FTX started, and IIRC his father was described as being involved in the running of the place: https://www.fastcompany.com/90957973/sam-bankman-fried-parents-ftx-trial#:~:text=Bankman's%20and%20Fried's%20involvement%20with,Bankman%20said%20he%20was%20involved.
At least Pa Bankman’s hands are very dirty
ETA: The entire Fast Company article is pretty damning, and specifically also about the parents’ involvement. Pretty damning.
Hoppie
@Kay: I was a young’n when I understood about having a shit detector, mostly by figuring out how many other folks DID NOT HAVE ONE. It was kind of scary. Too bad I never could figure out how to monetize that insight.
Steve Crickmore
@Ken: Fred Skinner was actually quite a nice man, and fun. Gin and tonic was his drink. Got to know him, working as a bartender, New Year’s Eve in Cambridge, Ma. I remember when I was serving him I asked him, his definition of romantic love? He said the mutual reinforcement of two people’s needs, which I have come to believe is true.
BethanyAnne
@Martin: That specifically destroyed my best friend’s inheritance. He didn’t know about Cramer, and took risk he should not have betting on Apple.
Splitting Image
@Gvg:
For me it was the fact that he claimed to be passionately concerned with civil liberties but held the opinion that black civil rights and women’s rights were trivial identity politics issues.
It’s reasonable to argue that the federal government tapping phones without warrants is a serious breach of public trust and infringement of civil liberty. True enough as far as it goes.
But government agents shooting people dead in the streets and lying about being threatened by the person they shot is a much bigger threat to civil liberty. As is the government deciding who can and can’t get health care when their life depends on it. And who is and isn’t allowed to marry or get a divorce.
Greenwald just yawned whenever somebody tried to talk about any of these issues and said basically “Can we get back to talking about issues that are actually important, like ones that affect ME?”
Update 1: He was also far too argumentative with people who responded to his posts. He always had to be right on every single point on every single issue. Never let anything drop, no matter how trivial.
Update 2: He was prone to showing up in the comments of any blog that criticized him and starting flame wars.
Update 3: He almost never dealt with the substance of anyone’s argument. He always went ad hominem and questioned your motives. Everybody was a corrupt brown-noser sucking up to powerful elites. Except him.
Update 4: The updates just went on and on…
Chetan Murthy
@Splitting Image:
over at LG&M, that was how we could tell that we had been visited by one of his sock puppets: the logorrhea, just unending.
Medicine Man
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Interesting theory that GG may be a long time russian asset. Would certainly put how he helped hand Snowden over to them in a different light.
Citizen Alan
@Ken: Having gotten a 4.0 in Professional Responsibility, I can say with some degree of authority that for most lawyers, “legal ethics” is simply “the list of things you can’t get caught doing.”
Citizen Alan
@Kay: Lol. I think I was 12 or 13 when I finally grokked how intensely most people dislike smart people who rub everyone’s noses with their superior intellect. When I went into private practice, I dumbed down my vocabulary and thickened my Southern drawl because otherwise, I would have intimidated all the clients who barely got a GED out of hiring me.
gene108
Very few people attempt financial crimes in the billions of dollars in as simplistic a manner as the gang at FTX and Alameda Research did.
Also, if we lived in a superhero / supervillain comic book world, I think Sam’s fall, humiliation, and conviction would be a great background story for a mathematical genius and business savvy supervillain. He’d be the model prisoner, teaching others about math and finance, while secretly working our ways to use AI, machine learning, etc. to subvert our dependence on technology, when he’s released. An alternate version would be Sam being “scared straight” upon release and build a legitimate business this time, having “learned his lesson”, and secretly use his growing resources to get back at a society that didn’t appreciate his genius.
gene108
@Martin:
Just doing the bare minimum of keeping track of all material transactions is enough to avoid a good bit of the mess Sam got himself into.
Can two companies with common ownership transfers funds to each other? Yes! They just need to keep track of what’s transferred and who owes who what amounts. Written agreements between the companies as to the nature of the transfers helps solidify the fact they are distinct entities.
Can ownership, in closely held company, withdraw corporate money for personal use? Yes. Just make sure to keep track of what ownership withdrew, and what they owe the company, and make sure it’s not a serious drain on company equity.
SBF’s undoing was refusing to care about basic internal controls that avoid problems like where did $8 billion in investor money go. If he crossed his t’s and dotted his i’s with his business activity, he’d just have declared bankruptcy and walked away when crypto crashed.
gene108
@schrodingers_cat:
The Iraq War was so badly managed by Bush & Co., even smug jerks like Greenwald realized “this isn’t right”, and talked about the instability, problems with Bush’s torture program, etc., while most of the MSM was still supporting the war.
They were the only critics out there for a bunch of us who noticed how bad invading Iraq was.
gene108
@dmsilev:
People who’ve done well financially have bought their parents houses, cars, etc. It’s something most of us don’t get upset about.
Geminid
Early birds in cloudless areas can get a good look at Venus this morning. It is very high in the sky.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
I was outside a few minutes ago, and I figured that had to be Venus up there. None of the other planets get that bright, let alone stars.
Barry
@Martin: “This isn’t going to go away until such time that we rebalance the economy in such a way that large sections of the population don’t conclude that go-big-or-go-home is the only route to the middle class. ”
These people are not ordinary middle-class strivers. This stuff will stop only if and only the responsible people are punished.
Chris Johnson
@Kay: People don’t get that Biden spent a lot of time earnestly and legitimately representing the citizens of the state of Delaware, including a bunch of credit card companies and LOTS of businesses incorporated there. He represented those constituents for 36 YEARS.
You can not like those businesses, but what on earth could he possibly stand to gain by being corrupt, when being earnest and sincere in representing his constituents is so obviously rewarding? He was aligned with the purposes of basically money walking around on legs. That’s more powerful than having money of your own, and he doesn’t seem like the greedy, unhinged type.
His real job was ENOUGH. Still is. Joe Biden has never had to be dishonest and probably never will.
If you figure capitalism itself is corrupt, that’s a different argument.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
And I’m still pissed at Obama’s “look forward, not back” response to all the financial shenanigans of that era.
The what?! Gotta admit I missed that one.
Shit like this happens because wealthy people have far, far more money than standard investments like the stock market can absorb, without driving P/E ratios way up. So they come up with esoteric bullshit like this.
The problem is TALOMSAATT – There’s A Lot Of Money Sloshing Around At The Top. Until something’s done about that – meaning taxing the hell out of the rich – shit like this is just going to keep happening.
Uncle Cosmo
I’ve been the Adult ADHD Poster Child for so many consecutive years they retired the trophy, and I don’t fit into that pattern at all. That probably has to do with parents who lived through the worst of the Great Depression as young adults and never caught a break til the war ended. Dad’s early life was almost an object lesson in the old Japanese proverb “The nail that sticks up gets hammered back down” and he passed on a life-lesson of deferring to anyone who might have the power to hurt you, never drawing the attention of those people, never trusting them if you did, and never, never, never taking any risk you could avoid because you were bound to lose. Looking back I’m almost shocked that he dared to take on debt to buy our house – but then we “lived poor” for years so he could pay it off in record time out of fear the banksters would scheme to take it away.
BellyCat
Chef’s kiss!
AWOL
@Ken: Corporations are sociopaths.
Hence . . .
schrodingers_cat
@karen marie: I am aware. I was writing op-eds about it in my college newspaper.
Uncle Cosmo
Ask me sometime about my reading-time-3-minutes demolition of the old “build-a-better-mousetrap” BS meme. (Or don’t, mir ist’s egal.)