Sam Bankman-Fried trial update: Where’s the money?

The SBF trial finished last week with the boy wonder himself testifying, as his attorney Mark Cohen comfortably led the defendant through a benign & naive narrative they are trying to spin to the judge & jury. Below is a courtroom sketch of Mark Cohen, the completely incompetent, ineffective & overpaid defense lawyer for SBF, as depicted by CoinDesk courtroom artist/reporter Nik De.

The SBF trial was paused Monday through Wednesday last week (Oct 23-25), because Mark Cohen was testifying with lots of press, cameras, reporters, etc, in another Manhattan courtroom– specifically in the Donald Trump v. New York fraud trial. That is a civil trial in its punishment & compensation phase, as Donald Trump has already been found guilty of fraud.

DOJ prosecution cross-examination in the criminal trial of SBF is expected to begin Monday (tomorrow), with the trial possibly ending next week, allowing the jury to deliberate a verdict. If convicted, the judge is going to come down hard on SBF, with an appeal highly unlikely to change anything, meaning SBF will need a Presidential pardon to get out of jail. SBF spread a LOT of money around into dark places and Trump loves NFTs, so it could happen. The other murky, unanswered question is, “Did SBF already cut a secret deal?” Its answer is unknowable to the public, but known in inner ruling circles.

Trump pardoned dozens of criminals (pic above) at the end of his Presidency simply because they paid his under-the-table extortion money, or they pledged their undying loyalty to the Donald.

Over $8 billion in customer funds is still missing from the FTX/Alameda fraud. Everyone in crypto assumes SBF has the stolen crypto stashed away in hidden wallet(s) somewhere in dark cyberspace. SBF was allowed plenty of time to do that– as FTX collapsed last November, as he was extradited back to the US from the Bahamas, and surely after he was allowed more-than-generous bail terms by a lenient Manhattan judge who let SBF stay with his parents in Palo Alto, California and work online, even after repeated violations of his bail terms.

Obviously US intelligence was monitoring & scrutinizing SBF’s online activities, but none of this (or its findings & conclusions) have ever been revealed to the public. What was SBF doing online during those months he was out on bail?

Without question, SBF moved massive crypto transfers from the time he was held by the Bahamian police, up until his bail being revoked after he published the personal diary of key DOJ witness (& former girlfriend) Caroline Ellison, who was SBF’s partner in crime. She pleaded guilty, as did a few others at FTX/Alameda, so their prison sentences will be much lighter. But the question still remains, “Where’s the money, SBF?”

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A year to Election 2024: The political outlook

One year to election day 2024 and the field is set. It will incumbent Joe Biden as the Democrat nominee and Donald Trump for the Republicans. Biden is running unopposed because no opposition (particularly from the left) is allowed within the Democratic Party or its corporate media apparatus. Any criticism from the left is branded as racist, misogynist and/or anti-semetic by the philistine fake media.

The experiences of 2016 & 2020 have taught the Democrats that primaries can be dangerous to elite interests. Bernie Sanders undermined Hillary Clinton in 2016, and as Wikileaks reported, the Democrats rigged that primary to ensure her nomination over a fake left figure in Bernie. In 2020, Joe Biden got hammered in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada before the Democrats pulled the machinery in South Carolina and rigged the vote for him from then on. By Super Tuesday 2020, the path had been cleared for Biden to grab the nomination and Bernie had dropped out– again.

The Democratic Party last year approved the reordering of its 2024 presidential primary, replacing Iowa with South Carolina in the leadoff spot to ensure a smooth nomination process for Joe Biden. In 2020, Biden received only 14% of the caucus vote in Iowa, then 8% in New Hampshire, and 19% in Nevada, which allowed Bernie Sanders to take an early delegate lead. It’s those pesky voters who screw things up for the Democrats in the primaries and this is how they are brought under control by the ruling establishment.

On the Republican side, Donald Trump took over the Party in 2016 and has held it in a stranglehold since. Not even the events of 1/6/21 can dissuade his most emboldened supporters who are given platforms throughout the right-wing media. The rest of the Republicans are a combination of career bureaucrats & businessmen who have no appeal to grassroots Republican voters. Everyone from Mike Pence to Ron DeSantis to Vivek Ramaswamy is a stick figure. None of them can speak to voter frustrations with any degree of empathy or believability, and thus they have been left by the wayside despite attempts from conservative Republicans to prop them up as legitimate alternatives to Trump.

The fact is both parties aren’t happy with their presumed nominees. Roughly 70% of Democrat voters don’t want Joe Biden to run again, and over 60% of Republicans don’t want Donald Trump as their candidate– yet this political re-match is set in stone. Joe Biden is semi-senile & non-responsive to the problems facing most Americans such as rising living costs, declining wages, attacks on democratic rights & imperialist wars abroad. The truth is Joe Biden supports attacks on workers & more wars everywhere. It’s how he plans to stay in power.

As for Trump, the problem is a lack of political backbone anywhere in two-party politics. Neither major party has the courage or the will to fight fascism, so Trump is allowed to do whatever he wants, including an insurrection & coup attempt on 1/6, and is never held accountable for his actions. This is what makes him so dangerous. As much as he is criticized & vilified by the fake left, Trump is seen as an essential backstop for capitalism in its late-stage crisis. If democratic forms of rule are no longer able to contain & control the working population, then dictatorial forms of rule will become the law of the land and that’s where Donald Trump comes in, as he’s being protected by powerful elites who understand this dynamic.

So where does that leave ~85% of people, who see no choice in either party or its pre-selected candidates? It’s time to organize rank-and-file workers across all industries for an all-out political fight against the two-party system. This will take the forms of massive workers’ strikes in heavy industry, education, health care & the rest. This is the ONLY way the workers can make their voices heard. It must be collective & internationally coordinated action with the goal of overthrowing capitalist parasites who rule every industry & business, and establishing worker control over production in all sectors.

This is the only way to stop the madness in Israel/Gaza, Ukraine/Russia, Taiwan/China, etc. It is the US government that is the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism, inequality & violence against civilians. It is Wall Street that commands this, in order to extract ever greater profits for itself. It’s the CIA & US intelligence apparatus that coordinates with fascists in Kiev & Tel Aviv to silence dissidents & bomb hospitals. It’s been like this since the end of WW2, and we have now reached a point where if it isn’t stopped, we will be hurled into a Third World War by madmen with no ethics.

The only viable political option outside of the two-party system is the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and it’s daily organ the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). All the other so-called “left” parties are frauds whose purpose is to funnel workers & youth back into the orbit of the Democrats. This includes the Green Party, the DSA’s, and the corrupt trade unions which are run by bureaucrats who sell out their rank-and-file constituents every time. The bottom line is that nothing is going to change for the better until workers & youth unite internationally and take matters into their own hands.

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