FTX Roundup
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FTX Roundup
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🔥 They’re going to wish we didn’t learn about “news grants.” But let’s start with how we found out. It was a decision made under pressure by The Intercept’s editor. He was looking at a lot of bad options.
Sometimes you have to get ahead of the bad news. Lefty news outlet The Intercept was forced to make an embarrassing admission this week — it had been accepting “grants” from one of FTX’s shady “philanthropic entities,” allegedly to support The Intercept’s mighty fine work on “biosafety and pandemic prevention.”
Meaning lockdowns, mandates, passports.
The Intercept admitted it was in line for a LOT of grants. They already got a half million a couple months ago, with another $3.5 million yet to come over the next two years.
Lefty news outlet ProPublica got even more than the Intercept. In an email to staff, ProPublica’s editor conveyed the tragic news that the unpaid portion of a $5M grant for reporting “on pandemic preparedness and biothreats,” was now probably kaputsky.
So far, it looks like FTX was lavishing multi-million-dollar grants on SCADS of leftist news magazines.
First of all, I’ll bet many of you were happily unaware that “news grants” were even a thing. Grants are completely different, and lots better, than bribes. OBVIOUSLY Sam Bankman-Fried couldn’t just write checks directly from FTX’s bank account to news companies.
That would be unseemly.
But apparently it’s NOT unseemly if you pay $150 to create a non-profit “foundation” to pay some bills for you. Even better, you can get a tax deduction for “donating” the money to your non-profit, before it turns right around and then “grants” the money to a news site from whom you’d like some friendly coverage.
Remember that puff piece the New York Times ran on SBF last week? What do you want to bet that we’re eventually going to find out the Times got a taste of some of that sweet investor money SBF was throwing around?
You might be thinking that SBF wasn’t so much doing grants as buying himself some favorable coverage for his fraudulent crypto business, and banking some “insurance” in case things got sticky, like they are now. What a ridiculous idea. Of COURSE editors can take multi-million dollar grants and still be completely objective. How dare you.
That we know of so far, none of the “completely objective” news companies who got FTX money ever disclosed that fact before now.
It might have shocked you to find out that not only is there a market for big companies to give large “grants” to news companies — without even buying advertising— but also the practice is apparently so widespread and so well-accepted that nobody’s blown the whistle on it so far.
Here’s what they want us to believe: Sam Bankman-Fried was an altruistic genius with a personal passion — like Bill Gates! — for pandemic preparedness and biosafety. So he quietly slipped a bunch of oversized financial grants to news agencies, “grants” that were so large they might have doubled the firms’ annual budgets. We don’t know if there were any strings attached, or requirements, or restrictions, or anything else.
Taking it just at face value, does it trouble you that there’s a market for directing what topics news companies focus on? In this case, it would be SBF directing a bunch of newspapers to report on pandemics and biosafety. Even if we interpret everything the most generous possible way, it still looks a whole lot like SBF was buying news coverage. The only question is whether his intentions were actually altruistic or were, at bottom, serving a different purpose.
🔥 This all kind of reminds me of how HHS bought the cooperation of corporate media outfits and news influencers by spending billions on vaccine ad placement last year.
We now live in a world of sponsored news. You can complain about it, but it won’t change anything. Corporate media exists to create a profit, first and foremost. Money and political influence (with which to obtain more money) drive news decision making. Not curiosity, public spirit, or ethical considerations.
The more overtly political a particular news outlet is — think MSNBC, Vox, ProPublica, and so forth — the clearer it is that these companies exist in order to satisfy a market. Not a market for news consumers. A market for news SHAPERS. If there are rich leftists lining up right and left — both in and out of government — then SOMEBODY has to satisfy that demand.
If corporate media adhered to ethics, they’d disclose their revenue sources. How much from each advertiser? How much from “news grants?” How much from the government? If we knew those things, we could make up our own minds about who and what to believe.
🔥 It’s not just buying news companies. Don’t forget politicians. Saturday, Breitbart ran a story headlined, “Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX Donated Over $300,000 to Lawmakers Investigating Him.”
The House Financial Services Committee, chaired by Representative Maxine Waters, announced earlier this week that the committee will handle investigating any wrongdoing by Bankman-Fried and FTX. In a happy coincidence, Sam donated $300,351 to nine democrat members of the House Financial Services Committee, or about $35K each, on average.
That’s not the only conflict of interest. Sam’s brother Gabe used to work for Representative Sean Casten (D-Il.), who’s a current member of the House Financial Services Committee. And here’s Maxine Waters blowing SBF a kiss back in December of last year:
The good news is that Maxine Waters is about to lose her chairmanship to Republican Patrick McHenry. We are SO grateful that the Republicans won the House.
🔥 On Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Cashed Out $300 Million During Funding Spree.” The gist was that while FTX was raising over $2B from institutional investors in 2021, SBF was selling large amounts of stock “back” to FTX — and he got a cool $300 million out of it.
Needless to say, that’s an unusual move, especially at a time when a company’s founder is asking other people to invest money. Selling large amounts of stock sort of suggests a lack of faith in the company’s long-term prospects. It should’ve been a red flag.
I mean, ANOTHER red flag.
The Journal mentions — but doesn’t dwell on — the fact that FTX never had a real board of directors. It was just Sam and two employees, and they didn’t hold meetings or vote on anything. In other words, investors like BlackRock poured millions into FTX even though Sam was accountable to no one, and was milking the company for hundreds of millions for himself.
🔥 We can begin to see the outlines of how FTX did it. It’s only a matter of scale. The trick is to quickly come up with enough money to capture three groups: politicians on oversight committees, the related regulatory agencies, and the corporate media. FTX *needed* to grow so big, so fast. Otherwise someone would have exposed him before he could launder all that money and fund the mid-term elections.
🔥 On Thursday, Senator Josh Hawley asked the DOJ, the SEC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for all information and communications relating to FTX.
Over the last couple months, the FBI was somehow able to find time to raid a UFO blogger, and a pastor and his son for protesting an abortion clinic, but during the largest financial disaster in history, it’s just crickets from the FBI.
Hello? Is there anyone there?
I won’t hold my breath for any of SBF’s properties to be raided. But something’s going to shake out. The story is just too big to contain. https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/c-and-c-news-monday-november-21-2022
