In the fiat world banks are regulated and can’t do crazy shit with their reserves.
https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-joe-bid... (https://archive.ph/BBpQN#selection-417.0-424.0)
> The 30-year-old Bankman-Fried has been a major force in Democratic politics, ranking as the party’s second-biggest individual donor in the 2021–2022 election cycle, according to Open Secrets, with donations totaling $39.8 million. That ranks only behind George Soros (about $128 million) but ahead of many other big names, including Michael Bloomberg ($28.3 million). What’s more, he had promised to spend far more on Democrats moving forward, predicting in May that he’d fund “north of $100 million” and had a “soft ceiling” of $1 billion for the 2024 elections.
EDIT: Not accurate ^
Yet 18 of the 25 top donors were Republican leaning. Billionaires comprise 20% of Republican funding vs. 14% for Dems. Most republican megadonors were entirely republican. The big ones are from hedge funds.
So yeah, SBF donated to the dems. We need more regulation to get money out of politics. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking the republican party is immune to this. They are in it. They tend to be more in it.
96% of house seats were won by the party that spent more in their race.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221113221316/https://www.nytim...
https://web.archive.org/web/20221113013307/http://www.opense...
> 96% of house seats were won by the party that spent more in their race.
I don’t think the causality here is clear. A lot of companies/billionaires/millionaires and even regular people tend to donate money towards the people who are likely to win the race. If you wanna be in the good graces of the person representing a certain district in the House the best way to do that is to make a bet on the likely winner ahead of the elections.
https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_race/2022?di...
Many have literally $0 by outside spenders (ignoring the parties themselves).
On the other hand you don't see a ton of money going to non-competitive races because it doesn't really matter. The politician doesn't benefit all that much so it's not exactly a great way to earn favors. Or at least, that's what I'd assume. Lobbying is cheaper than people expect but a lot of these totals are so low I can't imagine it really matters to anyone.
The highest spending race was Nevada 3. With ~$15M for Republicans and ~$5M for Democrats. Predicted a likely democrat Win by 538 and ultimately won by democrats 52-48. Contradicting kind of all points here we're making. It's fuzzy of course. Need to get money out regardless.
Just my own speculation, but this is probably only true to a certain point. A politician in a non-competitive race is not going to have anything productive to do with 15 million as in NV3, but money that goes to the PAC run by your former aide helps to grease his palm (so 100k goes in and 50k is spent on ads, 50k on the PAC CEO's salary for example), or to similarly grease the palm of your various consultants, friends, and family, or to grease the palms of friendly industry groups who you sincerely hope will hire you on a do-nothing job once you retire from politics.
Money coming in to a certain point is always a good thing, and I speculate being in a foregone conclusion race probably helps limit the scrutiny on how you spend it.
Fair enough and thanks for the context, but politically connected is politically connected. Can be politically connected to democrats or republicans.
You’re telling untrue facts according to your own sources — to minimize that the second largest Dem donor was a criminal stealing customer funds. Your comparison to Repubs is unfounded as none of their donors engaged in organized crime like SBF.
Why are you spreading election misinformation?
> Why are you spreading election misinformation?
Two, Fuck off. This is needlessly passive aggressive. There is no need to throw in a worst-faith assessment of my motivations for posting all of this.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/20/gop-operatives-char... https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-gop-donors-charged-in-in...
Even if talking just about people who are later found to have acted improperly, look at the CEO of FTX Ryan D. Salame, one of the largest Republican donors.
Anyway you are justifying this destructive behavior with more destructive behavior? It's no wonder you don't take more time to understand these things.
The argument falls apart because two examples were quick to find? If all you can complain about is that it was too easy to find two examples to counteract the commenters clearly partisan and facetious claim then it sounds like you're grasping at straws.
Please enlighten us on how we should have spent more than 10 seconds to understand that there are actually no republican donors engaged in criminal activity and the commenter was just making a factual statement we obviously don't understand.
I think the point was not whataboutism, but rather that the sewer of filthy lucre that we call "campaign finance," regardless of who gives/receives such funds, creates perverse incentives in the political system and should be discouraged/done away with.
That's not a partisan take IMHO.
I want the lot of billionaire donors to have their and their company's finances and political involvement investigated and made transparent for the public. Keep them all accountable. But ofc SBF is worse than all the rest because of how bad his actions have been. The worst. But overall we shouldn't allow any one to have such outsized power. Don't make it legal to politically donate this much money to any one.
On the other hand, you appear to be excusing the Republican donor's. Your comments are saying "go after this visibly criminal (according to our justice system) Democrat. Focus on that! Ignore all the republican [and other Democratic] ones". Being as partisan as can be.
nobody9999 summarized my side perfectly as well.
While I'm told that the ideological and technical underpinnings of crypto are designed to avoid government regulation, I hope that he is prosecuted thoroughly for any crimes he may have committed.
But further, I hope that this high profile Democratic donor drives Republicans in the House and Senate to support strong regulation on this burgeoning financial asset class/stateless currency (I'm still unsure of what it is). And in fact stronger regulation on the financial industry generally.
Why are you only looking to the Repub party? Ilhan Omar for example doesn’t care much if Biden was given corrupt money. She’s not going to suddenly do everything centrist Biden does. Biden has more in common with your average neoliberal Repub than a progressive Democrat, who themselves are normally only center-left.
> And in fact stronger regulation on the financial industry generally.
Both parties and neoliberals across the board have done the opposite since Reagan has been in power. Republicans specifically are publicly about deregulation while Dems will flip how they talk but are also about de-regulation and keeping class divides.
Look at the top donors on both sides. They are all non-working class. They all make more money via de-regulation and a capitalist society where the rich have more power than others. They already show their hands. They vote for the establishment to maintain their money and power.