Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

I'm not an economist, I don't understand how this works.

At least this I understand. Foreign powers, especially you-know-which-one have a strong interest in preventing EU from becoming too strong, and unfortunately this is easy to do because:

* it plays on primal human tribal instincts (they want to assimilate us, they will force or enable more immigration, etc)

* the way EU works, you only need to convince some of the countries

It really worries me that the US president is heavily invested in crypto schemes, since he and his family would benefit with the crash of the dollar. It is the conflict of interest to end all conflicts of interest

Kinda like getting a speeding ticket, the fact that other people were also speeding isn't a defense.

The real question is about Kraken. How they've managed to remain untouched is a mystery.

Absolutely.

By the time a pardon comes the persons life is usually already in deep distress, and whatever they were working on is likely already over. I don't see why it's such a tragedy to let some people get pardoned who maybe don't deserve it.

Until the Dem party fixes their brand and wins back some of the Senate seats they used to control in the 90s and early 2000s there will be no positive progress.

My future perfect world:

  proportional representation for assemblies (eg US House), 

  some arbitrarily low number of reps per citizens (200k - 400k?),

  no upper assembly (eg US Senate),

  approval voting for executive positions (eg Mayor, Sheriff, President),

  only public financing of campaigns,

  limit campaign season to maybe 6 weeks.

There's so many reasonable, impactful reforms which could be done. And my wishlist is based on my (imperfect) understanding of best available (political) science. And I'm all ears about SCOTUS reforms. And I doubt any reforms will stick, so long as our gini coefficient is so out of whack (wealth vs democracy, the timeless struggle).

(I've read that the French are talking about a Sixth, given that they've gone through several prime ministers in the past few weeks/months and seem unable to maintain a government long enough to pass anything.)

[1] https://thegoodlifefrance.com/short-history-of-the-five-repu...

> Provided that no Amendment [...] no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

(Awkward ellipsizing, but the elided text is another thing that's not allowed, which expired in 1808, and is otherwise thankfully no longer relevant.)

Better voting systems can be implemented, but since the states run federal elections, each state would have to pass legislation requiring a different voting system. Of course I expect all 50 would not agree on which alternative system is the best, which may or may not matter. And I doubt red states would want to change, as voting systems that better reflect the will of the electorate tend to disadvantage the GOP.

Eliminating gerrymandering is difficult, because it's hard to objectively define what is and isn't a gerrymandered map. There have been some attempts to do so, and I would say they've even been somewhat successful, but people can reasonably disagree with the methodology and thresholds used.

The Citizens United SCOTUS ruling and precedent absolutely needs to be reversed; agreed. Corporations are not people and should not get first amendment protections. Or any kind of protections outside any that are defined in regular law.

Another thing we need to do away with is the Electoral College. Presidents should be elected based on the national popular vote, not by per-state winner-take-all proxies, with vote apportionment that wildly advantages some states over others. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would effectively do away with the EC if states "owning" at least 270 electoral votes were to all sign it, but that's unlikely to ever happen. (Then again, it's more likely that the Compact would achieve that threshold than the passing of a constitutional amendment to abolish the EC.)

- Corporate money should be out of politics

- Gerrymandering should be stopped

If we had amendments for these two things, it could change A LOT. Congress might actually be able to function. Corporate corruption could be prosecuted. We might be possible to put meaningful limits on corporate power.

Of course, the devil’s in the details. How do you write amendments for these two things in a way that actually accomplishes the goals? But though it would be difficult, I don’t think it would be impossible.

I mean given how much is already happening in America, I am just curious from a legal standpoint if there could be done something like that (forgetting the insane backlash but still), what could the president of america do to completely sieze the constitution ?

If the branch responsible for making and changing laws was also responsible for the reversion of enforcing those laws - effectively what a pardon is - then there's absolutely no check on gratuitous law being passed.

The idea of the republic as opposed to a monarchy is that no part of the government is anyone's personal...well, anything...but that doesn't really negate the degree of control the President exercises, both in theory and in practice barring highly variable personal restraint, over the DoJ.

> The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that while the President may remove executive officers, he cannot lawfully direct them to commit acts that are unconstitutional, obstruct justice, or violate statutory mandates.

That doesn't mean the President doesn't override the DoJ, it means the President doesn't override the law.

> The constitutional structure also relies on normative independence - a separation within the executive branch that maintains rule of law.

Yes, that it relies on this but does not actually provide any mechanism by which it can effectively be assured is the fundamental design issue I am referring to being necessary to address if one wants "the President overrides the DoJ" not to be a simple fact independently of whether or not the pardon power exists and is vested in the President's discretion.

> Finally, while the pardon power is broad, it’s not the linchpin of executive authority over the DOJ.

I literally said that the pardon power is irrelevant to that, which is the exact opposite of describing it as the lynchpin.

> Removing or limiting that power wouldn’t change the fact that the DOJ’s prosecutorial discretion must still be exercised consistent with law, ethics, and constitutional constraints - not simply the President’s personal preferences.

To the extent that is true, that is only a negative constraint on prosecution applied by the courts, it can never compel a prosecution that the executive has declined. (Congress, of course, could punish the President for preventing prosecutions, via the impeachment power, but that’s hardly a substitute for real independence from the President of all or part of the prosecutorial power if that is what is desired. Or, for that matter, much of a remedy at all if more than 1/3 of the Senate is on board with the President's conduct.

Trump's pardons include hundreds of literal insurrectionists, promises to pardon in exchange for not testifying against him (witness tampering), and other blatant corruption. He fired the head of the OPA and installed a political hack to speedrun awful pardon choices and made a mockery of the process in a far more corrupt and damaging manner than anyone before him, and it's not even close.

... and is continuing to move further still ...

There are a number of reasonable posts in this very thread that are either already dead or on their way out - and I don't even agree with some of their positions.

The censors want Hacker News to keep its reputation as a place where you can have debates in good faith, while allowing their censorship powers to shape the conversation.

Pointing this behavior out upsets the calculus by warning their potential marks. So of course they want to strategically hide it.

This is what happened to Trump though, the established politicians do not like him and did everything they could to stop him from running.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do then. I agree Trump is bad. Am I supposed to just say that 3 times and click my heels and then he'll go away?

These are observations designed around trying to make sure, once Trump is gone, that we don't get another Trump. I can't change the current President and this constant purity testing about hating Trump changes nothing.

The reason Trump will have to blatantly violate the Constitution if he tries to run again is because the country was so spooked after FDR's third term that it limited Presidential terms. One could have made the same argument then, the only reason FDR ran a 3rd term is because he's FDR and a different person wouldn't do that. But that amendment is why there's a bright line around a 3rd term now.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5568271-hunter-b...

Also it's not like the democrat did not weaponize the justice to put trump in jail for 4 consecutive years.

I assure you, they are not.

Conflict of interest by attempting to curry favor for his vanity project by making donations? That's a fair criticism.

Another (more charitable?) explanation is they just never make the connection:

> It’s easy to find authoritarians endorsing inconsistent ideas. Just present slogans and appeals to homey values, and then present slogans and bromides that invoke opposite values. The yea-saying authoritarian follower is likely to agree with all of them. Thus I asked both students and their parents to respond to, “When it comes to love, men and women with opposite points of view are attracted to each other.” Soon afterwards, in the same booklet, I pitched “Birds of a feather flock together when it comes to love.” High [Right-Wing Authoritarian scorers] typically agreed with both statements, even though they responded to the two items within a minute of each other.

-- https://theauthoritarians.org/ (2006 ebook)

4000 of Biden's pardons were mass pardons. 1500 of Trump's second term pardons are also a mass pardon of Jan 6, a decision I completely agree with. I would have pardoned them too because people were losing their minds over it to the point of not being able to be productive anymore. Honestly I feel the same way about the stupid laptop thing, you all clearly can't be normal about it so I'm ending it.

The speed boats hauling ass in international waters are known smugglers on known routes using customized craft only drug smugglers use.

Policy of vaporizing these boats with weapons is both a) fairly effortless target practice for our military and b) puts major financial strain on that drug cartel operation.

Do you actually think this is a possibility? How do you see that playing out?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45693880

Imagine the US instead pulling the ship over and shooting every person, regardless of age or guilt, in the head—and then leaving. This is no different.

That is not even close to true. What other Presidents were "just as corrupt" and how?

Is that so? Please list the ways in which former presidents have violated the Emolument clause, profited directly from their office (i.e., issuing their own cryptocoin), and increased their family's net worth by billions while in office.

Either put up the facts, or stop with the "whataboutism" nonsense.

The common theme to the donations ("payoff" or "bribe" might be more accurate), whether to D or R was to weaken any push for crypto regulations.

A pardon makes it all go away. None of the baggage of convictions follow. Finding a job or a place to live is something they can do, as well as voting again.

In this case, FCPA hinders American companies from competing in foreign locales where greasing the local wheels is a requirement for getting things done. Like it or not, this is the world we live in but an argument could be made that dropping enforcement is pragmatic.

Crypto's problem is that when the law is updated to deal with these stunts, it's suddenly just a crappy version of the existing financial system.

It is both a reason not to buy drugs now (you're sponsoring all that other stuff) and a reason it's a ridiculous and immoral policy.

It is also on no way comparable to crypto.

The BSA is not a technicality and trying to reframe it as one is wild. It is to make sure that people that have a financial incentive to turn a blind eye to money laundering don't turn a blind eye to it. You don't need to be directly involved in the money laundering to be incentivized to let it happen.

Friends of ”I thought there would be no fact checking ”

This is a super, super low bar. One can meet the BSA requirements by sending every transaction to the regulators, but Binance didn't even do that.

The reality is the system will bend itself to avoid the problem, because it's been designed to avoid that problem.

This is not a company vs. company sort of issue, this is a "I want to avoid regulations that would cost me money as a fundamental aspect of my industry " issue.

If Coinbase thought they could legally not worry about all of this, do you think they would want to deal with it?

The sheer quantity of money used in cryptocurrency for money laundering and activity where traditional payment processors will not accept payments (largely illegal, e.g. drugs, counterfeit goods) also means that the keeping the ecosystem healthy involves having ways for this money to flow.

For example if your crypto is the proceeds of ransomware, you're going to have a hard time cashing out without using something like Monero (which effectively has no offramps) without going through an exchange that knows perfectly well that you're trying to touch tainted goods. Exchanges like Binance that just don't bother to check who their customers are when they withdraw cash for such assets are just as critical to the ransomware plague as any security bug or social engineering issue. It's one of the reasons that pre-crypto, even though ransomware was technically feasible, it was never able to grow into a large-scale operation--no offramps. But hey maybe the official stance of CZ supporters is now that ransomware is good, actually, and if you don't like it it's because you have partisan bias (???)

CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge of improper platform AML KYC implementation. Big banks routinely pay a fine for this, and never face imprisonment. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform. Credit where it's due, they somehow pulled off a 4 month sentence for this unprecedented charge. And now it's all for naught.

But something like that would fly in the face of the "Unitary Executive" insanity and would (I suspect) require a constitutional amendment, which is no longer remotely feasible.

A first comment said "without saying why". The second comment just says that this is blatantly not true, and that the rationale presented has been since confirmed as a very accurate prediction.

speak for yourself. the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as evidenced by the current political climate in the US.

California is one state among 50. People using it as an example of some sort of government being bad are objectively in bad faith.

Please inform me how my state's citizen referendums are bad? We are about to have a vote on voter ID laws, which I do not approve of, but what's important is that the people who care are able to have their will made manifest, and it will actually go up for a vote.

Meanwhile nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist.

If you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument, because california's shitty government predates democrat control, because it was always built as this crazy world where rich and connected people had control. California's government is built wrong, not because of democracy, but against it.

I think the opposite. That is exactly what we need. A lot of the problem we have come from the fact that the constitution speaks almost entirely in terms of what various government bodies do and provides no way for the people to directly override government actions they disagree with. This has led us to our current situation which is based on politicians exploiting loopholes (e.g., gerrymandering, stacking various judicial/administrative posts, manipulating voting laws, etc.) in order to preserve their position against potential electoral response.

In some cases these problems have been overcome or mitigated at the state level. . . via ballot measures. In California, for instance.

> California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but from where I'm standing California looks a lot more sane and stable than the US as a whole.

This is total crap. Tale of Two Cities is set against the backdrop of Britain’s reforms, in contrast to the French Revolution. America has peacefully seen through Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting, FDR’s New Deal and the Civil Rights Era, each peaceful restructurings of how our government works.

Revolutions transfer and consolidate power. Reforms broaden them. Those who miss this lesson of history and fall for glorified fictions of peasants’ revolts earn a consistent fate across millennia of human history.

Side note: strongly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6E4_Bcmscg&t=14s