Bankman-Fried Remains a Free Man, News Organizations Stick Up for Assange, and China Rocked by Protests: Last Week in Liberty 12/4/22
Hello everyone, welcome back to Last Week in Liberty! Every week we break down the most important news stories of the past week from a Liberty-minded perspective. Lots of very interesting stories from this past week, so let’s dive in:
FTX, SBF, and WTF?
I haven’t covered the entire FTX fiasco very much over the past few weeks. As more and more information as slowly come out, however, I think now might be a good time to step back and take a look at the whole thing.
For those unaware, FTX was a major cryptocurrency exchange. This means that people would trade deposit money to trade and store crypto on the site. The site was on of the biggest crypto-hubs in the world and was endorsed by the likes of Kevin O’ Leary, Tom Brady, and other high-profile celebrities. Several weeks ago, the entire company went belly up after what was essentially a bank run on the exchange’s accounts. Information about what was really going on behind the scenes at FTX was slowly trickling out, causing some to lose confidence in the company. Naturally, they wanted to pull their money and crypto out. The only problem is that FTX didn’t have it. They were cooking their books and defrauding their customers by claiming they had crypto on hand that they had actually lent out, invested, or just flat out didn’t have. As more and more people rushed to FTX to pull out their cash and coins, the whole company fell through. Mr. Wonderful would have been better off being “out” on this one.
The man behind the curtain orchestrating all of this was Sam Bankman-Fried, more commonly referred to by his initials, SBF. Before FTX’s collapse, SBF was hailed as a visionary and emblematic of a new generation of billionaires (Elizabeth Holmes, anyone?). In light of the present crisis, these articles are prime r/agedlikemilk material. Now, SBF has retreated to the safety of his Bahamanian villa to give interviews about how maaaaaybe a few mistakes were made, but businesses fail all the time and these things just happen. Oopsie!
Despite the fact that FTX and SBF are guilty as sin of defrauding their customers and breaking the law, the media has been surprising gentle in their reporting of the whole debacle. Instead of calling for his head put on a spike and proudly displayed on the stairs of the NYCSE, they’ve played along with the narrative that SBF has spun for himself: that he’s a businessman whose business just didn’t work out.
Seeing as how easy (and lucrative) it would be to paint SBF as a modern-day Bernie Madoff, why hasn’t the media proverbially crucified him yet? Follow the Money. SBF was a a big contributor to the Democrat Party, second only to Mr. George Soros himself. He also made impressive contributions to The Intercept and Vox. The ostensible motive behind this and all of his other charitable contributions that he was doing it for the greater good. However, in his own words, that was all just a bunch of PR.
Will the SEC eventually investigate and/or indictment SBF for his wrongdoing? While it (shockingly) hasn’t happened yet, I imagine that it will at some point. Far too many people lost too much money for nothing at all to happen. I believe the most likely outcome to be that he gets a slap on the wrist, spends some time in billionaire-prison, and is a free man again in no time. Regardless, I’m sure more information will come out in the following months about just how bad things were at FTX. Their new CEO, the man who was also CEO of Enron in the aftermath of its infamous scandal, has stated that he has never seen such “a complete failure of corporate control”. Given his…previous experience, that is saying a lot.
(psst…if you haven’t subscribed to the substack with your email yet, you can do so with the button below. It helps me out a ton, and it makes sure that each week’s LWIL is sent straight to your email inbox so you don’t miss it. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduling programming.)
News Orgs Finally Stick Up for Assange
This week, five news organizations, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, DER SPIGEL, and El Pais, have written and signed a letter to the U.S. Government calling for the release of Julian Assange. For those unaware, Julian Assange is the founder and brains behind the whistleblower organization, WikiLeaks. In 2019, Assange was arrested by the London Police after spending eight years of asylum inside of the Ecuadorian Embassy. Since then, he has been held in Belmarsh Prison under conditions that the UN has stated qualify as torture. Over the last several years, Assange has been through several rounds of hearings concerning his potential extradition to the United States, where he would then be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act and likely spend the rest of his life in prison.
The importance in Assange’s case lies in the fact that Assange never procured any of WikiLeak’s documents himself. WikiLeaks only ever received documents from other sources and published them after verifying their authenticity. The fact that Assange is being tried under the Espionage Act for nothing more than publishing documents essentially means that journalism in the United States becomes illegal.
Up to this point, mainstream media outlets have been mostly silent on Assange’s case. This represents the first time that any of them, much less the five news giants that signed the letter, have spoken out in favor of Assange. The question is: why now? Julian Assange has been in prison for three years, and in political exile for over a decade. Why speak out now? It could be because the United States will likely have Assange in their custody soon, so now is the time to make the appeal to the U.S. Government. However, why wouldn’t they make a similar appeal to the U.K. Government, who is holding him currently?
Regardless of their motives, its good to see the Assange case in the news again. Most people don’t know who he is, or the danger that this case represents against those who wish to expose the dark truths of those in power.
Big Trouble in Little China
As you might have seen on the news or on social media, not all is well in China. In recent days, protests have erupted all over the country, with large crowds taking to the streets. These originally started in response to the draconian lockdown measures dictated by the Chinese “Zero-COVID” policies, but has since evolved into demonstrations against the CCP in general.
What sparked these protests in the first place was the most unlikely of catalysts: The World Cup. While China does not have a team in the World Cup this year, the event was still a subject of interest and excitement for many Chinese. When they tuned in, what they saw were large crowds of people, all without masks and behaving normally, as if COVID wasn’t a concern. For those in China still living under strict policies of vaccine passports, mask mandates, and water-tight lockdowns, this was quite the shock. The CCP does their best to control what information comes in and out of China (a task they are increasingly failing at). While I’m there were quite a number of people who knew that the outside world had largely returned to normal, seeing that the rest of the world had moved on from COVID gave the general population quite a shock. The result is that they took to the streets.
(As an aside, China has done their best now to prevent any further bad PR from the World Cup. There is a now a separate TV feed for Chinese viewers, where any time the main feed pans to the crowd it instead keeps its focus on the field. Creepy stuff.)
These protests generate two questions:
First, will the CCP now back down from its Zero-COVID policies? Its always difficult to try and predict the internal machinations of the CCP. They have showed themselves to be very patient with internal strife in the past, as evidenced by the Hong Kong protestors. While they obviously don’t like the optics of people marching in the streets, they don’t want to have another Tienanmen Square on their hands. My guess is that they will try and employ a similar approach here and just wait the whole thing out. Even so, I would imagine that the massive backlash they have received will cause them to think twice about Zero-COVID going into the future.
Secondly, will these protests actually achieve anything? In the short-run, probably not. An authoritarian government like the CCP cannot be overthrown in a night. But even if protests die down in a few weeks, the CCP’s problem doesn’t just disappear. There is now a large subset of the Chinese people who have now realized that the CCP has lied to them. Do you think they will just forget and forgive that in a few weeks time? I doubt it. While there probably won’t be a revolution in the streets, a far more dangerous revolution is already taking place: a revolution of the mind. Once people acknowledge the CCP as liars, they can’t anything they say at face-value ever again. That results in a people that fundamentally don’t believe in their government. I ask you, is that state of affairs sustainable in the long run? Smart money says no, which gives me hope for the future of China.
On an ending note, it is also hilarious to see world leaders like Justin Trudeau standing up for the right of the Chinese people to protest their government’s handling of COVID whenever he did everything in his power to stop the tucker convey whenever Canadians were protesting him. Protests in rival country = good. Protests in my country = bad. Simple, folks.
Congress Avoids Rail Strike
Over the past several months, railroad unions have been involved in lengthy negotiations with rail companies over new employment contracts, which have been in lapse since 2020. Unions were looking to gain sick days for rail workers - which they currently do not have and must use their allocated PTO days in case of illness. Because of the 1926 Railway Labor Act, the Biden Administration has the authority to arbitrate in any affairs that would substantially affect interstate commerce, which he has used to try to bring both rail unions and companies together for a new contract.
Despite months of back and forth, no new contract could be agreed upon by all unions. Rail workers have threatened to strike if a new contract was not reached by December 9th, would would have deleterious affects on the U.S. economy during a busy Christmas season.
The issue has now been punted over to Congress to force the unions to all accept a deal and avert a potential strike. The new deal only allocates one additional day of PTO, much less than the several sick days that unions were hoping for. A bill confirming this new contract has now passed the House and Senate, with Biden signing it into law on Friday.
This whole affair is interesting not so much from the economic angle, but from a political angle. Not all of the Senate voted in favor of the new contract, and here are a list of those who voted “no”:
Collins - (R-ME)
Cotton - (R-AR)
Cruz - (R-TX)
Gillibrand - (D-NY)
Hagerty - (D-NY)
Hawley - (R-MO)
Hickenlooper - (D-CO)
Merkley - (D-OR)
Rubio - (R-FL)
Sanders - (D-VT)
Scott - (R-FL)
Scott - (R-SC)
Sullivan - (R-AK)
Toomey - (D-PA)
Warren - (D-MA)
Given that this bill was, in essence, Congress throwing rail workers under the bus to avoid a very inopportune strike, a few names of this list are no surprise. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are expected “no” votes. What is surprising is that the majority of these no votes come from Republicans. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio are not the names that come to mind when you think about pro-labor politicians.
Is there an element of this that comes purely from a desire to vote against Biden? Of course. Even so, this could be an interesting development in right-wing populism. Traditionally, the GOP has been the party of big business (and still is, mind you). 20 years ago, not a single Republican senator would have voted against this bill. Now, the majority of the votes against are Republican. I doubt that the GOP is going to become a pro-labor party anytime soon, but the optics of several populist Republicans voting pro-labor while the Democrats largely voting to avoid a strike is an interesting development.
The Latest Battle in the Culture Wars
If you keep up with these kind of things, the latest cultural controversy is the new Disney movie, “Strange World”. The animated film features a male character who is gay, which is relayed to the audience by a short reference to the character’s romantic interest, who is also male. It doesn’t have any further relevance in the film, and is a very minor part of the movie (which is intentional, as it allows Disney to cut it out of international releases). Even so, the film has been the subject of endless online discourse, especially in light of the fact that it was a major flop at box offices.
Critics of the film have blamed the introduction of an openly gay character as a reason that the film flopped. While that might have dissuaded some potential customers, there are much more convincing reasons that the movie failed to generate interest. There was little-to-no marketing or support from Disney for the film, the animation style is incredibly generic, and the plot is contrived and unoriginal. The result is a movie that was DOA.
What I find very interesting about this latest conflict in the ever-widening culture war is the responses from both the right and the left. The right has viewed this movie as evidence of the fact that Disney’s desire to force LGBTQ agendas down the throat of customers is not working and will only cause them financial turmoil. Get woke go broke! Those on the left have viewed this movie as an intentional failure on the part of Disney to give them an excuse to no longer include any characters with non-traditional sexual orientations or genders in their movies.
I find both of these views to be unconvincing. The right views corporations as being fully invested in “wokism” and happily willing to propogate it to anyone who will listen or watch. The left views corporations as occasional participants in LGBTQ representation, but only begrudgingly. The truth is companies care about their bottom line. If they believe that including gay characters in their movies will increas ticket sales, they will do that. If not, then not.
Over the past several years, large companies have largely made the decision that embracing LGBTQ communities and lifestyles, as well as (ostensibly) supporting and promoting them is what will help their bottom line. As soon as Bank of America, Johnson and Johnson, and Amazon all decide that “wokism” is hurting more than it is helping, they’ll drop it like a hot potato. While it is too late to tell for sure, that day might be sooner rather than later:
Bob Iger, the newly-returned CEO of Disney, remarked in a internal town hall meeting on Tuesday that he will seek to “quiet things down” in the future. Disney has been at the center of a lot of controversy in the last two years, including their response to the so-called “Don’t Say Gay Bill”. It makes sense that after all this noise, Iger would want to try and get the company back on track.
The culture wars are a fantastic distraction from things that actually matter, and my hat is off to whichever division of the CIA cooked them up in the first place (I’m only kidding…kind of). That isn’t to say that they don’t have any importance, but they are a product of temporary and ephemeral outrage directed only at things people have no control over. They still have a lot of political usage, however, so I’m sure they will be here to stay for the forseeable future. Sigh.
Other Interesting Links:
Ignoring the bigger picture of student loans
The world’s largest active volcano in Hawaii is active again
The corporate media deference that endangers us all
Where have all the snow crabs gone?
How the state seized marriage
A post from my blog this past week on taking a closer look at the Austrian concept of Thymology (shameless, blatant, blinding self promotion).
Quote of the Week
“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”
-Ayn Rand
Thats all for this week, friends. I’ll see you all next week same time, same place. Until then!