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The real question is, why weren't these illegal donations found and red flagged well before he blew up so publicly and the feds started picking through his fina

The real question is, why weren't these illegal donations found and red flagged well before he blew up so publicly and the feds started picking through his financial life with a fine toothed comb? The fact that they're just being uncovered now, and probably would have gone under the radar if he didn't blow up, signals to me that this kind of illegal donation happens all the time by the wealth class without getting caught and prosecuted, either because it's just that hard to detect, because it's nobody's job to care, or because the watchdogs actively don't care because all of their handlers do it too.

grugagag 4y ago
But of course. There’s the small risk that they get finecombed but the risk/reward ratio is too good not to do it. The system seems to be designed for this.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  I don't think the system is intentionally designed this way. That's just the reality of life with limited resources. When benefit of action > risk of action, it becomes competitively advantageous to do the action, even if illegal. You could miscalculate the inputs of that equation, but sometimes it's hard to tell if someone who blew up miscalculated or if they are simply one of the 0.1% that lose the bet while 99.9% got away with it and reaped the reward. Human law doesn't change this natural law. You could say that the only way to become absurdly rich is to fundamentally understand this natural law, even if you never end up breaking human law. You have to take risks others aren't willing to take. But this intimate understanding of the importance of risk also means it's likely that the ultra wealthy engage in explicit, well informed, and deeply intentional law breaking at much greater rates than the average person.
colpabar 4y ago
Congratulations! You're now a conspiracy theorist.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  One of my conspiracy theories is that the saying "two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead" is itself a psyop to make the masses believe that widespread conspiracies involving hundreds or thousands of people aren't practical to pull off. Large groups of people absolutely can actively or passively conspire and all remain quiet about it if their incentives strongly align. And if one of them breaks rank, then we can just pay off the news media to ignore them or paint them as a quack.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    See: operation snow white. It may have utilized up to 5000 covert agents, and was only detected perhaps due to an observant librarian.
    - fundad 4y ago
      See also COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
    - anonporridge 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
  - colpabar 4y ago
    Yeah, maybe it's just that I'm a decent liar, but the way that people so readily dismiss the possibility that groups of people can lie together and get away with it is just so confusing to me. There are people with secret families! The federal government lied about iraq having weapons and used it to justify invading another country! Believing that wealthy/powerful people aren't able to work together in secret to make themselves richer/more powerful is just so naive to me.
    - HEmanZ 4y ago
      I think everyone knows it's not that no one can lie, its just that number-of-people * odds-someone-breaks-the-lie * time conspiracy would have to be held means that conspiracies that have a lot of people in the loop for a long time are unlikely to go unexposed. A conspiracy requiring a significant footprint of people, money, resources, and generated artifacts can hold for only so long. E.g wartime atrocities involving hundreds of people might hold for a few years, or until the end of a war, but not longer. The lies of the Bush administration could hold long enough to get into war, but not for say 30 years. Usually this argument is super solid against the kinds of "long running super conspiracies" that people argue for. E.g: - The earth is flat and the fact it is a sphere is a lie told by generation of scientists and elites. 1000s (or more?) of people * hundreds of years. Ya right. - The moon landing was faked and everyone at NASA at the times knew it. 60 years * hundreds or thousands of people * massive resource spend and physical footprint: ya right.
bdw5204 4y ago
I think the real reason is that the political donation system operates on trust that the donors are who they say they are just like the voting system in most states just trusts that you are who you claim to be when you show up to vote (i.e. no requirement to show ID) and the mail-in voting system trusts that the voter filled out their ballot in secret without any coercion or intimidation. The entire US election system is comically insecure and the thing that's surprising is how rare evidence of large scale fraud is. This is probably because it is much easier (and legal!) for rich people to just funnel money into super PACs, buy their own media outlet and/or use political activist "non-profit charities" as tax dodges and jobs programs for their kids. Why make illegal donations to politicians or outright steal an election when you can just spend an unlimited amount of money on propaganda to brainwash people into supporting your agenda that is completely contrary to their own interests, the interests of their friends and family and their interests of their community? Why would you break the law when you could accomplish the exact same goal legally and get out of paying your fair share of taxes at the same time?
- monetus 4y ago
  An extortion racket for voting is only going to work in a small locality I think, it wouldn't scale to a large scale conspiracy without getting out. That guy in the Carolinas who tried it a few years ago was turned in by his family iirc.
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    Here's Tom Scott's second video explaining why electronic voting is a terrible idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Electronic voting machines and companies that manufacture them should both be illegal. Yet their use is widespread in America. The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. There is no good faith reason to use them.
    - slg 4y ago
      > The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. They make fraud easier. They do not make it easy. Lots of election data is public and analyzed by all sorts of people. Any big jump in turnout or shifts in the voting pattern of specific communities will be noticed and investigated even if it is just by hobbyist and journalists. Therefore the fraud would need to be incredibly widespread and only change the results subtly. Since elections are run at the local and state levels, at least in the US, it would need to be a huge operation in order to make enough small changes to accumulate to a result changing level of fraud.
ModernMech 4y ago
The FEC has 6 commissioners, and requires 4 for a quorum. In 2019, the FEC was down to 3 members, leaving the FEC without the ability to do any business. In May 2020, a 4th member was finally added but then another one retired, leaving the commission out of operation again until December 2020. Once they were operational again, they were probably backlogged and not fully operational. It could be that they were busy doing oversight of the 2020 election when they were out of commission, leaving the 2022 election vulnerable.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  They are both horrendously backlogged and paralyzed on important issues by partisan polarization (the FEC, unlike most “independent” executige agencies, has an even partisan split with no tiebreaker.)
KingLancelot 4y ago
[dead]
dragonwriter 4y ago
> The real question is, why weren’t these illegal donations found and red flagged well before he blew up so publicly and the feds started picking through his financial life with a fine toothed comb? Because what was illegal was (1) that the money was stolen from firms SBF had essentially absolute control over, and (2) that the money was channeled through straw donors to maintain SBFs desired political image. Neither of those are obvious without tracing money flows. And even with the investigation it may not have been obvious as soon, except that SBF personally bragged about doing straw donations to Republicans to maintain his preferred image in his post-bankruptcy “fire your attorneys and tweet out a litany of crimes no one has even accused you of yet” phase, which kind of pointed investigators at what to look for.
sangnoir 4y ago
> The real question is, why weren't these illegal donations found and red flagged well before he blew up so publicly and the feds started picking through his financial life with a fine toothed comb? Flagged by who - the donor or the recipients? It's obvious why neither would. Political donations in the US pretty much work on an honor system, this specific issue is only coming to light because someone is looking closely into a donor's books. By design, there is no strong oversight over donations by the FEC; I'm not sure it is structurally possible even if the will was there. Would the FEC provide oversight on election donations, and congress have oversight over the FEC? congress is made up of current-office holders and frequent candidates, the regulatory capture would be almost immediate (as early as the confirmation stage). Politicians will not facilitate the sort of proactive financial surveillance on themselves you think ought to have caught this issue earlier. edit: corrected "SEC" to "FEC".
- deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
  The FEC is the branch that should be flagging it if anyone. I’m less concerned about the wealth class than foreign citizens and governments though. Seems like we have a wide open gate that is intentionally being left open.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > The FEC is the branch that should be flagging it if anyone. Thanks - I corrected my comment. I was thinking FEC, but writing "SEC", probably because FTX is involved. More to your point - the FEC does not have a 30,000-foot view of finance flows into political campaigns and mostly relies on self-reporting. Contrast this to the breadth and depth of data vacuumed up by the Treasury department for Counter Terrorist Financing enforcement. > I’m less concerned about the wealth class than foreign citizens and governments though This has already happened on the record with the NRA, charges were filed, but it seems people collectively shrugged shoulders and moved on. Will it happen again? Absolutely. > Seems like we have a wide open gate that is intentionally being left open. Agreed, and the people in charge are ensuring the sound-proofed guardhouse next to the gate has no windows, and guests have to announce their arrival by shouting loudly. As Upton Sinclair observed: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it
bandyaboot 4y ago
I’m curious what, if any, effects might the FEC still be dealing with from their 3 year period of being de-existed

grugagag 4y ago

But of course. There’s the small risk that they get finecombed but the risk/reward ratio is too good not to do it. The system seems to be designed for this.

anonporridge 4y ago
I don't think the system is intentionally designed this way. That's just the reality of life with limited resources. When benefit of action > risk of action, it becomes competitively advantageous to do the action, even if illegal. You could miscalculate the inputs of that equation, but sometimes it's hard to tell if someone who blew up miscalculated or if they are simply one of the 0.1% that lose the bet while 99.9% got away with it and reaped the reward. Human law doesn't change this natural law. You could say that the only way to become absurdly rich is to fundamentally understand this natural law, even if you never end up breaking human law. You have to take risks others aren't willing to take. But this intimate understanding of the importance of risk also means it's likely that the ultra wealthy engage in explicit, well informed, and deeply intentional law breaking at much greater rates than the average person.

colpabar 4y ago

Congratulations! You're now a conspiracy theorist.

anonporridge 4y ago
One of my conspiracy theories is that the saying "two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead" is itself a psyop to make the masses believe that widespread conspiracies involving hundreds or thousands of people aren't practical to pull off. Large groups of people absolutely can actively or passively conspire and all remain quiet about it if their incentives strongly align. And if one of them breaks rank, then we can just pay off the news media to ignore them or paint them as a quack.
- googlryas 4y ago
  See: operation snow white. It may have utilized up to 5000 covert agents, and was only detected perhaps due to an observant librarian.
  - fundad 4y ago
    See also COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
- colpabar 4y ago
  Yeah, maybe it's just that I'm a decent liar, but the way that people so readily dismiss the possibility that groups of people can lie together and get away with it is just so confusing to me. There are people with secret families! The federal government lied about iraq having weapons and used it to justify invading another country! Believing that wealthy/powerful people aren't able to work together in secret to make themselves richer/more powerful is just so naive to me.
  - HEmanZ 4y ago
    I think everyone knows it's not that no one can lie, its just that number-of-people * odds-someone-breaks-the-lie * time conspiracy would have to be held means that conspiracies that have a lot of people in the loop for a long time are unlikely to go unexposed. A conspiracy requiring a significant footprint of people, money, resources, and generated artifacts can hold for only so long. E.g wartime atrocities involving hundreds of people might hold for a few years, or until the end of a war, but not longer. The lies of the Bush administration could hold long enough to get into war, but not for say 30 years. Usually this argument is super solid against the kinds of "long running super conspiracies" that people argue for. E.g: - The earth is flat and the fact it is a sphere is a lie told by generation of scientists and elites. 1000s (or more?) of people * hundreds of years. Ya right. - The moon landing was faked and everyone at NASA at the times knew it. 60 years * hundreds or thousands of people * massive resource spend and physical footprint: ya right.

bdw5204 4y ago

I think the real reason is that the political donation system operates on trust that the donors are who they say they are just like the voting system in most states just trusts that you are who you claim to be when you show up to vote (i.e. no requirement to show ID) and the mail-in voting system trusts that the voter filled out their ballot in secret without any coercion or intimidation. The entire US election system is comically insecure and the thing that's surprising is how rare evidence of large scale fraud is. This is probably because it is much easier (and legal!) for rich people to just funnel money into super PACs, buy their own media outlet and/or use political activist "non-profit charities" as tax dodges and jobs programs for their kids. Why make illegal donations to politicians or outright steal an election when you can just spend an unlimited amount of money on propaganda to brainwash people into supporting your agenda that is completely contrary to their own interests, the interests of their friends and family and their interests of their community? Why would you break the law when you could accomplish the exact same goal legally and get out of paying your fair share of taxes at the same time?

monetus 4y ago
An extortion racket for voting is only going to work in a small locality I think, it wouldn't scale to a large scale conspiracy without getting out. That guy in the Carolinas who tried it a few years ago was turned in by his family iirc.
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  Here's Tom Scott's second video explaining why electronic voting is a terrible idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Electronic voting machines and companies that manufacture them should both be illegal. Yet their use is widespread in America. The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. There is no good faith reason to use them.
  - slg 4y ago
    > The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. They make fraud easier. They do not make it easy. Lots of election data is public and analyzed by all sorts of people. Any big jump in turnout or shifts in the voting pattern of specific communities will be noticed and investigated even if it is just by hobbyist and journalists. Therefore the fraud would need to be incredibly widespread and only change the results subtly. Since elections are run at the local and state levels, at least in the US, it would need to be a huge operation in order to make enough small changes to accumulate to a result changing level of fraud.

ModernMech 4y ago

The FEC has 6 commissioners, and requires 4 for a quorum. In 2019, the FEC was down to 3 members, leaving the FEC without the ability to do any business. In May 2020, a 4th member was finally added but then another one retired, leaving the commission out of operation again until December 2020. Once they were operational again, they were probably backlogged and not fully operational. It could be that they were busy doing oversight of the 2020 election when they were out of commission, leaving the 2022 election vulnerable.

dragonwriter 4y ago
They are both horrendously backlogged and paralyzed on important issues by partisan polarization (the FEC, unlike most “independent” executige agencies, has an even partisan split with no tiebreaker.)

KingLancelot 4y ago

[dead]

dragonwriter 4y ago

> The real question is, why weren’t these illegal donations found and red flagged well before he blew up so publicly and the feds started picking through his financial life with a fine toothed comb? Because what was illegal was (1) that the money was stolen from firms SBF had essentially absolute control over, and (2) that the money was channeled through straw donors to maintain SBFs desired political image. Neither of those are obvious without tracing money flows. And even with the investigation it may not have been obvious as soon, except that SBF personally bragged about doing straw donations to Republicans to maintain his preferred image in his post-bankruptcy “fire your attorneys and tweet out a litany of crimes no one has even accused you of yet” phase, which kind of pointed investigators at what to look for.

sangnoir 4y ago

> The real question is, why weren't these illegal donations found and red flagged well before he blew up so publicly and the feds started picking through his financial life with a fine toothed comb? Flagged by who - the donor or the recipients? It's obvious why neither would. Political donations in the US pretty much work on an honor system, this specific issue is only coming to light because someone is looking closely into a donor's books. By design, there is no strong oversight over donations by the FEC; I'm not sure it is structurally possible even if the will was there. Would the FEC provide oversight on election donations, and congress have oversight over the FEC? congress is made up of current-office holders and frequent candidates, the regulatory capture would be almost immediate (as early as the confirmation stage). Politicians will not facilitate the sort of proactive financial surveillance on themselves you think ought to have caught this issue earlier. edit: corrected "SEC" to "FEC".

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
The FEC is the branch that should be flagging it if anyone. I’m less concerned about the wealth class than foreign citizens and governments though. Seems like we have a wide open gate that is intentionally being left open.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > The FEC is the branch that should be flagging it if anyone. Thanks - I corrected my comment. I was thinking FEC, but writing "SEC", probably because FTX is involved. More to your point - the FEC does not have a 30,000-foot view of finance flows into political campaigns and mostly relies on self-reporting. Contrast this to the breadth and depth of data vacuumed up by the Treasury department for Counter Terrorist Financing enforcement. > I’m less concerned about the wealth class than foreign citizens and governments though This has already happened on the record with the NRA, charges were filed, but it seems people collectively shrugged shoulders and moved on. Will it happen again? Absolutely. > Seems like we have a wide open gate that is intentionally being left open. Agreed, and the people in charge are ensuring the sound-proofed guardhouse next to the gate has no windows, and guests have to announce their arrival by shouting loudly. As Upton Sinclair observed: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it

bandyaboot 4y ago

I’m curious what, if any, effects might the FEC still be dealing with from their 3 year period of being de-existed