Capitalism at Work

The recent circus with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX is a great illustration of how capitalism flourishes in this country and around the world. After the collapse, we were treated to a fawning piece in the New York Times and a friendly TV interview. As with Enron and Elizabeth Holmes, I am sure SBF was treated as another young genius on CNBC and elsewhere. He seems to have also been a hero of politicians across the political spectrum. I will leave it to the pundits to tell us what lessons are to be learned. The lessons learned in the past are never heeded anyway. But there are some observaions to be made.

• When laws are written to the satisfaction of the capitalists--indeed many times the laws themselves are actually written by the capitalists themselves--there won't be much accountability. The crash of 2007-08 was caused by capitalists and their bankers, but no one of significance was even charged with a crime. Even with a Democratic president, the Recovery was done to the benefit of those who caused the mess in the first place. And that was not by accident...it was exactly the intent.

• The business press is totally unprepared to cover this kind of stuff. As long as they are getting their information from the SBF's of the world and just serve as mouthpieces, we are never going to get accurate reporting on these scams until after the fact. If something is too good to be true, it seems like at least someone in the business press would be reporting with a degree of skepticism.

• Politicians also need to be serving their constituents instead of the donor class on which they depend. When they talk about regulation "stifling innovation" they are really simply doing the bidding of their captilalist cronies. "Innovation" to capitalists is just a euphemism for "illegal and/or unethical shit".

• It ought to finally be clear that the assumption should always be that the crypto is nothing but a fraud and Ponzi scheme. The burden of proof is on the crypto world to prove otherwise. Guilty until proven innocent.

Capitalism relies on the complicity of many players to flourish. And those players provide that support time after time.