Regimeology is not just the art of interpreting the official pronouncements from the managerial elite, but it is also for interpreting their actions. Nothing they say can ever be accepted at face value, so nothing they do is on the level either. It is all signaling back and forth to communicate between nodes of the collective. If the regime happens to do something useful for the people, it is a happy accident. Most of what they do is about the internal dynamics of the regime.
The Sam Bankman-Fried story is a good example. At this point everyone understands that this is not a corporate financial scandal. There is little chance that the sophisticated people involved with this guy and his partners were unaware of the nature of his business. The entertainment people hired to shill for the company had no idea, as hey are stupid people, but the sharps putting important people in touch with this weird looking goblin of a man were not fooled.
The one thing we know is it was a money laundering operation to move cash into the pockets of politicians and connected people in the regime. To no one’s surprise, there is a Ukraine angle here. Apparently, Ukraine was taking money handed over by Washington and putting some of it into crypto accounts on the FTX exchange, allegedly to pay their own people. The absurdity of that claim is obvious. Most likely it was quietly shifted to other accounts and ended up in other pockets.
They say you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, but there is nothing that says you cannot teach a new dog old tricks. The heart of the issue is one of the oldest tricks in democratic politics. The politician makes a deal with a favored vendor, who then hires friends and relatives of the politician. Some portion of their salary ends up as expensive gifts to the politician. Alternatively, the vendor rewards the politicians with gobs of campaign cash.
In this case, that old political grift was updated to the digital age. Ukraine put funds into the FTX exchange, which Sam Bankman-Fried then used to buy friends in Washington, making sure those friends were friends of Ukraine. Those friends then made sure Ukraine was getting as much cash as possible. Given that so much was happening in crypto, no one was going to try and follow the money. As long as FTX stayed solvent, his scam could go on forever. Whoopsie!
Of course, we will never know where the money went as the regime sent in one of their best fixers to handle the liquidation of FTX. John J. Ray III is no doubt a competent and honest man, but he is being paid one thousand dollars an hour to clean up the mess, so he is not going to be biting the hand that feeds him. You read that right. He is billing one thousand dollars per hour for his services. The one guy who is assured of getting rich off FTX will be the man liquidating its remaining assets.
