March 28, 2024

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday for the massive fraud and conspiracy that

doomed his cryptocurrency exchange and a related hedge fund.



Bankman-Fried delivered a winding apology statement, saying he made “selfish decisions,” that haunt him “every day.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/28/live-updates-ftx-founder-sam-bankman-fried-sentencing.html



FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday for the massive fraud and conspiracy that doomed his cryptocurrency exchange and a related hedge fund. “They built something really beautiful and I threw all of that away,” Bankman-Fried said of his co-workers at FTX. “It haunts me every day.” “It’s been excruciating to watch this all unfold,” he said. “Customers don’t deserve this level of pain. “I was the CEO of FTX and I was responsible.”

SBF faced a maximum possible sentence of 110 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines for the massive fraud conspiracy that led to the collapse of FTX and a related hedge fund, a judge ruled Thursday. Judge Lewis Kaplan increased the sentencing guidelines range for Bankman-Fried after finding that he had perjured himself at his trial and knowingly obstructed justice.

The judge also found Thursday that the total loss of the fraud at FTX exceeded $550 million. Anything more than that is “just gravy,” Kaplan noted, referring to the fact that any more loss would not increase the top end of the guidelines. However, Kaplan said he “rejects the entirety of defendant’s argument there was no loss” at FTX, calling that claim “misleading, logically flawed and speculative.” After Kaplan ruled on the guideline enhancement, several victims of Bankman-Fried began talking about the effects of his crimes.

Bankman-Fried, who was wearing a beige jailhouse jumpsuit, looked at the victims as they talked to the judge. Federal prosecutors want Bankman-Fried sentenced to between 40 to 50 years in prison. His defense team asked Kaplan to sentence him to much less than that, between five and six-a-half years behind bars. Kaplan presided over the trial, which ended in November when a jury found Bankman-Fried, 32, guilty of seven counts and held him responsible for the roughly $10 billion of customer deposits that went missing in 2022.

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March 28, 2024

25 of the best mini breaks in France for spring

The pre-summer months are perfect for a balmy French holiday. From new art shows on the Côte d’Azur to wine-tasting in the Loire, let our expert be your guide

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe-travel/france/25-of-the-best-mini-breaks-in-france-for-spring-z6mvfxl8t

https://archive.is/IG63X



France is gearing up for an exciting summer as the world’s attention turns to the Paris Olympics, but the period before things really hot up is the perfect time for a short springtime break. Having been writing about France for nearly 20 years, I’ve had many of my best experiences, and made many of my best discoveries, in April, May and June, when gardens are in full bloom, hotels have good availability, and the temperature is pleasant enough to stroll around without a jacket. There have been many times, too, when the mercury has risen above 25C and I have sipped that first glass of rosé of the summer on a sun-drenched café terrace and looked forward to many more. The season offers a chance to explore a city, enjoy a walking or cycling tour, or soak up culture at exhibitions in galleries and museums. It’s also a great time to try somewhere new.

France offers so much variety in terms of its landscape, architecture, regional cuisines and cultures that you can often feel as if you’re in a completely different country without straying beyond its borders. This could mean embracing Basque culture in Bayonne, admiring Renaissance architecture in the Loire Valley, or strolling between the timber-framed villages of Alsace. What’s more, a short break is often a good opportunity to scope out an area you might return to for a longer summer holiday. I’ve chosen these 25 trips from personal experience, in places I know and love; be it the north Brittany coast for some fresh sea air, Toulouse for a fabulous food tour, or seeing the incredible Roman artefacts in Nîmes. Each location is easy to get to for a three, four or five-day break, without too much time spent travelling. And simple journeys mean you can get straight on with the serious business of eating, drinking, exploring and, most important, relaxing.







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March 28, 2024

Nicole Shanahan: Who is she? Why is she here? Because RFK Jr. needs the money.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/27/rfk-jr-running-mate-nicole-shanahan-money-vice-president/

https://archive.is/DPVjV


To paraphrase the memorable words of a notable figure who once ran for vice president on a third-party ticket: Who is she? Why is she here? With apologies to Adm. James Stockdale, a man with a distinguished military career who lightheartedly posed those questions about himself as Ross Perot’s running mate during his opening statement at the 1992 vice-presidential debate, they are worth asking in all seriousness about the selection that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday.



Kennedy’s pick for the vice-presidential spot on his ticket is Nicole Shanahan, a 38-year-old philanthropist and tech entrepreneur who has never run for office before. At the rally in Oakland at which he introduced her, Kennedy described Shanahan as “my fellow lawyer, a brilliant scientist, technologist, a fierce warrior mom.” “I need someone with a spiritual dimension and compassion and idealism and, above all, a deep love for the United States of America,” Kennedy added.

Whatever Shanahan’s other virtues, the most important reason for her selection is that she is worth a fortune as the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who ranks as the 10th richest person in the world on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Their 2023 divorce settlement is confidential, but the Wall Street Journal reported that she was seeking more than $1 billion.

Now that Shanahan is on the ticket with Kennedy, campaign finance law allows her to pour unlimited amounts of money into his campaign — something he badly needs. His campaign treasury is running low, with just over $5 million cash on hand reported in its latest federal filing, and qualifying for a spot on state ballots across the country is an expensive proposition. Candidates must have the resources to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures.

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March 28, 2024

The Spring issue of the Progressive Post is out

Download the PDF of the magazine



https://feps-europe.eu/issues/issue-24/

2024 is gearing up for an exceptional electoral year: about 400 million citizens will elect a new European Parliament, the US might send Donald Trump back to the White House and, altogether, more than 2 billion people cast their votes in 50 countries. For European Progressives, it is time for back to basics, which, in an era of shrinking welfare states, increased inequalities and rising living costs, includes a return to strong and impactful social policies. Hence our Special Coverage The future is social highlights progressive ideas for a fairer Europe, which is at stake in these European Parliament elections.

The transformative role Progressives can play is also at the core of the Dossier The art of progressive governance in turbulent times: European Social Democratic governments have successfully managed the Covid-19 crisis, made key contributions to shaping European recovery, and can play a decisive role in the future. However, the increasing strength of the radical right looms behind many of this year’s elections – it could even impact the war in Ukraine. The Focus on Ukraine: two years of full-scale war underlines this risk and the conflict’s implications on the Ukrainian people’s difficult path to democracy. Ahead of this new electoral cycle, we also reflect on women’s role in politics. The Dossier Women in politics: beyond representation looks at the crucial contribution that women in the European Parliament have made to key decisions that truly boost women’s emancipation and the advancement of society at large.

March 28, 2024

The Partisan Divide on NATO is New

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-partisan-divide-on-nato-is-new



The American public remains largely supportive of NATO. According to the latest Gallup polling, majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents agree that our current NATO commitments should be maintained or increased. Only 16 percent think we should decrease our commitment and 12 percent think we should withdraw from the treaty organization entirely.

But as Donald Trump continues to subvert the alliance—including saying he would encourage Russia to “to do whatever the hell they want” if NATO countries don’t spend enough on defense—ideological fault lines have emerged. Throughout the Reagan years, Republicans were consistently more supportive of NATO than Democrats. Four decades later, their respective positions have flipped: today, 80 percent of Democrats, and only 53 percent of Republicans, support maintaining or increasing our NATO commitments.



The decline in Republican support for NATO is not uniform: self-identified “MAGA Republicans” are driving the dip. In a recent Economist/YouGov poll, MAGA Republicans actually hold net negative opinions of NATO (-7 favorability), whereas non-MAGA Republicans remain decidedly positive in their assessment (+30).

As Ukraine funding looms large in the House, this partisan realignment—and intra-party division—will prove all the more important.

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March 28, 2024

The Corrupt Trifecta of Yass, Trump, and Netanyahu

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-03-27-corrupt-trifecta-yass-trump-netanyahu/



In the past few days, we’ve learned that Donald Trump’s reversal on whether TikTok should be barred from the U.S. is mainly a payback to Trump mega-donor Jeff Yass, who owns 15 percent of TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. But it gets so much worse. Now it turns out that Yass’s money helped Trump reap a multibillion-dollar windfall when his social media company went public. Yass’s company has been the biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that has merged with Trump’s Truth Social. What else do we need in this corrupt dance? How about the destruction of what’s left of Israel’s democracy.

Yass is also a major donor to an Israeli think tank and strategy group, called the Kohelet Forum, that has been a prime architect of Netanyahu’s attempt at one-man rule, the weakening of Israel’s democracy, and the elimination of what remains of the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Kohelet’s founder helped draft Israel’s Basic Law on the Nation-State, which took effect in 2018. This law established Jewish people as having the sole right to self-determination, and downgraded Arabic as one of Israel’s official languages. Kohelet also drafted the law that gives the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the power to override Supreme Court decisions, and grants the government total control over judicial appointments. This is a core part of Netanyahu’s strategy for clinging to power by evading prosecution.

One of Kohelet’s close allies is the Shiloh Policy Forum, which promotes illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and far-right Israeli politicians who support that policy. In the U.S., Eugene Kontorovich, head of Kohelet’s international law department and director of the Center for the Middle East and International Law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, has been instrumental in the movement to brand all criticisms of Israeli policy as antisemitic.

If we connect these dots, they display Trump’s effort to cash in by reversing his stance on China and U.S. national security, and the blowback between billionaire efforts to destroy democracy in Israel and similar moves to destroy it in the U.S. There is a dance between would-be dictators of similar mind (Trump and Netanyahu) and the oligarch who connects them. You might think that someone who professes to care about antisemitism would think twice about providing so much ammunition. But Yass’s cynicism knows no bounds, matched only by that of Trump and Netanyahu. The fates of democracy in the U.S. and in Israel are indeed linked. But not in the way the propagandists for AIPAC and Netanyahu would have us believe.

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related:



https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-12/ty-article-magazine/.premium/the-kohelet-tentacles-these-organizations-operate-around-the-right-wing-think-tank/00000186-44c3-de50-a1af-76eb01860000

https://archive.is/np3ap

The Kohelet Policy Forum, a conservative think tank that seeks to “broaden individual liberty and free-market principles in Israel,” generally flew under the radar for the Israeli public. That is, until the unveiling of Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s controversial plan to overhaul the Israeli judicial system, thanks to the forum’s influence over the Israeli right and state institutions. It now appears that the Kohelet Policy Forum is not working alone in exerting this influence. An investigative report by Shomrim has found that the think tank has taken an entire network of organizations and associations under its wing – and the connections between them are often obscure, downplayed or outright hidden from public scrutiny.

The Kohelet network can be divided into three categories. The first are organizations or associations, of which there are six, with a direct link to the Kohelet Policy Forum; most of them were established by officials from the forum or received funding from it. The second category is organizations that collaborate with the forum, and the third is organizations that share a managerial committee with them. In NGOs and civil society groups, it is a common and accepted practice for one large association to support several satellite groups, either financially or organizationally. This allows the larger groups to decentralize, and let groups with specialized knowledge handle particular issues. It also enables NGOs to maximize their resources – and significantly increase the scope and influence of their activities.

In the past, right-wing Knesset members have been fiercely critical of so-called left-wing organizations which operated in this way. The New Israel Fund frequently draws ire from the Israeli right, which has argued that, due to the extent of the organizations activities – of some of which the public is unaware – the NIF should be reined in. Now it seems that the conservative, libertarian Kohelet Policy Forum has adopted similar tactics – at least in some cases. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon in October 2021, Prof. Moshe Koppel, the founder and chairman of the forum, was asked about this very issue but refused to give a clear answer.

“The New Israel Fund gets donations and invests them; we are just a research institute,” he said. “Until recently, most of our work was internal, but not every project needs to be like that. If someone is crazy about a certain issue, why shouldn’t they work directly with me? We can help them with whatever they’re lacking.” When reached for comment, Kohelet said that these organizations are completely independent, and that “the forum is proud to play its part in helping Israeli civil society – of every type – blossom.”

From Pompeo to the teachers’ union...................................

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March 28, 2024

Who Controls Your Shopping Cart?

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2024-03-26-who-controls-your-shopping-cart-frerick-review/



In January of 2022, more than 8,000 employees at King Soopers stores in the Denver area went on strike demanding higher wages, better health care coverage, and stronger store security. After ten days, they reached a tentative agreement with the grocery chain, which is owned by Kroger. According to the union, the new contract included wage increases of $2 or more per hour in the first year for more than 95 percent of workers, topping out at an increase of $5.99 per hour. King Soopers agreed to invest more than $170 million in wages throughout the three-year agreement, plus more for health care. Leading up to the strike, the King Soopers union encouraged customers to move their shopping and prescriptions to the chain’s competitor, Albertsons. Once the King Soopers contract was ratified, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 union was able to leverage the threat of another strike to persuade Albertsons to implement the same wage increases, according to a Federal Trade Commission complaint filed in late February.

The union capitalized on competition between leading employers to secure higher wages across the board. (It’s possible the retailers worked together behind the scenes to limit the impact of this strategy: A 2024 lawsuit filed by the Colorado attorney general alleges Albertsons promised not to poach any King Soopers employees during the strike.) Months later, King Soopers’ parent Kroger announced plans to purchase Albertsons in a $24.6 billion deal. It was the largest proposed supermarket merger in the history of U.S. grocery, and would bring Kroger- and Albertsons-owned brands under the same umbrella, including Harris Teeter, Safeway, Ralphs, Fred Meyer, Shaw’s, Acme Markets, and more. A subsequent lawsuit alleged that the retailers’ close relationship preceded the merger announcement. Had this merger happened before the 2022 strike, the outcome for King Soopers workers might have been very different. As the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wrote in its complaint, “the combined Kroger/Albertsons would likely be able to impose terms on union grocery workers that slow wage increases.”



Arguing that the merger had the potential to raise prices for customers while simultaneously weakening unions’ bargaining power, the FTC sued to block the deal in late February 2024. Several state attorneys general joined the lawsuit, including the Republican attorney general of Wyoming. News of the government’s intervention came at a time of heightened political scrutiny of the food industry. The cost of groceries has risen by more than 25 percent since February 2020, the fastest since the 1970s. As President Biden fights for re-election in November, an internal White House analysis recently showed that grocery prices are the single largest factor dragging down consumer economic sentiment, The New York Times reported. The Biden administration has linked food-industry inflation to corporate consolidation, arguing that a handful of powerful companies are taking advantage of their overwhelming market share to hike prices and goose profit margins. In public appearances, the president has been harping on “shrinkflation”—a phenomenon in which companies quietly reduce the amount of food in a package without lowering the price—targeting snack brands in a Super Bowl–themed ad and working the concept into the State of the Union address.

Anti-monopoly messaging seems to have some bipartisan appeal. Republican Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) said FTC chair Lina Khan was “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job” the day after the Kroger lawsuit was filed. (Elsewhere, Republicans have been hitting the food-cost angle hard, but many blame rising prices on Biden’s economic policies, not corporate greed.) In addition to the bully pulpit, President Biden has promised to challenge food-industry power players by fighting mergers like the Kroger-Albertsons deal, promoting competition, and prosecuting anti-competitive behavior throughout the industry. The prosecution side of the equation, largely handled by the Department of Justice, has had uneven results: Various Antitrust Division actions have ended in acquittals for executives charged with price-fixing and settlements for chicken companies accused of wage-fixing. The Antitrust Division last year issued another lawsuit against Agri Stats, a company that provides granular information to meat processors that prosecutors say is used as an illegal collusion tool to raise prices.

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March 28, 2024

How to think about time

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-about-time-to-understand-your-hopes-and-regrets







Stretch out your arms to their fullest extent getting the tips of your fingertips on your right hand as far from the fingertips on your left hand as you can. Depending on where you are reading this, that might have been embarrassing, but you will feel like you’ve taken up more space than when you scrunch yourself into a tiny ball. Now do the equivalent in time… You can’t, right? We can spread out in space, but not in time. In time, we experience one thing after another, in a sequence of episodes. This is one of the striking things about time. It does something that space doesn’t do. It passes. You live in time, and whether or not you think about it, this difference between space and time affects how you act, what you can choose to do, and poses challenges of how to deal with the things you didn’t do or should have done differently. As Augustine of Hippo observed, it seems like we understand time until we try to articulate what it is.

When you stretched your arms out just now (you can take them down, if you haven’t already), you were varying across space. Your body filled up a region of space, but how it filled it was different in different places. Some of that space had fingers in it, some an arm, some an elbow, some a shoulder. Is change just different events filling up different bits of time? This view would be that your birth is in one bit of time, your reading this in another, and your death (hopefully) in another, much later time. Sure, we experience these as a sequence of episodes, but that’s something about how people experience things, rather than about what change really is. Let’s call this the temporal variation view. It goes with a ‘static’ view of time. Things vary across time, but they don’t change how they vary.

The other view is that change has no spatial analogue. Time passing might involve varying across space, but there is something fundamentally different about it. Let’s go back to your birth being at one time and your reading this article at another. We can represent them on a timeline. But that’s missing something. It’s missing the change. And that missing ingredient, whatever it is that the timeline with different events at different places lacks, is what is required for time to really pass. Call this view of change ‘McTchange’ after the early 20th-century philosopher J M E McTaggart, who argued that change couldn’t be mere temporal variation (and, also, that change is contradictory). It goes with a dynamic view of time, because time itself McTchanges as stuff successively happens.

Past and future

Once stuff has happened, it becomes the past. And there’s a sense in which you’re stuck with it then. You can dress it up in different ways, but whether you got out of bed and did the training, whether you said those hurtful things, and whether you crossed the finish line on the day, are now unalterable things that happened. In addition to the difference between change over time and variation across space, there’s a difference between the past and the future. We’re stuck with the past in a way we might not be stuck with the future. Maybe there’s nothing you can do about the future; perhaps you’ve set off a sequence of events that are now unfolding outside of your control. But at least sometimes you can influence the future, right? Your chances of making something happen in the future seem a lot higher than your chances of making something happen in the past. This contrast is called ‘the open future’, where, usually, it is assumed the past isn’t similarly open.

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March 28, 2024

Carrie Budoff Brown Of NBC Is Responsible For Hiring Ronna McDaniel

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/24/2231334/-Carrie-Budoff-Brown-Of-NBC-Is-Responsible-For-Hiring-Ronna-McDaniel

Vanity Fair is reporting that Senior Vice President, Politics at NBC Carrie Budoff Brown was the genius who hired Ronna McDaniel. Or to be precise, she’s the one who sent out the internal memo at NBC announcing McDaniel’s hiring at NBC.

In a memo announcing McDaniel’s hiring, Carrie Budoff Brown, who leads NBC’s elections reporting, wrote that “it couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” and referenced McDaniel’s leadership of the GOP “through some of the most turbulent and challenging moments in political history.”

However, a number of others at MSNBC noticed that McDaniel is a party to all of that turbulence and challenges we are facing in our political history. According to Brown, McDaniel will be involved in all platforms at NBC. Unfortunately for McDaniel, MSNBC’s President Rashida Jones said, “Uh NO WAY!”

Just days after NBC News announced it was hiring Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst, MSNBC’s President, Rashida Jones, told employees that the former Republican National Committee chairwoman won’t be contributing on air to the cable network, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

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March 27, 2024

Broadway Joe