The other day, I received an email from the Washington Post inviting me to attend an exclusive Election Night Watch Party in the Post newsroom. “Enjoy a cocktail reception and chef-led food stations on what could be a long night,” the nontransferable invitation added. Right at the top of the email, the Post noted: “Presenting Sponsor: STAND WITH CRYPTO.”
The organization is the campaign finance arm of the crypto industry. In allowing the group to underwrite its election evening, the Post has accepted an in-kind contribution.
As the newspaper whose reporting brought down Richard Nixon, the Post’s timing once again is unfortunate. The Post has suffered a quarter-million cancellations from appalled subscribers protesting owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to put his business interests under a possible Trump presidency ahead of the paper’s once-proud motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” and not make an editorial endorsement.
That could well be the motto of the crypto industry as well, which has spent at least $206 million in mostly dark-money spending on both Republicans and Democrats (and against those who would regulate crypto) to guarantee a pro-crypto Congress. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) alone was the target of about $40 million in negative ads financed by crypto interests.
These ads, typically, do not mention crypto at all. They find positive things to display about candidates friendly to crypto, and nasty extraneous things about those like Brown and Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), who lost a California Senate primary, with the temerity to try to limit crypto’s abuses.
In this, crypto’s dark-money strategy emulates that of the pro-Israel PACs. In ads directed against progressive Democrats who have been critical of Israel’s brutal actions in Gaza and the West Bank, the pro-Israel PACs do not mention Israel at all, but find other negative things to say.
Connoisseurs of these tactics may have noted the eerie similarity between the slogan “Stand With Crypto” and the widely displayed banners reading, “We Stand With Israel,” a cynical slogan that blurs the biblical Israel, the Israel of the legitimate 1967 borders, the Jewish people, and the barbaric actions of the current Israeli government.
There is another similarity between the tactics of the pro-Israel PACs and the crypto PACs. With this level of spending, pro and anti, many Democrats who are privately critical just conclude that they don’t need this headache, and decide to stop criticizing either cause.
Even if you abhor the inhumane brutality of what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank, the larger issue of Israel and Palestine is complicated. What would a just settlement for both peoples look like?
The issue of crypto is not complicated. The invented pseudo-currency serves no useful purpose except to enrich creators of cryptocurrencies and insider traders. For ordinary civilians who like to speculate on the direction of market bubbles, there are safer ways that don’t create systemic risks.
With Donald Trump ending up as the next president, the overwhelming likelihood is that the next Congress will deliver an even weaker regulatory regime for crypto than the current one, which is already too weak. That’s what dark money buys.
TRUMP’S ELECTION AS PRESIDENT AGAIN is the culmination of the debasement of democracy, which has been deepening for decades. One big part of that story is the loosing of dark money, which began with the Supreme Court’s Buckley v. Valeo ruling in 1976, permitting “independent expenditures,” made far worse by the 2010 Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited political spending by corporations.
To the extent that money corrupts, it particularly corrupts Democrats, as the party that is supposed to be the counterweight to raw capitalism. Republicans and industry spending directed at undercutting regulation are nicely in sync.
But even modest regulation is far too much for the business elite. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told a banking conference Oct. 28 that he is “tired of this sh*t” from regulators appointed by the Biden administration. To Biden’s credit (and Elizabeth Warren’s), he has appointed the toughest regulators since FDR. If Harris’s billionaire backers get their way, hers could well be weaker.
Dimon, who has described himself as “barely a Democrat,” has been courted for Treasury secretary by presidents of both parties. The New York Times described him as Barack Obama’s favorite banker. In the 2008 collapse, he scooped up Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual while working with Obama’s senior officials to make sure that financial reforms would be minimal.
Trump and Harris may have agreed on nothing else, but the fact that Jamie Dimon would be on the short lists of both for Treasury secretary speaks volumes about how capitalism, compounded by dark money, debases democracy.
Dimon began as the rare Wall Street holdout against crypto. As recently as April, he called it a “fraud” and a “Ponzi scheme,” saying that if he were in government, he’d “shut it down,” and branded Bitcoin a “waste of time,” calling it a “pet rock” that “does nothing.”
That was then. As other investment banks have reaped crypto profits, Dimon has led JPMorgan in developing its own blockchain and cryptocurrency, JPM coin.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect (prospect.org) and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. Like him on facebook.com/RobertKuttner and/or follow him at twitter.com/rkuttner.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2024
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