Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump departs after speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 conference, July 27, 2024, in Nashville.
Amid all the new energy released by Kamala Harris’s candidacy and J.D. Vance’s streams of semi-consciousness, one hardy perennial of American politics has taken a distant third place over the past week: big money’s continuing effort to use millions of dollars to shape popular democracy to its own ends.
Exhibit A is the concerted efforts of the crypto rich to ensure that government aids and abets the rise of this alternative pseudo-currency, in which an unseemly clump of the super-rich have invested non-pseudo actual currency. All this has been playing out in public at least since Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalists, aired a podcast in which they noted they’d invested in roughly 30 crypto startups; summoned their private jet to take them to Washington, where neither the president nor Gary Gensler, chair of the SEC, set aside their schedules to meet with them and hear their complaints; and concluded the only solution to this cosmic outrage was to endorse Donald Trump.
This past weekend, Trump himself trundled off to Nashville to address a national Bitcoin conference, where he pledged not only to loosen regulations on an industry that has become a mecca for speculation and not much else, but to enable industry members to serve on its government oversight board and to have the government set up its own cryptocurrency reserve. (Given crypto’s largely untraceable flows, imagine how useful that would have been for the CIA’s secret efforts to overthrow foreign governments!) The industry, he said, could become as central to American power as the steel industry once was (though he may have been thinking that metallic crypto coins, if issued in sufficient quantity, could be welded together to yield, say, a wall at the border).
Trump acknowledged that there were things about crypto he didn’t fully understand, but actually, he should understand it quite well. After all, one of the few industries in which Trump has been active is casino gambling, which has roughly the same level of nation-strengthening characteristics as crypto speculation: none.
Our crypto rich are now throwing way more money into controlling U.S. politics than the Mafia once invested in controlling Nevada. According to Open Secrets, one industry super PAC, Fairshake, now has roughly $120 million on hand to support House and Senate candidates. The crypto companies Coinbase and Ripple and the fretful duo of Andreessen and Horowitz have each contributed roughly $45 million to Fairshake, which has already disbursed about $15 million in its politician buying spree. For this reason, a host of Democratic candidates have felt compelled to announce that they won’t support close regulation of the industry, in an effort to forestall PACs like Fairshake shoveling all their funds to opponents. The financial press has reported that some of Kamala Harris’s aides have similarly sought to reassure the industry.
That industry, I should add, has yet to make an even remotely plausible case as to what function a floating pseudo-currency, never yet used in an actual monetary transaction other than speculative trading and concealing illegal deals, can or will perform.
Less mysterious but equally threatening to the notion that government can’t be bought have been the efforts of two mega-contributors to Democrats in general and Harris in particular to get her to promise to dump Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. The FTC chair has been at the forefront of efforts to break up monopolies that violate antitrust law, efforts that have apparently roused the ire of LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and media mogul Barry Diller.
What’s odd about their publicly stated demands is that they’re publicly stated. Such campaigns are usually waged quietly, behind closed doors, so that the politician thus lobbied can find some reason to discharge the offending official without appearing to be kowtowing to some megabucks supporter. In this case, it’s even worse: Both Hoffman and Diller either own, sit on the boards of, or have invested in companies under active investigation by the FTC. This is far more redolent of the aforementioned Mafia: bribing the pol to get the cops to back off.
Thus far, Harris has made no noises at all suggesting she’ll take Hoffman and Diller’s counsel. But silence won’t suffice in such matters. One of the most effective attacks that the ostensibly populist Republicans of the Trump era level is that the Democrats profess to be concerned about ordinary Americans but really are the tools of big-money donors (Hollywood, Soros et al.). As a result, it not only behooves Harris but also requires her to condemn, as loudly as possible, such efforts to buy her backing for policies that would actually undermine the progressive populism which Democrats need to champion both when campaigning and in office.
I’m not suggesting that she say Buzz off, Barry or Up your rump, Reid. But she should at least say that she’s not for sale, and that despite the plaints of otherwise supportive gazillionaires, she’s going to stick with policies and personnel supportive of the interests of the many over those of the few. That, lest anyone forget, is how Democrats win elections, and re-elections.
