I'm getting the distinct impression that the reason that the 'opposition' party does nothing about these crimes is that because they see them as opening future opportunities to exploit if power shifts back to them. What a mass delusion. Or mass incompetence. Can't decide which.
They tell us not to assume malice when incompetence is possible. But I'm fairly sure that sometime in the 70s, Big business, billionaires and special interests decided that only owning 1 major political party was dumb and said to themselves, "porque no los dos"?
I'm here to spread the gospel that the Democratic party, at a leadership/consultant/financing level , is the equivalent of a pro-wrestling heel or the Washington Generals (look it up kids). Ok sure, there's about 10 people in the Senate and Congress with discernable values but the rest exist only to protect their main constituency, Money.
The thing I think about is the possibility of rug pulls with "stablecoins." We saw it with the Melania coin. How big can a rug pull be? Can it destabilize an economy? I hope we don't have to find out.
The full faith and credit of the U.S. government is becoming a joke. We are devaluing the means by which we keep our massive debt afloat. To what end and who benefits? I think the end game may be to end all fiat currency in order to exert a decentralized control. It was Peter Thiel's dream two decades ago, I don't think that has changed.
It has always been about the very few getting it all at the expense of everyone else. That's the game, and we've allowed it to grow into the monster that it is today. We should have stood up way back in the Reagan 80's, but we didn't. Now its too late.
It is bad. I guess the question I ask myself is whether it has always been this bad and only seems worse because there is no attempt at pretense any more. Also, was the pretense worse?
Maybe we just accept that this country was founded on the idea that if you have the right pretty words you can get on with the dirty work of exploitation and the rubes will internalize the former to the point where they find excuses for the latter.
So perhaps, for example, we don’t have to contort ourselves to rationalize the motives of slave holders banging on about liberty?
Maybe, just maybe, most of that wasnt in good faith and the sooner we flush it, the sooner we can get to something better.
Competition under American capitalism has always been ruthless. That is not changing. What is changing is that there has long been a genuine effort to build a robust, well functioning, transparent, efficient **financial system** because that actually helps capitalism function well. That system is being sold for scrap.
Fair. But if one “advantageous ”outcome of the former system was the ability to hide its monstrosity then perhaps the inability to hide is net good? How many Americans even have 401ks? Though I suppose next up is privatized SS going into the casino of financial markets.
Must things break before people are willing to accept that what we had was actually bad for most people? Is breaking it the only way to replace it? Perhaps more importantly, how many must suffer without a guarantee that what comes next is actually better?
I’m not advocating for bitcoin or any other tech bro scam. I’m saying it is a symptom, the vulgar, out loud part of capitalist systems of exploitation that have always existed, not something separate or even that much different in degree.
I think this is akin to supporting NINA loans and looser CRA-driven lending standards in the run up to '08. Yes, it's a scam. But like those "innovations," crypto is more popular with some cohorts than others, and this is why Harris and her campaign promoted it too. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/13/nx-s1-5151968/harris-weed-crypto
Going cold turkey on scam culture won't be easy. My theory is that we've gotten far more scammy as we've increasingly engaged the non-WEIRD on their terms, and that this has been a 40 year project. Putnam called this. You diversify beyond any capacity to enforce norms, you open things up too fast, and trust and solidarity plummet. In trade, immigration, innovation, education and even entertainment it's all pump, dump, and run now.
The good news is that we've been here before, and there's historic precedent for digging our way out. The Gilded Age is a good model. Sky high rates of foreign born, a scandal plagued administration (Grant), speculative bubbles around rail and cattle and precious metals, Reconstruction and urban machine political shenanigans and excesses, plutocrats displaying their wealth on the most obscene terms possible, and growing civil and labor unrest. The backlash started at a slow burn. An Exclusion Act here, a few thousand vigilante acts there. Some Progressive reforms and reforming candidates (Bryan, Debs, McKinley, TR, Wilson), and a moratorium on all immigration in '24. Enhanced trade protectionism from '96 forward.
And then in '29-32 the dam broke. After being primed against Gilded Age scam culture and the self-serving bullshit of high minded technocrats like Coolidge and Hoover, after the Depression, people sent FDR to office for 4 back to back terms on some of the most lopsided margins in history. The New Deal Order he inaugurated lasted till Reagan, and now we're about done with the Neoliberal version of our latest Gilded Age. Hence Trump.
Crypto is dumb. The more people who can point this out, the better. But in the grand scheme of things it's a pretty small "lie" and a less corrosive and absurd one than many of the other scams and lies we've been asked to accept over the past 40 years, so I don't begrudge Trump too much for pushing what Harris and others had already pushed. Hopefully when this one pops, we can avoid bailouts. So I would just encourage some optimism here. Even in the tech industry, we're seeing more and more people talking about putting America(ns) First. Granted some of them are aspiring arms manufacturers but you have to take what you can get.
I agree that the gilded age is probably the best parallel for now but note that pulling out of that required the Great Depression. Not a happy forecast.
Harris was wrong to back crypto. Cheap demographic grab that failed.
In the context of the entire economy crypto could be seen as small (though still potentially the biggest single asset bubble in history) but allowing it to freely undermine the entire global system of government-controlled money could cause a lot of fallout.
I hear you but it’s not going to spread or undermine anything. Consider the most concrete it ever got - pics of cartoon monkeys on screens via NFTs. It’s online gambling grade goofy. On par with Lutnik’s gold citizenship cards and Trump’s steaks, almost charming in how shameless it is and in line with his authentic huckster image.
I get the allure though. The Dems have an innate revulsion towards concentrated capital and still hang onto their image as protectors of the working class. They’d genuinely like to fight scams. But this is their jam - neoliberalism (free trade, open borders, multi-culti values, overseas interventions) is the big scam now and they have no way to drop it or pivot against it. So they double down on it - abundance! Mamdani! Here’s Harris and Cheney, with a side of crypto and shady loans and weed “for the Blacks.” It’s truly gross.
My guess is that they run this all the way though. Someone like Newsom will carry the torch, and offer CA up as a model for us all. He’ll get there by attacking Trump/Vance on small ball stuff like this that only plays inside the Dem tent, while Vance savages him and the CA model. I doubt it’ll be a Mondale sized rout, but I think only then will Dems start to drop the neolib scam.
Every person who didn't vote for Harris voted for this. They tossed their lit matches into tRump's gasoline. Their 401(k)s will burn brightly and they will be distraught and Don Donald will shrug.
Was the Harris proposal to support crypto more acceptable because it was explicitly targeted at Black voters? Or does this make it less acceptable? Or was bundling support for crypto with scam giveaway loans and weed store licenses part of what made it more respectable?
Sorry if I'm slow on the uptake, but I live around a bunch of upper income progressives who think the Teamsters should go fuck themselves, and who think it's the American Way to hire a bunch of unprotected and underpaid non-citizen labor. Their moral universe is a confusing one, and I have trouble understanding it.
When my favorite football team loses I also get great satisfaction from scolding the fans who didn't cheer loud enough, for those that had the temerity to stay at home and watch from their couch and for those who stopped watching football because the people who profit most from the game are the vilest people on the planet.
Most importantly I never criticize the team when they lose because it can only ever be the fault of the fans despite their complete lack of meaningful agency in the outcome of the game. After all those ten people in section 420 were booing so loudly every time the team did something preventably stupid. !Purists!, I yell and go on feeling smug that in reality my team is the BEST regardless of the outcome.
If I'm understanding this correctly, Trump's crypto tether to publicly traded companies only works if the stock price of the company AND the crypto value both go up? The company wants investors to buy shares, and it needs to pay off its crypto "debt". The crypto "loan" from Trump (or whoever, it sounds like this is bound to spread) being paid decreases the risk for crypto investors.
It's an unstable symbiosis in which the failure of one directly leads to the failure of the other.
The entire British empire was built on scams and bribery. The American revolution was fought so that the merchant class could do their own scams and bribery.
The only thing that stops this is the constant pressure from working people to make these criminals give back to the people they’ve been stealing from.
Crypto has one use and one use only. It has essentially replaced money laundering. No need to commit a crime to cover another crime when you can exchange crypto legally . However, we should not underestimate the extent of international crime. It's bigger than we think and, therefore, crypto may not be the speculative bubble you think it is. When you buy crypto you are investing in crime and speculating that crime will go up. Under the current circumstances, that's not a bad bet.
The technology behind crypto actually has some interesting - and interesting to the labor movement - uses as *accounting tool*, if you ditch all the libertarian drivel surrounding it. That owes to two characteristics:
* Each unit IS its own serial number, definitionally
* A ledger using cryptographic hashes can't be forged - by the time you come up with an alternative transaction history that arrives at the same result which the math works for, the sun will long since have supernova'd.
Those are the *only* two interesting things about cryptocurrency, but they're pretty interesting. Like, if an organization - say, the Pentagon - did all of its accounting in such units, only converting to dollars where money comes in and when a human needs to be paid (say, mandating all defense contractors use those same units), not only would the Pentagon be auditable, but its books would literally BE their own audit.
It seems to me that has some utility, say, groups of employees whose employer would prefer to hide money from them.
Yes, treating it as "currency" is crap and always has been. But the tools underneath are worth co-opting.
Crypto currency for me most of my peers is still a mystery. Nobody is all that interested in investing in it. But it being a mystery is for the most part the reason, as NH points out, it makes fertile ground for government scams, and scammers in general. As it worms its way to becoming a acceptable ingredient of our financial structure, people will treat it as another way to diversify their portfolio, provided they even have one. We already are under assault by the finance industry, with takeovers by private equity firms, monopolistc industries, and fewer and fewer watchdogs. All we can do at this point is to keep ourselves informed and spread the word.
I think that is for sure part of the plan. To siphon off any public traunches of money (think teachers retirement funds) and then when Trump's economic policies start to crash grab all the money out of crypto. We won't know though because they will not have any honest reporting mechanisms for the average consumer. Only for government higher ups and possibly foreign governments.
Trump and his idiot supporters want to "run the country like a business," which is the stupidest concept ever to gain any kind of credibility with anyone. A business is not a democracy. A business is owned. The problem now is, in Trump's mind, he owns the country. It is his, he can do with it as he pleases. A business makes decisions based on making money, not even on being productive, if no productivity is needed to make money. The workers in Trump's USAcorp are us, the citizens, and just like in a business, we don't get a say in the decisions at the top, we just need to be fooled into thinking longer hours, lower pay, decreased benefits, no paid sick leave, etc., are good things. We are an expense, nothing more. Business leaders look at expenses mainly two ways, can I lower them, or eliminate them? That's how you MAGA assholes asked to be treated, and how you want the rest of us treated. You are consenting, even asking, for democracy to go away and be replaced with fascism, totalitarianism, pick another ism that is very bad for you. A business indeed.
I'm getting the distinct impression that the reason that the 'opposition' party does nothing about these crimes is that because they see them as opening future opportunities to exploit if power shifts back to them. What a mass delusion. Or mass incompetence. Can't decide which.
They tell us not to assume malice when incompetence is possible. But I'm fairly sure that sometime in the 70s, Big business, billionaires and special interests decided that only owning 1 major political party was dumb and said to themselves, "porque no los dos"?
I'm here to spread the gospel that the Democratic party, at a leadership/consultant/financing level , is the equivalent of a pro-wrestling heel or the Washington Generals (look it up kids). Ok sure, there's about 10 people in the Senate and Congress with discernable values but the rest exist only to protect their main constituency, Money.
Plus cowardice, and not all of them, but, yes.
The thing I think about is the possibility of rug pulls with "stablecoins." We saw it with the Melania coin. How big can a rug pull be? Can it destabilize an economy? I hope we don't have to find out.
The full faith and credit of the U.S. government is becoming a joke. We are devaluing the means by which we keep our massive debt afloat. To what end and who benefits? I think the end game may be to end all fiat currency in order to exert a decentralized control. It was Peter Thiel's dream two decades ago, I don't think that has changed.
It has always been about the very few getting it all at the expense of everyone else. That's the game, and we've allowed it to grow into the monster that it is today. We should have stood up way back in the Reagan 80's, but we didn't. Now its too late.
It is bad. I guess the question I ask myself is whether it has always been this bad and only seems worse because there is no attempt at pretense any more. Also, was the pretense worse?
Maybe we just accept that this country was founded on the idea that if you have the right pretty words you can get on with the dirty work of exploitation and the rubes will internalize the former to the point where they find excuses for the latter.
So perhaps, for example, we don’t have to contort ourselves to rationalize the motives of slave holders banging on about liberty?
Maybe, just maybe, most of that wasnt in good faith and the sooner we flush it, the sooner we can get to something better.
Competition under American capitalism has always been ruthless. That is not changing. What is changing is that there has long been a genuine effort to build a robust, well functioning, transparent, efficient **financial system** because that actually helps capitalism function well. That system is being sold for scrap.
Fair. But if one “advantageous ”outcome of the former system was the ability to hide its monstrosity then perhaps the inability to hide is net good? How many Americans even have 401ks? Though I suppose next up is privatized SS going into the casino of financial markets.
Must things break before people are willing to accept that what we had was actually bad for most people? Is breaking it the only way to replace it? Perhaps more importantly, how many must suffer without a guarantee that what comes next is actually better?
Woof, time to start drinking.
What makes you think it’ll be politically or ecologically possible to change course at that imagined point?
I’m not advocating for bitcoin or any other tech bro scam. I’m saying it is a symptom, the vulgar, out loud part of capitalist systems of exploitation that have always existed, not something separate or even that much different in degree.
I think this is akin to supporting NINA loans and looser CRA-driven lending standards in the run up to '08. Yes, it's a scam. But like those "innovations," crypto is more popular with some cohorts than others, and this is why Harris and her campaign promoted it too. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/13/nx-s1-5151968/harris-weed-crypto
Going cold turkey on scam culture won't be easy. My theory is that we've gotten far more scammy as we've increasingly engaged the non-WEIRD on their terms, and that this has been a 40 year project. Putnam called this. You diversify beyond any capacity to enforce norms, you open things up too fast, and trust and solidarity plummet. In trade, immigration, innovation, education and even entertainment it's all pump, dump, and run now.
The good news is that we've been here before, and there's historic precedent for digging our way out. The Gilded Age is a good model. Sky high rates of foreign born, a scandal plagued administration (Grant), speculative bubbles around rail and cattle and precious metals, Reconstruction and urban machine political shenanigans and excesses, plutocrats displaying their wealth on the most obscene terms possible, and growing civil and labor unrest. The backlash started at a slow burn. An Exclusion Act here, a few thousand vigilante acts there. Some Progressive reforms and reforming candidates (Bryan, Debs, McKinley, TR, Wilson), and a moratorium on all immigration in '24. Enhanced trade protectionism from '96 forward.
And then in '29-32 the dam broke. After being primed against Gilded Age scam culture and the self-serving bullshit of high minded technocrats like Coolidge and Hoover, after the Depression, people sent FDR to office for 4 back to back terms on some of the most lopsided margins in history. The New Deal Order he inaugurated lasted till Reagan, and now we're about done with the Neoliberal version of our latest Gilded Age. Hence Trump.
Crypto is dumb. The more people who can point this out, the better. But in the grand scheme of things it's a pretty small "lie" and a less corrosive and absurd one than many of the other scams and lies we've been asked to accept over the past 40 years, so I don't begrudge Trump too much for pushing what Harris and others had already pushed. Hopefully when this one pops, we can avoid bailouts. So I would just encourage some optimism here. Even in the tech industry, we're seeing more and more people talking about putting America(ns) First. Granted some of them are aspiring arms manufacturers but you have to take what you can get.
I agree that the gilded age is probably the best parallel for now but note that pulling out of that required the Great Depression. Not a happy forecast.
Harris was wrong to back crypto. Cheap demographic grab that failed.
In the context of the entire economy crypto could be seen as small (though still potentially the biggest single asset bubble in history) but allowing it to freely undermine the entire global system of government-controlled money could cause a lot of fallout.
I hear you but it’s not going to spread or undermine anything. Consider the most concrete it ever got - pics of cartoon monkeys on screens via NFTs. It’s online gambling grade goofy. On par with Lutnik’s gold citizenship cards and Trump’s steaks, almost charming in how shameless it is and in line with his authentic huckster image.
I get the allure though. The Dems have an innate revulsion towards concentrated capital and still hang onto their image as protectors of the working class. They’d genuinely like to fight scams. But this is their jam - neoliberalism (free trade, open borders, multi-culti values, overseas interventions) is the big scam now and they have no way to drop it or pivot against it. So they double down on it - abundance! Mamdani! Here’s Harris and Cheney, with a side of crypto and shady loans and weed “for the Blacks.” It’s truly gross.
My guess is that they run this all the way though. Someone like Newsom will carry the torch, and offer CA up as a model for us all. He’ll get there by attacking Trump/Vance on small ball stuff like this that only plays inside the Dem tent, while Vance savages him and the CA model. I doubt it’ll be a Mondale sized rout, but I think only then will Dems start to drop the neolib scam.
Every person who didn't vote for Harris voted for this. They tossed their lit matches into tRump's gasoline. Their 401(k)s will burn brightly and they will be distraught and Don Donald will shrug.
Was the Harris proposal to support crypto more acceptable because it was explicitly targeted at Black voters? Or does this make it less acceptable? Or was bundling support for crypto with scam giveaway loans and weed store licenses part of what made it more respectable?
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/13/nx-s1-5151968/harris-weed-crypto
Sorry if I'm slow on the uptake, but I live around a bunch of upper income progressives who think the Teamsters should go fuck themselves, and who think it's the American Way to hire a bunch of unprotected and underpaid non-citizen labor. Their moral universe is a confusing one, and I have trouble understanding it.
When my favorite football team loses I also get great satisfaction from scolding the fans who didn't cheer loud enough, for those that had the temerity to stay at home and watch from their couch and for those who stopped watching football because the people who profit most from the game are the vilest people on the planet.
Most importantly I never criticize the team when they lose because it can only ever be the fault of the fans despite their complete lack of meaningful agency in the outcome of the game. After all those ten people in section 420 were booing so loudly every time the team did something preventably stupid. !Purists!, I yell and go on feeling smug that in reality my team is the BEST regardless of the outcome.
Oh please. Kamala was cozying up to crypto scammer people too. She made it a central part of her campaign.
If I'm understanding this correctly, Trump's crypto tether to publicly traded companies only works if the stock price of the company AND the crypto value both go up? The company wants investors to buy shares, and it needs to pay off its crypto "debt". The crypto "loan" from Trump (or whoever, it sounds like this is bound to spread) being paid decreases the risk for crypto investors.
It's an unstable symbiosis in which the failure of one directly leads to the failure of the other.
The entire British empire was built on scams and bribery. The American revolution was fought so that the merchant class could do their own scams and bribery.
The only thing that stops this is the constant pressure from working people to make these criminals give back to the people they’ve been stealing from.
It has always been true and will always be true.
Crypto has one use and one use only. It has essentially replaced money laundering. No need to commit a crime to cover another crime when you can exchange crypto legally . However, we should not underestimate the extent of international crime. It's bigger than we think and, therefore, crypto may not be the speculative bubble you think it is. When you buy crypto you are investing in crime and speculating that crime will go up. Under the current circumstances, that's not a bad bet.
The technology behind crypto actually has some interesting - and interesting to the labor movement - uses as *accounting tool*, if you ditch all the libertarian drivel surrounding it. That owes to two characteristics:
* Each unit IS its own serial number, definitionally
* A ledger using cryptographic hashes can't be forged - by the time you come up with an alternative transaction history that arrives at the same result which the math works for, the sun will long since have supernova'd.
Those are the *only* two interesting things about cryptocurrency, but they're pretty interesting. Like, if an organization - say, the Pentagon - did all of its accounting in such units, only converting to dollars where money comes in and when a human needs to be paid (say, mandating all defense contractors use those same units), not only would the Pentagon be auditable, but its books would literally BE their own audit.
It seems to me that has some utility, say, groups of employees whose employer would prefer to hide money from them.
Yes, treating it as "currency" is crap and always has been. But the tools underneath are worth co-opting.
Good luck with that.
Crypto currency for me most of my peers is still a mystery. Nobody is all that interested in investing in it. But it being a mystery is for the most part the reason, as NH points out, it makes fertile ground for government scams, and scammers in general. As it worms its way to becoming a acceptable ingredient of our financial structure, people will treat it as another way to diversify their portfolio, provided they even have one. We already are under assault by the finance industry, with takeovers by private equity firms, monopolistc industries, and fewer and fewer watchdogs. All we can do at this point is to keep ourselves informed and spread the word.
It's gotten so bad so quickly that my head spins daily just trying to comprehend it all.
Well when Social Security enters the cesspool that'll be about it for those of us that strongly rely on it to survive. Begin the countdown....
I think that is for sure part of the plan. To siphon off any public traunches of money (think teachers retirement funds) and then when Trump's economic policies start to crash grab all the money out of crypto. We won't know though because they will not have any honest reporting mechanisms for the average consumer. Only for government higher ups and possibly foreign governments.
Countdown to what, exactly? Loud comments on Substack (my specialty)?
Crippling poverty. Just stating my viewpoint Doug.
I would prefer an uprising!
Another excellent piece. Well said.
Trump and his idiot supporters want to "run the country like a business," which is the stupidest concept ever to gain any kind of credibility with anyone. A business is not a democracy. A business is owned. The problem now is, in Trump's mind, he owns the country. It is his, he can do with it as he pleases. A business makes decisions based on making money, not even on being productive, if no productivity is needed to make money. The workers in Trump's USAcorp are us, the citizens, and just like in a business, we don't get a say in the decisions at the top, we just need to be fooled into thinking longer hours, lower pay, decreased benefits, no paid sick leave, etc., are good things. We are an expense, nothing more. Business leaders look at expenses mainly two ways, can I lower them, or eliminate them? That's how you MAGA assholes asked to be treated, and how you want the rest of us treated. You are consenting, even asking, for democracy to go away and be replaced with fascism, totalitarianism, pick another ism that is very bad for you. A business indeed.
It is a Ponzi scheme.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Charles Mackay. 1841.
Should be required reading.
All this is.
What is more worrisome is the damage it will do to the US economy and the World's when this fraud collapses.
The mortgage crisis took down Chrysler and others. Millions not involved lost their jobs.
I have been saying crypto will implode for years.
Now a corrupt conman is making it worse for his benefit.
Humans are soon stupid. Even so called intelligent humans.