Tag: cryptocurrency
Donald Trump

Behind Donald Trump's New Crypto Scheme: Is This His Shadiest Grift Yet?

While it has been a treat to see the value of shares in Trump Media drop off a cliff, what is much less fun is thinking about how much the whole enterprise distorts democracy.

Before Trump, it would have been impossible to imagine a former president helming a publicly traded company while running for office again. However, the Trump presidency shattered every norm as Trump used his office to line his pockets.

A second Trump presidency will be worse, without a doubt, particularly because the federal courts, now stuffed with Trump appointees, are happily weakening the meager guardrails that remain.

While the name “Trump Media” connotes some sort of multi-faceted media empire, it’s really just Truth Social, Trump’s hard-right social media network. Truth Social is, to put it bluntly, not terribly popular. Its audience keeps plummeting, and even Trump has returned to posting on X, a rival platform with an audience nearly 100 times that of Truth Social. The stock was comically overvalued, pegged at $7 billion despite Truth Social posting millions of dollars of losses and having nearly no revenue.

None of that seems to matter to die-hard Trump fans, who poured money into the stock with what one stock analyst called a “quasi-religious fervor.” They’re happy to excuse the losses, making statements like “I did it more as a statement to President Trump and to show support at the time,” said Teri Lynn Roberson to ABC News. “I wasn't really looking to make a lot of money,” said Roberson, who bought five shares of the company after it went public in March.

That’s probably the best attitude, given that top executives at Trump Media started selling off their shares as soon as possible, eating huge losses in their quest to get out from under the failing stock. Trump still owns his shares, representing roughly 57% of the company. Until Sept. 19, Trump could not sell shares, as he and other company insiders were in a six-month lock-up period. Toward the end of the lock-up period, Trump said he wouldn’t be selling his shares, a statement that goosed the stock price a bit at the time.

In a typical company, this might be seen as a vote of confidence from the founder, a willingness to risk their own fortunes. But Trump has far darker reasons to hold on to his stock. If Trump wins the election, the chances that investors will pony up and buy Trump Media stock increases. People could buy access to the president by throwing money at his company, which he would be running from the White House.

As Abdallah Fayyad explained at Vox, it is easy to imagine someone who has maxed out their campaign contributions deciding to show support for Trump by investing in Trump Media instead. This is, of course, not speculation.

During Trump’s first term, millions of dollars poured into his hotel in Washington, D.C., with Republicans pretending that they were just staying there because it was the most convenient location. However, they’ve barely stayed in that hotel since it changed hands and became a Waldorf Astoria in 2022.

And why would they? It’s no longer a way to show Trump their support by helping him profit financially. Trump has shifted his focus as well, instead selling access to Mar-a-Lago to the tune of $1 million per membership.

Trump Media is an ethical nightmare, but at least it’s a publicly traded company, which comes with transparency and oversight. Trump’s push into the crypto market, on the other hand, is opaque and unregulated—the perfect vehicle for a corrupt former president to get spectacularly more corrupt if he’s elected again.

The crypto project, with the uninspired name of World Liberty Financial, serves as a way for Trump to give all his failsons—now including Barron, who is the “visionary” behind the project—a fake job that still comes with real money. The fact that all of Trump’s adult sons—none of whom have worked in the financial sector—are heading the project is one way to tell that this crypto effort will just be another unserious grift.

Additionally, no one seems to actually know what this crypto company will do, even after a two-hour livestream launching the effort. Even Trump doesn’t seem quite sure. When trying to explain it, here’s what he came up with: “Crypto is one of those things we have to do… Whether we like it or not, I have to do it… It's crypto, it's AI, it's some of the other things,” he said in an interview on X. Got it.

Where some of Trump’s other ventures, like Trump steaks, Trump bottled water, and Trump vodka, might have appealed to the masses if they were any good, Trump’s relatively newfound affinity for crypto is wholly tied to that financial sector’s affinity for right-wing politics. It’s also a way for him to court the crypto vote and contrast himself with the Biden-Harris administration, which has cracked down on crypto scams and prosecuted people like Sam Bankman-Fried for defrauding investors out of billions of dollars.

The crypto sector has spent over $100 million during the 2024 election cycle thus far, hoping to usher in an era of less oversight and fewer consumer protections. Trump is the superior political choice if you want less regulation of the financial markets.

The conservatives on the Supreme Court have already seriously dented the Securities and Exchange Commission's ability to address violations by ruling that they must conduct full-fledged jury trials rather than use an in-house administrative process. Those same conservatives also just struck down the Chevron doctrine, which required courts to defer to agency interpretations of statutes.

Under Biden, the current head of the SEC, Gary Gensler, has called the crypto sector “rife with fraud and hucksters and grifters.” If Trump wins in 2024, he could weaken the SEC without legislation or court action simply by installing people who won’t impose fines or pursue scammy crypto companies. That’s not just a giveaway to the crypto bros Trump is courting, though. It would also be a move that lines Trump’s pockets with unregulated crypto cash while in the White House.

Ordinary people can see the obvious problems here. Trump shouldn’t have private business interests while in the White House, period, but all of that went out the window in his first administration. Trump certainly shouldn’t have a private business in a regulated industry like securities when he would have the power to weaken regulations over his own business.

But Trump fans love giving Trump’s businesses money and increasing his personal bottom line. They understand very well that Trump looks favorably at their efforts to funnel him cash. If he wins in November and his nonsense crypto project stays afloat until he takes office in 2025, conservatives—and hucksters and grifters—will have a very easy way to buy off the president with no fear of oversight.

The only way to stop this is to ensure Trump doesn’t win. Of course, he’ll still continue to hawk whatever products will help him fleece his supporters, but at least he won’t be able to do it from the Oval Office.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

What Makes J.D. Vance Something Far Worse Than Merely 'Weird'

What Makes J.D. Vance Something Far Worse Than Merely 'Weird'

When political observers describe J.D. Vance as “weird,” what they usually mean is the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s ranting about childless people, his extremism on questions like abortion and divorce, or perhaps his choice of eye makeup.

But there is a deeper level to Vance’s political weirdness that places him amid the most sinister forces in the nation today – and calls into question the supposed patriotism that motivates him and the “America First” movement he and Donald Trump now represent. To understand what Vance really stands for, and why his ideology is so distant from the Constitutional democracy he has sworn to uphold as a United States senator, it is necessary to examine the chief sponsor of his political and business career: a Silicon Valley billionaire named Peter Thiel.

Born in Germany and raised in South Africa, Thiel made his enormous fortune as a venture capitalist and executive in tech companies such as PayPal and Palantir. Attracted from an early age to far-right ideologues like the addled author Ayn Rand, the tech mogul has identified himself as a “conservative libertarian” and a critic of democratic systems. Not so long ago, he was heard to say that democracy and freedom – or at least his idea of “freedom” – are no longer compatible.

If that sounds ominous, it is a sentiment that Thiel has advanced for over a decade now – and that has long characterized a strain of anti-government extremism on the American right. It is a worldview that dates back at least three decades, when a self-proclaimed economic guru named James Dale Davidson began promoting it in his investment newsletters and video presentations.

Back then, Davidson’s seething enmity for President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton led him not only to make the preposterous claim that they were behind the death of their friend Vince Foster (who had tragically committed suicide), but to insist that Clinton’s policies would soon plunge the nation into a cataclysmic depression. The internet boom under Clinton, which boosted incomes and balanced the budget for the first time in decades, left Davidson looking foolish.

Undaunted by failure, he went on to write The Sovereign Individual, a 1997 tome that predicted the rise of digital currencies, along with other less prescient notions. It eventually won favorable attention from Thiel, who provided a gushing preface to a new edition in 2020, two decades after its original publication, that emphasized its influence on his own political outlook and urged it upon readers as “an opportunity not to be wasted.”

Why was Thiel drawn to Davidson’s obscure screed? Aside from its advocacy of what we might now call cryptocurrency – a dubious special interest promoted heavily by Vance ever since his elevation to the Senate – The Sovereign Individual foretold a world ruled by people like him. Governments, nation-states, and the social order would all collapse; digital currencies would replace all other forms of money, except among the poorest populations; taxation and regulation of corporations would become impossible. In its conclusion, Davidson and his co-author Lord William Rees-Mogg, a British peer, denigrated democracy as the twin of communism and welcomed the advent of a brutish and largely lawless world dominated by a tiny minority of the super-rich. (The fascinating tale of Davidson's checkered career is recounted in The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.)

It isn’t hard to imagine that Thiel, who has financed research aimed at human immortality, envisions himself as one of those godlike rulers. Does Vance agree with Thiel’s jaundiced view of democracy? Does he push crypto because digital finance will allow billionaires and their businesses to evade taxes and launder money? Does he look forward to a plutocratic dystopia replacing our republic?

No doubt the embattled Republican veep nominee would deny any such disturbing views. Yet Thiel isn’t the only ultra-reactionary influence on Vance. The Ohio senator has also endorsed Curtis Yarvin, a cranky computer programmer who says America needs “a national CEO, or what’s called a dictator,” and embraced Rod Dreher, an American writer who now serves the illiberal regime of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban.

All that makes Vance something far worse than merely weird.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His new book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

How Right-Wing Grifters Promote Online Sports And Crypto Gambling To Kids

How Right-Wing Grifters Promote Online Sports And Crypto Gambling To Kids

Right-wing influencer and Andrew Tate fanboy Adin Ross sits behind his computer and streams brightly colored slot games, blackjack, and roulette to his audience of loyal fans. Ross has blown through gargantuan sums of money while gambling on his livestreams and has won big jackpots.

“You have like tons of different emotions throughout your whole entire body,” Ross said about the euphoria of online gambling during an interview. “It’s just dopamine release.”

If Ross’ audience members are interested in following in his footsteps, he is setting them up to fail.

Ross is an example of influencers and right-wing figures who are promoting crypto gambling and sports betting ventures to their young audiences. Many of these figures, including Ross, have landed major sponsorship deals with gambling companies and are sometimes given house money to gamble with, removing the actual risk associated with online gambling.

Influencers are promoting these games to young viewers as gambling addiction rises among adolescents and horror stories about streamers and followers draining their bank accounts are popping up across the internet.

Meanwhile, a number of streamers have enormous and devoted followings across social media, and the lucrative industry is constantly evolving. Teens and young adults in particular have a fondness for watching livestreamers. According to a report in Wired, 21% of the users on Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch are between 13 and 17 years old.

Twitch has had a complicated relationship with gambling and casino streamers on its platform and has placed limits on the kind of gambling that is allowed. Some influencers have spoken out about the unrealistic expectations that gambling streamers create for their fan bases.

Influencers promoting gambling and betting companies

High-profile streamers, influencers, and celebrities have aligned themselves with gaming organizations like Stake, a crypto gambling and sports betting website. These figures share videos and pictures of themselves using Stake, gamble while livestreaming, promote the website, and sometimes share gambling earnings on social media.

For instance, rapper Drake has become an official partner of Stake, and the site has sponsored a handful of other influencers.

One of the most high-profile Stake-sponsored streamers is Ross, who has a “huge, dedicated fanbase” and exclusively streams on Twitch rival Kick. Kick is a new streaming platform that is reportedly backed by Stake and is a safe haven for white nationalist-linked content creators. The website features various gambling categories that viewers can join and watch streamers play.

On Kick, Ross labels some livestreams with “#AD,” appearing to indicate that the gambling he is doing on his stream is part of a sponsorship deal. At one point, Ross was reportedly making nearly $1 million a week from his Stake sponsorship.

An 11-year-old Ross fan reportedly admitted to gambling on Stake after watching Ross’ streams.

Ross has publicly acknowledged that young kids watch his gambling streams and that past projects he has sponsored have been scams.

“By the way, that MILF token shit that I did a while back, I already told you guys, don't buy that shit,” Ross said during a livestream about a past crypto project he promoted. “I got paid a bag to do that shit. Like, I don't give a fuck. I hope none of you guys actually bought it."

During an interview on the H3 Podcast, Ross was told about the potential harms that could come from promoting crypto gambling.

“I’m learning a lot, bro,” Ross said after hearing about the potential harms gambling can have on his audience. “I’m honestly overwhelmed right now in my life. Because it’s just — it’s so new to me.”

“You make me rethink about it now, bro. …. It’s just something I — that just doesn’t click right for me,” Ross later added.

But following this interview, Ross did not stop working with Stake and airing gambling streams.


Some of Ross’ sponsored streams are bombarded with racist and antisemitic comments, which could also have a negative impact on young viewers.

Ross recently sat down with UFC president and Trump superfan Dana White for an in-person gambling event. Following their meeting, Ross claimed that White hopes to connect Ross with Trump for a stream closer to the 2024 election. (White’s UFC also has an official partnership with Stake as well.)

Jake Paul, a right-wing influencer and professional fighter who has a massive following on social media including many young fans, co-founded Betr, a “microbetting-focused gaming company” that allows users to make monetary bets on specific plays or events, rather than betting on a team losing or winning a game. Paul appears to be hoping that the instant gratification of making money on small bets drives his young audience to Betr. Additionally, Paul has previously been accused of promoting gambling to kids.

Betr also appears to be targeting users on social media platforms that are frequented by young people, including TikTok and Instagram. The company has large followings on both platforms.

Other right-leaning influencers, including professional poker player Dan Bilzerian and gambling streamer Trainwreck (real name Tyler Niknam), have worked as sponsors for gambling companies in the past.

Major media companies are getting in on the sports betting action

Other outlets and platforms in the right-wing media ecosystem have aligned themselves with the gambling and sports betting industry.

Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News and Fox Sports, is associated with Fox Bet, a mobile app and website that allows users to make monetary bets on professional sport competitions and play casino games.

Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch has boasted about Fox’s foray into the sports betting world, describing the venture as “a huge opportunity” for Fox Sports’ portfolio.

And in 2021, Fox acquired right-wing sports website Outkick, which includes sports wagering and betting infrastructure. During a 2021 quarterly meeting with investors, Murdoch celebrated Outkick as an outlet that “will deepen our investment in the sports wagering ecosystem.”

The right-leaning media company Barstool Sports, founded by misogynist Dave Portnoy, operates Barstool Sportsbook, a sports betting platform and mobile app that is associated with Hollywood Casino.

Adolescent gambling addiction on the rise

Reports indicate that gambling addictions are increasing among teens and children, and experts are sounding the alarm.

The legal age to gamble in the United States is 18 or 21 years old depending on the state. This has not stopped influencers and gambling and sports betting companies from promoting their products and games to adolescents.

The earlier kids are exposed to gambling, the more likely they are to become addicted to the practice, according to a gambling treatment organization. Gambling addiction has the potential to “completely derail a person’s life,” cause mental health complications, and become a “gateway drug” to other adrenaline-inducing and potentially dangerous activities like drug use.

According to research from the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors, four to six percent of high school students are addicted to gambling. Compared to the one percent of adults addicted to the activity, this is a worrisome trend.

Researchers point to adolescents' underdeveloped brain functioning and emotionally driven decision making to understand why teens and children fall victim to gambling addiction.

Some sports betting and gambling groups have been fined for targeting their offerings to people under the legal gambling age.

While speaking with ABC News, Gary Schneider, a national board member of Stop Predatory Gambling, explained that these companies are targeting young users. “They want the next generation. They label it gaming,” Schneider said. “It's really gambling."

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Bitcoin

How Crypto-Backed Ponzi Schemes Endanger Our Banking System

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) last week raises serious issues far more significant than the obvious ones cited by the financial press and a broad range of Washington politicians.

Chief among these are bank loans against dubious assets. That’s not getting much if any attention in the news or from Washington and is likely to soon be swept under the rug, allowing needlessly risky banking practices to continue.

Before its collapse last week, SVB made loans against Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The question: why is any bank anywhere allowed to accept crypto as collateral for loans?

Why do banking regulators allow our federally insured and regulated banks make loans using magic internet money as collateral? That’s a crazy policy, no different than allowing banks to accept buckets of ice cubes in winter as collateral, even though they melt come spring and evaporate in summer.

Bitcoin and its imitators are not money. They are not currency. They’re hardly used to buy and sell, an unsurprising fact given that by design the Bitcoin system can process only seven transactions per second compared to many thousands of transactions per second for credit cards.

Indeed, except for laundering proceeds from drug trafficking as well as hiding assets from creditors, estranged spouses, and the tax police, cryptocurrencies have no use.

High-tech Ponzi Scheme

Cryptocurrencies and their cousins, Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs—are just a high-tech Ponzi scheme. Instead of Charlie Ponzi or Bernie Madoff personally running the con, the crypto scam relies on decentralized computer blockchain and “mining” of mathematical solutions.

Bitcoin’s supposed inventor, who went by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, has never been identified. He or she has since vanished, leaving holders with a digital string worth only as much as the next fool, or crook, will pay for this imaginary asset.

Early participants in Ponzi schemes profit mightily if they cash out while the gullible souls who get sucked in later wipe out. That is what happened to SVB, America’s 16th largest bank, which was big on crypto loans.

Many Bitcoin “investors” have already been wiped out as the “market cap” of Bitcoin plummeted from nearly $1.3 trillion in 2021 to about $389 billion on Friday, down almost 70 percent.

Why do banking regulators allow our federally insured and regulated banks to make loans using magic internet money as collateral? That’s a crazy policy, no different than allowing banks to accept buckets of ice cubes in winter as collateral, even though they melt come spring and evaporate in summer

Silicon Valley Bank is just one of many federally insured financial institutions that accept crypto currency as collateral for loans. Some banks will loan you 90 percent of the seeming value of your crypto, though 50 percent loan-to-value is more common and that appears to be the standard at SVB based on its web pages.

Zero Interest Crypto Loans

All sorts of financial news outlets offer advice on borrowing against crypto. These include NerdWallet, and the increasingly naïve and unreliable Forbes. People with crypto can even borrow at zero interest. Gadzooks!

For a sober look at the big risks of crypto loans read Investopedia’s essay.

In the wake of the second largest bank failure in history, you should be deeply concerned that for more than four decades we have failed miserably at regulating banks. That history contrasts with the period from 1935 until voters abandoned the moderating and successful New Deal banking rules in favor of Reaganomics.

We took a wrong turn when the prudent New Deal banking regulations in effect from 1935 were killed by Reaganomics, which re-regulated banks to reduce regulations and increase the risk of financial institutions failing. (There is no such thing as deregulation, only new regulation, which in our time on terms typically means regulations favoring corporations, including banks, over customers, financial prudence, and public safety.)

Congress’s Role Is Critical

What we need now are Congressional hearings to examine the reasons that cryptocurrencies can be collateral for bank loans.

Even if you don’t own Bitcoin or its growing list of alternatives, this story matters to you for multiple reasons.

Your money is only insured up to $250,000. Any money above that isn’t insured. That means if you’re a trustee of a nonprofit, for example, and it’s got $1 million in the bank, you or the organization you help lead is at risk of being wiped out in a bank failure.

The federal government is covering all deposits for SVB and at Signature Bank in New York, which failed Sunday. But that doesn’t mean it always will. During an earlier banking crisis nonprofits with more than the guarantee then in effect of $100,000 lost their deposits above that sum, which got very little news coverage at the time.

If people want to buy crypto, they should be free to do so. But they should not be allowed to put our bank deposits and investments at risk by using these digital tokens as collateral for loans. After all, it’s your, and my bank deposits, along with those of businesses, nonprofits, and our governments that the banks use to make loans, so it’s not like we don’t have a deep interest in blocking crypto of any kind as collateral for loans.

Reprinted with permission from DC Report.

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