And “genius” con artists eager to take their cash
David Dayen, editor of The American Prospect and author of “Monopolized Life in the Age of Corporate Power,” spoke with Jon Stewart to discuss the crypto meltdown.
Dayen summarizes:
As it happens, I was able to discuss the mess at FTX, and the role that politicians and the media played in protecting what we now know to be a fraud scheme, on The Problem With Jon Stewart podcast. Jon and I talked about what happened at FTX, how Sam Bankman-Fried managed to charm elites and buy their silence, and how familiar the whole crypto scam feels, as just a rather dull and well-worn way for financiers to separate people from their money.
Here’s the short version:
This was no boat accident
“Whatever fun name you wanna put on it, it’s the same damn thing we’ve seen over and over again,” Dayen says. It’s like the South Sea Company from the 18th century, one economic historian put it. Like mortgage derivatives and the S&L scandal (a good friend spent the 90’s closing banks for the FDIC), it keeps happening. The same people who profit from finance industry scamming keep doing it, stop government from preventing it, and ensure no one punishes them for it.
Finance is admittedly way out of my area. I leave finance to David. But I’ll make this observation I have repeatedly over the last eight years:
“It is axiomatic in our current political culture,” says Fraser, “that when we say freedom we mean capitalism.” I would add, that when we say capitalism, we mean, principally, one particular style for organizing a business: the modern corporation.
What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy.
We’ve grown so accustomed to seeing our software updated that it mostly occurs in our lives as background noise. But when was the last time corporate capitalism, the peculiar style dominant today, got an upgrade, a new operating system, reform? One that would bring FIRE monsters of our own creation to heel? Capitalism 2.0?
THE HORROR!
I’m “reading” Nobel Peace laureate Maria Ressa’s memoir, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator.” Ressa faces criminal charges in the Philippines for irritating the government of President Rodrigo Duterte that could shut down her online news organization, Rappler, and land her in jail for years.
When you try to change a system, she advises repeatedly, the system fights back.
When it comes to reforming kleptocratic capitalism, we have not even begun to fight.
Update: Because fuck them.