Crypto Cartel Capital: How Ohio Voters Helped Congress Became A Clearance Sale

Bribery On The Blockchain

The OTHER Bernie

Like AIPAC and the Military Industrial Complex, the crypto cartel isn’t really partisan per se. All 3 lean conservative but what they’re looking for are members of Congress and candidates for Congress willing to sell themselves to a high bidder. Of course they all prefer Republicans, a party that long ago abandoned all but the flimsiest pretense of serving the public good, but they’re willing to support Democrats as well— as long as they’re the type of Democrats unlikely to let morality stand in the way to the PAC’s priorities, proven corruptionist like Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Elissa Slotkin (MI), Jacky Rosen (NV), Shri Thanedar (MI), Shomari Figures (AL).

Yesterday, reporting for Punchbowl’s “Vault,” Laura Weiss took a look at used car salesman and bought-and-paid for Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno’s cartel approved blockchain bill. As the cartel has been requesting for years, Moreno’s bill will create a National Blockchain Deployment Advisory Committee at the Commerce Department, while tasking the secretary with a bigger advisory role. Commerce Secretaries, like Howard Lutnick now. His firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, a major crypto enthusiast, manages over $80 billion in Tether’s reserve assets, a stablecoin under scrutiny for alleged money laundering and sanctions evasion. Lutnick announced a $2 billion Bitcoin lending facility in July 2024, aligning with Trump’s pro-crypto shift. His firm stands to gain from deregulated crypto markets, raising conflict-of-interest hilarity. (Trump’s first regime included sleaze bag Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary; Biden’s most corrupt cabinet member was Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Obama used Penny Pritzker and Clinton used Ron Brown.)

Anyway, the crypto cartel spent over $40 million defeating Sherrod Brown and replacing him with Moreno. Moreno’s top ally on the cartel’s new bill happens to be Tim Sheehy (R-MT), who just happened to be the recipient of $11.3 million worth of efforts to oust Jon Tester and give them the seat.

Weiss noted that aside from being a car salesman, Moreno founded a blockchain business before his election to the Senate, giving him a direct stake in the technology’s success over and above his ties to the cartel’s political machine.

“Crypto,” she wrote, “has already made its mark as a major financial services focal point for the 119th Congress and the Trump administration. The White House launched its own working group on digital asset markets in January. There’s also interest in the House for Commerce to focus more on developing blockchain technology. Florida Reps. Kat Cammack, a Republican, and Darren Soto, a Democrat, have a House bill by the same name as the Moreno-led effort, which is similar to the Senate push but not directly coordinated. Cammack and Soto’s measure would also direct the commerce secretary to take on an advisory role on blockchain issues and create a ‘Blockchain Deployment Program’ at the department.”

She forgot to mention that Soto was a member of the Blockchain 8 way back in the bad old Sam Bankman Fried days, along with other crypto puppets Tom Emmer (R-MN), Ritchie Torres (D-NY), Byron Donalds (R-FL), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Warren Davidson (R-OH), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) and Ted Budd (R-NC). Speaking of which, I wonder how long before the Bankman Fried family guys a Trump pardon for their son.

So this is what we have here— not just some marginal sideshow but the main event: the wholesale auctioning off of public policy to the highest bidder. The crypto cartel is just the latest entrant in a long, sordid lineage of plutocratic influence-buyers— from Big Oil to Big Pharma to the war profiteers with their think tank mouthpieces and Pentagon sinecures. Like AIPAC and Raytheon, the crypto boys aren’t just investing in policy outcomes; they’re buying protection rackets, ensuring that Congress remains a fully owned subsidiary of whoever can fund the next Super PAC blitz.

And just like those other industries, the cartel’s political investments pay off because, thanks in great part to a corrupt Supreme Court, America's political system has normalized corruption. The system is built not to punish this behavior but to reward it. Moreno’s sham bill is just one more example of the rot that festers when campaign finance laws are gutted, when corporate lobbyists ghostwrite legislation and when both parties compete not over who can serve the people better but over who can deliver the highest ROI to their oligarchic patrons. In a functioning democracy, this would be a scandal. In ours, it’s just Wednesday morning.

Hannah Arendt warned of the “banality of evil,” but what we’re living through is the banality of kleptocracy— a society so thoroughly captured by moneyed interests that theft becomes the operating principle of governance. And Orwell, ever prescient, saw the future not just as a boot stamping on a human face, but as a smiling lobbyist replacing that boot with a campaign donation— and an implied threat about the costs of non-compliance. The great danger isn’t just the corruption itself— it’s that we’ve stopped being shocked by it and willing to fight against it.