In what may be a first in American history, President Trump just expanded the presidential pardon power to include corporations.
Corporations are artificial legal fictions designed to maximize shareholder wealth. Nonetheless, they can theoretically commit crimes and be indicted for them. According to a 1999 memorandum from the Justice Department, the “important public benefits” of prosecuting corporations include “deterrence on a massive scale,” particularly for “crimes that carry with them a substantial risk of public harm,” such as “financial frauds.”
BitMEX had been charged with violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to implement anti-money laundering (AML) and "know your customer" (KYC) protocols between 2015 and 2020. The founders had pleaded guilty in 2022 and faced probation sentences along with significant financial penalties. BitMEX itself was fined $100 million for its noncompliance.
BUT WAIT!! IT GETS A HELL OF A LOT WORSE
The Crypto Plot Against America’s Gold Reserves
The crypto “industry” was one of the biggest spenders in the 2024 election. It practically single-handedly bought a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, turfing out labor’s most reliable senator, Sherrod Brown, with $40 million in advertising. And it convinced Donald Trump to make a 180 with a big sack of campaign contributions. Back in 2021, Trump said crypto was a “scam,” but now he has his own coin, his media site is in discussions to buy a crypto exchange, and he’s fully bought into the claims that the industry is overregulated.The article goes on to point out that the biggest part of MAGA's heist scheme is to revalue America’s gold reserves, which amounts to a stockpile of about 261 million troy ounces of gold. That’s about 8,133 metric tons. That gold is valued by statute at $42.22 per ounce, or $11 billion in total. But the market price of gold at time of writing is $2,631 per ounce. That’s more than 55 times as much, or a total of $688 billion. The scammer Lummis proposes the Treasury issue new gold certificates based on the market price, and then using the resulting $677 billion in cash to buy Bitcoins. Her kleptocrat bill requires the government to buy up 200,000 Bitcoins a year for five years, until a “strategic reserve” of a million is accumulated.So now that crypto has bought great political influence, it’s time to cash in. How might this happen? The basic idea is to turn the American government into the biggest crypto bag-holder of all time. If the plan goes through, hundreds of billions of dollars of public assets will be spent or leveraged to buy a million Bitcoins, allowing the tiny minority of Bitcoin moguls to finally cash out their holdings into real money. It would be one of the biggest upward transfers of wealth [a/k/a heists] in world history.
At the Financial Times, Toby Nangle explains the various plans. One idea is to loot the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which is largely under the president’s control, and has about $41 billion in net value. A much larger plan has been formally introduced by crypto shill Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY). It’s called the (sigh) Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness Through Optimized Investment Nationwide (BITCOIN) Act, and it identifies several public assets that might be drained. One idea is to reduce the capital reserve requirements at the Federal Reserve from $6.8 billion to $2.4 billion; another is to skim off the Fed’s $6 billion in annual money-printing profits.
A “strategic reserve” of fake money bough for about $700 billion in real money? WTF?? Economists have condemned the reserve plan as a “crypto bailout” for wealthy speculators. Bitcoin’s volatility and lack of intrinsic value make it unfit for national reserves. Paul Krugman argues the scheme is a “rug-pull scam,” comparing it to Argentina’s $Libra token collapse. At present, evidence of explicit theft is circumstantial. However, djt’s actions and track record of criminality align with historical patterns of actual kleptocracy. djt and MAGA elites have weakened oversight by firing inspector generals and directing state resources to allies. That is corruption incarnate. The USSC has gone a long way toward legalizing government corruption in the 2010 Citizens United decision, the 2024 US v Snyder decision and other pro-corruption decisions.
The USSC cynically calls corruption “free speech.” The court has formally rejected all protections against “the appearance of corruption” and “generalized influence” over policymaking. Those decisions staring with Citizens United in 2010 have enabled (1) a vast expansion of dark money, mostly secret spending by nonprofits and shell companies, reaching $1.1 billion in 2024 elections, (2) dominance in politics of a wealthy donor-class dominance where the top 0.01% of donors now account for 42% of federal campaign contributions, and (3) legalized self-enrichment for politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) who leveraged federal court rulings to repay $545,000 in personal campaign loans using post-election donor funds. Collectively, those federal court decisions reflect a broad trend of insulating politicians and donors from accountability while equating money with protected political speech.
Q: Is it hyperbolic or irrational to use the term hyper-kleptocracy or even just kleptocracy to describe djt and his corrupt, authoritarian MAGA wealth and power movement? Or, was government about equally corrupt before djt came on the scene in 2016?
