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Sanders Raises Alarm Over GOP Crypto Bill Designed to 'Enrich Trump and His Billionaire Backers'
"Congress is moving quickly to pass the GENIUS Act, which may make a bad situation much worse," said Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
May 06, 2025
As the Republican Senate majority leader plows ahead with a plan to hold a vote on a cryptocurrency bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders is planning a Wednesday conversation with industry experts regarding the proposed legislation, which his office warns would "enrich Trump and his billionaire backers."
The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act would create a regulatory framework for a type of cryptocurrency called stablecoins. Sanders' (I-Vt.) office said in a Tuesday statement that the bill "threatens the stability of our financial system" and "makes it easier for President [Donald] Trump and his family to continue to engage in corrupt dealmaking enabled through their cryptocurrency, to the great benefit of themselves and their tech oligarch backers."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), another critic of the GENIUS Act, has argued it could facilitate illicit activity and provide little protection for consumer funds.
In February, the advocacy group Consumer Reports warned that the bill lacked consumer protections and could inadvertently allow large tech companies to enter the banking space, as in create currencies, without being subject to the same scrutiny that is applied to traditional banks.
"Under the Trump administration, we have seen a coordinated effort to boost the cryptocurrency industry to directly benefit President Trump and his oligarch allies," said Sanders on Tuesday. He also highlighted that Trump this week promoted a scheduled private dinner for the top holders of the $TRUMP meme coin, effectively soliciting purchases of the crypto token that now accounts for a substantial portion of his net worth.
Also, a stablecoin launched by Trump's World Liberty Financial crypto venture is going to be used by an investment firm backed by the government of Abu Dhabi to complete a $2 billion business deal, according to The New York Times.
"If that's not a troubling form of corruption, I don't know what is," said Sanders of the two cases.
The latest revelations regarding Trump and cryptocurrency appear to have diminished the GENIUS Act's chances of passage, according to The American Prospect.
The GENIUS Act had enjoyed support from a handful of Democratic senators, but a number of them backed off from supporting the bill in its current form over the weekend, writing in a statement that they wanted to see stronger provisions on anti-money laundering, national security, and other issues. "But reading between the lines, it was clearly the Trump corruption that soured them," the Prospect reported.
Sanders said that "in the face of this corruption, you might hope that Congress would step in to clamp down on corruption. Instead, Congress is moving quickly to pass the GENIUS Act, which may make a bad situation much worse."
Axiosreported Tuesday afternoon that Warren and another GENIUS Act critic, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), will introduce the End Crypto Corruption Act on Tuesday. The proposal would bar the president, vice president, members of Congress, and their immediate families from issuing digital assets, like stablecoins, perAxios.
Sanders' conversation will be with Sacha Haworth, the executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a group aimed at reining in Big Tech, and Corey Frayer, the director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, a consumer research and advocacy organization.
The conversation will be livestreamed on his Facebook, X, and YouTube, and through Act.tv.
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After Two Setbacks For Google’s Monopoly, the Fight To Rein in Its Empire Continues
Long given an effective pass for its anti-competitive behavior, the company is finally getting its comeuppance in federal court, and not a moment too soon.
May 02, 2025
Don’t look now, but the federal government just notched not one, but two, major antitrust victories against one of the biggest corporations on Earth.
In the past few decades, digital monopolists like Google have built far-reaching empires impacting almost every facet of our online lives. Long given an effective pass for its anti-competitive behavior, the company is finally getting its comeuppance in federal court, and not a moment too soon.
Back in 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Google for illegally monopolizing the search market. In 2023, this was followed by a second suit over the company’s digital advertising monopoly. In the first case, federal Judge Amit Mehta stated the obvious in his ruling that when it comes to the search engine market, Google is a monopolist; in April, the DOJ pushed an ambitious remedy proposal to dismantle its search monopoly. Google was dealt another blow in April in the second case, where judge Leonie Brinkema agreed that Google has illegally monopolized online advertising.
Antitrust enforcers are now making major strides toward reining in Google’s anti-competitive behavior.
There’s no question that Google’s monopoly is looking more fragile than ever. Even as Big Tech CEOs have bent over backwards to curry favor with the Trump administration, they’ve failed to stop antitrust efforts against them from continuing. And at a time when Meta is also in the antitrust hot seat in court, there’s real reason for optimism when it comes to finally taking Big Tech to task.
Nevertheless, when you consider the scale of Google’s empire, the search and digital advertising lawsuits should be seen as just the beginning of the battle. Sure, anyone who’s used a computer understands just how ubiquitous Google’s search engine is. But less obvious to most people is that it is set to control a media empire bigger than Disney, all while working to dominate the self-driving car market and gobble up promising startups. This doesn’t even get into the AI factor: As the DOJ noted in court, the rapid pace of AI development could further entrench Google’s monopoly if left unchecked.
Take YouTube, Google’s most powerful asset after search. As antitrust suits against Google in the U.S. and abroad have piled up in recent years, YouTube has often felt like a threat hidden in plain sight. Take the issue of advertising on YouTube, for example. The Information, a tech-focused publication, noted last year that Google has a policy of requiring would-be YouTube advertisers to use Google’s in-house DV360 tool. The impact of this rule has, predictably, been to put more money in Google’s pockets while deepening advertisers’ reliance on its services.
For $1.6 billion in 2006, Google was able to take control of what today is the world’s largest video platform, with the deal avoiding antitrust action. Almost 20 years later, there remains no real competitor to YouTube: Though TikTok and Instagram’s Reels compete with YouTube when it comes to short-form video, the service is without a peer in long-form, monetizable content.
In June 2024, a coalition of advocacy groups called on the DOJ to scrutinize YouTube. In their letter, they noted that the platform’s dominance is propped up by bundling practices that make it nearly impossible for rivals to compete. Of specific concern is that smart TVs emerging as a norm in U.S. households could allow Google and YouTube to cement its dominance in home entertainment.
Few moves better illustrate Google’s expansionist mindset (and arrogance in the face of antitrust lawsuits) than its bid to acquire Wiz. Though not a household name, there’s a reason that Google is intent on acquiring it, even after its initial bid was turned down. Despite launching just five years ago, Wiz has grown so fast that it is now used by roughly half of all Fortune 500 companies. By acquiring Wiz, Google will make other corporate giants even more dependent on its services, further fortifying its monopoly status.
Much of the coverage of the Wiz deal centers on its price tag, and for good reason. At $32 billion dollars, the Wiz acquisition stands to be the most expensive in Google’s history. This isn’t just notable because it is occurring in the face of multiple antitrust showdowns. But more unusual is that this figure is 30 times larger than Wiz’s expected revenue for 2025. While the math may seem peculiar at first, there’s likely more than meets the eye here.
Few have better insight into Google’s anti-competitive behavior than Jonathan Kanter, who took the company to court twice when he led the DOJ Antitrust Division under former President Joe Biden. In a recent CNBC interview, Kanter posited that the deal could be a “Trojan horse for Google to get access to data that is increasingly becoming out of its reach.”
In 2006, federal regulators fumbled the ball by allowing the acquisition of YouTube to go through unscathed. The next year, the Federal Trade Commission made the mistake of allowing Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, a deal that would help build and cement the company’s digital advertising dominance. But two decades later, antitrust enforcers are now making major strides toward reining in Google’s anti-competitive behavior. As federal officials work to correct the mistakes of the past, they should continue taking a multifaceted approach to Google’s monopoly.
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The DOGE Days Are Over: Elon Musk and the End of the Techno-Fantasy
For all his bluster and noise, Musk never figured out how to meet people where they are. Utopian tech visions rarely do.
Apr 27, 2025
Elon Musk’s political and cultural influence—once feared as dystopic, transformative, and totalizing—is beginning to resemble a flash in the pan.
Not long ago, Musk seemed poised to remake the world—or at least to meme it into submission. His presence felt not only pervasive but inescapable. He was the heir apparent to techno-authoritarian chic: a “dark MAGA” demigod in a zip-up jacket, preaching a gospel of Martian salvation and machine-learning rapture.
But today, his standing is slipping. Recent reports suggest Musk has fallen out with U.S. President Donald Trump’s inner circle. Cabinet members reportedly clashed with him over his interference in federal agencies; others took him to task for rogue public statements. He drew further public ire for what many saw as a graceless and callous approach to mass firings. Polls show that while many Americans still express interest in the Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE), they overwhelmingly disapprove of Musk at the helm.
Unlike traditional MAGA, Musk’s vision doesn’t look backward into the past. It projects forward—into the void.
Then came his public rebuke in Wisconsin, where a $20 million effort to influence a state Supreme Court election—complete with Musk handing out million-dollar checks at a rally—was soundly rejected by voters. All the while, Tesla faced mounting scrutiny from regulators, and average Americans started attacking the cars themselves.
Now, his jokes have gone stale. X (formerly Twitter) is drifting into irrelevance, and his once-magnetic pull over public discourse feels more like static than signal. The man who once stormed a stage wielding a chainsaw is now being quietly uninvited from the party.
But if this does mark the end of Musk’s political career, it shouldn’t be remembered as a sideshow. Musk represents a recurring fantasy: a transgenerational techno-messianic dream that imagines salvation through systems, transcendence through circuitry.
To understand Musk’s rise and fall, it helps to look backward—specifically, to his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. A Canadian chiropractor and political dreamer, Haldeman led the Canadian chapter of Technocracy Inc., a gray-uniformed movement in the 1930s that believed engineers—not politicians—should rule the world. It was a post-democratic fantasy of optimized control, an early prototype of what we now call algorithmic governance.
When that didn’t pan out, Haldeman joined the Social Credit movement around the time its Quebec chapter began promoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and flirting with homegrown fascism. Censured and disillusioned, he moved his family to apartheid South Africa, a country he praised in his writings as a stronghold of Western Christian values and white self-governance. There, Musk’s father, Errol, built wealth through engineering and real estate ventures, and later acquired part ownership in an emerald mine in Zambia.
Elon Musk inherited this worldview and polished it. His own techno-utopianism is just a shinier version of this old settler dream. The medium changed. But the fantasy didn’t.
Unlike traditional MAGA, Musk’s vision doesn’t look backward into the past. It projects forward—into the void. His vision is of a world run by smart people and smarter machines, with little room for emotional irregularity, biological vulnerability, or democratic friction. In this model, emotion is treated as a bug. The body becomes obsolete.
It’s not just Musk. His outlook is broadly shared among a certain class of technocratic elites who, despite appearing ideologically opposed, converge on a shared goal: the construction of a post-human world. Whether framed as innovation, inevitability, or progress, the underlying premise is the same—merge biology with technology, and minimize the complications of the human condition.
Klaus Schwab, the recently investigated former head of the World Economic Forum—and an advocate of implantable microchips—summarized this new paradigm in a 2022 interview with Swiss broadcaster RTS: “In this new world, we must accept transparency—total transparency. You have to get used to it. It must become integrated into your personality.” He added, “But if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be afraid.”
That same year, Yuval Noah Harari, a senior advisor to the WEF, declared: “We are now hackable animals… The idea that we have a soul, this spirit, and free will—that’s over.”
As the AI wave crested, the tech industry followed suit. Meta launched a child-friendly AI therapist. Microsoft patented chatbot technology to simulate the dead. Apple’s VisionOS 3.0 began muting family group chats based on an “emotional volatility index.” Emotional honesty gave way to managed vibes.
Amid it all, Musk tweeted: “It has become increasingly clear that humanity is the biological bootlicker of AI.” A curious comment from a man who has actively helped to tighten the laces.
But now, the music seems to have stopped. Musk appears increasingly out of step with the moment. For all his bluster and noise, he never figured out how to meet people where they are.
Utopian tech visions rarely do. They tend to hover above the friction of daily life—above labor, land, and limits—before, inevitably, they come crashing back to Earth.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece referred to Klaus Schwab as the likely former head of the World Economic Forum. However, he resigned days before the piece was published. It has been edited to reflect this.
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