America on Droogs

 

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR>>
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+ So what have Elon and the Droogs been up to this week?

+ Even though the FDIC is funded by banks, not the federal tax dollars, Musk’s team of droogs raided its employee databases and ordered the mass firings of federal bank examiners. What could go wrong that didn’t already go wrong to bring the FDIC into existence? A lot in the crypto/meme-coin late-capitalist economy.

+ Consider Argentina, where the anarcho-capitalist and Trump acolyte Javier Milei is now under investigation for encouraging his followers to buy the LIBRA crypto, which soon collapsed by 96%, wiping out $4.4 billion of its market cap in just a few hours.

+ Here’s Yanis Varoufakis on Milei’s crypto scam:

On Friday 14th, Argentina’s President Milei tweeted about the $LIBRA coin, encouraging his followers to buy it on the grounds that it would “help fund small businesses and start-ups”. As if that weren’t enough, he shared a link for people to buy it online. Naturally, within a few hours, $LIBRA’s price shot up. Many more people, trying to escape the poverty that Millei’s policies have subjected them to, rushed in to buy. Alas, soon after the price of $LIBRA crashed and they lost their money.

This is a standard tactic by crypto scammers. It is known as a ‘rug pull’: draw in naïve buyers only to stop trading and run with their money. But when the President of the country does it, it is more than a scam, a scandal. It is a crime.

More broadly, this incident confirms how dangerous the illusion of apolitical, non-state, money is. Money can never be anything other than state-based. That we need to democratise our public money is, of course, crucial. But any attempt to privatise money, however well-meaning its adherent might be, is bound to end in tears and to empower an oligarchic circle. End of story.

+ Danny Nelson reports for Coinbase that months before the memecoin scandal Hayden Davis, a co-creator Libra, bragged of sending money to Javier Milei’s sister saying of the Argentine president in a December text message: “We can also have Milie tweet and meet in person and do promo. I control that nigger. I send $$ to his sister and he signs whatever I say and does what I want. Craziest shit.”

+ In an interview on Argentine TV, Milei claimed it wasn’t his fault investors who saw his Tweets about Libra were scammed, “I didn’t promote it; I just shared it”.

+ Is the Libra hustle that much different than the Trump Family meme-coin pump and dump, where Trump and select insiders made off with more than $100 million trading fees and the small investors seduced by Trump’s pre-inauguration endorsement lost billions in the apparently legal swindle?