From the Powell Memo to Crypto: How Wealth Keeps Buying the Rules

By Zack Kaldveer

From Wall Street's financial crises to Big Crypto's election war chest, decades of corporate power have reshaped our economy, our laws, and our democracy

Crypto evangelists sold Americans on a revolution in money that would free ordinary people from the grip of powerful banks and Wall Street. Instead, cryptocurrency has become a speculative industry whose billionaires and corporations are spending enormous sums to influence elections, weaken regulations, and shape the laws governing their own profits. Behind the promises of financial freedom lies a familiar story of concentrated wealth buying political power.

In 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell urged the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to organize American business into a formidable political force. As our documentary HEIST: Who Stole the American Dream? reveals, his confidential memo helped reshape American politics and government to serve the interests of big business. Powell insisted that “political power is necessary” and identified the courts as a “vast area of opportunity.” Decades later, Supreme Court rulings, including Citizens United, helped open the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending through independent political committees. Big Crypto would exploit that opening with remarkable force.

Financialization: From Deregulation to Repeated Economic Crises 

Over the following decades, Wall Street and powerful business interests helped transform the economy through deregulation and financialization, increasingly rewarding financial speculation over productive investment and broadly shared prosperity. The consequences were devastating:

• The Savings-and-Loan Crisis: Deregulation and reckless lending fueled the 1980s collapse, leaving taxpayers with a massive bailout.

• The Wall Street Deregulation Era: The repeal of Depression-era banking protections in 1999 helped dismantle safeguards against financial excess.

• The 2008 Financial Meltdown: Risky mortgages, complex financial bets, and inadequate oversight triggered a global economic crisis.

The pattern was unmistakable: privatize profits, socialize losses, and relentlessly pressure lawmakers, courts, and regulatory agencies to dismantle the rules designed to protect consumers, taxpayers, and the broader economy. Today, finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing account for more than 22% of the U.S. economy. 

The Crypto Heist 

Cryptocurrency is the latest incarnation of the financial casino that helped bring down the economy in 2008. Yet much of the industry revolves around speculation: investors buy digital assets hoping someone else will pay more for them tomorrow, rather than because those assets produce anything of value.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls crypto a “hyper-powered example of predatory finance, influence-buying, and corruption.” According to the Federal Reserve's latest household survey, just 2% of American adults used cryptocurrency to buy something or make a payment in 2025, compared with 9% who bought or held it as an investment. Far from replacing traditional money, crypto remains a speculative marketplace driven by investors and gamblers rather than by people using it for everyday purchases. 

Wild price swings, market manipulation, massive frauds like the FTX scandal, and the use of digital assets for money laundering have exposed the dangers of this largely speculative marketplace. And as crypto increasingly intersects with conventional banking and financial markets, the risks may no longer be confined to those willing to gamble.

Crypto Corruption: From Speculation to Political Power 

Big Crypto's most consequential innovation may be its extraordinary campaign to buy political influence. According to Public Citizen, cryptocurrency corporations contributed more than $119 million to federal election efforts by mid-2024, accounting for a staggering 44% of the corporate contributions it tracked that cycle. By the second quarter of 2026, the industry's contributions to super PACs and hybrid PACs had reached $206 million, more than any other industry. 

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was strikingly candid about the industry's political strategy. “Money moves the needle. For better or worse, that's how our system works.” Much of the money he’s referring to flows through super PACs like Fairshake, which reward industry allies and punish critics, often through attack ads exploiting divisive issues unrelated to cryptocurrency. These attacks conceal the industry's real objective from voters, which is to elect lawmakers who will write the rules in its favor.

Rick Claypool of Public Citizen described Fairshake's political war chest as a “corporate Death Star hovering over elections,” threatening candidates who refuse to bow to the industry's demands. Consider former Senator Sherrod Brown, a longtime advocate for tougher regulation of the cryptocurrency industry. After industry-backed groups spent heavily against him in 2024, Fairshake announced plans to spend nearly $30 million to defeat his comeback bid this November.

Big Crypto's political influence extends across party lines. Republicans have embraced the industry's agenda, but as David Dayen and Luke Goldstein documented in The American Prospect, influential Democrats, including Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, have also championed crypto-friendly policies. Fairshake has endorsed 32 House incumbents from both parties, all of whom voted for the industry's favored CLARITY Act.

Lewis Powell urged corporate America to “penalize politically those who oppose it.” More than half a century later, Big Crypto has followed that playbook with chilling precision, pouring millions into rewarding political allies and punishing its opponents. 

Deregulation, Project Crypto, and Trump's Kleptocracy 

Big Crypto has turned America's campaign-finance system into a vehicle for legalized political bribery. Under Donald Trump, Big Crypto's political spending is yielding a spectacular return: an administration willing to dismantle financial safeguards while its president personally cashes in. 

As Eleanor Davis-Diver documented in The American Prospect, federal regulators are advancing Project Crypto, dismantling oversight and rolling back enforcement against an industry notorious for fraud and speculation. Meanwhile, efforts to integrate crypto into conventional banking and financial markets threaten to expose working families to risks reminiscent of the 2008 financial collapse. 

And then there's Trump himself. According to Public Citizen's damning investigation, the president earned at least $1.4 billion from crypto ventures in 2025, while investors in Trump-linked crypto products were left an estimated $4.7 billion underwater, largely in unrealized losses.

The corruption allegations are mounting. On October 22, a federal lawsuit reported by CNBC accused Trump and his family's World Liberty Financial of violating the Constitution's Foreign Emoluments Clause through more than $2 billion in crypto-related deals involving a powerful United Arab Emirates official. The suit alleges that Trump personally profited from transactions involving foreign interests while serving as president.

While Trump enriches himself through an industry his administration is supposed to regulate, millions of Americans are struggling to pay the rent, keep their health insurance, and stay afloat as everyday costs and household debt eat up their paychecks. The contrast is obscene: a president cashing in while working families struggle to get by.

The Political Tide May Be Turning 

But the corporate assault on democracy is encountering resistance. In September, the Senate blocked the crypto industry's prized CLARITY Act, with every Democrat and several Republicans refusing to advance legislation that failed to adequately address Trump's conflicts of interest and other regulatory concerns.

As David Dayen reported in The American Prospect, polling in Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio found overwhelming concern about Big Crypto's electoral influence, comparable to the roughly 79% of voters concerned about Wall Street's political influence. Candidates aligned with Wall Street and Big Crypto are facing unexpectedly competitive races, suggesting that the industry's spending may be provoking a backlash. 

Dayen put it this way, "Populist anger, including anger at the wholesale purchase of elections, is drowning out those attacks in Ohio and elsewhere.” And the lesson here is encouraging. Corporate money can distort democracy, but it can’t guarantee the support of voters who recognize that their government is being sold to the highest bidder.

Stop the Next Heist: Reclaim Our Democracy 

Reversing the damage requires more than defeating a handful of crypto-backed candidates. We must change the rules that enabled this corporate capture of our political system. That means:

• Overturning Citizens United and restoring meaningful limits on corporate election spending, with full disclosure of political donors and expenditures.

• Enacting public financing of elections, giving candidates a viable path to office without dependence on wealthy donors and big business interests, and making elected officials more accountable to the people rather than their biggest contributors.

• Restoring strong financial regulation, including meaningful oversight of cryptocurrency, enforcement against fraud, and protections against another taxpayer-funded economic catastrophe.

• Ending presidential profiteering and conflicts of interest through enforceable ethics laws, financial disclosure, and divestment requirements.

• Electing representatives who answer to voters, not billionaires, and holding accountable those in both parties who put industry profits ahead of the public good.

The Powell Memo helped inspire a corporate political offensive that has reshaped American politics for more than half a century, concentrating wealth and power among America's economic elite. But its architects don't get the final word, and neither do today's crypto billionaires. This November, Americans have another opportunity to reject this corruption, reclaim their democracy, and insist that government serve the many rather than the wealthy few.