Barbarians at the bookstore

The transaction is complete. The price has been paid. And Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey has sold out the American people once again.

When Cory Booker joined nearly every Republican in the Senate to pass the GENIUS Act, he did not merely vote for a piece of legislation.

Long ago, Booker picked a side in the class war that has been raging against working Americans for half a century.

With the vote for weak cryptocurrency regulation, he made it absolutely certain which side that was.

Let us examine the ledger.

On one side: Donald Trump and his family, whose crypto ventures—including the USD1 stablecoin launched mere weeks before the vote—have generated over $1 billion in profits, vaulting the president 118 spots on the Forbes 400 list.

On the other side: the ordinary Americans of New Jersey and beyond, watching their paychecks shrink under the relentless erosion of inflation, unable to afford homes, unable to save for retirement, unable to escape the grinding reality that the game has been rigged against them.

Cory Booker looked at these two groups and made his choice.

He chose to hand the Trump family a regulatory green light to print themselves billions while handing working families nothing but the promise that their dollars will continue to rot.

He chose to enable a system where the President of the United States profits directly from legislation he signed into law—a level of corruption so brazen that it would have brought down a Roman emperor.

The corruption runs deeper than the Trump family’s bank accounts.

It runs straight through the $130 million the crypto industry spent in the 2024 election cycle.

It runs through the maximum individual donation Sam Bankman-Fried gave to Cory Booker—the same Sam Bankman-Fried now residing in federal prison for orchestrating one of the largest financial frauds in American history.

It runs through a political system where a pile of $5,700 checks buys a senator’s vote to legalize the very machinery that produced the fraudsters who wrote them.

Booker stood on the floor of the Senate and dared to complain about Donald Trump “grifting on crypto himself.”

He called it “ridiculous” that a president and his family who made billions from the industry were shaping its rules without ethics provisions. He accused Republicans of walking away from bipartisan negotiations.

Then he voted for the crypto bill anyway.

This is the essence of the class war’s fifth column: the politicians who talk like populists and vote like plutocratic parasites.

Who decry the corruption in the morning and enable it by evening. Who collect their campaign checks from convicted fraudsters and then pretend surprise when the system produces more fraud.

What did the American people get from this transaction? Nothing.

Our dollars continue to lose value while crypto billionaires hedge against the inflation that working people cannot escape.

The financial system grows more fragile while stablecoins—the preferred payment method for terrorists, cartels, and ransomware attackers—are welded directly to the banking system.

Consumer protections vanish while the crypto industry boasts that it “got what it paid for.”

The GENIUS Act allows stablecoin reserves to be held as uninsured deposits, creating a doom loop between the crypto casino and traditional finance.

When the next crash comes—and it will come, because this industry has all the stability of a house built on a blockchain—the taxpayers will be left holding the bag.

Just like 2008. Just like the savings and loan crisis. Just like every other time Wall Street gambled and Main Street paid.

Cory Booker will be on the list of those who made it possible.

The tragedy is that he knew better. He stood in that committee room and spoke the truth about what was happening.

He knew the Trump family was profiting, but felt indebted for the Park Avenue fundraiser they held for his first Senate campaign.

He knew the ethics provisions were missing. He knew the negotiations had been sabotaged.

And then he voted yes.

That is not bipartisanship. That is not a compromise. That is a veteran of the class war who was never on our side, handing your enemy the ammunition to finish off his own constituency at the moment of battle.

Elizabeth Warren stood on that same floor and warned her colleagues: the GENIUS Act folds stablecoins directly into the financial system while applying weaker safeguards than banks must follow.

She reminded them that the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000—also bipartisan, also hailed as innovative—paved the way for the 2008 crash that destroyed 10 million homes.

Booker voted for it anyway.

So let the record show: when the choice was between working families and crypto billionaires, Cory Booker chose the billionaires. After all, more than 50 of them have contributed cash to his campaigns, and ordinary people only voted for him.

When the choice was between protecting the financial system we all rely upon and enriching the Trump family, Cory Booker chose the Trumps.

When the choice was between standing with his constituents and standing with Sam Bankman-Fried, Cory Booker chose the convicted felon.

The people of New Jersey sent him to Washington to fight for them. Instead, he enlisted in the army that has been waging war against them for decades.

And when the history of this second Gilded Age is written, his name will appear not among the defenders of the republic, but among the collaborators who opened the gates and sold his book to the barbarians.