Reposted by Brian Baresch
There is a moment at the very very end of Abdul El-Sayed's podcast with Ezra Klein (book recommendation section) where he talks about the idea of "speaking truth to pain" and this will be staying with me for an extremely long time. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...
![The bill’s proponents describe the Clarity Act as providing “clear rules of the road” for digital assets, painting Democrats who oppose to a bill as inexplicably standing in the way of clear guardrails for crypto. “A no vote tomorrow kills the toughest ethics reform this country has ever put on the books, kills consumer protections for every American holding digital assets, and hands the future of this industry to our foreign competitors,” threatened Senator Lummis on Twitter.11
But regulations were previously, if belatedly, being enforced in the crypto sector by the SEC, which applied laws that cover a broad range of financial assets that fit the definition of an investment contract. Courts repeatedly upheld this application to the crypto sector — much to the chagrin of deep-pocketed crypto firms like Coinbase, Ripple, and Gemini, who responded with hundreds of millions in lobbying and saw their cases dropped under Trump [Quid pro quo]. Facing what they viewed as an existential threat from an SEC demanding they play by the same rules as other industries, the crypto sector spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for the Clarity Act and electing lawmakers who would let them write their own rules. The result is not “clear rules of the road”, it’s industry-drafted deregulation with a loophole-ridden ethics section bolted on only after Republicans realized that even the pro-crypto Democrats installed with the help of $130 million in industry spending wouldn’t sign off on a bill placing no limits on Trump’s historic grift.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:exrxvyu6bpoym6mbnctke5tn/bafkreihs7egzwealhou5yd64db7rgm74prlm2hcskcoqormzkn3m6iomz4)
