The campaign for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat is set to be the most expensive nonpresidential campaign in national history. The single biggest source of money is the cryptocurrency industry, devoting more than $40 million to their top policy goal of defeating Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown, a Democrat.
Polls show the race between Mr. Brown and Republican challenger Bernie Moreno as too close to call. Mr. Moreno is a cryptocurrency evangelist. He supports the industry’s deregulation agenda. Mr. Brown has been one of the biggest impediments to unfettered growth of crypto, helping defeat a Republican proposal to open the door for crypto in employee retirement accounts.
The Blade Editorial Board shares Mr. Brown’s skepticism over the practical use for crypto currency in the legitimate economy. The secrecy inherent in cryptocurrency has been most useful to drug, human, and weapons trafficking, facilitating terrorism, and manipulating currency valuations.
Crypto has been embraced by Donald Trump, who has launched his own branded currency while pledging to use his power if elected president to make the United States the capital of digital currency.
The key to achieving that goal is backing regulators off their oversight mission. Citizens won’t notice until and unless federally insured banks carrying cryptocurrency on their balance sheet implode because of manipulations like those that caused the near overnight collapse of FTX.
The fraud behind the demise of last election cycle’s cryptocurrency darling, Sam Bankman-Fried, has done nothing to slow momentum for the deregulation agenda behind the industry’s campaign contributions.
Ideally, as the single biggest recipient of crypto campaign cash and as a leading evangelist for the industry, Bernie Moreno would use his near constant presence on TV and radio to make the case for his position.
Instead the campaign commercials are about transgender athletes allowed to compete by the NCAA and the Ohio High School Athletic Association, as if that’s a concern for the United States Senate.
Ohio is no different than the rest of the nation. Cryptocurrency is invisible in the $160 million national campaign to elect a Congress beholden to deregulation of digital dollars.
It’s beyond ironic that the TV commercials trying to scare voters about terrorists crossing the border are paid for by an industry heavily used by terrorists. Since cryptocurrency is so important to Mr. Moreno’s Senate campaign, it would be nice to see him produce a commercial that makes his case for deregulation.
First Published October 27, 2024, 4:00 a.m.
