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[### Crypto industry amasses colossal war chest for elections

Politico

https://www.politico.com › news › 2025/07/15 › crypto...](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/15/crypto-super-pacs-war-chest-key-house-votes-00452356)

1 day ago — Since the 2024 campaign ended, crypto firms have doubled down: The PAC network has raised $109 million since Election Day. The latest ...

A super PAC group funded by cryptocurrency companies will enter the upcoming midterm elections with more than $140 million in the bank, according to new fundraising data shared first with POLITICO — a mammoth sum that now looms large over an effort to pass industry-friendly legislation in the House this week.

The group, known as Fairshake, raised $52 million in the first half of 2025, piling onto an already huge sum of crypto campaign cash that could be wielded against lawmakers who oppose the industry’s Capitol Hill agenda — and boost the political fortunes of those who support it.

The PAC network’s fundraising highlights how top crypto firms are plowing ahead with a lobbying strategy that overtly uses political spending to get their way from Congress. The group includes three affiliated super PACs — Fairshake, Protect Progress and Defend American Jobs — that collectively spent $135 million supporting industry allies and taking down crypto critics in Congressional races across the country last year.

Spending by the group in the 2024 campaigns helped take down key roadblocks to the industry’s policy agenda, including former Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown, who lost his Ohio re-election campaign to Republican Bernie Moreno — a crypto enthusiast who benefited from more than $40 million of crypto PAC spending. The PACs also boosted industry supporters in dozens of other House and Senate races across the country, including the California Democratic Senate primary and hotly-contested House races in Alabama, Arizona and Virginia.

Since the 2024 campaign ended, crypto firms have doubled down: The PAC network has raised $109 million since Election Day. The latest fundraising haul comes as the House is preparing to take up landmark crypto legislation this week that would help legitimize digital assets as mainstream financial products and craft bespoke new rules governing the sector.

“Fairshake is stronger than ever as we remain focused on our mission of building lasting support for crypto and blockchain innovation,” said Josh Vlasto, spokesperson for the PAC group. “We are building an aggressive, targeted strategy for next year to ensure that pro-crypto voices are heard in key races across the country.”

The PAC is primarily funded by three companies: the venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, which invests heavily in digital asset startups, and the crypto firms Coinbase and Ripple.

Fairshake’s latest fundraising haul includes $25 million donated by Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, along with previously announced contributions from Ripple Labs, Uniswap Labs, and the crypto entrepreneur Robert Leshner.

Coinbase’s chief policy officer, Faryar Shirzad, said in a statement that “crypto is already woven into America’s financial fabric,” and the company is “committed to fighting for the consumer protections and financial empowerment” that digital asset owners “deserve.”

The top Washington priority for the group’s top donors is a GOP-led crypto market structure bill expected to go to the House floor on Wednesday that seeks to create a first-ever crypto regulatory regime by divvying up oversight of digital assets between securities and commodities regulators.

Republicans leading the push for that bill are seeking to win over as many Democrats as they can ahead of the floor vote in order to show that the measure has political viability in the Senate, where bipartisan support is needed to clear a 60-vote threshold. A similar GOP-led proposal passed the House with 71 Democratic votes last year — as Fairshake was beginning to ramp up for the 2024 campaign — but concerns over the Trump family’s business entanglements in crypto may make matching that figure difficult this week.

Some Democrats are considering voting against the sweeping market structure measure but supporting a second, narrower crypto bill affecting so-called stablecoins that the House is expected to send to President Donald Trump’s desk on Thursday.

The crypto super PACs, though, have signaled that the vote breakdown on the broader bill, led by House Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.), will be their primary consideration as they weigh how to deploy their 2026 haul. The group spent more than $30 million benefiting House Democrats during the last campaign.

A non-profit dark money group that is affiliated with the Fairshake PACs called the Cedar Innovation Foundation said in a statement Monday that Hill’s so-called CLARITY Act is “the most important vote members will take this Congress.”

// Trump Border Czar Tom Homan: ‘There Will Be No Amnesty’ | The Conversation

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/banks-and-the-trump-administration-see-opening-to-bring-back-wall-street-casino-in-coronavirus-crisis/

no lnx

Banks and the Trump administration see opening to bring back Wall Street casino in coronavirus crisis

Written by Joan McCarter / Daily Kos April 12, 2020

The banksters are gonna bankster. Right now, they are gleefully rubbing their hands together as if they were washing coronavirus away, but in anticipation of the rollback of regulations they’ve been under since the last big economic crisis. You remember it—the one that they created a dozen years ago that nearly brought the global economic system down. Since then, they’ve been chafing under the modest rules imposed by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. But those rules are being eased under the current economic and public health crisis, and if the banksters have their way, there will be no going back.

The Federal Reserve and other regulators are loosening the rules on how much capital banks have to hold to be able to absorb losses; are allowing smaller banks to take on a higher debt load; and the Trump administration has delayed rules that would make them prepare against potential losses and set up systems to minimize risks. Trump’s cronies are doing their best to figure out how to weaken all these rules and turn Wall Street into a casino again. They see this as an opportunity, but the top Democrats in charge of banking oversight vow to fight.

“While our federal regulators, agencies and financial institutions must take action to protect consumers and our economy, I must emphasize that it is unacceptable to use this crisis as an excuse to justify rollbacks of important financial regulations that are in place to protect our financial system and economy,”Rep. Maxine Waters, chair of the House Financial Services Committee,warned last month. “Wall Street will take advantage of anything to chip away at commonsense financial protections,” Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, told Politico. “Right now, as we deal with the economic fallout of coronavirus, we need the financial watchdogs to keep a close eye on the financial system. We need to be doing everything we can to protect hardworking Americans, not helping Wall Street and big banks skirt regulations.”

Banks do need to have flexibility to make loans and keep businesses and individuals afloat. But they also need to not play roulette with the global economy, and Wall Street certainly has done nothing in the past 12-plus years to indicate it was going to watchdog itself.

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https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/07/17/sec-climate-risks-disclosure/

 Karen Savage

A bill that would require public companies to disclose the risks posed to their business by climate change passed a crucial committee vote in the House on Wednesday.

The House Financial Services Committee passed the Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2019, which was introduced by Illinois Rep. Sean Casten in 2018. The bill would require the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to develop and implement guidelines for companies on disclosing climate risks. The SEC would be required to make the information available to the public on its website.

“Climate change is a risk to the stability of the global financial system,” Casten said. “This bill presents a market-based solution to understand the impact of a changing climate on companies and provide investors, lenders, and insurers with better information.”

The bill now moves on to a vote by the full House, and if it passes, on to the Senate. With the Senate still controlled by Republicans, it is unlikely to have enough support.

Companies are currently required to disclose the risks that other issues—including lawsuits, significant corporate events and other business trends—pose to their business in annual SEC reports known as 10-Ks. But they are not required to specifically disclose risks posed by climate change.

A study by ClimateWire in 2016 found companies’ voluntary risk disclosures are often vague, with little useful information for investors. Because there are no standard guidelines for measuring and reporting climate risk, comparing risk from company to company is difficult, if not impossible.

The Climate Risk Disclosure Act would require companies in the finance, insurance, transportation, electric power, mining and non-renewable energy sectors to disclose direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and to disclose the total amount of fossil fuel-related assets owned or managed by those companies. Companies would be required to use specific parameters for climate scenario analyses and to disclose the methods used in calculating the social cost of carbon. That makes it easier for investors to compare companies based on their climate risk.

Fossil fuel companies have long been accused of not providing complete, consistent or transparent information on the risk climate change poses to their business.

Exxon is currently facing a lawsuit by the New York attorney general’s office for allegedly deceiving investors for years by deliberately downplaying the climate risks to its business and long-term financial health.

In recent years, BP, Exxon, Shell, Chevron and many other major fossil fuel companies have faced intense shareholder pressure to disclose their climate risks. While some have begun to deal more transparently with the issue, many continue to reject shareholder requests.

A law requiring disclosure will help shareholders make better-informed investment decisions, said Danielle Fugere, president of As You Sow, a nonprofit that advocates for corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy.

“Climate change is very important to investors and shareholders because climate will impact every facet of the economy, from agriculture to supply chains to realty, we’re already seeing those impacts,” Fugere said.

“It’s impossible to predict the next PG&E bankruptcy will be—that was a bankruptcy related to climate change that nobody saw coming last year.”

PG&E, California’s largest utility, has been found liable for several of the state’s largest wildfires, with climate change intensifying the conditions that lead to them. The company’s shareholders have lost more than $10 billion since the company filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.

More than 50 investor and advocacy groups sent a letter last week to Casten and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment, in support of the bill.

“Ensuring climate risk disclosure is standardized will allow companies and investors—especially those managing state employee pension funds and other long-term portfolios—to plan for a low-carbon future, and that science and data guide the process,” the groups wrote in the letter.

Casten said residents in his home state are already feeling the effects of climate change and said it’s crucial that investors understand the risks.

“In just the past few decades rising temperatures have worsened extreme weather events; wildfire seasons are longer; in Illinois the painting season has been shortened from seven months to six months. Mosquitoes are expanding their territory, spreading tropical disease. Two feet of sea-level rise is already baked in,” Casten said.

“What does that mean if you are a property manager investing in assets on Miami beach? What does that mean if you are a seed developer who has seeds that are not going to be able to germinate at the rising temperatures in my home state of Illinois?

“If you are an investor, you would like to know the answers to those questions.”

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http://www.propublica.org/article/jpmorgans-connections-to-the-house-finance-committee

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is on Capitol Hill again today, this time to talk to the House Financial Services committee about the bank's recent multibillion-dollar trading loss. According to his prepared testimony, Dimon plans to deliver basically the same remarks he gave the Senate banking committee last week, apologizing but giving few details.

His Senate hearing was hardly a grilling; senators mostly praised him for his "emphasis on continuous quality improvement," in the words of Senator Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

As we charted last week, JPMorgan happens to have plenty of connections to the Senate committee. The House committee where Dimon is appearing today has its own ties to the bank. Congressmen and staff from the committee have gone to JPMorgan and its lobbying firms. Members have also gotten hefty campaign contributions from the bank's PACs and employees.

The House Connections

JPMorgan has two in-house lobbyists with connections to the House Financial Services committee.

There are also three former congressional staffers with committee ties at firms currently lobbying for JPMorgan:

Data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics also shows how representatives on the committee have benefited from the generosity of JPMorgan's employees and PACs.

In the 2012 election cycle, JPMorgan's PACs and employees have so far given $168,000 to members of the committee. About 80 percent of that came from one of the bank's PACs.

Despite the hearings, neither the House nor Senate is actually conducting investigatons of JPMorgan's losses. But the Department of Justice is, along with five of JPMorgan's regulators — the FDIC, SEC, CFTC, OCC and the Fed. Lest you find that load of government acronyms as bewildering as Dimon said he did, we've also laid out their various investigations, and in a few cases, their own JP Morgan connections.

The SEC

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into how JPMorgan disclosed risks to shareholders. SEC chairman Mary Schapiro outlined in testimony to the House today the various kinds of disclosure the SEC can target, without going into details on JPMorgan.

JPMorgan has two former SEC enforcement heads working for them now: the company's general counsel is Steven Cutler, who headed enforcement at the SEC from 2001 to 2005. They have also reportedly retained William McLucas from an outside law firm, another SEC enforcement director who spent two decades at the agency.

The CFTC

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is flexing new muscles gained from the Dodd-Frank financial reform. According to the Wall Street Journal, they are subpoenaing internal bank emails to determine if JPMorgan officials made deceptive statements — something that could constitute fraud or manipulation of derivatives market. The CFTC has never brought charges under the new rules, which went into effect last year.

The OCC

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency director's testimony for today echoes what he told the Senate earlier this month. The agency is looking at JPMorgan's risk-management strategy leading up to the losses, and reviewing the OCC's own oversight of the bank.

As ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger wrote recently, this is also something of a test for the OCC under its new commissioner Thomas Curry. The agency has had a reputation for favoring light regulation — including a watered-down version of the Volcker Rule, a Dodd-Frank ban on proprietary trading that some say would stop trades like the one that led to JP Morgan's loss when it goes into effect. Curry cautioned in his testimony for today that the OCC hadn't determined whether JP Morgan's trade would have been banned under Volcker.

The Fed

In his testimony, the legal counsel of the Federal Reserve said that the agency was still looking, but had not yet turned up any evidence of weak risk controls at JPMorgan.

Jamie Dimon sits on the board of the New York Federal Reserve — something that's prompted a proposed bill from Democratic senators that would ban officials of banks that can receive loans from the Fed from serving on any of its boards. JPMorgan and 17 other banks whose execs served on regional Fed boards got emergency loans from the Fed between 2007 and 2009. A government report found no evidence of conflict of interest from the arrangement, but did raise the concern of "reputational risks" from the appearance of one.

The FDIC

The Federal Deposit Insurance Commission chair testified that the FDIC has added extra staff and has "met daily" with JPMorgan employees to take a broader look at the company's risk management beyond the unit that made the losing trades, according to their prepared testimony.

A recent appointee to the board of the FDIC, Jeremiah Norton, is a former executive at JPMorgan Securities. Before that, he was an aide to Ed Royce, R-Calif., who sits on the House finance committee.

The DOJ

The DOJ isn't testifying this morning, but they have started an inquiry into what executives at JPMorgan knew when they initially dismissed the losses. It's not clear what kind of charges could come from that investigation.