You know those movies where impoverished miners, fresh from the mines, stand in line for the only store in town, paying with a fistful of some tattered and unrecognizable currency? Did you ever feel wistful for such a time? It might just be your lucky day, as giant corporations are trying to figure out ways to squeeze even more dollars out of consumers and workers.
The news that both Walmart and Amazon are considering issuing stablecoins isn’t only bad because it would shift your attempt to get a deal on a lawn chair or into the dumb world of crypto—though that is plenty bad. But it would also create a patchwork economy, one where your money is good at one place, but not another.
Walmart may soon have a new way for you to buy that cheap lawn chair.
Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to other currency, typically the U.S. dollar. You still buy and sell via the blockchain, but the value of the coin doesn’t swing wildly the way we typically think of bitcoin pricing going off the rails because another currency backs it.
But even if stablecoins are safer to use than tying all your money up in the $TRUMP memecoin, they present a different problem if companies can issue their own coins. Your Walmart stablecoins might get you a sweet deal there if you use the WalCrypto or CryptoMart or whatever terrible name the app will eventually have, but what if you find a better deal at Amazon on that lawn chair?
Well, sorry. You aren’t going to be able to use that Walmart stablecoin at Amazon if you want the cheapest lawn chair. For that, you’ll need some Amazon stablecoin. Did you see Delta is running a super deep discount on trips to London? You’ll need the Delta stablecoin and the Delta app. You get the picture.
Companies are interested in this because issuing their own currency—which, no matter how you dress it up, is exactly what this is—allows them to sidestep the significant costs of payment processing and other banking fees. It brings banking in-house, and the attraction for big companies is obvious.
But for the consumer, it shifts away from universal payment acceptance—your Visa is pretty much recognized everywhere and requires no complicated shenanigans to process—into a Byzantine proposition of payments that only work in one place. It also requires you to tie up some amount of your actual money in different coins for different companies, making it more difficult to spend freely.
Trump holds up a signed executive order regarding cryptocurrency in the Oval Office of the White House, on Jan. 23, in Washington.
This move might not be so worrisome under any other presidential administration, one that actually understands it is the job of the government to protect consumers. Instead, we have President Donald Trump, who made $57 billion from crypto last year and who is turning the White House into a sales room for his meme coin. The Securities and Exchange Commission just dropped one of the few cryptocurrency cases remaining, letting cryptocurrency exchange Binance off the hook for $4.3 billion shortly after Binance started cozying up to Trump’s World Liberty Financial. Neither Trump the person nor Trump the administration has any genuine interest in protecting consumers when it comes to crypto.
The Trump administration is also not terribly interested in regulating corporations much at all. Instead, it’s all about nixing research into employee exposures to toxic chemicals and gutting the agencies overseeing workplace safety. The latter particularly helped former shadow president Elon Musk, who faced a host of regulatory investigations before his $250 million propelled Trump back into the presidency. Musk also managed to get Trump to render the National Labor Relations Board nonfunctional by stripping it of a quorum, a convenient thing for a guy who faced constant investigations and lawsuits over his treatment of workers.
So what could be better than allowing Musk to basically run a company town? Which business leader in America has displayed a more conscientious, pro-worker stance than Musk? It’s sure to be just fine that Musk’s SpaceX employees voted to turn the site of the SpaceX launchpad into a town, Starbase, Texas.
It’s part of a larger overall project by Musk to build company towns all over, or towns completely controlled by one person or company. Sure, America outlawed payment in company scrip nearly 100 years ago, as the practice often left miners brutally in debt, but why should that be any obstacle, really?
The United States spent a long time crawling out of the era when corporations could control every aspect of a worker’s life, even how they were paid and where they could spend their money. But so much of the modern conservative project is about dragging the country back into that past, where being a worker or consumer came with little to no protection. It’s the very worst RETVRN.
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