Marble Falls Chris Lahane has built an almost legendary political legacy over the last 20 years back to his Obama days, within the Democratic Party ranks, and as a wildly compensated gun-for-hire to a laundry list of tech companies, regardless of the questionable program of his commercial activities. All of which makes him hard to ignore, as a recent profile of his work for the cryptocurrency industry in The New Yorker detailed. I’m not going to rehash the pros and cons of his questionable values in service to crypto, Airbnb, and other outfits. Let’s just say that would be a longer conversation.
What interested and, I guess honestly, disturbed me the most, was his basic premise that these tech companies have become “the most powerful cohort in politics,” as the reporter summarized his views. What he said directly was a face slap, mic drop:
“At one point, organizations like labor or political parties had the ability to organize and really turn out large numbers of voters…If Airbnb can engage fifteen thousand hosts in a city, that can have an impact on who wins a city council race or the mayoralty. In a congressional or Senate race, fifty thousand votes can make a difference. The platforms are really the only ones who can speak to everyone now.”
The reporter, Charles Duhigg, overlaid Lahane’s argument noting that,
Today, Internet platforms have the bigger reach; a tech company can communicate with hundreds of millions of people by pushing a button. Of course, simply having a huge user base doesn’t guarantee that [they] can get everything [they] want. Voters respond only to enticements that they find persuasive. But companies like Airbnb, Lehane understood, could make arguments faster, and more efficiently, than nearly any political party or other special-interest group, and this was a source of considerable power.
All of that is enough to force us to step back and wonder how to meet this challenge that has emerged so powerfully, and it doesn’t even mention the obvious: these tech companies and their masters are as rich as Croesus! The article’s real point is not how tech companies can mobilize a base bigger than the rest of us can, but that they are now using their deep and seemingly limitless pockets to implement Lahane’s devastating tactic of “flooding the zone” with money. On a national scale, we’re seeing Elon Musk’s antics and crazy money PAC supporting Trump while he spews daily on X-Twitter. The crypto gang put together PACs with more than $170 million to pour into federal and races in order to escape and mold regulations. Candidates are chosen as object lessons by Lahane, his clients, and copiers to punish with huge donations to unseat them in order to herd others in line in their desire to get re-elected and not stand out from the herd by opposing tech policy objectives.
Between the federal tax and general policy drift that allowed these behemoths to grow unregulated and unprincipled, politicians who now toady to them, and a Supreme Court that has abetted limitless billionaire and corporate political contributions, unmatchable by mere citizens and existing mass organizations, “Houston, we have a problem.”