Regulatory Capture, Billion-Dollar Mistakes, and ICE Killing a Father
At the Federal Communications Commission, Paramount showered officials with gifts while chasing approval for a billion-dollar deal. The Kennedy Center gala hosted by President Trump prioritized tickets, illustrating how regulatory capture is not a bug but the operating system. A media conglomerate buys goodwill from the very body meant to police it, and the White House rolls out the red carpet.
At the Justice Department, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche admitted to a billion-dollar mistake ahead of his confirmation hearing, a confession Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) brought to reporters. Blanche, a corporate lawyer elevated to police the firms he once served, embodies the revolving door between capital and the state. The mistake is not an aberration — it is the qualification.
As CounterPunch argues, redistribution begins long before markets open. The legal system pre-distributes power by defining property, contract, and corporate personhood in ways that favor capital. The FCC and DOJ episodes are the visible tip: the architecture of rule-making itself is built to serve the ruling class.
Parallel to the capture of regulators is the capture of ideology. PragerU, backed by a billionaire-funded machine led by a former Israeli spy, is pushing racist, neoconservative, pro-war curricula into American classrooms, targeting children with pro-business, pro-Israel messaging. The same class that buys FCC seats and DOJ nominations funds the production of consent.
When the law becomes an instrument of class rule, accountability evaporates. The Trump administration vowed to destroy the International Criminal Court rather than submit to its jurisdiction, while ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine, shot and killed a Colombian father legally working in the U.S. as his three-year-old daughter watched. The victim, 26-year-old Joan Sebastián Guerrero, was a father of a three-year-old girl. State violence at the border and impunity at the Hague share a logic: power protects its own.
The revolving door spins — corporate counsel to top cop, media mogul to regulator, billionaire to curriculum designer — and each rotation tightens the grip. The cost falls on migrants hunted in their neighborhoods, children fed propaganda instead of history, and a father killed in front of his daughter by agents who answer only to capital. Until the legal architecture that pre-distributes upward is dismantled, every confirmation hearing and gala invitation is just another invoice paid by the many for the few.