Sunday January 1, 2023; 2:54 PM EST
- When a government agency or function that oversees and guards against the excesses of a particular industry has been infiltrated and dominated by figures from the industry, essentially ending the regulatory function and replacing it with the sham appearance of oversight, they call that regulatory capture. A section of the Wikipedia article on the subject suggests, for example, that the Federal Communication Commission has been captured by the media industry that the FCC is meant to regulate. As a result, you might expect to see larger numbers of radio and tv stations owned by smaller numbers of companies, and increased difficulty for smaller start-ups and for companies attempting to broadcast the voices of underrepresented groups. This progression would serve monied interests and would degrade the quality of democracy, demoralizing and alienating citizens as a result. It's such a destructive process that it deserves more attention in society, in the writing of columnists, bloggers, and reporters.#
- The destructive process called regulatory capture applies to political parties more clearly than we tend to say. Our recently deceased representative to the U. S. House, Jackie Walorski, was a deeply faithful party member and classic sort of back bencher, I thought. Her social media streams mentioned many events she attended in parts of the Ind.-2nd House District where you'd be pretty sure the audience was already made up of her fans, and next to no events where she's come into the city and speak with Democratic voters. In that sense she seemed to understand her service in the House as service to her party, not service to her district. In a country deeply gerrymandered to serve party interests, especially in Indiana, gerrymandering captures legislative function for a political party, serving as proof that our parties enjoy thinking of themselves as mechanisms of state capture. So much for democracy.#
- (Paragraph 1 revised from a 12/31/22 posting.)#