What Is Wrong With America Today

It isn't capitalism. It's the corporatocracy wearing capitalism's clothes, and a school system that stopped teaching us the difference.

A growing share of young Americans have looked at this country and decided capitalism is the problem. I understand why. I also think they've been handed the wrong name for the thing that's actually robbing them, and nobody in the education system bothered to teach them the difference.

This is a long one. I've tried to back every accusation with a named case, a date, and a source. Both parties get their share because both parties earned it.

Capitalism: an economic system built on private ownership, voluntary exchange, and competition, where businesses win by serving customers better than the next guy.

Crony capitalism: a system where businesses win by securing favors from government, including friendly regulation, bailouts, protected market share, and merger approvals, instead of by competing.

Corporatocracy: the end state of crony capitalism, where large corporations and their lobbyists effectively write the rules the rest of us live under.

Editorial: V64OTD is a one-person outlet. When I say "I," I mean me, an old Texas dude in Fort Worth who has watched this slide happen over a lifetime. What follows is my analysis, built on public records and reporting listed in full at the end.

Capitalism Isn't the Villain in This Story

Here's what the headlines about "young people turning to socialism" leave out. When Gallup asked Americans in 2025 about related ideas, 95% rated small business positively and 81% rated free enterprise positively. Big business drew just 37% positive and 62% negative.

Read that again. Americans aren't rejecting markets. They're rejecting bigness that has escaped accountability.

The numbers for capitalism are slipping, though. Overall support for capitalism fell to 54%, down from 60% in 2021. Among Democrats under 50, only 31% view capitalism positively, compared to 54% in 2010. The youth shift has been building for years. Gallup's 2018 poll found that positive views of capitalism among 18- to 29-year-olds had fallen from 68% to 45% since 2010, and more of them viewed socialism positively (51%) than capitalism (45%).

But researchers who dug into those polls found something telling. Many younger respondents no longer define socialism as central planning and government ownership. To many, it means private production, equality, and fairness. In other words, a lot of young people are asking for a fair market and calling it socialism, because nobody taught them the vocabulary.

Adam Smith, the man most often credited with explaining capitalism, saw the real danger coming in 1776: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Smith wasn't defending big business. He was warning about it.

The Corporatocracy Playbook

Real capitalism says you win by building a better product. The corporatocracy says you win by hiring better lobbyists. Right now, the second strategy is booming.

Federal lobbying hit a record $5.08 billion in 2025, crossing $5 billion for the first time, with nearly 15,800 organizations reporting lobbying activity. Health care led every sector at a record $868 million, followed by finance, insurance, and real estate at $711 million.

Then there's campaign money. The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision opened the door to unlimited independent spending on political campaigns. By the 2024 cycle, outside spending on federal elections hit a record $4.5 billion, and more than half of it came from groups that do not fully disclose their funding sources. This isn't a one-party problem. Conservative committees spent more than $2.2 billion, and liberal committees spent $1.7 billion.

When that kind of money flows, it expects a return. Here's what the return looks like.

Receipts: How Washington Keeps Waving the Mergers Through

First, a correction to a common belief. Congress doesn't usually vote on individual mergers. The Justice Department, the FTC, and agencies like the FCC review them, and federal judges sign off on settlements or rule on challenges. What Congress does is write laws that determine what's allowed, and it has repeatedly done so in favor of consolidation. Here's how that plays out at every level.

Congress rewrites the rules: radio (1996). The Telecommunications Act of 1996 eliminated limits on how many radio stations one company could own nationally and loosened local limits. The FCC's own staff found that between 1996 and 2002, the number of radio owners dropped 34%, mostly through mergers, and San Antonio's Clear Channel grew to roughly 1,200 stations. Before 1996, no company could own more than 40 stations. That's why your "local" station may sound like it's broadcasting from nowhere in particular.

Congress legalizes a merger after the fact: Citigroup (1998–1999). When Citicorp merged with Travelers in 1998, the deal violated the Glass-Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Company Act. The Federal Reserve granted a temporary waiver, and less than a year later, Congress passed Gramm-Leach-Bliley to make such mergers permanently legal. The companies' leaders had run a lobbying campaign to repeal the Depression-era law. Texas's own Senator Phil Gramm put his name on that bill, and President Bill Clinton signed it.

Then came the revolving door. Robert Rubin, Clinton's Treasury Secretary, joined Citigroup in October 1999, shortly after leaving Treasury. He collected $115 million in pay from Citigroup, excluding stock options. When the bank blew up in 2008, Citigroup took $45 billion in TARP money and secured a federal backstop that limited its losses on $306 billion of toxic assets. Profits stayed private. Losses went to the taxpayer. That is not capitalism.

The agencies approve, and 16 years later, it's still in court: Live Nation–Ticketmaster (2010). The Obama-era Justice Department approved the Live Nation–Ticketmaster merger in 2010 with conditions. By 2024, the Justice Department was suing, alleging the merger had left Ticketmaster controlling ticketing at around 80% of U.S. venues, driving up prices for fans. Six days into the March 2026 trial, the Trump administration's DOJ reached a settlement. A majority of states kept fighting on their own. A federal jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally monopolized the industry, and that fans in 22 states paid an extra $1.72 per ticket. During the trial, internal messages surfaced in which a company ticketing executive bragged about "robbing them blind."

Fort Worth's own: American–US Airways (2013). In August 2013, the Obama Justice Department sued to block the merger. In its complaint, the Justice Department stated flatly that increasing consolidation among large airlines had hurt passengers. Three months later, it settled. The airlines agreed to give up takeoff and landing slots at Reagan National and LaGuardia, plus two gates each at Boston, Chicago O'Hare, Dallas Love Field, Los Angeles, and Miami, and the deal went through.

A 2016 ProPublica investigation reported that the reversal came after the airlines hired former Obama administration officials and other well-connected Democrats for an intense lobbying campaign. That campaign went through the White House and a high-level contact at the Justice Department, over the heads of the staff prosecutors. Some lawyers who worked the case told ProPublica they were appalled by the decision to settle. Doug Parker, the US Airways CEO who took over the combined company, publicly thanked the politicians who had joined the airline in lobbying for the merger.

Texas played its part, too. Texas, home to American, and Arizona, home to US Airways, were among the states that joined the Justice Department's lawsuit, but six weeks later, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, then running for governor, pulled out. His settlement kept the combined airline's headquarters in North Texas and guaranteed three years of service to 22 Texas airports. Local jobs were protected, and the question of competition was left for someone else.

The result: the Obama administration approved three major airline mergers, leaving four companies controlling more than 80% of the market. To be fair, some aviation analysts argue the Justice Department's case against the merger simply wasn't that strong, and that no lobbying was needed to explain the settlement.

The one that got blocked: JetBlue–Spirit (2024). In March 2023, the Biden Justice Department sued to block JetBlue's $3.8 billion purchase of Spirit, arguing that eliminating Spirit would raise fares. Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, agreed. He found JetBlue planned to convert Spirit's planes to its own layout and charge JetBlue's higher fares, which would hurt cost-conscious travelers. In his ruling, he wrote a line to Spirit's loyal customers: "This one's for you." It was the first time federal regulators had ever won a lawsuit stopping a major U.S. airline merger.

The ending nobody wanted. Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2024 and again in August 2025. Then, on May 2, 2026, it ceased all flights for good after failed bailout talks with the Trump administration and a fuel-price spike. It was the first shutdown of a significant U.S. airline since Midway in 2001. Today, United, American, Delta, and Southwest control about 80% of the flights available to passengers.

Here's the detail that says it all. During its second bankruptcy, Spirit sold its O'Hare gates to American for $30 million and to United for $30.2 million. The upstart's assets flowed straight to the giants.

Both sides claim vindication. Critics of the Biden-era Justice Department say blocking the deal killed Spirit and cost American workers their jobs. Defenders point to fuel costs and a budget model that stopped working after the pandemic. My take: when the big carriers wanted to merge, they got a deal. When a smaller carrier tried to grow into a real challenger, it got blocked. And when the challenger died, the big carriers bought its gates. However, if you score the JetBlue ruling, the system keeps protecting the incumbents.

A judge takes the companies at their word: T-Mobile–Sprint (2020). The Justice Department approved the deal after the carriers agreed to sell prepaid assets to Dish Network, which was supposed to build its own network, leaving four national competitors. When states sued to block it, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero rejected their arguments that the merged company would raise prices and that Dish would fail to become a real competitor. The states were right about Dish. Dish failed to build the promised network and struggled under heavy debt, and EchoStar eventually sold its spectrum to AT&T and SpaceX. Bloomberg reported that the sales effectively ended any hope of the fourth carrier that regulators had stipulated as a condition of the merger. Four national carriers became three, and the promised replacement never showed up.

Lobbyists overrule the antitrust lawyers: HPE–Juniper (2025–2026). In January 2025, the Trump Justice Department sued to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise's $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks, warning that the combined company and one rival would control 70% of enterprise wireless networking. Then the case settled. Two senior antitrust officials appointed by the Trump administration itself were fired for opposing the settlement. One of them, Roger Alford, called it a scandal representing the "Rule of Lobbyists" over the "Rule of Law." The Justice Department's own finding was that the merger could raise customer costs by up to 14%. In August 2026, Judge Casey Pitts approved the deal anyway, acknowledging it "may lessen competition." He also found two violations of the Tunney Act, including HPE's failure to disclose lobbying of the CIA and the Pentagon. The rules were broken, the judge said so, and the merger went through anyway.

A settlement check before a license transfer: Paramount–Skydance (2025). With the Trump administration's approval of Skydance's $8 billion purchase of Paramount still pending, Paramount agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over a "60 Minutes" interview. Critics called the payment a veiled bribe. The FCC approved the merger 2–1 in July 2025. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the settlement and the merger review were not related. Dissenting Commissioner Anna Gomez said the FCC used its power to pressure Paramount into a private legal settlement. You can decide for yourself which explanation holds up.

The beef on your plate. This one hits Texas ranchers directly. Four companies — Cargill, Tyson, Brazil-based JBS, and National Beef — slaughtered about 85% of U.S. grain-fed cattle in 2018, up from 25% in 1977. In fairness, a 2024 USDA report found that consolidation lowered production costs and consumer prices, but there is also evidence that it has cut the price ranchers are paid for cattle. In November 2025, President Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate the big meatpackers for possible collusion and price fixing. When four buyers set the price for an entire industry, "free market" becomes a slogan, not a description.

Is There Any Sunlight Between the Parties?

I'm not naive. The two parties fight hard over social issues, and both have extremes. But I wanted to know whether that fight is also happening where the money is. So I followed four trails: the donors, the votes, the revolving door, and their own portfolios.

Same donors, both sides of the aisle. In 2024, the top 20 business and corporate PACs split their giving roughly 55% to Republicans and 45% to Democrats. That's a hedge, not a preference. Defense contractors show it clearly. With Congress reviewing a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request for 2027, Republican Rep. Ken Calvert, who chairs the House subcommittee that writes the defense budget, took in more than $200,000 from defense contractor PACs and executives in the first three months of 2026. On the Democratic side, House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar and Democratic Whip Katherine Clark also took large sums from the same industry.

The crypto industry has made the approach official. Its Fairshake super PAC network runs three arms: one that spends on Republicans, one on Democrats, and one on both, with a single goal: electing crypto allies regardless of party. It had raised roughly $193 million for the 2026 cycle. By mid-2024, the candidates backed by crypto super PACs had won 36 of the 42 primaries where those PACs spent money, according to Public Citizen.

Same votes when it counts. In 2018, Congress rolled back Dodd-Frank rules on midsize banks, raising the threshold for heightened federal scrutiny from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. The Senate passed it 67-31. Every Republican who voted said yes, and so did 17 members of the Democratic caucus. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had warned in advance that the change would make it more likely that a bank of that size would fail. Silicon Valley Bank, which had lobbied for the relief, collapsed in March 2023. It had $209 billion in assets at the end of 2022. Some of the Democrats who voted yes, including Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, defended the law afterward.

Same exit door. In 2025, a record 866 members of Congress and congressional staffers moved to lobbying and related jobs, a 60% jump over 2024. It split almost evenly: 440 Republicans and 384 Democrats. Over the long run, researchers found that 25% of House members and 29% of senators who left office between 1976 and 2012 registered as lobbyists.

The textbook case is Rep. Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican. He was the chief architect of the 2003 prescription drug law that barred Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices, then announced in 2004 that he was leaving Congress for a reported $2 million-a-year job running PhRMA, the drug industry's main lobbying group.

Same portfolios. Members of Congress earn a base salary of $174,000, which has been frozen since 2009. Many are worth far more. As of mid-2026, the richest sitting member is Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) at roughly $1.3 billion, according to the tracker GovGreed. It ranks Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) second at about $480 million and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) third at about $254 million. On the Democratic side, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's net worth is estimated at about $267.6 million by Quiver Quantitative, built on holdings in Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Netflix.

Here's one close to home for this Dispatch. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) owes much of his family wealth to his wife, Linda, an heiress to Clear Channel founder Lowry Mays. That's the same Clear Channel that grew to roughly 1,200 stations after Congress lifted the ownership cap in 1996.

These are estimates. Disclosure forms report assets and liabilities in broad ranges, include spouses, and generally leave out personal residences. Even so, the pattern holds: in 2018, 43% of members of Congress were worth at least $1 million, compared with an estimated 5% to 12% of Americans.

The trading is bipartisan, too. Among members who actively traded in 2025, 29 beat the S&P 500: 15 Democrats and 14 Republicans. To be fair, most members didn't beat the market that year. Of the 311 disclosed portfolios, only 100 did, with Republicans averaging 17.3% and Democrats 14.4%, compared with 16.8% for the S&P 500. The problem isn't that they always win. There are so many trade stocks in industries that their own committees oversee.

The ban has not been passed by either party. Polling shows 86% of Americans support banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks. When Democrats ran the House, Speaker Pelosi rejected a ban outright in December 2021, saying members should be able to participate in a free-market economy. She later signaled openness, but the House never voted on a ban while she held the gavel.

When the Republican House finally passed a ban on July 22, 2026, the bill only stopped members from buying new stocks. They could keep and sell what they already own; the president was exempted, and an unrelated voter-ID requirement was attached, so just 13 Democrats voted yes. Its fate in the Senate is uncertain. One party sat on the ban for years. The other passed a watered-down version loaded with a poison pill. The result is the same: members keep trading.

Where the parties really do differ. In fairness, the gap isn't zero. Most Senate Democrats voted against the 2018 bank rollback. In 2022, Democrats alone passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which let Medicare negotiate some drug prices for the first time, partly reversing Tauzin's 2003 ban. It cleared the Senate 51–50 on a party-line vote, with Vice President Harris breaking the tie, and the House 220–207. Republicans have passed their own party-line tax and spending packages. Real differences exist on taxes, labor, and regulation.

My verdict. I don't think the two parties meet in a back room to divide up the spoils. They don't have to. When both parties take checks from the same donors, both send staff through the same revolving door, both let members trade stocks on companies they regulate, and both find ways to keep that ban from passing, you don't need a conspiracy. You get the same outcome without one.

The parties fight in public about the things that fire up their bases. On the things that fund them, they usually find common ground.

The Classroom Is Where We Lost the Plot

None of this works if the public knows how the system is supposed to function. And over my lifetime, we stopped teaching it.

Until the 1960s, American public high school students were typically required to take three civics courses: Civics, Problems of Democracy, and U.S. Government. Today, most are lucky to get a single semester-long class. A 2024 policy brief from the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute found that time spent on civics began to decline significantly in the 1960s and continued to lose ground as STEM and No Child Left Behind testing took priority.

The money tells you the priorities. By the early 2020s, federal civics funding had been cut by more than 90% since 2000, to about 5 cents per student per year, compared with roughly $50 per student for STEM. Congress bumped civics funding to $23 million in 2023, which is still a rounding error next to STEM.

The results show up in the scores. On the 2022 national civics test, only 22% of eighth graders scored proficient or above. Proficiency meant understanding concepts such as the Electoral College and how citizens can influence government through the political process. NAEP called it the first-ever decline on the civics assessment.

Economics is getting worse, not better, and Texas is part of the problem. The Council for Economic Education reported in March 2026 that only 22 states now require economics to graduate, down from 26 in 2024, because Texas, California, and Indiana replaced stand-alone economics courses with personal finance requirements. Personal finance teaches a kid how to balance a checkbook. Economics teaches them why the checkbook keeps coming up short. We need both.

Even where civics is taught, it's often taught with the gloves on. In a 2023 survey, 65% of teachers said they had decided on their own to limit classroom discussion of political and social issues. The most common reason was doubt that school leaders would back them if parents complained.

I'll say plainly what I believe. Too many of our schools have drifted toward keeping kids occupied and moving them through the system rather than preparing them for citizenship. We graduate students who can't explain the difference between a free market and a rigged one, then act surprised when they conclude the whole thing should be torn down.

Why Socialism and Anarchy Are the Wrong Diagnosis

I want to be fair to the young people drawn to these ideas, because their anger is legitimate. The socialist argument says concentrated private wealth inevitably captures government, so the public should own or tightly control the commanding heights of the economy. The anarchist argument says any concentrated power, public or private, will be captured, so dismantle it. Both are responding to the real rot documented above.

Here's where I part ways. Every case in this Dispatch involves government power being used to protect concentrated corporate power: a law rewritten, a waiver granted, a settlement approved, a license transferred. Handing even more economic control to the same government that approved these deals doesn't cure capture. It gives the lobbyists a bigger target. And tearing down every institution doesn't leave a vacuum. It leaves whoever is already biggest and best-armed in charge.

The fix for a rigged game isn't to abolish the game. It's to enforce the rules and throw out the people who rigged it.

The Alternative: Make Capitalism Compete Again

The alternative to corporatocracy isn't a new system. It's the one we were promised: markets where the little guy can actually win. That means antitrust laws that get enforced even when a lobbyist has the Attorney General's chief of staff on speed dial. It means Tunney Act reviews with real teeth, since a judge who finds the law was broken shouldn't be powerless to act. It means ending the revolving door between regulators and the industries they regulate, and bringing campaign money into the light. And it means putting three civics courses and a real economics course back into every high school in America.

Call to Action

1. Learn who funds your representatives. Look up your U.S. House member and both senators on OpenSecrets and see which industries write their biggest checks.
2. Demand real economics in Texas schools. Contact your State Board of Education member and state representative and ask why Texas dropped its stand-alone economics requirement.
3. Watch the Tunney Act. Tell your members of Congress that a judge who finds a merger settlement broke the law should have the power to reject it.
4. Back your state attorney general on antitrust, regardless of party. In Live Nation and HPE, it was the states that kept fighting after Washington folded.
5. Buy local where you can. Every dollar at an independent business is a vote for actual capitalism.

So here's my question for you, especially if you're under 30: when you say capitalism has failed you, are you angry at the free market, or the rigged one?

V64OTD // IT WAS NEVER CAPITALISM. IT WAS THE CRONIES.

Sources

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