Congress Pressures FCC Inspector General To Investigate Brendan Carr’s Law Breaking And Wasting Of Taxpayer Money

Failures

from the radical-weird-zealots-with-a-violent-disdain-for-the-law dept

You might recall that back when Brendan Carr was an ordinary FCC Commissioner, he was super worried about government overreach. He was so worried, that he would attack literally any effort previous incarnations of the FCC took to hold giant shitty telecom monopolies accountable (net neutrality, basic pricing transparency, efforts to stop racism in broadband deployment) as radical government overreach.

But since being appointed head of the agency, Carr has easily been the most extremist, reckless, and power-crazed boss in FCC history.

When he’s not busy dismantling all FCC consumer protections, Carr has enjoyed threatening companies seeking merger approval unless they kiss the President’s ass, whether that means promising to be more racist (Verizon) or avoiding any journalism faintly critical of our mad, idiot king (CBS).

Carr’s recently trampling of the First Amendment via the temporary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel was only the latest example of Carr weaponizing sham investigations and the agency’s regulatory approval authority to ignore the law, a trio of lawmakers said last week in a letter to FCC Inspector General Fara Damelin.

Representatives Frank Pallone Jr., Yvette Clark, and Doris Matsui say they wrote Damelin back in March, suggesting she actually do her job (to ostensibly investigate waste, fraud, abuse, and violations of the law). That obviously didn’t happen.

This new letter cites numerous examples of Carr’s law violations since, including Carr’s threat to “investigate” Comcast for “news distortion” after the NBC covered the administration’s attacks on Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Again, they recommend Damelin actually do her job:

“Chairman Carr’s unprecedented and abusive actions warrant immediate and thorough
investigation by your office. There is ongoing and unprecedented abuse of FCC authority
weaponizing the agency in a way that violates regulated entities’ Constitutional rights and
personally benefits the President. Sham investigations and regulatory processes are also being used to operationalize this abuse of authority that amounts to gross mismanagement, waste, and misuse of FCC resources.”

The letter urges Damelin to dig into FCC records to more closely examine what kind of pressure Carr put on ABC and local broadcasters in exchange for placing Kimmel on an indefinite hiatus, something he’s trying to pretend he had nothing to do with despite leveraging direct threats on national television.

Any serious investigation is unlikely. In large part because not only is the United States historically and broadly corrupt, that corruption and regulatory capture has been normalized by timid careerists over decades. You generally can’t get even get a high-level job at the FCC unless you’re the type of person willing to pretend this sort of capture is normal (see: what happened to Gigi Sohn).

Carr’s attacks on laws and FCC process have all been propped up under the flimsiest of legal veneers that would collapse under any real inspection. He and Trump’s illegal destruction of the Digital Equity Act (which urged the FCC to investigate longstanding racism in broadband deployment), for example, was only “supported” by the flimsy claim that the inquiry was somehow discriminatory against white people.

His attacks on CBS and ABC are propped up by completely bogus claims that the companies violated the FCC’s dusty “news distortion” rule, a never-enforced agency guideline that’s supposed to only apply to the most extreme forms of journalistic abuses (a news org being bribed to be silent, for example).

None of this stuff would stand up to any serious legal challenge, which is why it’s all the more pathetic to see major companies (with bottomless legal budgets) and so many government leaders fold like a still-damp grade school paper mache art project.

It’s worth noting that Carr’s attack on the First Amendment are only a small portion of what he’s been up to. He’s also been taking an absolute hatchet to whatever is left of corporate oversight at the agency (with less transparency than ever) under the pretense of being highly efficient. Because the corporate press does not care about consume protection, this aspect of Carr barely even gets mentioned in the media.

At the heart of Carr’s efforts sits a weird, logically incoherent authoritarian zealotry.

He claims that the FCC has all the authority in the world to bully companies that aren’t appropriately feckless when it comes to Trump, while with the other hand dismantling any remaining authority the agency has to tell corporate power what to do.

He wants to claim to be all about efficiency and cost savings (when it comes to consumer protections, anyway), then turns around and wastes endless government resources on sham investigations. He claims to be undermining discrimination by emboldening racism. He claims to be protecting free speech by trampling it. He’s a typical authoritarian liar who believes in nothing beyond his own personal career arc.

I suspect once corporate America has gotten their fill of tax cuts, brutal and mindless destruction of all consumer protection standards, bottomless Trump subsidies, endless chaos, unpredictable tariffs, and rubber stamped mergers, you might start to see some exhaustion set in and a slight backbone start to form at some companies. But it’s clear that’s still a long way out, if it happens at all.

It’s a fucking embarrassment.

Filed Under: brendan carr, corruption, doris matsui, fara damelin, fcc, first amendment, frank pallone, free speech, mergers, telecom, yvette clark