The State's Force Only Flows Downhill

Look at who the state hurts and who it indulges, and one logic snaps into focus. The instruments of force — shock gloves, bullets, criminal charges — are reserved for migrants and the poor. Comfort, discretion and the privilege of self-policing flow upward, to capital and to the powerful. The same government that arms its agents to inflict pain on the powerless asks corporations to decide for themselves what counts as safe.

Start with the hardware. ICE recently bought about 6,000 pairs of electrical shock gloves, a device Mother Jones describes as a "pain compliance" tool that works like a taser at lower voltage. This was a procurement decision: the agency went shopping for a better way to hurt the people it detains. It took a state law, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, to ban law enforcement from using them — proof that any restraint on this administration's enforcers must be legislated over their objection, never assumed.

Then watch the force land. In Texas, a federal immigration agent shot a Venezuelan delivery driver, Garcés Pérez, in his car. On Tuesday, federal prosecutors announced an assault charge against the man who was shot, accusing him of striking an officer with a side mirror while trying to drive away. The person carrying the bullet wound becomes the defendant. This is how power launders its own violence: the victim is recast as the aggressor, and the shooting is filed as a crime committed against the shooter.

Now turn the lens on those the state handles gently. Sean Combs, in a low-security facility in southern New Jersey, has spent thousands of dollars a month to import his lifestyle behind the wall — massages, nude photos, Hennessy, per NBC News. Incarceration is meant to be the state's blunt instrument, but money buys a version of it that barely bites. The tenderness toward wealth runs deeper than one cell: when New York's mayor tried to place a modest tax on the second homes of the rich, a Staten Island judge struck it down. The delivery driver gets the bullet and the charge; the wealthy get room service inside and their second homes shielded outside.

The same asymmetry governs how the administration treats capital. At an event on artificial intelligence, Trump asked Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft to make safety decisions themselves, producing what The New York Times calls voluntary safeguards and a pledge to rebrand the technology as "super intelligence", the term Trump prefers. For the firms building the most powerful systems of the decade, oversight is a favor requested and declined at will. And the deference is mutual: one of Wall Street's biggest firms has admitted that paying ordinary depositors fairly could threaten the entire financial system. The machine is built so that fairness to working people reads as systemic risk, while a gun pointed at a Venezuelan driver reads as order.

Where accountability aims upward, it stalls. Former special counsel Jack Smith spent Tuesday before Senate Republicans defending his criminal investigations of Trump, one centered on efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The prosecutor who tried to hold the powerful to account is the one made to answer for it. The direction of scrutiny has been inverted along with the direction of force.

None of this is coincidence; it is design. A coercive apparatus decides every day where to point its weapons, and it points them down — at migrants, at delivery drivers, at depositors, at people with no lawyers on retainer and no governor's signature to shield them. Upward it offers self-regulation, comfortable cells, protected second homes and hearings that go nowhere. The cost is borne by those least able to absorb it. That is who pays, so that power never has to.