Money Talks: The Erosion of Democracy in the Age of Billionaire Influence

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Summary:

• The discussion covers the historical origins and implications of the deregulation of campaign finance laws in the U.S. over the past 50 years, as explored in the “Master Plan” podcast series.

• It traces how a concerted effort by powerful corporations and wealthy individuals, spearheaded by the Powell Memo in the 1970s, led to a series of court rulings that gradually eroded campaign finance regulations and allowed money to have an outsized influence in the political process.

• The discussion highlights how this has enabled wealthy interests to essentially “rig” the democratic system in their favor, by drowning out the voices of the general public and making it difficult for politicians to act in the broader public interest rather than serving their major donors.

• The conversation explores the challenges of reversing this trend and restoring a more representative democracy, given the entrenched power of money in politics and the psychological normalization of oligarchy among the public.

• Overall, the discussion provides a detailed historical account of how the U.S. political system has become increasingly dominated by moneyed interests, and the implications this has for the health of American democracy.

Transcript:

Rob Johnson (00:00):

Welcome to economics and beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

I’m here today with David Sirota. He’s a colleague, someone I’ve worked with in many different contexts over the years related to politics related to Ned Lamont’s run for US Senate. And he’s the chief executive and founder of the Lever News. And The.LeverNews.com is an extraordinary value for those who want to understand what’s unfolding in the United States of America at this juncture today. I welcome David, and we’re here to discuss extraordinary 11 episode podcasts. It’s available through the Lever.

It’s also available on places like Apple Podcast system and it’s called the Master Plan. Master Plan has a premium dimension which you can buy for a very small amount of money in relation to the quality and information. He’s been winning all kinds of awards for this outstanding episode, and I just want to welcome you David, and thank you for all the work you do. But I really want to underscore how, by the way, this is not pre-election partisanship at all. This is the playing field in which the United States of America exists and must function, and people in each party have to play through these rules that were created and we’ll talk about their creation and their implications over the next 30, 40 minutes. Thanks for joining me, David.

David Sirota (02:12):

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Rob Johnson (02:14):

And so let’s start with what inspired this series, the Master Plan. Where are you coming

David Sirota (02:23):

From? Well, many years ago I wrote a book, my first book called Hostile Takeover, which was about, I was a much younger person. It was about 15, 16 years ago. And I had worked on Capitol Hill and I had seen how money dominates the legislative process, but not just the legislative process. It dominates how we talk about issues. And I think that what I discovered as a young man, although certainly people older than me had discovered it before, was that in the modern era, you don’t really have to bribe people, bribe legislators as much. If you make sure that the discourse itself only includes policy options that money already wants. In other words, if the two choices that Congress are making is between two different bills and both bills serve the donor class, then money in a sense doesn’t even have to exchange hands. But bribes don’t have to happen.

(03:22):

And so I wrote that many, many years ago, and so this is sort of the bookend to that book, our audio series Master Plan, because what this series looks at is how that kind of immersive corruption took over our system and it makes the case, and I think it proves the case that it wasn’t some natural inevitability, it wasn’t some divine destiny where we’ve arrived at a place where our so-called democracy is basically just one set of billionaires arguing with another set of billionaires over who can buy the election. That didn’t have to happen. It happened because of a specific series of rulings and policies pushed by a specific set of people with a specific agenda. And I think the silver lining on that is that yes, we are here and I think a lot of people are feeling really demoralized about how the election happened, even if they get the candidate result that they may want. I think a lot of people are feeling demoralized about the entire oligarchy that we’re living in. And that was just on full display in this election. And the silver lining is that that system was created by humans. It was created by a specific set of decisions to deregulate the campaign finance system to legalize bribery. And the good news in that is that if humans created this, if it wasn’t a natural inevitability, then it means we can make different decisions moving forward and create a different set of conditions

Rob Johnson (05:02):

In the context of what you might call the education of democracy. I’ll ask you later on after we explore how it came to be, whether just because it’s human, is it reversible? In other words, can money block reversibility? I think that’s where some people’s pessimism is that they have perhaps learned from you and others the diagnosis, but they don’t know how to unwind things. They don’t know how to create that strategy. And I know you worked closely with Bernie Sanders and I know he’s expressed frustration at feeling like he had a very powerful agenda that could not what you might call inspire the nomination because it scared away the funding. But let’s start early on. I just followed it. I’ve been through the 11 episodes myself. But what were the origins? Where does this new pathway and new system, where did it begin?

David Sirota (06:12):

So our story begins a little more than 50 years ago, which if you look at American politics back then looks like a different planet in a different galaxy, in a different universe. I mean, it is really it hard to even imagine for those of us who didn’t live through it. This is a moment, the early 1970s when popular pressure has forced the government to create Medicare, Medicaid, the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the government declares a war on poverty. So this is an era where the government has become much more responsive to small D democratic pressure from the people. And then Watergate hits and Watergate spotlights. The last challenge, last and biggest challenge that really hadn’t been addressed by the reforms of the 1960s and into the early seventies, which was money corruption. Watergate is at its heart a campaign finance scandal, illegal money funding the break in of the Watergate money coming from blue chip corporations surreptitiously that part I think is forgotten about Watergate, but that is fundamentally what Watergate is. Watergate’s remembered for the break-in, but it is a number of major corporations had to plead guilty to campaign finance violations. And so Watergate spotlighted that underneath everything was still this problem of money having too much influence in politics. And out of Watergate passed the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms, which set up the modern campaign finance system through the amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act, really the first reformed or the anti-corruption and campaign finance laws in 50 years at that point.

(08:07):

But from there, something else was happening concurrently. While this government was much more democratically responsive, while people like Ralph Nader were having the legislative successes, they were having corporations, oligarchs, a major dynastic wealth families were very, very upset about what was going on and they didn’t like what was going on. And so a guy named Louis Powell who was at that point, the head of the American Bar Association, he was a tobacco industry lawyer on the board of Philip Morris, sort of the peak of the corporate establishment. He gets angry and he writes a memo to the Chamber of Commerce saying, Hey, we have a big problem here.

(09:01):

He invokes the language of FDR, FDR’s speech about the forgotten man in FDRs time, the forgotten man was the working man. He says that the real forgotten man in America is the businessman flips it on its head and said we have to basically fight back and fight to take back power over the government with a specific focus on the court system, but also a focus on just re-engaging in a deep way in everything from media to academia and the like. And out of the Powell memo, we uncover this, it’s never been reported before, we’re a series of secret meetings in which the Chamber of Commerce convened these meetings with some of the most powerful executives from the most powerful corporations in America to plot how to implement the Powell Memo Lewis Powell. By the way, a few months after writing that memo gets put on the Supreme Court, and that’s important to keep in mind because of what I’m about to tell you.

(10:03):

So out of the Powell memo comes the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the creation of the groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation, the legal architecture that ultimately gets boosted into the Federalist Society. And one thing they immediately start focusing on because the Powell memos focus on taking the playbook of Ralph Nader. One of his plays was filing cases in federal court to try to secure rulings that would essentially make law or invalidate bad laws. So they take a page out of that and the first thing they do is they attack the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms with in the Buckley v Vallejo case, and they secure a ruling that takes the radical then radical notions outlined by John Bolton. Yes, the same John Bolton in the early 1970s, a radical idea that money in politics is not corruption. Money in politics is constitutionally protected speech, which of course becomes the building block for the entire 30 40 year campaign to deregulate campaign finance.

(11:10):

Soon after the Buckley VI Vallejo case, another campaign finance case comes to the Supreme Court, a campaign finance case about whether corporations have are entitled to that constitutionally protected right to spend in elections. And Louis Powell, as we uncover in the podcast through his own writings and documents from the court, Louis Powell engineers a ruling at the Supreme Court, convinces the justices not to issue a narrow ruling. In this case it was a case out of Boston, but to issue a very broad ruling extending constitutionally protected rights to spend money. AKA money is speech extending those rights to corporations spending in elections. And that ruling the BTI ruling, which was made possible of course by the Buckley ruling, which built off of that ruling the BTI ruling became the most cited ruling ultimately in the Citizens United ruling. And that is a ruling created the BTI ruling created by Lewis Powell, the architect obviously, of the Powell memo.

(12:22):

So that’s how this all, that’s a shorthand way to explain how this all started, this focus on deregulating the campaign finance system, which then expands into a focus on narrowing federal bribery laws. Now I’ve buried the lead here a little bit because some people may be saying, well, why, if business felt under attack, would there be a focus on campaign finance and on bribery? The simplest way to answer that is is that I think that when you read the documents at the time about all this organizing, there was an implicit understanding that corporations and oligarchs can’t get the self enriching policies they want in a functioning one person, one vote democracy because in a one person, one vote democracy, the population is not prone to support policies that rip off the population and send wealth upwards to a handful of oligarch. So the people organizing this movement, these master planners to deregulate the campaign finance system and legalize corruption, they understand that and they understand that they don’t have a lot of votes, but they do have a disproportionate share of the society’s money. So they understand that they have to change the rules and the laws to allow the thing they have a disproportionate amount of money to rig and short circuit and really ruin the one person one vote paradigm because if they can do that, then they can buy elections, they can buy court appointments, they can buy regulatory changes through a campaign finance system that allows them to spend unlimited amounts of money on everything.

Rob Johnson (14:17):

I can imagine there are two arguments that are underpinning this. On the one side, the idea that people can buy elections means they can buy the use of federal revenue tax money and so forth to subsidize them. And that is almost a legalized crime. The other side though would say the population gets in the way of innovation and the rising tide could raise all boats. And if you let the sophisticated unlock, everybody will be better off. And that the, which I call traditional democracy doesn’t work, right? I haven’t seen that latter argument proposed other than in academia or conservative foundations. And with all the kind of issues we have now, like wealth extraction in medical care that costs more here in the United States than it costs anywhere in the world and it’s considered the 32nd best quality in the world, it’s very hard to make that argument that we’re doing things.

(15:37):

But for instance, I worked as very intensely on the financial sector savings and loan crisis and the bailouts. It is clear that once something happens, you don’t want to not bail out in the sense that everybody suffers from the collapse of the financial system. But when you do do a bailout, you have to do reforms because you learn that the system was crashing. So though you don’t repeat that performance, and I know you and Alex Gibney made a wonderful audible audio four, five hour series called Meltdown, which was really about the meltdown of confidence because they did the bailouts, the great financial crisis, but they didn’t do the healing. And my sense is that side that’s skeptical about the use of money in politics could look at that episode and become very despairing and discouraged. Moving to the current times, I see lots of politicians who avoid issues because they don’t want to offend money, and that doesn’t mean they’re part of the corruption. That means that they’re understanding. I don’t mean they’re not part of the corruption in action. Yes they are. They’re not part of the corruption in their heart. It’s not a moral purpose. I want to win this position and I need money to do so. But the question I guess as we’re going through Watergate and then we’re going to Citizen United and so forth, did anybody make arguments that it was going to be a win-win situation to let money have more influence on the design of social policy?

David Sirota (17:34):

Well, the master planners who perpetrated and executed this master plan, they make the argument that money is speech and they make the argument, and I guess if you take it on its merits that the more speech, the better that in a country with a First Amendment that exposing people to lots of ideas and more and more ideas is a good thing. Now, I think the election that we are living through right now offers a different argument that if you allow unlimited money into your elections through super PAC spending on ads, what it ends up meaning is that sure everyone in the country can speak, can post on Twitter or Facebook, but billionaires have the megaphone and drown out basically everybody else and nobody else can. I mean people can speak, but nobody can hear anything except the billionaires. So I think, is that a free speech situation?

(18:53):

I would argue it’s not really free speech. If the situation is everyone has the right to a little peep and the billionaire billionaires by virtue and corporations by virtue of a deregulated campaign finance system, only the billionaires and corporations have a bigger and bigger megaphone to drown out the sound, the desires, the demands of the rest of the population. So I think we’re, look, there’s always going to be a balance in the money speech debate. I think it’s very clear from this past election as the latest example that it’s way out balance that you now, if you want to run for office, forget about president. If you want to run for Congress, state legislature, whatever it is, you have to ask for private money to get the resources necessary to run a campaign, AKA, communicate with enough voters to have a chance to compete much less win.

(20:10):

And as Joe Biden himself said, and we talk about this in the final episode in the early 1970s when Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate, as he himself said, that money always comes with the expectations of favors, it always comes with strings attached. So that is the central paradigm that the political system itself, self-selects for people who will answer to bigger and bigger money, which is why we have a government that Princeton researchers found. It does not represent in any functional way the will of the people or really what the people want at all based on surveys. That is why it represents the will of the people paying for that government. And that fundamentally goes back to the campaign finance system. Now your argument that you floated a devil’s advocate argument that maybe we don’t want a democracy, that maybe what we want is the experts to be running everything, the technocrats, we can’t leave important decisions to democracy.

(21:20):

My response on that is first and foremost, the United States, even when its democratic institutions function, is barely a democracy. Even in a well-run campaign finance system, if we actually had that public financing of elections and the like, we still have a senate that allows 11% of the population, the representation to block whatever the rest of the country wants. We still have an unelected supreme court with lifetime appointments. We still have an electoral college that lets people who lose the popular vote win the election, right? I mean, there are all sorts of limits on our democracy. We are barely, even when our democratic institutions function, we are barely a democracy, barely a Republican democracy. So we’re almost already at a place where we have elites running our country to take it further, the argument that we can’t trust that democracy is a threat to a country making good decisions because the population is basically, as Walter Lipman used to call it a bewildered herd, and you can’t leave important decisions to a bewildered herd.

(22:39):

You could see how that functions. And in the reading I’ve done about China, that’s an attitude that’s pretty prevalent in China. That’s an anti-democratic attitude that parts of the Chinese population, this is from a friend of mine who served in the Peace Corps, wrote all about this in his wonderful book, kosher Chinese, that parts of the population don’t want democracy because they fear democracy will create a government that won’t make sound logical decisions. But I think if that’s where we’re going, if that’s where we want to go, we should, which is not where I want to go. I tend to be with Winston Churchill who says democracy is the worst form of government except every other form of government.

(23:23):

If you want to go there, if that’s the argument, then it should be made explicit. We should have that conversation if we don’t want a democracy because people can’t make decisions. And I think that, by the way, I think that this attitude, it’s unstated, but it exists among both liberals and conservatives. Obviously the MAGA movement is authoritarian. It denies election results unless it gets the people in office who it wants. But I think a lot of liberals look out at a country and have convinced themselves that people are too stupid to govern themselves. So there’s also an anti, so if the liberal billionaire wants to help outspend the conservative billionaire and all of that tramples democracy, fine. If it’s in service of our side winning. The fundamental question I think is do we actually really believe in democracy? And I think that’s very much in question, and I’m writing a piece about this for the election, which is that this election that we’ve lived through has been branded as an election about the survival of democracy. But the election itself in becoming a contest primarily of billionaires, this election itself in the name of saving democracy has torched a lot of what’s left of democracy.

Rob Johnson (24:47):

Yes. And there are a lot of awkwardnesses here that you said, I did the devil’s advocate, but taking the other side when you need money in order to speak, then free speech has been shut off for those who don’t have money. But the other thing is the idea that experts or owners of media organizations or members of the media or politicians who need to have big war chests to get reelected, can’t be bought, is essentially nonsense human beings. Let’s say you’re a tenured professor at an Ivy League school. You want the school to have a big endowment. You want to be secure throughout your life. You want your children’s education to be paid for, you want your healthcare and all those things. Are you going to take on issues that create a harsh reaction from the wealthy and powerful where, how would I say the security of your own institution can be put at risk if you’re too successful or effective in challenging it? So I think it’s a bit naive to talk about experts as though they’re not influenced or politicians are not influenced, or the media on what they choose not to cover is not influenced by the power of money.

David Sirota (26:18):

Absolutely. I completely agree. And I go back to again, it wasn’t a perfect age. It wasn’t a perfect time, but it’s important to remember that the effort to prioritize, amplify and create the supremacy of money in our political system began not out of nowhere. It began at a moment when the government was actually doing a lot of things that the public was demanding. It was actually responsive. I mean, again, I go back to this. I mean, this sounds mean. Can you even imagine it today? I mean, there was a period of what, 7, 8, 9 years where you had the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the government declares a war on poverty, creates the EPA creates the Clean Air Act, creates the Clean Water Act. I mean, that happened in a span of what, seven, eight years? The point being we had a moment not that long ago where the government was actually responding to public discontent.

(27:32):

Now, you can argue some of those programs weren’t created perfectly. Some of them should have gone farther for sure. But clearly we don’t have a government that responds in any regular way to the demands of the public and the crises in front of us. And I want to go back to something that you said because I think it’s so important. I think we understand corruption as a politician gets a campaign contribution or a super PAC funded by an industry, vaults that politician into office with lots of ads. I think less understood is the invisible form of corruption, which is that no money is spent at all, but politicians stay away from various issues, stay silent, create what in mafia terms is erta a cone of silence around all sorts of issues, knowing that if they speak out, if they get involved in those issues, they will be spent into the ground in their next election.

(28:36):

A lawmaker recently described it to me like this, that the biggest kind of corruption that he faces in trying to convince colleagues to work with him on things is all a big industry has to do is shake the coins in its pocket at his potential partners and they know to stay away because they know that if they involve themselves in an issue that inconveniences Wall Street or the fossil fuel industry or any other industry, they will be on a target list. So in other words, corruption, the best examples of corruption are look out at the United States right now. We have a massive healthcare crisis. We have a massive horrifying climate crisis to name two things, and they have basically not been a topic of conversation in the election we just experienced. They’ve just not been topic of conversation at all. You want to ask what the democracy crisis is. You want to understand how corruption works. You want to understand how corruption creates the democracy crisis. It’s that silence, that silence is the corruption. That silence is the democracy crisis.

Rob Johnson (29:57):

Yes, yes. Well, how would I say this? Avoidance that you talk about is something that I think has affected both Wall Street on the left tea Party on the right. Then we got a Republican house, a Republican senate, and then Donald Trump was elected. Donald Trump in some respects, was viewed as a guy who had a trust fund, have to beg for money against donors and other things on stage. And a lot of people who didn’t like either party, they didn’t like NAFTA, they didn’t like privatization of prisons. Edward Morgan wrote a famous book. He said, NYU, what really happened to the sixties as a result of the sixties is what I would’ve called it. But this idea that things got hardened, this so forth led to lots of people in both parties feeling disenfranchised and then Trump’s 2016 advertisements that were shown during World Series games the weekend before the election, he talked about the system’s broken, it needs to be fixed. The only people who are strong enough to fix the system are the American people side with me. And he was showing all kinds of background pictures of his opponent, Hillary Clinton talking with elites and all this kind of stuff. But I don’t think anybody now thinks that he did break away from these systemic pressures and powers or that anybody, no matter how honest, ethical, or wellbeing, if you want to get elected, you can’t defy those financial pressures.

David Sirota (31:53):

I think that’s true under the current system. I think that’s true. But I would offer a caveat. I mean, obviously Donald Trump did not drain the swamp. He swamped the drain. I think there’s also a lot of, there’s been a terrific study done about how oftentimes in the modern era populations elect right-wing governments after financial crises typically because the left of center parties in power at the time don’t take seriously any kind of crackdown or recovery effort that actually helps the population. I mean, that’s a topic for a whole other discussion. My caveat to the idea that you can’t win office without relying on oligarch’s, billionaires, the money system. Look, I think Bernie Sanders got close in 2016.

Rob Johnson (32:49):

How do we get out of this mess? How do we evolve beyond thes and stoppages and so forth? That all been, I would call revealed. And you’ve done a beautiful job of codifying everything and you’ve shown by the way people or John Cain or others, white House, others who are aware of legislation and some of who lost their job by standing up for the ethical of democracy.

David Sirota (33:22):

Well, I think first and foremost, we have to stop thinking this is normal. There’s a psychological capture going on here that I’m very concerned about, and this is a good time to discuss it At the end of this election, there was a moment that I think we all saw that I haven’t been able to get out of my head in this election, and it was at the Democratic Convention, and I think people will remember the moment, but they might not have necessarily realized the deeper message of it. Bernie Sanders had just given a speech saying, billionaires need to not control the political process. We need to repeal Citizens United. We need public funding of elections, which I think he’s completely correct about. And he was immediately followed. The Democratic Party scheduled him to be followed immediately by billionaire, inherited billionaire Governor JB Pritzker, who had spent $350 million of his own Hyatt of Hotel inheritance to win two campaigns for governor.

(34:33):

And this is not a commentary on JB Pritzker’s policy as governor. He’s been a fine governor. But Pritzker got up there and the line of the night was JB Pritzker bragging about being a billionaire and the applause, there was wild applause for this line. And he basically said, Donald Trump wants you to think that he knows how to deal with the economy because he’s supposedly rich. And Pritzker said essentially, well take it from a real billionaire and everyone erupted and cheered. I think if we really think, if you think about that moment for just a second, maybe it’s funny if you think about it for like 10 seconds or a minute, it’s horrifying. We are living in a society in which the Putatively left of center party is enthusiastically cheering on a billionaire, bragging about being a billionaire in a country being ravaged by higher and higher costs for the basic necessities needed to survive.

(35:44):

And I think what that moment tells us is just how normalized oligarchy really is, that bigger and bigger swaths of the country have decided that this is normal, this is acceptable, that billionaires controlling everything, billionaires, even controlling our political process, all of that is fine as long as our side’s billionaires outbid the other side’s, billionaires in the auctioning off of our elections. And I think fundamentally, I can give you various policies that we could pass to reduce money’s influence in politics. The disclose act from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to bring dark money out of the shadows, anti dark money disclosure laws in the states, public financing of elections, stronger anti-bribery laws, all those, we know what can be done, but none of those things will be done if we accept that billionaires and corporations get to always turn elections into auctions. If that is what we now define as a democracy, then what exactly are we saving and for whom?

(37:06):

And if we don’t realize that this isn’t normal, that we don’t believe fundamentally that this is unacceptable, then it’s true. None of the policies that we could talk about will ever happen. So the question in my mind is how do you break the psychological capture? And I would say John McCain in the late 1990s and in early 2000, ran a presidential campaign where he did break the psychological capture he and Russ Feingold, but he, through his presidential campaign, putting corruption and campaign finance at the center of his presidential campaign, he really did create a moment of awareness that this isn’t normal, natural, or acceptable, and they passed. Look, an imperfect campaign. Finance bill certainly didn’t solve everything, but I think he certainly raised the awareness of corruption as the central problem. And that hasn’t happened since. We haven’t seen a moment like that since. And my question is how do we recreate a moment like that?

(38:16):

And I guess if I’m being crazily optimistic, I’m not saying this is going to happen. I’m saying at least in theory, there could be a moment for that to happen after what we’ve just experienced in this election where not just the billionaire spending where the world’s richest man, Elon Musk put himself the center of the stage, not billionaire, funding from the shadows put himself in the center of the election. It seems to me that this could be after this election, a moment for everybody to say, okay, it’s gotten too out of control. This is a tipping point. This is too much. We’ve just gotten through a campaign in which the Democrats, their major TV surrogate for their campaign is billionaire Mark Cuban. The biggest line of the night at their convention was a billionaire bragging about being a billionaire. And the Republicans was a presidential campaign bankrolled by billionaires where the central character was the world’s richest man shilling for a real estate billionaire, right? This is a moment where the normalization potentially could be broken because it was so in our face, it could go that way. But of course, it could also go the other way that it was such numbing experience. It was such an overwhelming experience that we end up being numbed. And if we go in that direction where we’re just numbed, we’re inured to it, then nothing’s going to change.

Rob Johnson (39:43):

What concerns me is, for instance, there are a number of people who I think are highly affluent and well-meaning who’ve been advocating for things like universal basic income. In other words, what you guys do at the top to make more money, innovate this. And that is fine as long as basic healthcare, basic food, basic shelter education for my children through quality like public schools and public universities, takes care of all the really necessary stuff for now and for the potential of my children’s future. And if you do those things, then you can do other things with wild, excessive wealth, et cetera. What I feel anxious about is that politicians who are captured by the need for money to survive in office neglect some of those core issues. It leads to a hostility, a despondency, the kind of things that made me inspired to work with my friend David Smick, who was a guest on this podcast, on his film, America’s Burning. Is this the Second Civil War? And I wonder if the wealthy are not frightened by the possibility of Weimar Republic, like authoritarian ascendants destroying much of what inspired people to come to and love the United States.

David Sirota (41:27):

I mean, I would hope that there is some awareness among the affluent that this doesn’t usually end well, like the macroeconomics of all the wealth, most of the wealth being up at the top and everyone else struggling to survive. That doesn’t usually end well. I mean, how many historical examples are there? But I also see that the oligarchs and the oligarchy, I also see evidence that they don’t care at all. There’s this quote that I think could be the quote of the election where it was Kathy Wilde, who’s the president and CEO of the partnership for New York City, which is basically a corporate front group. It represents the New York City’s business leaders. And she was quoted in Politico. And here’s how the story went. This is directly from the story. Kathy Wilde, president of the partnership for New York City said, Republicans have told her that the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Donald Trump.

(42:36):

That’s a direct quote. And what I see there is, first of all, the idea that Democrats are a threat to capitalism is almost cartoonishly ridiculous. I mean, it almost makes you laugh. I mean, it’s just so wildly absurd. You can’t even believe somebody said that with a straight face. But if you strip out the parties, threats to capitalism are more concerning than threats to democracy. What has just been described there is fascism. That is a fascist attitude that the democracy must be tamed for the capitalism and the capitalist class. And I think the business community saying that out loud suggests a level of hubris, a lack of self-awareness, and a lack of care about where this all goes. And I think that’s deeply concerning because you’re right, even if you were an oligarch or somebody super rich, to my mind, you should have some thoughts about this doesn’t usually end well in history. The French Revolution wasn’t really a great time for a great experience for a lot of people, right? Right-wing revolutions aren’t great. That happened in South America, et cetera, et cetera, that had similar macroeconomic dynamics. But I don’t see that awareness in this country. I don’t see widespread awareness from the affluent class and the allegedly benevolent oligarchs that this country still has. I see none of that. I see very little evidence of that, which is disturbing.

Rob Johnson (44:28):

Yes. What concerns me, I is a lot of people who affluent, well educated, the general population doesn’t understand the complexity of issues and so forth, but unless we fortify the nation from preschool, as James Heckman shows, if you do a lot on preschool and nutrition, even prenatal nutrition, you create people who are more vital, more intellectually capable and so forth, and therefore adds credibility to reliance on democracy. If you crash the education system, it fortifies those who are skeptical about whether the citizens act wisely in a democratic order. And it feels to me like we need to fortify our democracy rather than gut it in order to create a broad sense of participation, reduce the fascistic risk, and how do I say, do what really matters to people.

David Sirota (45:43):

Yeah. And look, I think that the demand for you look back at the history of the last 10 years, 15 years, Congress switching parties in a way that it hadn’t before with a frequency that it hadn’t before. I think the public keeps voting for change and not really getting the change it wants. And I think ultimately at some point the system is going to break. I mean, it already probably is breaking. I don’t think there’s any one breaking point, but I think the system is breaking. And I did write a book called The Uprising, which was about the system was, this was back in 2007. The system was starting to break, and I said, it can go in a right wing or a sort of progressive popula direction. I think we know which direction it ended up going in. It went in a right wing direction.

(46:43):

And I think dealing with that and connecting it to the corruption, the legalized bribery at the heart of the system, that’s the connection we have to make. To my mind, that’s what master plan the audio series is really all about. It’s trying to break the psychology that says what we’re living through is normal, acceptable and just inevitable. It is not inevitable, but we have to have kind of an anti-corruption movement and sensibility at the center of our political awareness. It was in our lifetime, in my lifetime. I can think of once with John McCain, maybe once with Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign where he talked a lot about Citizens United, but it keeps popping up. But it has to actually be at the center of our politics. It’s certainly the corruption is at the center of the way our economy works and the way the corruption itself is at the center of the way our elections and our politics works. An anti-corruption sensibility needs to be at the center of the opposition movement. And I’ll put a more uneven, finer point on it. There’s a lot of talk in this election about the resistance, anti-corruption needs to be at the center of the resistance. That’s the key. And when I say the resistance, I don’t mean the democratic resistance to Donald Trump. I mean the resistance to the oligarchy that is destroying and pillaging everything.

Rob Johnson (48:26):

Well, like you portrayed with Gibney in the Meltdown, and Gary Gerstel wrote about in the rise and Decline of the Neoliberal Order, the skepticism of the population isn’t just vis-a-vis Donald Trump, it’s vis-a-vis both parties, whoever’s in power, which is responding structurally to money politics. And I remember in your final episode, you did some very beautiful excerpts, by the way. I want people to understand the text, the audio and things that you excavated to build this, including interviews with people about Watergate, talking to Tom Dashle, et cetera. Really, this isn’t you just painting a picture that’s in your dream world. All the people that were in the plumbing are affirming the vision. They present very quibble, very. And I think looking at your life, being so skeptical about whether you can serve people when the money politics is so pervasive was extraordinary.

David Sirota (49:31):

Well, thank you. And I think people will be blown away. I don’t want to give it away, but I think people towards the end will be blown away To hear a person, I didn’t expect to really find such footage, but to hear a young Joe Biden talk about this stuff, I mean, at the very end of the series, it kind of blew me away to go back to the politician whose career has spanned the course of the master plan and listened to him of all people really offer a cry for help from inside the system. That’s how I interpreted it. Some of the things that he said back in the seventies about how corrupt the system was and how the corruption was creating the oligarchy that was creating the democracy crisis. I mean, they are really prescient comments looking back on them. And I should add, we ask a difficult question, and I won’t tell folks the answer here.

(50:33):

They’ll have to go listen. But we ask the question, how can somebody admit, acknowledge, and expose speak? So frankly about the system itself being so corrupt and what that corruption does, but also participate in that corrupt system in some cases, in that corruption, the duality of that, the contradiction of that. And we ask that question, and it’s not an easy one to struggle with, but I think it red redos to all of us. I think it ultimately underscores that we can find this or that leader, this or that singular politician who might be an ally, but typically they can’t do things on their own. They are essentially lost leaders. They may be spotlighting something, but typically the political system will not move on behalf of the people. It will move on behalf of corporations at all times and billionaires. But the system will not move on behalf and in defense of the people, the broad public interest, unless it is forced, even if you have one or two relatively powerful people in the system, the system will not move on behalf and in defense of the people unless there is a demand. I mean, it’s the old idea, right? Power concedes nothing without a demand.

Rob Johnson (52:01):

Yeah. Well, I think we’ve covered the basis today. I want to encourage everybody to go to the levers website, lever news.com, find out what’s being done, and I would very much encourage you all to immerse yourself in the master plan and think about what kind of future you would like to have. Thank you, David.

David Sirota (52:28):

Rob, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Rob Johnson (52:30):

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