David Sirota (0:00)

Hey everyone. Welcome to the final episode of this season of Master Plan. Before we dive in, I want to let you know this episode is especially personal for me and I really hope you enjoy it. For those of you wondering what's next and wondering are we going to do another season of Master Plan, All I'll say right now is stay tuned. We'll have an update on that after the election. In the meantime, here's how to stay connected with us. 1. Go to Levernews.com right now to become a paid subscriber to help us create more in depth series like this one that hold the powerful accountable. You'll also get access to the Master Plan Premium feed with bonus episodes and exclusive content just for premium subscribers. 2. Go follow the Levertime podcast feed right now. It's our weekly news show that I host with Arjun Singh. Search Lever Time in your podcast app. 3. If you haven't already, please sign up for our free email newsletter to get our latest investigative reporting. We have links to all this in the episode description or just go again to Levernews.com now. Here's the final episode of this season of Master Plan the Lever when we fight, when we fight, we end. This was August 2024. American politics was on fire. Donald Trump had survived an assassination attempt, Joe Biden had dropped out of the presidential race and Kamala Harris had been installed at the top of the Democratic ticket. Amid all this chaos, I decided to take a trip to see the insane circus firsthand. I am in the hall of the Democratic National Convention. I just saw Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker walk by. Though this was a last minute trip and I hadn't done any planning, I managed to get into a few of the places you don't see on tv, the private parties. So I'm here at the Salt Shed in Chicago, which is a concert venue and they're going to have a Wycliffe concert and it's a climate event. Clean Power Happy Hour. It's a bunch of climate groups. The Democrats gathering was in Chicago, a place I know pretty well. I went to college right outside of Chicago. I worked my first newspaper job in Chicago. I went to my first Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1996. I worked on my first political campaign against a billionaire in Chicago and through that I got a taste of Chicago's notorious political culture. Chicago is the most corrupt city in the United States based on data from the Justice Department. Now when you hear the term Chicago style corruption, you might imagine smoke filled back rooms and secret exchanges of envelopes of cash but one of the first things I noticed at the democratic convention in 2024 is that corruption today is much cleaner and out in the open. It's less dirty envelopes stuffed with cash and more like the corruption you hear about on Wall street or at a Swiss bank. Glossy, systematic, mechanized, sanitized and corporatized. This is the new immersive corruption of the Master Plan era where it's right there on display for anyone bothering to look. There's all the corporate stuff is sort of integrated into everything. There was the Democratic cloakroom sponsored by Microsoft. I saw this kind of thing over and over at the DNC corporations sponsoring every event, letting everyone know they're the real stakeholders, the owners of American politics. There's a big billboard that says, with special thanks, FedEx Reynolds, the tobacco company SAP, Blue Cross, Blue Shield Stand with crypto. That's the name of a group and the American Clean Power association, the American Gas association, the Edison Electric Institute and the Nuclear Energy Institute. And this is a post gavel party celebrating power to the voters. Of course, this wasn't about power to the voters, as the sign at the event insisted. The convention was a gathering of the most powerful public officials in America. And so these sponsors are making clear that politics is about the power of the corporations and billionaires now permitted to buy everything. After the master planners so successfully deregulated the campaign finance system and legalized corruption, what started to freak me out at the DNC was not just how ubiquitous all the corruption is, but how normal it seems. No one's shaken by this. No one's bothered by this at all. Maybe even I'm not bothered by it. I'm sitting here drinking, drinking an ipa. That's how corruption gets normalized. Nobody even notices the contradictions. If I even said anything about the contradictions to anyone here, they'd look at me like I was an insane person. These thoughts made me feel pretty lonely and pretty demoralized, like maybe I really was the insane person. And maybe looking at this bacchanal of money politics, it would be better to just succumb to the master planners. I know this stake doesn't exist. Maybe it would be better to just live in the matrix. Ignorance is bliss. But the thing is, not everyone at the convention has just decided ignorance is bliss. While sulking around the convention hall one night, I heard a voice. I didn't expect to hear that same voice from those prescription drug bus trips I'd been on all those years ago. We need an economy that works for all of us, not just the Billionaire class. It was a voice that had been made out to be a pariah within much of the Democratic Party, but was now getting some applause. Get big money out of our political process. Bernie Sanders diatribe seemed aimed directly at the lobbyists, donors and master planners in the luxury boxes looking down on the convention floor. Billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primary elections. And then came a proposed solution. For the sake of our democracy, we must overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move toward public funding of elections. This wasn't just a reminder of what might have been had Bernie won the election in 2016 or 2020. This was a primal scream. So, yeah, I cheered along with the crowd as it politely applauded. For a minute, I felt this foreign, weird feeling I hadn't felt in a long time. What's it called? Joy. No, no, not exactly. Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. All right, right. Hope. Thanks, Obama. Yeah, I felt hope, which felt good. And just like when Obama said it, the hope lasted for all of five minutes because literally the next speaker after Bernie was this guy. Fellow Democrats, welcome to Chicago. It was J.B. pritzker, who spent $350 million of his Hyatt Hotel inheritance to buy the Illinois governorship over the course of two campaigns. And just minutes after Bernie's rant against billionaires, Governor Pritzker delivered the line of the night. Donald Trump thinks that we should trust him on the economy because he claims to be very rich, but take it from an actual billionaire. I could feel my hope evaporating with the wild cheering. Trump is rich in only one stupidity. Pritzker literally touted his billionaire status and he got effusive applause for it. Yeah, that really happened. And Pritzker was followed by a speech from a former credit card industry CEO reassuring the donor class that Kamala Harris understands that government must work in partnership with the business community. Much of the convention went this way. Some populist speeches mixed in with corporate speakers offering up vague platitudes, like this speech from Kamala Harris's brother in law, an executive from Uber who promised that when it comes to Kamala as president, I know she'll fight for you. Now, let's be clear. What was going on on the Republican side wasn't any better than the depravity at the dnc. The Republicans just offered a different, even less subtle, more in your face celebration of wealth and power. Just before the DNC word dropped that the richest man in the world would be launching a new super PAC to bankroll the election bid of Donald Trump, who if he wins, would be in a position to reward this same donors companies with even more government contracts than they already had. And you know Elon, I love Elon Musk. And I read. I didn't even know this. He didn't even tell me about it. But he gives me $45 million a month. So the endless summer of 2024 made crystal clear that we're living in the master Planner's world. And when I left Chicago, I left with questions. Which future will we choose at this fork in the road? A future in which we all decide we've had enough and that we're going to reduce the power of billionaires, corporations and master planners? Or a future in which we just cheer for the billionaires as the Master Plan continues. When we started this series, we promised you 10 episodes. You're on 10 on your guitar. Where can you go from there? But because these are such big questions, we decided to channel our inner Spinal Tap. We need that extra push over the cliff. You know what we do? Put it up to 11. 11. Exactly. In the 11th and final episode of this season, we crank up the volume and ask the biggest question of all. As corruption now threatens the survival of democracy, what exactly will it take to forge a different path? I'm David Sirota and this is Master. What about the Master Plan, huh? Money. Imagine waking up to find out that your private information has become available online for the world to see. We're talking personal details that you'd never want exposed. Well, this is the reality for countless people worldwide. For example, just this April, hackers tried to sell 2.9 billion stolen records online. Yes, billion with a B. The numbers are staggering. The major risks here include identity theft, fraud and phishing attacks. One way to fight back is with Incogni. Incogni contacts online data brokers on your behalf to remove your information from servers. Incogni also provides you with an online dashboard showing you how your data is being removed and protected. Go to Levernews.com data right now and get 55% off an annual Incogni plan when you use code lever 55 at checkout. That's L E V E R55. There's a 30 day money back guarantee. If you change your minds. There's no danger in trying it out. To claim your massive discount on incogni, go to Levernews.com data. In the spring of 2005, right before the master planners turned the Supreme Court of Sandra Day O'Connor and William Rehnquist into the Supreme Court of John Roberts and Sam Alito. The writer David Foster Wallace delivered a college commencement speech. There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, morning, boys. How's the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, what the hell is water? The acclaimed author captured a feeling I had right at that particular time in my own life, that time I told you about all the way back in episode one, that period of disillusionment that I experienced as a young person after spending five years swimming in the swampy corruption of Washington. The parable really spoke to me because, as Wallace said, it has everything to do with simple awareness. Awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over, this is water. This is water. I've been thinking a lot about this speech as our team has reported this series over the last two years. It's on my mind because corruption is our society's water. It's so immersive that it can lead us to forget that it is all around us. In this episode, we're going to get into some of the ways we can reverse the master plan. But before we do, it's worth looking at how America is swimming through all this water in the here and now, the water of corruption that the master planners took 50 years to flood into the system. Let's start with elections. This episode is being released one week before the 2024 presidential election, and the defining feature of the contest isn't just how much money is being spent, but also how, at this point, nobody's even trying to hide the transactional nature of all that cash. Remember how Supreme Court justices defined corruption as only explicit quid pro quo, Latin for this, for that. Well, here's the quid. Donald Trump summoned a who's who of top lobbyists and executives from the oil and gas industry to the upscale La Quinta slash bribery palace he calls Mar a Lago and proceeded to solicit $1 billion from the fossil fuel companies to get him elected. And now here's the quote. In exchange, the Washington Post reports, quote, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden's environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted. And this kind of thing isn't just happening on the Republican side. Rich Democratic donors and business leaders are contributing money to Vice President Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. But some are asking, is there a catch? Some of these donors are now openly suggesting Harris should replace the head of the Federal Trade Commission, progressive darling Lina Khan. And these aren't exactly mom and pop grassroots donors. Media mogul and Democratic donor Barry Diller said he would lobby Kamala Harris to remove Lina Khan. And there is a similar sentiment being expressed by mega donor Reid hoffman, who donated $10 million to the Biden Harris campaign. This doesn't even seem like an election anymore. It seems like an auction. But legalized corruption isn't confined just to the presidential election. It's also all the spending to buy seemingly every election up and down the 2024 ballot. AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is spending millions of dollars in primary races. Nearly half of all the corporate money flowing into the election this year is coming from the crypto industry. The 2024 election will be the most expensive ever, with an overall price tag of $15.9 billion. And this is just the spending that we know about. There's a whole ocean of dark money that's difficult to trace and quantify. The question is, what is all this money buying? It's buying legislation, court rulings and regulations for sure. But it's also buying silence. Think about the world around us. More than half of working age Americans are struggling to pay for health care even if they have insurance. Roughly half of all Americans ages 55 to 66 have nothing save for retirement. More than 137 million Americans are living in places with unhealthy levels of air pollution. Yeah, not good news. US Life expectancy decreased by the biggest margin since World War II. Corruption. Deep Master plan level corruption is the fact that in the face of all this preventable pain and suffering, the reaction from the elected government is most often this. That's right. Nothing at all. Just total silence. Corruption is every public official knowing that if they try to end all the stealing and the looting and the misery created by corporations and billionaires, they'll likely be spent into the ground in their next election. And so, for the most part, they keep quiet. Beyond elections, there's the whole other swampy nightmare of corruption in the courts. Okay, just jump right into my nightmare. The water is warm. After all the revelations about billionaires treating justices to lavish trips and gifts, master planners are now trying to block any crackdown on the most flagrant corruption. Democrats in the Senate advanced a bill to create an enforceable code of conduct for Supreme Court justices, the only members of the federal government who don't have one. Republican senators refused to allow the bill to even come to a vote. The court's conservatives also just created an entire new get out of jail free card for government corruption, making it far harder to prosecute a president for bribery. We're coming on the air with major breaking news from the U.S. supreme Court. Moments ago, the justices ruling on Donald Trump's claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution. The court deciding this morning, presidents do have immunity for a. Remember when Justices Roberts, Alito and Kavanaugh said this in their Supreme Court confirmation hearing? No one is above the law, and that includes the president. Under the Constitution, the president is not above the law. I don't think the president is above the law. Yeah, that was bullshit. Gesundheit. We'll see how that new immunity ruling from the Supreme Court plays out in the coming years. But one thing we do know for sure is that the Supreme Court's other rulings are now threatening to undermine new corruption prosecutions. In Ohio, the old Citizens United ruling is now being used as a criminal defense strategy. Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder is fighting against his 20 year sentence. Householder's attorneys argue that his conviction relied on undisclosed campaign contributions permitted by federal law and protected by the First Amendment, thus violating freedom of speech laws. A jury found that householder took a $61 million bribe in exchange for a billion dollar bailout for First Energy. The utility company already admitted to bribing him. Next up, remember last episode when we told you about the recent Supreme Court case actually legalizing bribery? Well, that may now be used as a criminal defense strategy in corruption. Famous Illinois, a 6 to 3 majority ruled that a gratuity was not bribery and therefore not illegal. Mike Madigan, the ComEd 4, Ed Burke, even Rod Blagojevich. Today's Supreme Court ruling could have an impact on all Illinois public officials convicted or accused of bribery. In New York City, that same Supreme Court bribery case is now being invoked after Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on corruption charges. Defense attorney Alex Spiro insisted today that Eric Adams should never have been charged. Courtesies to politicians are not federal crimes. Congressmen get upgrades, they get better tables at restaurants. That's just what happens. Spiro filed a motion with the court to dismiss the bribery allegations against Adams. All told, worth More than $100,000. Clearly, this is the master planner's world now. But they aren't done trying to shape that world. As evidenced by another recent bombshell revelation. An ultra secretive Chicago industrial mogul has quietly given $1.6 billion to the architect of the right wing takeover of the courts. The largest known political advocacy donation in US history. In a stunning expose, ProPublica and the Lever have revealed how Barry side was given his fortune to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, the co chair of the Federalist Society. And what does Leonard Leo plan to do with all of that dark Money? In an October 2024 interview with a conservative website, Leo laid it out in Powell memo esque terms, saying he wants to recruit people to, quote, control the choke points of society. The folks who have the greatest capability of entering into and helping to control the choke points of society. It's really important to find those people, to identify them, to recruit them. Then Leo said he aims to, quote, infiltrate the entire culture. And that means being at the tip of the spear, filing those lawsuits, building those talent pipelines, placing personnel in positions of influence, and then, of course, also trying to influence social and cultural institutions. Infiltrating the press, infiltrating entertainment, conservative movement, building beachheads in areas like news, entertainment, business and finance, corporate C suites, educational institutions. The word unprecedented is overused in our society. But taken together, all of what's going on in the present moment is actually for real unprecedented. We are now in uncharted waters and we are minnows swimming among sharks. That's why when I heard Governor Pritzker's line and all the boisterous cheering it generated at the Democratic convention, take it from an actual billionaire. Well, I felt like simply leaving the convention hall and walking myself into, into Lake Michigan, never to be heard from again. And if you've listened all the way to this point, I'm guessing you feel the same way. But that's not what we should do. After the break, we're going to meet those who are reacting to this mess with a more positive, proactive and constructive attitude. A reaction that invokes a clarion call from the era when the master plan was just getting started. I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. It's the mid-1970s. The Powell Memo is being implemented. The post Watergate campaign finance reforms are being gutted. Plans to roll back the New Deal are being formulated. And out Comes Network, a movie that seems to completely understand how the master planners see the world and what they want to create. The world is a college of corporations inexorably Determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. In network, this lecture from corporate management is aimed at the central protagonist, a disgruntled newscaster named Howard Beale, who started telling harsh truths on the air. We know things are bad, worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don't go out anymore. Network seems as resonant now in this era of legalized corruption as it was when it first came out in theaters nearly 50 years ago. And so does Howard Beale's demand. You've got to get mad. You've got to say, I'm a human being, God damn it. My life has value. So I want you to get up now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore. In the movie, people start screaming out their windows, I'm mad as hell. I'm not gonna take it anymore. I'm mad as hell. I'm not gonna take it anymore. But here in real life, angrily screaming out your window or despondently jumping into a lake is probably not gonna do much to stop the master planners who don't like democracy and who see the world as one giant business that they own. What might achieve better results is the stuff being done by people who are confronting the problem head on. So let's take a look at a few ways that those folks are trying to fight back. First up, let's start with the whole issue of transparency. The idea that we should at least be able to know who is spending all this money to buy elections. Throughout this series, we've mentioned Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's completely reasonable disclose Act. When corporations and other wealthy interests spend money, more than $10,000 to influence our elections, their identities must be disclosed. White House and campaign finance reform groups have made real progress with this bill. It's now supported by every Senate Democrat. Getting any bill this far up the political food chain is real progress. But of course, there's Mitch McConnell and his fellow obstructionists. Senate Republicans have blocked legislation to expose the names of wealthy donors who give unlimited funds to so called d dark money organizations. Thanks to that kind of obstruction, dark money is now not just a Washington problem. It's everywhere. So called dark money has arrived in local elections. Dark money is pouring into the Denver school board race. Just who is pumping money into secret nonprofit funds linked to Lansing lawmakers? But there is good news. There's progress being made far away from Washington, D.C. take Arizona, a swing state that was the home of campaign finance reformer John McCain and that passed landmark anti corruption legislation in the late 1990s. But in recent years, utility companies used dark money to buy elections for friendly Arizona regulators. $8 million in dark money secured an Arizona gubernatorial win for Republican former Ice Cream CEO Doug Ducey. And then in 2016, Arizona Republicans gutted the state's campaign spending disclosure law. And so right around then, this guy had his Howard Beal moment and then went to work. Arizona voters have a right to know who's contributing to political advertising. That's Terry Goddard, a former mayor of Phoenix and Arizona Attorney general. And because of dark money, so much of what we're seeing on the TV and get it coming through our mailbox is mysterious. It's paid for by some coward who's hiding and doesn't want us to know who it is that's paying for these ads. Goddard spearheaded a ballot measure to try to impose a dark money disclosure law on the politicians trying to keep all the corruption hidden. If passed, the ballot initiative would require organizations that run political ads to disclose their big donors. The ballot measure campaign was not an overnight success. In 2018, they were derailed by a legal challenge. In 2020, Covid halted their efforts. Then in 2022, another lawsuit tried to stop them. In that case, Governor Doug Ducey and other Republican state leaders filed a brief supporting the argument that Arizona voters should not be allowed to vote on the dark money issue this November. But Terry Goddard and campaign finance reformers survived the legal challenge. And when the votes were finally counted, Arizona voters are making it very clear this election that they didn't want dark money in political campaigns. Here's a look at the results. The AP confirming that Prop 211 will pass with roughly three out of four voters approving it across party lines. It'll force donors of at least $5,000 and up that pay for all of those negative ads to publicly discover disclose their identities. It won with a whopping 72% of the vote. 72%. But of course, that wasn't the final word. Because guess who is waiting to file a lawsuit. Can you guess? Hi, I'm Saul Goodman. Did you know that you have rights? The Constitution says you do. Better call Saul. Nope, not Saul Goodman. No, no, no. Waiting to file the lawsuit were of course the master planners at the Koch empire's Americans for Prosperity, the same group that had previously filed that anti disclosure case at the Supreme Court. In this new case, Americans for Prosperity tried to block Arizona's ballot measure from being implemented in the suit. AFP resurrected the old NAACP case from the 1950s that you heard about in the last episode, the one that helped billionaire donors and corporations pretend to be the same as persecuted civil rights activists in the Jim Crow South. But so far, at the time that we're recording this episode, AFP is failing to find success. They've been rejected by a lower court. Of course, the federal case is now being appealed because, as Terry Goddard told a local television station, so much is at stake for the master planners. The Koch organization and the folks behind American prosperity are the biggest dogs on the porch and they want to protect their franchise, which is a dark money franchise. So bottom line is, I think they feel that this is something that they can ultimately weasel up to the Supreme Court. Whether or not that happens, the entire situation spotlights how states and cities can and are fighting back, even as Washington seems gridlocked. Of course, disclosure isn't some cure all. There are other necessary deterrents needed as well, among them criminal prosecutions. And here again is some encouraging news. Even though the Roberts Supreme Court has made corruption prosecutions more difficult, there are some prosecutors trying to forge an anti corruption path. In the last few years, we've seen a Trump appointed Republican federal prosecutor bring that huge corruption case that we mentioned earlier, the bribery case involving Ohio's former Republican House Speaker. We've also seen a Democratic appointed federal prosecutor bring corruption cases against New York's Democratic Mayor Eric Adams and against a top Democratic power broker. In Washington, federal authorities announced bribery charges against New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and his wife. FBI agents raided the Menendez home in June of 2022, uncovering over $480,000 in cash stuffed in envelopes and closets. Again, the Supreme Court is making these prosecutions more difficult, but the cases are going forward, which is a good thing. And in just the last year, public corruption cases have actually ticked up. Not a cure all, but it's something. The problem though, is that these cases can all be appealed up to the same Roberts Supreme Court that's been whittling down the federal bribery laws. Two potential solutions for that are expanding the court and creating term limits for justices, which would at least provide the chance for a less corrupt court in our lifetime. And these ideas are finally part of the political conversation. Congressional Democrats are wading into a political firestorm over the Supreme Court. A group of lawmakers plans to introduce legislation today that would expand the court from nine justices to 13. President Biden has a compelling new pitch that includes major changes to The Supreme Court sources tell NBC News his proposed reforms, which would need congressional approval, include establishing term limits for justices. Recent polls show majorities of Americans support both court expansion and term limits. But once again, there's obstruction from. Yep, Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans. The Supreme Court is under attack. The big kahuna, of course, would be doing what Bernie said at the Democratic National Convention, overturning Citizens United. That will almost certainly never happen at the current Supreme Court. But there is another way to do it. I rise today in support of the pending constitutional amendment which would restore to Congress in the states the authority to rein in the enormous sums of money that are flooding into the political process. The People's Rights Amendment would overturn Citizens United. We need a constitutional amendment that will overturn Citizens United. Okay, so yeah, I know what you're thinking, and you're right. A constitutional amendment is a really long process, but it's not starting at square one here. You need 38 states to ratify such an amendment. And 22 states and 842 local governments have already called for such an amendment through ballot measures or legislative resolutions. That includes Republican leaning states such as Montana and West Virginia. But short of a constitutional amendment, where does that leave things? I've thought about this for 25 years and I keep coming back to the same answer that Bernie Sanders mentioned at the dnc. Move toward public funding of elections. Public financing of elections. Yeah, okay, it's a mouthful. And yeah, it sounds like the kind of super theoretical and complicated idea that would put you to sleep during a lecture at Ferris Bueller's high school in 1930 in an effort to alleviate the effects of the. Anyone? Anyone. But don't fall asleep. Public financing really isn't boring or complicated. What it basically means is that the government provides funds to candidates so that those candidates can run well resourced campaigns without having to rely on private money that comes with the expectation of legislative favors. The public money is given to any candidates of any party or ideology who qualify. And this isn't some crazy newfangled idea. It's been around since Teddy Roosevelt first proposed it in 1907. In fact, there was a viable public financing system for presidential elections for a few decades after Watergate. And there are some versions of public financing systems in a bunch of cities and in 13 states, including in swing states like Arizona, Maine and Florida. And three times in the last 50 years, Congress got close to doing it at the federal level for all congressional and Senate candidates. The Senate passed it in 1973, but it was blocked in the Democratic controlled house. Then in 1992, Congress actually did pass it, but then came the Sith law. Yup, you guessed it. Clearly it was crafted in a manner to benefit the Democratic Party at the expense of the Republican Party. And that's why it's been so divisive and partisan and why the President will veto it and there will be plenty of votes there to sustain the veto. And that's exactly what President George H.W. bush did. He vetoed it. And then only a few years ago, the House passed a public financing bill. But once again it was blocked in the Senate by. Yeah, him again. Were you expecting someone else? I find your lack of faith disturbing. To be sure, public financing can sound like just another wasteful taxpayer handout to greedy politicians. The attack ad that you don't like, well, there's a good chance you help pay for it. Florida taxpayers have already shelled out more than $5 million this year to publicly finance political campaigns. Taxpayer money is being spent to help candidates in Denver run for office. I don't want to pay for campaigns I don't agree with. If you think about it for only a second, that does sound outrageous. But if you think about it a bit more, the current system is the real problem. My old boss, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, put it pretty simply when he was asked about it. So public financing of all federal campaigns. It'd be a good start. We have the best government money can buy. That's the right way to think about it. If the public doesn't finance campaigns, someone else will. And if we let campaign money from billionaires and corporations control every election, then we're effectively letting the master planners buy the best government for them, not us. That's what we have now. A government in which a recent study by Princeton researchers found that, quote, the preferences of the average American appeared to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non significant impact upon public policy. It's a privately financed government satirized in that scene in the comedy film the Distinguished Gentleman where a lobbyist takes a new congressman to lunch. I'd like to do more money for you, but first I've got to get your positions on a few issues. Now, where are you on sugar? Price supports sugar price reports. Where should I be, Terry? Shit. It makes no difference to me. If you're for him, I got money for you from my sugar producers in Louisiana and Hawaii. If you're against them, I got money for you from the candy manufacturers. You pick. Let's say four. Yeah, four. Four. That's the system we have now, it's great for the master planners. They love it, which is why they so oppose a public financing system that would give people a way to run for office that doesn't force them to rely on legalized bribes. So if disclosure laws, prosecutions, public financing of elections, and all the other reforms are so obvious and so straightforward, then why don't we have them already? Is it just the master planner's obstruction or is it something more? That's after the break. There is no more important issue because the money comes into play everywhere. And reform is not for the short wind. It's a long, long battle. This is Fred Wertheimer, who you heard in episode two. I mean, you know, this is about power, and money equals power. So what you can do is curb it, you can limit it, but then you have to be ready to fight again. Wertheimer is one of the people from Common Cause who back in the early 1970s helped shame Richard Nixon into signing the first campaign finance reform legislation in half a century. I've thought a lot about our interview with him as I've considered all those reforms I just reviewed. It's a continuum you fight for as long as you're in the game, and then someone comes along and picks up and they do the fighting. Wertheimer is alluding to the historical cycles of corruption, scandal, backlash and then reform, the cycles that we've seen in the United States for more than a century. I'd like to believe we're moving into the backlash and reform part of the cycle, the mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore stage. And then the next generation picks up and does the fighting that Wertheimer's generation did 50 years ago. And then we get all those reforms we just reviewed. But I worry that the master planners have permanently broken the cycle by capturing our psychology. If corruption is the water in the David Foster Wallace speech, I worry there are signs we're becoming a culture that vilifies those who ever dare mention the water. This insidious trend started in early 2020. I saw it firsthand when I was Bernie Sanders, presidential campaign speechwriter. In the weeks before the Iowa Caucus, all of the presidential campaigns were doing what campaigns do, enlisting their supporters to contrast their candidates records with the other contenders. Our team enlisted law professor and anti corruption advocate Zephyr Teachout, who you heard in the last episode. I suggested she publish an op ed reviewing Joe Biden's close ties to corporate donors and detailing how Biden rewarded those donors with legislation and proposals that would help them. Zephyr Teachout, a New York liberal and prominent Sanders surrogate, argues that Joe Biden has a corruption problem for taking contributions from wealthy donors. She writes, middle class Joe has perfected the art of taking big contributions, then representing his corporate donors at the cost of middle and working class Americans. The allegations were well documented. In fact, Biden had long been known as the senator from mbna, a reference to the credit card company. And he'd been hammered in an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw. In 2008, you received $214,000 in campaign contributions from the company and from its employees. At the same time, you were fighting for a bankruptcy bill that NBNA really wanted to get passed through the Senate, making it much tougher for everyone to file bankruptcy. But this wasn't 1973 or even 2008, when corruption was considered a newsworthy topic. When Teachout resurfaced this criticism, it was 2020, after decades of the master planners normalizing such pay to play corruption. And so when teachout's op ed came out and we promoted it, it was portrayed as a scandal, not for Biden, but for teachout and for Bernie. Does the campaign believe that Joe Biden has a corruption problem? What the article is describing is the fact that Joe Biden has made deals with Republicans repeatedly over the course of. Nobody challenged the facts presented in the op ed. The scandal was that calling corruption corruption was apparently too impolite. The Biden campaign quickly swung back, and other observers suggested the attacks are part of a pattern for Sanders dating back to his 2016 campaign, when he faced criticism for not stopping supporters from aggressively attacked attacking opponents like Hillary Clinton. This was perfectly teed up for Bernie to have his own Howard Beal moment. I'm not going to take this anymore. But that didn't happen. It is absolutely not my view that Joe is corrupt in any way. And I'm sorry that that op ed appeared. To me this could have been a John McCain moment, a moment where Bernie Sanders called bullshit an elevated pay to play corruption to the center of the presidential election. But Bernie backed down. I was crushed. I know a lot of others who were crushed, too. If Even Bernie Sanders, Mr. Anti Citizens United, couldn't talk about corruption in honest and blunt terms, then who could? Of course, the press corps and the political class breathed a sigh of relief that manners had been restored. I think it was Elton John who once said, sorry seems to be the hardest word. For whatever reason, last night, Bernie Sanders could say it. Yeah, and it sounded good to A lot of people. Civil discourse, it's a good thing. Seems rare these days. Hooray for civility. I'm sure the master planners were thrilled that the C word, corruption, had been banished from the discourse. But that wasn't the end of the attempt to turn corruption into a dirty, unspeakable word. Two years later, a Texas oil tycoon is suing Beto O'Rourke. Billionaire Kelsey Warren is seeking a million dollars in damages from the Democratic nominee for Texas governor. The controversy in the 2022 Texas gubernatorial contest revolved around a 2021 winter power outage in the state during a surprising cold snap. For months now, O'Rourke has been making accountability for last year's deadly power outages. His key tenet of his campaign, O'Rourke focused on one energy giant in particular that made big money during the crisis. O'Rourke has said that one company in particular is Dallas based Energy Transfer Partners. It did make $2.4 billion in profit. And O'Rourke says that its CEO, Kelsey Warren, later gave Abbott a $1 million campaign donation. All of that is factual. Okay, so if it's factual, then what's the problem? In a 16 page lawsuit, Kelsey Warren now says these accusations go well beyond the sorts of vague and generalized accusations and political and corporate corruption that are often thrown around. Warren says that O'Rourke is suggesting that he did something illegal. But Beto argues that he is being silenced. The case was ultimately dismissed a year later. And so you might say, hey, no harm, no foul, right? Wrong. The Beto O'Rourke case was an intensification of the trend that had started with the Bernie situation in 2020. Talking about corruption won't just get you criticized and get you pressured to issue a sad apology. It became an actionable offense that a billionaire can use to drag you into court and sue you for a million dollars. And even if you win, you might end up buried in legal bills. Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast. Yes, it did, Ron Burgundy. And this effort to erase the issue of corruption from the political discourse, it's still escalating in early 2024, this happened after failing to advance the general election in the California's U.S. senate race. Congresswoman Katie Porter is now claiming that the race was rigged by billionaires. On social media last night, she thanked supporters for voting, posting quote, we had the establishment running scared with standing 3 to 1 in TV spending and an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election. Porter's comments were statements of the obvious. Yes, a super PAC funded by crypto billionaires absolutely had spent $10 million against Porter. Yes, Porter was outspent in the Senate race. And yes, getting outspent often sways election results. But when Porter dared to call that out in unvarnished terms, it was whipped up into a controversy. Orange County Democrat Katie Porter now facing backlash within her own party after she said billionaires spent millions to rig the election. Porter made very clear that she wasn't pulling a Donald Trump and denying the election results or alleging voter fraud. But that didn't matter. The news media, which is supposed to be a watchdog against corruption, it went on the attack with a barrage of headlines slamming Porter. Here's CNN joining the dog pile. Katie Porter, a Democratic congresswoman, complained in her concession speech and since then on Twitter saying her campaign had to withstand, quote, an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rigorous this election. Let me just state that's not what rigging an election is. The whole thing was an attempt to control language. As Porter's Democratic opponent Adam Schiff made clear, no Democrat should be using that language. And what I think is notable is the Democratic Party quickly said, hey, you don't go there. There is a real incredible difference between the parties when it comes to defensive democracy, but we just do not use that language. Talk about slimy. This attempt to equate Porter's legitimate criticism of the corrupt campaign finance system with Trumpian lies. It was grotesque, but it worked. And Porter backtracked. I wish I had chosen a different word because big money does influence our elections. Yeah, I have an additional wish. I wish that we could talk honestly about corruption rather than being polite about it or shitting the bed anytime someone gets mad when corruption is discussed. Because if we're polite about it or simply avoid the topic, one thing is guaranteed. We will never rein in corruption. We will never realize any of the reforms we've discussed, and the master plan will continue forever. Folks, sorry to keep you waiting. I apologize. Good afternoon. I'm about to head to New York for the annual UN General Assembly. Two years ago, President Joe Biden called a White House press conference to discuss a light topic, the future of America. I want to speak with you very briefly about a vote in Congress this week that addresses a serious problem facing our democracy. In my view, Biden proceeded to point to reporting from our journalists at the Lever, as well as ProPublica and the new York Times reporting that had just exposed the largest dark money transfer in American history that you heard about earlier in this episode, the $1.6 billion that was secretly transferred to Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo's network. And the public only found out about this $1.6 billion transfer because someone tipped off some of your reporters. Otherwise, we still wouldn't know about it, but now we know there's something we can do about it, Biden said. The revelations proved why the US Senate had to pass the DISCLOSE act to force the disclosure of all the dark money buying seemingly everything in Washington. Republicans should join Democrats to pass the Disclosure act and get it on my desk right away. Biden concluded by invoking the memory of the last campaign finance reformer who had led a successful fight against the master planner. Getting dark money out of our politics has been a bipartisan issue in the past. My deceased friend John McCain spent a lot of time fighting for campaign finance reform. For him, it was a matter of fundamental fairness, and he was 100% right about that. Ultimately, this comes down to public trust. Dark money erodes public trust. We need to protect public trust. I remember when this happened in 2022 because a lot of people contacted me congratulating the lever on our reporting that Biden cited. But honestly, I kind of eye rolled the White House speech because I'd already made up my mind about Joe Biden. A long time ago. I'd seen him help his pharmaceutical industry donors and his Wall street donors. He was the senator from mbna, the guy who helped his credit card industry donors crush millions of debtors. I'd viewed him as Mr. Corruption for most of my adult life. But as we were finishing up two years of research for this podcast, I stumbled onto some old tape that kind of blew me away. It's prompted some difficult questions that I can't get out of my mind. Inherent in the system that we have to run for elective office is corruption within the law. This is 1973. Watergate was raging, the Powell memo was beginning to go viral, and somehow Joe Biden had just done something unthinkable as basically a nobody underdog. He defeated a two term incumbent and had won a U.S. senate race at age 29. He was now appearing at the Cleveland City Club for one of his first speaking events as a senator. He proceeded to tell the assembled powerbrokers, donors and elites something they probably didn't want to hear. We're not going to begin to make an encroachment on moral wrongdoing in government until we elect men and women to office who are their own men and women unfettered by influence from interest groups, whether they be business or labor, until they don't have to come back to you and beg for money to run. Biden shared some revelations he had from his own long shot. Had in the beginning, when I started big corporations or big labor or big wealthy individuals or big anybody come along and said, here, Biden, we want to contribute $20,000 to you. I probably would have taken it. Not probably. I would have taken it because I had to go out and borrow $20,000 and put a second mortgage on my house to get that 20 to start. So what's the answer? We support the federal funding of federally elected offices. Biden's support for public financing of elections came right from his personal experience running for office without access to big money. And soon after this Cleveland speech in 1973, Biden helped add a public financing provision to a bill that passed the U.S. senate later that year. Side note, it died in the House. Months after that happened, he sounded off at an event televised by pbs. The system does produce corruption. And I think implicit in the system is corruption, when in fact, whether or not you can run for public office and it costs a great deal of money to run for the United States Senate, even from a small state like Delaware, you have to go to those people who have money and they always want something. Biden then implied that money's influence in politics was threatening to turn America into an oligarchy where a handful of big donors control the entire electoral process. How long is the American public going to put up with a small group of men and organizations determining the political process? I wasn't expecting to end this whole series thinking about Joe Biden, but I think there's something profoundly important here. Biden's political career has spanned the entire 50 year history of the Master Plan. And hearing Biden back in the 1970s makes his recent White House speech about the DISCLOSE act seem more authentic. But it also makes me wonder how a politician who can voice such blunt and taboo truths about corruption, how can that same politician also swim for so long inside that corrupt system? What does that mean? What does it mean that there's the Joe Biden who says in the 1970s, the system does produce corruption, and 50 years later, there's that same Joe Biden saying, there's much too much money that flows in the shadows to influence our elections. And yet there's also the Joe Biden who did this. You received $214,000 in campaign contributions from the company and from its employees. At the same time you were fighting for a bankruptcy bill. And there's the Joe Biden who was rightly lampooned on late night TV for doing this. Biden spoke at a private fundraiser earlier this week and told the big donors that he didn't want to demonize the wealthy and added that under his presidency, no one's standard of living will change. Nothing will fundamentally change. What does it all mean? The cynic in me says that it means nothing more than Joe Biden is a professional politician who periodically said some nice stuff about campaign finance just for show, but who got swallowed by the system. Once the senator from mbna, always the senator from mbna. And maybe that's true. God knows I'm not here to try to convince you what to think about Joe Biden. But here's the thing. Maybe two things can be true at the same time. Maybe it's also true that Biden embodies a much more significant truth about something way, way bigger than just Joe Biden. A truth about the system and about our responsibility to force the system to change. Maybe Biden is the older fish in the David Foster Wallace speech asking how's the water? And maybe his contradictions prove that even if people inside the system can see the corruption all around us and lament that it's destroying our country and really want to do something about it, maybe they still can't single handedly do much if we keep blindly swimming along and don't force them to act. Maybe it's on us to stop giving politicians a pass when they sell out and maybe we should stop letting them off the hook. Even if we like them and even if we voted for them. Maybe it's on us to produce enough righteous anger and outside pressure to force real change. Biden seemed to make this very point in another speech that I found when I was digging through archives of his career. It was late in the second term of the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president, he was speaking to a big group of young people. Let me ask a rhetorical question. If you could do only one single thing, only one to increase fairness, equity, opportunity to middle class, pass rational gun control, deal with immigration, et cetera, what would it be? I can tell you what one thing I would do. Get private money out of political process. Biden concluded that all this corruption created by the master planners had become a democracy crisis. What are we doing? We're cutting off access for so many of you, for so many bright young minds who the only way they can get engaged is you have to go where the money is. And where the money is, there's almost always implicitly some string attack. Biden wondered aloud about whether if he was starting out in today's world of huge money, if he could have ever gotten elected to the Senate like he did back in 1972, he asked those kids in the audience to keep demanding the kind of campaign finance reforms that he had pushed. I don't want you to get discouraged. I don't want you to get discouraged. I promise you, if you keep doing what you're doing, if you generate and increase your numbers, if you never apologize for your passion, if you always gird yourself against the temptation to rationalize, if you're actually willing to listen to the other side to generate a consensus, this can all get done. And then came what sounded almost like a plea, like a cry for help from deep within the swamp itself. We badly, badly, badly need you. So don't get despondent, don't disengage, disrupt the status quo, make noise, take everybody on, and don't ever settle for it can't be done. God bless you all, and may God protect our troops. Thanks. Whether you love or hate Joe Biden doesn't matter. This is not about Joe Biden or any other politician. It's about the bigger truth. This democracy badly needs all of us. The Master planners will win if we all disengage and let politicians, including Biden himself, off the hook. But if we don't settle, if we do make noise, if we do take everybody on, including the politicians that we think are our friends, then we, we do still have a chance to disrupt this crushing and corrupt status quo. And we do still have a chance to create a different future. A better one. Master I earned everything I got. Master Plan is a production of the Lever. This episode was written by me, David Sirota. Our editor is Ron Doyle. Our production team includes Jared Mayer, Laura Krantz, Ula Culpa, Arjun Singh and Ronnie Riccabeni. Fact checking of this episode by Chris Walker. Original music is by Nick Byron Campbell. Mixing by Louis Weeks. For our final episode of this season, we want to give some special thanks to folks who helped us throughout the whole series. First and foremost, a huge thanks to all of our paid supporters at the Lever who helped make this series possible. We'd also like to thank Sheldon Whitehouse, Jane Mayer, Robert Mutch, Anne Southworth, Adam Winkler and Jeffrey Toobin, whose previous reporting and research were so instrumental in telling this story. Big thanks to Lewis Black, Brett Saunders, Ralph Nader, Tom Daschle, Ben Clarkson, Armand Aviram, Michael Balkin and Steve Zansberg at Zansburg Balkan llc. Also, thank you to Jeff, Joanie Morgan and Vanessa and the entire team at the podglomerate. Thank you as well to Joel Warner and the entire team at the Lever, who continue to report on corruption every day@levernews.com and of course, a very special thank you to all of our spouses and children and family who endured our long days and nights and angst and anxiety about this whole series. One last thing. I want to dedicate this series to my friend, the recently passed Jeannie Kaplan, a true fighter for social justice and a true friend who's inspired me in so many ways. I know she would have loved to hear this whole series. We miss Eugenie.