To continue. To put 2020 u. S. Election. Just. Hi im Steve Clements and i have a question how bad are the problems of big money and powerful corporations in american politics and are they eroding people stressed in elections their elected leaders and even democracy itself lets get to the bottom line. In the last president ial election cycle more than 2000000000. 00 was raised and spent by the top 2 candidates donald trump and Hillary Clinton this time around we have some fabulously wealthy candidates mayor Michael Bloomberg tom stier and even donald trump but were still waiting for proof in his never released tax forms while other candidates pride themselves on not accepting any big money with the top one percent of this country getting even richer and the poor getting poorer and the middle collapsing out of the middle class and concentration of money in fewer and fewer hands what is happening to the solvency of we the people fortunately we have some folks with us today who have the answers matt stoler is the Research Director of the American Economic liberties project and the author of the 100 year war between monopoly power and democracy Michael Fauntroy is a professor of Political Science at Howard University here in washington d. C. And joining us from stanford connecticut is republican strategist liz mayor whos been advising political candidates for years thank you all so much for joining us today this is a big heavy topic matt let me start with you youve written this book out there to really take a historic look at the concentration of power and money and how that was ill served at one point in the nation how it was toppled would you think were back in that time so whats the danger today well so over the last 25 years or so more than 75 percent of American Industries have become more concentrated so were facing a crisis of monopoly and what we see in the political realm is the metaphor station of that this is new but we have experienced Something Like it before in the 1920 s. And thirtys we faced robber barons who concentrated power across our political. Kaname we defeated them in the 1930 s. During the new deal and then in the 1970 s. We made a series of intellectual choices to unleash concentrated power once again and so today we have concentration everything from cheerleading to missiles and munitions to Search Engines to show social networks and then you have a bunch of monopolists like Michael Bloomberg for example who are running for president and who are using the money that they extract from Michael Bloomberg so he runs basically a instant messaging and data service for hedge funds and banks and you have to use it to communicate with your clients doesnt operators have video theyre going to some similarities and they do have a data service but in terms of the instant messaging you have to have a bloomberg terminal if you want to communicate its just you cant you cant avoid it if you are at a certain level on wall street and they have their overfunded wall street because of weve enabled finance and so Michael Bloomberg has Pricing Power so every year he personally earns you know we dont know because its a private company but probably 1. 00 to 4000000000. 00 of just straight up cash which he can use to finance anything that he wants and right now he hes financing a president ial campaign and buying most of the Democratic Party liz let me ask you about whether you have the similar concerns that matt stoler does about the concentration of wealth and power as a as something thats a contagion is a real problem a disease to democracy if you will. With regard to elections i would say i dont quite share matts concerns and ill come back to why in just a minute as a political consultant i will say when were talking about things like big tech i do have some concerns particularly theres a lot of work that i personally have done looking at google and the amount of power that they have purposely infractions these kinds of things i do have a lot of concerns about that monopolist monopolies in that context in the extensive power that they exert but in the political realm i mean lets just jump to Mike Bloomberg since hes who was mentioned 1st is astonishing to me and i see this over and over and over again in politics how much people who have a ton of money that they can spend in an unfettered way who arent necessarily reliant on small dollar donations for example to keep them accountable to individuals just burn their money on the most insanely stupid stuff that does not do anything to advance their political fortunes so i mean a couple of good examples with regard to Mike BloombergMike Bloomberg apparently has somebody on staff who is being paid quite a lot of money i cant remember the exact figure when i when i sort of poked around about this but quite a lot of money and this person or these people who are consultants literally what theyre getting paid to do is reach out to socalled twitter influencers and offer them Something Like i think its 6000. 00 to just post favorable Mike Bloomberg content this is become a matter of huge reticule one of the accounts that theyve reached out to is an account called el bloom veto which is run by a friend of mine which basically makes fun of Mike Bloomberg inability to speak spanish you know and offering to collaborate or seeing if they can find a way to like spin the content of that account i dont know whether Mike Bloomberg maybe hes making 4000000000 a year off of bloomberg terminals but if hes spending it on that kind of thing in a Campaign Context he might as well just be setting his on fire for all of us to watch but maybe with regard to advertising i. I would say the same thing i mean i dont want to run on here but i live in the new york media market im pretty sure everybody in the new york media market knows who Mike Bloomberg is knows what his accomplishments are knows what its liabilities are theres no reason that he needs to be advertising here this is a totally blue area the primaries not going to come until late and i swear to god if you put on t. V. Between 6 pm and 8 pm youre going to see at least a slight bloomberg ads and this is the most expensive media market in the country again he might as well be taking in so youre talking as if it will actually be more effective right were talking as a strategist and thats one thing i and yes and then the other side though is on what somebody should be doing or not be doing with their money you know i think that 1st amendment gives people you know the freedom of speech the ability to make political comments to to do the things and you know if they want to spend money foolishly our system sort of lets them do that but isnt that a thing then arguing that a fabulous lee bill you know rich billionaire is essentially somehow undermining and cutting off the way a healthy democratic ecosystem should work so im interested in the difference between kind of foolishness and kind of getting the equilibrium right in the democratic ecosystem. Well i think if you have if you have the foolish expenditure its very difficult to undermine the system because youre doing something thats utterly ineffective right in order to undermine a system you have to be doing something thats effective and i would say when you look at money and politics where people are usually complaining about it generally speaking the groups or the individuals theyre talking about are wildly ineffective you know ive never actually received any Koch Brothers money except for like i dont know 100 bucks for a couple of recent articles i guess maybe its partly coke fund itself just go ahead and trash the Koch Brothers here but you know they get a bad rap for spending so much money to procure political outcomes but if you actually look at what they do they are so wildly ineffective that i really honestly wonder why anybodys particularly concerned about them well see maybes tom styer will prove to be more effective with his money in South Carolina and maybe i will be having a different conversation and ill take a different tone after that but as of right now it looks like tom sawyers billions he spent a ton of money to get to what like revenue per cent i mean i just i just dont buy that notably undermine the system by being ineffective michael i mean it is a problem for you as you see it i again im trying to figure out lets imagine a healthy democratic ecosystem you respond to you know youve heard liz youve heard matt what are the pieces that matter for you is it money is it Something Else well you can talk about a healthy democratic system about talking about money thats part of the central core of it so you know its something thats on for a 2nd the money part of which i hope to be able to burn through for me you can have a healthy democracy or a healthy democratic you go ecosystem where the well informed electorate and so part of the problem here is that there is a lot of money that has been used not just by candidates in support of their own attempts to win over this but also money spent to misinform the public about certain things that are going on in Public Policy so you have people who actually believe things that are not true and so when people vote and behave better used to an untrue things then that is that is the. Active as liz mentioned a 2nd ago and effective use of money misdirecting people who are. In for solving certain things that are less important than other things that are more important and that happens just as much all make it real for me tell me you know we heard about facebook weve heard about ads on Google Twitter is banned political ads which is it in an interesting step for them to take what would you have them do in the space that that would would you lead to a healthier system but not censorship well im not for censorship let me start there so youre not for censorship but face book runs bad thing im not im not even talking about his book at this point im talking to other much more ground Grassroots Level we have an electorate that receives countless numbers of. And consumes countless amounts of information from sources that are purposely misleading them and so when you look at the various ways in which citizens receive their information and actively believe things that are not true then to me that is where the real corrosion occurs in our democratic system there are people out there who believe that the economy is doing well and i think you can find some data points that demonstrate that but if you live in the brasco or in the heartland of the United States or you rely on agriculture you might not know that 20 the far bankruptcies are up 20 percent this year over last year you may not know if youre here a lot and the Public Discourse about how the president trumpets black unemployment for example as if thats evident evidence that but the black communities are doing better but the reality is the black homeownership rate is at a 50 year low the black male protests of the when you hear donald trump say that you want to scream what will i do scream storm up my point is that too often we rely on one or 2 day right wants to tell a larger story that isnt backed up by the full range of. Information as. You know and i think thats good because i was sorry i was just going to say i think thats true but i think that actually drives. A couple points that are really important here when were talking about money in politics the overwhelming majority of that money is spent on ads and ads are actually a fairly ineffective way of communicating information to people and influencing fotr opinion whats far more effective is earned media of course im a Strategic Communications consultant so i have to say this its my industry but in reality if you go back and you look at 2016 it wasnt money that the result for donald trump actually the thing that correlates most strongly to electoral outcomes is the share of earned Media Coverage that a candidate gets and thats where i think we do have a problem because as much as i like working with ideological media on both the look right and the left you do have a situation where quite a lot of those people deliberately overlook things that are counter to their philosophical driver and you also have a situation in Mainstream Media where you have a massive decline of local media you have a decline of investigative media and you have a lot of a shift towards employing younger reporters who dont necessarily have 10 or 15 years worth of experience to vet stories that can be very important about candidates and can provide people with some really valuable information those people arent in a position where theyre able to make good decisions so you do end up with an informed electorate but thats not because of the Koch Brothers spending money necessarily thats not because of Mike Bloomberg wasting all of his money advertising to people in connecticut who probably already like him look im. Going to end the system going to have to step in look its not just about ads and Mike Bloomberg is not wasting his money he is rising in the polls theres a theres a believe me not your lying eyes thing going on here mike there are 2 billionaires on the debate stage the president nice states is a billionaire Money Matters ok and let me just give you a quick example the center for American Progress its not just about ads the center for American Progress is the most important thing to take on the democratic side they got a lot of money from bloomberg and then they. They were trying to publish a report on on a whole bunch of aspects of Civil Liberties and they explicitly took out the piece on Mike Bloomberg setting up a muslim surveillance unit in new york city because they were getting money from blue from from Mike Bloomberg and this happens across the board it happens with every Big Corporation in d. C. That gives money they are controlling and structuring the debate internally in here theyre also spending a lot of money on ads so a lot of ads dont work a lot of ads do work but i will just say that when were talking about the crisis of concentration we are not just talking about ads 2000 out of out of 3000. 00 american counties now have no daily newspaper and this is a direct result a direct result of facebook and google concentrating power over the flow of ad money in this country that is a crisis for democracy is a crisis of concentration so how do you fix it matt because to a sensitive area thats not Political Campaigns just to be clear thats if were talking about this in the content it isnt a Political Campaign its absolutely Political Campaigns Mark Zuckerberg now structuring you here to excuse me can you just let me talk Mark Zuckerberg is is structuring how we talk about politics right now he is structuring what kind of ads people can run and what kind of ads people cant run right that is absolutely about poll my question to you is how is what youre seeing new and different now that hasnt been part of the political dialogue for quite a long time well its not its not entirely new and different its just more extreme so in the mid 1970 s. And i go into this in goliath there was a really radical shift in both Political Parties where they stopped seeing concentrations of private power as a threat to democracy this is the main character of my book is a congressman a right patman he was over from the texas right im talking about he was he was the chair of the Banking Committee and he was overthrown essentially by bill clintons generation right that the watergate babies and they didnt they werent suspicious of concentrated private power and then in 78. 00 you had Newt Gingrichs generation come in and take over the Republican Party you roll that forward 40 years you roll of them and. Position of the political economy for 40 years and you have what we have today which is a whole set of billionaires that are running our politics in a set of institutions concentrated private power people like Mark Zuckerberg so you mentioned organizations in d. C. Blow the whistle on some of this kind of thing well the money through your point helps explain why are we arent hearing them right in the size of the whistle in the silence of the world so is informed in some measure by how much money and how much reach you have yes it may be true that some of these has dont do much to impact the way people think but they help to reinforce what people already believe based on the information they get other than other places so i just think that when you look at some of these Good Government organizations as we might call them w