Guest thank you. My pleasure. Next, Zephyr Teachout and janine wedel discuss corruption in business. Its an hour and 20. Good evening everybody. Welcome to tonights event. Thank you so much for coming despite the noreaster storm and terrible conditions. We really appreciate and it could not have a more interesting topic or better panel to address it. There are some people who are attracted to sort of neat tiny little problems theyd like to solve, and other types of people are attracted to chronic problems that are as old and deep as politics itself, and curbing corruption is one of those cal helpings. What i want to say about the members of the panel two whom i know very intel one i had the pleasure of meeting just now. Theyre people who managed to talk about this topic which can be quite distressing in an uplifting way, and sometimes can make you almost feel optimistic about corruption if thats possible. So im very honored to introduce our panelists first, Zephyr Teachout, who briefly ran for governor of new york in the democratic primary. I was her running mate. And as the author of many books including corruption of america, which is the book she is talking about today, and have also authored a number of articles on corruption, professor at fordham hall. To her left janine wedel an anthropologist at george mason university. The author of the book unaccountable right here and back there and the author of shadow elite and numerous other books. Our met rater is larry the founder of the may day pact, my mentor in law school my close friend and allaround person who is changing the world. Ill let him take i it from here. Thank you tim. Thank you so much to the two of you for participating in this event, and thank you to new america for hosting this. Which is incredibly timely. And for me, i am incredibly excited because these two books, i have known zephyr and seen zephyr grow for 27 years and ive loved her book every since i started at five. But janines book i just had a chance to read and theyre books that perfectly compliment each other and the culture is fixed on a narrow perception of corruption. As we think of corruption today, its basically rulebreaking quid pro quo what criminals do what bad people do what thirdworlders doom thats what corruption is. So you can know if youre not a third worlder, not a criminal not a quid pro quo type not a rulebreaker, then youre not engaged in corruption. Thats basically the view. That dominates in the political state, dominates in jurisprudence and dominates in so much of popular and professional culture. These two books come at that conception in two very different ways. Zephyrs book historically gives us incredible intrigue into understanding the conception of corruption at the framing at a time when america conceived of itself as defining a vision of a republican in contrast to a corrupted system, which they knew and in some ways loved but believed had collapsed totally and janines account is an account of contemporary conception of corruption in many areas from think tanks to media to government to the academy. Very close to the work im working on at harvard, where we focus on Institutional Corruption. What is striking about these two books, theyre very, very different. Theyre talking about the same thing but different. Zephyrs book is incredibly optimistic in a certain sense. I was struck watching her run for governor that there was a feature of zephyr that was most helpful was her smile. Right . So in this book there is a certain kind of style because the problem which she identified in this book is tied to a mistake, which makes you feel like the problem is solvable if we can just get one or two people on the Supreme Court to change. Whereas janines problem is her book an incredibly depressing what you would do to address this problem. Theres one moment at the end of the book when she described an event incident at a tsa Security Check where she had she didnt want to be bodyscanned so she had to use special screening and of course to punish her they made her wait and wait and wait and wait before they would find a special screener and she was she described herself as focused and very disciplined and positive and polite and kind as she possibly could be, but each five minutes she would ask and they would say, somebody is coming. But nobody came. So she was at the last moment before she was going to be able to catch her flight and she adopted a strategy to break this, which was she started singing as loudly as she could the star spangled banner. And of course the tsa people quickly looked through heir list of relation regulations and its not against the riles to sing the star spangled banner. So they had no reason to tackle her or arrest her so the only thing they do is get her out by finding someone to search her and let her go so i want to talk about that. But the general point, the general problem, the general depression of this is if were in this problem in so many spaces, so many sphereswhat is the lever that we can use . So the way id like to proceed with this most of this conversation i want to have is conversation between these two great authors of these two really great books. And then well have time at the end for questions from the audience. But i want to start with zephyr and allow zephyr to introduce the idea which modern jurists have erased from our history this, idea of corruption at the center of what the framers were talking about, and just help us understand how did they get it . I read janines book and imagine there would have been an equivalent of her book written in britain, so it described the horrible state of the corruption in britain but then someone saw that and then figured out how to flip so it they came to america. Introduce this part. The book is really my far left exciting but effort to stand in the middle of the street and sing the star spangled banner as loud as possible. Deeply patriotic book, and recognizing something i learned from larry is actually started almost quoting you verbatim, larry which the founders of our republic the men who wrote our constitution got many many things wrong. They got race wrong. They got gender wrong. But they had some really powerful insights and part of i think the impulse of the book is to say that if were going to solve some contemporary problems, theres an extraordinary value in identifying the strains within our history in which theres extraordinary wisdom and value and then elevating those because its going to take Something Like singing the star spangled banner, something more than just going along and being cynical to break ute of our Current Crisis of corruption. At the Constitutional Convention as i detail in at the book, many different topics but the topic that comes out more than any other is the question of basically corruption. What you might call now money and politics the different ways in which money and power could lead Public Servants to represent themselves their friend, a small group, instead of representing the public or their constituencies. I came across this because i was starting to try to understand what the Supreme Court was doing how i was defining corruption and some cases in 2006 and 2007. And so i said, lets see what they thought about it back at the beginning. Its actually quite shocking once you read the transcript of the convention, how much this was the focus, the topic. When the the new yorker, Alexander Hamilton later described the Constitutional Convention, he said, we tried to enact every practicable obstacle against corruption and intrigue and that seems like a pretty accurate description. They were in there messing around, how do we put up barriers and walls. Just a few examples and then ill answer your question more fully. One thing thats most striking to me is they had their own version of what we think of as the resolving door problem revolving door problem where 50 of people go into congress now and end up becoming lobbyists huge change from 30 years ago. Then also staffers come in and out. Staffers and, as gentleman do gentleman janine staffers who revolve in and out of public rolfs. At the time the revolving door problem of the Constitutional Convention era, the threat was people who go into office to get a go into elected office in or the to get appointed office. Get a great job at the post office. Get a great you might not have too many obligations. So a way in which the king in england really secured a lot of power to himself because you basically take a parliamentarian and if you can promise a really wellpaid job the parliamentarian would work for the king instead of the people and actually mason, who your school is named after, described the provision in our constitution that prohibits holding an office while Holding Elected Office is the cornerstone of the constitution because you didnt want people going into office and serving other masters. Theres a blend of christian and airs stockcracy thinking in the founders thinking about corruption. I argue the aristocracy thinking prevailed, but really the are bitter and the great thinker and puts virtue and corruption at the core of a successful republic, and talks about not lang that is reminiscent of janines book. If the public it bust underthe corruption of this in office but corruption of citizen happy. You have an only gigs as a citizen to be public oriented in your public actions. Not all actions. And he talks about were going to be in real trouble when the citizens of a country sort of give up and wait patiently for their hire. Basically wait patiently for the moment where they will be hired by one of these private entities. So thats sort of the roots i see coming into the convention. Then when the framers were speaking about the corruption of parliament, that kind of corruption operated differently from thinking about the thing they were worried about was different from worrying about the way in which an individual might go into parliament so he could get a particular appoint right . It was the king having an improper role in parliament. Yes. I think those are related. The king having an improper role in parliament and also concern about what photograph frank talked about. Put the love of money and the love 0 power in the same place it will excite the passion nor love of money and love 0 power in such a great way theyll be confused and their worst kind of people run for office. I focus very much on whats happening in this country and independence at the time was seen as a kind of opposite to corruption and independence as im the opposite of dependence and dependence and corruption are very similar and you can see by the thinkers that the founders relied upon the use. They would use dependence and corruption interchangeably because the problem is you would have institutions and individuals within those institutions who are dependent had an appropriate dependencies outside and were not independent of private power, independent of private money and independent of the king. So they certainly thought about corruption in structural institutional ways you need to build a system which didnt didnt encourage there wrong in dependencies. That is the distinctive blindness of this court. This court will me think of corruption in individual ways. It refuses to think about in structural ways. And one of the puzzles is why they have done that. This is a difference and i want to think about that in relation to your book but this is an interesting difference in the accounts of the two of you give because your book is very much a letter to a Supreme Court justice and part of that letter as i have tried to emphasize it is people who otherwise say we are going to interpret the constitution away the framers would have interpreted it. Zephyrs book is the it is radically inconsistent with a narrow conception of corruption. Thus one part of this message. But another part of the story youre you are telling is the way in which there is a long tradition of protecting institutions like government. All of a sudden it disappears and the question is what is motivating in it. What are leaving the justices to do that collects the motivation for that type of corruption seems to me different from a count you are giving and the motivation to see corruption as quid pro quo. That has an obvious return to the people that are dancing that idea but you think the justices on the Supreme Court are adopting at . I think its one of the great puzzles. I genuinely do in the book has some provisional ideas like why we see 200 years and one of the jobs of the courts in general to protect all these kinds of corruption. And then we see the collapse of that understanding soap why . What is Justice Roberts really thinking and what is Justice Scalia thinking and what is Justice Kennedy thinking . I proposed budget berries and i have no idea if any of them are right. Its a genuinely provisional chapter where im throwing out a bunch of ideas because i want us to engage in this question. One theory is that they are sort of part of a network of what we call in law economics a way of thinking about the world and that way of thinking about the world relies on the vision of the selfish person, the egotist and i tie that back to hobbes. Its a little bit of the hobs arises and the founders were antihobbesian. Hobbs has an egotistic view of the person. Fundamentally selfish thats it. When they wake up in the morning and go to sleep they are thinking about policy and they are thinking about themselves in one way or another so its the law of economics and bets that anisom lava personality. Another is just a belief that the best way to govern a south side of democratic representation like a a market i find it so fantastic i have a hard time expressing it that a market is a better distributor of public goods than a kind of collective public coming together and represent a voice so as much as we can remove politics from the distribution of goods the better it is in that vision is politics and Democratic Politics is itself corrupt and corrupting so we should run away from that as fast as possible. Another sort of argument i put out there not controversial but people disagree with me on this one is that we have been currency report that doesnt have anybody with any political experience on it so they do not know of what they speak. They have a fantasy about the way politics works and they have no idea what it is like to sit in a room make strategy and to think how important that 2000 or 4000 or 6000 is from a donor as they dont realize how corrupting Campaign Financing is. Theres a naivete or distanced what they bring. So they have all these reasons that are tied to some kind of mistake but its hard to see them as doing it for their own personal selfinterest which is different from the kind of account that you are offering in many contexts where it certainly serves the interest of people who will go from government to private interests to conceive of corruption and is very narrow way to celebrate the anticorruption campaigns which are fighting corruption in this way because it makes it easy for them to then have enormous personal gain. So i think you see it as tied to that motive much more. While i talk about structured unaccountability and how accountability gets structured into corporate and government organizations and then about the players and the way in which they very often dont even seem to be aware of whats of the terrain on which they are playing. And of course my background and my approach is as a social anthropologist and as someone who worked in Eastern Europe under communist communism and after communism and i studied the difference between how the system said it worked, how it was supposed to work and how it actually works. Or doesnt work. So one thing that i charted was one thing called the 30 togetherness what polls called 30 togetherness. It was basically working under the table and doing deals in that context people needed to do it in communism in order to get back cut of meat or gasoline or a passport to travel abroad. You needed to have networks and you needed to have the long term sort of informal deals with people. And then after the wall fell and i was still there working and trying to understand what would transpire, what i noticed was what has been called greed corruption as opposed to need corruption which is more this oneonone corruption that takes place in a single venue that the economists like to chart as opposed to people who are working in a systemically and across institutions. So what i saw was the government government, a onetime Government Official who also was working for a western bank who also had his own foundation connecting the dots and overlapping, having multiple and overlapping roles and using the information in one venue for use in another. Fastforward a number of years to the west and i began to see very similar dynamics including the divergence between what the system purports to be and why people on the ground, what we realize its actually happening. So for instance it used to be that retired generals when they retired 20 years ago have a database that shows that predominantly retired generals and admirals would actually retire and golf or play with their kids and now today predominantly it has continued to serve in a variety of ways in the defense industry. So for instance a retired general will sit on a government Advisory Board that affords him access to proprietary information while at the same time serving as a consultant to a Defense Company are even setting up a Venture Capital were being part of a Venture Capital company. At the same time that he maybe has a philanthropic activity as well. This is what i call representational juggling and the problem is that its an information problem. We the public dont know what role or what agenda is being played out in any given context so when that general its a problem as zephyr said in serving multiple masters and that goes back to the bible. You noted that could be a problem way back then. So then when we are seeing a retired general on television we have no way of knowing whether there is some agenda for his actual expertise that is being presented or whether there is some other agenda. This problem is systemic. Unfo