More closely with his other battalions were doing that was his failing. He should have kept better track of that seeing that reno was and moving forward like he was supposed to. He should have seen that movement and responded to it. The only thing i can think of why he would keep going was that other column that was supposed to be coming south to meet them in a pincer movement, maybe there was the remote idea that he could see carry in the distance or Something Like that. He was way far away. It was that final move. Had custer been able to unite with them they would have made it through the battle because of those two battalions and three battalions can make it. So no, i dont think it was inevitable and i dont think it was coming. He made mistakes and enumerated particularly his estimations of the real fatal one was the final move. Some people say in the debate, was custer even alive . There was one theory went to the river and was killed and they carried his body back up. Theres another theory, only a few guys went to the river and the rest of them kept going. Those debates are endless but in my opinion if it is true that they all went down to the river they should have come back they should have known where reno was but they shouldnt. There was supposed to be a three prong attack on putting general cook at that time, custer had no idea he had met a few days earlier, chief crazy horse. They thought they were proceeding upward to meat altogether and i think to me it surprised me he didnt want anybody to know. I completely agree with that. Quote really blew it. Not only did he fail in his battle and decide to stop because he was out of ammo and according to one of his age he spent the next few weeks hunting and fishing, he didnt send any scouts out, didnt try to inform the other columns that were in the field operating against the enemy but back to the fort and to chicago and had to come back to fort lincoln and to the field and everything was over by the time anyone knew his guys were out side. He really blew it. I dont know why he doesnt get more criticism. He should have sent people out to inform people. Scout couldnt have made it through. At least give it a shot. Is there a surprising time going by . I will end questions and ask you to have some coffee drinks cookies, talk for a little bit. Thank you for coming, thank you to our friends at cspan and hope you enjoy s. [applause] booktv is on twitter. Follow us to get scheduling updates, author information, and other live programs. Twitter. Com booktv. You are watching booktv, next Zephyr Teachout and janine wedel discuss corruption. The key for coming despite the noreaster storm and terrible conditions. We appreciate it. There are some people who are attracted to tiny little problems they would like to solve and other people are attracted to chronic problems that are as old and deep as politics itself and corruption is one of those challenges. What i want to say, the pleasure of meeting just now. In an uplifting way. And if that is possible. So i am honored to introduce our panelists. First to Zephyr Teachout but who ran for governor of new york in the democratic primary. I was his running mate. The author of many books including corruption in america from Benjamin Franklins snuff box to Citizens United which we are talking about today and a number of articles on corruption. To the left is janine wedel, an anthropologist at george mason university, the author of the book unaccountable how elite power brokers corrupt our finances, freedom, and security which is here and there and the author shadow eat and numerous other books. Our moderator hardly needs introduction, founder of the mayday pack, my mentor in law school my close friend and allaround person who is changing the worlds. I will let him take it from here. Thank you so much for participating in this incredible event. In new america, new york city. It was incredibly timely. For me incredibly exciting because these two books, i had seen Zephyr Teachouts grove for 27 yes and loved her book. But janine wedel i just had a chance to read and these two extraordinary books that perfect complement each other and they complement each other in the context of a moment where the culture we have six incredibly narrow conceptions of corruption. We think of corruption today, corruption is quid pro quo what bad people do, 1third were elders do that is what corruption is so you can know, if you are not a criminal or a quid pro quo type, you are not engage in corruption. That is basically the view that dominate in the political space, it dominates in jurisprudence and dominates in so much of popular and professional culture. And these books come at that conception in two different ways. Zephyr teachouts book gives us an incredible entry into understanding the conception of corruption at a time when america conceived of itself as defining a vision of a republic in contrast to a corrupted system which they knew and in some way believed had collapsed totally. This is an account of contemporary conception of corruption from think tanks to media to government to the academy so very close to the work at harvard. But there is no significant difference between these two. They are very different, they are talking about the same thing but very different. Zephyr teachouts book is incredibly optimistic in a certain sense. I was struck watching her run for governor that there was a feature that is the most powerful, her smile. In this book, the problem she identified in this book is tied to a mistake, which makes you feel the problem is solvable if we can only get two people. Janines problem is her book is incredibly depressing. What exactly would you do to address this problem . There is one moment in the end of the book an extraordinary moment, she describes events, an incident at a t. S. A Security Check where she didnt want to be body scan so she had to use special screening and of course to punish her they made her wait and wait and wait before they would find a special screener and described herself as focused and disciplined positive and polite and kind as she possibly could be but each five minute she would ask and nobody can. And then she was going to catch her flight. She adopted a strategy to break this norm which was she started singing as loudly as she could the star spangled banner. The tee as a people looked through their list of regulations and it is not against the rules to sing the star spangled banner. They had no reason to tackle her or arrest her so the only thing they could do is get her out by finding somebody and let her go. But the general problem is if we are in this problem in so many seers, what is the whether we can use . The way we proceed with this, most of this conversation i want to have is a conversation between these two great authors of these great books and then we will have time for questions from the audience but i will start with Zephyr Teachout and allow her to address this problem that modern jurists have erased from history, the idea of corruption at the center of what the framers were talking about and help us understand how did they get it . I imagine there would have been an equivalent of her book that could have been written that describes a horrible state of the corruption in britain but someone saw that and figured out how to slip it when they came to america. Ebook is really my far left exciting average to stand in the middle of the street and sing of the star spangled banner as loud as possible. It is a deeply patriotic book. And recognizing what i learned from where day. And the founders of the republic, the men who wrote the constitution got many things wrong. They got raise wrong, they got gender wrong but they have some powerful insights, the impulsive the book is to say if we are going to solve contemporary problems there is extraordinary value in identifying strains within our history in which there is extraordinary wisdom and value and delegating those because it will take Something Like singing the star spangled banner something more than going along and being cynical to break out of our Current Crisis of corruption. At the Constitutional Convention as i detail in the book there are many topics but the topic that comes out more than any other is the question of basically corruption money in politics, different ways in which money and power could lead Public Servants to represent themselves or friends, a small group instead of the public for their constituencies. Starting to understand what the Supreme Court was doing, the defining corruption in some cases in 20062007 so lets see what they thought it is shocking to read a transcript of the convention. When the new yorker, Alexander Hamilton described the Constitutional Convention tried to enact every practical obstacle intrigue. That is an accurate description how they put up barriers and walls and a few examples to answer more fully, one thing that was most striking is their own version of what we think of as the revolving door problem. 50 of people go into congress and become lobbyists, a huge change from 30 years ago and also staffers come in and out morrison staffers, it is a whole network, revolved in and out of public and private roles, in many ways. At the time the revolving door problem of the Convention Area was the threat that people who would go into office, go into elected office or appointed office, get a great job at the post office, that you might not have many obligations so there is a way in which anyone who secured a lot of power, you basically take a parliamentarian and if you promise really wellpaid job the parliamentarians would work for the king instead of the people in the constituency and mason who your school is named after describe the provision that would prohibit holding Elective Office as a cornerstone of the constitution, he didnt want people going to office and serving other masters. Where they got it from is a blend of christian and aristoteles in thinking about corruption. But the Aristotle Ian thinking predominates. The convention had something to hang their hat on but really the arbiter in fact, puts virtue and corruption at the core of unsuccessful republican. If the public was not just corruption of those in office that is not corrupted an obligation as a citizen to stay public oriented in public actions not all actions, and talks about we are in real trouble when the citizens of a country give up and wait patiently, basically wheat patiently for the moment where they are hired by one of these private entities. The route that i see coming into the convention. When the framers were thinking about the corruption of parliament, that kind of corruption operated differently from thinking the thing they were worried about was different from the way an individual might go into parliament so he could get a particular appointment, the king having an improper role. Those are related. The king have an improper role and there was concern about what franklin talked about love of money and love of power in the same place will excite the passion for the love of money and love of power in a great way and the worst people going to public office, those who want a lot of money and power as opposed to those who want to serve more publicly and systems that will attract people who have a public orientation. We agree on most. Because your focus is still on individuals. The important thing is janine wedel brings out institutional structure so that was what they talked about. Right. The way in which there are there is a lovely history as you know, the language of freedom and independence are powerful words in American History and i focus on what is happening in this country and independent at the time was seen as a kind of opposite to corruption and independence was an opposite of dependence and the dependence and corruption is very similar and you can see in the thinkers that the founders relied upon, they will use dependence and corruption sometimes interchangeably. The problem was you would have institutions within the institutions, inappropriate dependencies outside and we are not independent of private power. Independent of the king. They thought about corruption as a structural, and in to encourage the wrong kind of dependencies. That is the think of blindness the will only think of corruption in individual ways, refuse to think about it in instructional ways. And this is a really interesting difference and accounts that the two of you give your book is very much a letter to the Supreme Court justice or two Supreme Court justices. Part of that letter as i tried to emphasize, not people who otherwise say we are going to interpret the constitution of the way the framers would interpret it, Zephyr Teachouts book is a way of saying heres what framers would understand corruption to mean and it is radically inconsistent with the narrow conception of corruption you are offering right now. Another part of the story you are telling is the way in which there is a long tradition of protecting institutions like government against all of a sudden this appeared. The question is motivating the justices to do that paula feels to me that you can see corruption as a quid pro quo. That is a return to the people who are advancing that idea but you think justices are on the Supreme Court . It would be a great puzzle, i genuinely do. There are provisional ideas like why we see 200 years one of the jobs of course in general is to protect against all these kind of corruption. And then we see that understanding, what is Justice Roberts really thinking, and and i propose a bunch of ceres, and i see a provisional trapper, i see as engage in this question. One theory is apart of a network of will be sought economic way of thinking about the world and that relies on the vision of what relies on the selfish it arises. Basically egotistical view of the person that people are fundamentally selfish you leverage their self interest for good things as possible and when they go to sleep and think about policy thinking about economics in the model of the personality. Another which was related to these economic was a belief that the best way to govern was outside democratic representation. It is so fantastic the market was abetted distributor of public goods than the collective public coming together in representative way so as much as we can remove politics from distribution of goods the better it is. Politics and Democratic Politics is it self correcting corruption and run through that as much as possible. I see another sort of argument i put out there is not controversial, is we have a current Supreme Court that doesnt have people with experience on it. They do not know of what they speak. They have a fantasy about the way politics works and no idea what it is like to make strategy and think how important that 2,000 or 6,000 is. And corrupting the private system for campaign finance. There are reasons for this mistake. It is hard to see them as doing it for their personal self interest, the different account that you are offering in any contexts where it certainly serves the interests of people who go from government to private interests to conceive of corruption in this narrow way to celebrate the anticorruption campaigns which are fighting corruption because it makes it easy for them to have enormous personal gain. You see it as tied to that motive. I talked about structured and accountability 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 what of the terrain on which they are playing. My background and my approach is as a social anthropologist and as someone who worked in Eastern Europe under communism and after communism and i studied the difference between how the system said it worked and how it actually worked. Or doesnt work. One thing that i chartered was what is called dirty togetherness. It was working under the table, doing deals. In that context, it was people needed to do this under communism in order to get that cut of meat or gasoline or passport to travel abroad, you needed to have net worth and you need to have these long term informal deals with people and after the wall fell and i was still there working and trying to understand what would transpire, what i noticed what what has been called free corruption instead of a new corruption which is one on one corruptions it takes place in a single venue that the economists like to charge as opposed to people who are working in a systemically and across institutions so what i saw was the one time Government Official who also was working for western bake who also had his own foundation connecting the dots and overlapping having multiple land overlapping roles and using the information in one venue for use in another and fast forward 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 what people on the ground, what we realize is actually happening. For instance, it used to be retired generals when they retired 20 years ago, i have a database that shows that predominantly retired generals and admirals would actually retire, golf or play with their kids and now today predominantly, that is most continue to serve in a variety of ways in the defense industry. 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 consultant to a Defense Company or even setting up a venturecapital or being part of venturecapital. Somebody at the same time he is at a think tank, the same time he has a philanthropic activity as well. This is what i called representational juggling and the problem is weve the public, it is an information problem. We the public dont know what role or what the agenda is being played out at any given conflict so it is a problem as Zephyr Teachout said of serving multiple masters and that goes back to the bible, noti