People could harvest their own salt and there was a kind of doityourself to it, but its like purple and yellow and [inaudible] my friend that wears a kind of clerical somebody made her a hat anhalf and it was all some f like catwoman. [applause] [inaudible] thank you so much for coming out. [applause] [inaudible conversations] senator Sheldon Whitehouse offers his thoughts on how the government is impacted by corporate money into special Interest Groups in his book captured the corporate infiltration of american democracy. He is interviewehes interviewew york times investigative reporter, eric lilpton. Host i want to start by asking why did you write this book, simple question. Guest the simple answer is i was really getting discouraged all the criticism and antagonism, suspicion and frustration about the federal government which generations of americans have fought and bled to protect and preserve when the real problem i think is not the government, but its infiltration by corporate forces. I think if we could get those corporate forces where the Founding Fathers thought they should be which is out of elections and politics, the frustration would decline a lot. Host i see that your dad was a diplomat in laos and thailand. Tell us about your upbringing and worldview and the process. Guest growing up in the foreign service, i saw two things. One, we were always in the pretty dangerous and impoverished places, so i saw around me everywhere American Families who had chosen to go where if their kid was seriously hurt there wasnt a good hospital or medicine or you could go to movies o the moviese water wasnt safe to drink him if something was bitten by a dog you would have to go to the rabies series because it was probably rabid. Rabid. What yo you learned in a generan but people didnt talk about as much as we do now is that something mattered about america that was worth putting your family through all that stuff and then i thought at the other side the reciprocal which is in all these Different Countries although my father used to say they like to tweak the eagles, but behind that was a respect for and admiration for and confidence in america that created i think a beacon for many people and many countries around the world, so it kind of came in by those is absolutely nobody gave a lecture and told me this but the Important Role of america in the world is civilians as well as any kind of lasting lesson. Host looking at your career you have been in Government Service since you graduated from the university of Virginia Law School and worked at the Attorney Generals Office and then you went to work for the governors and u. S. Attorneys and you are an attorne attorneyl yourself and then ultimately elected to the senate. So much was between the private law practice and has been in the government sector. Why has that been the career in the life that youve chosen . Guest part of it is to follow the lesson i learned as a child which is america is a special place and getting the government right for america is a special thing to do even if the state and local level. It has given me the chance to see the government from a lot of perspectives and it is that array of different perspectives that has helped inform this book. Host guest the core argument of the book is the corporations and all these other entities that are in some coordinated way trying to influence the system in congress and successfully doing it and so why is it different now than i was decades ago do you think, and i know that Citizens United is at the top of the list of. The extent to which corporate lobbying dominates in congress i think is about 301 over everybody else by recent studies. Thats probably been so since the 1970s, and the problem of regulatory capture and administrative agencies and regulatory agencies where the regulated industry basically moves in and begins to exert control over the Regulatory Agency has been around since Woodrow Wilson wrote about it, so some of this is a constant theme. The new things i think ive beem as Citizens United and the entry of Corporate Power and the groups that exert Corporate Power into the elections in a dominant way. When you have one Group Spending 700 million plus in the last election and threatening to spend 400 million more in the midterm, that is a huge footprint, and theres a lot more going on behind it. The second piece has been kind of bringing home the longterm effort of the Republican Party to put the socalled business friendly judges in the courts so that the courts have become increasingly hostile to regular folks and increasingly interested in protecting the corporations to the point where there was a poll not too long ago that a human being could get a fair shot at the corporation and i think 9 of the people that answered said it could. I take it back, 6 of the people said we think an individual can get a fair shot and 54 said no, the corporation is going to have the advantage. So when you have a spread like that, about whether a human being can get a fair shot against the corporation in the United StatesSupreme Court, that is a signal that we have a problem. The book talks about the impact of Citizens United and there is a turning point in the influence of money and politics. But i guess i just wonder how you would reconcile that with the fact President Trump defeated thpresident of trumpded Hillary Clinton much of who were much better funded by the packets and supergroups and similarly you have the tea party that disrupted congress and the chamber of commerce and the coke printers are not friends with the teen party so how do you reconcile those things . Guest i dont think they need all that much reconciling. Its a happy conversation we should have here today. But jeff who was once a Republican Communications person in the white house and then went to the fda as a republican official has written a book about the extent to which the tea party was closely connected with the fossil fuel crowd and the Tobacco Industry on how thatll developed very much in sync with the deregulatory agenda of those forces. So, i dont think that that is quite as out of sync as you might think. And they put the question of donald trump the other way. I think one of the reasons people were attracted to someone with his sort of general impertinence and disrupted this is because they were fed up. And i think one of the reasons they were so fed up is they thought the government that had started to bog down into being able to cross a corporate interest so he in some respect may be the product of what im talking about. It is a similar impulse. Its a constitutional blind spot and i guess i want to ask you to explain a little bit more if you see that there is a flaw. It was crafted by americas founders and it was a document to balance different conflicts of interest and of the key interest they were trying to balance was the right of the people to not be overwhelmed by their government, and so they divided up the government into a Different Branch to check one another and the protection from the creation of the new royalty or aristocracy. So, they had a specific set of concerns they were trying to address. And i think they addressed it really well considering how well the document plastic. The public wasnt happy with that. They wante wanted the bill of rs and make sure that they were precisely recognized and protected, then the bill of rights was at it. In the entire process, there was not a lot of concerns about corporate participation in the politic. It was understood that this would be a citizen operation and there were not very many corporations around at the time. They have disgraced themselves and there were very few that tended to build canals or schools and that was it and then they were also in close political control by the legislatures to set them up so i dont think it ever crossed the founding thought of as minds that the corporations would have a big role in this political hol institution that they established and that blind spot has been exploited by the Corporate Power first in the runup to the progressive era when Teddy Roosevelt took them on and actually took them. Now they have rebooted and we have the problem again of too much Corporate Power and having never contemplating that they would be there they dont have any checks and balances. Host one is the examination of the nonprofit groups and thus were the organizations are backed by groups that present themselves as the one philanthropic founder to influence the political process without necessarily registering it. As a reporter that writes about this i see this a great deal myself it isnt simply the registered while being lobbying but then the lobbyists simply walks in and points to the handiwork of all of these affiliated groups. Talk about how it creates disappearance of a groundswell when its something be incorporated. Let me give a very specific example. I was the unite United States ay in rhode island back in the department of justice when they sued the Tobacco Industry for denying that tobacco caused this for human beings. So they won the case and it was very clear. I had that in the back of my mind, so i have been thinking about whether data should be a model for the climate denial and fossil fuel industry and i wrote an oped in the Washington Post was good enough to publi publish. Im not one of the celebrities s nobody paid attention for a while but after a couple of days suddenly, you keep track of your press and so i noticed over the next couple of the there were more than 50 pieces that appeared around the country attacking me and this idea and they all came from the same the more or less. In the cookiecutter argument with the same authors and you could trace it back to this machinery of the specialinterest Fringe Groups with telltale ideas like the First Amendment rights of the companies to commit fraud which is wrong. That is a falsehood forever. The amendment ended where the fraud began so the argument that that was not the case was a telltale sign and then when i provoked them in a different way so you could kind of ring the bell in the network and watch it respond with multiple dozens of apparently independent legitimate expressions of opinion that are not just doing the propaganda work. What is wrong with that setup and why did that threaten democracy from your prospective . Because people dont know who it is. If it is exxon mobil saying this is our opinion and we are going to fight for it, this is what we believe and what we stand for which is we should be able to defraud the public to our Hearts Content whether Climate Change is real, then we can have that discussion and you know who the partys interests are and people understand what the circumstance is. This circumstance is. When you set up something called the Heartland Institute which nobody knows what it is or an institute that is named after the extraordinary American Hero george c. Marshall and you just put his name on an institute and use it as your fringe group and you do that 40 or 50 times, and you end up with this array of dc the public of who said that this stuff because it helps people understand the story when they know who the protagonists are. If youve been able to hide behind a curtain pulling strings the public is deceived and that is not good for democracy. Host doesnt the left do some of the same things . Your book doesnt talk about george soros or the environmental groups. They all have their own networks of nonprofits with opinion oped pieces. Whats different about their obligation . Guest im close to the community and one thing that i would say to them so im not speaking out of school as they are pathetically badly organized. Everybody goes off and does their own thing and its very rare to get any kind of organization or strategy on an issue, whereas on the other side it is strategically developed because they are all just parts of the same creature to create the illusion that its the same thing but its not so. The other thing is the four environmental groups and labor unions are spending down a scarce resource when they engage in this and they need to get those that believe in their cause to try to fill the resource back an in so they can stay in business. On the other side its a moneymaking proposition for these industries. The International Monetary fund has said the fossil fuel industry gets a subsidy every year 700 billion, billion with a b. So to protect a subsidy that big theres an enormous amount you can spend so its profitable for the other side to play this game and outside has to try to find simply sympathetic sources to replenish and that creates a massive unfair advantage, so both resources and strategy, the corporate side is miles ahead of us. Host but i wonder why youre not more critical guest when the league of conservation voters does something, Everybody Knows who they are and there is nothing behind them other than the members who believe in their cause. They are not a front group for the corporation or a particular industry whereas the george c. Marshall institute behind it is like five Big Companies and foundations and its part of an array so you dont know when somebody from the Heartland Institute writes an oped in the paper for who they are there on behalf of. When the league of conservation voters rights in the paper Everybody Knows that is the league of conservation voters and the environmental group, we get it. Host im going to read some language that was used, a kneejerk antimurdoch spewing out Conspiracy Theory that makes you sound like a blogger at the center of american progress. Wasnt it what is it like to be on the side of that criticism . Guest it shows that i am getting through the desperation. They dont say that what i am saying is not true they just attack me as an attack dog. People will see that ive taken a thoughtful approach and understood history is looking te understood histories looking around what everybody sees. This is not suggesting that jfk and Marilyn Monroe are in utah and that Justin Bieber is their love child. This is very much i think sensibly developed stuff they just dont want to see if so they put people out there to try to smear things up a little bit. But it all comes in a days work. Host another thing ive read as you are influenced by your wife in an inappropriate way that she has a phd in marine science and specializes in biology. He guest so she actually knows something about oceans and they are polluting the oceans in ways that you can demonstrate in a middle School Science lab by combining salt water and watching the ph drop into the acidification go up. I have thought only my wife but others have influenced me in a way that i argue this stuff its a 400 parts per million and its been between 170 to 300 for as long as human beings have been on the planet. So we are rolling some danger this dice and going to places weve never been in the history of the species before. They go off the coast of washington and oregon and theyve had Severe Damage and acidification has an Important Role in that. Im proud to stand with nasa and the union of concerned scientists and my wife in pointing all this out. Host you use the term Money Laundering. Philanthropic groups that collect and donate to other groups. Why do you describe them as Money Laundering efforts . Guest what they do is take money from whomever. Lets say you want to make a contribution to the institute you dont want the George Marshall institute to be tagged by a member of the press, so somebody to take huge amounts of exxon mobil money then you go to a place like the donors trust to deliver it where ever they want it to go with the name and identity stripped away so that now the donation to the institute for justice says donors trust. It is an extra layer that helps protect the powerful corporate interests. Its not some innocent sounding quite impressive sounding Public Research group so it has kind of a nefarious role in protecting all the different friend groups from accountability for who they are that can be proven by where they get their money and it severed the link so it comes from displays. Why should the identity of the donors for that purpose and maybe you. Host how serious do you consider the problem in the political system even though under law they are a Nonprofit Organization how serious do you consider that issue . Guest i think it is pretty serious. First in virtue of being nonprofit they are allowed to fire their donors and if they can speak as if they are independent when in fact they are the glove over the hand of a particular industry. Second, they are capable of gathering enormous amounts of resources so they can become immensely powerful and they are allowed by Citizens United to get involved in politics and spend enormous amounts of money in politics. So when americans for prosperity is going to spend over 700 million in the last election with up to 400 million in the coming midterm that sends an incredibly powerful signal to stay out of our way, dont cross us. And when they add to that youre going to be severely disadvantaged, that is a quote if you cross us and when they call about it again, political peril its just americans but peace and prosperity is so that has been a problem. And that segues into the problem of the groups and then you can look back to see what on earth they used that if they just threaten to spend the money and if they are just going to the Campaign Manager as a candidate saying we are going to spend 10 million on your primary opponent in the next election and you will never see it coming and you will never know who it is a. That is a serious threat and nobody will see that. It just changes the way the politics work and it isnt visible when the public space. Host a paragraph i thought was compelling and im sure the republican colleagues in the corral think of the fences as high into the gun towers as morning political power and the amplified voices warning nobody leaves the corral. You will be severely disadvantaged. Its not a great place to be. Nobody likes to be threatened or play the fool or cater to someone elses whims. Nobody likes to go through againsgo against therespected ve universities were telling them that your point is they feel compelled to do so. Guest talking about Climate Change is like talking to prisoners about escape. They may very well want to do it, but they are anxious about being caught. So we probably have six to ten senators who would like to work on climate bill and we have those that sponsored the bills before senators united and we have those that run for president on good climate platforms but nobody will budge. On the other side, we just had the secretaries of the treasury and the former chairman so the distinguished group of republicans and there is a broad array of people that support the carbon fee and a bunch of the senators that have an action on the climate what is the problem . The problem is because of Citizens United has allowed the fossil fuel industry to set up and we are going to crush anybody that crosses us and they try to mail them to the ground knowing that makes it look like it as partisan as opposed to traditional specialinterest pleading and they can use the Republican Party to prevent things from getting done so they dont torture us and the democratic side anywhere near as much as they threaten the republicans. Do they say they are offended for your suggestion that they are held hostage and denying the true belief on the issues . I know that its the right thing but right now i cant do it. The first one i tried to do is go to the home state universities that express their disappointment or frustration with me and say heres what the universities and home states say about Climate Change so maybe you should listen and we go on from there. I tried to be polite about it but we have a problem on our hands and the fossil fuel industry is this behaving. Host i want to go back to his role in the democratic par party. They are funded by small dollar amounts and why again i just want to get back to why it plays on the other side if there are factors influencing him that our selfinterest as well. Guest there may be that i havent seen it. He made an enormous amount of money as an investor out in california and is now out of the business and one way is to put money into trying to counter the fossil fuel effort by putting the money up on the environmental side of the issue. Last time it was about 50 million. Americans for prosperity alone spent 750 million. Theres only so many billionaires that want to spend it on trying to protect and fight back against this industry and on the other side of the industry has an endless desire to prevent any kind of regulation and continually. Host the corporate funded organizations you talk about possible litigation. Gerrymandering started when they arranged to have a legislative district of a massachusetts state senator drawn in such a way you couldnt possibly be defeated because it wa is a key political ally of the governor and they made a cartoon of the shape of the district and they called it the gerrymandering and that is where the term came from. It doesnt take long for people to figure out that if you do protections in gerrymandering you could also do a tax so people start drawing the districts and ruined the chances of the opponent and politicians that they didnt like. What the republicans didnt like in the project was to say wait a minute, this isnt about these individuals, this is about the delegations for what they did is they took states like wisconsin, ohio and pennsylvania and they drew maps in which the democrats were concentrated in the high democratic preserved basically into these high concentration districts so that allowed them to draallow them todraw the disy could win 55, 58 margin. So the result of the situation was like in ohio in 2012 president obama got reelected statewide. My friend Sherrod Brown got elected statewide back to the senate. But ohio sent a congressional delegation that was 13 republicans to five democrats. So they sent a huge counter majoritarian delegation because they pact them together and that allowed them to carve up the rest of ohio into 13 republican districts and by doing so they were able to win the house and they took pride in that and said we lost the congress by over a million votes bu but he won by 0 congressmen because the carve up the districts in this way. But unfortunately, the republicans on the Supreme Court had given the green light to do that and told them no matter how bad their behavior is going to be, they were never going to quarrel in that political gerrymandering. Host if the republicans had to control, then why has it not been their rights to create the congressional districts they see fit . Guest there is a constitutional principle of onef oneperson anoneperson and one e theory is that it will count the same and any deliberate attempt to take people to vote a certain way and isolate them into highly concentrated districts so that they dont have the effect affet statewide that they should have, in a regular democratic system is counter majoritarian. And when you are dealing with the house which is supposed to be the majority rule place, you are basically turning upside down one of the most basic democratic principles which is those that find th win the mosts wins the election and that is a tough game to start to play. Host it is a pattern that is inconsistent in this neutrality and the Supreme Court do you feel it has become more politicized in recent decades and what are the consequences of that in your prospective . Guest i have argued a case and spent a lot of time arguing in the Appellate Court and Supreme Court. Its hard to believe and its hard to say that a court has begun to put it some on the scales but when you look at the Business Lobby Group in the country winning by 21 of the cases nowadays and when you look at the predictability into cases that involve either the majority to win the elections or the balance between corporations and human beings and directed in favor corporations were some of the far rightwing social issues, they always seemed to tip that way. Theyve thrown up their hands and come to the agreement. It is a 54 decision lining up to do so and they say wait a minute, this isnt right. This is not consistent with the text of the constitution. This is a doctrine that youve just made up and it doesnt matter because time after time, 5for, reliable as clockwork, there they go and the pattern is becoming really demonstrable and that is one of the reasons the public disenchantment is so significant. People have to be leaving the court and fined 6 of people say that they would get a fair shot in the court and 54 think that they wont get a fair shot against a corporation, something is wrong that goes beyond one senators observations. Host one thing that ive observed as well as does all of these amicus briefs and interveners and they often come together with names that appear to be either academic or trade associations. But they are playing a role in helping move forward the cases e cases that consistently aligned with the corporate interests that are also litigating the same cases. How much of that is happening and is that a phenomenon that you think has grown in terms of the role that is playing in the federal Court Matters as they move forward tax guest it has grown. Its new and different and i dont think that Many Americans are unaware of what is going on. Most people believe what happens in the case and the court is a litigant has a grievance so they go out and hire a lawyer seeking to win the trial for the litigant and eventually the case if it continues to be disputed works its way up to the Supreme Court. Thats not the way the cases work. Very often, you have a group paid for by corporate interest to scam the country looking for litigation opportunities to try to bring the cases up to what they perceive to be a friendly court. And they go out and hire the litigant and they found a case in rhode island when i was the attorney general with a group called the Pacific Foundation to find a gentle man and say you like your case, we would like to take you to the Supreme Court because we think that we can prove a point with it so we went along with it and the next thing you know im in the Supreme Court arguing this case. But that has been turned completely backwards and then there is this additional eco chamber of amicus briefs from the south of front organizations that are telling the republican appointed judges what is the they want. So when the republican appointed judges deliver back to them what they said they want i think it creates a very unfortunate impression that theres basically a machine being cranked on the court where the speciaspecial interests put intt group that filed the brief. Host one of the players that has been participating in the investigation that has a lot of the briefs and groups that are funding the writing of the memos in the associations was the attorney general from oklahoma, scott pruett had 14 different lawsuits against the Environmental Protection agency that just last week was confirmed to serve as the administrator of the epa and what you voted against what is your concern of having him run against the epa . When scott pruett came in, he shuts that down and opened up a new appellate unit designed to basically sue on behalf of the fossil fuel industry said this was a big step up in the industry that is to have to go to these groups file the amicus briefs and now they have an attorneattorney general that woo in to work on their behalf. So if you wanted to obscure the hand of the industry and the legitimacy to the argument, what Better Things could you do then to get an actual attorney general to do this for you so with all of that going on i think the prospect for the Environmental Enforcement happening in the new administration is really small and people around the country have to look carefully at. One of the things you dont focus a great deal on is how to get out of the situation we are enamored witin and what the sold what is the pathway forward so if you can look how we emerge from this place that we have ended up in. A simple way would be to pass the act that has been in the senate for years that would require the dark money that comes in but nobody knows where its from to actually be reported. If you contribute more than 10,000 you have to report it and if it ends up in politics it doesnt matter how many youve got to follow that first wiki the fun out of hiding because you have to disclose any way. That would be important. I think that the corporations shouldnt have a political role in this country. The Founding Fathers set up nothing to have a political role. They assume those that we run would be decided and run by human beings and corporations come into the landscape and they are very successful creatures so backing them out i think more or less completely with basic ethic and. There are various ways of doing that but when you look at the alternative facts and fake news and corporate propaganda thats floating around i think the ultimate thing that has come through in the past has been for the American People to step up. When we took a look at the river burning we we said thats enough and we said we passed a bunch of walls but he changed the way we fought about the environmenthought about theenvir thing i grew up eating tv dinners and canned vegetables and that was all supposed to be great stuff and weve Learned Health food stores have gone from being weird places you have to be a member to join to be places like whole foods with trillions of dollars in business so weve had another Inflection Point there is so much is now the information went of pollution and john food that we need to make that step as a people and when we do it will be a better educated citizenry and we will be more active and awa aware. No one will be invited to the politics. Host have you considered reaching out to President Trump to talk about the decreasing the power of special interests in washington . Have you tried doing it or attempt to do the . Guest it might trigger a response if somebody is listening in the white house that it has been discouraging because here he came off of a very populist Disruptive Campaign and he could have easily been a force for good change in washington. Instead, its goldman sachs, the polluters and epa, the forprofit education industry at the department of education, over and over again. It is an interest in the area that has been given control over the regulators and its about as antipopulist as you can get. Seeing that signal has been discouraging because i would hope we could have conversations like that and we are still looking forward to doing things he promised on the campaign trail like getting rid of the carried interest exception that gives Huge Hedge Fund billionaires lower tax rates and figuring out a way to bring down the cost of the pharmaceuticals. They say they need to charge us more to do their research, but if the Companies Say we are going to charge more for the cars than anybody else in the world we want to make them safer and a charge for the safety research, nobody would accept that so there are areas we can push back and i hope he will pick them up. He said on the campaign trail he would let see if he keeps his promises. Host basically right now in the american political system we look at the exception there is little prospect for implementing the change youre talking about what is it like to be in the senate right now in such a place. It would have been a good one for the American People but instead we are dealing with a very unusual precedent that has created alarm among americans and democrats out of posting in the streets like never before and worldwide as we look to leadership and wonder what did he mean by that. So it is a unique time right now and we take confidence in the fact that the hands of the people peoples and they come out and vote in any kind of sympathy with the expressions we are hearing in the public right now we will have a democratic speaker of the house at least and we will be able to push back and begin to try to get some of the public business done. Host practically speaking, you are a United States senator and use the live part of your life in rhode island. How did you manage to figure out the time to write a book while you were doing your job as a senator and as a husband and father . Guest its a little harder than i thought. Some of the chapters begin with me talking about the issues as a senator so i wrote the articles on regulatory capture and i have been giving a lot of speeches on the fossil fuel role on climate denial and ive spoken about the court and the extent they run towards the corporate and the republican interest. So a certain amount of this stuff i learned and gathered in the ordinary course of my work but to sit down and write it out wasnt easy. On the weekends and late at night before going to sleep on mats flight between washington and providence turns out you can get quite a lot done. Host have you ever talked to the senator joni ernst about the Koch Brothers . Guest though i havent. Its less about her than the series of different interventions by the Fringe Groups that escorted her along her way. She is not the focus of the story. She is the passenger. The focus of that story is that the Koch Brothers have this elaborate setup in which they basically hand off at different stages of the election. The support effort is so they can keep themselves under waterr and not be visible to the public as they support candidates and to me, that is the heart of the story. Host what is your word of advice for the reader or the American Public that is watching the political process play out . What advice would you have for them if they are feeling frustrated or powerless at this point . Guest everything comes back to the voters. Citizenship is more than just sitting there watching tv ads and facebook posts that are designed to influence you. You have to step up a little bit. Its being a consumer isnt the same thing. And the next thing i would say is we shouldnt lose faith in the american system of democratic government that we thought the wars and survived depressions and centuries of the past protecting us so what is wrong with it, the government itself, what is wrong with it if the fact that corporate force has intruded into its original to human beings anbut human beit there is such a small signal in the overall malaise from Corporate America and corporate money. So dont lose faith in the system if you dont feel that you are heard. Figure out why it is the system isnt hearing you. I think if you read the book and take a look around you will come to the conclusion that you can hold corporations out and put them into the economic role that they have been so incredibly valuable for humankind but not in a political role that if they started running our democracy again we would all feel a lot better for everybody. Host thank you for spending time with us to talk about the book