Moyers & Company; 137; Elections for Sale

best luck this year. You don't really want corporations participating directly in elections. They have a very narrow interest, which is supposed to be their shareholders. But we want voters and citizens to have a broader interest. And what you may have missed in that Mittromy video. What I need you to do is to raise millions of dollars. Funding is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. The Colbert Foundation, independent production fund,

with support from the Partridge Foundation, a John and Polly Guth Charitable Fund, the Clemens Foundation, Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Herbalpert Foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, burdened, and peaceful world. More information at Macfound.org and Gunowitz. The Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation, the HKH Foundation, Barbara G. Fleischman, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, designing customized individual and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company. Welcome. The humorist Andy Borowitz says it would be nice to spend billions on schools and roads,

but right now that money is desperately needed for political ads. Sure enough, our political class is wallowing in cash, most of it going to your local TV stations. Last week, NBC reported that total spending on ads by both sides in the presidential race had surpassed $600 million for $118.5 million for Team Romney, 287.2 million for Team Obama. And get this, more than half of all that money for ads has been spent in just three swing states, Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. What's more, huge sums, not only for ads, but forget out the vote efforts like mailings and robocalls are going into house and senate races in the fight to control Congress. Altogether, $3 billion in campaign cash had been raised so far and it projected $6 billion by the election less than seven weeks away. It's not just that we're being hit by swarms of ads thicker than locust.

What's truly frightening is that we don't know who's really paying for them. I'm pledging to cut the deficit. Romney's worth $200 million. President's doing a mediocre job. I know Romney cares about big business. The real job growth cut the debt. I had no health care. I'm the jackpot. To the highest corporate bidder. If you're a super PAC empowered by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to take unlimited donations, you're supposed to make your donors public and you're not supposed to coordinate your efforts with the candidate. But there are ways to get around both requirements and to hide those campaign mega dollars. If you're calling yourself a super PAC, you become a social welfare group. That's right, a social welfare group. And the IRS designates you a 501C4 nonprofit. These are sucking up more and more of the big money precisely because their donors can remain secret. And just to add insult to injury, they're tax exempt. By the way, the Washington Post-Chrystal is a report

that pro-romney outside groups have paid for three out of four of the ads supporting him in this election cycle, while pro-Obama outside groups have paid for just one in every five ads backing the president. The conservative groups, so these are rights, have kept Romney in the game. And he should be able to outspend Obama rather significantly in the final weeks of the race. So whether you want to call it an arms race, a plague, a biblical proportions, or the death spiral of democracy, take it seriously, especially all that secret money. It's poison being mainlined into our country's arteries as toxic as arsenic in your drinking water. And you'll never know who put it there. No one knows the ins and outs of this cash and carry racket better than Trevor Potter. And no one is more committed to cleaning it up. A former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, he served as General Counsel to John McCain during the Senate presidential campaigns in 2000 and again in 2008.

Trevor Potter is with the law firm of Kaplan and Drysdale in Washington. And he's the founding president of the campaign legal center. That's a nonpartisan group committed to representing the public interest in enforcement of campaign and media law. All very impressive. But let's face it, these days Trevor Potter's greatest claim to fame is as the man who keeps Stephen Colbert out of jail. He advised Colbert on how to create his own superpack and then to set up his more clandestine 501-C4. Take a look. So how do I get me one Trevor? Well, lawyers often form Delaware corporations which we call shell corporations that just sit there until they're needed. So there's some anonymous shell corporation? Right. And I happen to have one here in my briefcase. Let's see it. Okay, what's it called? It's called anonymous shell corporation. Anonymous shell corporation filed in Delaware. Okay, I got this. So now I have a C4. Right.

Now we need to turn it into your shell corporation, your anonymous one. And we do that by having normally a board of directors meeting. And who's on the board of directors? Well, just you. We can just have a nice group of people. Sounds like a nice group of people. All right. Call to order. Let's do this thing. All right. So this says that you are the sole director of the corporation. I am. And that you are now electing yourself, president, secretary, and treasurer. Sounds like a great board. And you are authorizing the corporation to file the papers with the IRS in May, 2013. So I could get money for my C4. Use that for political purposes. And nobody knows anything about it till six months after the election. That's right. And even then they will know who your donors are. That's my kind of campaign finance restriction. Welcome, Trevor Potter. Thank you. You know, that's funny, but it's not a laughing matter. By November, we'll be drowning in money. This flood just keeps rising.

I brought a story in the Financial Times. A campaign group backing Barack Obama is pushing to raise up to $150 million in coming weeks. You know, Titvitat, to counter the Republicans' financial advantage and an expected advertising blitz for Mitt Romney. That just strikes me as an all-out, inescapable arms race. In a way, and I know this will sound a little odd, that's not entirely a bad outcome for this election, because what where we have been is that the Republicans have proven they have an enormous advantage in raising money. Therefore, they have, and I'm a Republican. But the party has essentially said, we have such a tactical advantage that we're not going to change this system. If it turns out that both sides end up raising a lot of money and fighting each other to a draw, then I think members are going to look at this and say, this is not how we want to run our system. And let's both of us step back from this. Thanks to you and Stephen Colbert.

We know a lot more than we ever did about Super PACs. And I took from your appearances on his show that they are essentially another bank account that politicians have at their disposal, even if they don't direct them. Clearly, they're there to benefit politicians and elect politicians. That's their job. The question is, to what extent are they actually under the control of a candidate? When Mitt Romney refers to my Super PAC, he doesn't mean, I think, that he can pick up the phone and say, I want you to run ads here or there, but he trusts it. And he knows the people who are running it, who are former campaign aides of his, just as the Democratic ones are former Obama White House aides. They are savvy. He relies on them to make the right decisions. And if Romney wants to go out and raise money himself for his own campaign, he is limited. He can only take $2,500 a person. If the billionaire who has just given him $2,500 a person is then encouraged to give to the Super PAC, he can give $2,500 million.

For the same purpose, which is electing Mitt Romney President. And will we know that? If he gives to the Super PAC, we'll know it. If he gives to the C4, which is the other pocket of the Super PAC, run by the same people in some cases, we won't know. Well, that's what gets people. How do they get away with that? Calling themselves social welfare groups. When, in fact, he's given the $25 million to a political organization. Well, the legal answer to that is that their principal purpose has to be something other than running political ads. At the end of the day, in order to qualify as a social welfare group, they're going to have to say that most of what we did was to educate the public, to lobby, and was not focused on electing a specific candidate. They're allowed to be an issues group. So again, the Sierra Club has a C4, the NRA has a C4, and they focus on gun control or the environment. But they're not supposed to be out the majority of the time

running ads about candidates. So they have to be very careful not to cross that line. Here's the problem. The line is this incredible gray moving structure. The IRS has a, you know, a dozen-part test where this or that or the other subjective factor can do it. So even if you wanted to comply with all of this and be really careful, it's not easy to do it. So there's no clarity in this, which of course invites people to blow right through it and what happens if you're devious or you really don't care or you just are results oriented, is you create one of these C4s. You run all this money through it and then you close it down. So it's gone. By the time the IRS gets around to it and might want to audit it, it's defunct. You create another one. So this is the problem that you really face when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it. So Karl Roves sets up a big super pack so it can collect millions of dollars from plutocrats

or anybody else to attack candidates for the House and Senate who oppose, let's say, the corporate tax breaks. It needs a fig leaf. It wants to protect its backers, its bankers. So Crossroads, GPS, sets up as a, quote, social welfare group. Under section 501 C4 of the tax code. And then it spends that money on negative ads paid for by secret donors. Barack Obama's got lots of excuses for the bad economy. Headwinds coming from Europe. Warren went on a charm offensive with some of the same banks who got bailed out. Tell Professor Warren, we need jobs. Not more bailouts and bigger government. Today in Washington, America's debt increased 3.5 billion. 3.5 billion every single day since John Tester arrived in the U.S. Senate. 3.5 billion more debt per day since when cascals bid in office. Tell Claire to stop spending and cut the debt. Doesn't that make a travesty of the very meaning of social welfare? Crossroads is an interesting example

because when they started, they came out and said, we're American crossroads, we're a group of Republicans and conservatives. This was after Citizens United 2010. We need to change Washington. We're going to be completely transparent. We're going to form one of these new superpacks. We're going to disclose all our donors. Well, that's fair enough. I mean, if that's what the law allows them to do, at least they're disclosing. Well, they didn't raise much money for the first month, two months, three months. Suddenly, they had a new idea. We're going to create a C4, which is going to do the same thing run by the same people. But it doesn't have to disclose its donors. They announced that. Then they announced we never saw the money. They announced they were raising tens of millions of dollars in the C4 and spending it. Now, they can't spend the majority on it on these political ads. But if you raise enough money, you have a whole lot of it, even if it's not the majority of what you're spending, to run these ads with. And that's what happened in 2010, based on their own numbers.

So back to your appearance on Stephen Cobair. Can I take this C4 money and then donate it to my Super PAC? You can. Well, wait. Wait, Super PACs are transparent. Right. And the C4 is secret. So I can take secret donations of my C4 and give it to my supposedly transparent Super PAC. And it'll say given by your C4. What is the difference between that and money laundering? It's hard to say. You're taking us deep into this Kafka-like world. You know that, don't you? Well, this is, I think, the problem is that it sounds Kafka-like. And it's because we don't have a single requirement for disclosure. If we did, if when you spent money on political ads mentioning a candidate in an election, you had to disclose the donors over $10,000, what the Disclose Act proposes. This would all go away because the reason people are giving to these groups is to avoid disclosure.

Without that, they'd go right ahead and give it to the publicly disclosed groups because it's so much simpler. The groups can spend 100% of what they raise on the ads. That it's the avoiding of disclosure that is leading to all these other complicated tricks that we end up trying to figure out. Let me walk you through some specific examples in Virginia, just recently. A swing state in the tight U.S. Senate race outside political groups have bought $37 million worth of air time in the state's top four TV markets. Half of that money comes from groups that keep their donors secret. As Senator, Tim Cain would derail Virginia's recovery, Virginia needs jobs. Not Tim Cain is big government policies. The U.S. Chamber is responsible for the content of this advertising. Allen voted for $121 billion in earmarks. Earmarks for imported fire ants, Alaskan Berry Research, and DNA study of bears in Montana.

And I'm doing what the president wants me to do. The president wants me to do. The president wants me to do. Contact Mr. Cain and tell him what Virginia doesn't need is another Obama clone in the Senate. George Allen, what's wrong with Washington? Majority back is responsible for the content of this advertising. So my question is, viewers and voters can't possibly know who's manipulating them then. What does that mean to representative government? And there are two problems there. One is, you're absolutely right. We won't know, but the candidate probably will. I can assure you that if in that Senate race someone is spending millions of dollars to elect the candidate, the candidate knows where that money is coming from. There's nothing illegal about telling them. It's illegal to actually sit down with them and show them the ad and say, do you want to edit it before I run it? But that's about the limits there. So they're going to know who the money is behind it. Someone can go to them and say, don't say a word.

I'm going to help you out. I'm going to drop $10 million into your race. The candidate is going to be incredibly grateful. But the voters of Virginia aren't going to know that. We are creating opportunities for corruption and candidates being beholden due specific private interest because of funding. And yet there's no disclosure to the rest of us. Now what does that tell you about our politics? Well, it tells you all we need to know about these super PACs, which is they are not what the courts said we were going to get. When the courts midwife these things, they said they can't corrupt because they're totally independent of candidates and parties. And that's why you can give them an unlimited amount because you're not buying access. The candidates may not like them. They're wholly independent. Well, it's below me. They're not independent in any way. They become sort of shadow party committees. The candidates, including the president or the White House aides, are allowed under the current rules to actually raise money for them to endorse them to say, you know, this group is really important to me. Mitt Romney went and spoke to a group of donors to what he called his super PAC.

And told them how important it was. So we don't have a wall between them. We have essentially a union. And that's what gives us this possibility of corruption. Another case study, something called the government integrity fund. Great name. It has been over $1 million on TV ads bashing Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio and supporting his challenger, Josh Bandele. Young Sherrod Brown voted more for Ohio. Today Sherrod Brown, he just votes the party line. Where did the young Sherrod go? And Josh Bandele got Ohio's credit rating upgraded. At the same time, Sherrod Brown's Congress got America's credit rating downgraded. Josh Bandele, protecting taxpayers. But the so-called government integrity fund, according to ProPublica, that's an investigative journalist organization, is shrouded in mystery. It isn't required to reveal donors. The only contact information is a PO box, but no one answers the questions, and they don't have to do so, do they?

You know, these groups have great names. They all come up with, and it sounds like mom and apple pie, but more importantly, it's designed to tell you nothing. If it was a group that at least said the coal companies organization, you would know where they were coming from. We don't know anything about this, and you're right, they don't have to tell us. One of the things that I discovered in doing my research for the Colbert show is these groups don't actually have to even tell the IRS they exist at the time they're taking in this money and running these ads. That was a surprise. I had assumed that they had to file because that's what these groups do, but it turns out they can file after the election. And again, when they file, they're not filing their donors. They're just saying, I'm here, and I qualify as a social welfare group. And one of the issues we have here, I think, is that the IRS has traditionally not spent a lot of resources on this. They get literally tens of thousands of applications to create these groups, and they can't look at them all. Historically, they've turned down a tiny fraction. Obviously, with a lot of the attention on them, it appears they're taking at least a closer look, but they don't have resources, and they are being knocked about by Congress on this.

Also, well, when it came out in the press that some of the groups that had applied for exemption, some of the Tea Party groups, so presumptively more Republican, were being asked extra questions by the IRS before they were given their exemption. Like, please tell us in detail what sort of public communications you are making because you say in your application, you're going to run advertisements. What sort of advertisements? And the next thing that happened after that report hit is that Republican members of Congress wrote the IRS and said, essentially, stop asking questions. What they said was, don't intervene in politics. These groups are trying to engage in public life, and you shouldn't be preventing them, that is being partisan. And did the IRS back down? We don't know. What we do know on a very similar issue is that, again, the press reported that the IRS was asking some of the people who had contributed these groups because the IRS knows who they are.

We don't, but they actually file a secret report with the IRS that tells the IRS who their donors are that it's not made public. So it's there. It's just we don't get to see it. So the IRS looked at those lists and saw big donations, million dollar donations, and they wrote and said, did you pay gift tax on this? And if so, can you please show us your gift tax return because there's been a dispute, but the IRS position has been that if you give to a C4, it is subject to gift tax on the donor. They asked this question and hit the front page of the New York Times. Again, there was a letter from a group of senators, Republican senators in Congress to the Commissioner of the IRS saying, why are you asking these questions? Why are you threatening the donors to see for us? I don't know if they were donors to liberal groups or conservative groups, but it was seen as the IRS trying to crack down on the amount of money going to see for us.

The Commissioner said, I give up. We promise we won't ask any more questions of any donors about gift tax. We won't enforce our current policy, and we won't do a thing until Congress clarifies this area of law and tells us what to do. Good luck. Well, and that's an example of how politically sensitive this has become. I mean, the IRS does not want to be in the middle of this fight. They're trying to keep their heads down. We know now that much of this corporate spending is coming from so-called non-profits in particular trade associations, and trade associations for some reason can hide all their donor information. Why is that? Well, what happened here, first of all, we don't have a system that was designed for this. We have a system where political committees are supposed to publicly disclose their donors. They register with the Federal Election Commission or at the state level with the state agency.

They say, we're a political committee. We want to elect a candidate. We want to participate in politics, whatever it is. They disclose their donors because disclosure was always considered a important value for politics. Then you have all these other private groups that do other things. You have C3s, which are hospitals and universities. They don't disclose their donors on their tax returns. They might announce them, but that's up to them. You have C4s, which are social welfare organizations. You have C6s, which are business leagues. You have a whole range of these, and they were considered non-political. So there was never a disclosure requirement because there was never a thought that they were going to be the principal and run around the disclosure laws. What happened was lawyers figured out that they could engage in the same political speech after Citizens United. They can now use corporate and labor money, and they could always have used individual money to run the same ads that the political groups are running. But because their C4s and C6s, they never were required to disclose their donors, and they're still not.

The American Petroleum Institute, that's the lobby for hundreds of multinational oil and gas companies. Companies trying to obstruct climate reform, increase drilling on public lands, protect their taxpayer subsidies and loopholes. Can funnel, as I understand it, huge donations secretly to campaign groups. Voters never know again what or who has hit them. And in 2010, groups funded by these big multinationals through the American Petroleum Institute unleashed a tidal wave of negative advertisements on Democrats in the midterm elections. Republicans took control of the House and since then have been in effect doing the industries bidding. How did they get away with it? Well, they, as a trade association, they're another type of nonprofit. They also do not disclose their donors to the general public. They don't have to tell people where their money came from.

If they spend it directly on advertising, which say the Chamber of Commerce often does, you will at least know where it's coming from, because it'll say the Chamber of Commerce, or it'll say a improve America, a project of the Chamber of Commerce. The US Chamber is responsible for the content of this advertising. The US Chamber is responsible for the content of this advertising. The US Chamber of Commerce is responsible for the content of this advertising. So you know when they spend it directly, at least what part of the economy it's coming from. However, they may well give that money to another organization, which isn't even got their name on it. So if they end up giving it to AC4, which then spends the money in that group is called Better America, you don't know where Better America's money came from. So these groups do not themselves disclose their donors. And again, most of their work is lobbying its oriented towards issues. You may well be right that they have really strong policy positions. But what they would say is the money we spend directly on political ads is not a major part of what we do.

What about foreign companies, foreign groups, multinationals? I know you remember the moment in President Obama stated the Union message when he said Citizens United is going to invite contributions from foreign companies. Last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations. And Justice Alito out there know it's not true. Is it true? The reason there was a bone of contention there is that in Citizens United itself, the Stevens, Justice Stevens and his dissent, had said this is going to allow foreign money in. The majority in their opinion responded to Stevens and said there's nothing in this case that has anything to do with foreign money. We're talking about corporate money only. There's a whole separate ban on foreign money and US elections and that is not being challenged today. So that law remains in place.

The issue behind it all is how do we know? If you have all these anonymous sources of spending, we have no way of knowing where the money is coming from. Take Aramco, for example. We talked about the American Petroleum Institute earlier. One of its members, big members is Aramco, the Arabian oil company, a member of an American based petroleum lobby. How do we know that's not Aramco money mixed up in the American Petroleum Institute's donations? Well, we don't. We have to rely on Aramco understanding and following the law. The way the law is written, the way the FEC regulations are written, they are supposed to use US-based money for their political speech and their own ads or giving it to someone else for politics, which means money that is derived from this country. So if Aramco has a US subsidiary and the US subsidiary makes money, the law says the US subsidiary can give and only US citizens can be involved in that decision. That's not the most straightforward thing in the world. Aramco has to understand that and carefully follow it and nobody on the outside is going to know how it worked.

Well, you take us right to the Corvik. How can secret corporate cash be a legitimate function of democracy? Well, it's interesting that the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision, that the one that I and I think many other people think was a big mistake. Even there, they went out of their way, eight to one, four in the majority, all in the minority got together and said, disclosure is a high value in a democracy. And what Justice Kennedy, who had written this majority opinion, said is today, for the first time, we are going to have a situation we've never had before in America where corporations are going to be able to spend unlimited amounts and it will be fully disclosed. Stockholders? Stockholders will know how their money is being spent, they'll be able to use corporate democracy to object and voters will know who's paying for the ads.

Which he said is an important democratic value that knowing where the ad is coming from, who is speaking to you informs you about the context of the ad and enables you to judge it and he said to hold politicians accountable. So that if someone gets elected after millions have been spent for them and you know it was the X industry or the Y industry that did it, you can then judge them and see whether they dance to the tune of those industries. And hold them accountable. So the good news is the court said these are American values, they are consistent with our Constitution. The bad news is we don't have the disclosure system, he promised us we had. Why? Well, did he misread the law, Supreme Court justices shouldn't? He's right, the McCain fine gold law did require disclosure that we're not getting. He talked a lot about the internet and the fact that it would give us instant disclosure. But as you and I know, you know, garbage in, garbage out if the information isn't there, it won't turn up. I thought that's where we were seeing the naivety of a Supreme Court just is really out of touch with reality.

When he said, okay, we're going to give them the right to spend all this money, but shareholders in particular and citizens can go to the internet, get the information they won't and then hold them accountable if they're not spending money for the company's profit, right? Right. And of course that's interesting in itself because it reveals the bias of that decision. He assumed the test was, are they spending the money in the way that most profits the company? And that's very interesting if you think about it because, well, I mean, you go back to the founding of our country and the founder's view was that we would be citizens and we would act in the interests of the country in our greater interests. They didn't think that everyone would go out and try to act solely in their own self interest to better themselves if it was bad for the country. These are people who had fought a war, who had left their families in their homes, clearly not in their self interest. So to say that the right thing to do in a democracy is have a corporation spend money in ways that will give them the most profit, never mind what happens to anyone else or the best of the country.

I think an example of why you don't really want corporations participating directly in elections. They have a very narrow interest, which is supposed to be their shareholders. But we want voters and citizens to have a broader interest to think about the next generation, to think about the greater good. There's an interesting quote from the head of Exxon on a new book out on Exxon where he says, Exxon is not a US corporation. We do not act in the best interests of the United States. Well, it is a US corporation, but what he meant is they have a shareholders all over the world, they have investments all over the world, and it's not his job to do things that are good for America. It's his job to do things that are good for his international shareholders. But under Citizens United, he can contribute as much money as he or his board wants to on secretly on projects that may not be in the national.

Right, again, this is the nasty combination, really the incredibly dangerous accident of Citizens United that allows this unlimited money and the other cases that have allowed unlimited contributions with a lack of disclosure. Because the presumption, the reason the court said this wouldn't be corrupting is we would know who was giving and could hold them accountable, and we don't. It's like water running down hill, the old cliche. It finds a way around every obstacle you put into place, and that's what's happened to campaign financiers for it. Well, it's a good cliche. It's been used by the Supreme Court. The reality is that dams hold. It can be done. In my view, McCain Fine Gold was doing that until Justice O'Connor retired, the only justice on the court who actually knew anything about politics and had run for office. And she was replaced by somebody who opposed government regulations. So we have five, four, the other way that could change.

Is it conceivable to you that the Citizens United decision and other thumbing of the nose at reform comes because the justices don't have real world experience? Yeah, I think they have a very ideological view without the real world experience that might tell them why it doesn't work. O'Connor is actually a great example of the opposite. She'd been a leader in the Arizona legislature. She had raised and spent money in politics. And when McCain Fine Gold came along, she was willing to defer to Congress because they were the ones who were actually facing this power of money, this flood every day. And to understand how it corrupted the system and it resulted in back door legislative changes in favor of major donors. She took that because she had been in a legislature and that to her was plausible. But I think the Supreme Court, at least five of the justices, have it in mind that these are incumbent somehow trying to protect themselves rather than incumbents who were trying to protect themselves from being corrupted. And being bought or because they object when they see other people and party committees being bought.

When you say they're ideological, what do you mean by that? Well, it seems to me that the Supreme Court majority in Citizens United ignored essentially a hundred years of American history going back to Theodore Roosevelt in his first clarion call that big money in Wall Street not dominate the presidential election. It's encouraging of Congress to limit corporate contributions. The court essentially gave that all the back of their hand and said, under our view of the First Amendment, you can't do this. Now, to me, that is ideological to, first of all, not only ignore the precedent for a hundred years, but ignore a whole range of court decisions by other Supreme courts, other justices who thought this was consistent with the First Amendment. Now, everyone is wrong who's gone before us. All those justices, all those cases, we just see it a different way. Seems to me to be a very ideological statement.

You know, Barack Obama had a real world experience in politics. And as a state senator, he worked to pass campaign finance reform. As a United States senator, he was critical to the passing of ethics and lobbying reform after the Jack Abramov scandal. He refused to take contributions from registered lobbyists or political action committees. And as a presidential candidate, he promised to, quote, tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on the lobbyists, and I have won. They have not funded my campaign. They will not work in my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president. And now, his own convention was crawling with lobbyists, smoothing with politicians.

And Romney Manual has been turned loose by the president to go for the goal. Did you suggest earlier that he didn't have a choice that with the great accumulation of money by the Republicans, he had to match them in order to be a viable candidate? Well, being as kind as I can, and remember I was John McCain's general counsel, so I have some scars on this one. I think he's a very practical politician. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but what he did in 2008 was sink the presidential public funding system. Yes. John McCain had committed to be in it if the other parties nominee would, everyone assumed that Obama would because he had said as much. And when the time came, he looked at it, and clearly his political people said to him, you're raising so much more money than McCain. Why would you go into that system and limit your spending? So don't go into the system. We've made the decision not to participate in the public financing system for the general election. This means we'll be foregoing more than $80 million in public funds during the final months of this election.

It's not an easy decision, especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections. And I think that was a practical political decision, but contrary to everything he had said about the value of public financing, and what we're now learning is once that cat is out of the bag, it's really hard to put it back in. And so I think we're in a radically different place than we were four years ago. Individuals now can give unlimited amounts and corporations to these super PACs. If they give to the Allied C4, social welfare group, no one will know who it is. So the first thing has happened is it is possible to spend a huge amount to effectively buy an election, influence an election in a way that other citizens will not be able to do. And that just couldn't happen before. You're describing a descendant to Donnie's inferno. Help me understand what we can do to get out of it. Can we get our democracy back?

Oh, yeah, I think that's the good news that we are. We're on the edge of spinning into this world where everyone is going to throw up their hands and say, it's too far gone. We can't do anything, but I don't think we're there. The Supreme Court gave us a roadmap. It says disclosure is fully constitutional. So we need to work on disclosure. The lower courts are continuing to uphold that. The groups that oppose disclosure and generally have opposed regulation in this area have been filing suits across the country trying to get state laws invalidated on the basis that they are too burdensome. They require too much disclosure. Those are generally being thrown out. The suits are, then the courts are upholding disclosure. So we know it's constitutional. We know in Citizens United. Disclosure is. We know in Citizens United the court thought we actually already had it. There was legislation introduced in the Congress called the Disclosure Act for popular consumption. It passed in the House, right? And then went to the Senate and was filibustered by the Republican.

It's actually come around twice. The first time it passed in the House and was defeated in the Senate. So that was 2010. They came back this time and it went straight to the Senate. They had a debate. Senator White House had rewritten this so that it's now surely disclosure. These special interests have motives. They have motives to spend this kind of money. And if those motives were good for America, if they were welcome to the average American, they wouldn't need and they wouldn't want to keep them secret. A bill that has only two discernible purposes to create the impression of mischief where there is none and to send a signal to unions that Democrats are just as eager to do their legislative bidding as ever. And again, they could not get the votes to get it to the floor.

Sadly, every member of the other party voted against it. What is so wrong, Mr. President, with voters having information about who is trying to influence their vote? What would it have done if it had passed? What would it have required? It would essentially have said that if you spend money to talk about candidates in an election season, no matter who you are, we don't care if you call yourself a C4 or a C6 or a Martian spaceship, whoever you are, if you spend money to talk about candidates in a public communication paid advertising, then you have to disclose who is funding the ad. If you could do it one of two ways. If your membership organization you could disclose your major donors because this was a new aspect, they said we don't want to disclose little donors, mom and pop, but if someone is giving you more than $10,000, that's a substantial sum of money, that should be disclosed if you pay for this out of your regular funds, your membership funds, your corporate funds. The other alternative is to establish a separate account, raise money for ads in that and only disclose those donors. So what we need at the state level and at the federal level is to keep working on getting disclosure, whether that is through Congress, whether that's through the Federal Election Commission, you know, it's interesting.

We would not be in the situation we're in, if we had a majority on the Federal Election Commission who were enforcing the McCain Fine Gold Disclosure Laws, we don't, we have five vacancies out of six commissioners. Five out of six? Five out of six? This is graceful of this function. Well, their terms have expired, they are sitting there waiting for their successors to arrive, they are lame ducks on whatever you want to call it, they shouldn't be there. Do we know why the president hasn't appointed successors? We don't officially, the unofficial view is that it's part of the Washington deadlock, that in order to get successors through a Senate, you have to have Republican and Democratic consent, and traditionally the president has gone to the congressional leadership of both parties to get advice from them and get names from them of people to nominate. And what we're told is, that's not happening. The White House isn't asking, Congress isn't giving, everyone is leaving this where it is.

So, you know, if I were the Obama administration, and I'm not, but I said here watching this, I would have made this a priority. There are several efforts underway to get a constitutional amendment that would reverse Citizens United, what's your stand on that? Well, I think talking about this issue is really important to our democracy, we need to recognize where we are, I think we need to recognize that we're in trouble and we need to make changes. A constitutional amendment is like climbing Mount Everest, it's the hardest thing out there you could possibly do. So, it may be the only way to get there, but my own view is it is really worth exploring all the other ways to get to where we want to go before saying we have to go up and down the mountain to do it. You have to get the supermajority in Congress to send it to the states, to get the supermajority of the states.

Whereas, you know, if you could pass pure disclosure, that would be a start, and that can be done without any supermajority of states at all. If you could get the IRS going, if you could get the Obama administration to nominate FEC commissioners, if you could get the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, to say that corporations should let their shareholders know where their money is being spent in politics. All of those things, I think, would be really helpful. If you could begin to talk nationally, as many of the states and cities are, about some way to have alternative sources of funding, some tax refund, which we used to have, there used to be a tax credit, so that you would double the amount that individual donors gave effectively, because it would be cost-free to them if they got it. I think all of those are possibilities. You could have a change in the Supreme Court. In the next administration, you may have one or more new justices of people retire. What can individual citizens do in the meantime?

Well, I'll give you a shameless plug answer, which is they can support groups like mine, the Campaign Legal Center, that are out there fighting these cases every day. Democracy 21 is fighting these cases. They have lawyers. They could use more help doing that. There are a lot of citizen groups out there that are involved in trying to make this issue a higher priority in Congress, common cause and others. They all need help, so I think getting involved with those groups is a start. Also, particularly on issues like the Disclose Act, writing members of Congress, writing your Senator or Congressman saying, I'm watching you on this. It's easy to find out how your members voted this time. Why not write them a letter and say, I know you voted wrong, and you better clean this up next time because it's important. Why do you stay with this? I mean, you give a lot of pro bono time to working on these issues. Why? Partly, I'm an optimist. I've been at this awhile. I have seen both the good and the bad sides, and I think we can have a better system. And a little bit, if I'm not going to do it, then I can't very well complain if other people don't do it. And also, I keep running into people.

I know a lot of people from the Republican campaign world, and they'll all say privately to me, Trevor, we need to change this system. This is really not good. I'll run into corporate executives who will say, this is corrupting. This is not how we ought to run things. And if they're a Republican, I'll say, gosh, would you be willing to do something about that? And I said, after the election, I don't want to upset the apple cart now. I don't want to draw attention away from our party's nominee. But, yes, we need to do something. So my sense of it is that there is a real will out there, a grounds well, to do something about this problem. Trevor, part of this has been very helpful. Thank you very much for joining me. Thank you. I appreciate it, Bill. Like everyone else, I watched the movie of the week. That clandestine video from Mitt Romney's fundraiser in Florida. I thought, we now have a record of what our modern day wealthy gentry really thinks about the rest of us. And it's not pretty.

On the other hand, it's also not news. If you had reported, as long as some of us have, on winner take all politics and the unenlightened assumptions of the moneyed class, you wouldn't find the remarks of Romney and his pals all that exceptional. The resentment, disdain, and contempt with which they privately view those beneath them are an old story. The video, in fact, called a mind our first guild in age. Back in the late 19th century, when the celebrated New York Dandy of the time, Frederick Townsend Martin summed up the era when he declared, we are the rich. We own America. We got it. God knows how, but we intend to keep it. And so they do, as that bitsy gathering in Florida reminds us. You can see in here one of the guests, ask Mitt Romney. What do we need to do? Just to raise millions of dollars, because the president is going to have about $800 million. That's by far the most important thing you can do.

The governor is being truthful there, because as we heard from Trevor Potter, money rules these campaigns. If there were more secret videos from other candidates, we would see them in equally compromised positions, bowing and scraping in their infernal pursuit of campaign cash, bending over backwards to suffer the advice that the privilege, think their money entitles them to. And I do mean both parties, not far from the studio the other night, and a Manhattan fundraiser hosted by Jay-Z and Beyoncé, President Obama, joked, if somebody here has a $10 million check, I can't solicit it from you, but feel free to use it wisely. At least, I think he was joking. Obama and Romney alike now shape their schedules as much around money making events as rallies and town halls. They'll change the campaign jets flight plan and make a special landing just for the cold hard cash. This folks is a racket, plain and simple. All that's spending by the parties, corporations, super PACs and other outside groups will push political and spending up this year by half a billion dollars, 25% higher than 2010, the biggest increase in history.

That prompted the CEO of CBS, Leslie Moombas, to lick his chops and tell investors last December, there's going to be a lot of money spent. I'm not saying that's the best thing for America, but it's not a bad thing for the CBS corporation. So, we journalists can't stop reporting on this, even though we're often told, please change the subject, everyone's tired of this one. I'm not so sure. Trevor Potter sees a groundswell for rooting the money out of politics as Americans come to see that this is the one reform that enables other reforms. And two polls released in the last few days report large majorities as many as eight in 10 of you are in favor of clamping down on the amount of money that corporations, the super rich and those shadowy outside groups are pouring into the campaigns. It's up to all of us to put a sign on every lawn and stoop in the land. Our democracy is not for sale.

That's why next week we'll investigate yet another way in which corporate forces and their political allies are flying underneath the public's radar with the help of a front group that goes by the innocent sounding name Alec. I've often told people that I talk to on the campaign trail when they say state what when they say running for the state legislature. I tell them that the decisions that are made here in the legislature are often more important for your everyday life than the decisions the president makes. If you really want to influence the politics of this country, you don't just give money to presidential campaigns. You don't just give money to congressional campaign committees, smart players, put their money in the states.

Alec has forged a unique partnership between state legislators and leaders from the corporate and business community. This partnership offers businessmen the extraordinary opportunity to apply their talents to solve our nation's problems and build on our opportunities. I was stunned at the notion that politicians and corporate representatives corporate lobbyists were actually voting behind closed doors on these changes to the law before they were introduced in state houses across the country. Alec has been, I think, a wonderful organization. Not only does it bring a like-minded legislators together, but the private sector engagement and partnership in Alec is really what I think makes it the organization that it is. That's next week's program. Meanwhile, at BillMorris.com, our colleague Laura Flanders has a web-exclusive interview on Occupy Wall Street's first anniversary and whether it's campaign to fight income inequality has made a difference.

She talks with journalist Arun Gupta, an author and activist, Marina Citrin. Occupy Wall Street got a drumming in a lot of the press on the anniversary. You had New York Times talking about a fad and you know, talk is cheap. How do you respond to that, Marina? To find out what Occupy is doing, you'd actually have to dig a little deeper and see that Occupy is kind of re-territorialized itself. Occupy put the public space back in society and it recreated the public so that people could come into these spaces and say like, hey, I'm unemployed and can't find a job. Person next to me, they're a home is in foreclosure. This other person, they have this huge student debt. Someone else, they like health care and they see their problems as all the same because the culprit is all the same. Wall Street. That's at BillMorris.com where you also can find out more about the people and organizations working to get money out of politics. You can help. I'll see you there and see you here next time.

Don't wait a week to get more moyers. Visit BillMorris.com for exclusive blogs, essays and video features. This episode of Moyers & Company is available on DVD for 1995. To order, call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. Funding is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. The Colberg Foundation, independent production fund, with support from the Partridge Foundation, a John and PolyGuth Charitable Fund, the Clemens Foundation, Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Herbalpert Foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society, the Bernard and Audrey Rapaport Foundation, the John D and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world.

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