Moyers & Company; 145; Hurricanes, Capitalism & Democracy

Don't move, you're gonna have to lift that up. You succeeded. You can make a deep dip here, to make them fall asleep, they are going to fall asleep alive No way to jump! . . . . . .

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. . . . . . for a new book and documentary on how climate change can spur political and economic transformation. She's also joined with the Environmental Writer and Activist Bill McKibbin in a campaign launched this week called Do the Math, moral in that short name. Naomi Klein, welcome. Thank you so much. First, congratulations on the baby. Thank you so much. How old now? He is five months today. First child. My first child, yeah. How does a child change the way you see the world? Well, it lengthens your timeline, definitely. I'm really immersed in climate science right now because of the project I'm working on is related to that. So, you know, there are always these projections into the future. What's going to happen in 2050? What's going to happen in 2080? And I think when you're solo, you think, okay, well, how old will I be then? Well, you know, and now I'm thinking how old will I be then, right? And so, it's not, but I don't like the idea that, okay, now I care about the future now

that I have a child. I think that everybody cares about the future and I cared about it when I didn't have a child too. Well, I understand that, but we're so complacent about climate change. New study shows that while the number of people who believe it's happening has increased by, say, three percentage points over the last year, the number of people who think it is human cause has dropped. It has dropped dramatically. I mean, the statistics on this are quite incredible. If you, 2007, according to Harris poll, 71% of Americans believe that climate change was real, that it was human cause. And by last year, that number was down to 44%, 71% to 44%. That is an unbelievable drop in belief. But then you look at the coverage that the issues received in the media, and it's also dropped dramatically from that high point. 2007, this was this moment where Hollywood was on board, Vanity Fair launched their annual

green issue. And by the way, there hasn't been an annual green issue since 2008. Stars were showing up to the Academy Awards and hybrid cars. And there was a sense, you know, we all have to play our part, including the elites. And that has really been lost. And that's why it's got to come from the bottom up this time. But what do you think happened to diminish the enthusiasm for doing something about it, the attention from the press, the interest of the elites? What is it? I think we're up against a very powerful lobby. And this is the fossil fuel lobby, and they have every reason in the world to prevent this from being the most urgent issue on our agenda. And I think, you know, if we look at the history of the environmental movement, going back 25 years to when this issue really broke through, you know, when James Hansen testified before Congress.

The massive scientist. Exactly. Our foremost climate scientist and said, it is happening, and I believe it's human-caused. That was the moment where we could no longer deny that we knew, right? I mean, scientists actually knew well beforehand. But that was the breakthrough moment, and that was 1988. And we think about what else was happening in the late 80s, while the Berlin Wall fell the next year, and the end of history was declared. And, you know, this is climate change, in a sense, it hit us at the worst possible historical moment because it does require collective action, right? It does require that we regulate corporations, that you plan collectively as a society. And at the moment that it hit the mainstream, all of those ideas fell into disrepute, right? It was all supposed to be free market solutions. You were, a government was supposed to get out of the way of corporations. Planning was a dirty word. That was what Communists did, right? Anything collective was a dirty word. Margaret Thatcher said there's no such thing as society.

You know, if you believe that, you can't do anything about climate change, because it is the essence of a collective problem. This is our collective atmosphere. We can only respond to this collectively. So the environmental movement responded to that by really personalizing the problem and saying, OK, you recycle and you buy a hybrid car and treating this like this could, or we'll have business-friendly solutions like cap and trade and carbon offsetting. That doesn't work. So that's part of the problem. So you have this movement that every once in a while would rear up, and people would get all excited. And we're really going to do something about this. And whether it was the Rio Summit or the Copenhagen Summit or that moment when Al Gore came out within convenient truth, but then it would just recede because it didn't have that collective social support that it needed. And on top of that, we've had this concerted campaign by the fossil fuel lobby to both buy off the environmental movement, to defame the environmental movement, to infiltrate the environmental movement, and to spread lies in the culture. And that's what the climate denial movement has been doing so effectively.

I read a piece just this week by the environmental writer Glenn Sherrup. He took a look and finds it over the last two years. The lion's share of the damage from extreme weather, floods, tornadoes, droughts, thunderstorms, windstorms, heatways, wildfires has occurred in a Republican-leaning red states, but those states have sent a whole new crop of climate change deniers to Congress. Yes, someone's going to have to explain Oklahoma to me. My sister lives in Oklahoma. You know, it is so shocking that James Inhoff, the foremost climate denying senator, is from the state that is so deeply climate-affected. There was something, actually, I was last year I covered the Heartland conference, which is the annual confab for all the climate deniers. And James Inhoff was supposed to be the keynote speaker, and the first morning of the conference, there was lots of buzz, everyone. He's a rock star among the climate deniers. Inhoff is coming. He's opening up this conference, right? And the first morning, the main conference organizer stands up at breakfast and lets lose the bad news that James Inhoff has called in sick, and he can't make it.

And it turns out that he had gone swimming in a lake filled with blue-green algae, which is actually a climate-related issue when lakes get too warm, this blue-green algae spreads, and he had gone swimming and he had gotten sick from the blue-green algae. So he actually, arguably, had a climate-related illness and couldn't come to the climate-change conference. But even though he was sick, he wrote a letter from his sick bed just telling them what a great job he was doing. So the powers of denial are amazingly strong, Bill. But I think if you are deeply invested in this free market ideology, if you really believe with your heart and soul that everything public and anything the government does is evil, and that our liberation will come from liberating corporations, then climate change fundamentally challenges your worldview precisely because we have to regulate. We have to plan.

We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer. So it isn't just, okay, the fossil fuel companies want to protect their profits, it's that this science threatens a worldview. And when you dig deeper, when you drill deeper into those statistics about the drop in belief and climate change, what you see is that Democrats still believe in climate change in the 70th percentile. That whole drop of belief, the drop off in belief, has happened on the right side of the political spectrum. So the most reliable predictor of whether or not somebody believes that climate change is real, is what their views are on a range of other political subjects, what do you think about abortion, what is your view of taxes? And what you find is that people who have very strong conservative political beliefs cannot deal with this science because it threatens everything else they believe.

Do you really believe or you convince that there are no free market solutions? There's no way to let the market help us solve this crisis. No, absolutely the market can play a role and there are things that government can do to incentivize the free market to do a better job. Yes, but is that a replacement for getting in the way actively of the fossil fuel industry and preventing them from destroying our chances of a future on a livable planet? It's not a replacement. We have to do both. We need these market incentives on the one hand to encourage renewable energy. But we also need a government that's willing to say no. No you can't mind the Alberta tar sands and burn enough carbon that will have game over for the climate as James Hanson has said. But I'm one of those who is the other end of the corporation. And we had a crisis in New York the last two weeks because we couldn't get gasoline for

the indispensable vehicles that get us to work, get us to the supermarket, get us to our sick friends or neighbors. I mean the point I'm trying to make is we are all the fossil fuel industry. Are we not? We often hear that. We often hear that we're all equally responsible for climate change and it's just the rules of supply and demand. The two cars I keep them filled with gasoline. But I think the question is, if there was a fantastic public transit system that really made it easy for you to get to where you wanted to go, would you drive last? Well I don't know about you but I certainly would. I use the subways all the time. And if it was possible to recharge an electric vehicle that if it was as easy to do that as it is to fill up your car with gasoline, if that electricity came from solar and wind, would you insist, no, I want to fill my car with dirty energy? No, I don't think you would because this is what I think we have expressed over and over again.

We are willing to make changes. We recycle and we compost. We ride bicycles. I mean there's actually been a tremendous amount of willingness and goodwill for people to change their behavior. But I think where people get demoralized is when they see, okay, I'm making these changes. But emissions are still going up because the corporations aren't changing how they do business. No, I don't think we're all equally guilty. President Obama managed to avoid the subject all through the campaign. He hasn't exactly been leading the way. He has not been leading the way and in fact he spent a lot of time on the campaign bragging about how much pipeline he's laid down and this ridiculous notion of an all of the above energy strategy as if you can develop solar and wind alongside more coal, more oil, more natural gas and it's all going to work out in the end. No, it just doesn't add up and I think personally I think the environmental movement has been a little too close to Obama and we learned for instance recently about a meeting that took place shortly after Obama was elected where the message that all these big green groups

got was we don't want to talk about climate change. We want to talk about green jobs and energy security and a lot of these big green groups played along. I mean the big environmental group. Yeah, the environmental groups went along with this messaging talking about energy security instead of talking about climate change because they were told that that wasn't a winnable message. I just think it's wrong. I think it's bad strategy. You got reelected. He got well he got reelected but you know what I think I think Hurricane Sandy helped Obama get reelected. How so? Well look at that the Bloomberg endorsement that came at the last minute, I mean Bloomberg endorsed Obama because of climate change because he believed that this was an issue that voters cared enough about, that they would, that independence would swing to Obama over climate change and some of the polling absolutely supports this, that this was one of the reasons why people voted for Obama over Romney was that they were concerned about climate change and they felt that he was a better candidate on climate change.

The truth was we didn't have a good candidate. We had a terrible terrible candidate on climate change and we had a candidate on climate change who needs a lot of pressure. So I feel more optimistic than I did in 2008 because I think in 2008 the attitude of the environmental movement was our guy just got in and we need to support him and he's going to give us the legislation that we want and we're going to take his advice and we're going to be good little soldiers and now maybe I'm being overly optimistic but I think that that people learn the lesson of the past four years and people now understand that what Obama needs and what we need, forget what Obama needs is a real independent movement with climate change at its center and that's going to put pressure on the entire political class and directly on the fossil fuel companies on this issue and there's no waiting around for Obama to do it for you. Why would you think that the next four years of a lame duck president would be more successful from your standpoint than the first four years when he's looking to reelection? Well I think on the one hand we're going to see more direct action but the other strategy

is to go where the problem is and the problem is the companies themselves and we're launching the Do The Math Tour which is actually trying to kick off a divestment movement. I mean we're going after these companies where it hurts which is their portfolios which is their stock price and you're asking people to disinvest to take their money out of universities in particular. This is what happened during the fight against apartheid in South Africa and ultimately proved successful. Yeah and this is, we are modeling it on the anti apartheid divestment movement and the reason it's called Do The Math is because of this new body of research that came out last year a group in Britain called the Carbon Tracker Initiative and this is a fairly conservative group that addresses itself to the financial community. This is not, you know, sort of activist research, this is a group that identified a market bubble and were concerned about what this meant to investors so it's a pretty conservative take on it and what the numbers that they crunched found is that if we're going to ward off

truly catastrophic climate change we need to keep the increase, the temperature increase below two degrees centigrade. The problem with that is that they also measured how much the fossil fuel companies and countries who own their own national oil reserves have now currently in their reserves which means they have already laid claim to this, they already own it, it's already inflating their stock price, okay. So how much is that? It's five times more. So that means that the whole business model for the fossil fuel industry is based on burning five times more carbon than is compatible with a livable planet. So what we're saying is your business model is at war with life on this planet, it's at war with us and we need to fight back. So we're saying these are rogue companies and we think in particular young people who so future lies ahead of them have to send a message to their universities who, you know, almost every university has a huge endowment and there isn't an endowment out there that

doesn't have holdings in these fossil fuel companies. And so young people are saying to the people who charged with their education, charged with preparing them for the outside world for their future jobs. Explain to me how you can prepare me for a future that with your actions you're demonstrating you don't believe it. How can you prepare me for a future at the same time as you bet against my future with these fossil fuel holdings? You do the math and you tell me and I think there's a tremendous moral clarity that comes from having that kind of a youth led movement, so we're really excited about it. What do you mean rogue corporations? You're talking about Chevron and Exxon Mobile and BP and all of these huge capitalists or institutions. Well, rogue corporations because their business model involves externalizing the price of their waste onto the rest of us. So their business model is based on not having to pay for what they think of as an

externality, which is the carbon that's spewed into the atmosphere that is warming the planet. And that price is enormous. We absolutely know that the future is going to be filled with many more such superstorms and many more such costly multi-billion dollar disasters. It's already happening. Last year was the, there were more billion dollar disasters than any year previously. So climate change is costing us. And yet you see this squabbling at the state level, at the municipal level, over who's going to pay for this. The public sector doesn't have the money to pay for what these rogue corporations have left us with, the price tag of climate change. So we have to do two things. We have to make sure that it doesn't get worse, that the price tag doesn't get higher. And we need to get some of that money back, which means looking at issues like fossil fuel subsidies, and, you know, to me, it's so crazy. I mean, here we are post-Hurricane Sandy.

Everyone is saying, well, maybe this is going to be our wake-up call. And right now in New York City, the debate is over how much to increase fares in public transit. And they want the Metro Transit Authority wants to increase the price of riding with subway, the price of riding with trains, quite a bit. And so how does this make sense? We're supposedly having a wake-up call about climate change, and we're making it harder for people to use public transit. And that's because we don't have the resources that we need. You've been out among the areas of devastation. Why? Well, for this book, I'm currently writing about climate change and a documentary to go with it. So we were filming in the Rock O'Aes, which is one of the hardest-hit areas in Staten Island, on Staten Island, and in Red Hook, and also in the relief hubs where you see just a tremendous number of volunteers organized by, actually organized by Occupy Wall Street. They call it Occupy Sandy. Right. Yeah.

And what I found is that people are just, the generosity is tremendous. The humanity is tremendous. I saw a friend last night, and I asked her whether she'd been involved in the hurricane relief. And she said, yeah, I gave them my car. I hope I get it back. If you see it, tell me. So people are tremendous, right? This means... So, one of the things that you find out in a disaster is you really do need a public sector. It's really important. And coming back to what we were talking about earlier, why is climate change so threatening to people on the conservative end of the political spectrum, one of the things it makes an argument for is the public sphere. You need public transit to prevent climate change. But you also need a public health care system to respond to it. It can't just be ad hoc. It can't just be charity and goodwill. When you use terms like collective action, central planning, you scare corporate executives and the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, because they say you want to do away with capitalism.

Well, I don't use phrase like central planning. I talk about planning, but I don't think it should be central. And one of the things that you must admit when looking at climate change is that the only thing just as bad or maybe even worse for the climate than capitalism was communism. And when we look at the carbon emissions for the Eastern Block countries, they were actually in some cases worse than countries like Australia or Canada. So let's just call it a tie. They're both really bad. So we need to look for other models, and I think there needs to be much more decentralization and a much deeper definition of democracy than we have right now. Decentralization of what, Naomi? Well, for instance, if we think about renewable energy, one of the things that's happened is that when you try to get wind farms set up, really big wind farms, there's usually a lot of community resistance that's happened in the United States. It's happened in Britain, where it hasn't happened is Germany and Denmark.

And the reason for that is that in those places, you have movements that have demanded that the renewable energy be community controlled, not centrally planned, but community controlled so that there's a sense of ownership, not by some big faceless state, but by the people who actually live in the community that is impacted. It's written that climate change has little to do with the state of the environment, but much to do with the state of capitalism and transforming the American economic system. And you see an opening with Sandy, right? I do see an opening because, you know, whenever you have this kind of destruction, there has to be a reconstruction. And what I documented in the shock doctrine is that these right-wing think tanks, like the ones you named, like the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, they historically have gotten very, very good at seizing these moments of opportunity to push through their wish list of policies.

And often, their wish list of policies actually dig us deeper into crisis. If you'll bear with me, I'll just give you one example. After Hurricane Katrina, there was a meeting at the Heritage Foundation just two weeks after the storm hit. Parts of the city were still underwater, and there was a meeting, the Wall Street Journal reported on it, and I got the minutes from the meeting. The heading was 31 free market solutions for Hurricane Katrina. And you go down the list, and it was, you know, don't reopen the public schools, replace the public schools with vouchers, and drill for oil in an anwar and the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, more oil refineries. So this may, what kind of free market solutions are these? Right? Here you have a crisis that was created by a collision between heavy weather, which may or may not have been linked to climate change, but certainly is what climate change looks like, colliding with weak infrastructure because of years and years of neglect. And the free market solutions to this crisis are, let's just get rid of the public infrastructure

altogether and drill for more oil, which is the root cause of climate change. So that's there, that's their shock doctrine. And I think it's time for a people's shock. People's shock? People's shock, which actually we've had before, as you know, where, you know, if you think about 1929 and the market shock, and the way in which the public responded, they wanted to get at the root of the problem. They wanted to get away from speculative finance, and that's how we got some very good legislation passed in this country, like Glass-Steagall, and much of the social safety net was born in that moment, not by exploiting crisis to hoard power for the few and to ram through policies that people don't want, but to build popular movements and to really deepen democracy. Well, the main thesis of shock doctrine, which came out five years ago before the great crash, was that disaster capitalism exploits crises in order to move greater wealth to the hands of a fewer and fewer people.

You don't expect those people to change their appetites, do you, or their ways, do you, because we face a climate crisis? I wrote the shock doctrine because I believe that we, I believe at the time that we didn't understand this tactic. We didn't understand it during times of crisis. In sectors of the business world and the political class, take advantage of our disorientation in order to ram through these policies. And I believed at the time that if we understood it, if we had a name for it, if we had a word, a language for it, then the next time they tried it, we would fight back. Because the whole tactic is about taking advantage of our disorientation in those moments of crisis. The fact that we often can become childlike and look towards, you know, a supposed expert class and leaders to take care of us. And we'd become too trusting, frankly, during disasters. It used to be said that whether, now global warming, climate change, was a great equalizer.

It affected rich and poor alike. You don't think it does, do you? What I'm seeing, and I've seen this, you know, I've been tracking this now for about six years, more and more, there's a privatization of response to disaster, where I think wealthy people understand that, yes, we are going to see more and more storms. We live in a turbulent world. It's going to get even more turbulent, and they're planning. So you have, for instance, private insurance companies now increasingly offer what they call a concierge service, the first company that was doing this was AIG. And in the midst of the California wildfires, about six years ago, for the first time, you saw private firefighters showing up at people's homes, spraying them in fire retardant, so that when the flames came, this house would stay, this mansion, usually would be standing,

and the one next door might burn to the ground. So this is extraordinary, because we would tend to think of, you know, firefighting. This is definitely, you know, a public good. This is definitely something that people get equally. But now we're finding that even there's even a sort of two-tiering of protection from wildfires. There was even a short-lived airline in Florida I read about that offered five-star evacuation service in the events of Hurricane. Yeah, after Hurricane Katrina, a company in Florida saw a market opportunity, and they decided to offer a charter airline that would turn your hurricane into a luxury vacation. That was actually the slogan. They would let you know when a hurricane was headed for your area. They would pick you up in a limousine, drive you to the airport, whisk you up, and they would make you five-star hotel reservations at the destination of your choice. So, you know, why does a hurricane have to be bad news?

This kind of privatization is what you wrote about in Shock Doctrine, that privatization of resources, monopolization of resources by the rich in times of crisis further divided as a society. Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things about this, about deregulated capitalism, is that it is a crisis creation machine. You know, you take away all the rules, and you are going to have serial crises. They may be economic crises, booms and busts, or there will be ecological crises. You are going to have both. You are just going to have shock after shock after shock. And the longer this goes on, the more shocks you are going to have. And the way we are currently responding to it is that with each shock, we become more divided. And the more we understand that this is what the future looks like, the more those who can afford it protect themselves and buy their way out of having to depend on the public sector, and therefore are less invested in these collective responses. And that is why there has to be a whole other way of responding to this crisis.

You wrote recently that climate change can be a historic moment to usher in the next great wave of progressive change. It can be, and it must be. I mean, it is our only chance. This is, I believe it is the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. And we have been kidding ourselves about what it is going to take to get our emissions down to the extent that they need to go down. I mean, you talk about 80% lowering emissions. I mean, that is such a huge shift. And I think that is part of the way in which, and I don't mean to beat up on the big environmental groups because they do fantastic work. But I think that part of the reason why public opinion on this issue has been so shaky is that it doesn't really add up to say to the public, you know, this is a huge problem. It's Armageddon. You have inconvenient truth. You scare the hell out of people. But then you say, well, the solution can be very minor. You can change your light bulb.

And we'll have this complicated piece of legislation called cap and trade that you don't really understand. But that basically means that companies here can keep on polluting. But they're going to trade their carbon emissions. And somebody else is going to plant trees on the other side of the planet. And they'll get credits. And people look at that going, OK, if this was a crisis, wouldn't we, we, we, we, we, we be responding more aggressively? So wouldn't we be responding in the way that you have, you know, respond, we've responded in the past during, during war times where there's been, you know, that kind of a collective sense of shared responsibility because I think when we really do feel that sense of urgency about an issue, and I believe we should feel that about climate change, we are willing to sacrifice. We have shown that in the past. But when you hold up a supposed emergency and actually don't ask anything of people anything major, they actually think you might be lying, that it might not really be an emergency after all. So if this is an emergency, we have to act like it. And yeah, it is, it is a fundamental challenge. But the good news is, you know, we get to have a future for our kids. Naomi Klein, thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. Since the election last week, those of us concerned about the amount of money and politics have been told repeatedly, get over it. Your concerns overblown. Citizens United is a boogie man, and big money didn't make all that much difference. Really? That's not what Trevor Potter thinks. And he's the expert on how money works as well. You may have caught him the other night, advising his clients, Stephen Colbert, on what to do about the super PAC they had created for Stephen last year in a clever effort to expose the potential for campaign finance corruption. Can I somehow give the money to myself and thereby hide it forever from all eyes and use it in the way that I wish? Actually, you can. I know him. Colbert Nation is in good legal hands with Trevor Potter.

He knows how the system works. He advised George H.W. Bush and John McCain on their campaigns for the White House. He helped draft the McCain Fine Go campaign reform act, chaired the Federal Election Commission, and founded the campaign legal center. That's an unpartisan group working with other campaign finance reformers to counter the influence of that $6 billion election. Welcome back, Trevor. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. So, did the money matter or not? Well, let me give you an analogy that you would appreciate on the East Coast, which is if you have a hurricane, when they're still building standing at the end and you come out and say I'm still alive, do you stop worrying about hurricanes? No. And I think that's where we are. The title wave of money was there. It left lots of Democrats standing. It was nowhere near what the Super PAC's hope it would be on the Republican side in the Senate races, and obviously they didn't elect Governor Romney.

But I think they had a huge influence on the race and they undoubtedly learned lessons which they will put into effect in the next elections. I've heard so many people say since the election world this proves that big money didn't make all that much of a difference because of a sort of a wash. I think there are a couple ways it actually made a big difference this year. The first one, which is very counterintuitive, is it may have actually badly injured Romney. And the reason for that is that after Citizens United, you had these so-called candidate Super PACs, and in the Republican primaries last spring you had Romney, who was widely the leader and assumed to have it wrapped up, and then you had two other candidates who came up, had millions of dollars spent on their behalf by Super PACs, and kept the race open. They were the Gingrich candidacy and his Super PAC and the Santorum one. What it meant was that instead of wrapping things up in February, Romney waited, had all of these primaries where he was attacked, and he ended up the primary season, somewhat

wounded because these Republican Super PACs had run really vicious ads against him, pre-saging the Obama attacks, and he was broke. Now if that hadn't happened, if we had had not had Super PACs, Romney would have raised the money, and the other candidates would not have, they raised no money themselves virtually. The millionaires, billionaires, funded them, each of them had one billionaire who kept them in the race. If that hadn't have happened, they would have had literally no money to pay for gas for a car. They would have been out. The billionaires kept the Republican primaries going? Yes, absolutely. What happened this year is the billionaires kept Santorum in Gingrich going for months in a way that the public never would have, and they attacked, used the billionaires' money to attack Romney. He had to spend his money to defend himself and raise a lot of money through his Super PAC to defend himself, but the result was the election took much longer to get a Republican nominee than the Republicans had hoped, and Romney was broke starting. If you look at a lot of what the Democrats are saying now, it is we had an advantage

because we were sitting there lying and waiting for them. Obama had no opponent. He had raised hundreds of millions of dollars that he could spend on advertising to define Romney in the early summer, and the Romney campaign couldn't hit back because it didn't have the money. So you realize what your acknowledging are even conceding that although the billionaires may not have gotten what they wanted, the Republican nominee, they set the agenda by spending money on these candidates who eventually had to drop out. I think that's entirely true. The billionaires, in many ways, drove the Republican primary race. It was their advertising. If you look at the spending, the candidates weren't raising the money for these ads. The Super PACs funded by billionaires were, and in both the Gingrich and Santorum cases just one billionaires each doing it. So you have two billionaires speaking and you get me one, and the collateral damage is Governor Romney. So I think Republicans are looking back at this and saying, we the party lost control of the primary process, meaning a billionaire or two, not the people.

I mean, there are people out there saying, well, this is the voice of the people and isn't it wonderful to have everyone involved. This is one billionaire speaking to another billionaire or two billionaires attacking a multi-millionaire in the person of Mitt Romney. So it's a very small conversational ambit, but it clearly changed the race. So that's one way where I think they had a huge effect. The other is if I were a Democrat and I were looking forward, I would say, we were lucky this time. We dodged a bullet. We had Barack Obama. He's an incumbent president. He had no primary challenge. He started raising money in April of 2011. So he had a whole year before Romney was really even beginning to think about the general election to raise and stockpile money. Even so, he just spent the Republicans to a draw because the Republican Super PACs raised and spent three times as much as the Democratic Super PAC, the one that Obama supported. And that's what the president out there as an incumbent urging cabinet secretaries to

fundraise forward, urging Democratic donors to support it. And even with that, the Republican Super PACs outspent the Democratic one, three to one. So if you look forward, you don't have an incumbent president. You have a contested Democratic primary. You may have a divisive one as you did Obama versus Clinton in 2008. We're going to be where Romney was this year. They're going to be broke. They're not going to have a list of four million volunteers ready to go. They're not going to have those hundreds of offices all over the key states in Ohio and elsewhere because they won't have had the money to open them. And the Republican nominee is going to be sitting there again, I think, with substantially more Super PAC support. So just because this time, Obama as an incumbent was able to spend them to a draw should not suggest anyone that that's what happens next time. I read in a couple of places that by the week of the election, President Obama had attended 221 fundraisers, far more than any other incumbent president in our history. In 24 states, I mean, the time that is used to raise this money has to figure into our

reckoning of its impact, right? This is actually a disaster for the country. This being the fact that we don't have presidential public funding and instead we have the incumbent president of the United States spending that much time out trying to raise money for his campaign instead of worrying about the economy, national affairs and international affairs. You may recall one of the debates, Romney went after Obama saying that after the Libyan incident, you left Washington and you went to Nevada. That was for a fundraiser. That's what they're doing. If you think of that many fundraisings, here's an interesting statistic for you. Back in 1984, Ronald Reagan was the incumbent president of the United States. He had a re-election. His campaign had to raise matching funds in the primary and had to raise money for the party, even though he was taking the federal grant as everyone has until this year in the general election.

Ronald Reagan attended in that year four fundraisers. He compared to 220. He compared to 221. We have a president. This is not an attack on Obama, this is an attack on whoever's there. We have a president who is, to some extent, not doing their job because they have to be off fundraising. The Romney people felt the same way. Romney was heard to be complaining in his campaign that he couldn't go out and meet voters and do the things he thought he had to do as a candidate because he had to spend all his time in closed rooms with small groups of wealthy people to fundraise. In order to get his ads up for his campaign, he couldn't campaign. There's a great irony here. And so you have two issues here. One is the time that the president is spending doing this rather than his job. And what happens to a candidate when the only people they meet and talk to and take questions for for months on end are a small group of our society who have a lot of money and certain views. And the Romney 47% comments reflect what he knew the donors think because he'd spent

so much time hearing things like that from this small group of Americans. Did those Republican donors, those guys in the room and the big Republican donors in particular get no return on their money this year? I think they did get a return and that's what we're going to see in the future. They didn't elect all the members of the Senate they wanted. They did do save some members of the Senate, some Republican Congress people who are under attack. But the real point is that these groups have a lobbying agenda. They have a legislative agenda in Washington and they now have a Republican party that is incredibly grateful for the time and money that was spent in this election. The Republican leadership wants them to do it again in the midterms in only two years. So they've got chits. They can call in. They have earned and purchased influence. If you are a Republican office holder, are you going to listen to Sheldon Adelson when he wants to talk about specific legislative issues when he spent millions of dollars

and you know he can do it again? Of course you are. Aren't you going to listen to American Crossroads which you hope is going to build a structure for the party in the next elections? Yes. And that's going to be true on both sides. It's not just Republican, if you're a big Democratic super PAC, you are going to have your calls taken by Democratic members when you say this is what we need to do. I heard you as Steve Cobair's lawyer advise him that he could keep the money he had collected through his super PAC and transfer it to his secret fund, the so-called social worker fund, and use it for lobbying if he wanted to. Let me see if I can make clear what's happening. I've got a 501-C4 called Cobair Super PAC SH. I take the money from the super PAC. I pass it through the 501-C4 into a second unnamed 501-C4. I place all the money inside that second unnamed 501-C4, and through the magic of your

lawyering and the present federal tax code, after I close this and lock it, that money is gone forever and no one ever knows what happened to it? You'll know, but nobody else will. Federal Election Commission rules say that he could have taken the money, written himself a check, and gone and bought a yacht. That's permissible because what the Congress has done is restricted actual candidates, members of Congress and their challengers, and said they can't use the money to buy a Cadillac or a yacht or other personal use, but none of these other political monies are restricted. All these super PACs, they'd have to pay income tax on it, but if they wanted to write themselves a check and take it home, they can.

What I was telling Steven Cobair is, if you're not going to do that and everyone's going to know it because that is disclosed, then you can take the money basically off the books, put it in a 501-C4 social welfare organization, and then move it around. As we've discussed before, these C4s can use that money for political ads if they want. You just won't know that it was Cobair's money, or they can use it for lobbying. So there'd be another invisible influence over the representatives we have sent to Congress. That we won't know about. Funded by super PACs. Right. Some of it may be disclosed through the lobbying disclosure provisions, but no grassroots lobbying has to be disclosed that way. So if you run ads or you're generating phone calls in a district or you're sending emails, none of that is going to be disclosed. How do you assess the impact of citizens united in particular on this election? First of all, what it tells us is the court really didn't understand how elections work, because they thought this spending would be totally wholly independent of candidates

and parties, and this so-called independent spending was being done by groups that were very close to the candidates and parties, and that's one reason they were so successful in raising all that money, is that donors knew they were close to Romney or Obama or the Republican or Democratic establishment, so they trusted them with millions of dollars they got. Then the court said that corporate shareholders would at least know what their corporations were doing, and through corporate democracy they could object if they didn't like it. The reality is the shareholders don't know, there's no requirement of disclosure to shareholders under the law, and most companies don't tell their shareholders what they're doing, and they certainly don't have an opportunity to object to it in any substantive way or change the corporation's policy. So I think the reform agenda looking forward is going to be, shouldn't there be a provision for shareholder democracy? What the Supreme Court talked about in citizens united? The SEC or Congress or the states that actually charter corporations, shouldn't they have

provisions saying that before a corporation uses shareholder money, it needs their approval. And Republicans are going to say, well, if that's the case, shouldn't we have that for labor unions? Well, why not? I mean, if you're going to have someone in charge of a group spending other people's money, and it really is other people's money, then shouldn't they get their approval to do that? The Supreme Court said, this money is not a problem if it doesn't corrupt, and the perception of corruption is also a danger. So it seems to me that you can't avoid the appearance of corruption in the use of secret money to lobby that was given for campaigns. It's one of the real problems with the citizens united case is that what they effectively said is, we on high have decided that independent spending in elections cannot corrupt. As a matter of fact and theory, we don't want to hear otherwise, it can't do it.

And therefore, you can have this unlimited spending. So when people look at examples of corruption, the court doesn't want to hear it. That's why they turned back a challenge from the state of Montana, which said, we have evidence of corruption in our elections, and they said, we don't want to talk about it, we've already decided the case. So what's going to have to happen here is the, I think we have to build a record over time showing the many ways in which this spending does, in fact, corrupt or have the potential for corruption. It may be because it's not really independent in the close ties to the candidates and the parties. It may be that it's not just election spending and add that voters are seeing, but it's tied to this lobbying campaign and trying to get something from the members of Congress who were elected by that spending. What do the reformers do next? The whole enforcement problem we have today has got to be addressed. We have a federal election commission that is usually deadlocked, three-three, which means

it can't do anything. That's one reason we have the disclosure gap in this election. And no one's done anything about the FEC. It has five of the six commissioners are in expired terms sitting there waiting for their successors. So I think there's a real opportunity here for the president to take the lead and to say we need a functioning FEC. I'm going to work with Congress. I'm going to go outside of the system. I'm going to look for people who are not Washington insiders, haven't worked for the party committees before. I'm going to find people who know something about elections or our independent prosecutor types who have integrity. And I'm going to nominate them to the federal election commission. You've been advocating for campaign reform for a long time. Given what just happened, this hurricane, as you say, of money, are you going to hang it all up? Maybe get a gig on Comedy Central? Are you going to keep at it?

I'm going to keep at it. Surprisingly as a Republican, I've actually come to the judgment that we're going to have to have some sort of citizen funding of elections. We're in an election cycle. We're not only a handful, literally, of billionaires. I think changed the way the Republican primary came out. We're the principal communicators in the general election. But even if you look past that, to all the money that Obama raised and Romney raised in all those congressmen and senators raised, one third of one percent of the American public actually gave money in recordable amounts to candidates. So 99.23% didn't participate in the system in recordable amounts, which means more than 200 dollars to a candidate. And what about the rest of the country? They deserve a voice. And I think we're going to have to find a way to do that, whether it is some sort of a

tax credit or a tax return to taxpayers. You know, Republicans always say we ought to be cutting taxes, we ought to be giving money back to the people. Well, maybe that's exactly what we ought to do. Give each citizen, each registered voter $100 or a voucher for $100 and say you can give this to the candidate of your choice. You're money back, you're all paying taxes, one way or the other income tax, gas taxes, social security taxes. You go out and fund candidates and parties that you like. So that's how the 99.23% gets involved. There's something fundamentally flawed about a system where in order to get elected, the members of Congress have to rely on the very people who are lobbying them day in and day out because that's their principal source of funding, those lobbyists and the interests they represent. And the problem with super PACs this year is they just upped the ante because it used to be a Senate race cost, well, who knows, but not much, then it was millions. The Virginia Senate race this year was $80 million, 50 million or so from outside groups,

the other 30 from inside. Well, if you're a senator and you have just been elected or haven't forbids you're up in two years, what are you thinking? You're thinking, I don't have time to worry about deficit reduction and the fiscal cliff, I've got to go to a fundraiser. I have to raise tens of thousands of dollars every day to have enough money to compete with these new super PACs and it'd be really nice if I could find a billionaire who would help me with my own super PAC and that means I need to be nice to a lot of billionaires who often want something from me in order to find the funding for my campaign and hope they'll do a super PAC. So you've raised the financial pressure on members and realistically the time pressure for all those fundraisers. At the very moment when we face a lot of issues that we'd like them to be focused on instead of their next campaign. Trevor Potter, thank you for joining us. Thank you very much as always, I appreciate it. That's it for this week, go to billmoyers.com for links to the campaign Legal Center,

the Sunlight Foundation and other citizens groups pushing back against the spreading slime of money. And don't miss our special video report from nearby Coney Island that explores firsthand how occupy Sandy and the group people's relief are helping those hardest hit and most front of all, that's all at billmoyers.com. Don't wait a week to get more moyers, visit billmoyers.com for exclusive blogs, essays and video features. This episode of Moyers and Company is available on DVD for 1995 to order call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen.

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