Mm-hmm.

And Lewis Powell wrote a memo that said to corporate America, and the chamber distributed it to every CEO in America.

It said, "You have got to be much more active in politics, and you've got to put a great deal of money into political campaigns and into public relations and into even academe." And this was an extraordinary document, and this was the beginning.

Uh, and I've, I only f- really found out about this because in the late '70s, I was at the Federal Trade Commission, and we were doing some, I thought, important work trying to protect American consumers and trying to deal with antitrust issues, monopolization.

And Congress, particularly the House at that time, under the control of the Democrats.

The Democrats had been in control since 1955 of the House of Representatives.

The House of Representatives stopped our appropriation, stopped the Federal Trade Commission, and I remember saying to the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission at that time, it was Michael Pertschuk.

How can we mitigate, which is an important word, how can we mitigate the damage being wrought by a biased Supreme Court?

CanadaWh- what does that tell you about the way he understands trade?

He doesn't understand it at all, Jonathan.

Uh, I, I'm afraid he's an economic illiterate.

I mean, he ...

You know, even, a, somebody who has taken one week of economics, even somebody who has not taken, ah, economics, who has just simply observed the world, understands that trade is generally speaking a good thing.

There's something called comparative advantage.

Ah, we get the benefits of Canada's forests, Canada's aluminum, Canada's this, Canada's that, and they get the benefits of we- what we specialize in.

When you look at everything Trump is doing on the economy right now, what worries you the most?

And I'm curious why you think that is.

Well, I think it's worse than simply echoing.

I think what we've had, Monica, is a steady erosion since the 1970s of our social contract.

And by social contract, I mean what we owe each other as members of the same society.

It had been the case, and I remember this, I'm old enough to remember this, that there was a social contract standing for the proposition that if you worked hard, and if you played by the rules, and if you tried to be a good member of your community and society, you would do better, your children would do better, everybody would do better, as the economy did better, as corporations did better, you would do better as well.

And that's what we lost.

We lost in part because of big money coming into American politics from big corporations and from very wealthy people, big money that changed the rules of the game, that changed the rules in such a way that almost nobody could make it except for The people already had a great deal of wealth and power and big corporations.

Do you see an arc in this story that bends the other way at some point?

Uh, so what would be an example or two of something they could do that would be big, that would make a difference?

Uh, well, I think we're hearing it around the country in terms of progressive Democrats who are saying, uh, you know, number one, Medicare for all or at least a single-party player, payer for, uh, healthcare that's going to be affordable.

Uh, you know, number two, childcare.

And number three, uh, housing, making housing more affordable and more available, uh, particularly to young people in this country who now cannot afford a house.

I mean, issue by issue, what people talk about over the kitchen table, uh, really are now central to the Democratic message.

And I think that, uh, a lot of Democrats I speak with, a lot of Democratic candidates are not get- um, are not, are not getting off on, uh, the, the, the issues that Republicans wanna talk about, uh, you know, issues of wokeism, uh, or issues having to do with, uh, with, with the Democratic socialists of America.

Uh, no, the Democrats are focusing where they should, on this issue of what can we do to make your life better off? I also expect the Democrats are going to be asking the same question that Ronald Reagan famously asked in 1980 at the end of his debate with Jimmy Carter, and that is, "Are you better off than you were at the start of this presidency?" And most people are gonna say no.

What went wrong in the Democratic Party? How did the Democratic Party become so corporate, and where were those mistakes made? Was it NAFTA? Was it in compromising on single-payer healthcare? What went wrong?

Yeah.

Uh, but let me just say, uh, there's a lot of studies that show that if we had a single-payer pa- a single-party payer, Medicare for All, it would be cheaper.

Right now, so much of our medical costs are going into administrative costs, and that is unnecessary.

Uh, number two, we have a gigantic military.

Uh, this, I mean, milit- uh, if you wanna talk about fraud, waste, and abuse, go to the military.

Look at what we are spending.

Look at the amount of waste there in the military right now.

Medicaid as well.

So if you could talk about the significance of this, the value of stocks as opposed to the more common measurements of wealth or income distribution and how these plain numbers can be disputed.

Well, I think this is very, very important because a lot of the administration, particularly the president, thinks the stock market is the major indicator of the success of the economy.

And it's not.

I mean, for years, we've known that there is a big gap between the Wall Street and Main Street.

And that gap is getting larger and larger and larger.

Because, again, you've got the top, the richest 1% of Americans owning almost half all of the shares of stock available in the United States.

And you've got the richest 10% owning 92% of all the shares of stock.

Let's talk about that.

So if you could talk about the significance of this, the value of stocks as opposed to the more common measurements of wealth or income distribution and how these plain numbers can be disputed.

Well, I think this is very, very important because a lot of the administration, particularly the president, thinks the stock market is the major indicator of the success of the economy.

And it's not.

I mean, for years, we've known that there is a big gap between the Wall Street and Main Street.

And that gap is getting larger and larger and larger.

Because, again, you've got the top, the richest 1% of Americans owning almost half all of the shares of stock available in the United States.

And you've got the richest 10% owning 92% of all the shares of stock.

Let's talk about that.

The richest 10% own 92%." So if you could talk about the significance of this, the value of stocks as opposed to the more common measurements of wealth or income distribution, and how these plain numbers can be disputed.

Well, I think this is very, very important because a lot of the administration, particularly the president, thinks the stock market is the major indicator of the success of the economy, and it's not.

I mean, for years we've known that there is a big gap between, uh, the we- Wall Street and Main Street.

Uh, and that gap is getting larger and larger and larger.

Uh, because you, again, you've got the top, the richest 1% of Americans owning almost half, uh, the, all of the shares of stock available in the United States, and you've got the richest 10% owning 92% of all the shares of stock.

So if the stock market goes up, uh, well, that's nice, I guess, for the people who own shares of stock, but it doesn't do anything for most Americans.

And even if you throw in the 401[k]s, uh, and their, uh, you know, their, the, their, their pensions and everything else that may be connected s- to the stock market, it's only a very tiny portion of the stock market for most Americans.

Let's talk about that.

The richest 10% own 92%." So if you could talk about the significance of this, the value of stocks as opposed to the more common measurements of wealth or income distribution, and how these plain numbers can be disputed.

Well, I think this is very, very important because a lot of the administration, particularly the president, thinks the stock market is the major indicator of the success of the economy, and it's not.

I mean, for years we've known that there is a big gap between, uh, the we- Wall Street and Main Street.

Uh, and that gap is getting larger, and larger, and larger.

Uh, because you, again, you've got the top, the richest 1% of Americans owning almost half, uh, the, all of the shares of stock available in the United States, and you've got the richest 10% owning 92% of all the shares of stocks.

So if the stock market goes up, uh, well, that's nice, I guess, for the people who own shares of stock, but it doesn't do anything for most Americans.

And even if you throw in the 401[k]s, uh, and their, uh, you know, their, th- their, their pensions and everything else that may be connected s- to the stock market, it's only a very tiny portion of the stock market for most Americans.

Let's talk about that.

Go through the 10 and then we'll discuss the impact that

it should have.

OK, I'll try to make it very I'll do a dramatic reading.

I'll try to make it very exciting.

Number one, we eliminate Trump's across the board tariffs because they they're import taxes.

They're raising the prices of just about everything American consumers buy.

Number two, we'll get energy prices down by ending Trump's war in Iran and shifting to renewable sources of energy.

Does that mean close to 37 percent of the United States economy is government spending? And if my math is correct, what does it mean if, let's say, 37 percent of our economy is what government spends? What does that mean?

Mm

... we will be able to get back, but we may not be ever the same again, because trust is at the center of so many of our institutions, whether you're talking about NATO or FIFA or the Department of Justice.

I mean, we trust that these institutions work as they are intended to work.

We never assumed that an American president could wreak havoc on these institutions.

A- and so then in terms of my analogy, yes, we're going to have to lock a lot of doors and windows.

We're going to have to invest a great deal of our time and energy, and maybe money, in buying locks and at creating a, a different kind of society that is less susceptible, less vulnerable to this kind of demagoguery.

Mm

... my personal view, because I'm an optimist at heart, Jonathan, is that our next president is going to be elected because that president, whoever it's going to be, has so much integrity and so much humility and so much concern about institutional integrity that he helps mend the country.

And the betrayal by Donald Trump, who made many promises to them and instead has damaged their prospects.

I think that's fair to say in terms of abandonment, yes, and betrayal, yes.

But another lens, if you excuse me, might be to say that we are in the midst of a revolution right now.

And let's call it a populist revolution.

that started not too long after the financial crisis of 2008.

People in this country began to see that the game was rigged against them or perceived that the game was rigged against them.

And the Democrats really didn't rise very much to the occasion.

I'd like you to have the last word here on, is there an American common good? And how should we think about it?

Um, why don't you tell us about, um, your experience there and about the importance of independent regulatory agencies? And we've just had a decision from the Supreme Court in the Slaughter case against the idea of the independence of these agencies to protect American citizens and consumers, and what that means.

Uh, well, Sid, to your point, um, when I was at the Federal Trade Commission, we did a great deal to, uh, reduce the influence of monopolies on the American economy and also to reduce consumer fraud.

Those were the two major roles, and they still are, supposed to be, of the Federal Trade Commission.

Uh, even then, in the late '70s, uh, it was difficult to get stuff done because Lewis Powell, who, uh, was originally an attorney in Virginia, had helped the US Chamber of Commerce come up with a plan in 1971, uh, to increase corporate power in America, fearing that Nader and Nader's Raiders and all of the labor people who were becoming a little bit stronger, uh, would rob corporations of the kind of independence and power they had already attained.

And Lewis Powell said that big corporations had to put more money into politics.

Uh, by the time I got to the, uh, Trade Commission, Federal Trade Commission in the late '70s, Lewis Powell's memo was already being put into effect, and there were already huge amounts of money being spent against what we were doing at the Federal Trade Commission, uh, on monopolization and on consumer fraud.

I, I, I was amazed at the amount of money being spent.

When you look at, uh, the amount of money that Elon Musk alone put into the campaign for Donald Trump, it was certainly enough to turn a small number of votes in a few states towards him, and, um, we don't put enough emphasis on the role of big money in politics.

Yes.

Uh, I mean, for example, if, uh, if, if companies can monopolize because they've paid off, uh, the, the executives and paid off, l- you know, the, the legislators, well, if they are able to monopolize, that means prices are gonna be higher than they would otherwise be.

Uh, the...

And I could give you many, many other examples.

Uh, the reason that, uh, Peter Magyar did so well, uh, in Hungary, uh, is that he tied corruption to the, the worries and the financial worries of average people.

Uh, and I think that's what Democrats need to do.

Now, there are a lot of things that can be done.

Yep.

a

nightmare.

Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

And so I asked older, occasional, a few older boys to kind of be my protectors.

And one of those older boys who was my protector is named, was named Michael Schwerner, Mickey Schwerner.

And in 1964, I lost touch with them, you know, after I became a teenager, I didn't need older protectors.

Carter administration, you said?

But I, I feel as though deregulation slips through the cracks, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that functions in terms of, uh, income inequality.

Uh, it is a form of trickle-down economics.

Uh, if you define trickle-down economics as giving benefits, uh, to the wealthy on the supposition that somehow those benefits are gonna trickle down to the middle class and the poor, uh, they haven't with regard to tax benefits.

We've had now years, starting with Ronald Reagan, in which we've seen, uh, that tax benefits that go to the wealthy don't help anybody.

They don't actually end up raising wages for people in the middle or at the bottom.

Uh, and we've also seen it with regulations, uh, particularly under the Trump administration, uh, where regulation after regulation has been either repealed, curtailed, or not enforced on the supposition or on the promise that somehow the economy is going to grow, these businesses are going to be doing better without the regulations, and everybody therefore is going to be better off.

Well, every step along that so-called logical pathway has been proven wrong.

Uh, when you were labor secretary for Bill Clinton, uh, can you talk a little bit about some examples, uh, that you might have had with, uh, considering whether a protection was good for the people or bad for, uh, the people and sort of the cost-benefit analysis that you had to do?

And I wonder to what degree that's something they've concluded, maybe based on being in that age range themselves, if the question makes sense.

Well, it's an interesting and important question.

Let me be very, very candid about this, because I am 10 days younger than Donald Trump, which means... that in nine days from now, I'm going to also be 80 years old.

Now, if you are 79 on the verge of 80, if you are commencing your ninth decade on the earth, you don't have as much, let's say, pizzazz as you had before.

Your mind is not working quite as quickly.

Your brain is still, hopefully, I mean, I like to think that my brain is pretty good, but there are a lot of people I know who are my age who are slowing way down in terms of their brain functions.

Now, the difference between this normal aging and dementia is real.

Maybe a very economically.

Yeah

... now, if you are 79 on the verge of 80, if you are commencing your ninth decade on the Earth, you don't have as much, uh, let's say, uh, pizzazz as you had before.

Your mind is not working quite as quickly.

Uh, your, your, your, you know, your brain is still, hopefully...

I mean, I like to think that my brain is pretty good.

Uh, but, uh- There are a lot of people I know who are my age who are slowing way down in terms of their brain functions.

Uh, now the difference between this normal aging and dementia is real.

How does it work when-- Is the idea that at some point Trump will be gone and nobody will ever talk about the 2020 was stolen thing again? Or what's the off-ramp from this?

Mm-hmm

...

in which they are actually going to give you something back, a good or a service.

But when you are in a bribe economy, what you're paying for is not just a good or a service, it is actually a government policy, or it is a government guarantee not to do something, uh, that is going to enlarge your income and your wealth.

Uh, and that bribe economy is not obviously as large as the regular economy, but the bribe economy shapes the regular economy.

And it's not just tax cuts, it's also monopoly or antitrust enforcement.

I mean, what the Trump administration has done is essentially eviscerate antitrust.

Mm-hmm.

I probably only listed a quarter of the things I could have listed that seem untoward about the dealings between the president and the president's friends and other countries.

Well, yeah, I think one of the most important themes here is that in previous administrations, and I've been involved in, actually worked for three, uh, presidents, uh, one Republican.

Uh, in previous administrations, you have had a, a specialized group of people in the State Department, uh, diplomats, people who, uh, have developed an understanding of a particular country, like Iran, uh, or like China, and they really do, uh, have a very central role to play in American foreign policy and what a president does when he visits one of these places or when he makes decisions about going to war, uh, such as Iran.

Uh, this administration does not have that.

This administration instead has the president's son-in-law, uh, uh, Steve Witkoff, who's another real estate developer, a president's friend, uh, a bunch of CEOs who are part of the delegation that went to China with the president, but where are the diplomats? Where are the people who are supposed to know what is going on?Uh, there is really no distinction at all in this administration between the personal business interests of various people who are advising the president, including his family, uh, and America's supposed national interest.

Uh, but the fact is that there are conflicts of interest.

These are what, this is what conflicts of interest means.

Our prices are higher, our cost of living is higher because of tariffs and the war in Iran.

What Hegseth said was just BS.

Um, well, BS.

[laughs] Yes, that's a good summary of exactly what the Trump regime is trying to pull off.

Uh, and, and it...

And they substitute belligerence, uh, for facts.

They substitute kind of anger and, uh, sort of a, a...

They, they, they avoid, uh, hard questions.

This is actually a thing caused by the Trump administration.

What do you say to that?

Well, I'd, I'd, I'd say it, that's wrong.

I mean, I, I used to be chairman of a group, a citizens group called Common Cause, and I went around the country arguing against partisan gerrymandering.

I, I argued that what states really do need to do is to, is to give the mapping of districts to independent commissions, and I still believe that.

Uh, but how are you going to deal with the situation that we've found ourselves in after Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, at Trump's insistence, uh, gerrymandered in the middle of a, you know, a, a 10-year census process where you are not supposed to gerrymander at all.

Uh, he gerrymandered and redistricted solely for the, and obviously, uh, for the purpose of creating more Republican seats.

Well, I, I, you know, uh, what Democrats have to do is have a detri- you know, a deterrent to that.

Just enlighten my audience about the 10 most important ways to resist right now.

Is the deficit the continuing limiting factor for social reform in the United States?

Well, it is, but it should not be.

Because what Republican presidents have done since Ronald Reagan— is they've run huge deficits.

I mean, really, really gigantic deficits.

In fact, if you didn't have the Reagan and the Bush, George W. Bush and the Trump deficits, you actually would have an economy in the United States that was very financially stable and very good.

But those Republicans, those Republican presidents intended to starve Americans The beast, in the words of David Stockman, who is Ronald Reagan's budget director, starved the beast in the sense that making it almost impossible for any subsequent Democratic president to do much because, you see, the deficits were so large.

And...

What is it about his followers that they don't just turn their backs on him at that point and say, you're a fraud, mate? Well,

Yeah

... uh, about the exactly that principle.

I mean, Louis XIV, uh, whether [laughs] you know, he said, "The state is me." Well, that's not what we have in the United States.

Uh, and we don't have, you know, George I or George III.

We don't have a king.

We have a society in which we want the person who is the president to be like George Washington.

Humility, humility, humility.

Let me ask you, for people who aren't sure, who are just worried about where we are right now, what does just showing up tomorrow do?

Yes.

And we see that over and over again, not only in the war, uh, in Iran, uh, that he doesn't know how to get out of, and he's really cornered now given the Strait of Hormuz, uh, but also in terms of what he's trying to deflect attention from, which is, number one, the economy, but number two, it's not just the courts, uh, finding that he abused his power, it's also Jeffrey Epstein.

Uh, let's not forget the Jeffrey Epstein case.

I mean, none of this has been on the front page-

seven out of the eight FBI documents, interview documents, had disappeared, and that was, uh, becoming an interesting story, and then suddenly Iran gets hit.

Yeah.

The story disappears.

Uh, and, and Donald Trump, what he's very good at, the one thing I'll give him a lot of credit for, is he understands the media.