Cenk Uygur

You spend the money on ads to get friendly coverage from the content, from the free media that you're getting from that same outlet. And so since every newspaper and every television station and network knows that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are their top clients, they're going to get billions of dollars from them. they never really criticize the Republican and Democratic Party.

On the other hand, if you're an outsider, they'll rip your face off.

Sometimes it's super direct. When I was a host on MSNBC, I had a company that I was criticizing in my script and management looked at it. And by the way, I used to go off prompter a lot and it drove them crazy. Not because I wasn't good at it. I think my ratings went up whenever I went off prompter, but because they couldn't pre-approve the script. And what do they want to pre-approve?

Hey, are you going to criticize one of our sponsors, one of our advertisers, et cetera? So we had a giant fight over it, and the compromise was I moved them lower in the script but kept them in the story, right? So sometimes it's super direct like that, but way more often it's implicit. It's indirect. You don't have to say it, right?

So I give you a spectacular example of it so that you get a sense of how it works implicitly. So since G is a giant defense contractor, they own MSNBC at the time of the Iraq war. They fired everyone who was against the Iraq war on air. So Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura, Ashley Banfield, but Ashley Banfield, they did something different with. Okay. She was a rising star at the time.

She goes and gives a speech in Kansas, not really even having a policy position, but just talking about the actual costs of this Iraq war and how we should be really careful. They hate that. So they take their rising star and they take her off air. Okay. And she goes, okay, good. Let me out of my contract. It's okay. I'll go because she was such a star at that time.

She could have easily gotten somewhere else. And they go, no, we're not going to let you out of your contract. Why not? Were you going to pay me to do nothing? Yeah. Okay. Not only that, we're moving your office. Where are you moving it to? They literally moved it into a closet. Okay. And they made sure that everybody in the building saw her getting taken off the air and moved into a closet.

The closet is the memo, right? That's the memo to the whole building. You better shut up and do as you're told. Okay. So that way I don't have to tell you and get myself in trouble. It's super obvious. There are guardrails here, and you are not allowed to go beyond acceptable thought. And acceptable thought is our sponsors are great, politicians are great, the powerful are great.

So it's very difficult but doable, and we will do it. But in order to do it, the populist left and the populist right have to unite. And by the way, that is why we have the culture wars.

No chance. Okay, so we can get into that in a minute. So the culture wars are meant to divide us. If we get united, we have enough leverage and power to be able to do it. But you can't do it through a normal bill. Because if you do it in a bill, the whole point of capturing the Supreme Court was to make sure that they kill any piece of legislation that would protect the American people.

You're saying the Supreme Court is also captured by this? Oh, 100%. So, okay. So let me explain. Again, people for the uninitiated, they think, oh, that sounds conspiratorial. Well, in this case, that's actually somewhat true because people now know about this. It's the Powell Memo, right? The most infamous political memo in history. Lewis Powell writes a memo for the Chamber of Commerce in 1971.

That's basically a blueprint for how the Chamber of Commerce can take over the government. And Lewis Powell explains one of the most important things you have to do is take over the media. But even more important than that is taking over the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of what is allowed and not allowed. And he says, we need, quote, activist judges.

to help business interests on the court, okay? And then Nixon reads the memo and goes, that sounds like a really good idea. How about I put you on the Supreme Court? And he puts Lewis Powell, the guy who wrote the memo, on the Supreme Court, where he's the deciding vote in Bolani and Buckley. So Bolani, those two decisions are 76 and 78.

And what they say is, yeah, yeah, I read the Constitution and it says that money is speech. No, it isn't. And no, it didn't. That's not even close to true. They just made it up. And they said, okay, in corporations, they're human beings. No, they're not. That's preposterous, right? And they have the same inalienable rights as human beings and citizens do. And

Money is speech and speech is an inalienable right. So corporations can spend unlimited money in politics. And there goes our democracy gone. Okay. So citizens United just shot a dead horse with a Gatling gun and made it worse and put it on steroids, but it was already dead in 78. So that's why every chart you see for the rest of your life, you'll see this, um,

every chart about the American economy starts to diverge in 1978. So until 38 to 78, we have golden 40 years of economic prosperity. We create the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. And our productivity is sky high, but our wages match our productivity. After 78, Productivity is still sky high, best in the world. Okay. Sometimes people, oh, the American worker's lazy.

Not remotely true. We work our ass off. Okay. But wages flatline and they've been flatlining for about 50 years straight. And the reason is because the Supreme court made bribery legal. So in order to get past the Supreme court, you only have one choice. That's an amendment. And so you have to get an amendment. Amendments are very difficult, but so for example,

You need two-thirds of Congress to even propose the amendment. So, well, why would Congress propose an amendment that would take away their own power, right? Because almost everybody in Congress got there through corruption. Their main talent is I can kiss corporate ass better than you can, right? So they take the most amount of money.

A person with more money in Congress wins 95% of the time, right? But the good news is the founding fathers were geniuses. And they put in a second outlet. They said, or two thirds of the states can call for a convention where you can propose an amendment. And after an amendment is proposed, then three quarters of the states have to ratify it.

That's what makes it so difficult because getting three quarters of the states, there's so many red states, so many blue states, getting three quarters of the states to agree is near impossible. But there is one issue that the whole country agrees on. 93% of Americans believe that politicians serve their donors and not their voters. So this is the one thing we can unite on.