Zephyr Teachout
speaker
84 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Zephyr Teachout’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And then in Citizens United, supercharged that by allowing corporate spending. So in New York, to be particular about housing and the subway, it meant that the real estate board of New York has this outsized power in state politics and gets just a lot of giveaways that most people think didn't make that big a difference and led to really expensive per square footage housing.
So that sort of occupied the space on housing. And then it led to New York state government under Andrew Cuomo first starving the subway. So then it had to spend all its money doing fixes that would have been much cheaper to fix earlier. And something that I do think you point out in the book, which is they also starved state capacity.
you know, they really said, let's consult everything out and pay big consultants. But that is downstream from the centralized corporate power over politics. And I think one of the things that's underappreciated is how enervating big money politics is, is how it drains politicians of dynamism, is how much big donors actually want government to not act.
not just in the lobbying front, which we've talked about earlier, but in talking to whether it's governors or congressmen, is that their tendency is towards no as opposed towards dynamism. And when you actually have a popular politics, people want to exercise that power.
Yeah. So I love the question. And I think it is sort of just telling the truth about the nature of how power is organized in society today. And I don't think it's just a few instances. I mean, this may be an area of difference. I think that the major enervating power is actually... centralized corporate power. And I think you'll find it in area after area after area.
So let's talk about green energy. You're probably familiar with the New York Sabin School, and they come out with this report fairly regularly on where are there checks on local rules against green energy building. And so I took a look at it the other day and it's majority red districts in New York.
And it looks like around the country that there's these new rules that come in that say you can't build solar.
Right. Green energy has become a culture war. And so I look at that and I say, I have a very clear story of where that came from. That came from 2010 when the Koch brothers decided to threaten every single Republican who dared use the word climate change in a primary.
And took something that in the McCain era had been Republicans and Democrats both thinking about green energy in the future and turned it into a culture war and then are going to local communities and saying, here, I've got a way to block your green energy project.
And the difference between you and me, I think, probably, is that if I were to go to, say, Western New York or places where these—and by the way, these are very significant blocks. You know, there's 400 different blocks, 400 different projects that are being slowed in terms of solar development or wind development. There's Kathy Hochul. You know, vetoing offshore wind.
I think to give some meat to the question, you might say, well, we've just got to stop local communities from doing things because we need to push through this green energy development. And the populist story is to actually just tell the truth about where this came from. Big oil has been crushing innovation in electric vehicles for 40 years now. And we know that, right?
Ezra, you don't actually—actually, I'm curious about this. You don't think that left-NIMBYism has been a bigger deal in crushing green energy than big oil, do you?
Okay, okay.
What I believe is that we should not have centralized corporate power governing our system, that there is a real... But in any given instance, I don't want to just be on the abstract. No, I'm not. And what that means is that I don't think it's good to have oligarchs fighting each other.
And that a system of like two oligarchs being on a different side of a thing is still a deeply broken system and that we should recognize that brokenness. And the example I would use is, you know, from the left, think of the oligarchs we were embracing just eight years ago. You know, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, that we're aligned with them on this.
So we should stay aligned with them and make sure we actually know the Democratic Party building up their power there. in order to, in that case, take on Donald Trump. But the truth is that if you engage in enhancing the political power of oligarchs because you have a short-term alignment on an issue, it will end up actually degrading the political process over time.
So there is a deep, deep difference. And then I want to use a specific example, right? The deep difference is what I care about so much is I believe in the future. I believe in dynamism. I believe in a country in which people's full selves are brought to bear. I believe in far more equal country where we actually stand up for working people.
And I believe that in order to stand up for working people, we need a dynamic country. And I absolutely believe that. that the biggest block to that is centralized power. And that in individual fights, you can say, oh, I think this moment of centralized power might force things through, but will fundamentally lead to highly concentrated, top-down, calcified power in the long term.
And the example I want to use, you and I first met over 20 years ago when I was working for Howard Dean.
Yes. And I don't blame Howard for this because I don't think he even knew about it. We wanted to put out a new, you know, here we are, a new dynamic campaign. We wanted to put out a new open source policy. And somebody's like, just run it by the general counsel of Microsoft first. And I was new to politics. I was totally shocked, right? That is a veto. That is a slowing down.
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