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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I think for 40 years, we stopped, to use your phrase, you know, bottleneck detective. We basically stopped asking the power question. And there's a little bit of history here. There was this big movement, which both Republicans and Democrats got on board with. I mean, I think some of the questions, if there are good ideas that come from Republican areas, I think we should take them.
I don't think it's a left-right issue. But they got on board with this idea that we should just focus on power. outputs and not on power. And so that's part of the reason you hear some resistance from the anti-monopolist to your vision. And I guess I would challenge to say what the anti-monopoly movement has started to do is started to investigate.
in areas where you wouldn't necessarily guess that in the Kroger-Albertsons merger that pharmacists would be on fire about it and be the biggest opponents, that they would see the joining of two big grocery stores as a fundamental threat. But once you start asking the power question, then pharmacists come out of the woodwork and say, yeah, this is killing us. We're getting starved by this.
And so it's not to say that it answers every question, but that it is in far more areas than what you think. That the loss of our looking at questions of power was probably one of the biggest losses. And so I think, one, sure, there are areas that can't be solved by that. But there's far more areas that surprise even me today that actually have a power component and a power bottleneck.
I completely agree with you. And I want to say it's one point that I don't think I've seen anybody talk about in the book, but I thought was great, is that you highlight a problem with the Golden Fleece Awards, you know, and the way in which we started.
You'll remember exactly, but it's the award for the stupidest government program. Who was it who...
Absolutely. And when you look at little things like, not little things, big local things, I should say, really important local things like the Second Avenue subway and procurement and the way in which, I mean, it's a way in which I think we've got corruption all wrong.
We're like really focused on this massive compliance regime instead of focused on the big corruption issues as opposed to little corruption issues. But I think you're right. And I think that does take a cultural change to be willing to accept failure. A program that I think really worked was the Paycheck Protection Program. Yep.
And the Paycheck Protection Program has gotten beaten up by so many different people by finding the examples of fraud. And there was a lot of fraud. And there was fraud. And it was worth it. It was absolutely worth it to support businesses around the country, to keep them open during COVID. It was worth it for the workers, for those businesses.
In order to do great things, you do actually have to do things wrong sometimes. And I really loved that point in the book.
Yeah, and I'll just repeat, I guess, what I said before, which is I think we focused on the wrong kind of corruption, right? So that what you want is systems... where there are lots of contractors and there is competitive bidding. So it actually really matters that there's lots of contractors. That's an anti-monopoly issue, by the way.
And then when you have those lots of contractors, and then you want systems that don't reward inside deals, like campaign finance deals, But I think that we've thought we can root out corruption by doing micro-checklists as opposed to looking at structures and systems.
And that we should look at structures and systems of power as the big defenses against corrupt systems as opposed to the checklists. We need some checklists, by the way. Yeah, you can't have no rules. Right. You can't have no rules. And I do think that there's some innovative things happening with procurement. But as I understand, there is a real issue with only a few suppliers.
That's one of the big corruption risks that we don't deal with through checklist compliance. You deal with through making sure there's more suppliers.
But to me, there's just something staring us in the face about why politicians aren't mission-driven. And it is money in politics. So you probably are familiar with the oligarchy study. It's now, I think, 10 years old, and it's only gotten worse, that wealthy people, there is real responsiveness here.
to their interests, and there's almost no responsiveness to what the public wants in terms of the outcomes. And what happens in those emergency situations, I believe, is that the leaders forget all their responsiveness to their donors. And they do for a combination of reasons. One is they really care about people who are dealing with the flood. And they really care.
I mean, I don't think everybody's awful. They really care about serving those people. But also they are out of the campaign mode and in the campaign mode when half of the money is coming from people who are making $100,000 donations in the post-Citizens United World.
The imagination of leaders, of who they are delivering for, the voices in their head, are not the people who are really not sure where their next paycheck is going to come from, have to pay too much for an inhaler, have had a stagnant wage. Their own sense of mission has truly been clouded by money and politics. And so breaking that, that's not an easy thing to break.
But, I mean, if Bernie Sanders had been president, right, if Bernie had won, I don't think any of us doubt that he would have felt like it was an emergency.
That it's an emergency for working people in this country in the sense that he would have figured out how to do what Pete Buttigieg did or Lena Kahn did or Jonathan Cantor did or Shapiro did in those moments is to take the tools of government to serve the working people of the country. So it's a hopeful story because it suggests we're not that far away.
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