[00:00:00] This is Democracy and Destiny. With Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, I have the per curiam opinion and judgment to announce on behalf of the court in Buckley against Valeo. We have a cancer within close to the presidency that's growing. In case 0 8 2 0 5, Citizens United versus the FEC, Justice Kennedy has the opinion of the court.

The First Amendment's core purpose is to foster a vibrant political system full of robust discussion and debate. There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders with fear for our democracy. I, along with Justices Kagan and Jackson dissent.

[00:00:53] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Welcome to the show. I'm Ciara Torres-Spelliscy. I'm a law professor at Stetson Law School in [00:01:00] Florida, and I'm a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. I work on the intersection of election law and corporate law. This show was inspired by my third book, Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy From Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians, published by NYU Press election day 2024.

I realize in today's busy world, reading a 300-page book is not on everyone's to-do list, but even I as a law professor, have time to listen to radio shows and podcasts when I'm commuting to campus or walking my dog. So here we are. This is “Democracy and Destiny.” Today's episode is about big business. I will be joined in a few minutes with my guest, Professor Jennifer Taub from Wayne State University Law School, who will talk about white collar crime.

But first, let's start with pay to play today. [00:02:00]

The term pay-to-play comes from the radio payola scandals in the 1950s and 1960s. Record companies would pay radio stations to play their music, hence it was literally pay to play. Today. The phrase pay to play is shorthand for all kinds of political corruption, especially when government contractors or others with business pending in front of the government pay bribes to public officials to get a private benefit, like a lucrative no-bid contract or approval of a corporate merger.

One of the things I learned while writing my book Corporatocracy is that political corruption is prosecuted frequently, but the media just doesn't report on it as often as it reports on other things like celebrity news. That leaves the misimpression with the public that corrupt politicians or shady government contractors are always getting away with crimes.

So I swore to myself if I ever had a news generating platform, I would highlight that political corruption can be met with serious legal consequences, [00:03:00] including fines and jail time. Our example of pay-to-play today is from the DOJ. I'll call this one “another Illinois politician is convicted for bribery in 2025.”

Former Illinois Speaker of the House, Michael J. Madigan, was convicted on federal conspiracy and bribery charges. This is from the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois. Chicago. A federal jury in Chicago, convicted former speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, Michael J. Madigan on conspiracy and bribery charges for using his official position to correctly solicit and receive personal financial rewards for himself and his associates.

Madigan, 82, of Chicago, was convicted on 10 counts against him, including one count of conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, four counts of using interstate facilities to promote unlawful activity, three counts of wire fraud, [00:04:00] and two counts of bribery. The jury acquitted Madigan on four counts of using interstate facilities to promote unlawful activity, two bribery counts, and an attempted extortion count. U.S. District Judge Blakely declared a mistrial on six other counts for which the jury did not reach a unanimous verdict. The jury returned its verdicts against Madigan after a four-month trial in U.S. District Court in Chicago. A sentencing hearing has not yet been scheduled.

Each wire fraud count is punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison. While each bribery count is punishable by up to 10 years, the maximum for conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States and each count of using interstate facilities to promote unlawful activities is five years.

Judge Blakely also declared a mistrial as to all six deadlocked counts against co-defendant Michael F. McLean, [00:05:00] 77, of Quincy, Illinois. McLean was charged with one count of racketeering conspiracy, two counts of wire fraud, one count of bribery, one count of conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, and one count of using interstate facilities to promote unlawful activity.

Evidence at trial revealed that Madigan who served as House Speaker and occupied a number of other political roles, conspired with others to cause the utility company Commonwealth Edison, to make monetary payments to Madigan's Associates as a reward for their loyalty to Madigan. In return for performing little or no legitimate work for the business, the true nature of the payments was to influence and reward Madigan.

In connection with specific legislation CommEd sought in the Illinois General Assembly, Madigan was also convicted of scheming to accept legal work unlawfully [00:06:00] steered to his private law firm and his son by an alderman of the Chicago City Council in exchange for Madigan's assistance. In inducing the Governor of Illinois to appoint the alderman to a compensated state board position.

The verdicts were announced by Morris Pasquale, acting United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Douglas Podesta, special agent in charge of the Chicago Field Office of the FBI and Ramsey Covington, acting special agent in charge of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division in Chicago.

Our next segment is Corruption Junction. I've been writing about money and politics for two decades. I was inspired to write my book Corporatocracy because of the events on January 6th at the US Capitol. One way to think of this book is it is the Supreme Court's horrible Citizens United decision meets the [00:07:00] horrifying events on January 6th, and so that we are on the same page, I will read a short excerpt from my book, Corporatocracy.

[Reading from Chapter 6 of Corporatocracy]

Now we get to the heart of the matter, which is the problem of political corruption. My guest, Jen Taub, writes on business law and white collar crime and has been published in CNN.com, Dissent [00:25:00] Magazine and Slate. She has written the books, Other People's Houses, How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages, a Thrilling Business as well as Big, Dirty Money, the Shocking Injustice and Unseen Costs of White Collar Crime. I'm so glad to have you here today to speak about the state of American democracy. Welcome to Corruption Junction.

[00:25:22] Jennifer Taub: Thank you so much for having me, Ciara.

[00:25:24] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Where did you grow up?

[00:25:26] Jennifer Taub: I grew up in a suburb, northwest of Detroit.

[00:25:30] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What inspired you to become a lawyer?

[00:25:33] Jennifer Taub: As an English major, I had to come to some quick conclusion as to whether I'd go on and pursue a PhD. I was reading a copy of Paradise Lost and I remember landing on one, and it was entitled “The Use of the word ‘waft’ in Milton's Paradise Lost.” It struck me that that was a very small, and dare I say, ineffective world that I would be entering.

But I just made this decision that I [00:26:00] wanted to have my life be larger than that, and I wanted my words to impact others and correct the injustices that I saw around me. My third choice. If I wasn't going to be an academic or a lawyer, I thought I would be a journalist. And I thought journalism would also be a way to use my words for impact.

I was very afraid, maybe it was prescient, that I wouldn't be able to earn a living, being a journalist. And I came to the conclusion that I had to be able to make my own way in the world earn a living. And so I figured that law would be a combination of using words to address injustices as well as a meal ticket.

[00:26:40] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What do you do to keep sane during these trying times?

[00:26:43] Jennifer Taub: The way I do it is I'm very much an external processor. I work through my thoughts and my feelings and my ideas through language. Often it's by written language, but of, in addition to BlueSky, the Twitter substitute, I'm there, but I'm also every day on YouTube. Monday through [00:27:00] Friday, I do a show called Jen Taub Live. And it taps into this desire to work through things to explain what's going on in terms of money, law, and power right now, especially in America. I sometimes have guests I need to have you on. And so I think the way I stay sane is that community. And people may think YouTube is just a cheaper form of broadcast tv, but it's different because when I'm on YouTube, the people who show up, I can see their comments in the chat and I actually respond to the chat by talking with people sometimes in the show, asking them questions. And I've built like a nice community of people, including these volunteer moderators who I have friendships with.

The way I stay sane is through the company of others and through this live show.

[00:27:44] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What was the Tax March?

[00:27:45] Jennifer Taub: That was my first major foray quite accidentally into activism. The Tax March was a nationwide event. I helped plan the DC Tax March, it was April 15th, [00:28:00] 2017. I was a co-founder of it with a couple other people who independently thought this would be a good idea.

Going back to look at the New York Times piece about this from April, 2017. What happened is I had gone to this [Women’s] March in Boston and we drove out there and it was kind of unbelievable. It felt really good to be in that crowd and it made me feel good that we were saying no to this person that we feared, and were right to fear, would be a lawless kleptocrat.

My interest in law as money, law, and power, as in the books that you mentioned, I'm really focused on the way the financial system and legal system allows certain people to extract wealth from the rest of us and makes the poor poor and the rich richer. The one thing that had been bothering me up to that point, he was, in my view, a white collar criminal type, and the type that Edwin Sutherland would define white collar criminals. Even though he had never been convicted of a crime, that his behavior aligned with this idea. And the one thing that bothered [00:29:00] me the most was that both his violation of the Emoluments Clause in violation of the Constitution, as well as his promise to share his tax returns with the public and having never done so. Because I had believed at the time that the tax returns would reveal that he had either engaged in tax evasion or he had shady activities that we might be able to track. The day after the Women's March, Kellyanne Conway, who was an advisor to the president, was on some television show and she said, “well, he's never gonna give his tax returns. No one needs them.” And I was so angry and I quickly looked up on the calendar that April 15th was going to be a Saturday. And so inspired by the Women's March, I was like, we should have a Tax March. It kind of caught fire and that's like a Sunday. And then I'd get to the law school on Monday and I'm seeing this thing blow up. And so then I found this guy, Frank Lesser, we connected and then we worked with people who are really good at organizing stuff in DC and then it turned out these things had independently cropped up all over the country.

We built an internet website platform and ways for [00:30:00] people to be able to connect with each other to help organize these things. And we came up with as a group, some guideline that people should follow: so it would be nonviolent, so it would be accessible, so people knew they didn't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of how they get a permit.

And we even created posters. My husband Michael is an artist, and he created these incredible posters and people could download them. And of course, Donald Trump didn't voluntarily release the returns themselves, but I think it was a success because it got people really interested in the topic of tax justice.

[00:30:30] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Are white collar criminals treated differently than other criminals in the United States?

[00:30:34] Jennifer Taub: The short answer is yes, but the footnote is there's no uniform definition of what it means to be a white collar criminal. And if we're talking about economically motivated crimes such as fraud of various types, whether it be fraud that crosses state lines that would be known as either mail fraud or wire fraud, or Medicare fraud or tax fraud, or securities fraud or embezzlement or money laundering, if [00:31:00] you want to refer to those as white collar crime or when corporations themselves are weapons against the public. When you think of people, companies that engage in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or the pharma companies run by the Sackler family, all of that. If we want to loosely call that white collar crime, then the answer is: absolutely, yes, always has been. And it's even worse now in the second Trump Administration. And I'm not just trying to be cute and annoying when I say there's no uniform definition and the book, Big Dirty Money, I talk about that. And I think it's important because there's this adage from the business community, “you can't manage what you don't measure.” And that is very true of what we call white collar crime.

[00:31:41] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What is regulatory capture?

[00:31:43] Jennifer Taub: Regulatory capture is when people or interests like lobbying interests, manage to get the people that they want placed at the highest levels of the agencies, the [00:32:00] federal, sometimes state and local agencies that were established by Congress or by the state legislature that were supposed to protect consumers or protect investors.

It would be people who have strong interests in Wall Street flourishing more than Main Street being in control of the people who get appointed to the Securities and Exchange Commission or people who have interests in, let's say, certain investments in certain drugs or pharmaceuticals being in a role that where they're supposed to actually regulate those entities placed.

Sometimes regulatory capture speaks to just showing up so much with so many people on the payroll who can be meeting with the staffers or the people at the top of the regulatory agency pyramid, that you influence them that way. I think today it's beyond that with Donald Trump and his implementation of the Project [00:33:00] 2025 goal to dismantle many of the agencies, I mean, we're beyond regulatory capture. We're now into this sort of regulatory ruin where the stated goal is to destroy and have no one keep their eye on the people who should be watched. And I can just give you one example, but getting rid of the person in charge of FEMA because they actually told Congress, they wanted FEMA to do well as opposed to be destroyed. More so even, Pam Bondi, who is his Attorney General, has announced that they're going to go light on white collar crime because they don't think it really hurts people. So, to me, regulatory capture can be that narrow concept. And then very broad where we are now, which is beyond regulatory capture, which is something that I would call the dual state.

[There’s a] book by Ernst Fraenkel for the 1930s, where there's two states. The people in power have what's called a “prerogative state.” Essentially, they violate the laws, do whatever they want to advance, and the law is designed to protect their property. And then the other part of the [00:34:00] rest of us live in the “normative state” where we have to follow the laws. Another way of saying this is something that apparently the president of Peru said in the 1930s, but it was "for my friends: everything. For everyone else, the law." To me we're beyond regulatory capture into literally the dual state.

[00:34:17] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Citizens United was the case where the court decided that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend as much as they want on political ads in American elections.

How could corporate law help respond to Citizens United?

[00:34:31] Jennifer Taub: Isn't this how we first met? Citizens United? Citizens United and Progeny, right? But to me, Citizens United isn't the worst. It's SpeechNow. SpeechNow a DC Circuit decision that followed a couple months later is the one that allowed for the Super PACs and the charade that there is actually independent spending by anyone including corporations to help further the election of a candidate or hurt another one. And even though it's [00:35:00] supposedly not coordinated, because if it's coordinated, then it would look like a direct donation, or given to the campaign. We all know that these things, a coordination by any other name would smell as foul. So to mitigate this, we've heard from folks like the Business Roundtable, they don't like the shakedown.

Most businesses, I should say, don't want to have to give directly to candidates, and so they still don't have to give directly to campaigns. Obviously they're not allowed to, but they're still pressured to give to political parties. They still have the ability, we know, to participate in these Super PACs.

One thing they can do is: make a pledge not to and announce that policy in their documents, in their filings. A lot of corporations are now announcing what their political spending behavior is, and I think that's good because if you announce that, then people will stop coming and knocking on your door. I think it hurts businesses when they affiliate with a particular [00:36:00] politician regardless of political party because it alienates some of their suppliers or customer base. We can see the example of Target that made some announcement that it wasn't going to be using diversity, equity, and inclusion and its hiring, but then there was just a consumer boycott and Target its stock is tanking. People don't want to shop there because it's like you're endorsing something that you don't believe in. Let me say, to be careful, someone like me doesn't want to shop there because I'm for diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think those words represent what America is about. And so, I think corporations would be smart to get themselves out of the political process. And be loud about it in terms of money, in terms of policies, like the marketing people have to decide what makes sense for them, and I think individual businesses can make those choices as long as they're within the law and then they face their customer base if it doesn't represent what their customer base believes in.

[00:36:58] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What are the [00:37:00] Emoluments Clauses and how should they apply to businesses that are owned by presidents?

[00:37:05] Jennifer Taub: Presidents should not be owning or operating businesses while they are in office, so there is a Domestic and there is a Foreign Emoluments Clause. The word “emolument” can mean a whole bunch of things like any profit, your salary, or compensation for services.

But remember that “Emoluments” also includes anything of value. The Domestic Emoluments Clause deals with the only compensation that a president is supposed to receive is the salary he gets. The Foreign one is meant to deal with stopping foreign influences on the presidency. The Domestic one was supposed to insulate the president against getting pressure from Congress or any other states.

Now let's focus on the Foreign one, Donald Trump and his meme coin, which is I think $Trump, as well as his stable coin. We've seen that there is foreign money [00:38:00] flooding into these enterprises. It's outrageous and it's hard to understand why Congress hasn't, I include the Democrats in this, already killed and buried the crypto bill in light of this. I should be shocked. We will not get them to do anything to enforce the Emoluments Clause. It just won't happen. We didn't even have an impeachment around that. Our two impeachments against Donald Trump didn't even deal with this, which is one of the most corrupt things.

When he was president first, when he had his hotels and his restaurants, and people knew to spend money at his hotels and his restaurants, if they were foreign officials, people were bidding on purchasing. I think it was either the meme coin or the stable coin and the highest purchasers in this auction, then got to have an audience with the president at one of his country clubs. In a segment of that larger cohort got to have a tour of the White House. And we're talking about, I don't know what he ended up raising from this, was it $100 million or $200 million? The [00:39:00] numbers escape me. There's so large.

He's out and out, I want to think of a way to say this, which is acceptable for radio listeners, but he is, let me find the right words. He is treating our country like she is a lady of the night and selling access and influence and pocketing it. He is leaving no opportunity off the table. This shouldn't happen and Congress could do something, but there isn't the will anymore.

So the fact that Donald Trump is violating the Constitution and that Congress doesn't want to impeach him for that. The Senate didn't even vote to convict him for helping to stage an insurrection and try to substitute the actual electoral college votes with fake ones. Emoluments used to bother me. Now it's just added to the list.

[00:39:45] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What did you think of the presidential immunity decision, Trump versus the United States?

[00:39:50] Jennifer Taub: I think it's an abomination. They should have specifically dealt with as a matter of law, the facts of the Donald [00:40:00] Trump case. It was the DC case involving Donald Trump's role in the runup in and through the insurrection, the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January of 2021. And at the very least, they could have said that as a matter of law, at the very least, these particular actions were outside of the protection, so that Judge Chutkan didn't have to start this up again. It took a long time, and by the time we get to then Donald Trump getting elected, this whole thing was too late and it gets dismissed.

Two, they should have ruled immediately. They have the audacity recently to claim in that, in the case that was just brought up about nationwide injunctions, they have the audacity, some of them, to claim an oral argument that we can act quickly.

They acted very quickly when it came to the 14th Amendment question of whether Donald Trump was disqualified from the ballot. They got on that really quickly.

They should have taken this case early [00:41:00] and decided it quickly. Third thing is on the merits, I think there's a real problem with the notion that there is an absolute immunity when it comes to anything that they say is in the core responsibilities of the presidency, including specifically the pardon power.

So on its face, they're saying the president can violate any congressional law when it comes to pardoning. Literally, he] could say pardons now cost $20 million. That is what they seem to be saying. And there'd be no way to prosecute him while he was in office or no way to prosecute him in the past.

You're presuming anytime they're in their official capacity, there's immunity. But to overcome that, if you're trying to do that, you can't even use evidence of anything, any activity that was in their core responsibility. So it's very difficult to overcome that presumption. What bothers me here is that I don't even know what they would even consider to be a non-official act, and feel that the Supreme Court is completely contradicting itself. But [00:42:00] when it considers what's an official act for purposes of interpreting two of the federal bribery statutes?18 USC 201 and 18 USC 666 for those, and, sorry, a third one, 1951, for those, so official capacity is very capacious when it comes to the immunity decision. Everything seems like it could be official capacity when it comes to punishing people for bribery official capacity and is very, very narrow. Part of it has to do with what the statute, one of the statute says, 201, but it doesn't have to do with what 1951 says, such as color of law. This decision is inconsistent with common sense. It was wrong how it was interpreted, and it was too slow.

On the other hand, I do appreciate the notion that we don't want to have a society where if we have a lawless government, they just go after their opponents and prosecute them for anything. But it's not the job of the U.S. Supreme Court to immunize presidents from explicitly unlawful activity like taking bribes in [00:43:00] exchange for pardons.

[00:43:00] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: And that tees up my next question perfectly, which is why is the pardon power particularly dangerous right now?

[00:43:06] Jennifer Taub: So the pardon power is particularly dangerous when you see it play out. In the case, by analogy, in the case of someone like Eric Adams, who's the Mayor of New York. That's a bit different. But I'm going to start with that because it leads into the danger of the pardon power. It's all about “are you with us or are you against us?” Someone like Eric Adams, who had been indicted for bribery and other official corruption, the Trump Administration wanted to dismiss the case, but not with prejudice. So they could bring it again. It's then just this kind of carrot stick. “You play nice. We're nice. You don't play nice. We are going to indict you again.” That was the thinking. Well, the judge wouldn't allow that. What they wanted is Eric Adams cooperation when it came to future immigration crackdowns by ICE in New York.

It is similar when it comes to pardoning people because the backwards looking pardon is [00:44:00] people who engaged in unlawful activity were convicted, like 1,500 of them in the insurrection from January 6th, 2021. Them getting pardoned is a way to thank them for what they did though. It's his way of looking backwards and thanking people for their lawless supportive of him.

It's also, if you do that [pardoning], then you have their loyalty. It's looking backwards for people who have a ton of money, who have given to his causes, bought his meme coin, or gone to his dinners and maybe their son gets pardoned. So it's a backwards looking thing. But the forward looking thing is if you look at those January 6th people, you could say, you know what? Donald Trump did what he said. He stood up for his militia. And it's encouraging people to engage in lawless behavior to all kinds of violent extremes with the understanding that they can get a pardon from him in the future. What's tricky is the closer we get to the end of Donald Trump's term, people are going to be, [00:45:00] if they're smart, less sure that they will get a pardon. So it's a very dangerous, dangerous proposition. And again, with the immunity from the Supreme Court, it's not just about money, it's also about violence. It's saying literally, “I got you covered. The law doesn't apply to you. Do my bidding.”

[00:45:18] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Does the Supreme Court have an integrity problem?

[00:45:21] Jennifer Taub: [There are] questions about Samuel Alito, including not being honest about the inability for him to walk over to a flagpole and take down a flag that his wife put up.

They have a real integrity problem. Harlan Crow buying Clarence Thomas's mother's home from her, and then letting her live there. All of the money and the vacations and the air travel that some of which was never disclosed until pushed. Clarence Thomas has a lifestyle that he believes he is entitled to. This is like regulatory capture. It's Court capture. Even if there's no quid pro quo, to me, corruption isn't [00:46:00] just limited to quid pro quo exchanges. It includes using an office of public trust toward your own end and thumbing your nose at people when they raise the issue.

[00:46:12] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What is straining the rule of law?

[00:46:14] Jennifer Taub: Money and tribalism. I think we are living in a kleptocracy. Right now, and I think it's not just Citizens United, it's the global flow of money. Citizens United made it worse, allowed things to be even more opaque. But we've got a big problem with foreign money and influence on the U.S. and then tribalism. And the tribalism, I mean, is “if my team does it. It's fine if their team does it, it isn't.” It's very easy to slip from that into the kind of dual state system and autocratic autocracies. I think we are already not through whatever this moment is. I think the U.S. is so clearly right now an authoritarian regime.

[00:47:00] I think that we have questionably standing institutions. I think law is still here. I think our higher education institutions are standing now. But what happens when it's time for the next round of grants and they're not given? It's one thing to go run into the courts and say they can't cut off our funding. But it's another thing when the next round of funding doesn't come in. We are one riot, one military crackdown, one Reichstag Fire away from a potential situation where we could be a North Korea type situation or Russia, I don't think we get there. I think Americans are too rebellious and won't put up with that. And yet I notice that two experts on authoritarianism have departed the U.S. and are living in Canada. Jason Stanley and Tim Snyder. When they left, it made me very, very nervous. I'm at the place where I think we get through this and we get stronger, and we can really be the multiracial [00:48:00] democracy that we're on the path to becoming. And when I see the President lawlessly sending troops into Los Angeles, I feel sad. It's almost like someone gave you a diagnosis of cancer and the five year survival rate is 30%. So I don't know. It's where I am.

[00:48:18] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Is there a final thought that you would like to leave with our audience?

[00:48:21] Jennifer Taub: Make connections with each other, your family members. Support the arts. Do what you love, because even in authoritarian regimes, even when family members or friends are being rounded up in these terrible, terrible times that we have seen throughout history, the one thing that keeps people alive and happy and can get through to the other side is love and art and human flourishing. And don't feel guilty about indulging. Now more than ever in those things, they build endorphins, whether it's cooking or art or music, or sitting around with family and laughing. They're not a distraction. We need to lean in to what we love. We cannot [00:49:00] let these people destroy it.

[00:49:01] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Where can the audience find your work?

[00:49:03] Jennifer Taub: Well, my books are available wherever books are sold and also for free at many libraries. Or you can find me every Monday through Friday, Eastern Time live on YouTube, and if my YouTube handle is. Jen Taub, or you can find me under the name Jennifer Taub, over on BlueSky.

[00:49:18] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Well, thank you so much for being here. Jennifer Taub.

[00:49:21] Jennifer Taub: Thank you, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy.

[00:49:30] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: As someone who spends her time focused on political corruption, it is easy to end up with a dim view of humanity. But one thing that has kept me happy and sane over the past eight years is my 100-pound chocolate labradoodle. Let me share my life motto with you, which is "Loves dogs hates corruption."

I have a pool in my backyard because for half of the year it is excruciatingly hot in my part of Florida. But we have also had a number of critters end up in our [00:50:00] pool from frogs to snakes to bunnies. One day our labradoodle started barking at the pool. This time, our pool visitor was a baby armadillo. They're pretty cute and armored, and when they get scared, they basically tuck into a ball and if they're gathering things, they sort of jump around, which is kind of hilarious.

We had this baby armadillo in the pool, and he clearly could not swim. So under my labradoodle's watchful eye, my husband got the mesh net that we used to clean the pool and gently lifted the baby armadillo out of the pool and back onto dry land. The baby armadillo shook off the water and trundled back to the hole in the fence, which is likely how he got into our backyard in the first place.

Okay, now back to business.[00:51:00]

So now we get to our final segment. “The fix is in.” Many of the problems with our democracy seem unfixable, but that is not true. These problems were created by human beings, and they can be solved by human beings. We can improve laws and practices at the local, state, and federal level. The first step is realizing that these are not unsolvable problems.

We can fix it. Today, we talked about big business and money in politics. One of the reasons why businesses can get away with spending dark money is the Federal Election Commission who is supposed to regulate money in politics, including enforcing the Tillman Act, which bans corporations from giving directly to federal candidates.

Is the FEC is poorly designed. The FEC has three Republican commissioners and three Democratic commissioners, but it takes four commissioners to do nearly anything. This means the FEC often deadlocks and does [00:52:00] nothing. It often doesn't enforce campaign finance laws at all. And political spenders know this. They game the system betting that the FEC is either not going to catch them or they're not going to punish them.

The FEC also needs a full complement of commissioners President Trump fired, Commissioner Weintraub. There's litigation over whether this firing was lawful. If we as Americans want less corporate money in politics or less dark money in politics, we need to reform the FEC.

A really elegant reform would be to pass a law that adds another commissioner to avoid ties. We need to fix the FEC so that everyday citizens can follow the money in politics. Just remember that democracy is worth defending and a little truth goes a long way.

Thank you to my guests for joining me today. This is a production of Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, who can be found on social media as ProfCiara, [00:53:00] P-R-O-F-C-I-A-R-A. The episode was mixed by WBAI. Our logo is by Entire World. Theme music was composed and performed by Matt Boehler. This show is based on the book Corporatocracy, published by NYU Press. This has been “Democracy and Destiny with Ciara Torres-Spelliscy.”

Listen to Full Episode here: https://soundcloud.com/profciara/democracy-destiny-ep-7-with or

Here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/democracy-destiny-ep-7-with-professor-jennifer-taub/id1818631157?i=1000720428641