Paul Blumenthal at Huffington Post has a must-read interview with Zephyr Teachout. She challenged Andrew Cuomo in the primary race for governor of New York this year, and did surprisingly well considering the huge mismatch between their campaigns. She's still busy on the issues her campaign centered around, and given the Democratic disaster in the midterms, what she has to say is well worth reading.
I've added an update to my diary currently on the Community Spotlight list linking to the interview, but it's such an important read I figured it was worth a separate diary right here. Read The Whole Thing - here's a taste.
On raising funds:
...like a perpetual hazing of elected officials or candidates for office, who are constantly put in this situation of begging for $500 or $2,000 from a set of people whose decision whether to give $500 or $2,000 is gonna make a big difference in your campaign. And it’s this perpetual situation of begging and begging and being a sycophant in a lot of ways that I think has absolutely affected our politics in the last 30 years.
Actually, I think the public feels it. There’s a lot of analysis of why people aren’t voting. Well, I think one of the reasons is it’s hard to vote for somebody who feels like they are, you know, in a fundamentally subservient position to the wealthiest Americans as opposed to a fundamentally leadership position. It’s not just about the message. It’s that people want to vote for leaders. They don’t want to vote for people who feel like they’re beggars. And the job right now is to be a very, very, very good sycophant.
On where the money is coming from:
After 1896, most political money came from outside politics instead of inside politics. Before 1896, you have some business money, but you see more political money come from basically the spoils system, basically the people who were working in politics contributing to the party’s campaigns. After 1896. you have a private funding system in this country that has never been truly stable and has never provided a long-term meaningful way to be a political party that works for the working class. The closest we got was from the '30s to the '70s, when there was enough labor funding to basically allow Democrats to be more populist and care about inequality. After the '70s, you see this increasing of big money, and then it really gets exaggerated at a few points, like after [the Supreme Court's decision in] Citizens United.
We’ve got to get rid of this private funding system because private funding inevitably leads to the corruption of politics. Right now, we don’t have a system of funding that allows you to be a populist Democrat and run for office, even if your ideas are wildly popular. We don’t have that system, we haven’t built it. In New York City, they’ve built it because they have a public funding system. In Maine, they built it. In Connecticut, they built it because they have public funding systems. But in a federal elections system, we don’t have that.
emphasis added
On the effects of concentrated wealth:
A premise of democratic self-government is decentralized economic power. It’s also a premise of innovation. You see a lot more innovation when you have decentralized economic power. In 1981, Reagan basically killed antitrust law, and most Democrats went along with him redefining antitrust as something that’s just about efficiency. ... So, for 34 years now, we have had a critical American concept that has been taken out of American political life, and it’s amazing if you take a word out, if you take out a concept, it’s hard to organize around.
Right now you say people don’t even know what I’m talking about when I say antitrust, honestly, or monopoly. But they know what I’m talking about when I talk about Comcast/Time Warner or what’s happened at the big banks, and I think we should revive this old Jeffersonian concept of trustbusting because we need to save our democracy. Because we have far too concentrated powers leading to less innovation, less power, less entrepreneurship and, most importantly, those monopolists are taking over our government.
emphasis added
On the Supreme Court:
...the Supreme Court will strike down any law that involves political spending unless it serves an anti-corruption end. So this is Citizens United -- they basically said limiting corporate spending does not serve an anti-corruption interest. Everybody knows this is crazy except the Supreme Court. [My] book is a long documentary letter proving that that not only doesn't make sense now, but that is an aggressive misunderstanding of over 200 years of history.
Read The Whole Thing - it's that good.