for those who don't know free press is the national nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to advocating for the public on issues of media technology and democracy it was an organization that was founded by me and john nichols ten years ago and it wasn't that long ago that i was sitting in a room something like this maybe fifteen years ago about to hear bob much as he and john nichols talk for the first time i was a young journalist in chicago i was a progressive and the only word i've been able to come up with for the impact it had on me was gobsmacked gobsmacked because they connected the dots for me as somebody who cared about the media who believed in in democracy and who was trying to stay positive about what this country and its people could accomplish and they've got a great way of providing those aha moments saying that thing you always believed but couldn't quite find the words for and you you will hear a lot of disturbing history and sobering statistics in their presentations tonight and throughout dollar ocracy you have your eyes opened but i don't think it will leave you hopeless because underneath any bad news they might share is an unshakeable optimism an unshakeable optimism even in the face of powerful and mendacious opponents an optimism that people have the power to remake this world and they've never been afraid to stretch washington's hopelessly narrow vision of what's possible simply because those ideas are the best ones that they had found they've never been afraid to demand the impossible and i think we need a lot more of that bob and john taught me that the media system we have isn't magical or natural it's the result of policy decisions and political decisions and business decisions and just because the people have historically been left out of those decisions doesn't mean it needs to stay that way that's why we started free press and a decade ago we believe that when people understood they had the fundamental right to try and change this broken and corrupted media system that millions of them would try to do it and fortunately we were right about that but if we're being honest if we tried to predict back then what the next decade would look like so much of what we've actually done would have been unthinkable we started with bob mcchesney personal e mail list and built an army of six hundred fifty thousand activists all across the country we went from a few people all huddled in a tiny apartment in western massachusetts to three dozen dedicated organizers and painters and we took once obscure issues that really only bob and chose me and john nichols were talking about issues like media consolidation and net neutrality and made the national concerns talked about by the press and even the president and we've taken on some pretty powerful institutions entrenched institutions in washington and won a lot more than we many people expected but looking back over ten years we also know that the truth is it's not enough we have to celebrate those victories but we also have to recognize that the reality for most people ten years later is that the media aren't really better it's not enough  dollar ocracy makes clear that policymaking is still dominated by giant companies and influence peddling peddlers journalism is in crisis it's not enough the free and open internet is under attack the surveillance state surpasses our worst nightmares simply not enough and so i agree with bob and john that now is not the time to tinker around the edges it's not the time to get lost in the weeds and it's not the time to settle for those compromises on compromises on capitulations that pass for the best we can get in washington i think the better choice and really the only choice is to go bigger to get louder and to broaden washington's narrow view of what's possible and that means that ultimately media reform the cause that free press was started to advance is no longer enough we have a more fundamental battle in front of us and that's that we're fighting for our rights to connect and communicate because people everywhere are fed up with the media they're tired of being lied to and ripped off they want to control their own online experiences and they'd really like it if their leaders in washington would stop spying on them and start answering to them i think it's time that we break down some of the silos i see a lot of campaign reformers and election reformers here tonight media reformers and we have to recognize that it's all the same fight that we're all fighting against this media money and elect complex that bob and john describes so well in their book and we know from that book that our opponents are already working together now we need to do the same so if you want a democracy and not a dollar ocracy we do need your help at free a people powered organization and if you haven't signed up to be a member you can take out your smartphone or pencils for you luddites and remember later to go to free press dot net we'll tell you about important when important things are happening give you ways to get involved in the fight to protect and open an uncensored internet defend press freedom and bring much needed transparency to the political attack ads flooding our airwaves that's enough plugs for me going to move on to the fifty seven is an absolute folk hero there i was actually from seattle like greg i lived here for thirteen years in the late seventy's much of the eighty's published when you're flooding your city very good  nice place to live and have lots of friends in the audience i would do a shout out palooza but that would eat into most of the time on the clocks all i'll do that you know i love all of you are my friends are here the book dollar ocracy is pretty simple concepts if you think ocracy means government by the dollars versus democracy which means government by the people the rule of the people versus the rule of the dollars instead of one person one vote you have one dollar one vote those with the most money lots of money have all the power those with no money have no power it's a pretty simple concept it seems a fairly accurate picture of how america works and it's really actually not a controversial issue among people who study american politics in fact in two thousand twelve two major studies were published by princeton university press by some of the leading political scientists united states marty guillen's and then a team of scholars from berkeley and doing a lot of studying of data they both came to pretty much the identical conclusion that if you look at the government of the united states and how it operates the decisions it makes almost never reflect the interests of a as it concerns of the bottom ninety ninety nine percent of the population they invariably reflect the interests of those at the very top those with lots of dollars when we did our book release party two months ago in washington d c we were privileged to be introduced by u s senator bernie sanders who wrote the forward to our book and senator sanders said unequivocally said i can tell you he's been in the senate now seven years and before that he served sixteen years in the u s house of reps senator this he said i can tell you that nothing can get through congress that is opposed by wall street or large corporations nothing unequivocal that's what we mean by dollar ocracy just this last summer former president jimmy carter was in atlanta meeting with some visiting german dignitaries and in what he thought was an off the record meeting but because someone brought their i phone it became an on the record meeting and carter said to the germans that the united states today is no longer a functioning democracy no longer a functioning democracy we are off the grid we're not where we used to be we're not were other democratic pratik nations are and that's what we write about in this book you try to explain first and foremost how the election system has been neutered and compromise him or do so no longer can reflect accurately reflect the will of the people to change government to determine the course of policies in the country now dollar ocracy has huge consequences for our lives it contributes to the massive growth of poverty in the united states in the last thirty years to the point our forty seven percent roughly notice that mitt romney savored number forty seven percent of the population roughly is either in poverty or since it are low income we've basically lost almost all the gains you made against poverty in the twentieth century we're going back now to the first half of the twentieth century for levels of poverty in the country we have levels of inequality in this country today that are much greater than they've been for one hundred years that are really way off compared to virtually other every other dance country in east asia or europe it's a comparable economy far worse than it was in this country three or four decades ago obviously with dollar ocracy you see political corruption the decision making process of government so closely tied to big money and special interests that it produces cynicism and malays among everyone else and then also what you see with dollar ocracy is a tremendous amount of stagnation economic stagnation to those in power in this country the way things are going right now is pretty much fine the fact that there is such tremendous downward pressure on wages the fact that the labor market for young people today is the worst that it's been and eighty years doesn't seem to really move the radar very much for those people instead for those atop the system the biggest concerns are getting rid of programs that they might have to pay for but that they don't benefit from personally social security medicare public education these are the zombie ideas that keep coming back even after the american people make clear they don't want them to go because there isn't one hurricane wind of money behind them and that's really what dollar ocracy is all about now in the talk today and what john's going to say to a lesser extent but certainly in the talk i'm about to give you and in the i confess some people get depressed they hear us talk to god the bad guys are winning they've read the system things are awful where is the nearest ledge where how can i get off this cruel planet and what we would argue is that first of all we're not pessimists i'll get to that later but more importantly american history is not a session of defeat it's not just one defeat after another powerful people screwing over and power less people in fact i think if you look at the history of the united states from say one thousand nine hundred to around one nine hundred seventy there were a series of major victories for democratic forces in this country that made this country a much better country made it a more humane country than it had been one hundred fifteen years ago we won the right to have trade unions effective trade union social security medicare we spread were education public education to working class people  in a manner that no other country in the world could equal and we had extended higher education to a higher percentage of the population the virtually any other country in the world these are things we should be proud of we extended the vote in the franchise from just being white males to basically the entire of the adult population including eighteen nineteen and twenty year olds these were great victories that we won between nine hundred ninety seven they weren't we had our losses if you're in the side of democracy but we won these great victories and i remember well because this is my generation that by  seventy this was despite all the war in vietnam despite militarism despite racism this was actually a very optimistic country and in fact in one nine hundred seventy a survey was done of teenagers all over the world and they found that american teenagers ranked among the three most optimistic groups of teenagers in the world along with israelis until a ends of chile fell off the list a few years shortly thereafter but basically that was where we were we thought despite all this country's problems we could look at them it was an optimistic moment the winds of history were behind us well as optimistic as i was as a teenager nine hundred seventy there were lots of people who were not as optimistic or not really lots of people numerically but not so people of influence who were not as optimistic in the business community there was tremendous concern that this huge inch crease of interest in politics by young people by people of color by women was goof gumming up the system and in a famous report they wrote that there was a crisis of democracy in america and the crisis democracy was that there was too much democracy the crisis of democracy of us that african americans people of color women young people students people traditionally do not get involved in governing the country were gumming up the works by getting active in politics and to save democracy in america to answer the crisis democracy had to lower the amount of democracy and get those people back on the couch in particular what alarmed the business community was the business corporations were at their low ebb compared to other institutions and how they were received by the public it was especially alarming to business in the early one nine hundred seventy s late i did see how many middle class and upper middle class young people were questioning whether we really needed large corporations  run an economy that their support even among their core constituency of young people seemed to be in decline in one thousand nine hundred one the u s chamber of commerce commission to a memo from one of the leading corporate attorneys in the country to say house of the business community a with this this confidential memo was sent to roughly fifty or sixty c e o s and billionaires at the time for an internal discussion by the people who own the country about basically how they should deal with the threat of too much democracy the author was a tobacco present day powell argued in that memo that it was imperative that business take over the government the business of and sitting on the sidelines and letting all sorts of people who had no business running the country run it business needed to increase its lobbying money dramatically and as a result shortly after the paul memo began a period in which the business lobbying in washington d c increased by ten times a ten fold increase in the next two decades the term k street became a terms like wall street or madison business control society will never be threatened or jeopardize that was the logical way that's how democracy works best when no matter who wins the election nothing changes that's that was lose polish democracy one of the other things paul said is it's crucial that we have a supreme court  court system filled with judges who are more sympathetic to business one of the problems that existed according to paul is that even once allegedly pro business presidents like white eisenhower richard nixon were on the bench they would appoint people who  their lifetime appointment would go rogue on them people like earl warren and they get all hung up on the first amendment in the constitution and the bill of rights and they sort of take it seriously policy that we have to make sure when someone gets in the court they understand which side of the bread the butter's on and we have people always put the interests of business first and foremost and they created the federal society to be a farm system to make sure knew when to go to the court would never go rogue on them ever again now state would have it just a few months after paul wrote this memo and it spread like wildfire in the corporate community there was an opening on the u s supreme court and guess who richard nixon decided to appoint to the court lewis paul lewis paul joined the court when he joined a court the one issue that he was singularly devoted to from the moment i got in the car was the idea that billionaires and corporations should be allowed to spend unlimited amounts of political campaigns now at that time in until it's really still through to this day when that issue came up people other lawyers are reporters to try to deal with paul's obsession with unleashing corporate and billionaire money on elections the argument always as well that lewis paul he's a very thoughtful moderate he says trying to come up with democracy in the modern times to deal with the modern nature democracy but when you read the paul memo that confidential memo it becomes clear why he wanted unlimited corporate money in politics he wanted to rid the system make sure his side would always win and you knew if you could buy elections your chances of losing would go way way down paul never quite got his way he was unable to get the supreme court while he was on it to agree to unlimited corporate or billionaire spending but finally he did get his way on two thousand and ten long after he was gone unlimited billionaire and corporate spending on politics it can't be with the officially with the formal campaign attest to what are called third party groups and to be accurate it also said there was unlimited spending for labor unions and some of the younger people in the audience the older people around you what labor unions are they there were these things we had a while ago in this country lewis powell one of the things you want to get rid of are labor unions they were an enemy there is not just for financial reasons but for political reasons but now we see the effect of citizens united in the book we chronicle what this great election looks like now in the post citizens united era already by our count and there is no official record keeping we had to do this research pretty much on our own  count almost eleven billion dollars was spent in the twenty five election cycle in the united states and federal state and local races double what was spent in two thousand and eight double a two times increase in two thousand and eight in ten times what was spent even allowing for inflation what was spent twenty five years ago so has billions actually is vested millions yes thank you twelve billion not million my gob and what we see also this massive increase in money is the increase in what's called dark money the citizens united case said that the should be accountable people should know who's giving the money should be transparent but i mean they said it shamelessly or cynically or ludicrously because there was no mechanism to do this and there is no mechanism we really have no idea how much is being spent we're still finding it out now newt's caches of hundreds of millions of dollars from last year that were coming across and most of the money is increasing the smartest version this money is what's called dark money it's going through a labyrinth of cayman islands style money laundering scheme so we will never know who's putting up the money that pays for these campaigns now a lot of americans say well twelve billion dollars is a big country eleven billion dollars that's not that much i mean the us that's a couple fighter planes you know if we're going to have a war you know who could care about that well let's put it in context let's put it in context germany two months ago had national elections and they elected a new government and we went and looked at how much every in germany this year they spent their national elections per voter all the political spending by the parties and candidates for every dollar that was spent in germany's national elections for every dollar provided it was spent in two thousand and twelve in our congressional and presidential race just our national elections united states really kick the bucket i mean we beat them thirty four to one imagine mention if we outspent germany thirty four to one we spent thirty four dollars educating a first grader for every dollar germany spent educating a first grader imagine  look like imagine a classroom then you'd have one teacher for students for assistant teachers an art teacher a music teacher gym teacher a personal trainer mrs it would be absurd i mean you have the most amazing education system ever we would be on a bit every kid in america get an education like bill gates his kids would love to have it would be an extraordinary experience but it doesn't work that way elections doesn't the more money you have in elections the more bogus they are that's the iron law of money in politics the more money more bogus and there's a reason for this first and foremost the citizens united decision and there are people who make that argument equate someone in this room or anyone in this country giving twenty five fifty  hundred even a thousand dollars to support a candidate with someone dropping fifty or one hundred million dollars anonymously to support a candidate or cause and all evidence shows they are two entirely different phenomenon the first thing is people are just giving money because they believe in civic process they want to support a candidate a set of ideas certain values whatever that might be and you know that's not necessarily a bad thing that's probably a good thing and that's what the supreme court said but all the evidence shows that when someone starts getting up in the unanimous zone of ten hundred fifty two hundred thousand one hundred million two hundred three hundred million like the koch brothers that it's not civic virtue it's not just that much they love their country that much more it's a transaction it's an investment in the political economy to get decisions you want that advance your  interest the koch brothers are perfect example of this the koch brothers this will surprise many people assume i'm sure they're looking around this room there are a lot of people who are probably go to bed at night thinking how much they hate the koch brothers what terrible awful human beings the koch brothers are but i'll tell you this right now there's that argument that you made that the koch brothers have given more money to liberal causes then anyone in the country they have do lots of support against the patriot act they give money they sell you to oppose surveillance they've been active in marijuana legalization they've been active in same sex marriage they've looked at the prison industrial complex and look at the racial component of it they supported all sorts of stuff like that lots of money to get the rich guys store a lot of that way but what's interesting about the koch brothers is that has no influence and when they go to buy a candidate for an election when they go to buy a pay for elections they're only interested in candidates who are going to push their what's their economic agenda lower no taxes no regulation smash labor unions get rid of social security public education medicare the big six that's their game and that's what they want and so they were huge supporters of ken cuccinelli the guy who just ran for governor of virginia because he's on that six issues i gave he's a home run hitter the koch brothers he's terrible on all those things they spend money on otherwise he's terrible and all those issues they care about but elections aren't about pushing civic ideals they're about the political economy buying the government to make you richer make you more powerful that's why they do it and that was the big lie behind citizens united that they're giving money to by the government is the same as someone of us giving twenty five dollars to support a candidate another reason why more money equals more bogus so where does this money go why do we have to spend so much more than every other country in the world on a per capita basis well the majority of it goes to political ads on television roughly six billion dollars in the two thousand and twelve cycle and ninety percent of those ads are what are called negative attack ads in the book we spend a lot of time fecht two chapters going through political advertising and chronicling just how inane and asinine they are and how they've changed over time i think for the sake of this discussion just put it this way those ads are illegal in most other democracies you aren't allowed to have candidate ads not to mention just negative ads none of that's possible illegal in britain illegal in germany illegal in sweden illegal in norway you are allowed to do that political advertising on t v is considered like the equivalent of germ warfare in a military conflict it's simply considered outside the boundaries of legitimate operations yet here in america it's all we've got left so people think that's the be all end all of democracy and the sad news about political advertising in the reason why it's so prevalent is that in the context of our two party system it works especially negative ads they are very successful and we document this at length in the book they're not going away of their own volition another problem with the huge increase of political advertising is that we've created this enormous institutional lobby that benefits by marinating our political system and money in this lobby is made up of media corporations that own all the local from the low end fifteen or twenty percent at the high end thirty five forty or forty five percent it is the entire basis of the industry and these stations and these are owned by ma and pa these are owned by half dozen of the largest companies in the economy these stations now are to any sort of reform of our electoral system what the n r a is to any sort of efforts to have gun control laws they are a powerful institutional force for the status quo and as they sell more and more political advertising commercial broadcasters in this country basically discontinued all campaign coverage debates by candidates free time for candidates extensive journalist coverage of races nonexistent even the legally that's the one of the highest form of public service they're supposed to provide in order to get their monopoly licenses they stop doing it in the laws not being enforced in them now that wouldn't be that big of a problem if we had journalism otherwise if we had vibrant political journalism we had a vibrant political culture with lots of news media lots of reporters covering politics then all these ads would make that big it wouldn't be that powerful but we have basically the opposite taking place we're seeing the freefall collapse and disintegration of journalism as an institution in the united states in the last ten or twenty years which means the ads have that much more power their space eclipsed stand alone as the only voices that are heard in politics today which means those with the most money get to by the terms of debate are you depressed and i'm trying to warm you up here that's my job on the warm up act let's just say that there's a reason why i'm not depressed in my johnson the process there is in my in fact were incredibly optimistic the first and foremost reason is that this is not a reactionary country there's a reason why there's powerful interests are working hard to make it possible to have unlimited spending on campaigns on one hand and to suppress the vote on the other hand in a manner that was literally illegal up to a year ago and is obscene at any time voter suppression on one hand and unlimited money in the other is because those forces know they can't win vera lection they've got to break the system they can't win a fair election where we had any sort of voter turnout in this country and we don't have much of a voter turnout united states only fifty three percent in two thousand and twelve germany was whining about their bad voter turnout this year seventy two percent if we had seventy two percent voter turnout every pundit in washington kirk williston pennsylvania avenue they call you know they have a national holiday to celebrate seventy two percent we've never seen anything close to that that's how it's done in other democracies real democracy seventy two percent norway seventy nine percent that you know you have lots of people voting in this country voting is whittled down to the lowest level of any advanced country in the world most cases by a wide margin so they know they can't win a fair election where lots of people vote and that's to give us power in our sails the forces of democracy are really on the rise in this country secondly i think there's a strong tendency by people and it's human nature i guess if you want to call it that to look around you and see what's going on and assume that what you see and what you've experienced in your immediate past is almost certainly give you what you're going to have your immediate future and if that's your immediate future some your future after that and there's a strong tendency to see the world that way it's a phenomenally small c conservative think is nothing will ever change that and what coming social change doesn't work that way it's not a gradual process that leaps out when pressures grow so intense and it was right here in seattle that i saw that most directly in my experience i was a grad student here and i got my d at the university of washington and one of my professors was a white south african who is very much anti apartheid and said very closely connected to the anti apartheid movement in south africa and so this is spring of one thousand nine hundred i went in to say goodbye to move to madison and he was sort of down and i said what's up and he said well i've been talking reading about it and i've been talking to my friends in south africa and we're now convinced that the ruling apartheid government will never negotiate with a and c will never do anything to give rights to black african and the only way there will be justice for black africans of south africa is so much bloodshed that it will make the country absolutely unlivable for generations it will define the country and make it on livable this is in the spring of one thousand nine hundred eight this was a guy more about south african politics than anyone i knew he studied it for a living this is a really smart guy two years later nelson mandela was released from robben island prison three years left or that he was elected president of south africa in that five years there was less violence and you'd find in a new jersey bar fight on a saturday night so my friend completely swung and missed he had no idea what was just around the corner all he knew was things were untenable but he saw no way out because he looked around him and he looked in the immediate past and that's it we have to go to the top mean important lesson we can't think like that if anything it becomes self fulfilling but it's absurd by that way nothing would ever change it would still be molecules you know we certainly wouldn't be where we are today nothing would ever change in history you want only by what's happened before you and that's the moment we're in now so that's the optimism that john and i feel as we look across this country and see the movements that are emerging and i would characterise myself as the second most optimistic person in america when it comes to social change i'd like to introduce you now to the first most optimistic person my co author and brother john nic brothers and sisters let me tell you you have just been through dollar ocracy you do not need a couple of jokers from madison wisconsin to come to seattle and tell you about the crisis because a month ago pollsters in washington state said that the people of this sta were overwhelmingly in favor of labeling genetically modified food everyone there literally is polling that showed you know we get into the high seventy's the eighty's in some surveys nationally into the ninety's percent of people saying they want to know what's in their food they want to at least have that label on the front but all washington state the threat was out there washington state might be the state it started putting the labels on the food and so in one o the shortest periods in american history the most powerful food processors the most powerful grocery makers in this country ponied up at a rate of one to three million dollar contributions and they plotted that money into the state of washington the most money ever spent on initiatives in the state of washington to make people vote against what they wanted brothers and sisters what you just went through is dollar ocracy and we got to stop it it you need to understand right upfront from your own experience what dollar ocracy is hollow it works it is a transactional relationship not a transformational relationship you seek to maybe transform the results of an election but understand this is a transaction this is what a rich person does to buy something and the people who were engaged in the transaction here in seattle and across this great state of washington this great progressive state where people actually care about what they eat the transaction they were involved in was the darkest cruelest of transactions because they knew all of these giant companies and you know  oh you talk about kellogg's you're talking about general foods are all these big companies what's not talked about the fact that all of these companies have rushed into the area of healthy food they're all making your garden burgers in your veggie burgers they're put him in a frozen food rack there at the store and they knew without a doubt that when a mom came in to buy veggie burgers for her kid and she saw a label on the front that said this is genetically modified food that mother wasn't going to buy those veggie burgers anymore and so they poured that money in not because they believed in something not because they wanted to influence a dialogue to be a part of a great discussion they poured that money in for a transactional purchase purpose they poured that money in to make sure that they maintained their corporate and business bottom line that is what we have created in american politics a circumstance where the most powerful companies in this world can maintain their income stream with a tiny investment of twenty two million in washington state and that for them is a tiny investment they can maintain their income stream and they can do so by protecting their ability to deceive a mother who wants her child to have healthy food brothers and sisters this is not a joke this is not a game we're involved in this is a democracy crisis because when the wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations in a country can warp the very dynamics of democracy when they can shift the sentiments of a great state in a matter of a few weeks with a huge in money then you have to ask yourself where does that end where does that stop where does democracy end and dollar ocracy begin i submit to you brothers and sisters we saw the line drawn on november fifth in washington state and if you are not angry enough to spend the next few years fundamentally transforming this electoral process in this country fundamentally transforming our media so that it actually reveals these crises if you're not willing to do that then i warn you the rest of your life will be far worse than what you've lived up to this point it will be a dark turning point where you will timidly begin to recognize that democracy is just a theater it's a spectator sport you get to watch you get to be played but you don't get to shape the future of your city your state or your nation and that's not the way it's supposed to be the story of this country is a great story of the american experiment began in error began a terrible terrible misstep that is at the founding of this country and i'm a i'm as patriotic as anybody you will see i get a tear in my eye when i see that parade on the fourth of july when i see that flag go by but i will tell you that this country was founded in the original sin of allowing slavery this country was founded  the original scent of divine denying the franchise to most americans at the founding of the american experiment the group of people in this room would be more than enough people to elect a member of congress they used to have elections in this country in a room much smaller than this fifty seventy five one hundred planters or wealthy businesspeople they would gather in a room and they would choose who would go to congress to represent them now the senators weren't even chosen and so small the democratic a circumstance senators were selected by the legislator often appointed by the governor but when they elected the house of representatives two hundred two hundred twenty years ago in a room much smaller than this often it was in a southern state it was hot and so they would push the windows open and so the great mass of people would stand outside and look in and see their representatives chosen they did not participate in the process you could not participate in the process if you were a woman because women were not allowed to vote you could not participate in the process if you were a person of color because persons of color many many actually enslaved but even those who were not and slaves not permitted to vote and the most significant thing often forgotten is that at that bonded most white guys were permitted to because if you weren't a rich white guy you had to stand outside as well and so the fact of the matter is women people of color not rich white guys all standing outside that one democracy that wasn't even a facade of democracy what it was was a plutocracy handful of wealthy people running everything but the genius of the founding of this american experiment was a few people knew that was wrong tom paine the essential  american revolution argued again and again and again that the franchise must be broadly extended to all citizens alternately to the most disenfranchised of people so that they could participate in the process of shaping a nation that pain argued would be a better nation than one chosen by the plutocrats pain argued in his essential early pamphlets he said the great problem by narky is you know some families some people got that some people actually saw that we might want to expand the franchise tom paine of course didn't work for him when he went to vote in the last presidential election of his life they would let him vote he was in new rochelle new york he went to cast his ballot they turned him away from the polling place they said well you're not an american he said well i did have some role in the founding of this operation and they said well you can't prove it you're sort of like an immigrant not a kid you know the woman approach going no way and i'm say way and so they turn tom pain away and they turn so many other people away but slowly we struggle we actually move forward as a country you know people always say the civil war was fought to keep the union together some people say today maybe it would have been so bad an idea to but but they say that it was fought to keep the unit together an awful lot of people understood that it was about a lot more than that it was actually about give given human beings rights and protections under our constitution and so in the aftermath of the civil war we passed a whole bunch of constitutional amendments we expanded the franchise to african american men you know african americans didn't go to the u s house of representatives for the first time in the twentieth century they went in there late eight hundred sixty thousand eight hundred seventy s we were electing african americans to statewide offices that are part of one hundred fifty years ago and then as the great historian eric foner tells us we must see voting rights a little bit like an accordion sometimes it expands and sometimes it contracts are voting rights are never so sure that we can look away african american men were denied the franchise we got rid of reconstruction replaced it with jim crow and segregation and so the struggle on again but women had seen the use of the constitution to expand the franchise to african american men and so women said hold it hold whoa whoa why don't we get a constitutional amendment to and one of the great brutal awful battles a state immense struggle women fought and succeeded in getting the right to vote and they were going yeah that you know can i just tell you something nobody ever says why it's important that women got the right to vote it wasn't just to be nice it won just to say oh everybody in nobody out no when women got the right to vote they transform the country understand that if women didn't vote mitt romney would be the president of the united states today they understand who gets to vote has some consequences and then when things get really wild then we said well if we're going to give women the right to vote why don't we you know the crazy thing they did this not long after we got the right vote they said you know what maybe we'll extend the right to vote t native americans native americans didn't get the right to vote until after women but they're very well it's their country what the heck and then they started expanding it to latinos hispanics in the southwest and then a nine hundred sixty s came and act civil rights act we started really going well and you know the interesting thing is people forget it wasn't until nine hundred sixty two barely fifty years ago that we amended the constitution of the united states to say that there could be no poll taxes we eliminated the property barrier to voting we eliminated the money barrier to voting two years into john kennedy's presidency we waited a long time and by the time we finished that decade we decided that young men and women who were going to send off to die in wars in places like vietnam maybe they ought to have a right to vote on whether we should go to war this arc of extending the franchise was an incredible historic accomplishment something that people died not small numbers of people immense numbers of people gave their lives in order to extend the franchise and as bob told you there right around the time when we started to get to that full vote in full franchise in this country that's when the money power started to move because the fact of the matter is the fact of the matter is if you can create a circumstance where everybody can vote but that voting class can be minit be elated by immense amounts of money you control against all of that progress and you can actually take the plutocracy of seventeen ninety and put it back in power you can create a circumstance where the people are outside looking in the windows well a small number of folks are inside making the fundamental choices about what happens in their country and one of the reasons that occurs is because as money has flowed into our politics bob and i detail in the book ten billion dollars spent ten billion with a b on the two thousand and twelve campaign as money has flowed into our politics journalism has stood down journalism has stood down in this country we have lost since two thousand and nine more than twenty thousand newspaper employees in this country we have close daily newspapers across this country in albuquerque in tucson in kansas city kansas in denver colorado and in seattle washington and as those fit in more ads as we have seen journalism exit stage right and the internet is brilliant as it is not beginning to fill the gap for every ten journalists lost  old media you're lucky if you have one hired in new media we end up in a situation where there is an information void and that boyd is filled by the massive inflow of money do not doubt that the reason washington state voted not to label genetically modified food was not just because of the massive inflow of money from out of state grocery processors it was also because of the massive outflow of journalism in the state of washington when journalism stands down and money flows in you create the perfect circumstance so what are we going to do about it you know i'd look somebody who watched us on more years the other night and there are students ready or the guy said yeah i was watching you for a while and then i thought i better get up and put the razor blades away because i didn't wanna see the rest of the show but rather sisters we are not disappointed and we are not discouraged because because this is how america works i hate to say it but america is this great big wonderful still relatively young country and we're just like my ten year old we know we should do our homework but we don't do it until right before it's time to turn it in we are a country that puts off reform and puts off change until we have to do it the history of this country is a history of waiting till we reach the critical juncture and then recognizing that if we do not act we will lose the country itself it has happened again and again and again throughout our history and we come to tell you today that we are act such a moment we stand with the washington men folks we stand with the move to amend folks we stand with the reformers who say it is time stopping there no because in the history of this country we don't just do one amendment we do as many amendments are necessary in the moment they did three after the civil war they did three in the  two in the nine hundred sixty s we don't just do one it's our brothers and sisters if the supreme court says money can go into politics but it's going to be hard to vote then let's not just amend the constitution to get big money out of politics let's amend the constitution to say that every citizen has a right to vote and a right to have that vote counted  so i love coming into the seattle town hall and cheering with all my friends and fellow citizens but i fear that as i walk home tonight i might start to anticipate that it would be a little difficult to amend the constitution you know i feel like doubt might creep into my heart and soul and this is the only thing i'm going to tell you the constitution was not written in stone it was not handed down on a tablet to michele bachman the constitution of the united states was written by imperfect man who said that the only way we would ever make a perfect union was to amend the constitution we have done it twenty seven times since the founding of the republic and we need to and i know i know how hard it is how hard it is to imagine but let me take you back a hundred years ago we write about this in the book a hundred years ago if you looked out across this country this great country you probably would look for a place like seattle looking east across the whole damn thing and you say all my gosh what's going on here well look there's a little girl running down the front steps of the apartment building or the the house where she lives and but she's not dressed in a school uniform she's she's dressed in a you know looks like she's going to work she's only six seven eight years old but she's going to a mills or work as a bobbin girl and you know that term bobbin girl it's so cute it sounds so adorable and yet what a bobbin girl did was reach into the machine and change the bobbin so that the machine could keep work they employed her because her fingers were so small that she could reach in places that an adult could not do things quickly that an adult couldn't in the midst of all these machines but sometimes the machine didn't stop just right so does the machine started up it would take a little girl's finger off to take her hand off but that was ok because it was a gilded age and those who owned the means of production they got to decide the rules in factories and workplaces they got to decide somebody got hurt well that was tough luck that was your circumstance and you know that girl came of age she probably work in a clothing factory and you know and sees the clothing factory sometimes they're on the tenth or eleventh floor of a building and you'd work with a bunch of young women young women who roughly your own age maybe a couple years older there are lebanese girls and greek girls and and italians and germans and jews and african americans who'd come north to get out of the segregated south and you'd be all working there tenth floor of the building and when the fire started when it started spreading through the factory you'd run to the doors because your young women you wanted so much to live in there's so much to live for but the doors were locked shut because in that gilded a the c e o s locked the doors so women wouldn't steal a bathroom break during their ten twelve fourteen sixteen hour work days and so those young women had to decide whether they would burn alive your jumped to their deaths and when the families of the triangle shirtwaist fire victims came in new york city to gather the bodies of their sisters and their cousins and their onsen their mothers  across the streets of that city and what they knew was not a single one of those women who had died had a right to vote to change her circumstance i was one hundred years ago barely a little over one hundred years ago and if they had the right to vote they still would have the right to elect their u s senate because the elect the u s senate was appointed to backroom deals the congress was not controlled by the people and if they had a right to vote for congress they still are never right to tax big corporations or the wealthy because we didn't have any of the infrastructure for taxing regulating corporations that we have today none of that existed one hundred years ago and people decided in their hearts and their souls that they had to change that and over a ten year period in this country women got the right to vote we created in an elected u s senate we created a tax system and a regulatory system that allowed us to put controls on corporations we began the process of outlawing child labor and protecting women in the workplace we began to roughly outline what would become the new deal and we did it with one to three constitutional amendments in a less than a ten year period and so i don't want to hear any whining from a single want to you tonight because the only question you have to ask yourself is this are you equal of your grandparents and your great grandparents because those are the people that fixed this country our hundred years ago in a great age of reform and bob and i don't come to you tonight to make you depressed to tell you what is wrong we come to you tonight to call you to action and to say that once more as has always been the case in this republic you must rise up to amend your constitution  finally that this country is not a dollar ocracy controlled by a handful of plutocrats while the rest of us look into those open windows brothers and sisters let us make it a democracy le twenty years ago democracy is coming to the usa let's make it come now brothers and sisters let's make our country a democracy let's make it happen so w a a manned here right you've got washington public campaigns you also got some great guys trying to say the post office which is an essential part of the american infrastructure but you're not you're not not a thing that you're doing i'm asking to do on your own at that washington and i know you feel superior but you're actually a little bit behind sixteen american states have already formally called on the congress to amend the constitution to get big money out of politics more than five hundred communities across this country have formally requested that that action be taken and it is time for the state of washington to join the f the anwer our group a number of us here are here with clipboards look for us afterwards and we just voted two weeks ago to go ahead with the citizens initiative petition and we have to gather three hundred sixty thousand signatures for the two forty five that we have to have to pass so my my question i mean a lot of states like you say through the legislatures have passed and we tried here but  get it out of the senate right right right so now we have to do the hard way so my question is how do you see this going across the country in terms of citizens initiatives and is that a stronger statement than then if all the legislature i mean it really has to be a social movement and i'm wondering if you want to contrast the two methods i'm going to let john field that one but first i just want to say something that john and i have this is the leslie of this tour been for two months and we've done about forty five or fifty events all over the country and for the first time in our critter i think virtually every single event there are lots of organize no coverage it's completely beneath the radar but it's happening all over the good there's no big money behind it george soros no one like that it's all this is the most grassroots movement i've seen in a very long time really is and let me just take a quick hit here and say  know on friday night and over the weekend we appeared on bill moyers morris and company to talk about this that was the first time in national broadcast television had actually in a serious an extended way covered this movement or covered any kind of conversation about it and you know tomorrow night you're going to have the folks have written the great book game change come in and it's a really good book and i've read read it and i'm very impressed with it but i'll just tell you that after we went on mars the show our book moved from you know respectable sales up to number two right behind game change on the amazon  the only reason i'm not trying to compliment ourselves what i'm trying to tell you is when you tell people about what's going on in this country and that there is a movement to make the change they become like like thirsty people the water they desperately want to to have this and i think the initiative referendums are far better than a legislative action and let me tell you why let me tell you why because what it no it's better because they don't know how to stop this stuff it's really interesting they've been totally failed in their efforts to stop this stuff they had last year the state of montana voted in the state of colorado voted on it montana voted for r president colorado voted for obama for president but the one thing they had in common was that both states cast roughly three quarters of their vote in favor of a man doing the constitution to get big money out of politics the fact of the matter is this is something real and we've had wonderful instances in some cities around this country where the newspaper actively the local media actively campaigned against reform literally said don't do it the l a times passionately opposed such a move in los angeles just this spring and you know what happened with all that media power saying don't do it l a voted three quarters in favor of amending the constitution give the people the right to vote money out of politics and they will do just that so go and get your amendment on over here speaking of g o p standing for either a grand obstructionist party or guardians of privilege i'm not aware of a single republican in the house or senate has spoken out against citizens united and as far as i'm aware every single democrat has opposed that richard decision in the house and the senate and that al gore senator kerry and president obama were all explicitly for campaign public financing of campaigns as is seventy five percent of the democrats in the house and the senate and i'm not aware of one republican who's come out for public financing of campaigns and finally what correlation do you meet between the fact of dollar ocracy and that hundred  at that you know right now out of two million books where it three hundred nationally number two in political but the reason i point that out is that you know i really want to emphasize there's excitement and passion not because of us not because of anything we've done but because of this thing and that passion extends beyond the democratic party the fact of the matter is around this country in many communities the people that were first out there to do these changes were greens and also it's other folks from different parties and when the state of maine voted on whether to instruct congress to do a constitutional amendment twenty five members of the republican caucus in the main house voted with the democrats to amend the constitution five members of the republican caucus in the state senate voted with the democrats free speech for people the great reform group has as identified more than one hundred prominent republicans across this country who have come out in favor of the constitutional amendment and recently in the u s house of representatives congressman walter jones from the carolinas became the first republican to sponsor a proposal to amend the constitution to get money out of politics and the thing we must say to our republican friends is if you honestly believe in your ideas if you sincerely believe in what you say then let's have a fair fight and a real debate not try and overwhelm the process with money honest republicans can and should be with us well the second part of your question referred to economic inequality in the united states is there or is that  yeah we may have spectacular economic inequality in the united states i've written about this lot elsewhere i mean do you have one example of how the situation has changed under dollar ocracy as a result of the policies put in place in the last forty  years there's an index it's used by sociologists and economists called the gini index which ranks inequality in countries in the united states has grown so much more unequal because almost all the gains in income we've had last thirty years have gone to the top one or two percent of the population even of the top one half of one percent one tenth of one percent that we now have levels of inequality in rich and poor that are more commonly found in countries like the philippines and malaysia we're no longer even remotely close to east asia earth northern europe or even southern europe we're just we' society and this is a real threat and its own face outside of being immoral and humane and all those of awful things because there's really no evidence you can have the rule of law in a credible democratic self governing society with that much economic inequality it's just something's got to give and we're living through that right now in the my view it's got to give us inequality not democracy while i appreciate the idea of moving from a dollar ocracy to a democracy and i think that's a very good thing to try to achieve i'm not satisfied at my age to only be able to exercise my democratic rights every two to four years and in between those two to four years i have to operate and live my life at the behest of my boss i have to live my life at the behest of corporations where i where people have to work as wage slaves and it seems to me that what we need to do was go beyond talking about  constitutional amendment we need to talk about the fact that the society that we live in which is entirely organized for the cumulation of capital and profit is destroying the entire planet and risking humanity and that we've got to go beyond talking about a constitutional amendment to allow everybody's vote to operate equally one person one vote versus one dollar one vote every two to four years we have to completely change the whole structure or we're completely screwed and i would like to know if you agree that capitalism has failed and that we need a revolution to get in i'm not talking about this is a like a wild concept i'm talking about this is something a necessary concept and i would like to know what you think about that seattle kind of contributed to this process november fifth and it appears they're still counting the ballots but there is at least an outside chance that seattle is going to elect a socialist to the city council now what i would suggest is happening there because it's not just here we've actually across this country seeing you know if we had a media in this country that actually covered politics as opposed to what ted cruz is talking about  people would know or as opposed to what you know chris christie up to this week people would know that something amazing happened across this country on november fifth voting people went to vote and they actually voted in places across this country for a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage like they voted for in sea tac they voted to increase the minimum wage and index it to inflation in new jersey the same people that reelected chris christie said he was wrong to veto a minimum wage increase and in seattle or in cincinnati they tried to come for the public employee pensions and the public employees and the citizens organize and they protected their pension rights by a seventy eight to twenty two margin the fact of the matter is people are waking up to the law of austerity and they're beginning to push back in some fundamental ways but let me tell you thomas jefferson thomas jefferson said it well and and i respect your question but i don't diminish the constitutional amendment because thomas jefferson when he said the tree of liberty must be watered every twenty years with the blood of patriots he was not doing some sort of gothic image of blood flying around what he was saying and he said it in great at great length and again and again is that if you try to lock up people into a constitution and never change it then they will be locked into the pathologies of the moment in which it was written what jefferson was talking about is the fundamental revolutionary act is to reshape and really make this country on a regular basis and so we talk about constitutional amendments because we believe that that's where we give real power to the people and we keep doing it we keep doing those reforms not as the end of a process but the beginning of a process and we saw another element of it in the state of wisconsin we both live in madison wisconsin and i cannot tell you how beautiful it was beautiful it was when scott walker best labor organizer in the history of the country scott walker came for labor rights in wisconsin and they first came that first day about a thousand and the next day ten thousand and the next day fifty thousand and one hundred thousand we were at a rally where one hundred eighty thousand people surrounded the capitol in wisconsin and i want to anthracis to you i know how our media covers things but people should be aware that scott walker's law is still in the courts in wisconsin unions are still organizing and winning fights and one of the reasons they're doing so is because those hundreds of thousands of people didn't wait till the next election they came to the streets at the time it was necessary and the fact of the matter is brothers and sisters when we talk about changing and repairing this country we want democracy on election day but we want democracy every day we want citizens to be out there defending this republic every single day of the week and we want to make it real not anyone during that period we're glad to but they told us they wanted us to do one more question and i think you were alone and said yes ok the last two all right so jefferson also said every generation laws and debts should also be abolished really important point because we modeled our our political system after the roman republic which is really bad because it failed the biggest problem of the roman republic is a wealthy elite controlled government at all times and even was democrats of that age eventually became patricians they forgot who elected them who brought them to power i believe that we're at a grave time as grave as our articles of confederation and it's time for a constitutional convention because we need to really get to the heart of the problem which is we have a a failed constitution it's a two hundred twenty five year old document that needs to be revisited in a member it's not going to be enough i'd like to tell you that on bainbridge island last tuesday in the election bainbridge island has seventeen thousand registered voters we were a model of democracy because we worked with very well with the banbridge island review our local newspaper we elected by a landslide three progressive candidates not withstanding that the three anti government conservative candidates raised in obscene amount of money through a pac with money from out of state a lot of money from out of state but the bainbridge island review on their front page of the newspaper made sure that everybody knew where that money was coming from and not withstanding that some of the candidates rammed full page ads every single week we all knew why they had the money to run those stats and as a result we rejected all of those candidates who had all the money by a margin of in some cases forty percent so my question is had the ads that we all saw in washington state against five twenty two been required every single ad been required to say where the money was coming from to fund those ads the ag the agribusinesses grow whatever do you think the result would have been different well that's a great question and i but it's hard to speculate but we're well well well we'll get to him to you know nobody here disagrees with your positive presentation of reforms that will improve our democracy but i think within your strengths also law your weaknesses and that is reforms are not only in large inning the the power of of people to change and improve and make less in equitable our system but in a very basic way the function of a reform is to act as a palliative to make the system based on oppression more acceptable to the masses and and that's why you focus on amendment changing whereas what you really need is a third party based on a labor movement that recognizes the fundamental truth that in our system is characterized by exploitation ok well real quickly for that guy in the guy i was like question before like capitalism you know we emphasize the structures of democratic governance and amendments not as as john said not as the be all end all but unquestionably the central issue of our times everywhere in the world is the structure of the political economy i mean that it's failing us environmentally socially and every level that's the great crisis we face not just the united states world wide and that's healthy democracy that's the central issue you would be debating that would be right part of we're trying to battle an organized structure so we can have that debate and have it out and have democratic decision making  about making it so that people have to announce those ads who's paying for the ads it's one of the courses free press works on i think it's very important but i think the in lieu hopefully will be successful we're going to work of the new f that now at the same time i think the other part of that that you've got at that's crucial is there was a newspaper in that in vain which i don't actually covered this image information readily available we don't have much news media left doing that and that's why we hardly talk about it this talk tonight but the central theme of our book and our research is how the commercial model of journalism is time i mean the internet's even more of a graveyard than old media there's just no money has ever ties and no one who supports journalism online and if we're going to have journalism it's going to be covering the stuff this gives information not just and candidates but at some politics in our communities what governments are doing we're going to have to answer that as a public policy question it's a fundamental major issue we face and we write about a lot but if we don't have that nothing else is really good ever written journalism for the environment the republic the democracy the socialist future all that scope and smoke they won't survive and then last but not least the question their constitutional convention i like this guy for asking a big bold question i love this guy over here for standing outside i got something to say and i love our friend from banbridge island telling us that it can actually work if we can actually beat him the back to the matter is that's what we need we need to be more pushy we need to make real demands and and i want to just close off with with this simple simple thought for you we accept a politics that is ridiculously narrow and dysfunctional if we were to just step back and look at the reality of what we're in we would realize that we are that frog in the boiling water that is already been turned up to a very high level had we just been dropped into this thing not a one of us would say that this was a functional democracy in this country the economist magazine every year does a democracy index they rank the countries around the world the united states in the latest listing has fallen to number twenty one or the twenty first best but here's the reality in addition to ranking that they give them a numerical rank on a one to ten scale the cutoff for a non not fully functional democracy is eight you fall below eight you start to be one of those countries that we look at and say you're not doing such a good job in the two thousand and thirteen listing the united states rating is eight point one brothers and sisters we've got about a year or two before we start to fall out of the range of even what the conservative economist magazine would call a functional democracy i'm not satisfied i'm not satisfied with our narrow politics yes i want to labor party i want to whole bunch of parties i'm not satisfied with limited reforms i want to whole bunch of reforms but brothers and sisters i will tell you this thing above all we will not get a single reform we will not get a single advance economically or socially in this country if you decide to stand down we need you to stand up and say this country is not going to be a dollar ocracy this country is going to be a democracy and once we make it a democracy we are going to start to solve all of the fundamental challenges we're not just gotta tinker around the edges anymore we agree with the reverend martin luther king jr five years after the march on washington when he was organizing the poor people's march he said the time for timid supplications has passed the time for timid supplications has passed the time for fundamental and radical change