thank you for coming thank you so much and really huge congratulations on the victory that you guys had last november my organization is in d c we are what's called a grass tops organization we're focusing on mobilizing elites around this issue we've got one hundred  forty former senators governors and house members already working with us to kind of warm up the environment in washington and we touted seattle as being the great victory that will help give this this cause a shot in the arm that needs and i wrote this book out of a shared sense of love heartbreak and hope love for the country heartbreak over what we think is happening to it and hope that things can change we start the book with this our country is a dream a dream created during a period of time known as the american enlightenment which came to a focal point during the american revolution and lasted until the early one nine hundred centuries the leading political thinkers of the day were the ones that we know so well thomas jefferson john adams james madison thomas payne george mason alexander hamilton and franklin their dream was to create a democratic republic in which the ultimate power rested with the citizens the charter of the commonwealth of massachusetts written by john adams yes it's true john adams wrote almost the entire constitution for the state of massachusetts which was ratified in seven hundred eighty seven years before the us constitution actually served as a boilerplate for the u s constitution has this in it this is part one article seven of the massachusetts charter quote government is instituted for the common good for the protection safety prosperity and happiness of the people and not for the profit honor or private interest of any one man family or class of men therefore the people alone have an incontestable indefeasible right to institute government and to reform alter or totally change the same when their protection safety prosperity and happiness require it i mean if you think about the history of human civilization never was there any civilization that rested itself upon such poetry even para clean grease which gave rise to plato and aristotle and many of the great playwrights that we still study today didn't have that kind of beautiful statement at its core so that's the love part the love part is also the fact that i grew up in st louis missouri in the heartland of the country the gateway to the west and as a kid was just absolutely corny about the american flag and the fourth of july and all things american and i just finally remember going down at the age of you know eight and nine and ten to the underneath the arch and sitting above the mississippi river and watching the fireworks explode over the over the great mississippi with hundred thousand people around me and it just gave me goosebumps american revolution so i feel like this is in my blood and and my love for this country runs very very deep so that's that was one of our my main major motivating forces yeah for the fourth of july i think i even told you this my first job as a reporter in kingsport tennessee was and i was i guess i think i was not even twenty years old yet i got an internship in my hometown newspaper and the first story i was signed was covering the fourth of july parade in king's for tennessee i was very fortunate in fact my first career was was as a newspaper reporter i  was lucky to get a job after college in memphis which is on the other side of the state from kingsport and i was reporter there and then i got a chance to cover the tennessee legislature and then finally  was promoted to a position in washington with scripps howard news service where i covered congress in the white house and the supreme court for a few years i had a longer career though in in public relations i left quite frankly because of the lure of a few a few extra bucks p r people make more money than than journalists do and wound up working for the insurance insurance industry sometimes i've said that i i spent twenty years on undercover assignment inside the insurance industry many times while i was working for the insurance industry i kept thinking maybe maybe someday i would have a chance to return to journalism and and share what i learned inside inside that industry never really thinking that that would ever come to pass but i had a crisis of conscience toward the end of my career and that led me to really assess what i was doing for a living and i came to the conclusion that what i was doing in my job as head of corporate communications for one of the largest insurance companies was the exact opposite of what i was trying to do as a journalist you know years before and that became such a conflict for me that i ultimately just turned in my resignation i didn't have the idea though that i would get involved in advocacy until i began noticing what was happening during the health care reform debate after barack obama was elected president and the health care reform debate was getting underway i could tell that the strategy that i had actually worked on when i was inside the industry was being implemented i had a kind of a unique role at cigna i was the chief spokesman for a company i dealt with the media but also dealt with their government affairs people and i spent a lot of time in washington helping to develop the communication strategy for defending more explaining the industry's point of view on any issue pertaining to legislation and regulation and one of the things that i had worked on was a campaign to try to influence the debate on health care reform and i saw it being implemented after i had left the company and i became so upset with seeing that the words that i had actually been been working on the planet i had been been a part of that i was really ashamed i was actually being implemented so i  found out a way to get involved with advocacy and and was invited to testify before a senate he had a senate hearing it was something that i felt compelled to do and i felt that it was a way that i was in some way was making a man's that was also as i said my first career was as a juror as a journalist i grew up in a and mountain city tennessee in kingsport tennessee two very small towns mountain city a very poor part of the country one of the poorest parts of tennessee the reason i mention that is because i while i grew up there my parents were able to put some money aside to enable me to be the first person to go to graduate college neither one of their families and i felt often that i needed to do something to to give back to  my family and to that part of the world it never occurred to me that it would take this that i would be taking this route to do that but i was fortunate in ways that i don't think a lot of young people today could be i left college  without any debt my parents were able to put me through college even though dad was a factory worker he had a job that doesn't even exist in kingsport tennessee now most of those factory jobs have have  in many ways i've been living the american dream and i i think that that while i no longer live and work in washington as i did when i was a reporter  think about those times back when i was a reporter in the mid seventy's the city was so much different than what it is now a very different place there were not nearly as many lobbyist there were not there was not nearly  raising money as there is now when you go back to washington i go back to washington now the place looks the same but that's about it in many ways it is such an entirely different place the places largely run by by  lobbyists by lobbyists and the members of congress will talk a bit more a bit later on spend so much of their time dialing for dollars and they don't call people like you and me they call the very wealthiest people people who have the ability to write big checks and in that regard this book is named a nation on the take because of what has happened over the last several years in washington particular but also in the state capitals the heartbreak part is that the reason why when i decide to do this book because we feel as if money and politics that thing that most americans kind of know about and most americans kind of hate they also feel pretty hopeless about it but but the point they were trying to make here is that it's reached the point of being a stage four cancer it's not something that we can just kind of turn away from anymore and discussed obviously you guys are not turning away you're fighting for reform here but here are some of the here's some of the dimensions of that stage four cancer the two thousand election cycle was a three billion dollar election cycle this year is expected to be a ten billion dollar election cycle the rise of lobbying when john kennedy was elected president there were two hundred fifty registered lobbyists in washington there are now twelve thousand registered lobbyists in washington last year those lobbyists disclosed that's just what they have to disclose two point six billion dollars in expenditures that's six hundred million dollars more than it actually costs to run congress the revolving door in one nine hundred seventy four around three percent of former members of congress left capitol hill and went to k street to join the lobbying industry last year fifty percent did exactly that time spent raising money twenty years ago members of congress said they spent somewhere between five and fifteen percent of their time raising money they now spend half their time raising money representative steve israel who represents a big chunk of long island shocked washington a couple months ago when he announced that he was not going to run again as a house member and he was the chief financial fundraiser for the triple c for quite some time and he wrote a piece in the new york times about why and he said i just can't do the fund raising anymore he estimated that in the fifteen years that he was in congress he spent four thousand two hundred hours just in call time dialing rich people asking for money if you stretch that out across a forty hour work week that means the two and a half years straight he spent basically would have spent just dialing for dollars dan glickman who was a blue dog democrat from kansas and then he was clinton's ag sector culture secretary and then he actually went to represent the motion picture industry in washington described it like this the sad truth is that given the frenetic search for money in federal congressional elections there simply isn't enough time in the day to stay competitive in campaign finance and do the actual job of policymaking i remember when i was a first elected to congress i and many other house members would often go down to the floor of the house of representatives and just listen to the debate i may not have had an amendment to a bill or a particular interest in the issue but i always felt that watching policy discussions and witnessing the crafting of  was an important part of my day doesn't this sound wonderful it gave me the chance to educate myself and interact with members of congress on both sides of the aisle today most lawmakers would tell you that any free moment not used raising dollars is simply time wasted the cash committee so the cash committee is the nickname in washington for the house finance committee and it's not because they deal with finance but because it's like winning  lottery ticket for fund raising sixty of the four hundred thirty five house members serve on the finance committee not because it takes sixty brains to think through financial policy but because it's just so lucrative last year alone those sixty members collected thirty million dollars directly from lobbyists and corporate executives from the finance industry the rise of billionaire spenders citizens united was handed down in tw explosion of sense of millionaire and billionaire intervention in elections nick conscious or a my friend at the new york times nailed it with his story back in october when he chronicled how one hundred fifty eight families have supplied or at the time had supplied one half of the campaign cash in the presidential election cycle the koch brothers as you guys probably know have pledged their network has pledged to spend nine hundred million dollars in this election cycle which is more than  c plan to spend combined so the network of a single family is now two or facing the financial power of both political parties and then finally dark money this is money that's very hard to trace it's run through five one c fo organizations it's a total abuse of the five one c four laws they're supposed to be social welfare organizations karl rove operates almost exclusively in c fours because he doesn't want anyone to see what he's doing and we've seen a five thousand percent increase in the deployment of dark money in elections since two thousand and four so those are some of the nasty numbers but what we also point out in the book is that those things drive the very behavior that we are all so concerned about right now and in part that this election is being defined by those include cronyism so if you take david stockman as an interesting guy to think about cronyism stockman was reagan's director of office management budget he wrote in his book recently the great defamation the corruption of capitalism in america that markets that the market system is no longer free today he says quote the aggressive and proactive use of political resources to gain something from the governmental process that would otherwise not be achievable in the market is what we see now money dominates politics and as a result we have neither capitalism nor democracy oligarchy this is mark mckinnon who was george w bush's communications director writing in the daily beast about seven months ago he said quote let's call this system that citizens united and other rulings and laws have created for what it is an oligarchy this is jim is controlled by handful of ultra wealthy people most of whom got rich from the system and who will get richer from the system and then finally gridlock we feel like this is one of the the the big failures of a lot of the reporting right now about gridlock in washington is they're not drawing the money in politics connection they just talk about the tea party but instead what we heard when i heard when we talked to members of congress and senators is that the reason why they don't aren't getting along is in part because they don't have time to get along and for this we would cite tom harkin said he said quote we used to have a senate dining room that was only for senators we go down there and sit around there and joe biden and  ted stevens and strom thurman and a bunch of us democrats and republicans we'd have lunch and joke and tell stories and develop a great camaraderie that dining room doesn't exist anymore not because people aren't going but because well we're just not there for instance we're gone on monday and friday tuesday we have our party caucuses that leaves wednesday and thursday and guess what people are doing then they're out raising money tom  daschle who is a member of my organization and works with us on a bunch of stuff was a press press conference with us on capitol hill two months ago and he said point blank i couldn't run the senate anymore because of all the fund raising was going on i just simply with this book is connect the dots for people to help folks see the linkages between money driven corruption and the inability of our government to work as it should for our benefit so the story we're really telling through a nation on the take is a story about the loss of self government and by that we mean the loss of our collective power to solve their own problems in the middle part of the book we tell this larger story through the the personal meet because of what they have to spend out of their own pockets every month for bill's prescriptions and that's that's thanks to the money for the pharmaceutical industry spends year in and year out to block any legislation mother a mother of six and as for years she's been trapped in a seemingly never ending nightmare of a struggle to keep or her home out of foreclosure and that is thanks to the hundreds of millions of dollars that the banking industry spent  shape the financial reforms that congress passed six years ago in ways that benefit banks and mortgage companies and makes it actually hellish elegy difficult for many average folks to to get the financial help they need and instead of bankruptcy and foreclosure we could have gone on and on there were many different examples we chose five industries to as i said to help connect the dots for people one that we didn't include we did a quite a bit of research was to the loans as i mentioned earlier i was able to leave college without any student debt now the the average student with with college loans has thirty five thousand dollars in student debt and those debts are almost impossible to discharge even if you file for bankruptcy and that's because of the the influence of lenders in two thousand and five they were able to make sure that in the bankruptcy reform act of two thousand and five that provision was included that makes it almost impossible for people with student loan debt to discharge those those debts to drive home the point of just how completely our system of government and our way of life has been shaped by being money big money from cradle to grave we told the story of a newborn baby girl here's what we wrote about the system that really has been created by big money imagine a baby  named born this morning in a hospital whose regulations medical equipment pharmaceuticals staff training and certification were partly created by the system little eve will ride home tonight in a car that was engineered by the system as much as it was by engineers the mileage it gets how safe it is the materials it's made of what goes into the gas tank how it's taxed what comes out of tailpipe evil arrive at home built at a home built to standards established in part by the system lobbyist trade groups phony citizens groups and corporate executives have waged massive campaigns for decades that are determine the quality of every breath of air that even draws into her new lungs her mother's breast milk has already been infused with pesticides herbicides and hormone disruptors that chemical companies and their representatives have fought to keep on the market once he starts eating solid food what other chemicals will she be consuming here's a spoiler alert less than a third of the eighty thousand chemicals on the u s market today are regulated at all so it's ultimately on and answerable question was  and if so to what degree and by whom the banking lobby has its fingerprints all over the regulations that shape her parents mortgage their taxes their medical bills their job opportunity eve can't escape the reach of the system you can't we can't government is a stand it's either working for us or it's working for those who are trying to rig it to get what they want sucking your employees legislators into their agendas and often diverting the resources our tax dollars into their pockets the message of all these of all these stories is that it's become increasingly difficult to truly solve any problem anymore for the common good even the financial reform that congress passed in two thousand and ten that was partial reform that first and foremost back to the profits of the special interest and sort of the same can be said for the health care reform congress passed the same year this is what we mean when we talk about the loss of self government the entire middle section of the book is in essence about what our nation's founders feared and hoped to guard against they feared corruption above anything else and by this we we mean not the corruption that never inevitably occurs when some of the people we vote for are found to be taking a few bucks under the table the founders knew that that kind of corruption would always be with us just because of human nature the kind of corruption that worried them most was the bending of government away from the public good and toward the interest of the few the few with the means with the money to buy influence to buy public policy to buy our government here's what thomas jefferson wrote exactly two hundred years ago in a letter to a former senator who like me call philadelphia home i hope jefferson wrote i hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy are very moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial  strength and bid defiance to the laws of their country that's two hundred years ago just imagine what thomas jefferson with a now so the hope part here's another thomas jefferson quote i hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing and is necessary in the political world as storms in the physical it's medicine necessary for the sound health of government so what can be done seattle actually is a great example but there are four things unfortunately one always says what's the silver bullet there is no silver bullet for this cause there are four areas that we need to work on number one is new ways of financing campaigns i truly believe the seattle model is the most revolutionary model out there and would love to see it replicated at the federal level but there are other models to like new york city has a matching funds model in which every donation given to a city council can let up two hundred  seventy five is matched six to one so all the sudden a fifty dollars donor looks like a three hundred fifty dollars donor to a potential politician and if you look at what the brennan center has done when they've studied pre and post that system pre that system all the fundraising in new york city was occurring in deep red dots on the upper east side an upper west side of manhattan two thousand dollars a plate dinners at wealthy people's apartments post that system all of a sudden the entire city basically all the boroughs look freckled because all the fundraising got pushed back out and so what politicians are saying is that now and sort of trying to figure out who can host a high dollar fundraiser for a they're holding barbecues back home in the bronx and brooklyn and elsewhere with their constituents fifty dollars you know ahead and it's totally democratized the political financial power in the city which then democratizes the rest of the power there are other models to connecticut has a clean money model manges thank god kinda kind of what we did when we struck down the idea of a poll tax that's what you all just done with campaign finance so hopefully the system will work really well in the next election and we can we can then begin replicating it rapidly around the country so that's number one number two ethics and lobbying reform even if you do campaign in finance if you don't deal with the revolving door you still have a huge problem so our proposal in the book is to jam the revolving door at least ten years we talk to off the notorious lobbyist who you guys remember went to jail jack actually endorsed the book and jack said he said five years he said five years is nothing i can get around five years i just hire some person i put the payroll have you know go out and play a lot of golf for five years build some relationships and then they could register as a lobbyist got to ten so that seems rather crucial transparency and disclosure i don't you know i think that in a way transparency disclosure has been overrated as the centerpiece or what a lot of people in washington think that it should be the centerpiece of reform it's important it's kind of a base that we all need but it's really you know right now ninety percent of the money in the system you can see is transparent ten percent is dark money so we're doing pretty well with transparency there are still improvements that need to get made we need to get rid of five one c four organizations entirely and make sure that the money flowing through most transparent and then finally we need a cop on the bea t the federal election commission is utterly broken it has six commissioners three republicans and three democrats they gridlock on all important issues and as a result the political class feels like it's the wild west like or maybe the better metaphor is they're like teenagers and the parents are out of town and they've got the run of the house so they're just going to they're just going to do whatever they want basically the super pacs as they exist today probably would not exist if not for the federal election commission because they are not supposed to be coordinating with campaigns and they are not supposed to be dedicated to a single candidate but they're doing both and the f e c won't do a thing about it so we've got to fix the f e c also so that sounds complicated and this is obviously a fight that is fundamentally about power in this country and who has power and why but one of the things we point out is that this is actually a very easy technical fix unlike other things that we have to fix in this country so here's what you write fixing most of this problem is technically remarkably simple compared to other things we need to fix we could do it in a day with a single piece of legislation if we had the power to get the legislation passed no pipes or wires or army bases have to be moved no new power plants need to be built or smokestacks retrofitted no cyber attacks need to be defended against no international humanitarian missions need to be launched no families or individuals have to change the way they eat or drive or raise their children no federal agency needs to be funded no schools need to alter the way they educate their children the workers need to be retrained those things transportation education public health national security good jobs those are very complicated things to fix and by the way many of them are much harder to fix because of the influence of money in politics this though how money flows in and around our political system our government is in light of those things a technical tweak and should be something that we routinely do as americans almost like cleaning out your gutters after the fall leaves clogged what are we up against for the sake of argument let's say there are about one hundred thousand people who will fight like hell to make sure that no campaign finance measure can pass hundred thousand is likely even too high a number i know a lot of lobbyist for instance who are completely sick of the game and plenty of politicians too and plenty of donors political donors by the way cannot stand it because their phones are ringing ten or twelve times a day with united states senators and house members on the other end of the line and  as one of them said to me he said i just think it's pathetic so let's but let's stick with a hundred thousand that's point zero zero three percent of the united states population we need the other ninety nine point nine seven percent need to push aside our cynicism and exhaustion and join with others from all walks of life to create a new surprising unstoppable movement for reform and what if we fail then what we will have certainly proven that as mark mc said an american oligarchy is no longer something that's just postulated intellectually but it's quickly becoming a reality so last night that i wanted to point out is that inevitable in some way especially when the soviet union fell and the theory was that somehow capitalism and democracy were the logical sisters and if we could go in and start help capitalizing russia they would become logically a democracy that could then spread these to asia but unfortunately that didn't happen and if you look at south america right now they're back sliding in terms of democracy so the experiment of democracy itself no longer seems so inevitable in fact it seems like it's possibly something that might not exist in such great quantities fifty years from now much more to kill it about this is a guy named stein reagan who's a professor of sociology and history at oxford and he wrote this he said it took only two hundred fifty years for democracy to disintegrate in ancient athens it would be two thousand years before democracy was reinvented in the united states and with with the united states constitution now as a representative democracy again government by popular consent proved ingenious the united states grew into the world's leading superpower economically culturally and militarily in europe democracies overtook authoritarian monarchies and fascist and communist dictatorships now the second democratic experiment is approaching two hundred fifty years two hundred forty years this year it has been as successful as the first but the lesson from athens is that success does not breed success democracy is not the default for human civilization it is a form of government that must be created with determination and that will disintegrate in the last it is due to fully nurtured in the united states and britain democracy is disintegrating when it should be nurtured instead by bold leadership if the lights go out in the model democracies they will not stay on elsewhere and so i think that we have to take that very very seriously and i know that this cause is one that does seem so overwhelming i mean the local victories are fantastic when at the federal level i know seems huge but i honestly have to say that it's not just that i worry about us not being able to fix the problems that we face in this country and that my children are going to face it so i actually worry that the experiment democracy is losing and that it might not be around in one hundred years if we don't fight like hell right now to restore it if you've been paying any attention at all to the presidential campaigns and i know you all have you know the bernie sanders of making a very big deal of big money in politics and he really doesn't miss an opportunity to talk about the urgency of taking some action and i think that i'm deadly played a big role in his victory here and in the other states where he's doing quite well actually one of the the centerpiece of his campaign that's great and nick and i hope that he keeps talking about it  and that he keeps talking about all the way to philadelphia where the conventional be held but it might lead you to think that this is just liberal cause the folks nothing could be really further from the truth polls consistently show that almost as many republicans as democrats believe that money plays too much of a role and in american politics there's a poll conducted last year by the new york times c b s news that showed that eighty four percent of adults  including eighty percent of republicans think that money has too much influence in american politics and that same poll eighty five percent said that they want to see campaign finance either fundamentally changed or completely overhauled and on the issue of limiting contributions seventy one percent of republicans along with eighty percent of democrats said that they they favored such limits both nick and i know a lot of republicans personally believe it or not and who are just as concerned  about this is as any democrat several of them are actually on issue wants board and there are a lot of tea party members who are also very engaged in fact that one of the very first people i talked to about money in politics was a friend of mine who who who actually went on to become head of the tea party in washington d c and he said he got involved in politics because of just the disgust he  saw based on local politics in fairfax county virginia result developers just getting their way and pretty much buying what they wanted from local officials one of us active and effective groups in the movement is an organization called take back arab public which was started by john potter who played a key role in the successful campaign to oust eric cantor a couple of years ago in the republican primary in virginia  another conservative in this fight is richard painter who worked for george w bush in fact he was his ethics are he's also a minnesota law professor and the author of a new book called taxation only with representation the conservative conscience conscious conscience and campaign finance reform reform he wrote an op ed in the new york times recently and this is one of the things he wrote why should conservative voters care the first big money  politics encourages big government campaign contributions drive spending on the earmarks and other wasteful programs bridges to nowhere contracts for equipment the military doesn't need solar energy companies to go bankrupt and the government and for profit educational institutions that don't educate when politicians are dependent on campaign money from contractors and lobbyist they are incapable of holding spending programs to account pain and went on to quote barry goldwater who wrote in hundred sixty book the conscience of a conservative that and that's what goldwater wrote in order to achieve the widest possible distribution of political power financial contributions to political campaigns should be made by individuals and individuals alone i see no reason for labor unions or corporations to participate in politics painter added that the current system is a betrayal of the vision of participatory democracy embraced by the founders certainly agree with that that indeed we should in such an otherwise divisive time we think this might be the very thing that can reunite us as a country as i said earlier this is the one issue in which democrats and republicans and liberals and conservatives and independents agree on and although the name stream media is not really covering it the revolution has really already begun liberals and conservatives have ever come together  places as different as far apart as maine and and tallahassee florida and here in seattle in tallahassee voters there approved measures to reduce the influence of big money on state and local elections before i turn it back over to to nick i might want to say that the cynics and the naysayers particularly those inside the beltway contend that this is just too hard to do that will never be  able to fix this because the wealthy and the powerful just have too much wealth and power but we've done this before in our book we we write about the times in our nation's history when we when we stood up to the entrenched special interest as as we did during the leadership of teddy roosevelt roosevelt became the single greatest champion of campaign finance reform that the country probably has ever seen when he took on the so called in the gilded age and compared to many of the other victories in our history what we need to do now actually actually seems a lot easier i think about what we as a people have addressed over the years  abolition of slavery suffrage civil rights and and marriage equality to mention just a few we look back to abraham lincoln who who said he hated the the monstrous injustice of slavery because he said that he said so eloquently it deprives their republican example of his just influence in the world we look back to elizabeth cady stanton who had the audacity to believe that women should be able to to vote and to suggest that we hold these truths to be self evident that all men and women are created equal we look back to martin luther king who moved us with our lawmakers to action with that one unforgettable sentence that i think you probably all have heard many many times i have a dream that i for the little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character and just last year we heard one of the conservative members of the supreme court  make the case that all of us should have the right to marry the one we love as justice anthony kennedy said of of the plaintiffs in the majority opinion their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness excluded from one of civilizations old as institutions they ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law the constitution grants them that right so i mention these milestones in our history to remind us that it is the american way to tackle big issues and it can constantly make progress toward that more perfect union no one is more proud of our country and the promise it represents than the naked eye we teamed up to write this book to hopefully make it more likely  that my son and and and and his wife and nick's kids and future generations who who come after us well or quite frankly still have that republican example that lincoln spoke about a  you talk about how you know democrats and republicans who want to change this issue i want you to talk a bit more about how much overall the r and c and d n c has been preventing any progress and what you s so it's interesting because they both both parties but the politicians in both parties are utterly exhausted by the system at this point i mean we didn't talk to a single politician who enjoys the job of fund raising and dialing for dollars half their time and what we didn't talk about is where the where they have to do they can't make any fundraising phone calls from capitol hill so they're there shuttled off to the d c headquarters where they sit in little tiny cubicles with call sheet stacks of call sheets this thick and a can of soda and they've got oftentimes they'll have an aide standing by who while they're talking to one person on the phone will dial the next person so they don't even have to take time to dial and they're doing that anywhere between three and four hours a day the d triple c in fact stipulated to new democrats coming in to congress and twenty fifteen that they spend four hours a day dialing for dollars and another hour a day doing what's called strategic outreach which means in person fund raising in washington typically from the industries they're supposed to be regulating so if you're on the finance committee you're at charlie palmer steak house which is two blocks from the capitol having lunch with bank lobbyist they there are very very few people who enjoy this process at this point and as i said the political donors are also really sick of it i mean if you just think about that three billion bucks total expenditures in two thousand verses the ten billion this year that's seven extra billion dollars dollars that would otherwise be going into philanthropy like into schools and homeless shelters and conservation land because that money is coming primarily from wealthy individuals who would be putting it off for someone so the d n c and r and c of course facilitate this activity but they also know that th e treadmill is moving so fast right now that the politicians are getting flung off it just like steve israel who resigned because of it so they know that something's got to give what they will be most concerned about is whether or not the politicians will have enough money if we develop new ways of financing campaigns to run viable campaigns what they saw with the presidential public financing system is that because it wasn't appropriately indexed people started opting out of it you guys remember in fact b obama was the first presidential candidate to opt out of a presidential pardon public financing system which basically killed it because it would only provide him with a hundred fifty million to run for reelection and he knew that he could raise a billion so as long as that so the key for the d n c for the for the political class is to make sure that the money provided by new systems is enough money if it's not not enough money then they'll probably oppose it if it's enough then they'll go for it was raising money was begging for money you know given the favorable statistics polls in the why is the clear champion is losing bernie yes i think they're i think that's much more complicated right i mean you know  reason why i was running as a democrat this year is because he couldn't imagine getting ballot access to an independent so i mean there are all kinds of things that are up but dragging down the burning campaign but obviously the message his message is resonating and listen ted cruz talks in almost every speech about what he calls the washington cartel which is the marriage of corporations and lobbyist making policy trump obviously is pretty good on this issue talked about how he can't be bought everyone else on the stage body can't be bought and hillary has the robust campaign finance platform that she's ever embraced in her entire life she doesn't talk enough about it but it's incredibly well done so it's the issue is there but i agree you know and bernie has driven it harder than anyone but you know we're not single issue voters in this country that all those other considerations whether it's brooklyn brewery ever would be overridden if they were true truly the kind of public support that you talk about and that support coming even from participants  politicians there's public support i guess the distinction is public support in the polls but what is lacking in nick and i know this to be the case and something to be working on going forward is there really has to be a movement more organized  than that exists right now there are a lot of organizations like nix and others that are in this this fight but there's a lot of work it do so back to the hope part of your speech you talked  john sarbanes congressman from maryland son of paul sarbanes the former senator has a piece of legislation called the democracy for all act which would create a matching funds system for congressional campaigns has one hundred fifty eight democratic sponsors on it and on the senate side durban has proposed something similar and is collecting support it's going to take two things in my mind number one the political repositioning of this cause away from the left if as long as campaign finance reform is seen as a lefty give away cause it we're not going to get it done in this country today not just in washington but also in most of the states i don't know if you guys have run the numbers recently in the states but here's the deal seven states only seven states in this country are what are called blue trifecta states where you've got a democrat governor and democrats control both chambers of the legislature seven twenty hearing about with millennialism latinos it's not happening and so as long as this is seen as like a big lefty cause it's not going to happen so we've got to reposition it as a centrist cause an american cosmic cause that we all care about because we all care about preserving what the founding fathers started number one number two it's going to take bringing the mob to the gates of the castle the when you talk to politicians about this exist current politicians what they say is i don't hear a lot about it i don't get phone calls about i get phone calls about drug pricing about guns about abortion about x y and z i don't hear enough about this and until they hear enough about it until they actually feel like their jobs are on the line because they are taking the wrong stance they're not going to feel compelled to act so we've got we've got to create a much more vibrant and powerful and racist movement than what currently exist is creating some pressure on the other side maybe we should be very happy about absolutely yeah they are you know the tea party folks are deeply concerned about and about the money establishment within the republican party that they feel like is lock them out of everything if you look at so back in november when the congress was fish finishing up business before the holidays there was huge piece of spending legislation went through and one of the things that mcconnell attached to it was a provision that would allow the basically struck down a little campaign finance rule that would allow the political parties to raise more direct what's called hard money than they previously could the tea party raged against it just as much as the progressives against it so you're you are seeing in as one mentioned also in tallahassee you're seeing an interesting marriage of grassroots bernie kind of progressives with it's not really i can't figure out whether they're rand paul tea party types or what type but with tea party types who feel as if both parties have been hijacked by wall street and the wealthy and they want to see some kind of revolution occur from the bottom up so this group take back are a public that when you mentioned earlier is headed by a guy named john pudden or john pudden or ran dave brat's campaign against eric can or he's the guy who tea party to eric cantor and he lives in alabama any of nine children and he learned politics at the heels of ralph reed doing christian coalition organizing and he's the real deal so he's not great on gay marriage and other stuff that maybe some people in this room are but he is the real deal and he thinks that our republicans been hijacked by big money so so so i think there is something really fascinating that's occurring but it's going to take a great act of trust on sides for progressives to reach out to tea party people and create this pub this potentially extremely powerful strange bedfellow coalition something we should be workin absolutely yeah so i you may not have heard of initiative fourteen thirty four which has been filed with the secretary of state in washington and it is being run by represent us and they are doing exactly what you were just suggesting making sure that the campaign committee includes republicans democrats well i don't know about democrats legal women voters and tea party person and  we're not ready to move into had unless they had that combination of people involved and it's fashioned after the seattle initiative and so i'm hopeful that the people in washington state will also see that it's really important to fix democracy first works on these issues in the state and we're hopeful that it doesn't interfere with initiative seven thirty five which if people get confused they often do and you have a bunch of initiatives on the ballot but i think that it's promising and we would be the first state to have that kind of campaign financing and regulations around lobbying and the revolving door and so i'm i'm hopeful that people in this room well look for it and look for the petitions that are being circulated now and that it gets on the ballot and you know we're talking on the way down here a few of us about trump and is it do you think yeah that the question is some people think trump is a good thing because he has his own money and therefore he doesn't have to ask people and he could be more independent you think that's correct  what is money in politics really matter because if you look at bush here is one hundred million dollars and he's you know out of the scene and trump is self financing and our simple answer is that no amount of money can overcome a lackluster candidate