Are We Now a Broligarchy?
58:15 Share

Hi, I'm Bianca Taylor. I'm the host of KQED's daily news podcast, The Latest. Powered by our award-winning newsroom, The Latest keeps you in the know because it updates all day long. It's trusted local news in real time on your schedule. Look for The Latest from KQED wherever you get your podcasts and stay connected to all things Bay Area in 20 minutes or less.

From KQED.

From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. If Donald Trump's nominees are confirmed, his administration could include a minimum of 13 billionaires collectively worth $383 billion.

While wealthy people have long been involved with presidential administrations, there's a point where the difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. And that's not even talking about the phalanx of tech executives who literally lined up behind Trump at his inauguration. Today we talk with experts about what the vast wealth entering and surrounding the administration says about the ethics and actions of the second Trump administration. It's all coming up next after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Growing up in the United States in the post-Reagan era, the idea of being a conservative implied a Milton Friedman-esque faith in the markets. The right in the U.S. might have wanted social conservative action, but the markets and therefore the companies were mostly supposed to be left alone to creatively destroy each other and make money. The government was supposed to be small.

But the same is not necessarily true around the world. Right-wing movements in Europe have often seen a role for the fusion of a large and directive central government with their large corporations. But that wasn't our thing, at least not in the main. Previous presidents didn't literally line up the CEOs of the most valuable companies in the world behind themselves at their inaugurations.

A move Trump made that Steve Bannon described as a sign that Trump, quote, broke them. At the same time, this administration is filling its ranks with billionaires, creating an unprecedented fusion of wealth and governmental power that feels outside the American tradition, whatever its other flaws.

Have we entered the age of the, quote, broligarchy? To discuss, we've got Brooke Harrington, professor of sociology at Dartmouth College, also the author of Offshore, Stealth, Wealth, and the New Colonialism. Her most recent piece for The Atlantic is titled What the Broligarchs Want from Trump. Welcome, Brooke. Thank you.

We're also joined by Paul Pearson, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of Let Them Eat Tweets, How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, as well as Winner Takes All, How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Welcome, Paul. Great to be here, Alexis.

And we've got Noah Bookbinder, who's the president of CRU, that's Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Welcome, Noah. Thanks so much for having me. Paul, I think I want to start with how we got here. We know wealth inequality in this country has been increasing for almost 50 years, with the very richest people increasingly leaving specifically the bottom 50% of Americans behind.

But it feels to me like the last five years have seen an even more obscene concentration of wealth at the very, very top in the form of these billionaires with amazing fortunes. What happened?

Well, that's a big and super important question. I mean, and I agree with you that what's happening now seems staggering, even if you take a long view and recognize that wealth inequality has been growing in the U.S. for half a century. I think one way to think, put in perspective what's happening right now is that in 1983, the top of the Forbes 400 list was Gordon Getty with

with a fortune of about $6 billion. That's in current dollars, so inflation is not telling the story here. So he was worth about $6 billion. In 2024, Elon Musk would be at the top of that wealth list with a fortune of $420 billion and with a gain of $200 billion just in 2024 alone. So his gain in the last year was 30 times

the total fortune of the person who a generation ago was at the top of the list. So it's just a staggering change. And it's, you know, it's driven by radical economic change. First, I think people would say a driver was financialization. You have the rise of Wall Street. There's a reason why it was called Occupy Wall Street when there was a reaction in 2010. But increasingly in recent years,

The tech fortunes have just wildly outplaced what's happened on Wall Street.

You know, Brooke Harrington, in your work, you kind of pointed out something that should be obvious to anyone looking at what's happening in the Trump administration, which is that a lot of the wealthiest people surrounding Trump, both in his administration and those lined up at the inauguration, with the exception of Lynn McMahon, they're all men. And many of them are also public figures in a way that maybe not all the wealthy people of old were.

So talk to me a little bit about how you see that situation. And is it what we normally would think of as an oligarchy or some kind of political system like that? Well, I think that I call them the broligarchs because they really are different from oligarchs in past eras of American history. We always had rich people bending the ear of our governments, right?

Rockefellers and Carnegies and so forth. But they weren't so public and overt about their political program. And as you rightly point out, the people I'm calling the broligarchs, which are the billionaires who come from high-tech finance and pharmaceuticals, they have a kind of

quasi-celebrity status that they've cultivated. They have a distinctive set of political beliefs that they're very determined to force on the rest of us. Unfortunately, that political vision is extremely hostile to democracy. You mentioned Reagan at the start of this.

I remember that transition in America. I actually shook Ronald Reagan's hand when I was 11 years old. And I remember when he was first running for president and this tectonic shift in American life happened where the whole idea of a public good or a common fate as Americans, he kind of made it disappear like a magic trick. And ever since then, it's become socially acceptable.

to have wealth for its own sake without any sort of social contribution. And that is truly radical and distinct from what oligarchs of the past were able to get away with socially. Noah Bookbinder, I want to bring you into this conversation. I mean, obviously it's complicated to reduce the things that are happening at the top of the American political system just to one variable, but...

How much of this situation that we're now in and facing is due to the Citizens United decision of years past and the flood of money that then followed into American elections after that? I mean, I think there have been a number of important decisions.

factors, uh, and, and some that we're really maybe just starting to understand that, that brought us to the place, uh, where we are now, but certainly, uh, the Citizens United decision. And really that is shorthand for a series of decisions in which the Supreme Court essentially said that we can have unlimited money in, in politics. Um, it had a, it really, um,

had a sea change effect on our politics, which means a number of things. And one of those is that industries, but particularly people with enormous, enormous amounts of money can have a vastly outsized influence on

who gets elected, but not only can they have vastly outside influence on who gets elected, but they also will get the ear of whoever gets elected because they're

You know, those officials know that these people gave a ton of money to support them and that they might not be where they are without them. And more and more, it's, you know, not only has it become possible for people to give unbelievable sums of money, but it's become possible for them to do it without the rest of us knowing about it. So they can give a ton of money. The people they're supporting know about it, but we don't.

And that really skews who has influence and who has the ear of those making decisions. You know, Paul, I read a statistic that 40 percent of all political donations come from the top one percent of the one percent. And on its face, it seems like that concentration of political donations is bad. But break down for us why it might not be a good thing.

Yeah, I mean, actually, the numbers that I've seen, the most recent numbers are a little bit worse than that. If you look at just the top 400 donors, which is which is even less than the top hundredth of one percent. So the top 400 donors in the country are.

When Barack Obama won in 2008, they gave about 5% of the total money going into federal elections. And in this year's election, it's about 28%.

Which is just astonishing, right, to think that three out of every $10 that are flowing into federal money, into federal elections, are coming from just 400 people. And, you know, obviously that's going to mean, as the other people on the panel have mentioned, that policymakers are going to be paying an awful lot of attention to what those people want. And that means that they're going to be paying less attention to what ordinary citizens want. Right.

I think just one and this has been going on for a while. And I think just one very clear indication of that is that once again, a Republican Congress is going to put tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans and corporations at their top of their political agenda. And this is true every time they come into office.

And and it's true, even though there's just no support in public opinion, including from Republican voters. You know, Republican voters do not say that they want to cut taxes for for the very wealthiest Americans and corporations. And the overall electorate doesn't say that either. And yet this is what what the government delivers when when these people have the year of the governors. You know, Noah, maybe this is just to ask the most obvious thing, but, you know,

It feels like the ethical situation of both a president asking for this money as well as the people who are giving it at those levels. Is it possible for that to happen in a way that's not ethically compromised? I don't really think there is. I don't really think that that is possible. You could imagine maybe if there were

a system of either complete transparency or a system where the person receiving the money could never have any idea who gave it. You know, you can maybe imagine some scenarios where it's a little less ethically compromised. Any of those scenarios are miles away from where we are today. I mean, what you actually saw in this election was this staggering revelation, which

You know, we really hadn't seen it in such stark terms before that that Donald Trump actually went to a gathering of oil company executives, some of the wealthiest people in the country, and said, if you raise a billion dollars for my campaign,

I will guarantee national policy that is good for the oil companies. Now, there's some dispute as to whether he presented it as a quid pro quo or whether it was just, hey, I'm going to do this. You should give me the money. But it sure sounded a lot like an exchange. We'll be back with more on the role of billionaires in the second Donald Trump administration. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Donald Trump has appointed an unprecedented number of billionaires and very wealthy people into his cabinet, which is leading some to ask whether we're now in a broligarchy era. Helping us understand how we got here and where we're going, we're joined by Brooke Harrington, a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College.

Paul Pearson, political science professor at UC Berkeley, and Noah Bookbinder, who's the president of CRU, that's Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. I want to hear from you. What role should billionaires play in this government?

You can give us a call, 866-733-6786. What are your concerns or questions about the level of extreme wealth represented in the Trump administration? That's 866-733-6786. The email is forum at kqed.org. Find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram. We're KQED Forum there, of course.

Brooke, before the break, we were talking about the massive infusions of wealth into our politics. I mean, did you want to add to those comments? And maybe I'm also very interested in the comparison between now and the Gilded Age, this late 19th century time where we did have extreme levels of wealth concentration. Yes, thank you.

When I was doing the research for this new book you mentioned, Offshore, I delved into some American history that I thought I was familiar with. But I learned some things that were very striking to me. Like, for example, until...

Rather recently, it was a widely held idea in the United States in a bipartisan way that vast concentrations of wealth in private hands were literally incompatible with a democratic society. Even Thomas Jefferson wrote about it. He called aristocracies of more harm and danger than benefit to society.

And Teddy Roosevelt talked about malefactors of great wealth. And, you know, that was a recurring theme up until about the Reagan 80s, when the moral valence of private wealth just flipped 180 degrees to be a good in and of itself that didn't need justification. But I think we're living in the logical consequence of this idea that wealth is a

should be allowed to grow to the point where certain individuals become more powerful than the government that made them prosperous. And that's what I heard from many of the wealth managers I went around the world to interview, that their own clients saw themselves as more powerful than the governments of individual nations, and they treated those nations like playthings, like paper dolls to be manipulated. You can't have democracy under those conditions.

whether in the U.S. or anywhere else. You know, Paul, you mentioned the unpopularity of tax cuts for the very rich. At the same time, why do you think Americans haven't voted for, taken steps, made moves to prevent amassing this kind of wealth or if it's been amassed, being deployed into the political system?

Well, I think public opinion polls suggest pretty strongly that most voters would favor those kinds of activities. And I mean, this would get us into a deeper conversation about the contemporary structure of American politics, which makes political reform extremely, extremely difficult. And you have I mean, just to mention two obvious obstacles against any kind of major reform of campaign finance. And again, the polls suggest that voters would actually favor this.

favor it quite strongly. But one is the U.S. Senate, where you have the filibuster, and you were never, you know, think of the role that Mitch McConnell, who, of course, is one of the biggest cheers for Citizens United, Mitch McConnell in the Senate, you're not going to get anything past a filibuster there. And then, of course, the Supreme Court, which has now become an incredibly powerful source of policymaking and policybreaking in the United States.

And with a 6-3 Republican majority on the Supreme Court, you're not going to get any reform of Citizens United. You know, Noah, for a long time, wealthy people, of course, have been in and around particularly the federal government, right? I mean, the ambassadorships are kind of a famous example of that.

And over time, we've at least tried to create some rules for how to handle wealth while people are in government and decision-making positions. What are those rules? And do they actually work in our current situation? Are they adaptable even to these vast infusions of wealth or does it just completely break them?

I mean, there certainly are some rules. A lot of those rules were developed in the kind of post-Watergate reform period. So there are rules, for instance, that say that people who are appointed to high-level government positions need to disclose their sources of income, their investments. Then they need to come up with plans either to...

divest, to sell off those interests if there might be conflicts of interest, or to recuse themselves, to not make decisions that could affect their wealth. And over time, those rules and a whole litany of related rules have worked pretty well. And I think we've seen in recent years them starting to break down. The

Politics have changed, there's much more willingness to kind of blow through traditions and even blow through rules and laws where there aren't strong enforcement mechanisms. There's also this kind of level of wealth and power that didn't exist previously.

You know, you have to wonder if you have somebody like an Elon Musk who has vast business interests and also is being given a position which we're still figuring out exactly how it's going to work, but may give him influence over how.

large swaths of the government work, are you going to be able to avoid conflicts of interest there? And even if you can, even if you have a situation where, you know, he really is not weighing in on any decisions that could affect his wealth,

If you have someone who is known to be enormously powerful and very close with the president, you have to wonder whether other decision makers in government are going to feel like they need to be favorable to him, even if he didn't say a word, in order to make sure that they're keeping on the right side of the president and those close to him. So I don't know that the current system can work in these kinds of situations. Mm-hmm.

You know, Paul, at the top of the show, I mentioned that Steve Bannon said that the reason that Donald Trump lined up tech executives behind him at the inauguration was to show that he had broken them, was the quote, as to say that he controlled this set of people. What do you think about that?

Well, I actually think it's something to take quite seriously. It's the one thing I am a little concerned about in conversations like this, that we can think that these unbelievably wealthy oligarchs are kind of pulling the strings entirely. And while I think they obviously have way disproportionate influence, I also think we need to take seriously the idea that President Trump

is extremely powerful in this situation and that at least some of these oligarchs have come on board not because there's so much ideologically aligned with the president. I mean, clearly some of them like Elon Musk are ideologically aligned with the president and sort of thrilled to get out there and parade around on stage.

A lot of them, I think, actually, as Brooke was saying before, kind of like would rather be in the background and not up there on the stage, which is actually quite unpopular, I think, with most American voters to see these billionaires parading around. But I think many of them are actually quite fearful of President Trump and because.

He's concentrated now enormous power in the executive branch. Our system of checks and balances is largely breaking down. We can't expect

uh republicans in congress to really provide much check or i think the courts the republican courts provide much check and you know trump has signaled very strongly that he is somebody who rewards his friends and punishes his enemies so if you're a very wealthy even if you're somebody as powerful as jeff bezos

You have to worry a lot about whether you're going to get that favorable regulatory decision, whether you're going to be able to make some merger, how some court case is going to be handled. And so Bannon maybe over-speaks in saying, as he likes to do, in saying that Trump has broken these people. But I think part of what you were seeing up there was bending the knee, right, which Trump likes people to do.

That to me actually is as worrisome in some ways as the kind of influence that these oligarchs might have for their own interests. It's the fact that they're also fearful of Trump and that there's a political alliance where he's the one pushing to basically leverage their resources, including their control over things like Twitter and Facebook, to get out the messages that he wants. Yeah.

Patrick, one of our listeners, writes in to say, "Can your guest comment on which political party gets the most money from the richest 400? I thought that they donate to both parties equally so they have an audience regardless of who gets elected." Paul, I may come to you on the factual question here. And then, Brooke, you mentioned something about the way that these ultra-wealthy folks

see themselves as above these kind of national political concerns. So let's Paul, do you happen to know the sort of party breakdown on those donations? Yeah, it's a great question. And it's shifted over time, I would say until recently, you know, Democrats, I mean, the Democrats continue to raise a bunch of money from billionaires as well. It hasn't all swung to the Republican side. But with the very top income givers, it's always been somewhat disproportionately Republican. And there seems to have been a real shift

especially in this last election. I mean, it is a real thing to see that, you know, a significant amount of the Silicon Valley money in particular has shifted over to the Republican side. And how about to that that other question of sort of whether, you know, for for the ultra wealthy, this is really just about hedging their their bets of plowing money into the political system. But they don't really they don't really have a party affiliation in that way.

No, I mean, I think that is like a thought stopping cliche. Whenever you hear people say both sides about anything, that's a way of sort of throwing up their hands and abdicating, engaging with the actual data. I think the data are actually quite clear that billionaires, not just in America, but around the world, want to support political parties that will not constrain them, that will not subject them to democracy, essentially.

They may attempt to buy some sort of insurance policy by donating to a pro-democracy party here and there. But fundamentally, the alliances of most billionaires around the world is to their own unfettered power. And that's one of the reasons they use the offshore financial system, which has been my research specialty for almost two decades.

That's a place that you go to escape not just taxes, but any laws you find inconvenient. Now, that runs up pretty hard against democracy, which is why even the Silicon Valley billionaires who did donate to the Democratic Party made one very specific demand, which is that Lina Khan be fired as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, because she was actually imposing the law on them, and they are not willing to tolerate that.

You know, Mike over on Blue Sky writes in to ask, you know, these billionaires role is to show us why it's a bad idea to let them have an outsized influence. Brooke, what allowed the tide to turn against the oligarchs to end the Gilded Age?

Well, you know, we had class traitors like Teddy Roosevelt who came along. He was one of them, and they expected him to align with them on their interests as heirs to dynastic fortunes. And he turned on them because his lifelong allegiance was to—well, actually, the—

He made himself famous in New York, for example, for enforcing all kinds of unpopular laws about, say, closing saloons on Sundays when people really wanted a drink. So although he was a big rule breaker in some aspects of his life and political career, he came along and said, you know what? We're not going to allow monopolies to just flourish unconstrained. We're going to break those up.

And there was a lot of shock on the part of his class peers, people he had known since he was a child, saying, wait a second, you're supposed to be on our side. I'm not sure if we have someone like that who can come along almost like a Trojan horse from the inside of the wealthy class and say, no, my allegiance is actually to preserving American democracy, however imperfect it is.

Am I wrong to worry that's too personal of an answer, that there were structural reasons why that was a possibility, that break was possible, and why the New Deal could come along with a bunch of the different reforms and increasing it? Like, weren't there other things that were going on, too, like aside from just individual people deciding to make these breaks?

Oh, for sure. But I was talking about the other Roosevelt, Teddy. Oh, I know, I know, I know. But like in that series of decades, the changes that might have come along? Oh, yeah. I mean, now I'm getting a little bit outside my area of expertise here. I'm not an historian, but...

What I've learned from reading people who are historians is that, you know, the conditions in the U.S. following the First World War and following everyone's observation of the Russian Revolution was, oh, my gosh, that could happen here, too. We better tamp down on any sort of labor activism and left-wing activism.

rallying, like what Eugene V. Debs tried to do with the Socialist Party. And then when the Great Depression came along, and it really looked like we might have the ingredients for another American revolution along the lines of the Bolshevik one in Russia, I think people were willing to try things out of desperation just to prevent that outcome. And

structurally, I think that desperation gave FDR permission that he might not otherwise have had. Maybe similar to what allowed Barack Obama to take office in the wake of the global financial crisis that started in 2008, because there was just such panic and desperation of like, we've got to try something new now. Yeah. You know, Paul, do you want to add anything on the

political situation or any of its historical resonances to those periods? Yeah, I think one way to think about this is there are a lot of downsides to massive economic inequality, you know, for ordinary citizens. And I think in that sense, there is a parallel between

the Gilded Age and the kind of gradual political revolution against the Gilded Age that has involved both the Progressive Era and later the New Deal, where in many ways a society that was producing huge amounts of wealth

had lost its capacity to actually improve the quality of life for ordinary Americans, right? And to translate that kind of wealth gain into actual gains in broad social prosperity. And we've witnessed something very similar really now over the last

generation, but it feels particularly intense at this moment with this increase in massive concentrations of wealth. But at the same time, lots of Americans are suffering economically and face very intense challenges. You know, there's been a

a breakdown in the gains in life expectancy in the U.S. in the past generation, which is really a stunning thing. I think an indication that prosperity is not spreading to the whole of the population. And you can see in public opinion huge discontent about that. It's not as if...

High levels of inequality are popular. There's a lot of discontent with the idea that billionaires should be having this kind of power. But there's also a lot of disillusion about the political process. And, of course, Donald Trump's, you know, one of the ironies of all this, right, is we're talking about the role of these billionaires.

billionaires in the power that they have in a Trump administration. But Trump has risen to political power in part based on the economic and social discontent. There's been this shift of working class, lower income voters away from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. We'll be back with more on that when we get back from break. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the unprecedented number of billionaires and ultra-wealthy people who Donald Trump has appointed into his administration. We're joined by Paul Pearson, a political science professor at UC Berkeley, co-author of Let Them Eat Tweets, How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. Noah Buchbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and Brooke Harrington, a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College, the author of

Offshore Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism. Let's bring in some callers here. Ed in Berkeley. Welcome.

Hi, good morning. So I have been living in this beautiful country for 60 years, spent 15 years at UC Berkeley, physics and nuclear engineering department. And I saw how a $28,000 house I bought in 1968 in Berkeley Hills, now selling for almost $2 or $3 million. The only solution, because what happened, the fact is the United States is richer than ever, richest than ever it has. But all of the money shifted so high,

Very few people have access to it. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Americans can't make ends meet, not only with horrible rent and horrible house costs, but also everyday life. Never mind when Mr. Reagan shipped technology

tens of billions of jobs to Japan, to Korea, and this is what we have now. We have to put ceiling in wealth. What do you do? What does this guy or this other guy do with $400 billion, $200 billion? You can't do anything. Your body chemical worth is a few bucks. We need to put ceiling in wealth. Call it whatever. It is not communism. It is not socialism. It is fact. We need to make the life of hundreds of millions of Americans better. I had pre-education.

Cal was free when I was student and professor there. Now it is beyond most middle class. So as many other schools, there's also war in education. We have to bring free education, free college education back. Let me take the wealth cap point to the panel here. No, I think I want to start with you now. Thank you for that point. I mean, Federal Reserve data...

we'll back up what you're saying about, you know, there has been this incredible acceleration of wealth moving to the top and for, you know, the middle and down, there's been stagnation. Noah, talk to me a little bit about, you know, the idea of these wealth caps as kind of a, you might call it an ethical aid, perhaps. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it ultimately, some kind of

or rules or practices that allowed more even distribution of wealth would be obviously in the interest of the vast majority of Americans. So why isn't that happening? Why are we moving in the opposite direction? And there are a number of reasons, but I think a lot of it comes back again to this

massive influence of money in politics. I think that, that, um, the people in charge, particularly somebody, uh, like Donald Trump who comes from great wealth and is, has surrounded himself with others, um, who are the wealthiest of the wealthy. Um, he understands that, you know, those behind him are people who would lose out, um, with this kind of proposition. And, um,

So he's not going to do it. And even in administrations which are in a different place politically, there is a lot of reliance on the wealthiest people. The other thing is that whether it's through lobbying or through TV commercials or much more stealth kind of

efforts to influence people over social media and otherwise. Money allows you to...

to have lots of opportunities to change people's minds. And there has been a tremendous success with sort of corporate interests and wealthy people launching, you know, really effective campaigns, often very quiet campaigns, but very effective to convince regular people that it's in their interest to go along with these sort of economic,

plans that actually aren't in their interest at all, because maybe someday they'll be very wealthy or, or their freedoms are endangered or a whole lot of other ways to kind of make this pro oligarchy position seem like something that regular people should want.

You know, Brooke Harrington, when I've talked to people about the possibility of, you know, either very high wealth tax at the very top or a wealth cap or something, a lot of the response seems to be, well, we couldn't do it because of offshore wealth tax.

havens and the kind of inability of the state to actually be able to implement some kind of wealth cap or very high wealth tax. In your research on this, have you come to agree with that position or do you think it's possible? I think it's possible on the condition that there's more international coordination in enforcing taxes because

The problem with wealth now is that it's fungible, it's fluid, it can be moved around the world really easily. And our tax systems are based on a world of material wealth, like land, which you can't just pick up and move around and hide from the taxman.

Now that you can take it to Singapore or the British Virgin Islands, it's really hard to know what wealth people have unless those other countries cooperate with you and share information. And the U.S. has been a notable contributor.

non-participant in many international agreements that would make it harder for wealthy people to elude the tax laws of their own countries. It's brought a lot of money to the U.S. because if the U.S. doesn't agree to share information with other countries about foreign nationals who put their money here in the U.S., that makes us sort of

a wild west. And in fact, the U.S. is number one on the list of secrecy havens. We provide the best secrecy to rich people who want to escape all manner of legal obligations, from taxes to debts to court judgments, what have you. That's not an honor. It's making some people very rich, but it also means that we're cut off from alliances that could help us

coordinate and crack down on elite tax avoidance and tax evasion. And basically that boosts the banking sector here, right? Because very wealthy people keep their money here. That's right. Let's bring in Hamayat in Fremont. Welcome.

Hi, good morning. I had a two-part question for the professor. The first question was, I have a lot of community members who don't like to participate in the process because they point out that it's controlled by the 1% or even less than that. So what's the point? What would the professor say to someone like that to convince them to keep participating in the process? And the second part of my question was,

Even though we have the right to vote now, does this seem just as worse of a time as it was in the times we didn't have the right to vote? Because at that time we weren't allowed to, and now it seems like even though we're allowed to, the money that's in politics is making our votes seem insignificant. Thank you. Thanks so much for that. Paul, why don't we take this one to you?

Yeah, it's a great question, of course, and the feelings that are expressed there are quite common. I think people are enormously disillusioned with the political system. They feel like it's broken. I guess I would say two things, though. One is that actually, you know, the Biden administration took the most aggressive steps, and Democrats in Congress, most aggressive steps to

to kind of push back in a more redistributive direction of really any administration since the 1960s. And a lot of those ended up falling short because they didn't, you know, they had

just a 50-50 Senate, the filibuster, you know, one senator, Joe Manchin, quite conservative, understandably, coming from the state of West Virginia. But they did accomplish some significant redistributive reforms to their important policies and came, I think, quite close

to getting a lot more done. So, you know, to me, that does suggest that there's a possibility there under the right circumstances that you could build on. And in a lot of ways, I think it was quite unfortunate that Biden

was running for reelection in the wake of COVID and inflation that was generated coming out of COVID that was just devastating for whatever government was in power all across Western democracies. So and even given that, you know, Trump still only won. He won by one and a half percent, which is the narrowest

popular vote victory, I think, since 2004. So, you know, he won. He actually won quite narrowly. So I do think that there were some possibilities there. And then I think the way that one has to also think about this is that you try to create a kind of self-reinforcing cycle where you begin with some reforms that can potentially build to other reforms. And that in the same way that we've sort of gotten into this very negative feedback loop of growing wealth and growing political power for oligarchs,

You know, if you can start getting reform moving in the other direction, hopefully it could build to things that are more consequential, like a serious effort to put some limits on wealth accumulation.

Listener over on X wants to make sure that we recognize one attempt here. Your panel discussed why Americans haven't used their vote to challenge the oligarchy. We tried. His name was Bernie Sanders. And what happened? The entire Democratic Party apparatus united to stop our movement. The Democratic Party, they're in the pocket of the wealthy, same as the GOP, taking into account what Brooke Harrington said earlier, which is oftentimes just saying both sides is a

means people don't engage in this way. What do you think, Brooke, about the Bernie challenge to the both sides argument? I was...

until recently, Senator Sanders' constituent, and I just made a little video for him about oligarchy. So I feel like he and I are aligned, at least on some important things. But I'm always really disturbed to hear people say, well, you know, there's money on both sides of American politics. Both parties are corrupt. Therefore, they're the same. Therefore, my vote is pointless. And it's

It's just so manifestly untrue in the results. Like the proof is in the pudding. What's life like under a GOP administration in recent years versus what's life like under a Democratic administration? It makes a big difference to me as a woman, I'll tell you that. It's not great to be in a situation where the Secretary of Defense is like,

"Yeah, women should just go back in the home and start having more babies. They have no role in public life." It makes a big difference. The imperfection, the corruption of democratic politics is not a reason to wash your hands of it or turn your back on it. It's a reason to roll up your sleeves and engage because it's actually possible to make it better.

I'm not advocating for any particular candidate or saying, you know, blow up the system either. I'm just saying, like, I like democracy, and I would like to put my effort into restoring it. And I think other people can too, but it will never happen if people throw up their hands and say both sides are the same. Alexis, could I just jump in real quickly on this? Yeah.

I completely agree with what you're saying, Brooke. And I think it's really important to recognize that the Sanders wing of the party

actually worked quite closely with Democratic moderates in that and during that Biden years. And, you know, so, of course, they didn't get everything that they wanted. There were a lot of compromises. But it was, I think, an example made much more difficult by just it's just so hard to pass things in the American political system, especially the way the Senate is structured. But it is an example of exactly what Brooke was talking about, where you had broad compromise within the coalition to try to advance democracy.

an agenda that would have done a lot for working class and middle class Americans. Let's bring in Stephen in Sonoma. Welcome.

I've been politically sober since November 6th at 4 o'clock in the morning West Coast time since Twitler won. I think that we need to get used to this type of dominance of oligarchs in our politics. Therefore, I would caution people to think locally, regionally, and statewide, and who they're sending to Congress. I mean, California is a different beast, but...

This is real. It's not going to change the money in politics. It will not change. And if you think it is, you're deluding yourself and your audience. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen.

The local situation is an interesting one. And, Noah, I'm going to come to you on this. Obviously, San Francisco's politics are a world away from the national political situation. But we also do have a mayor in San Francisco who poured $8 million of his own money into his campaign. The mother's net worth estimated around a billion dollars. We've got J.B. Pritzker and the Democratic Illinois governor, also a billionaire.

Around here, at least locally, one of the arguments that was made was that people with their own money, you know, who are in politics actually owe less to other people. And so it's kind of like an ethical boost. Like, what do you make of that argument?

It's an argument that we're hearing more and more these days on all sides of the political spectrum. That was one of Donald Trump's initial arguments. It's something that various Democratic politicians have made. Frankly, I find it pretty offensive. You know, the idea that at a time when we are worried about

about the influence of very wealthy and powerful people to say that, well, the only way to avoid that influence is to actually put those wealthy and powerful people into office directly seems utterly backwards, right? It is, yes, there might be less

of a tendency to be influenced by other people who are wealthy and powerful, although Donald Trump belies that a little bit.

But what you're essentially doing is saying that, well, the only cure to that is to directly give power to the already most powerful among us. And that is certainly not going to be the solution for making sure that government works for regular people. I think we have to, as Brooke and Paul have said, we need to all be engaging in the system to,

you know, be trying to do whatever we can to counter the influence of powerful interests. And we need to find ways locally and nationally a little bit at a time to move toward a real reform that allows us to start to resemble a democracy again.

A couple last thoughts from our listeners here. Cynthia writes, "The Broligarcs run public companies. They don't own them. And by the laws of the corporation, they're obligated to optimize earnings for the shareholders. They need to cozy up to Trump because they are obligated to earn money for the shareholders and Trump would punish their companies if he were offended." Cynthia, thanks for that comment. Patrick writes, "I think the more powerful force defeating the people in this case is the fact that roughly half

the country does not hear any real news. Trump Republicans and the oligarchs that have almost complete control of these people's beliefs and votes. This will only get worse as more and more people are captured by the false reality now created by social media, especially given that these oligarchs control that information source.

A lot of happy thoughts here at the end of the show. I mean, we have been talking about the unprecedented number of billionaires and ultra wealthy people in the Trump administration, helping us understand how this extreme wealth has been impacting our democracy. We've been joined by Brooke Harrington, professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. Her latest book is Offshore Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism. Thank you so much, Brooke. Thank you.

We have also been joined by Paul Pearson, political science professor here in the Bay at UC Berkeley, co-author of the books Let Them Eat Tweets, How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, as well as Winner Take All, How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Thank you, Paul. Great being here. Thanks, Alexis. And we've also been joined by Noah Bookbinder, president of CRU, that's Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Thank you, Noah. Thanks so much for having me on.

The 9 o'clock hour forum is produced by Grace Wan and Blanca Torres. Our interns are Brian Vo and Jesse Fischer. Welcome to the team, Jesse. Jennifer Eng is our engagement producer. Francesca Fenzi is our digital community producer. Judy Campbell's lead producer. Danny Bringer is our engineer. Katie Springer, a real hero, is the operations manager of KQED Podcasts. Our VP of news is Ethan Toven Lindsey, and our chief content officer is Holly Kernan.

I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour ahead with Mina Kim. Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.