YouSaid · the spoken record

Danielle Brian

lines on the record: 57
first: 2024-06-27
most recent: 2024-06-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The event's so powerful for the last 50 years. And that's kind of what we're writing about in our book is that this might be a period where a period of corporate power that we document how it came to be. And now it might be falling apart. We'll see.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was almost 10 years ago now that the country has been from top to bottom against trade. Look at immigration. We've closed down borders. The Republican Party is 100% anti-immigration. They're still against regulation and against tax increases. However, we see more and more Republicans who are in favor of giving more power to the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department to rein in big companies. So I see the next iteration, no matter who's present, of continued to chip away at the power the corporations have had in DC for the last 40 years. I mean, I think in a normal world, companies would look around right now and they're afraid of Lena Khan at the federal trade commission and they're afraid of various regulators in the Biden administration who are trying to create these new rules and regulations. In a normal world, companies would say, well, let's just elect a Republican president and all our problems will go away. But Donald Trump is probably the most anti-corporate president we've had in the last 50 years. So corporations are really running scary at this point, which is kind of amazing because”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this is less about lobbying and tactics and more about corporations and their power, but corporations have less influence in Washington in the last few years since Donald Trump was elected. I mean, in my entire lifetime, both the Republicans and Democrats created a pro-business center in Washington that stood for a couple of key things, lower taxes, less regulation, open immigration policies, and free trade. Corporations supported all those things. And now the country Republicans and Democrats are moving away from those things. Let's just take trade. Trade has been a central tenant of corporate policy in the Republican Party for my entire lifetime. In the 2016 election, Bernie Sanders was anti-trade. President Trump, candidate Trump, was antitrade. And then even Hillary Clinton came out as antitrade. Even a lot of these trade bills were Clinton trade bills.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This seems like we are at an inflection point, right? One party or the other is going to win lobbying will change in one way or the other, but it's going to change on the paths we've been on. We're either going back to one version or we're going down the road we're on. Is there another inflection point where it might change yet again the way it changed in the 70s?”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would think if Trump is elected that the money is going to go to the Paul Manaforts and the other guys and Brian Ballard who was very close with Trump and he made a hundred million dollars lobbying Trump in the first Trump administration. I think these small group of people around Trump will really get all that money. If Biden wins, I think things keep going exactly where they are now, which is where power is more diffuse in Washington, where Biden defers oftentimes to Congress. Now Congress can't get anything done. But at least Congress has the authority to try to, in jurisdiction, to try to pass laws and regulations. So it'll continue to go toward these outside groups and toward people trying to influence constituents in order to get members of Congress to vote for or against business legislation.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that really strikes me at this moment for money in politics in particular is that's half of the country, including Donald Trump himself. The other half of the country presumably does not want that to happen and they want change, right? There is a lot of desire for the dismantling of some of these corporate structures for more competition in various markets and antitrust, as you said, for more oversight, more accountability from some of the big companies that run our infrastructure. The companies are sort of trapped in the middle, right? They can't spend money on getting what they want from Donald Trump. They can spend FaceTime. Like Tim Cook can sit in the Oval Office and try to get the iPhone excused from the trade war with China, which he was able to do. But they can't just spend money to change his mind the way they were. And then if they go the other route, they're up against a party that doesn't want them to win, right? That isn't going to be receptive to that. So where's the money going to go? Because it seems like...”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Donald Trump would like to be king. And when he was president, he acted very much like one. You know, the way the government works is the president supposed to propose legislation and Congress is supposed to debate it and come up with a law. And he skipped that process. He just created executive orders to get things done the way he wanted them without any input.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unless someone can be Trump again. That seems like at least half of the country they want the king. I don't know how else to describe that. They want someone to operate the country from the top down in that specific way.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of lobbyists, they'll really just be two or three or four or five, including Paul Manafort, who will be getting all the business. However, if Donald Trump is elected, at some point after four years, he will be gone, and then I would expect us to go back to the old model, which is a much more democratic Washington government.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's amazing. I'm not sure. I mean, that definitely runs counter to sort of the evolution of how lobbying and how power has evolved in Washington. I mean, since 1974, power has been much more diffuse in Washington after Watergate, the American people responded by electing members of Congress who were called the Watergate babies or Watergate reformers, and they moved power from the presidency to Congress and from congressional leaders to committees and subcommittees and made sure that many more policymakers and members of Congress had their hands or influence on legislation. And the idea was to, if there's bad apples out there, the bad apples can't have too much power over the government. So from 1974 to now, the number of people involved in policy has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Trump, again, reverses that. He pulls everything back to he's the only person who matters, and therefore instead of Washington having thousands and thousands and thousands.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that that model of lobbying, you got to show up at the hotel and talk to Paul Manafort, and maybe you'll get an audience at Mar Lago. There's a huge part of the country that feels like that's more honest. They're all crooks anyway. They might as well act like gangsters, right? We might as well get the glitz and glamour, right? There's a part of the country that truly feels like that is more honest than the other way. Yeah, that's amazing.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a free man. The public perception, I think, of Paul Manafort is that he's sort of been chewed up and spit out by the country. But if Donald Trump wins the election, Paul Manafort will be back. He will be a key gatekeeper to the Trump administration. Again, this is the big if Trump wins. But Paul Manafort could be the most successful lobbyist of all time in just a few months because there's nothing that Donald Trump cares more about than loyalty. And there's one person in the world who's gone to jail for Donald Trump, and that's Paul Manaford, and he will be owed.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He does what he wants to do. And as president, he still has tremendous power to do so. So he acts through executive orders or requiring agencies to promulgate different rules or regulations. And the only person in charge of the government in the Trump administration is Donald Trump. And therefore, lobbyists don't care about Congress anymore. They need to go directly to the president. There's only a handful of people who know Trump well. Ironically, one of those people is Paul Manafort. Paul Manafort was a very young guy when he started the lobbying firm of Black Manafort and Stone in the 1980s, which was based on his relationship with people in the Reagan campaign and the Reagan administration. He's now about to replicate that model where he's obviously very close with Donald Trump. He would have become a lobbyist in the first Trump administration had he not been the middle of the Mueller investigation and then gone to jail. Now he's been pardoned. He's out of jail.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, they are from a previous era, but it's something that's sort of amazing to us is that Donald Trump actually represents a reversal of sort of how lobbying has moved from DC to outside of DC and from powerful members of Congress to constituents. Donald Trump just does whatever he wants to do. He doesn't care about Congress. He doesn't move legislation through Congress to the normal channels. He doesn't even let his agencies make policy, which is the way he...”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Million dollars to Donald Trump's super pack. That seems like a problem when, let's go back to AT&T or Google, AT&T or Google can only give $10,000 to the Republican National Committee to support Donald Trump or the Democratic National Committee to support Joe Biden. That gives billionaires a huge advantage over companies in corporate America when it comes to influencing elections. I'm not saying that we want companies spending a ton of money in our elections, but the rules should be the same, that billionaires and companies should be allowed to spend the same amount of money and face the same disclosure requirements. I mean, we don't know who these billionaires are, but we know the names of the companies who donate to politics. So it seems like we should know who the billionaires are also.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facebook message from Citizen for Connectivity. You know who they are. People are smart. They can figure out whether they support the message or not. Right now, you have all these good sounding groups running ads and giving messages to consumers and to regular Americans. And you don't know who they are. And that seems a little unfair, especially when the lobbyists, the traditional lobbyists, they do have to comply with a set of rules. I think another thing that might be a little unfair might be unpopular to say is that the McCain Feingold campaign finance reform act of 2002, that law said that big companies can't give unlimited donations, can't give million dollar donations to the Republican National Committee or the Democratic National Committee. And therefore they haven't done that, have not been able to do that. But yet we had these billionaires on the right and the left who are allowed to write million dollar checks to super PACs or outside campaign groups. I saw the other day that there's some billionaire whose name I've never heard of who gave 10”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's another hard one to answer. There's no doubt that the system that Washington and the government would be better, the American people would be served better if you removed money from politics. If members of Congress didn't have to spend so much money chasing campaign re-election dollars, and by doing so had to go to these fundraisers with companies and talk to companies, or in many cases, do things for companies in order to get money from companies to run their re-elections. The problem is, as we said, is that is the First Amendment, is that campaign donations are a protected form of free speech we've learned, and that lobbying itself, the right to petition one's government is protected under First Amendment. So given that you can't do those, what are some other ways of fixing the system? One is, I think, just to say that some of this outside lobbying that we've talked about, these new citizens groups for connectivity, they should be disclosed. Who are they? Who's funding them? And therefore, if you see an ad or someone, if you get a”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You walk into the First Amendment, you walk into Citizens United, you walk into all these huge, thorny philosophical problems of how you might regulate speech, particularly political speech, which no one wants to regulate ever. But you have to balance it out somehow. And it feels like one of the things that's happening is people get wise to the tactics, the big companies get brittle, their products get worse, the trains start crashing. And the electorate actually says, you know what, we should actually regulate these companies in some way. And the pendulum just swings back on its own. Is there a way to accelerate that? Is there an approach to regulating this kind of lobbying that makes sense to you, that feels like it would be fair, or is it just a bunch of kids have to wise up?”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I think about in that context a lot is, okay, if we think this is bad, and like broadly, the big corporations of America, having most of the political influence in the country seems bad, right? There should be some balance there. And how you write a law to regulate that gets really dicey because you walk right into is spending money speech.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facebook and Amazon from smaller upstart companies to giving them this huge political muscle. So cut to TikTok, TikTok did the exact same tactic a few months ago. They had 9 million people or they contacted 9 million users and said, call your members of Congress and tell them not to vote for this bill. And it failed spectacularly. So what is the difference? I don't know. I mean, maybe it was that. That members of Congress believe that TikTok is controlled and owned by the Chinese government. And that's a wall they will not cross. I'm not sure. Maybe members of Congress are too wary of these campaigns and know they're corporate funded, whereas 10 years ago, people didn't know that they shut down the internet a day was funded by Google and the other tech companies. I'm really not sure. It's a great question.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So as you remember then, I mean, those bills were going to pass in the Senate 99 out of 100 senators had signaled their support for it. It had incredibly strong support in the House. Only a few members opposed it. The protagonists of the bill had spent $100 million lobbying for it. And the tech industry was going to lose. And then all of a sudden, they said, hey, we have our users. We have internet users. Let's try to activate them. And they had a day called Shut Down the Internet Day on January 18th, I believe it was, where thousands of websites shut down. They put banners on their websites that said, you know, Congress is going to pass the bill. It's going to kill the internet. Call your member of Congress and have them vote against this bill. And in 24 hours, that bill was dead because so many members of Congress heard from millions of consumers and millions of internet users saying, don't vote for this bill. What was amazing about that moment is it made the tech industry into big tech. It moved Google and Facebook.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's really interesting. And I don't have a good answer there. I said that Google learned from Microsoft. TikTok tried to learn from Google. About 10 or 12 years ago, there was a big bill in Washington that supported a lot of major copyright owners who thought they were getting their lunch eaten by Google in the tech industry. Hollywood and the MPAA and music industry and Rupert Murdoch and many others sponsored this bill that tried to really regulate or hinder the tech industry. And the bill would have required tech platforms to police some of the information that their users put on the internet. And it would have hinder the growth of the industry. At one point, the Google and Tech opponents had spent nearly $100 million lobbying for that bill in DC had very broad support.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Piece to the puzzle is really interesting to me. I would say it started with Uber, right? Uber wants to be in all these cities, the cities are mad at Uber for disrupting taxi monopolies. Uber's putting messages in the app. Call whoever to yell at whoever that works. We've seen that play out with various different companies. Meta has done it, Google has done it. TikTok just recently. Did it to fight whatever divest or sell legislation that has come through? It didn't work for TikTok. It backfired in spectacular fashion, right? The response from Congress was like, see, you can affect political decision making by young Americans. We don't want you to do this. What is that pendulum, right? Because if the money in lobbying has moved these sort of like dark money operations.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These regulators and members of Congress out of our way. So instead of ignoring Washington and getting hammered by Washington like Microsoft did, Google came in early and came in often and spent a lot of money to create friendships to kind of know where problems were coming. And again, from then until now, they've been successful. There's never been a major anti-tech or anti-Google legislation or lawsuit that's been effective. And that's really because they spent money early and often. And then as you say, they innovated. They use different tactics. They try to get their users involved, their users, as in Americans, to talk to their members of Congress on their behalf. I think AT&T and some of the larger telcos still use more traditional tactics of hiring lobbyists and using campaign donations where the tech industry is a little more innovative.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they spend a lot of money here. The tech company started off differently. One, there was no tech industry in the 1910s and 1920s and 1930s. So they really just got in the game more in the 2010s, as you said. And they started out mainly in Silicon Valley, incredibly smart engineers and business people. And they said, you know what, we're so smart. We know what we're doing. We're changing the world. We're creating this whole new economy. And Washington, we don't care about you. Stay away from us. Don't regulate us. Don't talk to us. Don't get in our business. And that worked for a long time until the government sued Microsoft in the 1980s for antitrust violations. Microsoft took a decade to get out of the way of that antitrust case. And then when Google was first founded and came to DC in the early 2000s, they learned from Microsoft's mistake and they said, hey, we're going to hire a bunch of people in DC because we want to be a huge and powerful company. In order to do that, we need to keep.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The telecoms, as you know, have been around forever. I mean, that was Mobel and AT&T. You know, they were one of the big monopolies way back in the 1920s and 30s. They're sort of a legalized monopoly because the government said, okay, AT&T will help you wire the whole country so everyone has phones because we think that's good for society and good for America and good for the economy. But then in the 1970s and 80s, we said AT&T, you're a monopoly. Agent T was eventually broken up into the long distance company, which is AT&T, into the baby bells, if you remember that term, which is the local phone companies. But those companies were around forever. And they all knew, let's give lots of money to our local members of Congress, and let's hire lots of lobbyists to be friends with them to keep the status quo. The telcos, as well as some other utilities, are heavily regulated industries. Because they're heavily regulated, they know their fortunes, literally their profits, depend on the rules and regulations in DC and at the federal trade committee.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They went from like nothing to something, but yeah, the something is still small in the grand order of things, but it's. Something for them. Google has a billion people now. An army of Google people wander the streets. Meta has a ton of people. They've learned that they have to play this game to preserve their monopolies. Are they running a different playbook than the telecoms or pharma or Wall Street? Are they trying new things? Or is it the same moves for every big industry?”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The rise of big tech lobbying feels like it started in 2010. These companies were no good at Washington for quite a while. The telecoms have long been experts at Washington. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, you name it. They're very good at DC. They spend a lot of money. Tech companies Apple famously had no one for a long time. Now they got a lot of people, right? Well,”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can't vote on this thing. Don't make us vote on this thing. And there hasn't been a vote. So that's lobbying that was not a lobbyist for Google going up and talking to Chuck Schumer and saying, hey, let me give you a campaign check and don't hold this vote. This was going out to the people and scaring members of Congress and saying we will defeat you if you vote for this bill. So to me, that's an example of outside lobbying.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“May not be winning the hearts and minds of people, but they have successfully blocked these cases and legislation from moving forward. Let me give you a good example. We talked about inside lobbying versus outside lobbying. There's a big bill in the Senate this year to basically regulate the big tech companies seem to have very broad support outside of Washington and had important support in the Senate Commerce Committee where it was being voted this year. Senator Chuck Schumer was given the decision, do you bring this bill to the Senate floor for a vote? And everyone thought this vote's going to happen because the American people seem to be against these tech companies. And the tech companies went out in the States and ran ads in key states of senators on the Senate Commerce Committee. And those ads basically said, if you vote for this bill, we're going to defeat you at the ballot box. We're going to spend so much money on ads that you will never know what hit you. And those senators went to Chuck Schumer and said,”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It definitely seems like the country has turned against tech. Both Republicans and Democrats are saying these tech companies are too big, too influential. They know too much about our lives. The government, as you said, has several antitrust cases going right now against Apple, two against Google, one against Amazon. I'm sure there'll be another Facebook one soon. There's bills in Capitol Hill that would break up big tech and would rein them in. But to this point, this second, none of those have been successful. No bill has actually become a law. None of those cases have succeeded. There are cases that are moving now that might succeed. But so we're saying here that the American people have moved against big tech and that maybe even Congress has moved against big tech and maybe even the federal trade commission and DOJ has moved against big tech. But so far because of big tech's lobbying might, they have been successful. They have blocked those cases.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and maybe let's go to farmer real quick. Maybe that's one of the reasons that farmers had trouble most recently is because people see the cost of drugs because we all buy them. So you see that retail cost. You see the cost going up and up and up. But what you don't see is whatever investment that the companies say it takes to make those drugs. We don't see the billions of dollars or years that takes to innovate and to come up with life-saving drugs, which is the industry's argument. But it's an intellectually challenging argument because you have to think about it. Whereas you just see the cost of your insulin going up and up and up and you think that's a problem. In terms of tech, yeah, it's much more in your face. But here's an interesting point about tech.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I want to connect that to lobbying here because it strikes me that one of the things that you've described in the book and one of the things you're talking about here is we've moved the lobbyists from K Street in DC talking directly to members of Congress to the people. And then it turns out these companies, whatever they're called, whatever dark money groups they set up, are in competition with everyone else on social media. Like you can't really buy the influence. And when it comes to big tech in particular, the electorate is using the products. Like they can see that Facebook or YouTube or TikTok or whatever is doing good things or bad things in a way that it's really hard to see what big pharma is doing or Wall Street is doing. And so you might win, the Wall Street lobbyists might win this way. But the big tech lobbyists are losing the battle left and right because people just don't like the products. That feels like a part of the shift here.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Corporate America, by attacking Boeing, by attacking any company that moves jobs overseas or closes down. But it's not just Donald Trump. There are a growing number of populist Republicans in the House and the Senate who are also bashing companies. And the most interesting place this plays out, in my opinion, is in the antitrust world back to the robber barons and the JP Morgan's and the railroads back of the 1910s and 20s. Those days are back where important Republicans are saying we need to strengthen our antitrust laws to get the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to rein in these big companies. And to me, that's fascinating because in the last 50 years, Republicans have said the opposite. They've said, let's keep the government out of the way. Let's let these companies grow. And now all of a sudden, not all Republicans, but some Republicans are saying these companies have gotten too big, that they have too much influence over our lives, and we need the government to...”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. So you're right, Ronald Reagan was a key point. Also, just to go back for a second, I think in the 1970s, these companies started pushing back on the growth of the government and they got stronger and stronger than the sort of a tipping point. And the tipping point was probably Reagan, you know, where Reagan was elected saying the government isn't the solution to your problems, which it had been for 50 years. He said the government is the problem. And that was really a mindset change in how the government operated. Republicans obviously were in control of Congress and the presidency went during Reagan's eight years or most of his eight years. And then we move all the way up till now, exactly as you say. It seems like now we're at a tipping point in the other direction, where the height of corporate power was sometime in the last five years, maybe three years, maybe seven years. And now companies are all of a sudden under attack, not just by Democrats, which we'd sort of expect, but by Republicans. Donald Trump has been scoring political points and getting votes by attacking.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would put that next to generally Ronald Reagan and the move to let companies get bigger. And we have these much more powerful companies that are much bigger across the economy now. There are some pushback on that, right? The DOJ is suing Apple and Ticketmaster and Adobe. Is that changing the balance of power with the lobbists? Is that changing the approach to lobbying?”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lobbyists and funded campaign donations to push back on those rules and regulations and try to restrain the growth of government, which they did very successfully. So that rise of corporate power in the 1970s. And from then until now, companies have really risen in power unaffected or unrestrained by any other force. So right now what we have is companies incredibly powerful and really no one else is. So that's why the 1970s were a pivot point.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it is now with more than 100 federal agencies and thousands of regulators in Washington creating all sorts of rules and regulations for the economy and industry. And for the most part during that time, companies supported the growth of the government or at least didn't really fight hard against it. And that was in part because companies were making money. Companies sponsored the League team. Things were going great and corporate profits were strong. What changed in the 1970s is that the economy created. And when the economy crated, we had stagnation, we had inflation, corporate profits went away. Companies looked around and said, hey, who's to blame here? And they blame the government. They saw all these rules and regulations they had to comply with that they weren't making money in part because they were spending money dealing with compliance and dealing with regulations. They felt like they couldn't do what they wanted to do in the marketplace because of government interference. So they did what any company, smart companies would do is they invested in their problem and they hired lawyers and”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of pivot points through history that we write about, but the major turning point is the 1970s. I remember the era of the big trusts in DC, the big monopolies in the country. We had Standard Oil and JP Morgan and the railroad barons in the 1910s and 1920s and early industrialization in the country. And those industries had tons of power and were deemed monopolies. And Washington and the government responded to that by creating the antitrust laws and the Federal Trade Commission and really trying to crack down on the abuses of monopolies in big industry. And they were successful. And from the 1920s to the 1970s, companies had very little influence in Washington. There weren't big monopolies. Consumer groups and labor unions, which were strong back then, had most the influence in Washington. And they pushed the federal government to grow and to expand into the big bureaucracy.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or fake lobbying organization. Comcast or ATT. They might be battling against Google and Facebook and Amazon might have a competing group. What we see more and more about lobbying is it's one industry group against another industry group because industries have so much money. And labor unions have been in the decline for 60 years. Labor unions don't have the money to put up these groups to create these groups to fund them. Labor unions have really been dying in Washington for a long time, whereas companies are on the ascendancy. So the problem here is not that companies are creating these groups, although I would argue that there should be more disclosure about them and who they are, but that there's really only industry groups out there. There's not a competing side. So when a member of Congress wants to figure out how a particular law or bill would affect industry or affect consumers, there's really only the industry lobby to talk to. You don't get the pro consumer side.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is broadly, you might think of it as dark money. A lot of people describe this sort of influence operation as dark money. You've got these groups that are unregulated. Why haven't the other interest groups moved to this model? Why doesn't the labor movement go to this model? Why not spend the money the same way?”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have been a reporter in Washington for about 30 years, and in that time I basically learned one thing, and that is that members of Congress will do whatever it takes to get re-elected. And to get reelected, you need 51% of your constituents. Americans for connectivity, in our hypothetical example, goes to the residents or the voters in a district and says, hey, we need more Americans online. We should be spending more money on broadband research. The government should be funding more broadband connectivity and connectivity is good for schools. And they try to rally constituents to support a cause because what lobbyists have realized that if 51% of a member of Congress's constituents support broadband internet connectivity, then the member of Congress will support that. One way of lobbying is to go to the member of Congress and try to push for that legislation. But there's competing interests pushing on the other side. So lobbies have realized go to their constituents. If you can win the battle to get a majority of their voters to support whatever the industry wants, that's what they'll get because the member of Congress will follow and vote for that.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where the influence is actually happening, right? If you want some policy, you fund a bunch of those groups. What's the mechanism from those groups? Doing whatever they do, spending whatever money they spend in actual policy proposals.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's lobbying, but to me, that's outside lobbying. The inside lobbying is AT&T or Verizon, hiring lobbyists using campaign donations to go to Capitol Hill to try to change legislation. Outside lobbying is Americans for Connectivity. So let's just stick with the AT&T lobbyists as a hypothetical. If you wanted to know what AT&T was doing on connectivity legislation or broadband legislation or whatever, you can look up in three seconds and figure out how many lobbies they have, how much money they're spending, and what they're doing. America's for Connectivity. We have no idea who they are. We don't know who their backers are. They're not lobbyists. They don't disclose. Are they running TV ads? What are they pushing for? But more importantly, who's funding them and who are they? Because America's a connectivity. They're not Americans for connectivity. That's Comcast or their Google or their Verizon. Who are they? We don't know. That's shadow lobbying.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Explain how that money works. This is really interesting to me. You're describing a world in which the official lobbyist who files the form and discloses what they're doing is receding in what you call influence pedaling is on the rise. I certainly see it all the time as we cover even just tech policy. If the telecom giants want something, a bunch of weird organizations spring up with names like American for Connectivity Freedom and they oppose broadband funding. Like this happens all the time. That's lobbying, right? That's funneling money towards what you might call an astroturf campaign, or you try to build some influence. And you're saying they're just outspending everybody.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Group and it'd be probably a worker group. And those interest groups would battle each other to shape legislation. Those interest groups are now basically called lobbies. You know, there's an industry lobby and there's a consumer lobby and there's an environmental lobby and a civil rights lobby and there's all sorts of lobbies. The problem we have now is that the balance is out of whack. As in companies are spending so much money lobbying Washington that they've basically destroyed their competitors. There's essentially no labor union movement in DC. Labor unions have very little power. Consumers have very little power. Environmental groups have very little power. So companies basically are the only game in town. If they push for a policy, they very likely get it. And that's how things have been since the 1970s. And that's the problem is that these lobbyists like Evan Morris and corporate lobbyists have so much influence over legislation that there's really no one else out there to balance them.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That type of lobbying, which we can call influence pedaling, or any other name we want to make up, is not considered technically lobbying. And therefore, those activities and that spending is not disclosed to the public. In the case of Evan Morris, $45 million of the $50 million he was spending was outside of Washington. It's so loosely regulated that, for one, you and I don't know what it is. But more importantly, the public doesn't know, the government doesn't know, and his case, even his own company didn't know what he was doing with that money, which gave him the freedom to dip into that money and line his own pockets. But going back to the beginning of our country, actually, the founding fathers saw that they would be lobbying in the country. They knew that laws and regulations weren't going to be made in a vacuum. Our form of government was set up to have three branches of government that would fight each other and there would be checks and balances to create laws and regulations. But they also saw that there would be interest groups, there would be industry.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To fill out a form every three months saying who your clients are, what you're doing, what you're up to, so that people like me and you or the public or anyone can look at those forms and see who is actually lobbying Washington. However, what a lot of this book is about is what Evan Morris was actually doing. And that is spending money to influence public policy, not by talking to members of Congress, but by working outside the Beltway to gin up news stories or to get constituents fired up about something or to talk to local agencies or local community groups, get them to sign letters saying, hey, we should ban this policy or”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a modern vision of what lobbying is. But the idea that there would be lobbyists dates to the history of the founding of the country. Why did it turn into this sort of unethical or this perceived unethical character? Just starting with Evan Morris then rolling backwards, Evan Morris's lobbying budget is influence budget in Washington, DC was about $50 million a year. So his company spent $50 million a year trying to shape rules and regulations and policy in Washington. But there's two types of lobbying. There's traditional lobbying, which has existed forever until the last decade or so. And that's lobbyists who are paid by companies to go up to Capitol Hill to talk to a senator, to talk to a member of Congress, to talk to some of the administration, to try to change a policy or block a policy or effect a policy. Those people who are spending their time directly talking to members of Congress are called lobbyists, which is a legal definition, and you need to disclose.”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I realized through reporting and what we say in the book is that following the rise and fall of this Genentech lobbyist named Evan Morris helps show basically everything that's wrong with Washington, how Washington has changed over the years, how companies have gotten more powerful, how lobbying has changed, how lobbying has moved from a type of business that was regulated and disclosed and people could tell what was going on to lobbying now, which takes place far outside of Washington, DC. There's way more money being spent there than we know about. An unscrupulous characters like Evan Morris can basically steal money without anyone knowing about it. Evan is under investigation for embezzlement. I don't want to give away your whole book, but that seems like when most people think about a lobbyist, you do think about the shady sort of corrupt character who is probably embezzling some money, who's doing something on ethical, that wasn't always the case, right?”
2024-06-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT