Who Rules America: How Money Dominates Politics | Political System | ENDEVR Documentary

[Applause] hello chicago every school child learns power in washington is formally divided three ways between the executive branch in the white house now occupied by barack obama in the judicial branch topped by the supreme court with nine judges all political appointees and the legislative branch where the senate has a hundred members with two from every state and the house of representatives 435 drawn from districts across america this is the formal system of checks and balances that is supposed to keep the country on the stable course of democracy and yet wherever you go in this capital of america and meet the people who are the most informed about how the government really works you hear that the system isn't working and that the voters are not in charge you hear it from a member of congress who controls america an elite group of people who function in a stratosphere globally and beyond the constitution beyond the reach of government they have enormous resources you hear it from an expert on our elections our politics are being hijacked they're being hijacked by anyone by people who are willing to spend millions of dollars to you know elect or defeat certain candidates you hear it from the head of a public interest group we have a plutocracy we have a corporate plutocracy and the rules in washington are written by the corporate lobbyists working on behalf of the biggest corporate interests in the country and you hear about lobbyists from a veteran former congressional staffer who would only talk to us if his face and voice were altered 99 of the people that i see live in congress are white men and women who you can tell are wear very nice expensive suit and ties and dresses and they are going into the republican offices i rarely see african americans here i rarely see hispanics i rarely see asians i rarely see muslims um it's like you see these very well-dressed guys who just came off learjets and you can tell they're right out of the country club and they're going to republican offices asking for a tax cut of some kind these are not just opinions this well-researched book by william domhoff details how the government today is being run by powerful elite forces outside the government as we will see his conclusions are supported by experienced insiders here in washington dc all of these insiders say that money and special interests are now in control they too ask who rules america in washington we spoke with leaders of three respected watchdog organizations that specialize in researching and analyzing hidden forces operating behind the scenes public citizen focuses on corruption and accountability issues robert weissman is their president and described how laws get passed how does a piece of legislation emerge how does it become law how does it get implemented and how does it get enforced at every step of the way you really have sort of corporations in whatever industry dominating the process why don't congressman the people we elect challenge the system well they are products of the system and so they've got an inherent bias of favoring look they've succeeded in the system one way or another and those who challenge it are going to have to fight really entrenched power so of course there are many of them who are very good and who do challenge the system but by and large people got to washington because they figured out how to make the system work for them even if they came in as insiders most of them were quickly educated on the ways that things that really do work in washington if they hope to get things done or get reelected and they succumb to their corporate interests where does the money come from the top 100 donors have given 77 percent of the money going to super pacs that means one percent of the donors are giving 64 of the money uh this is a tiny elite that can afford to make the contributions uh that are going to be most influential in this election cycle this website opensecrets.org documents where all the money and politics originate sheila krumholz oversees it as the executive director of the center for responsive politics i think many of the people who are concerned about money's role in in washington and how it greases the skids for for uh private narrow interests to kind of rule the day believe that the money is uh that the members of congress and policymakers control uh the levers of power but that the donors the kind of patrons of these people are operating the strings the politicians are kind of the visible locus of power but the but the people behind them really are calling the shots how do we find out who those people are well we have millions upon millions of records of donations to federal candidates political action committees including leadership packs which are their kind of slush funds that they control and the parties we also can see money going directly to the super pacs these are the political action committees which are supposedly are only giving contributions uh to groups that are spending money to run independent expenditures independent of the campaigns and parties the problem is of course that there's this secret pot of cash being collected by groups that do not disclose where the money is coming from and they are running advertising political ads which are often quite damning and nasty and not sometimes irresponsible but are highly influential and we have no idea where their money is coming from she showed us what their data shows a small minority controlling the process with very few millionaires funding all politics there are 610 registered super pacs 190 of 95 of them are ponying up the money for the ads so far but this chart really demonstrates what a dramatic increase we've seen in uh spending on advertising by these groups so in 200 2012 uh we're seeing over 100 million spent that's 100 increase over the amount spent in 2008 and a 400 increase over last cycle this is a who's who of who's lobbying in washington between 1998 and 2012. the u.s chamber of commerce spent 831 million dollars the american medical association 269 million dollars general electric 268 million dollars the pharmaceutical research and manufacturers of america admit to 219 million plus for lobbying and there are many many more 2012 could be a turning point in american politics because of all the big money that's literally being invested mary boyle is the vice president of common cause in who is ruling america you certainly have to look at the people who are giving the most money to political campaigns they are highly influential people who give a lot of money to political campaigns millions of of dollars you know want something for return they tend to be really savvy business people who have made a lot of money because you know they know what they do they're doing and they don't make investments without wanting an investment on their return it's unfortunate but obviously it buys media time it also buys constant mail efforts and also obviously you support candidates who will ultimately come to the united states congress who may vote your way the largest contributors to political campaigns in america are the financial institutions uh the second largest contributors are large real estate developers that means that if you're running for office you have to get elected by promising to support policies that are supported by the real estate sector and by the uh financial sector that lends to the real estate sector and doesn't this really kind of put the democracy under threat yeah i mean corporations are free now due to citizens united and a couple of other court rulings to give more money than they have ever been allowed to be before and that is certainly a threat to our democracy because what it does is it drowns out the voices of regular people it's uh you know discouraging in one sense and that you know the election of 2008 showed a tremendous number of people who want change and yet there seems to be at every turn change is being resisted by minorities that are very skillful at undermining change certainly 2008 was the you know change election and we have been disappointed that there has not been more change coming from the white house now that president obama is running for reelection he too is spending most of his time raising money two billion dollars for political campaigns that's why robert weissman says this scandal involves both parties yeah it's a bipartisan problem for sure the uh the two billion is just the presidential race the over the overall national race will probably be around 8 billion obama is an extremely talented fundraiser so he's going to be able to raise big money the massive chunks of outside super rich money and corporate money though look like they're going to go overwhelmingly on to the republicans it is so expensive to run for office whether it's a presidency or the state legislature that you just have to go out and start raising money from people who want something in return to run for office the money in politics just doesn't finance candidates it pays for lobbying in 2011 there were 12 654 lobbyists spending 3.32 billion dollars on influencing politicians agencies and regulators i was with a group of 20 women from the middle east last week and we said they want to know about code pink in our work and i said come to congress and meet us and we met in the cafeteria and we looked all around said all these people are lobbing congress and they think they're going to have some influence but the influence doesn't happen here there's a special place in the capital that special people go to that we can't go to and that's where the people who have money go to do the lobbying and they also have their special parties where they pay a lot of money to have a face to face with their congress person that's where things get done the scholar francis fox piven says that's because of another problem not all americans can or do vote very developed very twisted and very distorted system of electoral representation it is store distorted not only by big money although that's certainly very very important because of the advertising and the campaigning that it makes possible a lot of people do not in fact have the franchise and even those who vote are not represented fairly people in smaller states have more representation and so so this helps explain why small but well-funded groups like the pro-israel lobby a pro-military lobby can have so much impact joanne landy has examined who makes foreign policy it's an informal network of the people who rule america even though they don't go around wearing signs saying we rule america that's who makes the positive whether it's with politicians or whether it's with think tanks or with the military or you know i mean it's they're all interconnected landy says these lobbies are more united than divided you know they're just disagreements among them but they're disagreements about methods not goals you know so some people think you should get rid of some nuclear weapons other people think you should hold on to them all but the differences are really they cover the gamut from a to b as they used to say the sort of day-by-day run-of-the-mill reality is that those who have high positions in politics and strong connections with money interests and the moneyed interest themselves run the country we are now on the way to the congress which now enjoys less than a 10 percent approval rating from the public you know how you know a congress person not only have a little pin here but they never carry anything it's always an assistant who's carrying something and all they get is people who are fawning over them and you know so they're in their bubble and they don't recognize i think that the country is so cynical about them the congressmen are cynical too i literally ran into representative john conyers in a dark hallway he's the longest serving member he complains that they are being deluged by lobbyists are you seeing a lot of wall street people donating to congress trying to stop the reforms i don't you don't see that but you know what's going on they haven't stopped i mean the congress wanted to reform financial you know the financial laws and it seems like they're being stopped at the regulatory level by all these donations from members of congress i mean from big banks and wall street well it will show up it shows up on the quarterly side but i i have no reason to believe that there's been any cessation of that or reduction and so you get the same results stagnation jpmorgan chase has shocked the markets by revealing a trading loss of over two billion dollars two weeks later it was reported that the huge bank jpmorgan chase lost two billion dollars gambling on exotic derivative products in what they called a synthetic credit portfolio if jamie dimon makes this mistake because we know he's good what the hell is going on at citigroup and a bank of america thanks to the mistakes by jp morgan which is the biggest us bank in terms of assets rippled through the financial world for many it brings back memories of 2008 when big banks risky bets threatened to collapse the financial system it was later reported that the bank's lobbyists had fought against a new rule that if passed would have prevented this giant loss the internet buzzed with the bad news because this is the derivatives market this is very important could pan out to be nothing largest u.s bank you know best buddies with the fed um and of course this is a whole lot of debt but none of the commentary i saw discussed the lobbying by jp morgan chase you see banks time and time again getting into problems slipping up and you've got america's biggest bank jp morgan doing exactly that and frankly um the banks are their own worst enemy we know we were sloppy we know we were stupid we know there was bad judgment we don't know if any of that's true yet of course regulators should look at something like this that's their job so you know we are totally open come on with regulators and they will come to their own conclusions but we intend to fix it learn from it and be a better company when it's done one of the amazing lessons i think of everything that led up to the crashes they can't control themselves even to the extent that they will destroy their own industry even at the extent they will destroy their own companies the short-term profit motive seeps in in so many poors of individuals and divisions and offices and whole companies they will destroy themselves so we definitely can't trust them to figure out how to control themselves public citizen later played a role outlawing insider trading by members of congress on information they obtained in hearings and investigations public citizens considered it corruption the notion that the powerful shouldn't get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everybody else and if we expect that to apply to our biggest corporations and to our most successful citizens it certainly should apply to our elected officials especially at a time when there's a deficit of trust between this city and the rest of the country congressman jesse jackson jr the son of the famous civil rights leader has been representing chicago's second district for 17 years he's consumed with investigating and explaining how the system was set up historically to serve states rights and special interests i filed an amendment to the constitution to guarantee us the right to a public education of equal high quality why because every american that's in a public school ought not be in states rights slavery in other words the lesson of the african-american overcoming the constitution with respect to states rights was not heeded through time by the american people and it is the exact same system that they are stuck in today and they just don't know it we asked him why congress has become so dysfunctional i've never seen it more polarized i've never seen it more divided along geographical lines along factional lines along economic uh political lines it's not what the democracy was conceived to be it's not what it has it was supposed to evolve into and unfortunately the american people are are the victims of this process how would you answer that question who rules america there are two types of material power in this country and in the world one is political and one is economic we the people have the power politically to control and determine the economic system and there is a constant struggle between people power and economic power we the people control through the political system our economic destiny and the economic destiny of the nation increasingly the heavy hand of the economic system is controlling the political system and manipulating the people who controls america an elite group of people who function in a stratosphere globally and beyond the constitution beyond the reach of government they have enormous resources they own the media the power to investigate they get to shape the narrative of the stories they get to model and position candidates for public office and shape an image in front of the american people an image that oftentimes does not jive with reality and yet the american people see this image of leadership and they vote for it only to find out the human frailties and the shortcomings of the individual at a later date we met a former congressional staffer who worked on the hill for a leading legislator for 12 years he agreed to talk with us only if we blacked out his face and distorted his voice he was scathing in his description of how decisions get made this is a great institution but unfortunately you have an untold amount of members of congress that spend 60 percent of their time raising money and then when because they got a run every two years which makes no sense um they have to raise millions of dollars just to be competitive to go on television because the cbs abc and nbc and cnn charge this outrageous amount of money to get tv commercials it ought to be free or very low cost so what happens is these members of congress are relying on well-intentioned staffers many of them are just out of college many of them were interns to make major decisions on foreign policy and domestic policy and healthcare and employment and jobs and they're not really mature enough he also told us many of the staffers get bought off by special interests and big donors and a lot of these young people are just out of college just out of graduate school they have to pay back these enormous college loans and graduate school loans they're paying unbelievable rent in washington dc northern virginia often times more than a third of their income a lot of them were taken care of out of work family members so there's a pressure for them i'm sorry on them to go work for the money to interest on k street a lot of staffers even progressive staffers have left the hill and worked for the large drug companies work for the oil companies well it's usually the biggest industry it's usually the biggest companies in whatever industry you're looking at if you're looking at overall national economic policy wall street is the dominant influence you don't know what's happening the pharmaceutical industry and you know there the big big pharma's got caused those the shots um as as you know within the financial industry which factions are most important it's still really the biggest institutions that set the agenda there have been polls on where americans think our money goes in our government and just about nobody has a clue that people wildly overestimate how much goes to aid and of course part of that is because we talk about weaponizing foreign nations as aid and and they're they wildly underestimate how much goes to the military and yet says our whistleblowing former congressional aide the real problem is not just corporate power the biggest problem in america is not the corporations it it's not even necessarily the money for campaigns the the biggest problem is that the american people don't really organize themselves in their congressional districts to mitigate the power of special interests they're not utilizing their democracy because they don't know how the game works the donors know exactly how the game works you give a member of congress the money they're gonna probably do what they've asked them to do so if you've got millions and millions of people who voted for obama or vote for their member of congress and then that's the end of their political involvement well that's the end of democracy coming up next the role wall street plays wall street the banks and the financial industry writ large is the single largest source of campaign cash in the united states and it has been for years if not decades next time on who rules america you

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Keywords: Free documentary, documentaries, full documentary, hd documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), Business Documentary, who rules america, politics, us politics, us politics documentary, who rules america documentary, political power, the fight for political power, american politics, political system, lobby, Danny Schechter, danny schechter documentary, How Money Dominates Politics, Political System

Id: at3gh_FNLmo

Length: 24min 37sec (1477 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021