
David Sirota is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter based in Denver, Colorado. He is the founder and editor of The Lever. He previously served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter and is the creator of Audible’s acclaimed financial crisis podcast series Meltdown.
Learn more about the Master Plan podcast by visiting the website.
I am going to start this interview a bit differently, by asking a controversial question: Is the concept of checks and balances dead within the U.S. government? Master Plan spends a great deal of time explaining how enmeshed congressional partisan politics are with our judicial branch, that I couldn’t help but feel we are without hope in that sense. What’s your interpretation of the events you detail?
One of the master planners’ key revelations was that in a country where their self-enriching policies are unpopular, they’d need to focus on the least democratically accountable branch of government - the judiciary. It’s a branch that’s not subject to elections and that’s filled with people who enjoy lifetime appointments. They understood that if they could take that branch over, and turn it into a super-legislature that actually makes laws, they wouldn’t have to worry as much about the desires of the general public.
The system of checks and balances has subsequently broken down both because of the judiciary turning itself from a law-interpreting branch into a law-making branch - and because the other branches have basically accepted that with little push back. Congress has plenty of ways it could reassert its power, and the executive branch could certainly work to reorganize or expand the courts. But that hasn’t happened.
The one line that keeps echoing in my head from Master Plan is the legal argument underpinning all of the legalized corruption we have today: “Money is free speech.” This is unfortunate because I had already begrudgingly acclimated to–not accepted–“Corporations are people.” I am no lawyer, but I wonder, if the former statement is true, and the second is true, is there not an argument to be made about fairness? Is all free speech equal? That can’t be true if some have more money than others to exercise speech, to the point where they can stifle others speech. Has that been argued? Or is it naive to believe that our elected officials and courts care about fairness?
Legally-speaking, there used to be a distinction between citizens’ speech and commercial speech. However, in practice, that distinction has largely evaporated, giving corporations the right to use money as a constitutionally protected form of unlimited speech - which translates into corporations and their owners using massive amounts of money to control the entire political process. The system is totally out of balance because equating money with speech effectively allows the speech of those with lots of money to completely drown out the speech of everyone else. Those who created and now preserve this system clearly aren’t interested in anything resembling “fairness.”
It becomes clear, though Republicans or Conservatives have really benefited from these intentional cracks in our campaign finance system, that Democrats have also benefited and have aided in upholding some of the judicial confirmations and legislation that have weakened campaign finance reform. I mean, I was surprised to learn that late Republican Senator John McCain led the charge on reform and that a Democrat controlled Senate confirmed Justice Clarence Thomas. Who today, in any party, is trying to call out legalized corruption and where are they in addressing the issue?
There are people who call it out - Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse come to mind. And even Joe Biden has periodically lamented the domination of big money in politics. But one takeaway from Master Plan is that without a popular uprising demanding real reforms, any allies inside the system simply will not be able to make change.
Part of the reason that uprising hasn’t happened is because we live in a society whose tribal politics inculcates us to believe that we can’t criticize or pressure “our side” - and that if “our side” happens to be winning inside the corrupt system, then everything is fine. But that kind of psychology perpetuates the corruption we have now - and prevents any kind of reform from happening.
I recognize that as a journalist you may not want to share your opinion on this, but what are those you’ve interviewed saying needs to happen now that we know how pervasive legalized corruption is, and what is actually realistic given our political climate?
There are plenty of ways to reduce and limit the corruption we’re immersed in - everything from passing the DISCLOSE Act and requiring disclosure of dark money spending, to creating stronger anti-bribery laws, to repealing the Citizens United decision via a constitutional amendment, to creating a system to publicly finance elections - one that would give people a way to run for office that didn’t force them to rely on private money that comes with the expectation of legislative favors. All of those ideas are possible and real.
So why haven’t they happened? Part of it is that the master planners have the raw political power right now to obstruct reform. But the main thing preventing reform is the public simply accepting the status quo as some immovable permanent reality.
I would like to talk about the podcast medium for a bit. What benefits–if any–have you found to reaching audiences through audio versus print?
I will always be first and foremost a writer, but I believe audio is probably the most intimate medium for storytelling. I worked in radio for a while, and a friend of mine in that industry once said to me that the best kind of radio is the kind where the host remembers that he/she isn’t talking to thousands or millions of people, but is actually talking to one person - that person sitting in their car, or taking a walk. So we’ve tried to honor that intimacy in the kind of storytelling we’re doing. Our scripting has tried to be deliberately informal and conversational, as well as respectful of the listener’s time. We’ve also tried to use archival footage to really show evidence and not just tell the audience what’s happening and expect they’ll take our word for it.
Investigative journalism is tedious work, and there are so many details that you wade through as a reporter that you then have to determine how to communicate to the audience. Sometimes those details can be boring or complex. Humor is a rhetorical device you employ often throughout the show. You also reference a lot of pop culture. I found myself engaged at times by both. Can you talk about these scripting choices and their purpose?
I fundamentally reject the idea that a serious investigation of a serious topic has to be a boring experience. Master Plan is about very serious topics. We’re asking a lot of the audience. So our thinking was, if we’re going to ask listeners to eat their broccoli, we should probably pour some cheese on that broccoli to make it a delicious experience. So we did our best to make the story as fun and compelling as possible - but in a way that didn’t frivolize or undermine the gravity of the facts we are reporting.
To wrap up, what do you hope comes of your team’s reporting? Admittedly, I felt pretty hopeless while listening to the first 8 (of 10) episodes. Is there anything U.S. citizens can do for such a systemic issue that has beneficiaries across both the major political parties?
Corruption is so immersive and ubiquitous these days that it can feel less like a fixable problem, and more like air or water - a force of nature and inevitability.
My hope is that this series reminds listeners that the corruption we see everywhere is the opposite - it’s not natural or inevitable or divine, it’s the result of specific decisions by mere mortals who had a plan, which means that other humans can make different decisions. But we can’t make those decisions if we believe it’s all out of our control. It’s not out of our control - this is a human-created problem which means there are human-created solutions.
Thank you for your time and this incredibly important reporting! Before we end, is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?
Master Plan is an outgrowth of the audio work we do each week at Lever Time - which is our weekly reported audio show. I hope everyone will subscribe to both Master Plan at MasterPlanPodcast.com and to Lever Time at LeverTimePod.com.
If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact guest curation called “Democracy at Stake” from Mila Atmos of Future Hindsight podcast.