51. The Master Plan to Legalize American Corruption

It’s easy to get disillusioned with American politics. There’s a two party system that makes everything seem intractable, a general lack or transparency, and an overwhelming sense that corporate greed somehow controls everything. But it didn’t have to be that way.

This week I had the great privilege to interview investigative journalist David Sirota about his brand new limited series podcast Master Plan. In it he traces the roots of our current political deadlock back more than 50 years to Nixon administration where the destined-to-be-impeached president took a bribe on tape from the Milk lobby.

When the news came out that dairy farmers were funneling vast sums of cash into the Nixon campaign American politicians did something almost unheard of: they passed new laws on campaign finance that made this exact thing illegal. What could have been the beginning of a new era of transparency in government ultimately had the opposite effect. Frightened by the possibility of clean politics a soon-to-be supreme court justice named Lewis Powell cooked up a document that became the vision of corporate oligarchs to legalize corruption. Sirota and his team of talented journalists (which includes my wife Laura Krantz) follow the story from the infamous Powell Memo through a series of backroom deals, pivotal supreme court decisions and bad faith efforts all the way to the penning of the Republican manifesto “Project 2025” in this year’s election.

I don’t want to give too much away, except to say that the show elegantly covers a huge breath of American history and will make you think about politics in an entirely new way.