Evil corporations aren’t just charging too much for their products, they are actually undermining the very fabric of our democracy.
At least that is the picture that Zephyr Teachout painted in her TEDx presentation. Teachout, who ran against Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the 2014 Democratic primary, has made a name for herself as a lawyer and anti-corruption activist and writer.
Her talk Sunday described a process she calls the “chickenization” of certain industries. Using Tyson Foods as a model, she said that when corporations get too big, they begin to dictate terms to their suppliers, denying them the ability to make their own business decisions. According to Teachout, Tyson tells chicken farmers exactly what kinds of chicks, feed and water to use. She says it turns farmers into “serfs for Tyson.”
“They can’t drop out because Tyson and a few other processors own so much of the market that, if they drop out, there is no one else they can sell to,” Teachout said.
Once a corporation gets big enough, Teachout said they can start dictating terms the way Tyson does with its chicken suppliers. She said Wal-Mart is such a powerful market force that it can tell Levi’s what kind of cotton to use in its jeans and tell Coca-Cola what kinds of sweeteners to put in its sodas. Companies are forced to comply or lose their business at Wal-Mart.
Teachout compared modern-day CEOs to the robber barons of the 20th century. Amazon, whose CEO and founder Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post, had a contract dispute with Hachette publishing this summer and made it harder for consumers to get books from Hachette. She said that this was an example of how corporations could use their power to disrupt democracy.
“This might seem like a small fight, but if you think about the ‘ingredients’ which are in books — ideas — it becomes something more dangerous,” Teachout said. “They have a power over ideas. Even if Amazon isn’t using that power now… we are giving it the power to control which ideas come to us.”
According to Teachout, it isn’t just retail companies that experience a “chickenized” industry. She said that concentration exists in the banking and cable industries and that companies with too much of the market have the power to control the content of what is on television.
“This kind of control in the marketplace bleeds over to control in our political sphere as well,” Teachout said.
She said that chicken farmers were afraid to speak out against Tyson’s practices because the company could retaliate by giving them worse chicken feed or more restrictive contracts. She also said that writers and publishers were hesitant to protest Amazon’s policies out of fear that their books would never reach consumers and their ideas would never be heard.
“We not only don’t have the competitive, thriving small business economy that we want, but we also don’t have the competitive, thriving idea economy in democracy,” Teachout said.
Teachout asserted that when the Reagan administration rewrote anti-trust laws in the 1980s, it laid the groundwork for companies like Tyson to integrate vertically and take hold of the market. She advocated breaking up banks and large corporations and insisted on “neutrality” for companies like Amazon, which would force them to treat each publishing house equally.
“I believe everybody already knows this,” Teachout said. “I believe people already feel a sense of powerlessness, the sense of a lost way in terms of our American entrepreneurial spirit and democracy. There is a sleeping giant out there in the country of people who want to take on these monopolists who are not acting as market actors, but as political actors.”
Pipe Dream had the chance to sit down with Zephyr Teachout
Pipe Dream: You’ve said that campaign contributions are like a “gateway drug to bribery.” Do you think that publicly financed campaigns are the answer to that?
Zephyr Teachout: I do. It’s not the only answer because there is more than one gateway drug. What happens is you get really used to raising money from someone who is giving you $30,000. In New York, the limits are so high, you can raise enormous amounts of money. They may not say explicitly, “I want this built, I want this tax break,” but you know what’s up. Then it becomes very easy when someone comes along with something that is illegal, and more explicit, to feel like it’s all just the same. You’re already acculturated to not see this as corrupt, but as just doing business.
PD: You ran in the last primary election against Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who had a $35 million war chest. Do you think if campaigns were publicly financed last year, the results would have been different?
ZT: I can’t say I would have won, but it would have been a totally different campaign. I didn’t get press at all for the first month I was running. I started running in mid-June, so in mid-June to July, I wasn’t getting any press. And the reason is, and reporters have been very honest with me, is that if you don’t have any money, you aren’t seen as a serious threat. So reporters use money as a proxy for seriousness and viability of a campaign. If we had a public financing system, instead of spending my first month on the phone trying to raise in $2,000 chunks, because I just don’t have the people that can give me $30,000, I would have spent that first month out there organizing. Every $5 contribution would have been worth $30.
Eventually, if you look at what I raised, and if it had a public financing system added onto it, I believe I would have raised $3.5 million instead of $800,000. So that’s a total difference. The press would have treated me differently, I could have had ads. I ran a whole campaign with no ads. We still did pretty well, but the purpose of campaign finance isn’t so that one can win, but so that one can get a voice. We talk about it like not having any oxygen, like you’re breathing through a straw because of the amount of press you can get.
I was really lucky because Cuomo sued me, so that led to a press moment so I could get attention, but had he not sued me, it would have been extremely difficult to get in any of the papers. Once there was a conflict, once there was that court case, they could cover the court case and then the race. But so often they just wait around until someone shows that they have the money.
PD: Where does voter choice factor into this? Binghamton is a great place to talk about political entrenchment. Our state Sen. Thomas Libous has been in office for 27 years, and we just elected him despite a recent indictment of lying to the FBI. Where does this factor in when talking about getting corruption out of New York state government?
ZT: Well I think a lot of people don’t vote. There has been a lot of chatting after this most recent election that nobody voted, and maybe the Democrats didn’t get out the right message. But I don’t think it’s just about words. People want to vote for someone that they think is free and is going to be a leader. If they know that everybody is only raising money all of the time, that’s not exciting or inspiring because you know they won’t be free. I actually was very excited about [Anndrea] Starzak, I was disappointed that she lost.
I think overall, it’s not just an individual race that leads to a culture of complacency, where you feel like there’s nothing you can do. What you see with a public financing system is that far more women run, it’s a real feminist issue, more people of color run and of course more middle-class people run. Right now, if you’re not rich yourself, you better have rich friends if you want to run. That’s a broken system. I think you’re going to find a lot more interesting people running in a public financing system. Some of them are crazy, but you would rather have that to bring some life into it.
Look, I don’t know what’s going to happen with Libous’ indictment, or if he’s done anything illegal, but there is certainly a pattern of him serving special interests.
PD: You’ve been a very outspoken opponent of hydrofracking in New York state, which seems like a non-issue now that Gov. Cuomo has come out against it. What’s the next big issue facing New Yorkers?
ZT: We haven’t banned fracking in New York state until we’ve banned it everywhere, because we still import fracked gas from Pennsylvania. The only way to ban it meaningfully is to replace it with renewable energy sources. In terms of energy, given where the populace is and what they are going to need for clean, healthy jobs, we should be actively building renewable energy infrastructure faster than we are. And education is a huge issue. People are spending money around the country on the New York education fight, and that is on the basics like making sure we have music and arts and testing.
PD: So what do you say to critics of publicly financed campaigns that would rather see taxpayer money spent on things like education and arts programs?
ZT: Well right now, the taxpayers are paying billions of dollars to the donors, because donors will maybe donate $100,000 and get a $30 million tax break. So that’s $30 million that we are giving away to campaign donors, which is far more expensive than funding the basics of democracy. So yeah, there’s a cost, but it’s nowhere near the cost of this legalized corruption.
PD: I’m sure you’ve been waiting to speak with the Binghamton University student newspaper to announce any further candidacy for office, so what’s next for you? Do you plan on seeking office again?
ZT: I’d love to. Of course it will be a lot easier if there is public financing of elections, but I don’t have any particular plans yet. So we’ll see. I loved it, it was so much fun, in part because all of these entrenched powers have become a little lazy and a little scared. I just want to see a bigger range of people come out to run for office.
You don’t have to follow the exact route or the right path. It shouldn’t be a career path. It should be something artistic and exciting and powerful for people. With students, one of the things that I see is students say, “I really care about climate change” or “I really care about police brutality,” but when I ask them what they want to do about it they say they will work for a nonprofit, or protest or march, but they won’t run for office. So I hope that the people who are willing to protest would see running for office as another way to go.
PD: You won my home district of Albany.
ZT: Yes, by a lot! Twenty-seven percent!
PD: So does that indicate to you that New York is ready for more progressive change?
ZT: I think so, but I’m going to be insistent on this. I think Cuomo has a Reaganite trickle-down, non-democratic ideology. I am a traditional Democrat. I am not embarrassed to call myself progressive, but I am at the center of the American and New York Democratic tradition. It is Cuomo and a few others who have moved far to the right. So yes, people are ready to own our Democratic roots.