understanding how we got where we are today. >> we can continue our study of wiscons wisconsin. he spoke about his book, dollarocracy. f >> the inflow of huge amounts of money to our politics has changed almost everything about our politics for the worst, not for the better. historically, in an american political campaign, the dominant force in the campaign, the center of the campaign was your human level engagement with people. that has just been blown apart. now, we have campaigns that are defined by sound bytes, not real address, not real interactions. they are defined at the state level by flying around the state

in a jet and landing at an airport, having an appearance, getting back in the fly and fly -- getting back in a plane and flying off. we have politics that are delinked from the human-level interactions. candidates tell me -- they will tell you, in many cases, that huge portions of their days that used to be spent interacting with humans are now devoted to running down a list of names of rich people, calling them and asking them for money. sometimes candidates have told me they spend seven or eight hours a day making campaigns to ask for money, that's seven or eight hours out of every campaign day that is taken away from your constituents, your community and political process and put into a scrambling, a desperate search for money.

it's hard to imagine something more unhealthy for the democratic process. one of the things we talk about in the book is a critical juncture that happened in the early 1970's. demomeracy was winning. we had had a series of developments from the 1950's, maybe from the end of world war ii on, that had expanded american democracy. you can seen the civil rights movement, which had made the promise of voting rights real. with the voting rights act and with the civil rights act and changes in the south, you saw a passage to an amendment to the constitution that extended it to 18 to 21 year olds and ended the poll taxes and you could not erect a financial barrier. a lot of changes had occurred in a

relatively short number of years. you had the 1960's, was a great time of opening up. at the end of the 60's, you saw a lot of that come into our politics and you saw a dominant discussion about how to perfect a lot of things, including the environment. the environmental movement became very, very strong. it was so powerful, if you can imagine this, richard nixon bent to the demands of an environme environmental movement, signing into law a clean water act, a clean air act and so the strength of these movements, environmental, consumer protecti protection, voting rights created a lot of discomfort among the old order, among powerful people who had had power for a long time. in the early 1970's, you saw a response

to that. lewis wrote a memo in which he suggested to corporations that they needed to get more involved in politics. they had to start to develop their own think tanks and they had to lobby a lot more and they had to really try to influence elections as best they could to push back this rise of demands from the great mass of people, which is really changes the circumstance in which organizati organizations operated. it was popular with major corporations. they loved it. if you look at powell's notes, you'll see letters from corporate ceo's saying, please, please send me a copy of your memo. now, powell had turned down opportunities to be richard nixon's appointee to the supreme court several times.

he was approached again and he said, yeah, i'll take the court gig and he became a supreme court justice. on the supreme court, in a number of rulings, he was the lead writer or a strong supporter of decisions that began to open up the process for corporate money; began to open up the process of money for wealthy people. he was opposed by another conservative, william. he said, again and again, we have to be careful with this. if we start to knock down the barriers to campaign money flowing in from special interest and wealthy interest, we could end up in a situation where money takes over. even into the 1990's,now

they are gone. the majority on the supreme court is a powell majority and they have decided again and again to knock down barriers to corporate money and politics. you have seen the triumph of his vision and the democratic process. money totally dominates our politics. >> a person isn't used in the first amendment. >> what is your -- maybe you don't want to touch this -- as a person, do you worry at all? as a person, do you worry at all that there's too much money in politics? >> no, i really don't. i think we spend less on our presidential campaigns each year, when there's a

presidential election, than the country spends on cosmetics. >> is that series of rulings culminated, that ruling effectively said, corporations can spend what they want to influence our politics, in combination with rulings before and since. we've ended up in a situati situation, our campaigns used to cost a couple hundreds of dollars and now they are millions of dollars. >> with all due deferens -- for special interest, including foreign corporations. it would not limit our election [ cheering and applause ]

i they should not be based on bank roll. they should be decided by american people. >> there was construction of concept of corporations have certain human rights. that was extended by the supreme court into politics. if an individual has the right to give money, than a corporation has the right to do so. this is a big, big leap. it went against all the things that states and federal officials had operated on. it went against values that republican and democratic presidents and governors had embraced and knocked down a huge amount of our existing campaign

finance law. in the immediate aftermath of it, people say, corporati corporations -- -- corporations are not going to do that. the reality is, since the citizens united ruling, we have seen a massive uptick in the spending on our campaigns and we are going from record-level of spending to record-level of spending. each new election cycle, we hit a new peek of spending and the growth and the amount of money has been exponential. it hasn't all come from corporations. it has also come from wealthy individuals who are giving money and what we really should understand is, that citizens united is not in and of itself the definitional ruling for our times. citizens united has become a catch phrase

for a series of ruling going back to the 1970's and after citizens united. we look at them as a whole, knocking down our existing campaign finance laws and creating a circumstance where it is just incredibly easy for money to flow wherever it wants in our politics. there's a fantasy that says money didn't influence our politics, it's just given to political players because you like where they stand. but the reality of it is, many decisions aren't about a partisanship or an ideology. they are about an advantage for a corporation or individual. people ask themselves, why, in campaign after campaign do we hear candidates say, we want to get rid of tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas. you hear it again and again and yet

it never happens. why doesn't it happen? well, because there's an awful lot ofnist inter -- awful lot of interested people who don't want that change. we often here people on the left and the right say, why do we spend so much on the military when it is so in efishabout -- inefficient? they are getting incredible amounts of money and exposed for waste and going over budget and they keep getting all this money. well, the reality is that those military contractors have spent an immense amount of money to influence our politics through campaign donations, but also through lobbying. most people don't see all of that spending in any kind of coherent way. it

comes in not merely through campaigns and political parties as it once did, but also through independent groups and super parks and dark money operations. at the end of the day, we have a very untransparent money process where people don't know who's dominating the discussion. it is being dominated and it has a profound impablth -- impact on our politics. it is a throwback to what powell was hoping for. corporations are able to shape the discourse and that shaping of the discourse is very, very damaging. we see good idea tossed to the side. we see dysfunctional ideas raised up and made dominant in our politics and it is fair to say, today, that not just candidates and campaigns are shaped by

money, but our debate itself is shaped by money. that, to me, is a very unhealthy thing. i think we've gone in the wrong direction. in the book, we detail how all that happened. if you don't know how we got there, some people might think the is natural and normal. it's not natural, it's not normal. it's not how our politics were and it shouldn't be the sort of politics that we seek for the future. if we want to find by dollars than votes, if our future says that money is speak, corporations are people and citizens are spectators in this great battle between big-money interests, it diminishes our democra democracy. when you get elected to congress, when you get elected to the u.s. senate, coming out of this process, no

matter how good a person you are, after you've had a very long day; after you've been debating for three or four hours and running through committee sessions, when you come back to your office, if you've got a call from an individual citizen in your state or you've got a call from somebody who is your biggest campaign donor, he said, whose call do you think i return at night? he's a really decent man and he was speaking a truth that many politicians will not admit. when your campaign is defined by, dominated by money, you spond to money. and that our politics delinked from our citizenry and incredibly unhealthy because the fact of the matter is, money, big money, often has very, very different interests than the great massive citizens. the history of

america is a history of people fixing problems and we should never assume that all the problems were fixed in 1787 or in 1865 or in 1965. what we should recognize is, that new problems occur, new challenges arise and when those challenges come our way, we ought to meet them as the founders intended by writing elements of a constitution that will respond to the moment in which we live, to solve those problems, to make real democracy. we've done it before, we have to do it again. our book had theadacious goal, to people who have started organizing, to go for it. don't be overwhelmed, do not think it was impossible. it was overwhelming and impossible to get votes for women and to get

rid of segregation and jim crow and not just the civil war, but the civil rights. it was unreal and impossible to say that 18 to 21-year-olds who could be sent off to die in a war also ought to have a say at the polling place about whether we go to war. those were unreal and impossible and yet we achieved every one of them. there's no reason to believe we cannot achieve a real demomeracy in -- democracy in which money is not viewed as speech and people and our elections are organized so the vote matters more than the dollar. we can do it. it's a doable task and we know it's doable because the people of this country had taken on equal challenges in the past. it's our generation's time to take on the challenges and overcome

them. >> up next, we visit the home of an architect and hear from ron about his book. he writes home of love and loss, about the life and career. f >> we're sitting in the first studio of frank lloyd. his home was built in 1911. destroyed in 1925 and rebuilt and this is the third version of it. each version has a story to tell. the first was an ark textural su -- architectural solution. how he and his lover could return to europe and live together out of the prying