How Dollars Can Damage Democracy

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Let’s just start at the beginning. How serious a problem does Biden face this week with these votes in Congress and given the opposition by some really important people, including in his own party, to the spending he’s proposing?

JANE MAYER, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: Well, I mean, I think we’re here at a moment of sort of the maximum showdown, really. And, you know, so this is a tremendous challenge to the Biden agenda. As I see it, it’s not just to the Biden agenda, it’s a tremendous challenge to efforts that he and others have made to try to do something to take on climate change. I mean, it’s not just sort of a narrow political fight, it’s actually kind of a fight of global importance and it’s hanging in the balance right here in Congress right now because Biden has put forward a plan that puts a lot of money into efforts to move the United States economy from fossil fuels on to sort of clean energy, renewable energy and it’s being fought tooth and nail by the fossil fuel industry, and as you say, even by some members of Biden’s own party, in particular, one senator, Joe Manchin, who is a Democratic senator who heads the energy committee in the Senate and who is from a coal producing state, West Virginia. So, it’s very dicey. The stakes are huge and the amount of money involved is, you know, incalculable.

AMANPOUR: Jane, let’s talk about the amount of money. How much money is involved and how is it kind of divided between what looks like and you’ve obviously mentioned the climate agenda and we’re going to get to some of the fossil fuel people who are going to end up before Congress soon, but there’s climate that’s being, you know, attacked, there’s health, there’s tax policy, there’s all that kind of stuff. Are there — can you sort of make a distinction between which one is stronger, how much money being paid, you know, to counter each of those?

MAYER: I mean, Christiane, honestly, I don’t feel I’m in a position to be able to calculate all the money, part of it is because some of its secret spending, and an awful lot of money that influences American politics right now is money that goes into the non-profit role. It’s not just lobbying and direct campaign donations. That’s the sort of obvious money. But really, what we’re talking about is a whole sort of echo chamber that’s been created by industry that’s captured the politics to a large extent in America and it’s created by funding think tanks and academic centers and front groups that look like they’re led by consumers, but it turns out they’re funded by industries.