AMY GOODMAN: We look now at a major new investigation into how political extremists and corporate forces are orchestrating a system of legalized corruption in the United States. A new podcast series from The Lever aims to expose their scheme. It’s called Master Plan. It’s narrated by David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever. In this clip, he describes how he first became interested in following money in politics and the resulting corruption.

DAVID SIROTA: Can you pinpoint the exact moment when you realized how corrupt and FUBAR everything was? I can. It was after a predawn bus trip to Canada.

ROGER GARRITY: Sera Congi joins us live now from the U.S.-Canadian border in Highgate with more on the story. Sera?

SERA CONGI: Roger, it’s a matter of consumers paying one price here in the U.S. and a different price just 40 feet from where I’m standing.

DAVID SIROTA: It was the year 2000. I was a few years out of college, following my dreams of good government and progress that I’d seen on The West Wing. I scored my first big job in politics working for a then-obscure New England congressman who had started busing seniors to Canada in search of lower-priced prescription drugs.

REP. BERNIE SANDERS: So, then the question comes: Why is it that the same exact prescription drug, manufactured in the United States of America, is sold here in Canada or in Mexico or in Europe at far, far lower prices than that product is sold in the United States? That is insane.

DAVID SIROTA: He was right. It is insane. And he had a plan to fix it: a bill that would allow American pharmacies to buy cheaper drugs from Canada and sell them to Americans at the lower world market prices. It was a commonsense idea that seemed popular in both parties. Some Democrats even started campaigning on the issue in the 2000 election. I worked for one of them, in Montana, a farmer running for Senate who was organizing similar bus trips to Canada.

BRIAN SCHWEITZER: We didn’t ask people when they got on those buses for Canada if they were Republicans or Democrats or libertarians or vegetarians. We only asked them if you would like to make a difference. We said that we would embarrass Congress into action. And over a year ago, when we started these trips, Congress had never heard about the problem about prescription drugs. Now everybody’s got a solution.

DAVID SIROTA: The pressure campaign worked. More lawmakers from both parties sponsored the bill. It got votes in the House and Senate. It passed Congress, and President. Bill Clinton signed it. To 25-year-old me, it seemed the system had worked. There was a problem. The public pressured its government. The legislative machine went to work. And the wrong was righted. But then the hammer came down.

JOHN ROBERTS: A congressional plan to reduce Americans’ medical costs today ran smack into a roadblock.

DAVID SIROTA: I remember hearing the news. I was in my tiny D.C. apartment.

JOHN ROBERTS: Secretary of Health Donna Shalala, in a letter to the president, has now scuttled the plan by citing “serious flaws and loopholes” which “undermine the potential for cost savings.”

DAVID SIROTA: The trickery was grotesque. Lawmakers issued their press releases touting the passage of a bill that promised to lower the cost of prescription drugs, but the pharmaceutical industry had been funneling millions of dollars to both political parties, and lobbyists got their allies in Congress to slip a loophole into the bill. Then the Clinton administration used that loophole to kill the program before it could ever go into effect.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Since she couldn’t certify that American consumers wouldn’t get lower prices, she didn’t want to hold out false hope and be involved in something she thought was not legitimate.

DAVID SIROTA: The Clinton White House made this announcement right after Christmas, when everyone was on break — the kind of timing often used in Washington to make sure nobody notices something bad is happening. The whole thing reeked of corruption. And today, the price of medicine continues to skyrocket.

KRISTIN BYRNE: Last January, prices of more than 800 medications went up. It hurts those without insurance, and even those with it.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from the podcast series from The Lever called Master Plan.

For more, we’re joined by its host, David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever. His new Rolling Stone article is headlined “How the 2024 Election Is Normalizing Corruption.”

David, thanks for staying with us. Why don’t you lay out this series that you’ve been working on for a long time?

DAVID SIROTA: The premise of the series is that we live in a world where the campaign finance system has been deregulated and anti-corruption laws have been gutted. We’ve seen that recently at the Supreme Court, but we’ve seen it at the Supreme Court and in our politics really for decades. And I think we understand implicitly — polls show that people understand that we’re living in a time when money completely and thoroughly dominates politics. Every day you wake up, there are headlines about how much money is flooding into the political system. And it feels like that’s just the natural course of events.

But what we trace through never-before-reported documents is that this was a plan, a specific plan to deregulate the campaign finance laws, that started about 50 years ago with something called the Powell Memo. Back then, Lewis Powell, on his way to becoming the Supreme Court justice, issued a memo, wrote a memo about how corporations needed to reinvest in trying to take over the U.S. government because the government had been becoming too democratically responsive. And so, part of the plan that came out of that Powell Memo was a plan to destroy the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms and to destroy any future campaign finance reforms.

Soon after that, you saw the Buckley v. Valeo case, which enshrined the radical legal doctrine that money in politics is not corruption, money in politics is constitutionally protected speech. That came out of groups — that case came out of groups inspired by the Powell Memo. Soon after that, Lewis Powell, on the Supreme Court, extended those free speech rights to corporations trying to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections.

That ruling from Lewis Powell ended up becoming the basis for Citizens United — Citizens United, written by, of course, Lewis Powell’s immediate successor on the court, Anthony Kennedy, himself a former corporate lobbyist, famous for doling out money in Sacramento, in that Legislature there. And that ruling, of course, says that money cannot be regulated spent in elections, if it comes from so-called independent expenditure committees. And that ruling now has allowed an explosion of campaign cash into our political system.

And finally, after that came a string of rulings essentially weakening the federal bribery statute so that it’s almost impossible to prosecute corruption and bribery, straight-up bribery. So, the point being here is that people who are watching this understand that the system is dominated by money. I think what we unearthed, again, through never-before-reported documents, is that it was a specific plan to deregulate the campaign finance system by people who knew they couldn’t get their way on policy unless they were able to short-circuit democracy. To my mind, this is the real crisis of democracy: allowing our democracy to be bought.

AMY GOODMAN: And we just have 20 seconds. How is this election normalizing corruption, David?

DAVID SIROTA: Well, when you look at Donald Trump running out there, saying to oil donors, “Give me a billion dollars, and I will give you the policies that you want”; when you see, to my mind, Democrats trying to avoid too many — taking too many positions that might offend their corporate donors; when you see Democrats’ big donors demanding, for instance, they fire Lina Khan; and none of that seeming like a scandal, all of it seeming like that’s just the way politics is done, we are in an era where that kind of corruption is now normal. And that’s a problem.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, David Sirota, editor-in-chief of The Lever, the podcast series, Master Plan. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.