00:00Joining me now is Devon Osno, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the brand new book,
00:04The Haves and Have Nots, Dispatches on the Ultra Rich. There are so many great stories in this book,
00:11and I want to talk about that. I just wanted to start with, I mean, before the break,
00:15I brought up Trump's scrapping Operation Klepto Capture in a win for Russian oligarchs everywhere,
00:20I suppose. They're the big winners in this. Even domestically, as I just mentioned,
00:25you open your book with the scene of top billionaires sitting right by Trump at his
00:28inauguration. What's your reaction to how much everything in this administration seems to be
00:33for sale? Because that seems to be much more out in the open than anything has been in the past.
00:39Yeah, you're right. I mean, in many ways, Jen, it feels as if this is a golden age for the oligarchy.
00:44I mean, not only overseas in Russia, as you see, he has now gotten rid of this program,
00:50which the U.S. and allies were using to put pressure on oligarchs who are close to Vladimir
00:55Putin. But here at home, there are not only the very visible ways in which he has sought to
01:00surround himself with the most powerful business interests in this country, but also every day
01:05behind the scenes. Jen, I'm hearing about it from people who work in government affairs,
01:09who work in lobbying in Washington, who say we have never seen an exchange of money for influence
01:14on a scale like this. It is staggering. Even people who have been doing this for a long time,
01:19a million dollars for a group dinner with the president, money that goes to a super PAC called
01:23MAGA Inc., or five million dollars for a one on one meeting. You know, even by the standards of
01:28pay to play, this is new and very uncertain territory. One of the interesting points you made in the book
01:35is that that visual we all sat and watched and sort of commented on of the inauguration, right,
01:42was not really the start of the oligarchs building power in this country. It wasn't the start of all of
01:48these billionaires sort of coalescing around Trump or even trying to saddle up to politicians in
01:54Washington. And it was an interesting point because I think at the time, a lot of us said,
01:59well, this is the start of this, right? And it really wasn't. So tell us more about that.
02:03Yeah, there was a fascinating moment. You'll remember in the final days of the Biden administration,
02:07he talked about the rise of what he called an American oligarchy. Scholars of that subject told me
02:13that is the first time they've ever heard the word oligarchy uttered in the Oval Office.
02:18And it is a real signal moment in the history of American power and money. Look, there has always
02:23been money to some degree in politics, but it has grown so dramatically over the course of the last
02:29two decades. It's almost easy for us to overlook. But take one statistic, Jen. In 2004, in that
02:35presidential election year, billionaires in this country contributed about $13 million to the election.
02:40Sounded like a lot at the time, except that in the most recent election, they contributed 200 times
02:46more, $3 billion into the election. There's just no way in which we can't recognize the fact
02:51that money is now shaping our politics more than it ever has in this country.
02:56We've seen this is clearly causing a tremendous amount of outrage. There are protests all over
03:01the place nearly every day. We've seen anti-Trump protests growing like hands off in April and no
03:06kings, which is a demo coming up next weekend. Organizers 5051 are pushing for people to boycott
03:13billionaire-owned brands, which is everybody's looking for kind of an action to be taken.
03:18Does public action like that help limit these oligarchs? Or what should people understand about
03:23the impact of it? Yeah, that's actually a really interesting fact of history. The pattern is
03:28unbelievably clear that when you look at countries that have dealt with the rise of oligarchy and the
03:33places as disparate as South Africa, Ukraine, the Philippines, one of the very clear patterns
03:39is that public pressure, civil society is one of the forces that can actually push that back.
03:45And in fact, we've seen it here recently in Wisconsin, the effort to stand up in effect to
03:52Elon Musk's attempt to use his money to win the result by the result of that election.
03:57You know, that was a case, as scholars will put it to me, they said the only solution to oligarchic power
04:01is to dilute and balance it with citizen power. And the solution to that is, frankly, it's the kinds
04:09of protests you were just talking about. In some cases in history, it's been labor strikes,
04:13it's investigative reporting, but you have to keep up the pressure. It's a sustained movement over
04:17time. And we've seen already in the first few months of this administration that the public is
04:21simply not comfortable with what they're seeing. And some of these protests have been much larger than
04:25the organizers expected. I wouldn't be surprised if the ones coming up are too.
04:31you
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