End the Hostile Takeover

In his new book, Hostile Takeover, David Sirota unleashes a stinging 300-page indictment of a system corrupted almost beyond recognition. We have a government in which the greater good is subsumed by corporate interests day in and day out, and where political discourse itself is framed by those very interests; we end up discussing everything but the reasons why average Americans are worse off than they were 30 years ago.

The indictment has a number of counts -- the corporatocracy has gamed the tax codes, assaulted our right to a day in court, kept us from discussing single-payer health care and launched a relentless assault on Americans' right to organize. Sirota shows how the economy that most of us experience has been bled dry by "Big Money" interests while working people have faced a death by a thousand cuts, great and small.

Hostile Takeover is a gut-punch for anyone who still believes in the American Dream. But while Sirota gives us an unmerciful look into how the system is gamed, he doesn't leave readers feeling hopeless. Under a veneer of world-weary cynicism, Sirota's an optimist. Central to the work is his belief that if people are given a greater understanding of how the cards have been stacked against them, they can and will defeat the hostile takeover in its tracks.

I spoke with Sirota last week by phone as he was killing some time in Chicago between stops on his book tour.

Joshua Holland: You pinpoint the beginning of the Hostile Takeover in the early 1970s -- as many others have. Most people agree the proximate causes were the building of conservative infrastructure, the conservative media, etc. But I want to ask you about the bigger picture, looking beyond the proximate causes. I mean, was there a shift in our political culture then, or in our corporate culture?

David Sirota: I think what you're asking is -- and I get this question a lot -- money has always played a role in politics, what's different about how it plays out now?

JH: Yeah, you're better at this question thing than I am.

DS: I've been doing a lot of interviews. My take is that conservatives got smarter in the ways you described, but I think one of the ways that corporate America got smarter was that they began to understand that there was value to them in infiltrating the Democratic Party. They realized that owning the Republican Party was not enough, and that grabbing a chunk of the Democratic Party -- even a small chunk -- would allow the system as a whole to radically shift to the right far more quickly than if they just pursued a binary strategy with one party. We used to have one big business party and now we have one and a third -- or one and a quarter -- and that quarter is really integral to what's allowed the hostile takeover to move towards completion -- or at least to intensify.

JH: So you don't see both parties as being hopelessly sold out. What's your view of the likelihood of retaking that quarter -- of retaking the Democratic Party?

DS: I'm very optimistic about that.

JH: You are.

DS: Yes, I am. I've been asked why I stick it out with the Democratic Party. Well, I think my book lays out examples of why. I think there are really some reasons to be encouraged. There are some people in a bad system who are fighting back, I think there's infrastructure being built to better support people who are willing to stand up for ordinary citizens and I think people are starting to realize that there is political -- electoral -- value in a politics based on fighting back against the hostile takeover. I've written about that before, about how Democrats in red states are winning by being far more populist.

JH: Can this happen before we get public financing of campaigns? Because in your book, you do what a lot of policy people do: You lay out a lot of smart alternatives -- a lot of commonsense policy fixes. But elsewhere you talk about how we don't have an honest policy debate -- that those debates are being smothered in huge "piles of steaming bullshit," in large part because of where the money comes from. Given that, is public financing a precondition for getting anything done?