Corporatocracy
Gaslit Nation unmasks the real villain: the corporations hijacking our democracy, using Trump as a distraction as they loot and destroy our country. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Brennan Center fellow and professor of law at Stetson University College of Law, and author of Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians, explains how corporations funded Trump’s violent coup attempt on January 6, 2021.
In Part I of our discussion, Torres-Spelliscy shows us the inner-workings of corporate greed, and why boardrooms are fine with Trump chaos. In Part II of our discussion, out Thursday in our bonus show for Patreon (get access to that for $5/month at the Truth-teller level), we discuss concrete ways to fight back, including as the corporate lobbyists on the Supreme Court kill what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, which Americans gave their lives for.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
ICE, it's not just ICE. It's CoreCivic, it's GeoGroup. Those are corporations that run ICE detention centers. That's right. They are for-profit. They are traded on Wall Street. And what happens is that those companies and this system is that it does not accept anything but growth. It's not even good enough to be profitable. It's not even good enough to be profitable. You have to be more profitable and more profitable and more profitable. It's not enough to be a profitable business. You have to keep growing those profits. And so once they've rounded up every person in this country, who do you think is next?
Andrea Chalupa (00:53):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, the film in Kremlin doesn't want you to see -- so be sure to watch it.
(01:03):
Gaslit Nation, a show about corruption in America and rising autocracy worldwide. And this week I am honored to be joined by the great Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Brennan Center fellow and professor of law at Stetson University College of Law. And I have a lot of questions for her. First and foremost, how do we survive and thrive in a corporatocracy? No, rather how do we overthrow one and take back our democracy from the corporations that are treating us the people as they say in Ukraine about the oligarchs there, like the shit they grow their money in. So welcome, welcome to Gaslit Nation.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (01:45):
Thank you so much for having me.
Andrea Chalupa (01:47):
So during Trump's first term, during that first nightmare, I had a dream and I pay close attention to my dreams for all the important reasons that we should. It's a grounding exercise, but also in studying my grandfather's story, my grandfather was born and raised in Dombas, Ukraine, a region of Ukraine that's been under invasion by the Russians for the past decade. It's where some of Stalin's worst crimes were carried out against Ukrainians. And my grandfather coming up there wrote a memoir and he would write about his dreams. He wrote about a dream he had on the eve of being arrested and tortured during Stalin's purges as a young father. So I pay a lot of close attention to my dreams at a time of autocracy. And one of the dreams I had in Trump's first term that always stuck with me because I was holding my hand and showing me things was that Trump is just a big bouncing clown and that there are these darker forces that are using him to basically enrich themselves, empower themselves in terrorizing the rest of us.
(02:48):
And so my number one pet peeve is how much oxygen he sucks up because of course he is a maniac, but you have this whole resistance media eco chamber that just keeps going like, "Listen to what Trump did today." When it's so many larger forces that helped bring Trump to power are enriching themselves often today, who are hiding in the shadows. And those are the corporate boardrooms, the men and women who sit on those boards and the CEOs and the executives of these companies that are just making money hand over fist, rolling back regulation. And I'm so grateful to have you on the show to unmask those villains, Scooby-Doo style. So I wanted just to ask you about that. Sort of how do you see that dynamic playing out and how did it play out in bringing Trump to power?
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (03:39):
So that's a huge question and a good one. I work on the issue of money and politics. I focus on corporate spending in particular. And one of the things that I have worked on for years now is the problem of dark money. Dark money is money that's spent in politics where the public cannot tell where that money came from. Now often the source of dark money is a cowardly corporation. They are not willing to spend under their doing business as name and instead they put it through various entities, usually a opaque nonprofit. So the entities of choice are 501c4 which are social welfare organizations and 501c6s, which are trade associations. And once that money goes through those opaque nonprofits, no amount of due diligence on the part of a voter will reveal them. One of the things I used to say when I was doing my book tour for corporatocracy to various audiences is the way that you reveal dark money is either litigation or a leak, otherwise the public is just left none the wiser.
(05:06):
And this is a huge problem. So in 2020 there was a billion dollars in dark money. In 2024, there was $2 billion of dark money. So the question of who is behind the politicians who have been elected is actually one where the biggest spending is the unknown spending.
Andrea Chalupa (05:28):
Okay. So you're saying there's a problem. So we're getting drowned out by a tsunami of dark money.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (05:37):
Yeah. I mean, the thing that is sort of strange about the campaign finance system is, well, for one, not everything goes through the campaign finance system. That's good and bad. So often I'm asked about things that are really questions about bribery. And if you really are giving a bribe directly to a politician, that is a different part of the law than our campaign finance system where it is lawful to give candidates who are running for office set amounts of money. So it all depends on what office they're running for and we have different rules at the federal level than we have in each of the 50 states. So when people ask me, "How much money can I give in an election?" I'm like, "Which election? It really matters." And then if you're a really big donor and a really big political spender, then you can spend in all sorts of ways that have no limits.
(06:38):
So one of the things that happened after Citizens United, which is a Supreme Court case from 2010, which says the corporations can spend an unlimited amount of money in our politics. After that, we get the creation of entities known as super PACS. Super PACS are these entities that are ostensibly independent of political parties and candidates. They are supposed to spend completely outside of coordination with those entities and they can take in an unlimited amount of money from rich individuals, corporations, unions, other groups, and then they can spend that money in an unlimited way in our elections. So when you look at the big spenders in the last few cycles, it's almost inevitably a super PAC.
Andrea Chalupa (07:37):
Voters in Maine through a ballot measure are trying to block what you're describing and limited spending through these super PACs in our elections, basically what Citizens United unleashed in 2010. And in the 16 years since Citizens United, one of those things will never look the same again moments in our country, we've had billions of dollars bribing our politicians, confining them willingly in the golden handcuffs. That is exactly how the Kremlin uses dark money offshore bank accounts to capture politicians in countries like Ukraine and Georgia and get them to become pro- Kremlin parties to politically invade a country without having to fire a shot. And here the corporations are doing it through Citizens United, through the Republican Party, but Maine voters in fiercely, famously independent Maine are fighting back with a ballot initiative that's now being challenged by the whole arsenal, like the Darth Vader death star of Republican lawyers and then this is going to go to the Supreme Court, right?
(08:50):
So this maybe.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (08:53):
Well, so the Supreme Court has control over its docket and in any given year they only grant cert and agree to hear about 5% of the cases where they could, which means that 95% of the cases where someone wants the Supreme Court to weigh in, the Supreme Court just ditches it and leaves whatever was happened in the lower courts alone. Now often when it comes to campaign finance, the Roberts Supreme Court has been completely hostile to normal, reasonable reforms. And so during the Robert Supreme Court, which is now, we've got 21 years of this, they have knocked down every single campaign finance law that has come in front of them except for on very sort of weird one out of Florida and that only applied to judges. So every other campaign finance regulation that has hit the Supreme Court has died at the Supreme Court.
Andrea Chalupa (10:01):
So what the main voters have done in fighting back against Citizens United and his ballot measure to contain this dark money flood of money, he could strike that down, John Roberts.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (10:13):
Well, he has to have four other justices with him, but given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, there is often a six three split with six conservative justices going one way and three dissenting liberal justices going another, but that six person majority can make binding case law and if they follow the same pattern that they have over the last 21 years, then campaign finance reforms have a very fraught path if they have to go in front of this compliment of justices.
Andrea Chalupa (10:55):
Right. And John Roberts, since his time in Reagan's DOJ has always been going after voting rights and expanding the power of the vote and now he's done it like the worst bond villain from his Supreme Court. He was put on that Supreme Court to do exactly what he's doing, which is help bring back Jim Crow.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (11:18):
He has definitely been hostile to the Voting Rights Act since the 1980s when he worked in the Department of Justice and you can see in his opinions specifically in Shelby County where he got part of the Voting Rights Act and he does it in a really clever way. He attacks a formula instead of attacking pre-clearance directly, but by attacking that formula, he makes preclearance go away. So he is a incredibly bright lawyer, but I would hesitate to say that he wants Jim Crow back in part because I have to read almost all of the opinions that come out of the Supreme Court and every now and then Chief Justice Roberts will surprise you and he has written about racism in the justice system and how it needs to be eradicated. So I think if he was truly for Jim Crow, you wouldn't find opinions like that from him.
Andrea Chalupa (12:25):
Is that recent though? Is that maybe because they're seeing their poll numbers as the most hated Supreme Court in their nations or something like that. They've given some speeches where they sound a bit defensive, like where they're reading the comment section and they're trying to be like, hey.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (12:43):
The things that the Supreme Court have done in dismantling either the campaign finance system or making the Voting Rights Act less effective, they will have to live with that for the rest of their lives. Now sadly, so will we because we are stuck in a system where money has an outsized voice and where legislators love to pass new voting restrictions. And there was a time in American history like during the Warren Court where those voting restrictions would largely be struck down and voters would be given a better chance at exercising the franchise. And now we have a Supreme Court that goes the exact opposite direction. I mean, they have these moments of clarity every now and then where they do the right thing. I am encouraged by some of what the Roberts Court has done, but in the area of democracy, it's pretty depressing.
Andrea Chalupa (13:51):
Yeah. When you said that they have to live with this, that they've struck down or they've gutted the Voting Rights Act, I think they're fine with that. I think they're proud of living with it. I think they're like, "Put it on my tombstone, put it on the base of my statue in the Heritage Foundation." So I wanted to ask about your book, Corporatocracy. How did corporations help make January 6th possible?
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (14:20):
So this I think is a under-reported story, let's put it that way. So I look at many things as a money and politics issue in part because I'm campaign finance lawyer and it actually I think turns out to be true in certain cases that the only explanation is if you follow the money, which is a lesson from the Watergate scandal back in the 70s. So this book was inspired by January 6th. I had been a Senate staffer right out of college and so I had worked in those buildings and I knew what it was like to have violence at the Capitol because when I was a Senate staffer, there were two Capitol police officers who were killed and I remember going to their funeral in the rotunda and I just remember thinking about how the Capitol police puts their lives on the line so that we can have a functioning democracy, that our legislative branch is real and meaningful.
(15:31):
And so when January 6th happened and you had this huge crowd overwhelming, not just the Capitol police but the metropolitan police as well, there were many people doing different things that day. Some of it was nonviolent and a lot of it was violent. And so you have like over a hundred officers who were injured that day. And I really feel like this is underappreciated by a lot of the American public.
(16:07):
The reason that Congress was in a joint session that day was to certify the results of the 2020 election, which is constitutionally required. And this mob coming into the building and terrorizing members of Congress, senators and their staff stopped that count for many hours, which is a constitutional crisis. So when I looked at that, as I was watching TV and being completely horrified, my campaign finance question popped up, which is, who paid for this? And I think the question of who paid for this is still one that is not completely solved, but the researchers over at the January 6th select committee who looked into some of the financing of all of this give us some clues and then other nonprofits doing FOIA requests and the like have revealed other things. So one of the things that I saw was a group called the Rule of Law Defense Fund.
(17:23):
So the Rule of Law Defense Fund is probably a group you've never heard of. They're pretty obscure. They're an offshoot of the Republican Attorney's General Association, otherwise known as RAGA. And RAGA in 2020, which is the relevant period, had a majority of its funding from publicly traded corporations. And here's just a little list of the top donors to RAGA in 2020. So it was Blue Cross, Altria, Comcast, Walmart, AT&T, CVS, Home Depot, Anheuser-Busch, Fresnius and Pfizer. And one of the things the Rule of the Law Defense Fund did on the morning of January 6th is it put out a robocall asking for Patriots to come fight at the Capitol.
(18:32):
And I would imagine, just to be fair, I don't think these corporations knew that their money was going to be used for such a robocall, but when you fund these groups, I think you have some responsibility to make sure that it's not used in these anti-Democratic ways. And after January 6th, one of the things that happened is many corporations came out in public and they said, "We are not going to fund the people who refused to certify Biden's election on January 6th." So even after the rioters are cleared out of the Capitol, there are still, I think it's 146 members who still won't vote to certify Biden's win. This group of lawmakers have earned the dubious distinction of being called the sedition caucus. And so corporate donors after January 6th for a little while there promised that they would stop funding the sedition caucus. And what is really, really depressing to me is that they couldn't keep that promise.
(19:48):
As simple as that promise is like, "We're not going to fund these anti-small Democratic politicians." And a lot of that money came flowing back into our political system. So some of the same people who were funding RAGA couldn't keep their, "We're stopping our funding promise." So that included AT&T, Comcast, Home Depot, Walmart, and Pfizer. And they kept giving money even after January 6th and after telling us that they would be better. I really worry about what that says about money in politics, that even something as momentous as a constitutional crisis was not enough to stop campaign money from flowing.
Andrea Chalupa (20:47):
And what justification do they have? I know in some cases with Home Depot, they're proud Trump supporters and they let ICE carry out raids at Home Depots. Is this purely ideological? How are they justifying it to themselves? What are they saying when they're pressed on this? Because it's not a great PR opportunity for them. Look at what is happening to Target with the Target boycott. Target's desperate for that to go away. So what are they saying to themselves like, "Oh, we have to play both sides. You never know who's in power we give to both companies." What is their official position on this? Are they just like, "We hate trans children and you're trying to turn all of our children trans and gay with these sex surgeries at school and these litter boxes for cats because now our children are convinced they're a cat because of the big gay agenda." You know what I'm saying?
(21:40):
When you press them on what their position is, they're always like, "Well, both sides are extreme." It's like, no, they're not. No, they are not. One side is just completely brainwashed with disinformation and hate and prejudice. So what is their official position?
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (21:53):
Well, I guess it's going to differ company to company to company and different corporate leaders have given different excuses over time. I mean, one of the things that I've been quite depressed with is-
Andrea Chalupa (22:13):
Yes, this is a place to share it.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (22:16):
Is looking at law firms that sort of capitulated early in Trump 2.0 and corporations that capitulated early in Trump 2.0. I mean, I think of Tim Cook who is just stepping down from Apple and his obsequious gifts to Trump, whether it was to fund his ballroom and or to give him some gold nugget.
Andrea Chalupa (22:49):
Just watch the Melania documentary in the White House One of a handful of white supremacist films to be shown in the White House, just like D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. Yes, by Woodward Wilson. Anyway, go on.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (23:03):
So I think that's a horrible legacy to leave. It's just astonishingly craven and I wish that there was more courage among corporate leaders because they have enormous sway in American politics with the public, with politicians and to see them cave, it was really, really frightening.
Andrea Chalupa (23:40):
Well, why would someone like Tim Cook a cash hoarder, cave? What is he afraid of? I mean, the tariffs can't be great for Apple. The fact that Americans, his customers are being hit in the pocketbook and have less money for his trinkets, his overpriced flashy marketing trinkets. My husband is a software engineer and he will absolutely never buy Apple. I'm just putting it out there. But what ultimately does Tim Cook have to fear from a Trump presidency? What does he think Trump is going to do?
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (24:15):
Well, let me answer this by drawing on history. So because I work on campaign finance, I have to know a lot about Richard Nixon because he was one of the great offenders of violating campaign finance laws and he violates them so badly that it really does cross the line over into bribery. So in the Nixon administration, one of the things that they had to deal with, which is not unlike our times, is runaway inflation. And so the cost of everyday items, including food, was going up. And so what the Nixon administration did is they implemented price controls and then they had this board that would implement the price controls. Now, if they had just implemented price controls across the board, that would have been one thing and that would have been sort of equally fair or unfair to everyone. But instead what happened is that became a source of graft and one of the examples of this is McDonald's.
(25:39):
So McDonald's wanted to raise the price of its cheeseburger and it does, even though there are these price controls. So the Nixon price control board says to McDonald's, "Hey, you can't do that. " And then Ray Crock gives a quarter million dollars to the Nixon campaign and then suddenly he's allowed to raise the price of his hamburger. And I would imagine that a similar calculus may be going in the minds of certain CEOs today in 2026. They want to be the exception to the tariff or they want to be the one who gets the carve out for an otherwise onerous rule so that that gives them a competitive advantage against other corporations who have to actually pay the tariff or have to abide by the price control rule.
Andrea Chalupa (26:46):
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up at the truth teller level or higher on Patreon. Discounted annual memberships are available and you can give the gift of membership. Get bonus shows, invites to exclusive events, all our shows at free and more at patreon.com/gaslit. That's patreon.com/gaslit. Thank you to everyone who supports the show.
(27:09):
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(27:38):
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(27:52):
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(28:08):
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