Episode #279
Zephyr Teachout: Organic’s Deal With The Devil

Zephyr Teachout uses the question of organic integrity to explore a larger political problem: what happens when concentrated private power reshapes public rules while staying mostly within the law. Starting with the pressure on Real Organic to join forces with industrial organic against Bayer and Syngenta, she and Dave unpack corruption, anti-monopoly politics, regenerative agriculture, decentralization, and why any movement that gives up its leverage too early risks losing the very thing it set out to defend.

Our interview with Zephyr Teachout has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Zephyr Teachout at Long Wind Farm in October, 2025:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast, and I’m talking today with my friend Zephyr Teachout. Zephyr, I’m so glad that you came to my home. You saw the farm…

Zephyr Teachout 0:09
It was so exciting to drive past the greenhouse.

Dave Chapman 0:13
It’s hidden in here, isn’t it?

Zephyr Teachout 0:15
Yeah, and incredibly easy to find once you describe it. Of course, I’ve been past it a hundred times.

Dave Chapman 0:22
I know. I love how completely hidden it is from the road, even though it’s right there. We’ll start with the deal with the devil. I asked you this on the panel at Churchtown, but I would like to unpack it more. I’d like to let you roam around this question a bit. I have been approached a number of times by people who represent the industrial organic side of the conversation.

Zephyr Teachout 1:04
I didn’t know which devil you were going to talk about.

Dave Chapman 1:06
That’s the devil.

Zephyr Teachout 1:07
Okay, I thought you were going to talk about the split in the MAGA movement, but this is…

Dave Chapman 1:12
That too. There’s a lot of questions these days. The landscape is complicated. But I have been approached just recently again by somebody from that world, from the world of Driscoll’s, CCOF, and the National Organic Standards Board, saying, “Surely we can link arms against a common foe. And the common foe is Bayer and Syngenta.

Dave Chapman 1:47
They really do hate all of organic because they love regenerative, because they can say “We’re regenerative.” They have a massive amount of money they pump into promoting that, because finally, there’s something that’s organic-ish that can use chemicals.

Zephyr Teachout 2:07
As you know, I come at this from a different angle. I was fascinated at your last conference to hear about this. The way in which regenerative itself has gone through a process that sounds similar to the organic.

Dave Chapman 2:26
Much quicker.

Zephyr Teachout 2:27
Much quicker. It feels like eight years ago. I would think of regenerative as, again as an outsider to this, a lot of cover and a whole ecosystem that maybe isn’t self-contained, but that… So tell me more…

Dave Chapman 2:51
It’s fine, but let’s touch on regenerative, because it’s an important question. Everything is connected. Regenerative started as a term, really, with somebody working with Robert Rodale at the Rodale Institute a long time ago, back in the 70s. Bob wanted to get to a deeper organic.

Dave Chapman 3:14
This is before the government was involved or anything. But it was becoming something in the marketplace. It was great. We were succeeding. But we were maybe losing some of the movement, aspects of it. What was the movement back then? It was community, equality – racial equality, and gender equality – all these things.

Zephyr Teachout 3:41
It’s a whole political vision.

Dave Chapman 3:43
I think his was a vision of, “Let’s not think that this is just a way of farming and not a way of farming, just with certain inputs and not using chemicals.”

Zephyr Teachout 3:57
But it’s interesting. I talk to my students about what we call keywords. You don’t need the term, but these words that we all use are completely contested. So we’re able to talk to each other and use the word “corruption.” We may have a totally different understanding.

Dave Chapman 4:16
That’s interesting. I would have thought we would have agreed on corruption.

Zephyr Teachout 4:23
As you know, I’ve done a lot of work, and there is a strong move over the last four years to make corruption just that which is criminal, just quid pro quo, as against a 2,000-year-old history of saying, “Corruption is the selfish use of public power.” It’s sometimes criminal, sometimes not, but you can call something corrupt without it being a violation of the criminal law. So I use that…

Dave Chapman 4:54
I love that. That’s an important thing to say.

Zephyr Teachout 4:59
I think it’s extremely important, because then it leads to Citizens United, it leads to Buckley v. Valeo, it leads to the Supreme Court saying, “We can’t pass laws that look like they’re limiting some form of information speech as anti-corruption laws if they’re just about stopping power from selfishly governing.”

Zephyr Teachout 5:31
The Supreme Court said we can only pass campaign finance laws if they have an anti-corruption purpose. That itself is problematic, but that’s been the deal since 1976. So what corruption means matters enormously.

Dave Chapman 5:57
Because they didn’t necessarily define that.

Zephyr Teachout 5:59
They didn’t define it at the moment. The current court thinks corruption is just basically Keystone Cops cash being traded in the IHOP bathroom. Then, if you say, “We need to limit how much money, or we need to stop corporations from spending money in elections,” they say, “That’s not an anti-corruption purpose,” because we have this very limited understanding of corruption.

Zephyr Teachout 6:25
So this is where we use this word again all the time. Half the people you’re talking to think corruption is just criminal violations, and half the people think it includes lobbyists and big companies using public power for self-interest.

Dave Chapman 6:42
In which they’re using legal means to twist the process – to influence the process.

Zephyr Teachout 6:48
I think most people see corruption far beyond Donald Trump’s grotesque corruption, which is a lot more like the Keystone Cops kind. But when the law and a lot of elites see it in this narrow way, then it limits our ability to have a more equal and open democracy with integrity.

Dave Chapman 7:13
Yeah, right. I interviewed a guy, a Republican dairy farmer, big guy. He had served on the National Organic Standards Board, and he was absolutely outraged by the whole process. I said at one point that these are the failures of capitalism. He said, “No, because it’s great.” He was a Republican conservative. He said, “No, it’s corrupting the process.”

Dave Chapman 7:43
I thought, “Okay, great distinction.” He still believed that if we just played by the rules – and, of course, the problem is, they changed the rules through this process.

Zephyr Teachout 7:54
Through this process.

Dave Chapman 7:55
Yeah, which he got.

Zephyr Teachout 7:56
He’s not wrong. If you’re a dairy farmer, I would see the incredible corruption of the process, but speaking of words that we use all the time that are contested, capitalism is right there.

Dave Chapman 8:09
I would love to hear. Tell me about that.

Zephyr Teachout 8:14
Capitalism, for some people, means where there are markets – anytime that we use market exchange as the way to run a society. For some people, it means how we allocate goods through capital markets. That’s one way of thinking about it.

Zephyr Teachout 8:38
For other people, it’s where you have extreme financialization, where the financial sector has grabbed hold of farming the way it has with DFA, Dairy Farmers of America, where you have Wall Street taking over every nursing home through private equity roll-ups. They’re not objecting to markets; they’re objecting to the current structure of capital markets controlling local markets.

Zephyr Teachout 9:15
That’s just two of many different understandings of what capitalism is. One of the reasons I don’t tend to talk about it too much, although I’ve thought maybe I should talk about it more, is because I think we so often talk past each other when we use the language of capitalism.

Zephyr Teachout 9:28
I can’t speak for that dairy farmer, but I think there’s a lot of people who say, “I’m a capitalist.” By that, they mean, I think people should be able to… They come from a capitalism versus communism, a Soviet frame.

Zephyr Teachout 9:45
So, if you’re from a certain generation, you think, “Well, we have a choice of an autocratic system where the government makes the shoes and you don’t have any freedom.” Then, if you have that binary system, capitalism looks great. If you come from a Marxist tradition, you look at it totally differently.

Zephyr Teachout 10:08
It leads to us speaking past each other, because that dairy farmer might believe that it’s both important to be able to start your own business and that not everything should be driven by maximal profit on Wall Street.

Dave Chapman 10:24
Do you remember, I think it was 2019, where they were talking about high-road capitalism and low-road capitalism?

Zephyr Teachout 10:33
No, I didn’t…

Dave Chapman 10:33
It was interesting. The premise was that America has low-road capitalism, and it was really because of slavery that it was so embedded in our whole economic system, and which treated people as possessions to be used however you wish.

Dave Chapman 10:54
High-road capitalism would be more like Sweden, where they’re still using capitalism, which is the idea of a market correcting itself, but with values as if people mattered.

Speaker 1 11:11
I’m hesitant, having not read all of this.

Dave Chapman 11:17
You shouldn’t be listening to me for the example.

Zephyr Teachout 11:21
This relates to part of the reason why I focus on, and I have a vision which is constantly changing, of what a healthy market looks like. But it’s not an absence of markets. I tend to focus on anti-monopoly. But it is critical to my vision that nursing homes can be run by people who care about the health of the people who are in them, and that not everything be financialized.

Zephyr Teachout 11:55
To me, that is absolutely grotesque. I saw this beautiful thing recently, talking about… there’s a vein of evil in commoditizing everything. I think it is possible to say the government doesn’t make the shoes or grow the crops, or the carrots or tomatoes.

Zephyr Teachout 12:24
To me, one of the most important challenges of this moment is breaking free of a limited imagination of what a healthy, humane, moral market looks like, and not saying all market systems are evil, because I don’t actually think they are.

Dave Chapman 12:49
I got challenged when Austin came to Vermont Law School, and I was just moderating the conversation. It was a very nice group of 25 students or so. One woman got up and said, “Well, I’m a little alarmed by your support of capitalism – my support of capitalism,” because I was quoting Adam Smith from Eric Schlosser’s beautiful foreword to Austin’s book. God, it’s so good.

Dave Chapman 13:19
I was just like, “Oh, my God. Adam Smith is one of us,” which is that he believed in the free market, but he believed that the government had to protect the freedom of the market from monopoly – from the undue concentration of power in the hands of a few.

Dave Chapman 13:40
I thought, “Well, that sounds like a pretty good system. It might be fantastical to think a government will do that. That’s what we’re trying to figure out – can we bring the government to protect the citizens?”

Zephyr Teachout 13:54
I think of the job of government, which we have too rarely called upon in the last 40 years. One of the core jobs of government, which is us – if it’s working, if it’s not corrupted – a real government is to protect us from private tyranny

Zephyr Teachout 14:20
Private tyranny in the form of Bayer-Monsanto, and which goes to your puzzle, is if you have a tyrant, and then you have an autocratic lord who’s coming to try to make a bargain with you to take on the tyrant, what do you do?

Dave Chapman 14:46
What do you do? I don’t think we’re done with with regenerative and organic.

Zephyr Teachout 14:53
Okay, we’ll go to regenerative. I was fascinated as somebody who is close to, but not inside this community. I was just in East Set for the solstice party two nights ago, saying, “I was hearing some interesting things about regenerative at Dave’s conference.” To somebody, they said, “Oh, what…” I was like, “I can’t get my handle on it.”

Zephyr Teachout 15:21
But going back to the 70s, I experienced it as there being that organic, and then maybe now we’re regenerative, also as being like corruption – a positive vision as opposed to a negative vision. If you think of democracy as another keyword, a word which we use all the time but have very different meanings when we rightly use it.

Zephyr Teachout 15:49
It functions – it’s not like we’re saying gobbledygook when we say “democracy,” we can still have a conversation – but we’re often describing very different things when we use it. So organic strikes me as a word like that, and regenerative too.

Dave Chapman 16:07
And regenerative too. We have to say that out of Bob Rodale’s thing, he died a peaceful death soon after he announced it. Nobody was interested in regenerative as being organic plus. It was like organic was still struggling just to be organic. It went through its phases, and it had its challenges, and we’re dealing with those challenges right now.

Dave Chapman 16:29
They’re the challenges that you write about, which is what happens when a bully comes to the party and they’re big and strong, and everyone’s a bit afraid – nobody wants to tell them to stop drinking so much. They don’t want to get punched. They’re just a lot bigger than everybody else, and strong.

Dave Chapman 16:48
That’s happened in organic, because the market started to work. The market worked because people wanted an alternative to the chemical, industrial, agricultural complex. They didn’t want to eat that food. They wanted something else, and so they turned to organic as the only choice standing. It came from a strong movement of a lot of people who wanted to change everything.

Dave Chapman 17:17
In America, that’s where organic came from. In England, it’s interesting. It had a more conservative tradition. I’m trying to understand what that is. I’m not there yet.

Zephyr Teachout 17:26
Very fascinating.

Dave Chapman 17:27
I know. It was the lords and ladies. Some of them were literally Nazis. But I’ll tell you what, Zephyr – this is really far afield – but I’m now reading a book by Walther Darré, who was the Nazi Secretary of Agriculture for eight years or so. He believed in organic.

Dave Chapman 17:50
He was bringing it into state policies. He was transforming Germany. The vehicle then was not the word organic; it was biodynamic. He believed in it, and I’m so fascinated by how this works. The biodynamic community itself is very divided. Half of them were like…

Zephyr Teachout 18:13
What era was this?

Dave Chapman 18:15
This was in the 30s. The book I’m reading, he wrote in 1930 and it’s so confusing…

Zephyr Teachout 18:24
In this industry, I have never heard…

Dave Chapman 18:26
Oh, and it’s dire. They were growing biodynamic herbs at Dachau. This is so disturbing. The prisoners were working growing the herbs for medicinals for the troops, for the SS. It was very confusing. Some of the biodynamic people, just as what’s happening with MAHA, said, “Oh my God. We actually have a shot at changing. We can change the agriculture of Germany. We can make it biodynamic. We don’t agree with everything these people are saying.”

Dave Chapman 20:01
When they started, it was bad, but it wasn’t nearly as extreme as it became. The other half were like, “They’re fascists. We don’t want to have anything to do with them.” Ultimately, the biodynamic people got thrown out. All of it got thrown out because one of the greatest supporters was Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s second in command in the Nazi Party.

Dave Chapman 19:26
When he took a plane and jumped out with a parachute to try and find the King of England to persuade him to seek a separate peace, and was imprisoned, and seemed to be somewhat of an insane person, Hitler rejected all those too close to Hess, and that includes…

Zephyr Teachout 19:46
And rejected the whole…

Dave Chapman 19:48
Yeah. This is a whole interesting conversation.

Zephyr Teachout 19:51
It’s such a powerful story, and frankly, just such a reminder of, first of all, the non-linear nature of history matters, and how important understanding history is – not because it gives simple, easy lessons, but because of the real complexity.

Dave Chapman 20:16
Yeah, it was never simple.

Zephyr Teachout 20:19
Anyway, the word you used – just how incredibly confusing it is to hear something like that.

Dave Chapman 20:25
Yes, they call that eco-fascism. Ecology was invented by a German in the 1880s. He was an extreme anti-Semite. He had beliefs that were in accord with the idea that some people are better than others.

Zephyr Teachout 20:45
Okay, so it comes out of this sort of moment when Darwinism takes a leap from biology to politics.

Dave Chapman 20:57
All I know is that George Washington Carver studied ecology when he went to college at Iowa State. His professor, whom he lived with because a Black man couldn’t find any place to live in Iowa, was… What’s his name, the vice president under Roosevelt for many years?

Dave Chapman 21:21
He’d been Secretary of Agriculture before that, and he was extreme lefty, and then they got rid of him and replaced him with Truman at that final convention. It was a big deal. The world would have been so different.

Dave Chapman 21:34
George Washington Carver was there studying ecology, and it wasn’t anything about the science per se that is racist or negative or positive; it’s just a science of reality – the science of the biological diversity of our universe, and maybe seeing our planet as a living organism and all of that. Pretty amazing.

Zephyr Teachout 22:00
One thing that this reminds me of is President Wilson, who was supported by Du Bois when he ran. Du Bois saw Wilson for many different reasons, and I’m simplifying, but he was an anti-monopolist. Wilson came to be one of the worst segregationists in American history.

Zephyr Teachout 22:36
For those of us who are excited about an anti-monopoly tradition, he was a president who spoke more about the dangers of a single company coming to control a town and what it meant for human freedom if you only had one place to work in a local area.

Zephyr Teachout 23:00
Wilson was a profound heartbreak for Du Bois and the other civil rights activists of the era. He was also anti-monopolist, and then he poisoned so much of that history, because if we then look back at history and say, “Who were the anti-monopoly champions at the federal level?” Certainly FDR. You see this rabid racist, and it’s very confusing. It’s also true – you can’t deny that history.

Dave Chapman 23:35
We think of anti‑monopoly as being with people who are completely anti‑racist now, but it’s not a given. The same with organic; it’s not a given. That’s why I consider where we’re at right now to be very interesting.

Dave Chapman 23:55
But just to go back and finish regenerative for a moment, what happened is it got picked up again by some Midwestern farmers, and the most famous now is Gabe Brown. Gabe Brown’s brother, by the way, is certified real organic. I never thought it was a good idea to stop…

Dave Chapman 24:20
Gabe Brown believes it’s a good idea to stop using chemicals. But his definition of regenerative does not mention that. He has a certification now called Regenified, and it does not mention “chemicals.” Except “It’s good to minimize, maybe, but yeah, go ahead. You can do it. What we care about is measuring the soil, carbon, and the life in the soil,” which is good.

Dave Chapman 24:43
We care about that, but it leaves a lot out. What it does is make it attractive to the people who are selling those chemical inputs because it lasts Bayer and Syngenta…

Zephyr Teachout 24:58
Explain it to me again. Maybe all of your people who watch this probably know this upside down and backwards.

Dave Chapman 25:04
Nobody knows it upside down and backwards. It’s complicated.

Zephyr Teachout 25:07
Explain to me, as somebody coming from the outside, who says… It seems to me very exciting that regenerative is taking off. It seems like it is in all these very quickly growing corners that you wouldn’t expect. There’s just regenerative everywhere. What precisely is happening that you think is dangerous?

Dave Chapman 25:38
What regenerative means is being changed by those very same forces.

Zephyr Teachout 25:44
Including Bayer.

Dave Chapman 25:46
If you go to Syngenta’s website, I assume it’s still up, they have the most heart-rending description and defense of regenerative imaginable, written by people who are far better writers than me. It goes on and on and on. You’re crying by the end. You get to the last paragraph…

Zephyr Teachout 26:03
It’s a beautiful story about the…

Dave Chapman 26:04
A beautiful story. Then, of course, in the last paragraph is still involves the responsible use of chemical inputs. The whole thing is a way of blurring the distinctions and making it that… How many people say, “I love regenerative,” and you say, “How do you feel about herbicides?”

Dave Chapman 26:27
Well, of course, that can’t be regenerative, but it is. It might not be what you think regenerative is, but it is what you’re buying that’s being called regenerative.

Zephyr Teachout 26:39
This goes back to what you think the North Star should be. This is something that, as anti-monopoly, is getting more popular, which I’m very excited about, trying to figure out how to make it portable, so that somebody who has read far less than you, Dave, can say, “Oh, I know a series of questions to ask.” A way to think.

Zephyr Teachout 27:12
Then I don’t need to know what the Robinson-Patman Act is, and I don’t need to know what price discrimination is, but I have a series of questions that maybe I’ll be wrong, sometimes maybe I’ll be right. I don’t have to make it popular and make it part of regular politics, basically unspecialized.

Zephyr Teachout 27:34
In anti-monopoly, we do have some ways of doing that. Always ask not just what’s coming out the other end, but who has power in this system. Let’s just do it. You don’t need to be a specialist in economics to say, “Who has power here? How many different companies are involved?”

Zephyr Teachout 27:57
If you look at all the different parts of the process that go into making this carrot, just say, “How many companies are involved with distribution? How many companies are involved with growing?” “Well, it turns out there’s two companies growing carrots.”

Zephyr Teachout 28:20
I don’t think we’re there yet. It’s something we’re really working on. But how would you do that for regenerative? How would you give me a shorthand way of saying maybe you don’t even want to use the word regenerative anymore? This is healthy.

Dave Chapman 28:38
I have to say, I support real regenerative, which is the same as real organic. I don’t support fake regenerative, which is what most regenerative is. I don’t mean that there aren’t people in there who are great farmers and doing all the right stuff, but we have to see it as a political movement.

Dave Chapman 29:00
Regenerative is being used as a political movement. By that, I mean, for one thing, our government is pumping millions to billions of dollars into supporting “it,” whatever “it” is. Then I look at “Who’s happy about this? Who embraces regenerative?” I go, “Bayer, Syngenta, Pepsi, McDonald’s, ADM, Cargill.” It goes on forever.

Dave Chapman 29:31
It’s basically all of big food supports what they call regenerative. You can say, “Well, that’s not what I mean.” Then I say, “Well, then you need a movement to say, ‘I support real regenerative.’” Whatever you call it. But that’s exactly what we’ve done with real organic.

Dave Chapman 29:51
One big difference between regenerative and organic is organic went a long time before it really got corrupted. A long time. Organic farming has been going on for thousands of years, but as a political movement, it started in the 30s.

Dave Chapman 30:10
At first, it was the lords and ladies on their estates, mostly, and some very forward-thinking farmers in England. France and Germany had their own movements and their own champions, which we don’t know as much about. Then it came to the US. It came to the US from England. It came from J. I. Rodale.

Dave Chapman 30:32
He fell in love with the writings of Sir Albert Howard and came and said, “I’m going to change the world.” I just interviewed his granddaughter. It was interesting. I said, “Why did he do this?” She said he was very concerned about his own health. His family all died very young. They had bad hearts and everything. He’s like, “I have to turn this around,” and he made a fortune turning it around.

Dave Chapman 30:59
He was quite successful. But he built a big movement, mostly of organic gardening, people in their own garden saying, “I’m not going to use the chemicals. I’m going to make compost.” Great. Then it spread into farming. Then Vietnam hit, and the world exploded.

Dave Chapman 31:17
That’s where I came in. I was one of those young people going back to the country. In my case, it was back to the country. I grew up on a farm, but for many of them, it was going to the country for the first time and going back to the land. Organic was what we were going to do, just because socially, that’s who we were.

Zephyr Teachout 31:37
Then it lasted from the late 30s, but then it exploded in a contained way until…?

Dave Chapman 31:47
We had the problem of success, which every movement has when they succeed. At some point, there’s enough money in the water that you’re very attractive to the sharks. They smell the money and they come. It’s like blood. Organic built enough, and people started coming in, not necessarily because they believed in organic; they believed in making money.

Dave Chapman 32:10
Okay. That doesn’t need to be a bad thing. That can be the market working. Some of them were genuinely converted; for some, it was a very cynical, “I just want this market.” I think it started to sink when the government got involved.

Dave Chapman 32:27
But that isn’t necessarily because the government got involved. That was around 2000, when they started the National Organic Program. They passed the Organic Foods Production Act law in 1990, which was a wonderful law.

Zephyr Teachout 32:48
Comparing the histories is really interesting – organic and regenerative. So with organic, looking back, putting aside questions of cause for a second, just saying, “When did it actually start to become a word where the food did not represent organic food?”

Dave Chapman 33:10
I have to say that most of the food in 2000 or 2010 was still organic that was being called organic.

Zephyr Teachout 33:11
That’s why I’m asking.

Dave Chapman 33:20
2017 might have been a turning point. Still in 2017 the small organic dairy farms in Vermont were thriving.

Zephyr Teachout 33:37
Wow, really?

Dave Chapman 33:38
Yes, that recently, they were thriving, around 2016-2017. They were able to survive on small farms, and other small farmers were looking at them, going, “Maybe we should go organic.” I don’t mean that they were making bank.

Zephyr Teachout 33:57
You know the history much deeper, but I think of the farm crisis and then all the efforts to create shared storage by Anthony, and what’s his name, in Vermont?

Dave Chapman 34:10
Elena, maybe.

Zephyr Teachout 34:11
Yes, Elena, right. I have all these sort of random spots. I don’t think of it as thriving.

Dave Chapman 34:19
Let’s say that farmers were not going out of business. Small organic dairy farmers were not going out of business.

Zephyr Teachout 34:28
Because they were doing direct to market, or were they selling to…

Dave Chapman 34:30
No.

Zephyr Teachout 34:31
They were selling to DFA, they’re selling…

Dave Chapman 34:33
They were selling, probably to Organic Valley, mostly, and that was working, and to Stonyfield and Horizon Organic. They were all coming in because the market was growing. Since then, a great many of them have gone out of business because the market is more and more consolidated.

Dave Chapman 34:55
The big confinement dairy farms are flooding the market with cheap milk, and it’s married to the consolidation in the supermarkets. They all have their own store brand, and it’s always the cheapest.

Zephyr Teachout 35:12
Do you happen to know about Whole Foods? What its store brand sources are, because they tend to be very vertically integrated.

Dave Chapman 35:22
I honestly don’t know about milk with them. I do know about tomatoes.

Zephyr Teachout 35:31
One of the things we are trying to figure out, you and I, and we could be wrong, is there is part of organic that is essential, which is decentralization. Let me say what we’re trying to figure out, and then backfill it a little bit.

Zephyr Teachout 35:52
We’re trying to figure out how essential decentralization is to the organic vision. I come to this a little motivated, which is that my own vision of democracy is that it has to be decentralized. But I want to be honest and say that it’s also good that there are seat belt laws…

Dave Chapman 36:26
Speed limits. We like speed limits even though we break them.

Zephyr Teachout 36:32
I’ll use seat belts because we’re talking about an auto industry or whatever. That whether or not the industry is concentrated, there are some basic consumer protection laws that we should have that are just better for the world. They’re better for health, and we should have them even in concentrated markets.

Zephyr Teachout 36:48
I’m going to keep fighting to have decentralized markets, but I respect people who are like, “We just need to have better airbags.” What I think we’re trying to figure out is part of organic might say, ‘Okay…’

Zephyr Teachout 37:05
A little bit like PETA. It was very different. If you’re a PETA person, maybe you listen to me, tell me if I’m wrong. But I see PETA as having said the best way to get to vegetable burgers is to work with Burger King and McDonald’s. We’re just going to work with the biggest companies in the world and make sure that they have more vegetable-sourced meals there.

Zephyr Teachout 37:42
We don’t care about the market structure, but the way to get to our consumer goals is through working with the big guys. We’re trying to figure out, or I’m trying to figure out… There are some things that just truly offend me about the way organic has been defined.

Zephyr Teachout 38:03
I, separately from believing in decentralization, want to have more healthy food. But how tied are these visions together? How tied is the anti-monopoly vision to the organic vision? I think that’s part of what…

Dave Chapman 38:19
I struggle with this, Zephyr. I agree completely that this turns out to be the question. I wasn’t sure when I started. I just thought it was corruption, honestly. I thought it was one company. That’s what I thought. I thought one company that grows hydroponic tomatoes had lobbied the USDA to put in this crazy new rule, that now we embrace soilless production in organic, which is based on the health of the soil.

Dave Chapman 38:53
At first, somebody asked me, “Are you up against multinationals?” I went, “No, we’re up against one company. They happen to be in Mexico. They’re smart. I like them personally. I’d have a beer with them, but they’re wrong, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do this.”

Dave Chapman 39:12
Then I discovered Driscoll’s. I didn’t know that they were the ones actually controlling the conversation, because they’re so quiet about it. We didn’t even know that they were growing hydroponically, and they were thousands of acres. We didn’t know. Their certifier knew, but their lobbyist, the Organic Trade Association, did not know.

Zephyr Teachout 39:33
This is part of the reason we need… I want to say this explicitly, because I think it’s really important, and it relates to our initial corruption conversation. Concentrated power leads to corruption. It just does. This is a thousand-year-old wisdom: absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it relates because the story of Driscoll’s corruption, to me, may involve some cash bags, but I haven’t heard about them.

Dave Chapman 40:09
I haven’t either. As far I know it’s all legal.

Zephyr Teachout 40:13
As far as I can tell, it’s all legal, but it is nonetheless a corruption of the system. People know that I’m an anti-corruption person, and they say, “Well, why did you start doing anti-monopoly?” It’s the same thing. Even people who know that tend to say, “Oh, what would your anti-corruption platform be?” An anti-corruption platform has to involve anti-monopoly.

Zephyr Teachout 40:44
You say, let’s just make Facebook treat kids better, but it’s hard for Facebook, as it’s currently structured, not to take over the government. It’s so powerful. Now it’s in bed with Trump. In 2020, liberals were embracing it because it was kicking Trump off. That’s just five years ago.

Zephyr Teachout 41:13
The structure of a company that powerful is such that you can’t trust it. It’s going to align itself with power, and it’s going to use whatever power it has to get what it wants. I personally can’t separate the power question from the substance question.

Dave Chapman 41:38
The substance?

Zephyr Teachout 41:39
Like how to define organic. We are talking about such levels of lobbying power. As you know, it’s not a lobbyist walking in with a nice tie for a little meeting; it’s a social life in Washington. You know better about the organic, but it’s the seven people at a cocktail party who are, one way or another, engaged in something.

Zephyr Teachout 42:13
It’s who you’re doing your solstice party with. It’s not a simple, single lobbyist meeting. It’s somebody right now, as we’re sitting here, with a team of ten people figuring out what the communication strategy is for when there is a story that goes to The New York Times. They’re defensively prepared for the media environment.

Zephyr Teachout 42:39
None of those people count as lobbyists; they’re called communications professionals, but they are corrupting the media environment.

Dave Chapman 42:47
And they’re so good at it.

Zephyr Teachout 42:52
You’d be good at it too.

Dave Chapman 42:53
Well, I know.

Zephyr Teachout 42:54
There’s 40 of you. Like when we went to work on social media regulation in Congress – just straight social media regulation – there are 300 Facebook and YouTube lobbyists for every one. You can be as great as you want. That’s hard.

Dave Chapman 43:16
That’s right, and you get worn out, and they don’t, because when one gets tired, they just send another in.

Zephyr Teachout 43:20
They’re up on cycling in France, and there’s still 364 of them. I’m going a little far afield, but to return to this question, I would say in order to have the conditions under which we can have democratic conversations, we need to have decentralized power.

Dave Chapman 43:48
Here we are, at that basic question of the deal with the devil.

Zephyr Teachout 43:51
We aren’t in those conditions. So what do you do when you’re not in those conditions?

Dave Chapman 43:54
Yeah. So the PETA people are going, “Well, we’ve got to work with Burger King,” whatever. Here we are, and we do have a common enemy: me and these big bullies in the playground who don’t want to be violent. They would much rather get along.

Dave Chapman 43:54
There are people who are bullies who just want to walk in and be like Trump, “I just want to humiliate you, because I like that.” But that’s not who these people are. These people are very nice and all of that. They just want to win. They want their company to grow. It already is a monopoly.

Zephyr Teachout 44:34
But what are they asking for you in return?

Dave Chapman 44:38
They want me to lay down my sword. They want us to say, “You’re right, and let’s get together and make public statements together and show that we’re united.” I get asked to be united so often by people from the other side: “We need to be united. We have genuine enemies who are trying to destroy us.” There’s nothing new about that.

Dave Chapman 45:10
Bayer, and before that Monsanto, have been trying to destroy us forever. They hate us, of course. But what’s also interesting – this is complicated – is that the same companies that want to unite also have a huge stake in chemical agriculture.

Dave Chapman 45:24
Just to take Driscoll’s: I just read an interview with Søren Bjorn. I was confused about whether it’s Bjorn. Sorry. It’s Søren Bjorn, and he’s the CEO. He said that organic – which a different Driscoll’s representative said was over 70% of the organic berry market – is 15% to 20% of Driscoll’s market.

Dave Chapman 45:44
Wait. Say that again.

Dave Chapman 45:47
Organic is 15% to 20% of the berries that Driscoll’s sells. The other 80% to 85% are conventional. They can’t lose, no matter what happens. It’s like, “Well, if people think organic is phony, then they’ll go back to buying the conventional, cheaper ones.”

Zephyr Teachout 46:07
Yes. I have so many different questions. If they win, what …? I’m haunted. Maybe this is not quite on point, but I think it is about the drive to make unnecessary people, to make us useless. You never, ever want to give up your own power, and you never want to allow yourself to become useless so that you would be in a position where they could ride over you if they win.

Zephyr Teachout 46:07
That sentence didn’t totally make sense. Let’s go back to it. Maybe I’ll edit it out. Maybe this is just part of what real conversations are like. I’m not saying what you should do; I’m asking questions, real questions. Why not keep up your sword and still attack Bayer together? What does that look like?

Dave Chapman 47:20
Interesting question. The person who I like quite a lot, who was pitching this to me, once said something to me about the organic movement, and I said, “You’re not in the organic movement. I’m sorry, you represent something else. It’s not the organic movement.”

Dave Chapman 47:44
When he said, “Can’t we put down our sword?” I said, “Oh, does that mean that other people are going to say, ‘You’re right. Hydroponic should not be called organic’? I’ll embrace them. This isn’t personal.”

Zephyr Teachout 47:59
He can let down his sword. Like who has the sword here?

Dave Chapman 48:04
Exactly. I’m feeling like I got a butter knife.

Zephyr Teachout 48:09
He has the sword right now. They are claiming that these bags of blueberries, and I’m haunted by Hugh’s research, or your research now, are not grown in soil. He is attacking…

Dave Chapman 48:31
Some of them are not even grown without prohibited pesticides. But that’s different. That’s fraud. That’s the corruption where we’re breaking the law.

Zephyr Teachout 48:42
Thre’s a fraud part, and it needs to be named as such. The level of fraud that your research showed, even within organic by their own terms, is astonishing.

Dave Chapman 48:55
And traditionally, until we came along, the organic movement has been reluctant to call that out. They call it out and say, “You have to stop that.” But they don’t want to talk about it to the New York Times because they don’t want to tarnish organic in the public’s eye.

Zephyr Teachout 49:19
This is something I think we have learned in the anti-monopoly movement. There is so much fraud right now in our society. It’s in these big companies that just get away with it. We think, “Oh, it’s just a problem of their bigness. It’s just the kind of non-illegal corruption.”

Zephyr Teachout 50:09
But once you get to that size, there’s also a lot of gross fraud, In banking and… Instacart backed off, but it looked like they were deceiving customers about what prices were, pretty recently. There’s at least a claim that what they were doing was fraud.

Zephyr Teachout 50:09
This raises the question of genuine fraud and actually going after the deep fraud. But even if they were doing everything without fraud, they’re still attacking what organic is. Let’s just be clear about who has the sword. So you go back to them, I like this, and you say, “You lay down your sword.”

Dave Chapman 50:27
I said, “Yeah. Is that what you’re proposing? I’m happy to come to that party.”

Zephyr Teachout 50:34
They said, “No, we’re not going to lay down our sword.

Dave Chapman 50:37
Right. They said…

Zephyr Teachout 50:38
That seems like they’re not going to do it.

Dave Chapman 50:41
Right.

Zephyr Teachout 50:41
“But we want a partner in attacking Bayer,” and you said, “We don’t have a…” Again, I’m asking. I’m not…

Dave Chapman 50:48
Yeah, I don’t know. We attack Bayer all the time.

Zephyr Teachout 50:51
Are we coming to a press conference where we both…? Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie.

Dave Chapman 50:58
I know. I love it.

Zephyr Teachout 50:59
You do love it. I love it too. I don’t think anybody thinks that Ro Khanna then has to agree with Thomas Massie on anything else. They are coming together to say, “Release the Epstein files. There is this grotesque cover-up by the Epstein class. Let’s stop it.” That isn’t Ro laying down his sword.

Dave Chapman 51:29
Nor Massie.

Zephyr Teachout 51:30
Nor Massie, that’s right.

Dave Chapman 51:31
God bless them. They disagree about things, but they also share strong concerns about something important. They stand up together.

Zephyr Teachout 51:40
I think it’s changing American politics. I think it’s exciting. What if you say to him, “Let’s be a Massie and Ro…” Because why do they need you to lay down your sword to attack Bayer?

Dave Chapman 51:41
I don’t know.

Zephyr Teachout 51:47
They just want you to lay down your sword. You know what that shows? That you have real power.

Dave Chapman 52:04
I know. It’s remarkable to me that they even care. Honestly, it is

Zephyr Teachout 52:08
No. Don’t laugh about it. It matters. The fact that they care about it is actually a very beautiful sign of your power. That they are asking nicely recognizes that they realize they have real weakness. That’s exciting to me.

Dave Chapman 52:29
I’ve invited him to have a recorded public conversation about it. I don’t know that he will, but we’ll see.

Zephyr Teachout 52:37
I love that idea.

Dave Chapman 52:39
I would enjoy it too, if we have an honest conversation. That was part of why I wanted to talk to you, because I thought, “Well, to find the words to be clear about what’s wrong with the deal with the devil?”

Dave Chapman 53:01
We have this example of making a coalition in which you don’t necessarily love everybody’s perspective in the coalition. That’s what a coalition is.

Zephyr Teachout 53:18
I think there’s evidence that Big Green made a deal with the devil on natural gas. When you talk about a real deal with the devil, what that means is supporting an all-of-the-above strategy in opposition to coal.

Zephyr Teachout 53:42
Coal is the worst, and therefore… We’re talking about the 2008 Obama year fracking. Coal is so terrible, so we will make a deal and not criticize. That is when it is a true deal with the devil.

Zephyr Teachout 54:19
When you agree to not criticize.

Zephyr Teachout 54:06
When you agree to lay down your sword on things that are true, like methane. That’s where I think it gets really problematic, and Big Green isn’t real trouble. They’ve lost a lot of credibility and…

Dave Chapman 54:30
I feel that for us in the Real Organic Project, our role is to represent the traditional… and I still believe in all of those things about organic, and I still believe it’s important. I still believe it’s how we should farm.

Zephyr Teachout 54:51
But if I imagine you just standing shoulder to shoulder with the farmers that I know from the NFU, who are not organic, from National Farmers Union. Some are. They have a really interesting range, but I don’t think of that as…

Zephyr Teachout 55:20
Let’s just talk about different devils. I think, “Oh, okay, if you work together with some cow ranchers who may not be organic, talking about the dangers of the closed-down supplier deals – that doesn’t feel like a deal. It doesn’t feel like you’re compromising anything.

Zephyr Teachout 55:46
That just feels like, ‘Okay, we disagree, but we’ve got a common enemy. Let’s deal with…'” I don’t know what I’m thinking. I’m moving around, but, like, deal with ADM. We’ve got a huge problem with the buyers, right, concentration in buyer markets.

Dave Chapman 56:03
It’s just what Rodale did. They made a deal with Cargill. I think it was Cargill. Might have been ADM. I think it was Cargill and Bell & Howell, a big poultry person, to supply that big organic poultry with organic grain grown here, and they converted 100,000 acres, with a lot of money involved. It’s like, “Well.” That’s the question, Zephyr. It’s the same.

Zephyr Teachout 56:35
Wait. Say that again. Which is – which deal are you then? It’s a political question, which is, when do you both take on another bully, even if they are aligned but disagree. They’re small, and then there’s this other situation, which is Driscoll’s.

Dave Chapman 56:53
Let’s talk about Driscoll’s, because that’s what I know better than organic poultry. Driscoll’s, 20% maybe of what they process, what they buy from many, many growers, is certified organic. Of that, not that much is what would be called Real Organic. But some, some would be, but now it’s moving more and more to be hydroponic.

Dave Chapman 57:20
It’s just bags of shredded coconut husk – and we’re feeding it something made in a processing plant as a fertilizer that is natural. It’s like the difference between natural ingredients and artificial ingredients, where the natural ingredients started as bark and the other one started as oil. But in fact, they’re totally processed and totally fake.

Dave Chapman 57:49
But here’s the big difference: the organic stuff, by and large – not all – genuinely is not sprayed with toxic pesticides. We know from the testing we did that some of it is sprayed, but okay, that’s fraud. We understand that’s breaking the law. But the stuff that isn’t breaking the law isn’t.

Zephyr Teachout 58:14
They have 20% pesticide-free, which has maybe 5% that is actually organic. All their pesticide-free stuff is organic.

Dave Chapman 58:28
Yeah, it’s certified. It’s legally certified. The government says, “We know what you’re doing, and we approve of it. We allow it.” The reason the government says that is because they were lobbied by Driscoll’s to do that. Okay, that worked, and we lost that one.

Dave Chapman 58:44
But here’s my question, because I completely disapprove of that, and I will say so publicly and say, “That’s not organic. That’s not what organic means.” What organic means is important. So, we should be talking about what it does mean and why it can work and does work. We look at some place like King Grove Organic Farm, where, whether they’ll survive the market, God only knows.

Dave Chapman 59:05
But what we do know is that what they do works biologically. It works horticulturally. They can’t say, “Well, that would never work. Everyone will starve.” They won’t starve. Hugh and Lisa’s yields are higher than the average chemical yields, and they’re old plants.

Zephyr Teachout 59:21
I think Hugh and Lisa story is so important.

Dave Chapman 59:25
It is so important. Yeah, oh God, and they’re such amazing spokespeople for it. Here’s the thing: at the same time, right now in Watsonville, there is a movement trying to force Driscoll’s to stop spraying near schools and in communities.

Zephyr Teachout 59:43
Yes, which they shouldn’t do.

Dave Chapman 59:44
Which they shouldn’t do. Omar went on a hunger strike for a month, and Ann Lopez spoke, and Dolores Huerta spoke. It’s great. Of course I support them, but at the same time, I’m going to attack what Driscoll’s is going to replace it with, if they do.

Zephyr Teachout 1:00:08
It makes perfect sense to me. Just in your press release, say, “We are happy to stand with other non-organic producers like Driscoll’s in fighting…

Dave Chapman 1:00:19
In fighting the use of pesticides.

Zephyr Teachout 1:00:22
…the use of pesticides, because they are causing…

Dave Chapman 1:00:26
All these health problems

Zephyr Teachout 1:00:27
And those health problems are so important. I don’t think you have to give it up. Their explanation for why you have to give it up doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t… If you want to take on Bayer, it is stronger as a political matter to have enemies on something else to take on Bayer.

Zephyr Teachout 1:00:51
It doesn’t actually strengthen the political fight against Bayer. They just want you to shut up. And they want you to shut up because what you’re saying is important. My mind was totally opened by those plastic bags, seeing those plastic bags that count as organic. I believe that if America saw those plastic bags – not everybody, but a lot of people would say, “That’s organic.”

Dave Chapman 1:01:29
My fear, though – and obviously, we say that. We say it over and over. We show the pictures. My fear is the poor people go, “That’s why I’m going to buy regenerative.” You go, “Oh my God, wait. Now you’re going to have the stuff sprayed with glyphosate.” These are murky waters.

Dave Chapman 1:01:52
You know the famous story when the oil industry went down to Brazil at the famous thing, whenever it was, and said, “We get it. Climate change is real.” They did get it. They did know the truth. They said, “We’re with you, and we’re going to work with you, and we’re going to come up with voluntary standards.” It set back the climate movement by a generation.

Zephyr Teachout 1:02:23
I know. You saw what happened in 2021. Putin invaded Ukraine, shocks the market. Oil and gas prices go through the roof. The cost of production does not, so the profitability for – let’s take BP – becomes too great, and they roll back all of that promised renewable investment.

Zephyr Teachout 1:02:51
Just an example of what happens if you trust these big companies. All these billions of dollars they were going to spend on renewable energy made sense in 2019, and then when the cost of selling oil stays the same, but the price shoots up, they no longer want to move to renewables, because they’re making more on…

Dave Chapman 1:03:09
The driver was entirely economic.

Zephyr Teachout 1:03:11
The driver was entirely economic. But the idea that we were then trusting in BP’s or Exxon’s climate commitments… we cannot trust them. It would be – say what you want about the people there and the choices they made to work there – it just wouldn’t make any sense, given the way financial markets work, to trust them right now.

Zephyr Teachout 1:03:11
The idea that we should be embracing Driscoll’s as an institution? No, Driscoll’s should be broken up. Give him a few more knives, and then go stand with them in taking on Bayer, because these are not incompatible things to do in politics.

Dave Chapman 1:03:11
The challenge, and this is the question, is if you see somebody who is very large and centralized, and they are suggesting that they’re going to do something good if you help them, is the answer to that, “You should do something good, but I’m still going to try and break you up, because I can’t trust you if you remain at that scale”?

Zephyr Teachout 1:03:11
I ran for governor against Andrew Cuomo in 2014. A series of accidents led me to that moment. But basically, the Working Families Party recruited me. They said, “We need somebody to run against Andrew Cuomo. He’s terrible on all these things. He supports Republicans, which he did, and makes his donors go support Republicans in the State House in New York.

Zephyr Teachout 1:03:21
You got to run against him.” I said, “Okay, I’ll be your candidate.” Then, two days before I was about to be formally endorsed, he made a deal with them, and they asked me not to run. First I thought, “Okay, well, they brought me, Dance was the one that brought you. I guess I’m not dancing anymore.”

Zephyr Teachout 1:06:00
But then it was like, “What leverage will we have to hold him to that deal once you’ve made that deal?” I called a bunch of people. I said, “What’s the leverage? How do we know?” We didn’t have it – we didn’t have leverage. So, I stayed in the race and ended up working very closely with the people fighting fracking. Then he’d been fracking. We had leverage.

Zephyr Teachout 1:06:41
We didn’t leave our leverage. We would have had more leverage if the party had stayed with me. But don’t ever give up your leverage. Now, if they have a way to make a commitment to you – a real commitment – that you’ll know, then this is the power we’ll have at that imaginary future date. I just don’t know what that is.

Dave Chapman 1:07:03
Yes, there’s no offer of faith.

Zephyr Teachout 1:07:07
What is that power? Then there’s like, “Well, then you’ll just go back to accusing them again.” Well, then you’ve just given up eight months or two years of power. I don’t understand that. These are complicated questions. I’m not saying they’re simple questions.

Zephyr Teachout 1:07:25
But if they’re asking you to give up leverage, then why on earth would they listen to you once you’ve already given up your voice? By the way, Andrew Cuomo did not stop or disband. He promised the Working Families Party to disband this group of Republicans that he supported, and he didn’t do it.

Dave Chapman 1:07:44
He didn’t do it. You were asking about how do we talk to people about this who haven’t spent the years studying it that you have. It’s a great question. One of the things I wanted to bring up was the military industrial complex.

Dave Chapman 1:08:26
Just the concept of that, that Dwight Eisenhower, the five star general and two term president, in his last speech in 1961, warned our country of the military industrial complex. I think it was the first time that I know that that term was used. I don’t know. But it was like, “Whoa. This is not where we expect this to come from.” Since then, there have been a number of other industrial complexes named.

Zephyr Teachout 1:08:49
This one is enormous, and it’s still… It’s not like it’s sitting; it’s growing. The way in which big tech is increasingly embedded in the military-industrial complex is extremely dangerous. Not for nothing, there used to be 65 big contractors the U.S. government went to; now there are 5.

Zephyr Teachout 1:09:12
It was a problem when there were 65, but when they’re 5, it’s unclear who’s driving what. The level of concentration is such that they say they’re too big to fail at this point.

Dave Chapman 1:09:36
Well, you see Boeing and Airbus. They both seem to be terrible at what they do, and…

Zephyr Teachout 1:09:42
You see Boeing when you talk about actual fraud, illegality, and the human dangers that always come. You may not see at the beginning that people are going to die, but if you allow these monstrosities to exist immune from democratic accountability, people do die.

Dave Chapman 1:10:05
Well, there’s no doubt that people are dying from agriculture and food. No doubt about it.

Zephyr Teachout 1:10:17
What you were starting to do at the last conference, which I loved, is okay, so regenerative is this thing that we do not embrace. What I heard is maybe we do not embrace it. We return to organic. We keep using organic. We keep insisting on organic.

Zephyr Teachout 1:10:40
Who was it who said that great line? I think it was Stephen Colbert. If you want to do something really evil, make it really complicated. Deny the complication. It is true in economics all the time. I have a friend, Matt Stoller, who returns to this refrain. He is an anti-monopolist who is constantly saying …

Zephyr Teachout 1:11:08
He is making fun of the elites who are saying, “It’s really complicated. You can’t do anything about it. A lot of people just have to die.” Let’s acknowledge the simplicity of this. There is something beautifully simple about what you are asking for with organic.

Dave Chapman 1:11:22
I understand anti-monopoly. I understand what that means. The challenge is, it’s an anti-movement instead of a pro-movement. I do not like when people tell me that I should be more positive, because I feel like we offer a very positive direction.

Dave Chapman 1:11:31
We know where we want to go, but I do understand that I do talk about the way things are, and it is a lot of difficult things to hear and talk about. Is there a positive phrase? I know pro-democracy. Is that the positive side of anti-monopoly?

Zephyr Teachout 1:12:08
For me, it is. I hear the question because I sometimes yearn for it too. Other ways to describe it, like, what is human freedom and flourishing? It all sounds a little abstract. But I guess I’ve spent half my career being anti-corruption and the other half being anti-corruption, just using different anti-corruption tools.

Zephyr Teachout 1:12:41
I hope people have a sense of release and freedom associated with this language, but we have to do some work on it. I’m not done, and I don’t think we are done in figuring out how to talk about a healthy vision.

Zephyr Teachout 1:13:04
Part of my reaction to the capitalist, communist, socialist labels is like, “Are these words doing their job?” I think a lot of young people – I shouldn’t say young. And I’m not saying young in a diminishing way. I’m saying a different generation that didn’t grow up with the Soviets – for them, socialism means a market in which people care about each other, in which there’s room for human caring.

Zephyr Teachout 1:13:46
For those of us in the Cold War generation, I have two responses. One is, nice job Europe, but that’s not enough. Democratic socialism in Europe is not actually sufficiently decentralized for my taste. It’s insufficiently radical in terms of empowering people.

Zephyr Teachout 1:14:14
The other is that I sometimes think, I think I may fall into that. I think I was wrong. I think I’m becoming a pundit, as opposed to thinking about what is true. I think other people won’t accept socialism and taking on too much by using the language of socialism.

Zephyr Teachout 1:14:36
I think that farmer isn’t as reachable if you use the language of socialism. I think that farmer wants a society in which, again, I don’t know him.

Dave Chapman 1:14:45
I think we want the same thing.

Zephyr Teachout 1:14:48
Most of the farmers that I know don’t think that private equity should be rolling up the nursing home that their moms are living in. They want a society in which there are genuine moral obligations to take care of each other, and that those are real.

Zephyr Teachout 1:15:08
There are real disagreements, and we shouldn’t lie about those disagreements, but most people do not want business owners to be in impossible moral dilemmas, where they either take care of the land, or they go out of business. Whatever word describes that is essential.

Zephyr Teachout 1:15:33
Anytime you centralize power, you put people in impossible moral dilemmas on a daily basis, and we shouldn’t live in that kind of society. I’ve resisted the capitalist, communist, socialist triad as maybe each one of them…

Zephyr Teachout 1:15:33
I’m definitely not a communist, because I don’t believe in that level of centralization of power. Although I’ve met some interesting communists recently, and a lot of them are quasi-anarchists. These words also mean different things.

Zephyr Teachout 1:15:33
So I’ve tried to avoid that triad, but I do think for a lot of people under 40, socialism means a society in which people care about each other. I just want to make sure we don’t have some industry that calls itself socialism, but you still have Driscoll’s sitting there, which is – I know I’m talking in circles – which is why I’m like, “Who’s gonna make the carrots?”

Zephyr Teachout 1:14:47
But the most socialized industry in America right now is, to your point, about the military-industrial complex, the Department of Defense. That is not my vision for what society looks like. I don’t find these words adequate to the future vision.

Zephyr Teachout 1:15:33
No, that’s helpful.

Zephyr Teachout 1:16:23
But I also hear that democracy – that can sound tricky – like, “Yeah, so you’re anti-monopoly, pro-democracy?” “Yeah, we’re all pro-democracy.”

Dave Chapman 1:15:37
Scalia gave a talk, and he read this really moving document. It was like the Declaration of Independence. It was all about freedom and human rights. When he was done, he said that that was the Declaration of Independence for the Soviet Union, meaning anybody can use this language. It doesn’t mean anything.

Zephyr Teachout 1:17:36
And I want to use words that mean something.

Dave Chapman 1:17:38
That’s right. That has to be about actions. You have to take those words and make them whatever your words are. What are your actions? What do you actually do?

Zephyr Teachout 1:17:50
I do think pro-labor means something, and we haven’t talked about that. But pro-labor means real protections for organizing at workplaces. I don’t think that’s trivial. I think anti-monopoly means something. I want pro-democracy to mean something.

Dave Chapman 1:18:06
Okay, Zephyr, we could talk a long time. We’ll do it again, I promise, because there’s a lot we didn’t get to. But it’s been a while. I know that your family is waiting. So, thank you very much.

Zephyr Teachout 1:18:19
Thank you so much.