Imagine a world where big bags of dirty, anonymous money by elections, politicians, and the laws that govern our whole society. Spoiler alert, it's the current reality in the United States. Hey everyone, it's me David Serota. I'm thrilled to share this clip of the inaugural episode of master Plan, the lever's new investigative podcast series that was recently named a
must listen by The Guardian and Apple Podcasts. In each episode of master Plan, we expose the secret scheme first hatched in the nineteen seventies that's been methodically legalizing corruption for the wealthy. With the help of never before reported documents, we'll look back at how it all began, how this plan was executed over decades, how it's still being implemented today,
and how we can stop it. You'll learn things you never knew about icons like President Richard Nixon, Senator Mitch McConnell, Fox News founder Roger Ayles, and Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. You'll learn how their master plan to legalize corruption affects you and your family and undermines American democracy today. In this special preview, we go back to nineteen seventy one, a time when hot pants were hot, bell bottoms were swinging, and campaign cash flowed like milk
without further ado. Here's a short clip from master Plan. This is corruption, this is bribery. Don't let it stand.
This corruption is an American issue.
We live in a corrupt nation, a nation corrupt to its bones.
We have reached a saturation point of corruption at the federal level. It is corrosive on society because nobody has any trust or belief or puts any legitimacy in our institutions anymore.
When I say the word corrupt, what jumps into your mind? Maybe you think about a file on your computer hard drive not working, or the blue screen of death. The file has been corrupted, the GX has corrupted my system. Maybe you think of some far away regime on the other side of the world where government officials get rich while everyone else starves. Somalia has held the title of being one of the world's most corrupt countries for the
past decade. Maybe you think of something from pop culture, like the Nevada Senator and the Godfather demanding a bribe from the Corleone family. Or maybe you think of the wires walking bribery machine. Clay Davis she if you're a Republican political junkie, this is probably what comes to mind. Barisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company, paid Hunter Biden millions of dollars to serve on its board of directors. And if you're a Democratic political junkie, I'm guessing you think of
stuff like this. Trump told the group that they should donate a billion dollars to his presidential campaign because, if elected, he would roll back environmental rules that he said hamper their industry. Corruption in politics is the process of using money to break the machine of government so that the machine no longer benefits the public. It only benefits the
wealthy and powerful. Now there's the corruption of say a cop taking a bribe to rip up a speeding ticket, or a government official diverting public highway funds into their own pocket. This kind of petty corruption is bad, but greedy individuals will always exist, which makes this kind of small time graft inevitable even in the best run governments. But then there's systemic corruption, the kind of corruption that's become so pervasive and so common that you start to assume, oh, well,
that's not even corruption. That's just how things work. Deep down, you sense that there's a glitch, but it's hard to pinpoint the problem when you see it everywhere. It is all around us.
You can feel it when you go work, when you go to church, when you pay you a tax.
This is the deep, systemic corruption that now pervades America, and you get a glimpse of it every time you hear about how much money is flooding into politics and elections.
Morgan billionaire is spending a record eight hundred and eighty million dollars in the midterms.
Spending projected to reach get this, nearly eleven billion dollars. We are seeing a storm of campaigns spending.
An ultra secretive Chicago industrial mogul has quietly given one point six billion dollars to the architect of the right wing take over the courts.
This kind of all consuming corruption does not occur naturally. It's not inevitable. It is created by people who want to trap us inside a system of bribery, graft, and dishonesty because that serves them. So who exactly designed this dystopia we're now immersed in. The Lever's team of investigative journalists has spend the life last two years digging into archives and lost audio searching for that answer, and we finally found it. I'm David Serota, and this is Masterplan.
In this first episode, we'll eventually go back fifty years to start exposing the epic story of how corruption was legalized in America. But first, let me tell you where this story started for me. Can you pinpoint the exact moment when you realized how corrupt and fubar everything was? I can. It was after a pre dawn bus trip to Canada. Sarah Kanji joins US Live now from the US Canadian border in Highgate with Hey everyone, it's Sorota again. I hope you enjoyed this preview of the first episode
of our new series, master Plan. If you liked what you heard, head over to the Masterplan feed for new episodes every Tuesday. If you want to hear new episodes of master Plans sooner and get exclusive bonus content, go to levernews dot com and become a paying subscriber. That also gives you access to all of the Levers podcasts, all of our live events, and all of our other exclusive content and investigative journalism. Thanks for listening. Rock the boat,