Talking to Republicans who aren't leaders - that's not very difficult both on anti-trust and on campaign finance reform. I think it's a lot more complicated when you talk to highly funded leaders - that's the innate, deeply problematic part of our politics.

Zephyr Teachout

Trust Politics Finance

Voters have a responsibility to make a judgment with whatever facts are available on Election Day.

Zephyr Teachout

Men Wit Whatever

We, as lawyers, must point out that unrestrained power is almost always abusive.

Zephyr Teachout

Power Ways Way

At their best, new media are chaotic. The new technologies disrupt political pomp and glamour and engage people in an unpolished and unpredictable give-and-take. They also give citizens access to a surprising depth of raw information.

Zephyr Teachout

Age Zen Up

Facebook is a known behemoth corporate monopoly. It has exposed at least 87 million people's data, enabled foreign propaganda and perpetuated discrimination. We shouldn't be begging for Facebook's endorsement of laws, or for Mark Zuckerberg's promises of self-regulation.

Zephyr Teachout

Pet Men Ted

Every constitutional standard is engaged in difficult but important line-drawing.

Zephyr Teachout

Age Wing Win

We fought a revolution to free ourselves from arbitrary power and the whims of a monarch.

Zephyr Teachout

Power Whim T

So the job of building structures, building a constitutional structure, is not just to punish those who behave badly but actually to protect people from their own temptations.

Zephyr Teachout

Who Us UN

President Trump is taking foreign money through his businesses, which is in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

Zephyr Teachout

Money Men Business

To be fair, money and politics never work in a directly straight line.

Zephyr Teachout

Work Politics Money

People traverse the dangerous journey to the US because of deep fear. They are often escaping brutality, even life-or-death situations.

Zephyr Teachout

Life Fear Death

You may think of Google as a single organic entity, but in 2011 it bought a different company every week.

Zephyr Teachout

You Week Very

The attorney general of New York state has a special authority and responsibility to preserve the integrity of businesses and nonprofits in New York under the state's own laws as well as under the U.S. Constitution.

Zephyr Teachout

Business York Well

Amazon's outsized power is looking less and less like smart business and more and more like oppressive politics - one company bullying us all.

Zephyr Teachout

Power Politics Business

Women are routinely demeaned, dismissed, discouraged and assaulted. Too many women's careers are stymied or ended because of harassment and abuse. In politics, where I have worked much of my adult life, this behavior is rampant.

Zephyr Teachout

Work Women Politics

I don't think we should reduce the corporate tax rate.

Zephyr Teachout

Think Thin Tax

Until the 1980s, candidates spent a fraction of their time talking to donors; just a few weeks a year, a little more right before an election. True, they'd fund raise from the wealthy interests, as they do now, but it was a minuscule part of their job: policy and constituent services were the heart of the work.

Zephyr Teachout

Work Time Art

In some states, the attorney general is appointed, but in New York state it's an independently elected position. The New York attorney general has an obligation to the people first, to her conscience and to the rule of law, not to the governor, and not to the legislature.

Zephyr Teachout

Science York Torn

Everybody's always going to have some self-interest. When it passes a certain point, that's when it become corruption.

Zephyr Teachout

Ways Way Very

Mom and pop shops paying taxes while Amazon got billions just to come to town didn't seem right, and, post-FoxxConn, people are less likely to fall for the promised jobs numbers.

Zephyr Teachout

Mom Yin While

We need to pressure lawmakers to hold hearings on pending mergers, and pressure federal and state enforcers to use their full powers.

Zephyr Teachout

Power Use Us

The Internet doesn't just enable cool avatars and the shorter form. It also allows the deeper form: cross-linked blog posts, extensive research, simultaneous screens and raw debate footage that anyone can scan online, at any time.

Zephyr Teachout

If we don't have a responsive democracy, all the debates about charter schools, and fracking, and high-stakes testing, and the militarization of police forces - all of which are issues I care about – they aren't real debates.

Zephyr Teachout

New York state's Donnelly Act gives power at least as great - many think greater - than that of the Sherman Act. We have strong consumer protection laws that can be used to protect against scams and frauds by corporate monopolists.

Zephyr Teachout

The federal government has shown little willingness to stand up to corporate monopolies, and use its powers under the existing antitrust statutes, including the powerful Clayton Act and Sherman Act.

Zephyr Teachout

So paid media is when you buy an ad - typically in a presidential campaign that will be in Iowa, New Hampshire, the early states. It costs some money to make the ad, but the greatest cost is in actually placing the ad on TV.

Zephyr Teachout

You build massive databases, you learn everything you can about the people in those databases, you figure out exactly how they can be useful to your campaign, and you ask them to donate money, door-knock, the virtual equivalent of being a sort of army of stamp lickers.

Zephyr Teachout

And increasingly, as people live online, we are used to making really snap judgments about somebody's character based on their Facebook page or the way their blog feels or look.

Zephyr Teachout

Parties are fun, but they don't create community.

Zephyr Teachout

There's this myth out there that self-perpetuates that candidates believe that although the populace cares about corruption, they're not going to vote on it.

Zephyr Teachout

So one of the things I want to focus on is how we can show how taking on private financing is taking on this fundamental democratic threat.

Zephyr Teachout

A lot of organizations have pointed out that under public financing systems, you see a lot more candidates of color and a lot more women. But you also see the power base behind these candidates is more representative and far less exclusively wealthy.

Zephyr Teachout

Talking to Republicans who aren't leaders - that's not very difficult both on anti-trust and on campaign finance reform. I think it's a lot more complicated when you talk to highly funded leaders - that's the innate, deeply problematic part of our politics.

Zephyr Teachout

I see the job of attorney general as the single most important legal office in the country when you can't trust the federal government.

Zephyr Teachout

I mean this is a revolution in how campaigns work - more money was spent by super PACs than by either myself or John Faso. So what that means is that if you're a voter in this district you are more likely to have heard from a super PAC than from me or my opponent.

Zephyr Teachout

I'm an FDR Democrat, and I really believe that the most important thing is the institutions of political parties, and engaging in those institutions, and, where you disagree with them, speaking up and sharing your disagreement.

Zephyr Teachout

Every district is going to be different, but if you wanted me to give advice to those candidates: Run your own campaign, the DCCC does not run your campaign. Figure out ways to raise money from small-dollar donors, and put some real energy into that because that will give you freedom to say no to big donors.

Zephyr Teachout

The way we fund campaigns is a feminist issue and a race issue. If you want more representation, you can't say it's going to be really expensive to run for office and you need a rolodex of billionaires.

Zephyr Teachout

I have always wanted to run for Attorney General, and I always wanted to have a baby, but I did not think I would be doing them at the same time.

Zephyr Teachout

I'm going to Congress to break down the doors of power.

Zephyr Teachout

Congress is corrupt, gridlocked, broken, dysfunctional. It's not working and we need it working again. It's not going to get fixed by people who are deeply, in one way or another, inside this really broken system.

Zephyr Teachout

One of the more important things the Bernie Sanders campaign did is reach people who are political but not electorally political. They're political in either non-profits or community groups, but didn't see how important it was to get involved in electoral politics.

Zephyr Teachout

Women's voices need to be in politics, and shaping politics from the very beginning, not serve as an afterthought.

Zephyr Teachout

The core of my platform is to change the role of money in politics, support public education and break up monopoly power. All of these are fundamental prerequisites to a responsive democracy.

Zephyr Teachout

Most of the corruption in Albany is legal corruption, not illegal bribery. It comes from campaigns being funded by millionaires and corporations.

Zephyr Teachout

The public should have access to unfettered communication and commerce, and the Internet is increasingly the medium where that takes place.

Zephyr Teachout

A real economic development policy would address the root issues hampering business growth, like access to credit and marketplaces so dominated by giant companies that it is impossible to compete.

Zephyr Teachout

The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn't want to.

Zephyr Teachout

In my view, we need to break up Facebook from Instagram and the other potential competitors that Facebook bought up.

Zephyr Teachout

There is so much we don't know about Facebook. We know we have a corporate monopoly that has repeated serious violations that are threatening our democracy.

Zephyr Teachout

Political corruption is eating our democracy out from the inside. Most Americans know that. But democratic and economic health can't be easily disentangled.

Zephyr Teachout