Well, that's a good entry to the subject of my political evolution. Because the issues I care about haven't changed. What changed was my understanding of how we solve those issues. I truly believed that the private sector could step up to the plate and provide the financial resources and the volunteer time to tackle poverty and all those social problems. I really did. But then I found out firsthand, through observing the Republican leadership at work, how unserious they were about addressing those issues. I mean, in Gingrich's first speech as speaker he actually said the issue of poverty would be more important than balancing the budget. So there was a sense that something different would be done, but of course that was not the case.

And the other factor was seeing firsthand how difficult it really was to raise money for social problems from the private sector. When I started to raise money for these issues through my own group, the Center for Effective Compassion, I saw how different it was from raising money for the opera or fashionable museums. So that was the beginning of my own political transformation. I was always a moderate on social issues -- for gun control, pro-gay rights -- so I haven't changed there. It was really a change on the role of government. The government needs to play a role in these problems. It can't all be the private sector. And it's in this book too: You can't have an unregulated free market in a democracy. The divisions in this society are so glaring, and they cannot be sustained. Just one statistic: In 1980, the average CEO made 42 times as much as the average worker; by 2000, it was 531 times the average worker. That's the whole story.

And as you frequently point out, that kind of obscene compensation is often divorced from their achievement. You see CEOs being rewarded this way for mediocre accomplishments -- or even running their companies into the ground. You had a great column last week on the new Treasury Secretary John Snow, and how much he got from CSX even though the company really struggled during his tenure.

Yes, there's really been a delinking of performance and reward. And yet in the Senate you had [Illinois Democrat Richard] Durbin and [Iowa Democrat Tom] Harkin trying to block Snow's nomination because of the administration's [pro-corporate pension reforms], but they caved when Snow simply said he would look into it. And that's what I mean: Democrats are not using their power to disrupt, which is a major power. They could have used their power to shine the spotlight on who Snow is, and what his nomination says about the mind-set of this administration. Sometimes one individual example is powerful enough to highlight what's happening across the board. I mean, you had a story here, you have an individual who's about to be in charge of the Treasury Department, and the IRS, whose company paid no taxes for the last three or four years.

Whose company actually compensated him more for leaving his job to go into government -- because of course he's going to help them by going into government. Yeah, you had what they used to call a "teachable moment."

Yes, you did. There are so many teachable moments right now. Today there's a great story in the New York Times about tax shelters: We have this whole industry designed to defraud the American taxpayer, in a time of historic deficits and grave threats to the homeland. Why are we allowing these tax shelters? If you want to be an American company, you pay taxes here. End of conversation. The provision in the homeland security bill that you could now avoid paying American taxes and get government contracts. That was a teachable moment.

We have so many teachable moments. The corporate welfare in the budget. The confirmation of William Donaldson at the SEC -- he's the guy to bring real change? More analysts are being indicted every day. It's all there -- we need to keep pointing it out, and creating a critical mass of outraged individuals. But we're lucky in that these crooks are very colorful. In "Pigs at the Trough," I really wanted to put flesh and blood on who they were, to show how they robbed their shareholders, defrauded the public, and didn't have a sense that it was immoral.

Do you have a favorite pig?

Oh yes, it's Jack Grubman, because of who he was and what he did -- and how he got away with it. I wrote about it in my column: he's only getting away with a fine, because of the way [New York Attorney General] Eliot Spitzer settled with Wall Street. I mean, the fine was $15 million, which will sound like a lot to our readers, but he was making $20 million a year, so it's less than a year's salary, not to mention all of his wealth. And then you look at what investors lost because of his advice, which amounts to billions of dollars. It just confirms that upstairs-downstairs America I talk about in the book. He got away without punishment, without even having to admit wrongdoing.

Whereas those of us in downstairs America would be going to jail.

Right. I asked Spitzer: Why didn't these guys at least have to admit wrongdoing? And he said something like, well, if they did, companies might go bankrupt. But I thought the invisible hand of capitalism was supposed to pick winners and losers, not the attorney general of the state of New York. I wrote the book because I wanted to make clear that these corporate scandals are political scandals -- because if it were not for the collusion between Washington and corporate America, none of this could happen. The watchdogs would not have turned into lapdogs, and that's what happened. What's disturbing is that nothing has really changed. And it will keep going on unless and until we demand change. And people are starting to demand change.

Were you heartened by the response to the Detroit Project? Some of the media were kind of snarky.

Yes, but I don't worry about that. It's been amazing. You know that when I wrote the column, I really wasn't planning a campaign. I wasn't. I wrote about the idea for the ads, and I ended the column by asking if anyone would be willing to pay for them. And the readers responded. I woke up to an e-mail from you -- forwarding me these amazing messages from readers, asking where to send their money -- saying to me, "What are we going to do about this?" So we created our own nonprofit, the Detroit Project, made the two ads, and look where we are. It's not all us, by any means. But we've had a national conversation about fuel efficiency and oil independence: Barbara Boxer is introducing legislation to cut the tax credit for large SUVs for business; Dianne Feinstein is trying to close the SUV-fuel efficiency loophole; Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, is trying to get SUVs out of the state fleet, and you have another Republican, Gov. George Pataki, trying to end the SUV tax credit in the state of New York. We have thousands of people who've come to our Web site pledging to give up their SUVs when their lease is up. Even the president is pledging to increase hydrogen research -- which is great, though we all know it's a diversion from what he could do right now. But the fact that he felt compelled to do even that shows how far we've come -- how much public opinion had shifted even in the last month.

What did you think of the media coverage?

Look, the ad got criticism, but if we had not done this ballsy ad, if we had not done something edgy and compelling, we would not have gotten coverage at all. We upset some people, who took it literally. The ads were parodies of the drug ads. Parody and satire is an important way to capture the imagination. But literal people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh got mad and tried to change the subject and make it ad hominem, or ad feminem -- direct it at the people behind it.

And make you the issue.

Yes, but that doesn't bother me one bit. I consider it totally part of the process. I focus on the change we brought about. But it's not all about us -- there's a response now that would not have been there a year ago.

It's probably a combination of Iraq, terror, the economy. And you call the ads satire, but I actually think that it's fair to make the case that reducing our dependence on foreign oil makes us safer.

Well, sure. To take the fuel-efficiency issue and make it a national-security issue was a new way to look at an old issue, and that opened people's eyes up. People care in a different way. But truly -- part of it is simply the moment we're living in. This is a populist moment. In the book, I quote Henry Blodgett saying he and the other new economy cheerleaders were "plucking the chords of the Zeitgeist." I kind of love that quote, because he really did that at the time -- they really were plugged into the zeitgeist. But now it's a new zeitgeist -- a populist zeitgeist -- and it's ours.

This story has been corrected since it was first published.

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