Arjun Singh  0:03  
From the levers. Reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh who is Kamala Harris. We know she's the Vice President and has been a politician for 20 years, but throughout her career, Harris has always been something of an enigma. It's odd for someone who served as a senator, Vice President and the Attorney General of the most populous state in the country. But it's not to say that Harris has never done anything influential. Far from it, Harris has been front and center on major issues such as how the California government responded to widespread fraud and abuse in the state's housing market, or how San Francisco dealt with crime and homelessness through it all, Harris has clearly shown an aptitude as a politician, but now that she's running for the highest office, of all, she's held her cards close and offered little insight into what the person behind the office believes. But the answers might already be there sprinkle throughout her career these past two decades. Today on lever time, we're gonna look back at some key moments in Kamala Harris's career, we'll hear about her first run for office, and then look at what really happened when Harris squared off with some of the biggest banks in the country.

Arjun Singh  1:16  
So you're at the DNC right now.

Marisa Lagos  1:19  
I am. I'm at the Hyatt Regency, which is where the California delegation staying, as well as a couple others, Virginia, Hawaii, is here. It is a scene in the lobby.

Arjun Singh  1:31  
Marissa Lagos is a political correspondent for the public radio station KQED, and the co host of the podcast political breakdown. I caught up with Marissa a few weeks ago, while she was covering the Democratic National Convention, Marisa has been a reporter in San Francisco since 2004 the same year Kamala Harris was first elected to public office, and for the last 20 years, marissa's covered Harris in one form or another. It's it's

Marisa Lagos  1:55  
just wild, like I literally have a photo of her holding my baby at the 2016 convention, because she walked by it. You know, I've known her since she was da. She I brought my five month old there because it was that, or not cover it. And she's, she's a baby grabber, so she grabbed the baby and, like, just that kind of thing where you're like, This person, I know her like, and now she's up there on this stage. It is. It's pretty wild.

Arjun Singh  2:19  
A couple weeks ago, Harris walked out onto a stage at the United Center in Chicago and formally accepted her

Kamala Harris  2:25  
nominee, I will be a president who unites us around our highest aspirations, a president Who leads and listens, who is realistic, practical

Arjun Singh  2:42  
for politicos and insiders who've been closely following the presidential race, Harris's speech could be seen as the end to one of the strangest and most dramatic sagas in American politics. Less than two months ago, it was assumed that Joe Biden would be the one on that stage. Instead, the president, who dropped out of the race in July, was relegated to an 11:30pm speaking slot earlier in the week.

Joe Biden  3:05  
It's been the honor of my lifetime to serve as your President. I love the job, but I love my country more.

Arjun Singh  3:16  
For a lot of people just tuning in, though it may have been the first time they actually saw Harris giving a speech. For the past three years, she's been the low key vice president who quietly waited in the wings as Biden's number two. I imagine that must have been a strange role for someone who spent the last decade or so as a big city district attorney, the attorney general of the state that's home to Silicon Valley in Hollywood and eventually California senator, a position she only out for four years before becoming the vice president.

Cheree Peoples  3:43  
So America, the path that led me here in recent weeks was no doubt unexpected, but I'm no stranger to unlikely journeys. So

Arjun Singh  3:56  
Harris has an impressive record, and few in politics have held quite as many influential positions as her, it's all probably what led her to try and make her run for president less than three years after she first got to Washington, and in that campaign, Harris positioned herself as one of the more liberal people in the race, aligning herself with people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Cheree Peoples  4:15  
For the people, meant fighting for middle class families who had been defrauded by banks and were losing their homes by the millions in the Great Recession, and I'll tell you, sitting across the table from the big banks, I witnessed the arrogance of power wealthy bankers accusing innocent homeowners of fault, as if Wall Street's mess was of the people's making,

Arjun Singh  4:44  
but that campaign would end up in flames, and Harris would drop out less than a year later, even more, when she assumed her position as the presumptive nominee a few weeks ago, her campaign said she wouldn't even be running on the policies she proposed a few years back, I

Marisa Lagos  4:59  
think that 20. 1920 20 campaign was an anomaly like I think, if you take that and the way she was trying to kind of cater her positions to where the party was at in that moment, like that was her worst moment, in my mind, in politics, she just was unsure of herself. She wasn't speaking from her heart and her convictions. I don't think today, Harris

Arjun Singh  5:18  
seems to be aligning herself with the populist economic agenda of the Biden administration. She's released plans to fight corporate price gouging, expand the child tax credit and provide federal aid to first time homebuyers. Outside of that, though, she's been pretty cryptic about what she actually wants to do. So for now, if we want to get a sense of what Harris, the future president, is like, we need to start in her past.

Cheree Peoples  5:40  
I strongly believe, and the work of my office has proven it to be true that when we're talking about serious and violent crime, lock them up in San Francisco, in my office, we've increased the conviction rates for the DAs office to the highest they've been in just under 15 years. But when we're talking about nonviolent crime, that is actually the crime that is occupying the bulk of our public resources and beds in our state prison system, and we need to have a meaningful system to reduce the likelihood. You can't call

Marisa Lagos  6:06  
her a progressive prosecutor, because that word did not exist when she was a DA I mean, she got elected, took office in 2004 we were still very much in the tough on crime era. None of the reforms that came forward later had happened when Kamala

Arjun Singh  6:21  
Harris graduated from law school, she immediately dove into law enforcement. The year was 1990 and Harris had graduated from the University of California Hastings College of Law just a year before, and her first gig in government would be his deputy DA in Alameda County, which includes Berkeley and Oakland in the late 1980s violent crime had begun to rise throughout the country. When Harris would join the DA office in 1990 violent crime in Oakland was two years away from peaking coupled with the rise of urban violence was the increased abundance of crack cocaine, a highly addictive drug that was tearing through inner city communities, and also helping to feel violence between the gangs that trafficked in, even if you didn't experience it directly, it was hard not to be aware of it. That's because throughout the 80s, the media would air segments like this night after night, helping to cement an image of cities like Oakland as dangerous and in disrepair Good evening

News Broadcast  7:19  
topping nightcast, the war against drugs in the Bay Area, at least one city is telling drug dealers and users Enough is enough. That city is Oakland. Oakland has a big drug problem, and police are fighting back by sweeping through neighborhoods and rooting out drug dealers. Nightcast reporters,

Arjun Singh  7:34  
inevitably, this got the attention of politicians, and a national consensus was forming that the government needed to approach drug usage and violent crime with zero tolerance.

Joe Biden  7:44  
America is under attack, literally under attack by an enemy who is well financed, well supplied and well armed and fully capable of declaring total war against the nation and its people, as we've seen in Colombia, it's well

Arjun Singh  7:59  
known by now that one of the politicians leading that charge was Harris's future boss and our current President, Joe Biden. The same year Harris was graduating from law school, Biden gave a televised address in which he criticized Republican President George Bush for his approach to the war on drugs.

Joe Biden  8:19  
The Defense Department spends $300 billion a year to prepare for a war we hope they'll never have to fight. But the President says he wants to spend only $8 billion next year on a war we're already fighting and we're losing. The President says he wants to wage a war on drugs. But if that's true, what we need is another D Day, not another Vietnam.

Arjun Singh  8:42  
And this was the climate that Harris became a crime fighter in. In 1998 she would move over to the San Francisco da office, and in 2003 she would go up against the incumbent da Terrence Hallinan, a former counterculture defense attorney who advocated for the decriminalization of prostitution and notably indicted members of the city's police leadership multiple times. Here's Marissa Lagos again.

Marisa Lagos  9:06  
She really did try to strike a balance. I think she's always been very aware of her role as the first of a lot of things. She was coming from communities that have been disproportionately affected by gun violence, by the prison system, by all those tough laws that really a lot of which started in California in the 90s. But she also was a prosecutor. I mean, she spent over a decade in the Alameda County DAs office and doing civil litigation in San Francisco before she became da so she was not running as a like, burn it all down, you know, abolitionist type candidate, and in fact, in her da race, she really was in the middle. It wasn't

Arjun Singh  9:44  
just crime that Harris focused on. During this period, she became interested and concerned about the welfare of children, and her approach was to be, well, tough about it. So as the DA she used the authority of her office to file charges against parents whose kids were chronically absent. Here she is in 2010 her six years. SFDA, explaining the policy

Cheree Peoples  10:04  
as a prosecutor and law enforcement, I have a huge stick. The school district has got a carrot. Let's work in tandem around our collective objective and goal, which is to get those kids in school

Arjun Singh  10:18  
during Harris's 10 years. Da, no parents were actually sent to jail, but she did levy fines in some cases. A year after that speech, California would pass a statewide version of her truancy bill, but this time, some local municipalities did arrest parents, in some cases, parading them in front of news cameras. And not all of those cases were clear cut. Take the 2013 case of Cherie Peeples, a mother whose daughter had missed 20 days of school due to medical reasons, something the school was aware of at the time of her arrest. However, peoples was in the middle of a technical battle with her daughter's school, leaving her vulnerable to being charged by her local da, and that's what they did. Eventually, her charges were dropped, but not after a protracted saga with the legal system, something which still haunts her today.

Cheree Peoples  11:06  
I got put out of my home. I end up getting evicted because of it. So my eviction is still on my record. I still have to clear my record from the arrest so the arrest record is still there. I'm in the process to try to get it expunged, try to figure all of that out on top of still trying to maintain the health and safety of my child. I'm thankful I got Harris

Arjun Singh  11:26  
eventually expressed some regret over that statewide bill, but that moment is a good illustration of how Kamala Harris wielded power throughout her career. HARRIS often planted herself within the left, like many progressives, she frames issues in the language of social justice, and makes an effort to signal that she believes a lot of the problems facing American society are the result of systemic and class based policies. Here she is, for example, not long after first being elected District Attorney, the

Cheree Peoples  11:52  
criminal justice system is not working for the African American community. I can tell you, as the chief law enforcement officer for a major city in this country that it is not working. We see that in the statistics that you've outlined, 2 million people are in the prison system in this country. Over 40% are African American, in spite of the fact that we only constitute 13% of the general population. It's not working. It's not working when we recognize that African American men, the leading cause of their death is homicide, we overly are overly represented, both as victims and as defendants and as witnesses, our communities suffer because our babies hear the gunfire every night. So the seven year old has post traumatic stress disorder and cannot go to school the next day and learn at the

Arjun Singh  12:30  
same time, even in this early period in her career, Harris shows a clear deference towards institutional power in the establishment, rather than tear down and rebuild the criminal justice system. Harris frequently implored people to embrace and reform it. That argument

Cheree Peoples  12:46  
is not working. What I suggest we do as African Americans is own this issue in law enforcement and then define it in the way that works for us. Because it is a myth to say that African Americans don't want law enforcement. We do. We want our grandmothers to be able to walk to church and be safe. We want our babies to be able to walk to the park and be safe. What we don't want is racial profiling. What we don't want is accepted for. What we don't want is to have our civil liberties and civil rights be stripped. But we do want law enforcement, so let's define it in the way that works for us by saying, I want community. And to

Arjun Singh  13:22  
reporter Marissa Lagos Harris's time as da also exemplifies the shrewd political instincts that would ultimately guide how she acted in office. This

Marisa Lagos  13:31  
is a person who saw what she wanted and really went for it, and she clearly had, I mean, from the beginning, just, I think, really raw political talent and ability to connect with people. I interviewed four folks who call themselves, you know, part of the Kamala OG is people that have worked with her for 2030, years. Ran her first campaign, and they just talk about, like, the first time they met her, seeing something special that like they felt that she had a talent that, you know, and in a city like San Francisco, there's actually a lot of pretty talented politicians. We have produced, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, the list goes on, you know. I think some of it is that San Francisco, Bay Area, California, mentoring, right? That you had really this machine of both, you know, very pro worker, very pro labor, liberal in many ways, but also very pragmatic. And I think you see that through line with Harris, even if she's not always been, as you know, close with all of those people. After

Arjun Singh  14:34  
the break, we'll hear about what happened when Kamala Harris became Attorney General and squared off with some of the biggest banks in the country, and whether or not she actually delivered for the people of California. We'll be right back. You.

Cheree Peoples  15:11  
Oh, I am so overwhelmed by the incredible, incredible hard work and support and faith and friendship and love

Arjun Singh  15:25  
in 2010 seven years after she first ran for San Francisco District Attorney, Harris successfully ran for attorney general of California. She was considered a rising star in democratic politics, often drawing comparisons to President Barack Obama, Harris's race would also coincide with the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, something Obama was grappling with at the time, and in particular, a housing and foreclosure crisis that was ripping through the nation. Here he is the same year Harris began her campaign for California. AG,

Barack Obama  15:55  
I'm here today to talk about a crisis unlike we've ever known, but one that you know very well here in Mesa and throughout the valley in Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs, the American Dream is being tested by a home mortgage crisis that not only threatens the stability of our economy, but also the stability of families and neighborhoods.

Arjun Singh  16:20  
In 2007 mortgage lenders began falling like dominoes and filing for bankruptcy. Around then, banks and mortgage lenders tried to cash in on the housing market by offering more and more loans to people, even people who traditionally have been deemed too at risk of default. These loans, also known as subprime mortgages, became the hottest thing on Wall Street, and that ultimately contributed to one of the worst economic crises the world had seen since the Great Depression. Banks that had swallowed up these mortgages to sell off incorrectly moved the debt between entities they controlled, and that meant the mortgages were corrupted in a haste bankers, lawyers and mortgage collectors tried to fix their paperwork, in some cases fraudulently. But worse were the 1000s of homeowners who were incorrectly threatened with foreclosure or lied to as the state with the largest population. These problems were especially acute in California, where by 2010 the year Harris was running for attorney general, more than half a million homes received foreclosure notices. So

Matt Stoller  17:21  
when she first got elected in 2010 she ran for California State Ag, and she said, I'm going to do something on foreclosures. And then she was like, I'm not going to sign on to the Obama administration framework of just doing whatever the banks wanted. And I got excited about that. Matt

Arjun Singh  17:37  
Stoller is the Director of Research of the American Economic liberties project. Most

Matt Stoller  17:41  
state attorney generals have a few lawyers, and they certainly don't have lawyers who can handle complex financial questions. But really big states, California, Texas, Illinois, New York, actually do have a capacity. They have real lawyers, and they have a lot of them, and they can address big, complex questions, and they have jurisdiction, and California is a really big market, so California can set national policy and has the capacity to govern. And so I was excited, because she said, I'm going to work with other state officials. The other person she worked with was Eric Schneiderman in New York, and they were like, we're going to do a mortgage Task Force, and we're gonna, we're gonna really bring some justice. And then they signed on to a deal with a big headline number,

Arjun Singh  18:26  
what Matt's referring to is known as the National Mortgage Settlement. Back when Harris was attorney general, every single state wanted to go after mortgage lenders, and there was palpable public outrage over what had happened. Seeing this, the federal government organized the Attorney Generals of every state, including DC, to pool their resources together, and that turned into an eventual $50 billion settlement that was divided up between the states. Today, it's something you can hear Harris frequently bring up

Cheree Peoples  18:53  
the housing market can be complicated, but look, I'm not new to this issue. As state attorney general, I drafted and helped pass a homeowner bill of rights, one of the first in America. And during the foreclosure crisis, I took on the big banks for predatory lending with many of my colleagues, including Roy Cooper, and won $20 billion for California families when I was attorney general,

Matt Stoller  19:21  
she signed on to this deal, you know, where the banks would pay a bunch of money, most of the money they ended up not really paying, because it was stuff they'd already done. Will will give loan forgiveness as part of the payment. Or, you know, they and the cash they did pay, they got a tax write off for it. And there were other ways that they were extracting out of the payment they were making. It was really ugly and dishonest, but it was consistent with the Obama administration framework, right? And they said we're going to create a tough mortgage task force that's going to really look into the banks. Six months after they announced it, the mortgage task force did not have offices or a phone. They never investigated anything. They never got documents. They never interviewed anyone. It was a complete sham. So that's really bad. Even

Arjun Singh  20:03  
more than that ugliness is that many, many California homeowners were ultimately given the short end of the stick. Harris's boast of a multi billion dollar settlement may be technically true, but it evades the fact that the settlement ultimately benefited the banks more than Harris's actual constituents.

Aaron Glantz  20:21  
She is claiming in her ads and on the stump that she delivered $20 billion in compensation to homeowners, and that is only true if you really crane your neck, really, really, really hard.

Arjun Singh  20:37  
Erin glance is a Peabody award winning journalist and the author of the book, homewreckers, how a gang of Wall Street kingpins, hedge fund magnates, crooked banks and vulture capitalists suckered millions out of their homes and demolished the American dream. You know,

Aaron Glantz  20:50  
I'm not an expert on Pinocchios or fact checking, but I will tell you what the truth is. The truth is that the single largest part of that $20 billion settlement with the big banks, Bank of America, Wells, Fargo and JP Morgan Chase went to short sales

Arjun Singh  21:12  
as part of the national settlement, banks agreed to forego homeowners remaining mortgages and let homeowners sell back their homes for less than what they had initially purchased them for sometimes way less $9

Aaron Glantz  21:24  
billion of the $20 billion went as write downs to banks for 10s of 1000s of California families who were able to walk away from their houses and ended up with no home

Arjun Singh  21:44  
and no money. The Internal Revenue Service even acknowledged in 2013 that the short sale forgiveness provided no material benefit to homeowners and to Aaron Glantz Harris words on the campaign trail about taking on big banks kind of ring a hollow

Aaron Glantz  21:59  
so there's an argument to be made that the banks were the primary beneficiaries of the settlement. This is all important, because I think that we all recognize that the American people are angry and they're upset, generally speaking about how the economy is going. And a lot of people, maybe the pro Biden folks would say, how can people feel this way when the unemployment rate is down and the stock market is up, right and the economy looks good, and the reason is because there was an incredible loss of wealth 15 years ago for millions of families across this country, in large part because there was such a huge loss of equity in the middle class from the foreclosure crisis. So the policies that she took, she took, did not help people stay in their homes in a meaningful way. You know, I've been in conversation with people who lost their homes during that time here in California, and a lot of them don't want to go on the record now, because the last thing they want is to be part of a story that leads even one person to vote for Trump at the same time they're still bitter about what happened to them 15 years ago. And I think that those two facts can live together.

Arjun Singh  23:11  
When I asked Matt Stoller what he thought of Harris saying on the campaign trail that she stood up to big banks, he put it a little bit more bluntly,

Matt Stoller  23:18  
a total lie, and I worry that she doesn't know it's a lie. It's also bad that she's bragging about it, because she does have things to brag about. I mean, she did important things on pharmaceutical prices and hospital prices, you know, she did some things on for profit, colleges, scams and stuff like, she has things she can brag about without lying. So that worries me that she's doing that like

Arjun Singh  23:39  
Matt was saying, it's not as if Harris doesn't have a record of standing up to corporate power in some ways as the AG, she actually did fight against hospital consolidation and even sought to bring down the price of drugs.

Matt Stoller  23:52  
She did do some useful things on pharmaceuticals this California state. AG, there are these arrangements called pay to play arrangements where a company that has a patent for a medicine. You know, when that patent runs out, a company can come in and make an unpatented version and sell it for less, and this brings down pharmaceutical prices, right? And what they've what these guys have started doing is the the company that has the patent starts paying the company that doesn't have the patent to not deploy that medicine. So it's a Pay for delay. It means, all right, we're gonna effectively get another year or two or three of our patent illegally. And California was right there litigating on it. She also looked into sort of certain hospital pricing games. What emerges

Arjun Singh  24:33  
from Harris's time as attorney general is a mixed picture, one that in some ways parallels the careers of a lot of Democratic establishment politicians in politics, there's a constant push and pull between where the momentum for change comes from. Is it popular movements in the public, or do shifts happen because of the leadership of the people in office? Looking at Harris's career, it's hard to find an area where Harris really broke with Democratic orthodoxy or fought. For an issue that was not popular within her party. And there's one story that Aaron Glantz told me that felt particularly revealing. It begins with a bank called IndyMac. IndyMac was a mortgage lender and well, if you've been following along so long, you probably know how this story's gonna end.

News Anchor  25:16  
Fear, anger and high anxiety were the prevailing emotions outside branches of the failed IndyMac bank out in California. Eventually,

Arjun Singh  25:23  
IndyMac was bought by a bank called one West, which was founded by Steve Mnuchin, Donald Trump's future treasury secretary and a longtime fixture on Wall Street. Here's Aaron glance

Aaron Glantz  25:33  
again, Steve Mnuchin and his Wall Street ownership group took over this failed bank called IndyMac, which had been one of the worst lenders before the bust, it was one of the largest bank failures in American history, and there was a loss share agreement between Steven mnuchin's Wall Street group and the federal government, where, in exchange for taking On this troubled bank, we agreed to subsidize his losses on foreclosures. So whereas your average bank would not want to foreclose on anyone, because it would result in a loss for them, we had agreed to subsidize Steve mnuchin's foreclosures, and so that financial incentive was removed. So he was his bank was just like foreclosing on people like crazy, and these were mostly elderly homeowners and mostly people of color. IndyMac,

Arjun Singh  26:28  
the bank, minuchins one West took over, used especially malicious tactics to sell people mortgages. One of their most infamous tactics was called a reverse mortgage.

Aaron Glantz  26:39  
These reverse mortgages targeted elderly people who already own their homes but were cash poor, and they would say, like, we'll give you a check, and then you never have to pay it back, right? But then on top of that money that you get interest and fees compound. And so a lot of these families got a very small amount of money, and the banks would just rake in interest in fees and interest in fees to the point where then, if the family member wanted to pass it on to their loved ones, there was no money left in the house. That's why so many of one West foreclosures involve seniors, because you would have these families that got relatively small checks that they would hope would help them in retirement, and ended up owing tremendous amounts of money to this bank.

Arjun Singh  27:29  
Now, none of this is Kamala Harris's fault, and the mortgages lent out by IndyMac occurred long before she became California's Attorney General. Where things get interesting, though, is when Harris's staff begin to look into the tactics indie Mack had employed. You

Aaron Glantz  27:43  
know, her staff starts to look at this bank, and they find all kinds of irregularities in the foreclosure process, and they say, Let's prosecute this bank. And again, it was especially important because not only was one of the worst actors, but also because of the fact that we were actually we the taxpayers were actually paying for these foreclosures, and they put together this big dossier, and they gave it to her, and she declined to prosecute.

Arjun Singh  28:11  
Harris's argument was that, as a federally chartered bank, she had no authority over one West California's Attorney General, a claim that's been disputed.

Aaron Glantz  28:19  
The independent legal experts that I and others have talked to have said that this is just a bunch of baloney, right? That you know, the charges are brought all the time against federal banks here in the state of California based on their activities here in California. This is a bank headquartered in Los Angeles area, most of its you know, like a large portion of these allegedly fraudulent foreclosures occurred in the state of California. There's plenty of legal basis to move forward. Her staff makes a clear and convincing argument. It's also a fact that Steve Mnuchin was a contributor to her campaign as California Attorney General. It's also a fact that Donald Trump was a contributor to her campaign as California Attorney General, did the host play a role in her failure to prosecute? I think that the most important thing that I keep coming back to is the way in which the American people are are angry and upset about the state of things. Even more important is her main claim that she took on the banks and to look at exactly what relief she got, and to see that the largest portion of the settlement involved homes where the people who used to own them were left at the end of the settlement with no home and no money, is really, really important. She didn't hold Steve Mnuchin banks, account bank accountable for wrongfully foreclosing on many of these families, and she also didn't give relief to families that lost their homes like she's claiming. There is no doubt that she was more. Aggressive than the Obama administration in Washington, and that she did take steps to help California consumers, but it's just not like she says.

Arjun Singh  30:13  
What does it say about Kamala Harris that she refused to prosecute Steve Mnuchin in one West does it reveal a politician who will ultimately sell out the people for short term political gain, or was it a lapse in judgment, perhaps even in cowardice of losing a case in court to one West?

Arjun Singh  30:38  
Then there are other contradictions. As a politician from the San Francisco Bay Area, Harris's boosters are who's who of the tech elite. Yet Harris also serves as the vice president in an administration that has taken the largest steps of any to go after big tech, most recently winning an antitrust lawsuit against Google, a firm whose officials have sprinkled Harris with cash. That dichotomy recently spelt over into public view when a major backer of Harris, LinkedIn co founder, Reid Hoffman went on television and said he thinks Lena Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, should be fired.

Reid Hoffman  31:12  
I do think that that Lena Khan is is is is a, is a bad is is a, is a person who is not helping America in her job and what she's doing, and so I would hope that Vice President Harris would replace her.

Arjun Singh  31:29  
It should also be noted that Hoffman sits on the board of Microsoft, and co founded the company inflection AI, which was eventually acquired by Microsoft, an acquisition that was investigated by Kahn's FTC. Here's Matt Stoller again.

Matt Stoller  31:41  
He's a longtime donor and Butler for Kamala Harris, probably going back at least a decade. So he wants to go back to the kind of the neoliberal era. He wrote a book called Blitzscaling, which was a business strategy book, but also a political book. And his argument was, look, the ideal business form is a big company that controls a market. And what you should do if you're starting a company is you should try to get a lot of money from Wall Street and pour it into a market that you can corner. So that was the strategy. And he profiles different companies who have done that, Google, Facebook, Standard Oil. He's like, this is what we need.

Arjun Singh  32:13  
Of course, one can have advisors and family members, even donors who don't agree with them. It's not unheard of for a politician to end up surprising people, most notably Joe Biden, who ran as an establishment, corporate friendly Democrat and ended up staffing his administration with people who've directly challenged corporate power. But we haven't seen that surprise from Kamala Harris yet. We don't even know how Harris would approach issues like potentially breaking up big tech or reining in monopolistic behavior. Instead, Harris is offered a vague vision of expanding things like the child tax credit and providing a subsidy to first time homebuyers, something she dubs the opportunity economy. So next week, we're going to continue looking at Harris's life and career and see what happened when she was thrust onto the national stage after leaving the Attorney General's Office, that's next week on lever time.

Arjun Singh  33:10  
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me Arjun Singh, with help from Chris Walker and editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back next week with another episode of lever. Time you