MOYERS: All over the country television stations are the big winners even before the votes are counted.

Over a billion dollars in political advertising will have been spent by election day. What does all this money buy? That's something my guest knows all about. Once upon a time chuck lewis was a television journalist.

His last job was producing for 60 MINUTES. Then he went straight and in 1989 he founded the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity which makes him the loneliest man in Washington. Among his books are CHEATING OF AMERICA, and THE BUYING OF THE PRESIDENT 2000.

He and the Center are now among the country's most respected analysts of money and power. And I'm pleased to welcome Chuck Lewis to NOW.

You and I have been kindred spirits and allies on this issue of money in politics for a long time now.

In fact, I want my audience to know that many years ago when you were starting this center, the Schuman Foundation, which I head, was one of your important funders.

That's been some time now but I've been following the work you do and I have to begin by saying we haven't been very effective, have we, in reducing the influence of money in politics?

CHUCK LEWIS: No, you're right. We've told the world about the problem but the problem persists year in and year out. And these forces are so entrenched, they've been there for decades. There's more of them than ever. There were 62 lobbyists in 1968; today there's 20,000.

MOYERS: 62 in 1968? Registered lobbyists?

CHUCK LEWIS: Registered.

MOYERS: And now there are 20,000?

CHUCK LEWIS: 20,000, and it's probably higher.

Those are the ones that just register. So Washington is just swarming with folks that are trying to get favors, and politicians are beholden to them.

The bag men are the lobbyists who raise all this cash that we've just heard about. And so we have a... We just have an incredibly entrenched system, and the folks that sponsor our politicians have been doing it for years, and the politicians need their money and that's a mutual addiction, a dependency.

And they're enabling each other to do what they do. And it's very hard to break that hammer lock.

MOYERS: America pays the world's highest prices for drugs while the pharmaceutical industry has more lobbyists in Washington than there are members of Congress. Coincidence?

CHUCK LEWIS: (\laughs\) Not a coincidence. It is a extremely powerful industry. And you know, whether it was the healthcare reform stuff of the mid-'90s or it's prescription drug things happening today, this industry does whatever it wants, essentially, in Washington. No... This is not an industry that's cowed by those in power; this is an industry that controls those in power.

MOYERS: Take the business scandals that have rocked us this year. Is there a relationship between those scandals and campaign contributions?

CHUCK LEWIS: No question about it. Throughout the 1990s we had a substantial deregulation, basically a steady aloofness by those in power of the accounting industry but also business in general in terms of deregulation. And these interests wanted to make sure government looked the other way and stepped back from their activities.

And you can point to precise bills and precise years. The accounting industry very famously got legislation limiting their liability in 1995 when the Securities and Exchange Commission wanted to do a tighter regulation of them in 1999, the Chairman was basically told to stand down and it was defeated.

Because these powerful corporate interests, business round table, a lot of these powerful corporate groups did not want too much regulation.

MOYERS: Perhaps the most powerful interest group in Washington is the national association of broadcasters which represents not only the media giants that control much of the industry but all of those stations out there that are benefiting from that billion dollars. So how do you break the hold when the media won't cover the problem that exists?

CHUCK LEWIS: Well, that is a lot of the problem. I mean, we looked at the media a few years ago...

MOYERS: The Center did.

CHUCK LEWIS: The Center did. And they spent $11 million to kill campaign finance reform. They wanted to make...

MOYERS: Who did?

CHUCK LEWIS: The broadcast industry. They spent that kind of money. They took lawmakers on 315 all- expense-paid trips around the world to educate them about their issues, which is the kind of trip we'd all like to get.

The Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulates broadcasters, they took them on 1,400 all-expense- paid trips around the world. And so the system is substantially rigged and controlled by the broadcasters.

Very few people want to go up against the broadcast industry because not only are they giving millions of dollars, $75 million over a five-year period from all the media companies-- $115 million spent in lobbying by these powerful interests, but they control your face... Whether or not your face and voice are on the tube or on the airwaves. That's power.

MOYERS: So cable television fees have risen four times faster than inflation, while media ownership has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Coincidence?

CHUCK LEWIS: I don't think so. But we were sold a bill of goods. When the telecommunications act of '96 passed, we were told because of free market enterprise, deregulating the cable industry, things like this would not happen. The prices that we pay on our monthly cable bill would go down. They've gone up about 20%.

MOYERS: Is there anyway to break the grip of money in politics?

CHUCK LEWIS: There are some basic things that are, I think, rather common sense. Number one is transparency. Any...

MOYERS: Openness.

CHUCK LEWIS: Openness...Any politician that's standing for office that has any entity that's secretly raising millions of dollars needs to be outed and they need to... They have a lot of explaining to do to the American people.

MOYERS: is transparency getting harder?

CHUCK LEWIS: Transparency is getting harder because there are some states that are sort of like the Cayman Islands where you can hide money in states.

And then what happens is they transfer the money around. They launder it around the country. So if I want to write a million dollars to some committee somewhere, then they'll send it out and it will be listed as a transfer in the records. Good luck figuring out what that money was about and what it bought.

The idea that in the 21st century we have secret committees and a secrecy system worse that Watergate 30 years after Watergate is utterly peculiar. So that's a no-brainer. Everyone says they're for disclosure. The bottom line is, that's a lot of hooey, they're not for disclosure. It's just a line they use. We need to hold them to that. So start with basics, like openness and disclosure.

The other thing is, what a concept, how about if we actually enforced our election laws? I know it sounds crazy. We have a federal election commission. To do an investigation of some problem, you have to have a majority vote, whether it's three Republicans, three Democrats. They can't issue a subpoena without a majority vote.

Gosh, 3-3, sorry, we can't investigate. So they lop off hundreds of violations to the election law every year; they don't even pursue it, because they can't get a majority vote. So we have an agency that is a toothless wonder.

MOYERS: Controlled by both parties.

CHUCK LEWIS: Controlled by both parties.

MOYERS: Whose interest is not the interest of the country.

CHUCK LEWIS: Exactly. It's been captured... The old thing about capture theory, the regulator has been captured by the people it's supposed to be regulating. And this happened years ago; it's just gotten much worse. So we need to enforce existing election laws tenaciously.

I mean, I'm really a hardcore person on this. Not only would I enforce the laws, if someone does something they shouldn't with money and politics, I think they should pay the fine out of their pocket. You know, the idea that they use campaign money to pay the fine, now talk about a wrist slap. And so...

MOYERS: I think they should go to jail.

CHUCK LEWIS: I do, too. So the bottom line is, we don't really want to enforce these laws the way it's set up in Washington. So these are basic.

This is not wild-eyed stuff. We're not talking... I'm not talking about things like public financing and all kinds of other theories and approaches. This is basic stuff. We don't do that.

MOYERS: A lot of people will tell you, Chuck-- I'm one of them-- that there is nothing new in this.

When I was in politics years ago people delivered money in bags to candidates for president in both parties.

That the hold of money over politics is a constant in our society. They even say it's too late to save democracy. Yet you keep trying.

CHUCK LEWIS: Well, I don't think it's too late to save democracy. I mean, who said that? Why would they say that? I mean, we're still living, aren't we? We're still breathing.

These decisions affect the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. We have a problem in this country. The most basic things that affect our daily lives, powerful interests have gotten in there and interfered with them.

MOYERS: Examples?

CHUCK LEWIS: We looked a few years ago at meat packing plants and food safety. Millions of people get sick every year from bad food.

MOYERS: Lots of cases lately.

CHUCK LEWIS: Lately, just in the last few days. And so, where is the government here? Well, we don't really inspect meat. We rely on the companies to inspect meat. We have a voluntary system. And no piece of legislation has made it to the floor of the house or senate in years, not since the mid-'80s. And we found that...

MOYERS: On this issue.

CHUCK LEWIS: On this industry.

MOYERS: To regulate the industry.

CHUCK LEWIS: Right. And the food industry has fed congress $41 million in contributions to make sure they look the other way. And the key is to ball it up in the key committees. Well, that affects all of us. I don't want my two-year-old to eat a bad burger and get sick or worse. Why... This affects our life.

This is a hugely important thing. I'm not willing to give up on democracy. I mean, we need to know what these bastards are up to. I'm sorry, we do. And we need to start tracking them. We need to hold them accountable. And we need to ask them inconvenient questions.

You can't get a straight answer out of any politician today. They have a whole phalanx of aides that make sure you don't even talk to them. The only time we see them are in their paid ads that are all airbrushed and everything's perfect. And so finding the truth is becoming more and more difficult.

MOYERS: How do people find out about the Center for Public Integrity.

CHUCK LEWIS: You can go to the publicintegrity.org. That's our web site. There are a number of groups that are tracking these politicians and their activities. The center for public integrity is one of them. But if you need to find out about your politician as you get ready to vote, there's lots of places to go and do it. Ours is one of those sites, there's many out there.

MOYERS: Thank you very much, chuck lewis, center for public integrity.

CHUCK LEWIS: Thank you.