By Lucy Komisar
Nov 2, 2026
The Council on Foreign Relations today featured Daron Acemoglu, author of “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” A terrific subject. Not what you ever hear at the Council which is largely what the corporates, the oligarchy and the Deep State promote. I expected comments about corporate and big money control of politics. He made some remarks about workers not getting fair share, taxes on workers higher than on capital, but Council members, who with very minimal exceptions don’t care a fig about workers, asked about AI.
And instead of explaining how failure to deal with workers interests threatens democracy (actually we have an oligarchy of the rich), Acemoglu talked about the AI interests of the professional and investor class. Given a chance to raise issues that Council members routinely ignore, he punted.
After the meeting he told me the solution is that workers vote!!!. Of course he knows of the study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014), which concluded that economic elites and interest groups determine policy, while the preferences of average citizens have “near-zero” influence. Too small even to quantify. To suggest change comes when workers vote means Acemoglu is a fake. No mention of the possible impact of DSA and other grass-roots efforts to challenge the corporate control of American government. He actually talked about the effect of the “center-left” Democrats. Center-LEFT! Is he kidding. Schumer and Jeffries? In Europe they’d be in the parties of Macron or Merz.
I sat second row center, but moderator Sewell Chan refused to call on me to raise those issues. Maybe because I have pressed him on his refusal when he was Columbia Journalism Review editor 2024-25 to run my piece of how MSNBC killed its reporter Ken Dilanian’s story on the Bill Browder-Magnitsky fraud.
Chan said it was “old.” But Browder is interviewed constantly as an “expert” on the “bad” Russians. Here is the link to story about Ken Dilanian’s revelation– with lots of evidence — of the Browder-Magnitsky scam.
Ironically Sewell, a USC Annenberg Center on Communications fellow on “focusing on the fight for press freedom in the US and abroad” doesn’t include corporate press caving into legal threats to kill a story that impacts on U.S. foreign policy. He is also a fake. CJR’s previous editor Kyle Pope, who initially described the story as “great,” killed it after a phone call from MSNBC. The lure of being invited on a network news show is probably too great. Dilanian didn’t protest; he kept his job. So, let’s talk about U.S. press freedom.
When I asked Chan after the meeting why he didn’t call on me, he said to talk to Council staff. Wow! I suspected Council staff have told moderators not to call on Lucy Komisar (she doesn’t follow the Deep State line) but I never had a moderator tell me this directly!