Saudi Arabia's economy is transforming. What's behind it? The Public Investment Fund, or PIF.

It's one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, creating 13 new sectors,

66 companies, and more than 500,000 direct and indirect jobs so far. PIF is also the first

sovereign wealth fund to issue a green bond supporting Saudi Arabia's 2016 Net Zero emissions target.

Find out more at pif.gov.sa.

I'm Amanda Lentman and this is Battleground, a podcast from The Recount.

Apologies in advance, I've got a bit of a cold, so please forgive my sniffling.

Our guest this week is Judleggum. He's the author of Popular Information,

a newsletter about politics and power. Prior to that, Judd's been in many areas that overlap

with politics. From founding Think Progress in 2005, he worked as a research director for Hillary

Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. He ran for state office in Maryland. He's someone who

just really, really understands corporate influence in DC and the media. And I wanted to have Judd

on the show this week to talk about the ways in which corporations have power over politicians

and over media and the way in which those two things overlap so that the media has a harder time

holding politicians accountable for their corporate influence and the messy ecosystem that all of

these actors operate in. It's a really interesting conversation. I learned a lot, Judd names some names

on which corporations have been the worst actors and I think you're going to like it. But before we

get to my conversation with Judd, I want to talk about the utter cluster fact that is the legislation

trying to make his way through the House and Senate in DC. You know, the day this episode airs

September 30th is ostensibly the last day of the fiscal year of the United States government,

which means that by today, Congress needs to approve new government funds or the government will

shut down. Democrats in Congress have voted to keep the government open through at least November.

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