"jesus POWELL! How do you know that's not just some terrorist pulling your chain."
Matthew X
profrv at nex.net.au
Tue Aug 27 14:16:54 PDT 2002
Media Transparency
The Powell Manifesto
How A Prominent Lawyer's Attack Memo Changed America
Jerry M. Landay
POSTED AUGUST 20, 2002 --
America's Second Gilded Age has been scoured of its glitter, along with the
platitudes that its town criers preached -- "too much government," "market
infallibility," and "prosperity forever."
The house that so-called New Conservatism built has operated on the
principle that "ideas have consequences." The principal "ideas" they
marketed were individual gain over public good, deregulation, big tax cuts,
and privatization. For two decades, since the installation of Ronald Reagan
in 1980, the radical right has run a tightly coordinated campaign to seal
its hold on the organs of power, ranging from the highest law courts to the
largest corporations, from the White House to Capitol Hill, from television
tubes to editorial pages, and across college campuses.
They have constructed a well-paid activist apparatus of idea merchants and
marketeers -- scholars, writers, journalists, publishers, and critics - to
sell policies whose intent was to ratchet wealth upward. They have
intimidated the mainstream media, and filled the vacuum with editors,
columnists, talk-show hosts, and pundits who have turned conservatism into
a career tool. They have waged a culture war to reduce the rich social
heritage of liberalism to a pejorative. And they have propagated a mythic
set of faux-economic values that have largely served those who financed the
movement in the first place
They shifted the nation rightward; tilted the distribution of the nation's
assets away from the middle class and the poor, the elderly, and the young;
they red-penciled laws and legal precedents at the heart of American
justice. They aimed to corporatize Medicare and Social Security. They
marketed class values while accusing their opponents of "class warfare."
They loosened or repealed the rights and protections of organized labor and
the poor, voters, and minorities. They slashed the taxes of corporations
and the rich, and rolled back the economic gains of the rest. They came to
dominate or heavily influence centers of scholarship, law, and politics,
education, and governance - or put new ones in their place. Their
litigation teams nearly overthrew an elected President. And, to maintain
power, proclaimed Constitutionalists on the right, to this day, wage a
concerted counter- revolution against such Constitutional guarantees as
free speech and separation of church and state
Movement conservatism was a power tool formulated by scholars such as
Irving Kristol, political organizers like the late Treasury Secretary
William Simon, opinion molders and popularizers such as William F. Buckley,
and a phalanx of think-tank operatives including Edwin Feulner and Paul
Weyrich. A highly integrated front of activist organizations has been
generously funded by the banking and oil money of the Mellon-Scaifes of
Pittsburgh, the manufacturing fortunes of Lynde and Harry Bradley of
Milwaukee, the energy revenues of the Koch family of Kansas, the chemical
profits of John M. Olin of New York, the Vicks patent-medicine empire of
the Smith Richardson family of Greensboro, N.C., and the brewing assets of
the Coors dynasty of Colorado, and others.
Their grants have paid for a veritable constellation of think tanks,
pressure groups, special-interest foundations, litigation centers,
scholarly research and funding endowments, publishing and TV production
houses, media attack operations, political consultancies, polling mills,
and public-relations operations. The concerted campaigns they run, also
underwritten by such self-interested corporations as those in healthcare,
pharmaceuticals, and finance, have weakened the AARP, the Food and Drug
Administration, Head Start, Medicare, and welfare programs.
This has amounted to the greatest organized power grab in American
political history. Astonishingly, it goes largely unreported on television,
radio, and most newspapers
Its media-attack tactics have largely silenced the critical attention of
the mainstream press. Americans, therefore, remain largely unaware of the
sweeping changes movement conservatism has wrought
Few are aware of the critical role played in the political power shift
rightward by a prominent Richmond attorney and community leader, Lewis F.
Powell, Jr., at the very threshold of a distinguished career on the U.S.
Supreme Court
Jerry M. Landay has produced public-affairs programs for PBS and
commentaries for NPR. He is assoc. professor emeritus in journalism at the
University of Illinois, a former CBS and ABC news correspondent, and writes
on national and media issues.
[This is a very long, but very important article. I hope you will click
through and read the entire piece. We MUST fight back. If you havent
signed up to contribute the price of one movie ticket per month to support
Buy Back Our Government, I hope you will do so now.Caro]
And heres the memo that started it all, also posted at
Media Transparency
ATTACK ON AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM
On August 23, 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce distributed the Powell
Memorandum to its national membership of leading executives, businesses,
and trade associations. The memo, published here in its entirety,
constituted the entire contents of the issue of its regular publication
WASHINGTON REPORT to members.
It bore the headline: CONFIDENTIAL MEMO. ATTACK ON AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE
SYSTEM.
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