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 They loosened or repealed the rights and protections of organized labor and the poor, voters, and minorities.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.