"jesus POWELL! How do you know that's not just some terrorist pulling your chain."

[Matthew X]

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They loosened or repealed the rights and protections of organized labor and 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 haven’t 
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 here’s 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.