Surely, as a good consevative, you’re familiar with The Powell Memorandum.
Using his blueprint, the Right has set up a conservative archipelago of think tanks, institutes, political, social and media associations and the funding infrastructure to support it. The goal is to lay down the theoretical underpinning and propaganda base for a political and social program designed to make America safe for big business and corporate domination. It’s all here, look it up. Or do you already have it, calligraphy on parchment, hanging in your bathroom so it can inspire you when you sit every morning for your daily meditation?
Reading through it, one can not only
trace back the roots of modern conservatism to their fountainhead, but even the source of its rhetorical style and the cadences and rhythms of its prose. Here is where all the talking points started, read it carefully and you will see all the lunatic wingnut conspiracies in their original embyonic form.
In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell’s nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Powell Memo did not become available to the public until long after his confirmation to the Court. It was leaked to Jack Anderson, a liberal syndicated columnist, who stirred interest in the document when he cited it as reason to doubt Powell’s legal objectivity. Anderson cautioned that Powell “might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice…in behalf of business interests.”Though Powell’s memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration’s “hands-off business” philosophy.
This guy was not just an obscure Party theoretician, writing in some academic journal nobody reads. He wound up on the Supreme Court, thanks to Mr. Nixon, I wonder if he would have ever been confirmed if this memorandum had been known to the public at the time.
Powell [embraced] expansion of corporate privilege and wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that effectively invented a First Amendment ‘right’ for corporations to influence ballot questions.
Don’t sell your side short, Tom, this is not a short term set of guidelines for promoting one single grassroots issue. This is the whole shooting match. This is the Conservative Manifesto, the Right Wing Mein Kampf. The Gospel of Greed.
And it was not written and released publicly, but done in secret, a back door battle plan no one was supposed to read except the puppet masters themselves.