Michael Moore covers the 40th anniversary of the Powell Memorandum

[robertpaulsen]

As he writes on his http://www.michaelmoore.com/">homepage:

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html">The Empire Struck Back

It was 40 years ago today on August 23, 1971, that corporate lawyer
(and soon Supreme Court Justice) Louis Powell gave the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce a blueprint to fight back against
the New Deal and the rising middle class

http://old.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=21">Who You Gonna Call?

One of the first people with whom Powell discussed his memo was
Ross L. Malone, general counsel of GM

http://cwd.grassroots.com/corporate/rp/4148.pdf">Honesty by Accident (PDF)

Because of an apparent typo, the title of Powell's memo was
"Attack of American Free Enterprise System"

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/my-class-right-or-wrong">'My Class, right or wrong – the Powell Memorandum’s 40th Anniversary'

" issued a clarion call for corporations to mobilize their economic power
to further their economic interests by ensuring that corporations dominated
every influential and powerful American institution. Lewis Powell’s call was
answered by the CEOs who funded the creation of Cato, Heritage, and
hundreds of other movement centers." – Bill Black

[GliderGuider]

1. Yesss!!!

This is one of the most under-recognized turning points in the American march to fascism. AFAIC it's impossible to fully understand what has happened in the last 40 years unless one understands the importance of the Powell Memo. It's great to see Michael Moore getting it out there.

[robertpaulsen]

7. It's something I didn't really understand the significance of until I read it.

It's chilling how what they outlined came to pass. This paragraph stood out for me:

That 1971 letter, now stored in the http://law.wlu.edu/powellarchives/">Powell archives at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, carried two enclosures. One was a copy of a http://old.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=22">memorandum that Powell had written at the invitation of Eugene Sydnor, Jr., a Richmond friend and department store owner, as well as chairman of the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. Senior officials of the Chamber, including Arch Booth, its executive vice-president, decided to circulate it to privately to members. It was less a memo than a militant manifesto of political action, outlining in detail Powell's ideas on how business should go about responding to the assault against it. He urged the Chamber, which represented America's major businesses and trade associations, to take the lead in an aggressive "education" campaign in defense of free enterprise.(emphasis added)

http://old.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=21

The US Chamber of Commerce. They were part of the VRWC at its inception and continue to "take the lead" today.

[PufPuf23]

2. There was so much going on in 1971 that the Powell Memo was not noticed by Liberals and anti-facists

[GliderGuider]

4. Plus, it's significance has only become clear in hindsight.

Even if they'd known about it, I doubt many progressives would have recognized it for the turning point it was.

[Octafish]

3. ''My class, right or wrong.''

Gosh, how they love money.

Thanks for the heads-up, robertpaulsen.

A hearty kick to the pants of the Corporate Reich.

[robertpaulsen]

8. You're welcome, Octafish. They certainly do put class ahead of country.

Here's another good article detailing the importance of this:

The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of Right-Wing Extremists

The memo is important because it reveals the power that conservatives attributed to the political nature of education and the significance this view had in shaping the long-term strategy they put into place in the 1960's and 1970's to win an ideological war against liberal intellectuals, who argued for holding government and corporate power accountable as a precondition for extending and expanding the promise of an inclusive democracy. The current concerted assault on government and any other institutions not dominated by free-market principles represents the high point of a fifty-year strategy that was first put into place by conservative ideologues such as Frank Chodorov, founder of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; publisher and author William F. Buckley; former Nixon Treasury Secretary William Simon, and Michael Joyce, the former head of both the Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Powell Memo is important because it is the most succinct statement, if not the founding document, for establishing a theoretical framework and political blueprint for the current assault on any vestige of democratic public life that does not subordinate itself to the logic of the alleged free market.

Initially, Powell identified the American college campus "as the single most dynamic source" for producing and housing intellectuals "who are unsympathetic to the enterprise system."<2> He was particularly concerned about the lack of conservatives on social sciences faculties and urged his supporters to use an appeal to academic freedom as an opportunity to argue for "political balance" on university campuses. Powell recognized that one crucial strategy in changing the political composition of higher education was to convince university administrators and boards of trustees that the most fundamental problem facing universities was "the imbalance of many faculties."<3> Powell insisted that "the basic concepts of balance, fairness and truth are difficult to resist, if properly presented to boards of trustees, by writing and speaking, and by appeals to alumni associations and groups."<4> But Powell was not merely concerned about what he perceived as the need to enlist higher education as a bastion of conservative, free market ideology. The Powell Memo was designed to develop a broad-based strategy not only to counter dissent, but also to develop a material and ideological infrastructure with the capability to transform the American public consciousness through a conservative pedagogical commitment to reproduce the knowledge, values, ideology and social relations of the corporate state. For Powell, the war against liberalism and a substantive democracy was primarily a pedagogical and political struggle designed both to win the hearts and minds of the general public and to build a power base capable of eliminating those public spaces, spheres and institutions that nourish and sustain what Samuel Huntington would later call (in a 1975 study on the "governability of democracies" by the Trilateral Commission) an "excess of democracy."<5> Central to such efforts was Powell's insistence that conservatives nourish a new generation of scholars who would inhabit the university and function as public intellectuals actively shaping the direction of policy issues. He also advocated the creation of a conservative speakers bureau, staffed by scholars capable of evaluating "textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology."<6> In addition, he advocated organizing a corps of conservative public intellectuals who would monitor the dominant media, publish their own scholarly journals, books and pamphlets, and invest in advertising campaigns to enlighten the American people on conservative issues and policies. The Powell Memo, while not the only influence, played an important role in convincing a "cadre of ultraconservative and self-mythologizing millionaires bent on rescuing the country from the hideous grasp of Satanic liberalism"<7> to match their ideological fervor with their pocketbooks by "disbursing the collective sum of roughly $3 billion over a period of thirty years in order to build a network of public intellectuals, think tanks, advocacy groups, foundations, media outlets, and powerful lobbying interests."<8> As Dave Johnson points out, the initial effort was slow but effective:

In 1973, in response to the Powell Memo, Joseph Coors and Christian-right leader Paul Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation. Coors told Lee Edwards, historian of the Heritage Foundation, that the Powell Memo persuaded him that American business was "ignoring a crisis." In response, Coors decided to help provide the seed funding for the creation of what was to become the Heritage Foundation, giving $250,000. Subsequently, the Olin Foundation, under the direction of its president, former Treasury Secretary William Simon (author of the influential 1979 book "A Time for Truth"), began funding similar organizations in concert with "the Four Sisters" - Richard Mellon Scaife's various foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation - along with Coors's foundations, foundations associated with the Koch oil family, and a group of large corporations<9>.

The most powerful members of this group were Joseph Coors in Denver, Richard Mellon Scaife in Pittsburgh, John Olin in New York City, David and Charles Koch in Wichita, the Smith Richardson family in North Carolina, and Harry Bradley in Milwaukee - all of whom agreed to finance a number of right-wing think tanks, which over the past thirty years have come to include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. This formidable alliance of far-right-wing foundations deployed their resources in building and strategically linking "an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and concerned citizens groups both within and outside of the academy.... A small sampling of these entities includes the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Middle East Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Association of Scholars, as well as Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture."<10>

more...

http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/archive/the-powell-memo-and-the-teaching-machines-of-right-wing-extremists

[Octafish]

10. ...''an excess of democracy.''

Explains a lot, that Just-us Powell. The greedheads are so very afraid of having to share they're willing to believe that liberals -- intelligent, good-hearted, educated people -- are the same as commies.

Have you seen this from Yves Smith? Evidence for the continuation of a certain class' influence on policy and life:

It is high time to describe the Obama Administration by its proper name: corrupt.

Truly appreciate what you bring to DU's attention, robertpaulsen. Also appreciate your analyses, particularly regarding the future of our nation and planet.

[robertpaulsen]

11. That's just too tragic.

“Wall Street is our Main Street.” This is why good people in the administration like Van Jones get the boot and whoever made this obscene remark stay aboard. I can't hope for a transformative presidency anymore, the last time an individual President stood up to and wouldn't back down when corporate power stood in the way was http://journals.democraticunderground.com/robertpaulsen/239">JFK standing up to Big Steel by using the tools of the MIC, defense contracts, against them. We can't hope for change, we need to make it happen.

[DirkGently]

5. It was The Blueprint, for sure.

[underpants]

6. The Powell Memo is a cornerstone of the conservative movement. He didn't account for media though...

they took care of that by getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine creating talk radio and then Fox News.
Read "The role of the Chamber of Commerce" in the Honesty by Accident link.

This is a great source of material by Mr. Moore.

Powell was the Mayor of Richmond at one point.

[mmonk]

9. Yep and it will culminate this year in serious tampering with social security

and a frontal attack on what followed social security, Medicare and Medicare. It will be couched in "savings", "saving it for future generations", and "shared sacrifice" and a do nothing American public will say, "ok, we got to cut that big government spending" and the "serious people" from both parties will begin the first stages of assault on the concept.