POWELL DOCTRINE, EMPIRE OF ILLUSION & THE POWELL MEMORANDUM

 

Until the American oligarchy began pushing out the old, traditional, pragmatic center-right conservatives of the Republican Party in the 1970s, replacing them with hardline, fire eating, right wing ideologues, the Republicans served a valuable function in American politics — mediating, often uneasily and imperfectly, between the big money interests of Wall Street and the small businessmen of Main Street.

No more. With corporate America’s adoption of the program of action outlined in the infamous Powell Memorandum of 1971 to the US Chamber of Commerce, the “Great Uncoupling” of increases in wages and salaries from increases in corporate productivity and profitability which began in 1973, and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Republicans firmly threw their lot in with corporate America and Wall Street, leaving the more moderate Republicans of Main Street in the lurch. They left behind the old traditional Republicans, figuring that they could simply take them for granted as who would they vote for — the Democrats?

Sadly, the moderate, center-right pragmatism of the old Republicans, which balanced out the center-left idealism of the old New Deal Democrats, has been all but completely overthrown. The big money contributions that the American oligarchy began laying at the feet of business oriented Democrats in the 1980s helped change the orientation of the Democratic Party from general support of laboring America to a quiet, sub rosa support of corporate America.

So today America has two right wing political parties: the neoliberal, corporatist Democrats and the bat shit crazy Republicans. And the interests of the average working people of America and of Main Street small businessmen go generally unrepresented and forgotten. Sadly.

Sydney Rab

References is to the Memorandum of Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.

The Powell Memo (also known as the Powell Manifesto)

The Powell Memo was first published August 23, 1971

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.

In the early 1970s, the far right wing backlash and counterrevolution to the reforms of the New Deal, the post-WWII era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Great Society began. It started with the infamous Powell Memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce of 1971 that served as the blueprint of how the American oligarchy could undermine the power and wealth that the American middle class had gained for itself and restore the primacy the oligarchy had prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The American oligarchy has followed the instructions of the Powell Memorandum closely for nearly 50 years now, has regained the power, influence, and wealth it had lost, and shifted the political discourse and struggle in America dramatically to the right.

In 1973, began the Great Uncoupling of increases in American wages and salaries from increases in corporate productivity and profitability. Except for measly, grudging pay increases to cover inflation, the average working people of America ceased to share in the tremendous wealth that their labor created for the bosses and the shareholders. Forty-seven years is a LONG time to go without a REAL pay increase, and it explains why so many people in America are flat broke, struggling, living precariously from paycheck to paycheck, and are in debt up to their eyeballs. It also explains much of the social discontent and the “deaths of despair” in America in the years since.

Much of this reactionary counterrevolution occurred quietly and secretly, through profound, but stealthy economic moves that occurred in corporate executive suites and boardrooms, and in right wing scholarly studies and propaganda coming out of the work of a small, but dedicated cadre of right wing academics, and most effectively and tellingly, in the huge sums of money that the American oligarchy used to first undermine moderate center-right conservative politicians in the Republican Party, then to buy off business oriented politicians in the Democratic Party and push the “party of the people” hard to the right. Today there is no real, effective leftist political party in America, other than the small, vocal, but outnumbered and largely neutralized “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party.

Sad to say, but most average working people in America have been kept in the dark about what was happening, like frogs in a pot of water that was being heated slowly, but surely, until it was too late to respond effectively. Also, caught up in the day-to-day struggle to make a living, which became increasingly more difficult as the years went by, the average working people of America were simply too distracted and exhausted to pay much attention to politics and its effects on their socioeconomic standing.

Today the American oligarchy has pretty much succeeded in defanging and neutralizing the American political process as any sort of realistic threat to their power and wealth. The Democrats salute the oligarchs and say, “Yes,” and the Republicans salute the oligarchs and say, “Yes, Sir!” Completely forgotten in the elected bourgeois politicians willingness to do the oligarchs bidding is any REAL concern for the well-being of the average working people of America.

Any REAL reform here in America will only occur when millions of Americans take to the streets participating in mass demonstrations and general strikes.