Today is the anniversary of the worst memo in historyFriends, Today marks the start of the slide that ended in the catastrophe of Trump. On August 23, 1971, fewer than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It was titled “Attack On American Free Enterprise System” and it outlined ways in which corporate America should defend and counter attack against "disquieting voices” — environmentalists, consumer advocates, and labor unions. Powell warned that their voices were growing louder and their influence was gaining in the halls of Congress. I remember the time very well. The nation was witnessing a flowering of reform. Just as the “muckrakers” of the first years of the twentieth century had spawned the Progressive Era in response to the wide inequalities and corruption of the first Gilded Age and its “robber barons,” the reformers of the 1960s were on the verge of spawning another progressive era that would rebalance the American economy in favor of all its stakeholders. Louis Powell thought so, too, but he was deeply alarmed by it. He told corporate America that businesses must pour money into political campaigns, public relations campaigns, and litigation all aimed at putting an end to this wave of reform. Corporate America duly followed Powell’s’ advice. An entire corporate-political complex was born, including tens of thousands of lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, and public relations flacks. Within a few decades, big corporations became the largest political force in Washington and in most state capitals. The number of corporate political action committees (PACs) mushroomed from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 four years later. Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, corporate PACs increased their expenditures on congressional races nearly fivefold. Labor union PAC spending rose only about half as fast. I saw Washington change. When I arrived there in 1974 to work in the Ford administration, it was a rather seedy town. By the time I returned as secretary of labor in 1993, it had been transformed into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, major conference centers, beautiful town houses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor, most of whom were Black, out of the increasingly upscale Northwest portion of the city and made two of Washington’s adjoining counties among the wealthiest in the nation. By that time, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them, including registered lobbyists and lawyers. That came to more than a hundred lobbyists for each member of Congress. That tsunami of big money from giant corporations, their CEOs, top executives, and major investors, was engulfing American politics. It not only sunk reform; it began to rig the entire system in favor of the moneyed interests and against average working people. In subsequent years, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates, ruling absurdly that money was speech under the First Amendment and corporations were people. And America is in a second Gilded Age of near-record inequality and corruption, featuring robber barons like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the biggest robber of them all — Trump. What’s the answer? No easy one, of course, but we have to get big money out of politics. Start with campaign finance reform — public funds matching small-donor contributions to candidates that agree to limit their campaign spending. Here’s a video I and my talented team did about all this. Should you wish more detail — and how the Powell memo fit into subsequent decades of widening inequality and mounting corruption, and what we must do to reverse course — you might want to read my new book Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America. You can support local bookstores by ordering it at bookshop.org. |
UNDER CONSTRUCTION - MOVED TO MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON https://middlebororeviewandsoon.blogspot.com/
Saturday, August 23, 2025
Today is the anniversary of the worst memo in history
Breaking news: we outraised RNCC chair Richard Hudson BRAVO! NORTH CAROLINA DESERVES A FIGHTER LIKE OJEDA!
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FOCUS: David Gardner | New Tapes Reveal Ghislaine Spilling Her Secrets and Lies
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
The Maxwell Tapes: How a Convicted Trafficker Hoodwinked America At Trump's Discretion
The Maxwell Tapes: How a Convicted Trafficker Hoodwinked America At Trump's DiscretionChopped audio. Redacted transcripts. Softball questions. This isn’t transparency—it’s choreography.
Two days of testimony. Not one clean, continuous audio file—just dozens of chopped “parts” and “tests.” Transcripts peppered with redactions. And the interviewer? The sitting Deputy Attorney General, who also happens to be Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche. If you wanted to launder credibility, you’d do exactly this. For survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, it lands like a gut punch. They told their stories under oath, faced the smear machine, and a jury believed them. Then along comes a curated government release that reads like a reputation-rescue mission for the powerful. TL;DR (for readers who skim)
The Timeline That StinksThe order of operations feels designed, not accidental: key prosecutors out; a friendly in-house interviewer in; then a release packaged for maximum spin and minimum scrutiny. The optics aren’t “unfortunate.” They’re telling. Proffer 101: Not a Free Pass—But It Played Like OneMaxwell sat under a proffer—the classic “your words can’t be used against you in our case-in-chief unless you lie.” In real investigations, that boxes a witness in. Here, it felt like a padded room: sudden amnesia met with reassurance, not pressure. The result reads less like a search for truth and more like a search for a headline. And let’s not memory-hole this: Maxwell was once charged with perjury for earlier sworn statements. Those counts were dropped after her trafficking conviction to spare survivors another trial—not because she had some new gospel truth to share. So why is she suddenly a go-to voice on who’s a “gentleman”? Claim-by-Claim: Maxwell vs. Reality1) “Trump was a gentleman. I only saw him socially.”Why it fails: Even the president’s own words acknowledge a recruitment pipeline out of Mar-a-Lago’s spa. Survivors have said this for years. You don’t get to pretend the pipeline didn’t exist and call it “only social.” That’s not a memory. That’s a rewrite. From the survivor's vantage point: “Social” is what abusers call the front of the house. The real story lives out back—in the rooms, the schedules, the cash. 2) “I never recruited anyone from Mar-a-Lago.”(Day 2 update: “Not impossible, I don’t recall.”) From the survivor vantage point: Recruitment wasn’t a rumor. It had a location, a method, and a routine. 3) “If anyone told me something illegal, I’d have done something.”Why it fails: The jury didn’t convict vacuum air. Testimony put Maxwell in the rooms, on the schedules, and handling the cash. “No one told me” collapses when you were there. From the survivor vantage point: This is the oldest trick in the book—confuse “I didn’t hear a complaint” with innocence. Sudden amnesia. It’s one hell of a thing. 4) “There’s no ‘client list.’”Why it misleads: Technically, no official “list.” But there are contact books, logs, and documents placing powerful people in Epstein’s orbit. The “no list” flourish distracts from the records that do exist—and from what survivors have consistently described. From the survivor's vantage point: People demand a perfect list so they can ignore imperfect receipts. 5) “Epstein didn’t die by suicide.”Why it fails: The official finding says suicide, paired with a brutal indictment of jail failures that made it possible. Maxwell steers you toward mystery and away from accountability—and away from the years-long pipeline of abuse that preceded the jailhouse chaos. From the survivor vantage point: Conspiracy fog keeps cameras on the cell and off the victims. The Interview That Wouldn’t Cross-ExamineThe pattern is unmistakable:
Then there’s the medium: dozens of fragmented audio clips. In any serious inquiry, continuity is non-negotiable. Cuts create context—and motive. Survivors deserve the uncut version. What Survivors SeeThey see a convicted trafficker handed a microphone to varnish the reputations of men who mingled in Epstein’s world—and a government more interested in optics than the full truth. They see the same system that finally delivered a verdict turn around and platform the convicted, while the wounded are asked—again—to swallow the rewrite. This isn’t cynicism. It’s pattern recognition. If This Isn’t a Cover-Up, Prove It
Do that, and we can talk about credibility. Until then, this looks exactly like what it feels like: a government-facilitated absolution tour for the well-connected. The Bottom LineMaxwell’s “gentleman” line isn’t a stray sentence—it’s the deliverable. Everything around it—the chopped files, the guiding questions, the sudden amnesia—serves the same goal: absolve the powerful, blur the pipeline, and push survivors back into the shadows. Watergate was a break-in followed by a cover-up. This is a generation of girls fed into a machine of money and influence—and then forced to watch as that machine rewrites their story. That’s not just scandal. That’s a moral failure at the highest levels. Why it ALL mattersIf you believe survivors deserve the full, uncut truth, share this post, leave a comment for the record, and subscribe so we can keep pushing for receipts over spin. |
BREAKING: Patrick Dugan changed his mind and is now running against me as a Republican
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Supporter update: Rescuing animals in need
How we’re still helping Los Angeles after the wildfires
Adam Parascandola, vice president of the Animal Rescue Team here at Humane World for Animals, reflects on the six months that have passed since the wildfires in Los Angeles devastated whole communities. At the time, we saw the astounding courage and strength of the many California-based groups working on the ground. We pledged $1 million in funding to support the recovery efforts and for future preparation. In this blog, Adam gives updates about how we’re continuing to help Los Angeles recover. | ||||||||
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Photos by GDMatt66/Getty Images; Jean Chung/For Humane World for Animals; Rodrigo Pop/Humane World for Animals; Colin Hackley/AP Images for Humane World for Animals; Meredith Lee/Humane World for Animals; Keith Getter/Getty Images; Bob Landis |
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