Meet Lewis F Powell Jr, the man responsible for figuring out how to screw the 99% and told the 1% exactly how to do it.

Lewis F Powell Jr, a real 21st century man if you like corporate personhood, genteel racism, hating on affirmative action, the death penalty, government secrecy, and think that rape victims don’t “sustain serious or lasting injury”. (Coker v Georgia)

Lewis Powell was a Virginia corporate attorney who turned down a nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969 because the position didn’t pay as well as private practice. Powell was a partner for the firm now known as Hunton & Williams LLP for 25 years representing railway interest and Big Tobacco. As Chairman of Richmond School Board, a position he held in addition to his day job, he went along with Virginia’s defiance of Brown v Board of Education. When President Richard Nixon re-nominated him for the court in 71 – he accepted and became an Associate Justice.

The bulk of Powell’s legacy – some may suggest “path of destruction” would be more accurate term – lies not on the Court or his private practice, but in a memo he sent just two months before his 1971 nomination and confirmation to the nation’s highest court. Dated August 23rd, 1971 and sent to friend and Executive Vice President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Eugene Sydnor it was titled “Attack of American Free Enterprise System”.

Powell urged corporate America to fund four coordinated and overlapping campaigns to take back America from the “liberals” and the “New Left:”
1. EDUCATION AND COLLEGE STUDENTS: “We have seen the civil rights movement insist on re-writing many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor. Other interested citizens groups have not hesitated to review, analyze and criticize textbooks and teaching materials…. Social science faculties (the political scientist, economist, sociologist and many of the historians) tend to be liberally oriented, even when leftists are not present.”
2. PUBLIC MEDIA, ESPECIALLY TELEVISION: “The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs…but to the daily ‘news analysis’ which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system…. Whether this criticism results from hostility or economic ignorance, the result is the gradual erosion of confidence in ‘business’ and free enterprise.”
3. POLITICS AND POLITICAL POWER: “Business has been the favorite whipping-boy of many politicians for many years. But the measure of how far this has gone is perhaps best found in the anti-business views now being expressed by several leading candidates for President of the United States…. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be [assiduously] cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination.”
4. THE COURTS, THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM, AND LEGAL POLICY: “Labor unions, civil rights groups and now the public interest law firms are extremely active in the judicial arena. Their success, often at business’ expense, has not been inconsequential…. American business and the enterprise system have been affected as much by the courts as by the executive and legislative branches of government. Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”

The influence this single memo has had in shaping world events and public opinion cannot be understated. Even the tone in which it was written and some of the writing devices used are still being used used to this day as they are meant to disarm critical thinking and trigger one to pursue an emotional rationale as opposed to a logical one.

Powell’s goal in writing the memo was “changing how individuals and society think about the corporation, the government, the law, the culture, and the individual”. Replace “corporation” with “people’s commune” and it sounds like a promo line for Mao’s Cultural Revolution doesn’t it?

Excerpt from Powell Memo:

“No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack… The sources are varied and diffused. They include, not unexpectedly, the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic. These extremists of the left are far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society… “ August, 23, 1971 from “Attack of American Free Enterprise System” by Lewis Powell

(Right… Anarchists, Socialists, Communists have always felt so welcomed in America. It’s like the American flag is actually a big red and yellow or red and black welcome mat.)

POWELL’S PATH OF DESTRUCTION – OUR CURRENT REALITY

Powell saw vast anti-capitalist conspiracies in many areas of public and private society and suggests a wide range of “counter” measures be taken to make America a safe place for those who believe that being for free-enterprise is the same as being for freedom.

First Powell hoped to energize both America’s executive class and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. To do this he employed a standard set of alarmist rhetoric that not only framed the alleged “attack” as an attack on American freedom and America herself in absolutist terms, it also exaggerated the scope, effect, and immediacy of the perceived threats.

CHANGES AT THE U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

Up until shortly after the memo was circulated within the Chamber and the executive community, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was a fairly low-key organization that helped its member companies practice good business standards, help settle disputes, marketing, opportunities to network with other business people, and help companies navigate regulatory red tape. The Chamber actually AVOIDED getting involved in politics.

What Powell suggested in his memo was for the Chamber become a clearing house, a front group, a war chest, and the muscle in a fight to “save” free-enterprise in America. This represented a fundamental shift in how the Chamber operated and its mission. A shift in posture among the executive class at the companies that were Chamber members would also follow. The public and even the smaller “mom and pop” type businesses that were also part of the Chamber’s membership wouldn’t even be aware of this shift. Nor would Congress, at least not until the visits from the lobbyist and checks to their various re-election campaigns came rolling in.

CHANGES ON THE NATION’S CAMPUSES

First on Powell’s list for concerted corrective action… The nation’s college campuses and the “intellectuals” they harbor. Powell clearly fond the nation’s campuses and the teaching staff as a threat to America itself. Powell spends considerable time in re-imaging the education process in this country. In reading his areas of concern and suggestions to corrective action one cannot help, but think of recent reforms and the current drive to “reform” public education. Powell calls for an oddly Lenin-like “constant surveillance” of textbooks and that pressure be applied wherever it needed to be applied to get textbooks changed to support “free-enterprise”. Think Texas State Board of Education who had Thomas Jefferson removed from history books because the board was “offended” by his comments on the separation of church & state.

ARTICLE: How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/how-texas-inflicts-bad-textbooks-on-us/?pagination=false

Powell also called “equal time” requirements for conservative views on campus – implying that knowledge itself is somehow biased.

He also recommended the “balancing” of faculties and subject matter. Where ideology was not generally considered among academia, Powell actually suggests that ideology be a consideration to address the “issue” of ideology. This kind of shallow, crony academia is how a person like Jason Richwine gets a PhD from Harvard’s Kennedy School with a paper that claims that Hispanics are genetically inferior to whites in 2009. He based the data in his paper on a previously discredit work, The Bell Curve.

ARTICLE: Why Did Harvard Give a PhD for a Discredited Approach to Race and IQ?
http://www.thenation.com/blog/174291/harvard-phd-and-hispanics-iq-how-jason-richwines-dissertation-got-him-fired-heritage-fou

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Powell suggests the “issues” first be addressed at the college level, but once those are on the re-bound that high school and other levels be of education be addressed. Think of the current debate on school reform, efforts to vilify teachers and their unions, and the push to privatize public education through the use of Charter Schools.

Powell certainly had an excellent strategic mind for he saw an opportunity to not only address what he saw as the number one threat to free-enterprise and America – the nation’s campuses – but also how addressing the issues on campus in the correct manner one could build an interlocking web and self re-enforcing support and validation and that this web could be made to radiated outward, addressing other points of constraint elsewhere and working complimentary in a cross-functional pattern.

SELF VALIDATING KNOT OF SUPPORT OR POISON PILL IN THE HEART OF THE EDUCATION SYSTEM

It was clear to Powell that The Chamber of Commerce needed to start hiring their own scholars and speakers. The Chamber then makes them available to the press, the governing boards of colleges and universities. These scholars also begin churning out papers that can then be cited to substantiate claims that free-enterprise is good and everything else is bad. This not only builds a record for the press – so over time they feel more comfortable citing these “facts”, it builds the scholar’s or speaker’s reputation as they become more “highly cited”, which puts pressure on the educational system to get some of “those conservatives” on their networks and in their newspapers. All the while – these scholars will be reviewing and complaining about the “lack of balance” on campus as well as reviewing and complaining about text books – in other words constantly driving the system as a whole further and right by redefining where the center should be and erasing a broader non-ideological based perspective quite literally from the history books.

ARTICLE: The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of Right-Wing Extremists
http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/86304:the-powell-memo-and-the-teaching-machines-of-rightwing-extremists

ARTCILE: Right-Wing Rollback: The Powell Memo
http://www.zcommunications.org/right-wing-rollback-the-powell-memo-by-chip-berlet.html

RELATED AUDIO:

Mic Check Radio: The Powell Memo: http://occupythemedia.podomatic.com/entry/2013-06-16T23_41_01-07_00

Talk Nation Radio: Carl Gibson on Shutting Down the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: http://occupythemedia.podomatic.com/entry/2013-06-17T02_38_54-07_00

Occupy Radio: Activists Targeted by Corporate-Backed Laws: http://occupythemedia.podomatic.com/entry/2013-06-17T09_21_40-07_00

Air Occupy: Ag Gag Laws with Paul Shapiro: http://occupythemedia.podomatic.com/entry/2013-06-17T02_31_29-07_00

OTHER LINKS:

The Powell Memo (also known as the Powell Manifesto): http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell,_Jr

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The Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations: http://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/

The Lewis Powell Memo – Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/news-and-blogs/campaign-blog/the-lewis-powell-memo-corporate-blueprint-to-/blog/36466/