ATTACK ON AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM
written by Lewis F. Powell, later of the Supreme Court. Anti-communism had exploited American paranoia for years. Powell turned rightie propaganda into a major business, but at serious costs.
The document is remarkably inventive: arguably, in a class with Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Mein Kampf:
Personal Freedom =EQUALS= The American Profit System
-- Everything should be done with Free Markets
-- Business leaders are the best choices to manage America
-- Businesses need to tithe 10% of their advertising budgets to influence public opinion
-- The best propaganda engine combines centralization with discipline
Republican Senators, teabaggers, talk show and Think Tank creeps, lobbyists -- all of them echo Powell's oily assertions and his fantasies.
Who would believe that Ivy League grads hate America? That GM accepting advances to auto safety would take America over to a fascist or socialist dictatorship? That a couple dozen New Left bomb throwers threatened armed insurrection?
Powell's personal fantasies took hold. Now they've mutated to form persistent communal delusions.
Know your enemy... BTF :::
First,
HERE is the full text and an analysis. The Reclaim Democracy group see Powell's work as critical to establishing the strategic framework for Republican propaganda efforts:
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.
Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building - a focus we share, though usually with contrasting goals. One of our great frustrations is that "progressive" foundations and funders have failed to learn from the success of these corporate institutions and decline to fund the Democracy Movement that we and a number of similarly-focused organizations are attempting to build. Instead, they overwhelmingly focus on damage control, band-aids and short-term results which provide little hope of the systemic change we so desperately need to reverse the trend of growing corporate dominance.
We see depressingly little sign of change. Progressive institutions eagerly embrace tools like the web and e-mail as hopes for turning the nation in a progressive direction. They will not. They are tools that can and must be used to raise funds and mobilize people more effectively (and we rely on them heavily), but tools and tactics are no substitute for long-term vision and strategy.
Powell's aims are the opposite to what happens at DKOS.
The Powell system -- today's version -- is very well funded. Centralized. Disciplined to talking points. Wedded twice-over to paranoia.
DOS operates on a shoestring. The other stuff don't apply 't-all -- apart from CT postings, which are banned on arrival.
Alrightie, then.
Getting on with analysis, let's have a go at the Powell footnotes. His groundings. The memo has Powell talking personally to his friend, Eugene Sydnor, and the political crowd at the Chamber of Commerce -- dated August 23rd, 1971:
- Variously called: The "free enterprise system," "capitalism," and the "profit system." The American political system of democracy under the rule of law is also under attack, often by the same individuals and organizations who seek to undermine the enterprise system.
- Richmond News Leader, June 8, 1970. Column of William F. Buckley,
Jr.William Kunstler, warmly welcomed on campuses and listed in a recent student poll as the "American lawyer most admired," incites audiences as follows:
"You must learn to fight in the streets, to revolt, to shoot guns. We will learn to do all of the things that property owners fear."
- N.Y. Times Service article, reprinted Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 17, 1971:
The New Leftists who heed Kunstler’s advice increasingly are beginning to act — not just against military recruiting offices and manufacturers of munitions, but against a variety of businesses:
"Since February, 1970, branches (of Bank of America) have been attacked 39 times, 22 times with explosive devices and 17 times with fire bombs or by arsonists."
- Steward Alsop, Yale and the Deadly Danger, Newsweek, May 18, 1970.
"Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men who are practitioners of ‘the politics of despair.’ These young men despise the American political and economic system... (their) minds seem to be wholly closed. They live, not by rational discussion, but by mindless slogans."
- Editorial, Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 7, 1971.
A recent poll of students on 12 representative campuses reported that:
"Almost half the students favored socialization of basic U.S. industries."
- Dr. Milton Friedman, Prof. of Economics, U. of Chicago, writing a foreword to Dr. Arthur A. Shenfield’s Rockford College lectures entitled "The Ideological War Against Western Society," copyrighted 1970 by Rockford College.
"It (is) crystal clear that the foundations of our free society are under wide-ranging and powerful attack — not by Communist or any other conspiracy but by misguided individuals parroting one another and unwittingly serving ends they would never intentionally promote."6
- Fortune, May, 1971, p. 145.
Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans. A recent article in Fortune speaks of Nader as follows:
"The passion that rules in [Ralph Nader] — and he is a passionate man — is aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power. He thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great many corporate executives belong in prison — for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer .... He emphasizes that he is not talking just about ‘fly-by-night hucksters’ but the top management of blue-chip business."
- Jeffrey St. John, The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 1971.
"Memo to GM: Why Not Fight Back?"9 Although addressed to GM by name, the article was a warning to all American business, Columnist St. John said:
"General Motors, like American business in general, is ‘plainly in trouble’ because intellectual bromides have been substituted for a sound intellectual exposition of its point of view."
Mr. St. John then commented on the tendency of business leaders to compromise with and appease critics. He cited the concessions which Nader wins from management, and spoke of "the fallacious view many businessmen take toward their critics."
....
There's more, but you get the idea. The two or three dozen New Left activist bombers were a barbarian horde. Ivy League grads came out hating America. Socialism was at the gates, threatening to enslave America as it had done to benighted Europe.
Conclusion
It hardly need be said that the views expressed above are tentative and suggestive. The first step should be a thorough study. But this would be an exercise in futility unless the Board of Directors of the Chamber accepts the fundamental premise of this paper, namely, that business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.
Interference with businesses and profits is bad. The commitment to defend the profit system, itself, needs be funded from corporate advertising budgets. That was a first.
Powell writes with what one must see in hindsight as carelessness: that GM and Ford putting in seat belts and break-away steering mechanisms and criss-cross braking systems is a mistake. Better, people should have flown through windshields and been impaled by the thousands. Bowing to Ralph Nader was the greater Sin.
No empathy is expressed for the accident victims. Apparently they should be maimed, similar to John McCain's first wife Carol, for some greater good.
Before Powell, no one had implored American businessmen to spend millions of dollars to invade academia or to control American political discourse. No one had called for using advertising money on politics. Section titles from this ATTACK memo show his plan:
What Can Be Done About the Campus
Staff of Scholars
Staff of Speakers
Speaker’s Bureau
Evaluation of Textbooks
Equal Time on the Campus
Balancing of Faculties
Graduate Schools of Business
Secondary Education
What Can Be Done About the Public?
Television
Other Media
The Scholarly Journals
Books, Paperbacks and Pamphlets
Paid Advertisements
The Neglected Political Arena
Neglected Opportunity in the Courts
Neglected Stockholder Power
A More Aggressive Attitude
The Cost
Quality Control is Essential
Relationship to Freedom
"If American business devoted only 10% of its total annual advertising budget to this overall purpose, it would be a statesman-like expenditure."
This lays out a comprehensive plan to dominate American politics.
Toward the end we get to his fantasy arguments section. Surely, it was one thing to overreact to Ralph Nader or the mercurial Mr. Kunstler. What Powell did was to go over the edge. He came to believe that public reactions to the anti-communist war in Vietnam and to badly built cars was a product of organized and misguided plots to bring down the American democracy:
Relationship to Freedom
The threat to the enterprise system is not merely a matter of economics. It also is a threat to individual freedom.
It is this great truth — now so submerged by the rhetoric of the New Left and of many liberals — that must be reaffirmed if this program is to be meaningful.
There seems to be little awareness that the only alternatives to free enterprise are varying degrees of bureaucratic regulation of individual freedom — ranging from that under moderate socialism to the iron heel of the leftist or rightist dictatorship.
We in America already have moved very far indeed toward some aspects of state socialism, as the needs and complexities of a vast urban society require types of regulation and control that were quite unnecessary in earlier times. In some areas, such regulation and control already have seriously impaired the freedom of both business and labor, and indeed of the public generally. But most of the essential freedoms remain: private ownership, private profit, labor unions, collective bargaining, consumer choice, and a market economy in which competition largely determines price, quality and variety of the goods and services provided the consumer.
In addition to the ideological attack on the system itself (discussed in this memorandum), its essentials also are threatened by inequitable taxation, and — more recently — by an inflation which has seemed uncontrollable. But whatever the causes of diminishing economic freedom may be, the truth is that freedom as a concept is indivisible. As the experience of the socialist and totalitarian states demonstrates, the contraction and denial of economic freedom is followed inevitably by governmental restrictions on other cherished rights. It is this message, above all others, that must be carried home to the American people.
You will hear this line of talk out of Clarence Thomas, practically verbatim. There's a time warp operating. Communal delusions form as conservatives are drawn back repeatedly to 1971, to crisis, to these calls for emergency actions to save America from Powell's fantasies.
Powell's plan succeeded. He barely avoided a pattern of appeal invented by J.J. Hitchcock, of claiming that "the next two or three years will be critical." Powell worked hard at appearing more casual and cranked out his own version, his "time is late" phrase.
Over time, indeed, his proposals were fully funded. His "Speakers Bureau" concepts were expanded to today's gaggle of rightie Think Tanks.
Businesses spend huge amounts every year advertising on wack-job propaganda shows, paying their Think Tank pseudo-academics, running the likes of Hoover Institute at Stanford, and similar operations. They follow Powell's original plan to twist public opinion.
These conservatives also parrot his ideas -- which might as well be chiseled in stone.
No one before Powell had thought this could be done as a centralized national operation. Working out of SCOTUS over the years, he and his allies made it happen. His seat on SCOTUS gave him extraordinary standing among conservatives. No one questioned his proposals and no one has ever set limits. Today, SCOTUS is considering establishing yet another monument to Powell by eliminating Federal limits on direct corporate political speech in the form of media propaganda. That case has been heard in Court.
Ron Reagan fell for the core of these Powell fantasies, which he adopted for his 1980 campaign. By 1988, Lee Atwater took over the tactical operation (then moved over to offices under RNC) and used it to go after "Angry White Males." Atwater sold race-based hatred, along with the Powell redefinitions of "freedom," et. al. Rove did more of the same. Rove called it "Compassionate Conservatism," at least in public.
The irrationality of Powell's original thinking shows clearly when you consider the political landscape in 1971.
Republicans were running the country. Democrats and LBJ were still blamed for Vietnam. Richard Nixon had been president for most of three years. The 1972 election was well in the future, along with the Watergate scandal and release of the Pentagon Papers.
Powell's threat assessments recall Lewis Carroll's Red Queen. However, the power of this movement has grown steadily through the decades.
Powell's simple paranoid fantasies -- enhanced by Atwater and Rove -- continue to spawn communal delusions that affect many millions of Americans. A good half of the tea bagger signs might as well have been cut-and-pasted out of this ATTACK ON AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM.
Gold rules. Give "gold" a first-rate strategy and it can rule everything it touches. The medium is not quite the message -- as we can see. But Powell's strategy has won an impressive number of Federal elections, considering the nature of Republican pro-wealth policies.
Powell showed the righties a way to deploy large amounts of money effectively outside of public scrutiny. By the 1990s we see them buying up media resources and then building a rightie television network -- that's Murdoch playing Powell on steroids.
Today, it is fundamentally this Powell-invented political engine that has to be overcome by progressives on issues from health care to the environment to any part of regulation. Enough that you have to beat the usual lobbyists and sell-out office holders.
Government is fundamentally bad... government is the problem... dontcha know.
Powell and then Reagan made that bit of sedition as American as apple pie. The single weakness of the strategy is that the core content is so closely cast in the Powell mold.
The political strategy remains powerful through its well-funded propaganda engine. But also, it remains wedded to paranoia.
The institutions of the Powell-spawned propaganda engine rely, overwhelmingly, on selling hateful fantasies, which are repackaged by the various retailers to draw Americans into communal delusions. Appeals to authority are offered daily. False "facts" and outright lies are echoed through the corporate media. Such as the "Birther" lies are carried on and on.
You'd have to think that mainstream American businesses would be frightened at what their money has produced. In simplest terms, the GOP has gone over to liars and delusionals.
The Powell propaganda engine has turned destructive. It eats its young.
This rightie propaganda system commands massive resources, which they use to generate poisonous attitudes and even outright madness.
Such is America. And the truth shall make us free... or not.
I'd hate to have to bet on the outcomes either way. Perhaps the votes on this health care Public Option will show us which way the beam is tilting. Electing Mr. Obama could have been a pause, on a road to rule by the fearful and the mad.
Hope for the best.