Smothered by Riches: A History of the Corporate Takeover That Came After the Powell Memo

[erronis]

https://observatory.wiki/Smothered_by_Riches
Peter Coyote

How the worship of unregulated capitalism broke the unions, impoverished workers, and destroyed the great middle class.

This was mentioned today on Thom Hartmann's "Ask Thom Anything" show. It looks like a great explanation on what started our precipitous decline into unfettered capitalism.

Foreword

The truly existential question concerning Donald Trump is the least discussed. The totality of its banishment from news reporting and analysis resembles a taboo. That question is: Why has virtually half the American public lost faith in democratic institutions and the government’s ability to solve problems, fulfilling the Founders’ guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Without his base of support, Donald Trump would be another grifting blowhard (and sexual predator) preying on the unwary for self-enrichment. However, Trump’s particular genius of expressing his quest for power as resentments that resonate with many Americans’ deep disappointments and frustrations has created a following approaching 50 percent of the nation’s voters. Rather than examine the ways and means by which our economic and political system created and bolstered such disaffection among so many people, supporters of political norms and the rule of law have laid all blame at Trump’s feet. By doing so, they suggest that perhaps he was a tumor that once excised might return the body politic to good health. Absolved from discussion and analysis are 2020’s 74 million Trump voters and 147 members of Congress who refused to ratify Joe Biden’s victory—tacitly, and in many cases, actively supported his attempt at fomenting an insurrection to return to power without the hindrances of political norms and the rule of law.

If the reader was born during or after the 1960s it’s probable that they may consider Trump a one-off piece of bad political luck, like a random meteor smacking the Earth. They may not be aware of the six decades of intellectual and carefully constructed strategic scaffolding, generously funded by some of the greatest right-wing fortunes in America, which paved Trump’s path to power. These efforts, elevating profits above all else, have greased the skids for our country’s precipitous downhill slide toward becoming an illiberal democracy. As a consequence of their disciplined and relentless campaigns, lobbying, and threats, Americans are facing a presidential election in 2024 that may end our democratic rule-based system of self-government.

This four-part review traces key points in the genesis and toxic blooms of the highly organized efforts to dismantle Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and later decades’ safety nets and public protections. These efforts have decimated urban and rural working-class Americans since the 1960s and gutted labor unions, the historic wealth-producing engine of the middle class. Hopefully, this essay will explain to younger readers how a class of men and women that prized corporate wealth and regarded corrosive societal consequences as ‘necessary evils’ have continued to exert control over presidents and congressional decisions that have weakened government policies helping ordinary people. Their efforts have produced a new class of billionaires; imbalances of wealth and opportunity that rival feudal societies in the Middle East; and a privatized mainstream media that puts corporate profits above public interest.

The consequence of their efforts has pushed a sizable percentage of the population to embrace an alternate political universe based on myths, manipulation, and deceit. The tip of that history-changing spear was the volunteer foot soldier shock troops who smashed, ransacked, and defiled the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Four people died on that day, and in the days that followed, five police officers died of wounds sustained in combat with the crowd, or by suicide.

The initial battle plan was scripted 53 years ago, on August 23, 1971, by a Virginian corporate lawyer and defender of unregulated American capitalism, named Lewis F. Powell Jr. On that Monday, Powell, who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon, delivered a 34-page typed manifesto to a colleague at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The confidential memorandum, titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” laid out the contours of what would become decades of influential right-wing advocacy and action to remove any and all obstacles to profit.

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[hvn_nbr_2]

1. In fundamentalist capitalism, the only virtue is greed. nt