Powell Memorandum

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We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Not surprisingly, then, Powell’s Memorandum identified Nader as “the single most effective antagonist of American business.”13 Under the title “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the Powell Memorandum insisted that “no thoughtful person can question” whether capitalism was under siege from within. The “extremists of the left,” including “Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries” in the universities and the media were “waging ideological warfare against the enterprise system.” To counter Nader and his powerful reform movement, the Powell Memorandum advised that “it is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system—at all levels and at every opportunity—be far more aggressive than in the past.”

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The Reagan Revolution of 1980, which was built around the vision articulated in the Powell Memorandum, ushered in a conservative era committed to free markets, small government, pro-business tax policies, and deregulation of industry. The shift was so profound that it shaped the agendas of both major political parties. In the early 1990s, Democrats, fearful after losing five of the previous six presidential elections, also adopted more centrist, business-friendly rhetoric in an effort to regain their Election Day competitiveness. One of Powell’s most lasting influences was on the role of business advocates before the Supreme Court. Following the Powell Memorandum’s suggestion, the Chamber of Commerce established its own law firm, the National Chamber Litigation Center (NCLC) in 1977, just as the Bellotti case was wending its way up through the courts.

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In August, two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court, Powell wrote a lengthy memorandum for the Chamber of Commerce outlining the threats posed by the likes of Nader to the free enterprise system and detailing how business should fight back. Although the memorandum was not discovered until a year after Powell’s confirmation, once revealed it became a rallying cry for business leaders across the country. Indeed, the Powell Memorandum became an influential strategic planning document of the emerging New Right—a coalition of free market advocates and religious conservatives that swept Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980, pushed for deregulation of industry, and reasserted the influence of business in American politics.4 At the luncheon, Joe Cullman teased Lewis F.

Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

There was an “excess of democracy.”8 Looking for answers—that’s frightening. There was an immediate backlash in the 1970s, and we’re still living with the results. All of this is well documented. Two of the striking documents, which I think are very much worth reading, from opposite ends of the spectrum, are, on the Right, the Powell memorandum and, on what’s called the Left, the Trilateral Commission report. Lewis Powell was a corporate lobbyist for the tobacco industry who was very close to Nixon, who later appointed him to the Supreme Court. In 1971, he wrote a memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce, the main business lobby.9 It was supposed to be secret but it leaked.

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., 99, 110 Paul, Rand, 157, 162, 163 Paul, Ron, 75, 124–25, 157, 163 pensions, 12, 22, 24, 26 Peres, Shimon, 93 Peshawar, 16 pharmaceutical companies, 107–8 Philippines, 4, 17 Pinochet, Augusto, 61 piracy, 107–8 political Islam, 49, 61 Political Science Quarterly, 82 police repression, 119–20 politics, 32, 41, 57, 59, 121, 142–45, 171 electoral, 102–3, 117–19 labor demonstrations and, 41–43 poverty, 6, 66, 82, 84 Powell, Colin, 115 Powell, Lewis, 150–51 Powell memorandum, 150–51 power systems, 34–35, 69 aristocrats and democrats, 160–78 chains of submission and subservience, 34–43 global shift, 5–13, 58, 76–77 language and education, 126–59 mental slavery, 101–25 new American imperialism, 1–33 uprisings, 44–64 privatization, 11, 38, 39, 40, 156–57, 167 Progressive Labor (PL), 73 propaganda system, 35–40, 66, 80, 82, 102, 119, 122–24 property rights, 84, 85 public, power of the, 78–81 public education, 37–39, 147–48, 153–56, 166–68 public relations, 35, 79–81, 102–3 Qasim, Abd al-Karim, 61 Race to the Top, 153 racism, 3, 31, 92 Ravitch, Diane, 154 Reagan, Ronald, 62, 71, 82, 95, 99 recession, 23, 48, 86–89 Red Scare, 23, 68, 120 Reich, Robert, 170, 172 Reilly, John, 122 Republican Party, 41, 57, 75, 76, 124, 125 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 72 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 115 Right, 23, 32, 150–51 Riyadh, 52 Romney, Mitt, 57–58, 75 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 14, 23, 54 Roy, Arundhati, 22, 29, 31 Russia, 17–18, 20, 50, 61, 98, 102, 145 rustbelt, 11–12 Saharawi movement, 46 saltwater fallacy, 3–4 Saudi Arabia, 21, 49, 52, 61, 99, 111, 144 science, 142–43, 144 education, 154–55 modern, 143 sectarianism, 73–74 Seib, Gerald, 54 self-destruction, 42–43 Senate, U.S., 63, 85 sensory deprivation, 134–35 Shiites, 52–53 Singh, Manmohan, 19 Sino-Indian War, 20 slavery, 3, 34, 36, 51 end of, 34, 35, 36 mental, 34–35, 101–25 Slim, Carlos, 11 Smith, Adam, 8–9 social Darwinism, 157 social media, 105, 107, 145–47 Social Security, 39, 156–57 solidarity, 38–41, 146–47, 159 South Africa, 21, 50–51 apartheid, 71 South America, 6, 7, 57, 60, 161 Southeast Asia, 4, 60 South Korea, 9, 17 Spain, 4, 6, 33, 87 sports, college, 154–55 Stack, Joseph, 25–26, 29 Stalin, Joseph, 61 Stohl, Bev, 105 Stop Online Piracy Act, 107 strategic hamlets, 2 student activism, 73–74 submission and subservience, chains of, 34–43 Summit of the Americas (2012), 160–61 sunbelt, 11, 12 Sunnis, 52–53 Supreme Court, U.S., 70, 150 Buckley v.

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 12. Lewis Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” August 23, 1971. The Washington and Lee University School of Law, which Lewis Powell attended, maintains an archive of his writing and work. The complete text of the Powell Memorandum is available on the school’s website at http://law2.​wlu.​edu/​powellarchives/​page.​asp?​pageid=​1251, and from many other sources on the Internet. 13. Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All-Politics, p. xxx. 14. Blair Bowie and Adam Lioz, “Billion-Dollar Democracy: The Unprecedented Role of Money in the 2012 Elections,” Demos, June 2013, at http://www.​demos.​org/​sites/​default/​files/​publications/​billion.​pdf. 15.

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Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), p. 153. 27. Ibid., pp. 151–56. 28. Lewis Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” August 23, 1971. The Washington and Lee University School of Law, which Lewis Powell attended, maintains an archive of his writing and work. The complete text of the Powell Memorandum is available on the website http://law2.​wlu.​edu/​powell​archives/​page.​asp?​pageid=​1251, and from many other sources on the Internet. 29. Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, p. 154. 30. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), p. 116. 31.

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Often a watershed is crossed in some gradual and obscure way so that most people do not realize that an unseen shift has moved them into a new era, reshaping their lives, the lives of their generation, and the lives of their children, too. Only decades later do historians, like detectives, sift through the confusing strands of the past and discover a hitherto unknown pregnant beginning. One such hidden beginning, with powerful impact on our lives today, occurred in 1971 with “the Powell Memorandum.” The memo, first unearthed by others many years ago, was written by Lewis Powell, then one of America’s most respected and influential corporate attorneys, two months before he was named to the Supreme Court. But it remains a discovery for many people today to learn that the Powell memo sparked a business and corporate rebellion that would forever change the landscape of power in Washington and would influence our policies and economy even now.

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rgn=​div1;​view=​fulltext. 6 We have gone off track Naftali Bendavid, “Country Is Headed in Wrong Direction, 74% Say,” The Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2011; “Just 1 in 5 Americans Happy with Direction of Country,” CBS News poll, October 3, 2011, http://​www.​cbsnews.​com. 7 One such hidden beginning Lewis F. Powell, Jr., memorandum, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” August 23, 1971, http://​law.​wlu.​edu/​deptimages/​Powell%20​Archives/​Powell​Memorandum​Typescript.​pdf. 8 “America is coming apart at the seams” Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012), 11, 12. 9 “Mind-boggling” in its magnitude Alan Krueger, “The Rise and Consequences of Inequality in the United States,” remarks, Center for American Progress, January 12, 2012, http://​www.​americanprogress.​org/​events/​2012/​01/​pdf/​krueger.​pdf.

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CHAPTER 1: THE BUSINESS REBELLION 1 “The danger had suddenly escalated” Thomas Byrne Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1984), 113–14. 2 “There has been a significant erosion” Ibid., 13. 3 “Revolt of the Bosses” Ted Nace, Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003), 137–51. 4 Powell warned the corporate community Powell, memorandum, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” August 23, 1971, http://​www.​aspenlaw​school.​com. 5 Business was being victimized Ibid. 6 “Business must learn the lesson” Ibid. 7 In a private session Nixon meeting with Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca, White House tapes, cited in Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (New York: Random House, 1991), 515. 8 Nixon administration was swept along Jacob S.

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

It was then that a free-market orthodoxy established its ascendancy over American public culture. . . It has gone far towards establishing itself as the unofficial American civil religion. JOHN GRAY1 Joseph Coors, who had made a great deal of money from the beer brewing corporation his grandfather founded, was one of those inspired by the business battle plan in the Powell Memorandum: ‘Coors recalls that the Powell memorandum “stirred” him up and convinced him that American business was “ignoring” a crisis.’2 In 1973 Coors, angry after being found guilty of price fixing, unlawful limitation of competition and other illegal practices by the Federal Trade Commission, invested $250,000 of Coors Corporation money to start the Heritage Foundation.

Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Higher education has become a target for right-wing ideologues and the corporate elite because it is capable of teaching students how to think critically, and it offers the promise of new modes of solidarity to students outside of the exchange value proffered by neoliberal instrumentalism and the reduction of education to forms of training. In a wide-ranging and brilliant essay on higher education in this book, Chomsky not only lays out the reasons why public education is under attack, but also provides a critical reading of those historical forces such as the Trilateral Commission and the Powell memorandum of 1971, which made quite clear that the purpose of education was to “indoctrinate the young.” He then points to the various measures used by the financial elite and the right wing, extending from defunding the university and imposing a corporate business model on it to disempowering faculty, destroying unions and eliminating tenure for the vast majority to disciplining students by burdening them with overwhelming debt.

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

The final row shows the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of the population. They are members of the Forbes 400, a list published annually of the richest people in America.1 They also are the people who have tried for many years to transform their ideas about the role of government into public policy. The 1971 Powell Memorandum was a call to arms to business leaders that began a complex dance between these groups of rich people that can be clarified by describing the politics of people in the last three rows of table 1 in turn. The Investment Theory of Politics asserts that people invest in policies that benefit them.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Internet.org’s announcement is available at Internet.org (2013). 7.Duncan (2012). 8.Sachs (2008). 9.Clinton (2010). 10.DeNavas-Walt et al. (2009), p. 13, provide the US Census Bureau’s graph of poverty. Incidentally, it seems that something quietly devastating began in the early 1970s. Commentators in a range of fields cite that period as the turning point where America (and possibly the Western world as a whole) began to decline. Hedrick Smith (2013) blames the 1971 Powell memorandum for turning corporations into narrowly selfish, power-hungry profit seekers. Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2010) blame a political system bent to the will of the wealthy. PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel (2012), 39:30, says technological advance has decelerated since the early 1970s (except in the computer industry).

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

., 17, 34, 41, 53, 105, 152, 157, 183, 186, 192, 193, 195, 200, 201, 210, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 221, 222, 223, 230, 233, 234, 236, 238–39, 245, 250–51, 253, 254–55, 258, 264, 265, 266, 271, 280, 293–94, 304 business: anti-labor agenda of, 55, 121–24, 127–32, 135, 219, 303 conservative support for, 122–23 Democrats supported by, 53, 86, 127, 129–32, 140, 174–88, 220–21, 223–52 economic reforms opposed by, 79–80, 86, 87–88, 130–32 financial resources of, 74, 121–22, 131, 170–72, 179–80, 209 “grassroots” campaigns by, 66, 89, 114, 119–27, 131, 144, 179–80, 274 inside vs. outside strategies of, 121 large, 119–27, 128, 129–32, 179–80, 205–6, 231, 275–78, 279 lobbyists for, 89, 117, 118, 124–26, 135–36, 144, 183–84, 198, 205–7, 218, 238–39, 275–77 organizations for, 88, 104–7, 116–36, 144, 160, 179–80, 205–6, 231, 275–78, 279, 291; see also specific organizations political influence of, 65–66, 74, 79, 84–85, 104–7, 110–12, 116–36, 150–51, 160, 169, 170–72, 179–80, 183–84, 197–98, 207, 230–31, 242–43, 271–75, 282, 292–93, 304 Powell memorandum on, 117–18, 119, 125 regulation of, 55–56, 116–36, 179–80, 187, 205–6, 219–21, 246–47, 273–77 Republicans supported by, 34, 49, 53, 65, 86, 121–26, 129–32, 140, 157, 170, 174–88, 189, 194–222, 230–31, 244–46, 267 small, 119–20, 129–30, 131, 205–6, 243 tax reform opposed by, 47, 49, 50, 64, 106–7, 124–25, 132–34, 177, 179–80, 187, 312n see also corporations business cycles, 17–18 Business-Industry Political Action Committee, 122 Business Roundtable, 120, 121, 125, 126–27, 129–30, 205–6, 231 Byrd, Robert, 130–31 cable networks, 106, 156–57, 158 California, 84, 176, 240, 247, 300 Campaigns and Elections, 203 campaign spending, 66, 118, 121–22, 150–51, 163–64, 166, 167, 169, 170–84, 197–98, 203, 207, 209–10, 219, 223–52, 258–59, 271–75, 276, 304 Campbell, Anne, 176 Canada, 29, 31, 38–39, 52, 58, 60, 68 Cao, Joseph, 337n capital gains, 14, 16, 18, 39, 46, 50–51, 99–100, 133–34, 151, 214, 228–30, 312n Carlson, Tucker, 147 Carlton Group, 133–34 “carried interest” provision, 51, 228–29 Carter, Jimmy, 98–100, 116, 126–27, 130, 131, 132–33, 134, 137, 141, 152, 172–73, 175, 184, 186, 202, 255 Carville, James, 5 Cato Institute, 209 Census Bureau, U.S., 13, 311n Center for American Progress, 266 Center for Responsive Politics, 207, 227 Chafee, Lincoln, 265 Chamber of Commerce, 119, 127, 128, 129–30, 205–6, 231, 275–78, 279 Cheney, Dick, 189–90, 217 chief executive officers (CEOs): autonomy of, 231, 292–93 conflicts of interest of, 55, 66 incomes of, 1, 16, 56, 62, 66–67, 154–55, 198 international comparison of, 62–65 organizations for, 119–21 pay packages for (executive compensation), 2, 57, 61–66, 70, 198, 219–21, 246–47, 279, 319n, 320n, 335n political influence of, 117–19 retirement benefits of, 64 Chiles, Lawton, 131, 181 Christian Coalition, 203 Christian Conservatives; see Religious Right Christian Right, 139, 146–49, 160, 201–4, 205, 234–35 Church, Frank, 175 Citigroup, 71, 226, 249–50, 254, 261 Citizens United case, 293 Civic Culture, The (Almond and Verba), 144 civic groups, 107–12, 139, 143–45, 147, 155, 156, 158 civil rights movement, 95, 138, 139, 190, 202, 235, 275 class divisions, 29, 75–77, 131–32, 148, 151–55 see also specific classes Class War?

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Illustration Credits 1 Office of Public Affairs, Yale University, Photographs of Individuals (RU 686), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library 2 Courtesy of Yale Law School 3 Jason Torres 4 Mathieu Asselin 5 Courtesy of Harvard Business School 6 The American Lawyer, vol. 1, no. 1, February 1979 7 Courtesy Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; photographer: Sasha Maslov 8 Tom Toro, The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank 9 Jimi Celeste / Patrick McMullan / Getty Images (Getty Image #: 591768566) 10 Courtesy of Better Markets 11 Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo (Alamy Image #: E0XDNK) 12 Courtesy of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law / Jasmin Shah 13 Harold Shapiro 14 Courtesy of Issue One 15 Washington and Lee University Library: Lewis F. Powell, Jr., “The Memo” (1971); Powell Memorandum: Attack on American Free Enterprise System, 1 16 House.Sinema.Gov 17 Alexei Agaryshev 18 Photograph by Diana Walker / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images (Getty Image #: 53366136) 19 Courtesy of the Bipartisan Policy Center 20 Visions of America, LLC / Alamy Stock Photo (Alamy Image #: AHTDJE) 21 Ramin Talaie / Corbis / Getty Images (Getty Image #: 526380254) 22 Larry Downing / Sygma / Getty Images (Getty Image #: 590865840) 23 Scott J.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Conspiracy theories, because they tend to emulate fiction, often imagine Dan Brownian plots with great secrets at their centers. But from 1972 on, Justice Powell’s playbook wasn’t secret at all. For instance, in a 1974 speech Charles Koch gave to business executives in Dallas, he quoted its final line—“As the Powell Memorandum points out,” he said, without further explanation, “ ‘business and the enterprise system are in trouble, and the hour is late.’ ” He assumed that everyone in his audience was familiar with it. Almost nobody else was paying much attention to the new movement and generational project for which Powell’s memo was a piece of founding scripture.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

But the public release of the Powell memo was a gift to the neoliberal movement for it served as a rallying point for the many businesspeople, intellectuals, and would-be policymakers who wanted to restore free enterprise and free markets to the center of American life. John M. Olin, a onetime chemical magnate who had established the Olin Foundation in 1953, now redoubled the efforts through his foundation to mount ideological defenses for free market capitalism. “The Powell memorandum,” he wrote, “gives reason for a well organized effort to re-establish the validity and importance of the American free enterprise system.”2 Joseph Coors Jr., part of a team of brothers who owned the Colorado-based Coors Brewery Company, was also inspired by the Powell memo.3 In 1973, he, along with Paul Weyrich, founded the Heritage Foundation as a think tank charged with promoting free market principles and policies.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

— In Wichita, meanwhile, where he was rapidly expanding his family’s company and searching for more effective means than electoral politics with which he could spread libertarianism, Charles Koch, too, was galvanized by Lewis Powell. In 1974, Charles gave a speech to a group of businessmen gathered at a hotel in Dallas, quoting Powell. “As the Powell Memorandum points out,” Koch warned the group, “business and the enterprise system are in trouble, and the hour is late.” Koch urged his fellow business leaders to “undertake radical new efforts to overcome the prevalent anti-capitalist mentality.” He declared that “the development of a well-financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us today.”

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

We return to the issue of race and polarization in Chapter 6. 56 These six key votes were Obama’s stimulus package, Dodd-Frank financial regulation, Lily Ledbetter gender pay equity, Obamacare (first creating it and then overturning it), and the 2017 Trump tax cuts. 57 See Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016); Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch Network and Republican Party Extremism,” 14, no. 3 (September 2016): 681–99, doi:10.1017/S1537592716001122; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_Memorandum. 58 McCarty, Polarization, 3. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, new and expanded edition (New York: Basic Books, 2016), also have emphasized the asymmetry of the recent polarization.