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powell memo
Trump's Far-Right Army Is Threatening Bloodshed. Believe Them.
We must not only resist, but prevail. If we do not, it will be nearly impossible to reverse the course that America’s right-wing billionaires have set us on.
Jul 05, 2024
Kevin Roberts, who heads the Heritage Foundation (largely responsible for Project 2025) just implicitly threatened Americans that if we don’t allow him and his hard-right movement to complete their transformation of America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian state, there will be blood in the streets.
“We’re in the process of taking this country back,” he told a TV audience, adding:
“The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
He’s not wrong. America has been changed as a result of a series of corrupt rulings by Republicans (exclusively; not one of these rulings has been joined by a Democratic appointee) which have changed America’s legal and political systems themselves.
As Roberts notes, this is really the largest issue we all face, and our mainstream media are totally failing to either recognize or clearly articulate how radically different our country is now, how far the Republicans on the Court have dragged us away from both our Founder’s vision and the norms and standards of a functioning, modern democratic republic.
These actions — corporate personhood, money as speech, ending the Chevron deference to regulatory agencies, and giving the president life-and-death powers that historically have only been held by kings, shahs, mullahs, dictators, and popes — have fundamentally altered the nature of our nation.
First, in a series of decisions — the first written by that notorious corporatist Lewis Powell (of “Powell Memo” fame) — Republicans on the Court have functionally legalized bribery of politicians and judges by both the morbidly rich and massive corporations.
This started with Powell’s 1978 Bellotti opinion, which opened the door (already cracked a bit) to the idea that corporations are not only “persons” under the Constitution, but, more radically, are entitled to the human rights the Framers wrote into the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments).
Using that rationale, Powell asserted that corporations, like rich people (from the Buckley decision that preceded Belotti by two years), are entitled to the First Amendment right of free speech. But he took it a radical step farther, ruling that because corporations don’t have mouths they can use to speak with, their use of money to spend supporting politicians or carpet-bombing advertising for a candidate or issue is free speech that can’t be tightly regulated.
Citizens United, another all-Republican decision with Clarence Thomas the deciding vote (after taking millions in bribes), expanded that doctrine for both corporations and rich people, creating new “dark money” systems that wealthy donors and companies can use to hide their involvement in their efforts to get the political/legal/legislative outcomes they seek.
Last week the Republicans on the Court took even that a huge step farther, declaring that when companies or wealthy people give money to politicians in exchange for contracts, legislation, or other favors, as long as the cash is paid out after the deed is done it’s not a bribe but a simple “gratuity.”
So, first off, they’ve overthrown over 240 years of American law and legalized bribery.
Last week they also gutted the ability of federal regulatory agencies to protect average people, voters, employees, and even the environment from corporations that seek to exploit, pollute, or even engage in wage theft. This shifted power across the economic spectrum from a government elected by we the people to the CEOs and boards of directors of some of America’s most predatory and poisonous companies.
Finally, in the Trump immunity case, the Court ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution under criminal law, regardless of the crimes they commit, so long as they assert those crimes are done as part of their “official” responsibilities. And who decides what’s “official”? The six Republicans on the Supreme Court.
These actions — corporate personhood, money as speech, ending the Chevron deference to regulatory agencies, and giving the president life-and-death powers that historically have only been held by kings, shahs, mullahs, dictators, and popes — have fundamentally altered the nature of our nation.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the significance of this, or its consequences. We no longer live in America 1.0; this is a new America, one more closely resembling the old Confederacy, where wealthy families and giant companies make the rules, enforce the rules, and punish those who irritate or try to obstruct them.
In America 2.0, there is no right to vote; governors and secretaries of state can take away your vote without even telling you (although they still must go to court to take away your gun).
They can destroy any politician they choose by simply pouring enough cash into the campaign system (including dark, untraceable cash).
The president can now go much farther than Bush’s torturing and imprisoning innocent people in Gitmo without legal process: he can now shoot a person on Fifth Avenue in plain sight of the world and simply call it a necessary part of his job. Or impoverish or imprison you or me with the thinnest of legal “official” rationales.
We no longer live in America 1.0; this is a new America, one more closely resembling the old Confederacy, where wealthy families and giant companies make the rules, enforce the rules, and punish those who irritate or try to obstruct them.
America 2.0 is not a democracy; it’s an oligarchy, as I wrote about in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. The South has finally — nearly — won the Civil War.
While it will be months or more likely years before all of these new powers the Republicans on the Court have given the president, rich people, and corporations begin to dawn on most Americans, they will, step-by-step transform this country into something more closely resembling Hungary or Russia than the democracies of Europe and Southeast Asia.
The only remedy at this late stage in this 50+ yearlong campaign to remake America is a massive revolt this fall at the ballot box, turning Congress — by huge majorities — over to Democrats while holding the White House.
If we fail at this, while there will be scattered pockets of resistance for years, it’ll be nearly impossible to reverse the course that America’s rightwing billionaires have set us on.
There has never been a more critical time in the history of our nation outside of the last time rich oligarchs tried to overthrow our democracy, the Civil War. Like then, the stakes are nothing less than the survival of a nation of, by, and for we the people.
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The Six Corporate-Owned US Supreme Court Justices Have Completed Their Assigned Mission
The series of devastating rulings over the last week are the consequence of a corporate strategy launched 53 years ago.
Jul 03, 2024
For years, conservatives have railed against what they call the “administrative state” and denounced regulations.
But let’s be clear. When they speak of the “administrative state,” they’re talking about agencies tasked with protecting the public from corporations that seek profits at the expense of the health, safety, and pocketbooks of average Americans.
Regulations are the means by which agencies translate broad legal mandates into practical guardrails.
Substitute the word “protection” for “regulation” and you get a more accurate picture of who has benefited — consumers, workers, and average people needing clean air and clean water.
Substitute “corporate legal movement” for the “conservative legal movement” and you see who’s really mobilizing, and for what purpose.
**
I spent four years as policy director at the Federal Trade Commission, advising the commissioners on how best to protect the public from corporate excesses. I spent four more years as secretary of labor, protecting American workers from the depredations of big American corporations.
Most large corporations I dealt with obeyed laws and regulations designed to protect the public, but they spent a great deal of money trying to prevent such laws and regulations from being created in the first place and additional efforts contesting them through the courts.
Last week, the Supreme Court made it much harder for the FTC, the Labor Department, and dozens of other agencies — ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Food and Drug Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and National Highway and Safety Administration — to protect Americans from corporate misconduct.
On Thursday, the six Republican-appointed justices eliminated the ability of these agencies to enforce their rules through in-house tribunals, rather than go through the far more costly and laborious process of suing corporations in federal courts before juries.
On Friday, the justices overturned a 40-year-old precedent requiring courts to defer to the expertise of these agencies in interpreting the law, thereby opening the agencies to countless corporate lawsuits alleging that Congress did not authorize the agencies to go after specific corporate wrongdoing.
In recent years, the court’s majority has also made it easier for corporations to sue agencies and get public protections overturned. The so-called “major questions doctrine” holds that judges should nullify regulations that have a significant impact on corporate profits if Congress was not sufficiently clear in authorizing them.
Make no mistake: Consumers, workers, and ordinary Americans will be hurt by these decisions. Big corporations — especially their top executives and major investors — will make even more money than they’re already making because of them.
**
These rulings are the consequence of a corporate strategy launched 53 years ago.
In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then a modest business group in Washington, D.C., asked Lewis Powell, then an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, to recommend actions corporations should take in response to the rising tide of public protections (that is, regulations).
Powell’s memo—distributed widely to Chamber members—said corporations were “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.
In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of World War II, ensuring that corporations be responsive to all their stakeholders—not just shareholders but also their workers, consumers, and the environment.
Powell saw it differently. He urged businesses to mobilize for political combat.
Business must learn 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—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.
He stressed that the critical ingredients for success were organization and funding.
Strength lies in … the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.
On August 23, 1971, the Chamber distributed Powell’s memo to leading CEOs, large corporations, and trade associations. It had exactly the impact the Chamber sought—galvanizing corporate American into action and releasing a tidal wave of corporate money into American politics.
An entire corporate legal movement was born—including tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, public relations flaks, think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and corporate recruiters to the courts, such as the Federalist Society.
In 1972, President Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court.
Within a few decades, big corporations would become the largest political force in Washington, D.C., and most state capitals.
I saw Washington change. When I arrived there in 1974, it was still a rather sleepy if not seedy town.
By the time I became secretary of labor in 1993, Washington had been transformed into a glittering center of corporate America—replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, conference centers, beautiful townhouses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor to the margins of the district and made two of Washington’s surrounding counties among the wealthiest in the nation.
The number of corporate political action committees mushroomed from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by 1980. By the time I became secretary of labor, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them. That came to more than 100 lobbyists for each member of Congress.
**
The so-called “conservative legal movement” of young lawyers who came of age working for Ronald Reagan—including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.—were in reality part of this corporate legal movement. And they still are.
Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court emerged from the same corporate legal movement.
The next victory of the corporate legal movement will occur if and when the Supreme Court accepts a broad interpretation of the so-called “non-delegation doctrine.”
Under this theory of the Constitution, the courts should not uphold any regulation in which Congress has delegated its lawmaking authority to agencies charged with protecting the public. If accepted by the court, this would mark the end of all regulations — that is, all public protections not expressly contained in statutes—and the final triumph of Lewis Powell’s vision.
Corporate capitalism in the United States has always coexisted uneasily with democratic capitalism. The underlying question is which is in charge—big corporations or the people?
The current Supreme Court, and the corporate legal movement that spawned it, is intent on the answer being big corporations.
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Make America Mad Again—Mad About the Trillions of Dollars Taken From Them by the Very Rich
The 40-year trickle-down delusion, fashioned by right-wing economists, politicians, and financial experts, has deprived average Americans of the means to support their families in a comfortable, debt-free manner. It was planned. It's insidious. It's ongoing. And it should outrage every last one of us.
Jan 19, 2024
Middle America's anger is misdirected: toward liberals because of the misperception that educated elites are trying to foist socialism on a capitalist nation; toward minorities and immigrants, even though their financial struggles are similar to those of moderate-income white Americans; and toward the federal government, even as Republican state leaders reject Medicaid expansion and food assistance for hungry children and families. But largely unnoticed is the 50-year quietly coordinated and insidious campaign to transfer American wealth to the richest people.
The Massive Takeaway
A 2020 TIME magazine article reported that in just over four decades $50 trillion has been transferred from working Americans to multi-millionaires. According to the Credit Suisse 2022 Global Wealth Databook, in approximately the last decade (2010-2021) America's wealth has grown by over $80 trillion, up to $60 trillion of which was taken by the country's millionaires and multi-millionaires (about 10% of the population).
The sordid history of the wealth grab is one of power, greed, and manipulation.
This is a staggering takeaway of wealth. The TIME article suggests that the amount is "enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year."
This is where America's anger should be directed. The 40-year trickle-down delusion, fashioned by economists, politicians, and financial experts, has deprived average Americans of the means to support their families in a comfortable, debt-free manner. It allows multi-millionaires to siphon off our country's wealth effortlessly with the inevitable rise in the stock market. And it undoubtedly has contributed to the surge in "deaths of despair"—those from drug and alcohol abuses as well as suicide—that continue to increase among poor Americans.
How Did This Happen?
The sordid history of the wealth grab is one of power, greed, and manipulation. In 1971, corporate lawyer and soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell wrote a lengthy memo that rallied conservatives in their desire for business growth and free markets. Government, universities, and the media were the enemies. Political equality and shared prosperity were un-American.
Defenders of the rich argue that they've earned their wealth. But for the most part, they've simply learned how to exploit American prosperity.
Conservative think tanks sprung up. The "greed is good" philosophy of Ayn Rand was becoming justified. The influential economist Milton Friedman said "The free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people" and then infamously teamed with economist Arthur Laffer to convince American leaders that decreasing taxes on the wealthy would allow increased revenues to "trickle down" to the rest of the country.
We were then comforted in years to follow, as inequality grew, by the Wall Street Journal claiming that "income inequality is simply not a significant problem" and The Economist boasting that "the world now knows how to reduce poverty." The Charles Koch Foundation tried to shame us into compliance with the reassurance that earning $34,000 a year placed you in the Top 1% in the world.
The Labors and Taxes of Our Parents and Grandparents Created Our Nation's Wealth
Defenders of the rich argue that they've earned their wealth. But for the most part, they've simply learned how to exploit American prosperity. Beginning in the 1950s, funding for modern computer technology came almost entirely from taxpayer dollars through the Department of Defense and other branches of government. As explained by Mariana Mazzucato: "From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system—all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam." Adds political economist Gar Alperovitz: "Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s the National Science Foundation spent $200 million to build and operate a network of regional supercomputing hubs called the NSFNET. Connected to the ARPANET, this network established Internet access for nearly all U.S. universities, making it a civilian network in all but name."
In a similar vein, pharmaceutical companies wouldn't exist without money from the taxpayers, who have provided support for decades through the National Institutes of Health, and who still pay for most of the basic research for new drugs and vaccines. Yet both the tech and pharmaceutical companies claim patents on the products paid for and developed by the American people.
Overall, in the U.S. today, the federal government continues to be the largest source of funding of basic research.
We Need a Wealth Tax
Stock growth represents American prosperity driven by 75 years of shared effort. Everyone should benefit, probably by receiving a guaranteed income. Just a two-percent tax on total financial wealth would generate enough revenue to provide an $18,000 annual stipend to every American household (including those of the richest families).
With typical overreaction, the Wall Street Journal laments that "A tax on securities trades would...create large economic and societal distortions." We already have economic and societal distortions. Taxing stock ownership would be straightforward and fair-minded, while barely disrupting the portfolios of the millionaires and multi-millionaires who own close to 90% of all stocks.
Perhaps, with a tax on the effortless accumulation of stock market wealth, average taxpayers would finally receive a return on 75 years of American prosperity.
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