[lbo-talk] Fwd: [PEN-L] Kevin Phillips: declinist

Jim Devine jdevine03 at gmail.com
Fri Mar 17 06:49:11 PST 2006


if this memo hadn't existed, it would have been invented. US capitalism had to respond to the ongoing fall in profit rates and the rise of stagflation, along with various social crises ("Black Power," the anti-war movement, etc.)

On the other hand, it's interesting to note the background of a Supreme Court "liberal."

On 3/17/06, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Carl Remick wrote:
>
> "Faux is the second keen-eyed anatomist I've read (the
> first being Michael Perelman) to identify the opening
> salvo in the current US class war as being fired in a
> little-noted episode -- i.e., in 1971 the U.S. Chamber
> of Commerce galvanized American capitalists into
> concerted political action when it circulated a
> confidential strategic memo entitled "Attack on the
> Free Enterprise System" by corporate lawyer (later
> Supreme Court justice) Lewis Powell."
>
>
> Carl,
>
> At the History News Network site there's a piece by
> Dave Johnson that gets into this. Here's an excerpt:
>
> http://www.hnn.us/articles/1244.html
>
>
> Some History of the Conservative Movement
>
> In 1971 the National Chamber of Commerce circulated a
> memo by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell
> among business leaders which claimed that "the
> American economic system" of business and free markets
> was "under broad attack" by "Communists, New Leftists
> and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire
> system, both political and economic." Powell argued
> that those engaged in this attack come from "the
> college campus, the pulpit, the media, the
> intellectual and literary journals, the arts and
> sciences, and from politicians."
>
> According to the Powell memo, the key to solving this
> problem was to get business people to "confront this
> problem as a primary responsibility of corporate
> management" by building organizations that will use
> "careful long-range planning and implementation, in
> consistency of action over an indefinite period of
> years, in the scale of financing only available in
> joint effort, and in the political power available
> only through united action and national
> organizations." It helped immeasurably, Powell noted,
> that the boards of trustees of universities
> "overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are
> leaders in the system," and that most of the media
> "are owned and theoretically controlled by
> corporations which depend upon profits, and the free
> enterprise system to survive."
>
> Powell wrote that these organizations should employ a
> "faculty of scholars" to publish in journals, write
> "books, paperbacks and pamphlets," with speakers and a
> speaker's bureau, as well as develop organizations to
> evaluate textbooks, and engage in a "long range
> effort" to correct the purported imbalances in campus
> faculties. "The television networks should be
> monitored in the same way that textbooks should be
> kept under constant surveillance." Powell said that
> this effort must also target the judicial system.
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-- Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles



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