On October 10th, 2014,

the @washingtonpost produced this extraordinary project about the "N-Word." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dre/features/the-n-word

This prompted an op-ed piece by the often incendiary @piersmorgan,

which, as he's known for, generated a typical firestorm on social media:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2829080/PIERS-MORGAN-black-Americans-want-N-word-die-kill-themselves.html

I felt this latest public vetting of this very old controversy is a good time to call attention to a documentary by Todd Larkin Williams that got of notice in 2004, but not a lot since. Sadly, it's not complete on Youtube, but what is here, is pretty interesting and surfaces just a few of the many ways this issue is and has been discussed by people of all colors and from all walks of life.  Here;s some back story on it.
 

The N-Word Documentary

List of interviews

Part 1  – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN1JengGaZg
Part 2 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLTazJIkrGc
Part 3 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLaII-v-jMo
Part 4- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rq5jQ_4iTw
Part 5-  Missing
Part 6 – Missing
Part 7 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ8e9RI5DH0

Tim Wise on the use of the word "nigger/nigga." 

"No, white people should never use it. History has been a double standard, so get over it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmLXZ6_PW9A

Wynton Marsalis, the renowned black musician disagrees with Wise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ5dOOoBydM

My opinion on this issue is irrelevant, and has nothing to do with why I produced this post.

I feel it's the media's job, as well as our educational system's role to help discuss these kinds of issues in thoughtful and informative ways without always maligning or impugning people merely for having an opinion about a controversial topic.  These issues must transcend race because we are a multi-racial planet. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone should be able to voice theirs. Yeah, even Piers Morgan.

Related

Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy

It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it.

 

So, this morning, I tweeted the following quip:

Immediately thereafter, @GrimestTrigger tweeted this post that he'd written on his blog, Hints And Hunches.

I've read a lot of Ayn Rand debunkers in my time, many of them quite good, but many others grossly overwrought with tortured liberal prose trying to impress the reader with a smug condescension toward all those wayward 9th graders who are still in impressed by the objectivist queen of mean.

Grimest has avoided all of that, yet still nailed the essence of the fallacies in her world view, which has transcended its meager literary beginnings by poking a big stick in the eye of her linchpin character, John Galt, from her annoyingly popular novel, "Atlas Shrugged."  Over the past 50 years, with no small help from conservative book buying clubs and foundations trying to force her convenient beliefs on an intellectually sloppy planet, Shrugged, and her other greedy epistles, like The Fountainhead, have mushroomed into a religion of rancorous rhetoric that underpins that culture of selfishness that is subsuming America's politics, and perhaps the very future of our planet as well. 

Please show it every 9th grader you know, and everyone still thinking like one. It's another example of the kinds of primers I feel that liberals must make a conscious effort to share more of as widely as possible. It took conservatives half a century to teach Americans to think like they do, with no small help from false prophets like Ayn Rand.  It will take us at least that long to help teach a more just and sustainable world view for the human race to live by.

Note: I've been collecting these kinds of works,and plan to share them very soon in an interesting new way. If you have some Rand debunkers or interesting essays about her works or influence, please share them in the comments and I will consider them for possible inclusion in my compendium when it drops!
 

The Myth of John Galt

by Patrick Doyle (@GrimestTrigger)


“We never think entirely alone: we think in company, in a vast collaboration; we work with the workers of the past and of the present. [Across] the whole intellectual world, each one finds in those about him the initiation, help, verification, [and] encouragement that he needs”

Antoine Sertillanges, La vie intellectuelle, 1920
 
 
No one knows who it was that first discovered iron, but legend has it that a man named Magnes who lived in an area of Greece called Magnesia was the first to notice the phenomena of magnetism. His dog was probably named ‘Maggie’.
 
Less legendary are the writings of Lucretius and Pliny the Elder[i]. Later, it was Hans Oersted who showed that magnetism was related to electricity, and it was left to Maxwell to codify the phenomena and establish the basis for the electromagnetic theory.
 
From there, it was a whole cast of actors, over many years, each making their own contribution, that lead to the innovation of the electric motor[ii]. John Galt, hero of Ayn Rand’s second-rate work of fiction, Atlas Shrugged, ‘took’ these ideas and incorporated them into his ‘static motor’.
 
The same dynamic occurred with respect to machine bearings, without which any motor would be worthless.
 
Henry Timken is credited with the invention of the roller bearing, and was awarded patent number 606635 by the United States patent office[iii]. But roller bearings were actually invented thousands of years before Timken was even a twinkle in his mother’s eyes.
 
The first use of roller bearings was by the ancient Egyptians, to build the pyramids. And even they couldn't’t have made use of the idea without the invention of trees, and there’s no consensus who invented them.
 
One can now extrapolate this theme of continuity to the invention of Reardenite.
 
The point of all this is that no one stands alone in space and time, no solitary figure changes the course of history. And, when there is a need, someone will step in to fill that need.
 
Rand, who claims to espouse values that can only be derived through logic and observation, fails to notice the continuity of the innovative dynamic: one person improves upon another’s work; one person sees the possibilities that others overlook, or one person combines the work of several others and ends up with an entirely new product.
 
In each case, as it is in reality, one adds to what’s already there, made possible only because that previous person did the same thing. Collectively (that word!) this is called history, which is a function of reality, unlike Galt, which is not.
 
None of this would matter if not for the many acolytes of this fantasy. Too many of our current policy makers and influencer's read the silliness that is Atlas Shrugged (usually while at a young age, more susceptible flights of fancy) and decided that she’s right. And worse. Among many of Ayn’s acolytes are those who cherry-pick aspects of her worldview, discarding the very threads of logic that would otherwise make it whole. 
 
In the same way that the flu spreads from one person to another, so has Rand’s self-defeating philosophy spread, and the result is that today we have many people in our society who fancy themselves as clones of Galt, who espouse her philosophy.
 
Paul Ryan fits this bill. This man is in a position to affect every person in the country, yet demonstrates no abilities that would legitimately place him there. Sure, he’s graduated college, but he parasitically used his father’s Social Security benefits to so. And, true, he has managed to get himself elected to congress. So did Gopher, from The Love Boat. So, no bragging allowed.
 
The personal independence that the philosophy embraces would not be possible without the sacrifices and hard work of those who came before, in many cases the sacrifice of others was a product of altruism, a despised activity in her constructed universe.
 
Never mind that many of these same people have never accomplished anything on their own, at the time the book was read by them, and therefore had no real-life experience to compare the fiction to. For someone such as Ayn Rand, who repudiates the philosophy she’s invented through the sheer implausibility of the notion of the ‘independent man’, to inspire others to a pretended state of independence, the irony of it all is invisible and therefore unreal.
 
Just like John Galt.

The Original Text 

Related

 

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to every one who is striking at the root."
Henry David Thoreau

Purpose

This document is meant to provide an overview and reference links concerning "The Lewis Powell Memoradum." Few documents in American history have had its kind of root influence over contemporary everyday American lives, and I felt there should be one document on the web that makes it easier to find and peruse some of the better discussion and commentary about it, and later on, when I can find the time, perhaps the fallout and carnage that has resulted from it, as well. Since I couldn't find one, I created this one.  As a result, with one single link (shoqvalue.com/powellmemo), you can now educate others about this legendary and ruinous conservative manifesto more easily. I hope you will.

Introduction

The Powell Memo At A Glance (72 seconds of a history that may take at least 72 years to undo.)

Probably no other document has shaped the  contemporary American political landscape quite like the now infamous memorandum from Lewis F. Powell, now widely referred to as "The Powell Memoradum."  It was a call-to-arms for American corporations that was written by a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, to his neighbor working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It would summon them to enjoin a battle against a creeping liberalism and its infernal regulations and philosophies that threatened their status, profits, and corporate conversative sensibilities, if not their very existence.

The Powell Memo — sometimes called The Powell Manifesto — has directly and indirectly led to the rise of conservative think tanks, groups, and far-right media organizations and personalities that have over the past 40+ years collectively remade American democracy in an image more suitable to a radical conservative's world view.  When you see or hear those attractive and skilled pundits spouting conservative dogma on TV or radio, you can thank the Powell Memo.  It's a vital document to understand, and one that in my view still needs a well organized push-back from the American Left.

The memo has served to empower thousands of conservative pundits, broadcasters, educators and activists in a polemical language and set of strategies that have been used to bring American democracy to the hyper-partisan, uber-gridlocked dysfunctionalism that paralyzes it to this day. If you love our 21st century plutocracracy, so dominated by souless billionaires like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Foster Friess, Phillip Anschutz, and the tangled web of malevalent organizations and political machinations which they have spawned, then you'll just love the Powell Memo. With their money and influence, the legacy of the Powell memo has spawned organizations like Cato Insitute, Heritage FoundationAmerican Enterprise Institute, Media Research Center, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Family Research Council, Heartland Institiute, and perhaps the most significant of them all, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

These and so many other right wing organizations, their operatives, and their propaganda are routinely paraded before the American public every day on Fox News CNN, and other mainstream media outlets. The influence and policy prescriptions of these entities has infested the American political landscape like a virulent cancer, affecting everything from voting rights, to business regulations, to energy and climage change legislation, and nearly every corporate, social, or cultural issue between and among them.  And despite decades or knowing all of this, the American left remains largely powerless to offset this influence with any voter and corporate education efforts of its own.

Powell Memo Resources

The Powell Memo is no secret.  There are countless articles about it, and references to it that can be found all over the Internet. But there are also a lot of bad ones.  So I thought I would create a little knowledge hub to keep track of the better ones, and make it easier for people to pass them on their coworkers, friends and family.  Each has some little fact or dimension that the other lacks, so I advise reading all of them if you really want to be fluent when discussing this dangerous screed and the wreckage that it has left behind. Please share them widely.

Backgrounders on the Memorandum

Commentary On Specifics Of The Memo

Research And Related Resources

Related Works