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 Foundation, American 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.