Forget The Maine! Remember The Powell Memorandum!

Mitch Jeserich's show on KPFK/Pacifica Radio, “Letters and Politics”, just keeps getting better.

Today he had an interview that will make your blood boil, with Marion Nestle - I imagine her surname is not a coincidence. She's the author of a new cartoon-book about the food industry, how it pollutes our food and distorts political processes around the world, its lobbying, freeloading on the taxpayer, propagandizing children to get them addicted to junk - general capitalist corruption - and what ordinary citizens can do about it. The title is "Eat, Drink, Vote" -

For instance, did you know that the Pizza Industry of the State of Maine were able to persuade Congress to over-rule Government regulators, to have a minimal amount of tomato paste accepted as a serving of vegetables in school lunches across the nation? A manipulation of our laws that made them millions of dollars.

If you love the show as much as I do, you can send compliments to Mitch at mitch@kpfa.org. You can listen to the program on the KPFK Archive now (I just checked).

But what really interested me, in addition to Ms Nestle's information, and perhaps will interest those who have learned from this Blog about the Powell Memorandum, was Mitch's introduction to the program.  He laid out some detailed information that I had not heard before, about other measures that the capitalist stooge and Nixon-appointed Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, introduced with the aim of subverting much of the progress that had been achieved by the American people from the Great Depression forward, including the Glass-Steagall Act, which if Democratic President Clinton had not signed the 1999 legislation which repealed it, might have saved the world from the economic meltdown of 2008.

Powell was, even more than I had realized, a hugely important General in "The War On The 60s". I'm writing to Mitch Jeserich, to try to obtain a transcript of his illuminating comments.  If I manage to get hold of them, I'll be delighted to pass them on to you.  Watch this space!


The blurb on "Eat, Drink, Vote" goes like this:  "What’s wrong with the US food system? Why is half the world starving while the other half battles obesity? Who decides our food issues, and why can’t we do better with labeling, safety, or school food? These are complex questions that are hard to answer in an engaging way for a broad audience. But everybody eats, and food politics affects us all.

Marion Nestle, whom Michael Pollan ranked as the #2 most powerful foodie in America (after Michelle Obama) in Forbes, has always used cartoons in her public presentations to communicate how politics—shaped by government, corporate marketing, economics, and geography—influences food choice. Cartoons do more than entertain; the best get right to the core of complicated concepts and powerfully convey what might otherwise take pages to explain.

In Eat, Drink, Vote, Nestle teams up with The Cartoonist Group syndicate to present more than 250 of her favorite cartoons on issues ranging from dietary advice to genetic engineering to childhood obesity. Using the cartoons as illustration and commentary, she engagingly summarizes some of today’s most pressing issues in food politics. While encouraging readers to vote with their forks for healthier diets, this book insists that it’s also necessary to vote with votes to make it easier for everyone to make healthier dietary choices."

The Powell Memorandum and Other Conspiracies

In my earlier post today, I Want to Meet a Tea Party-er!, I mentioned my interesting car-pool ride to Santa Barbara. On that journey, the subject of The Powell Memorandum came up.

Written in 1971 for the US Chamber of Commerce by Lewis F. Powell, a corporate lawyer and tobacco lobbyist, the Powell Memorandum is almost unknown, yet it could fairly be described as the blueprint for our present state of society.

In this Blog a while ago, I shared an extract from my Book Proposal, "The War On The 60s", in which I described the infamous Memorandum and its effects. For those who may not have seen it, I'm reproducing it today as a separate Post.

Now I've come across another document, another chunk of what we might call the "Anti-Constitution", created by our Con-Founding Fathers....  This one was written by none other than Roger Ailes, President of Fox News

Roger Ailes, Con-Founding Father

You can learn more about the Ailes document in this extract from an interesting new Documentary, "The Brainwashing of My Dad", made by Jen Senko (you can skip the ad, thank goodness) -

The Documentary is discussed in today's "Daily Kos", here.  This is how "Kos" describes the film:
"When the filmmaker's parents moved to a place where her father had a long solo commute to work and started listening to Talk Radio to alleviate the boredom, her family saw him change from a non-political Democrat to a radicalized, angry Right-Wing Republican. What happened to Dad?"

How We Got in this Mess: the Powell Memorandum

From April 25th, 2013 -

How We Got in this Mess: the Powell Memorandum

I'm grateful to Paul Kaskiewicz, for putting me on to this several years ago.

The Powell Memorandum  (an excerpt from the Proposal for my Book, "TheWar On The 60s")

Part 1:

Between 1967 and 1972, the percentage of the public who looked favorably on business fell from 75% to 25%....

In 1971, Lewis F. Powell, a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a huge organization that still represents the interests of business today. It's a document that's almost never mentioned in public discourse, but which outlines a sweeping plan that would be a major counter-offensive against the “threat” of the 60s.

Lewis F. Powell, appointed by Nixon to the Supreme Court

With the combined arrogance and paranoia that seem to be trademarks of a privileged elite, Powell believed that “the American economic system is under broad attack”. Almost everyone was hounding poor corporate America – not only “Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries”, but “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and... politicians”.

Powell had the remedy: Though American business was "plainly in trouble", “the time has come -- indeed, it is long overdue -- for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.”

The poor, beleaguered business community, hemmed in though it was by powerful enemies, could still muster the support of “the Chamber's... strategic position, with a fine reputation and a broad base of support. Also... there are hundreds of local Chambers of Commerce which can play a vital supportive role.”

In the smooth language of diplomacy, and with many a Uriah Heep caveat about the sacred freedoms of academic study and free speech, Powell proposed that Big Business should establish panels of “professional advocates”, propagandists to be financed by business through the US Chamber of Commerce, to masquerade as disinterested scholars, as well as “a Speaker's Bureau, which should include the ablest and most effective advocates from the top echelons of American business.”

These pundits would “insist upon equal time on the college speaking circuit. The FBI publishes each year a list of speeches made on college campuses by avowed Communists. The number in 1970 exceeded 100. There were, of course, many hundreds of appearances by leftists and ultra liberals....”

Powell then made the astounding claim that among the flood of Communist outpourings on American campuses, “There was no corresponding representation of American business”.

No business schools? No capitalist Law taught? No supply-and-demand Economics lectures? No “Defense” research done in University laboratories, or new products developed with public money for the benefit of Corporations?

Hah!

Not only Universities should benefit from this intellectual generosity: “Action programs in the high schools should be considered, which could be run by local chambers of commerce”, but control “should be retained by the National Chamber.”

(As a teacher in California I saw how these programs have worked out, when my students were addressed by a lecturer from a large Bank, who told these young teenagers they should take out Credit Cards as soon as possible, in order to show that they could make their monthly payments regularly, and thus establish “Good Credit”.)

Rising to his paranoid theme, and sounding like Senator McCarthy, the disgraced Chairman of the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee of the early 50s, Powell went on: “The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs (such as "Selling of the Pentagon"), but to the daily "news analysis" which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system”.

Similar campaigns would cover all media.

Two months after writing his Memo, Lewis Powell was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Nixon. His Memo did not become available to the public until long after his confirmation to the Court when it was leaked to columnist Jack Anderson.

Jack Anderson -

“The incestuous relationship between government and big business thrives in the dark”

But Powell's proposals fell on fertile ground; the Chamber, and other corporate activists, built a powerful array of institutions intended to change the public's understanding of Business and society. These organizations are now household names, because we see them every night on TV, always presented as though they were disinterested institutions of learning - the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, and dozens more....

Powell's panacea paid off handsomely in the 1980s, under the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy. And it continues today stronger than ever, with the anti-regulation lunacy of the Republican front-group, the “Tea Party” - not satisfied with the “magic of the market”, which has destroyed huge sectors of the world economy, they think that if financiers and businessmen are allowed to do whatever comes into their angelic little heads, we'll all miraculously grow rich.

We can see now that Powell's thinking has been influential beyond his wildest dreams; now we have a Supreme Court that has given us a judgment laughably known as “Citizens United”, which hands over our entire election system to the Corporation with the biggest pocket-book, under the claim that secretly funding politicians is the same as free speech.

New Strand - Corporate Horrors

This new Strand to the Blog is for YOU to contribute to!

If you're like me, You are SICK TO DEATH of the ever-repeated LIE that Corporations are good for us. 

The Founding Fathers hated the whole idea of Corporations, and, later, when Corporations were chartered at all, it was only to allow them to perform one project, such as building a bridge, after which their Charter was revoked, and the corporation was wound up.

Watch this space for a Post on The Powell Memorandum....

A major part of the LIE is that Corporations are efficient, and Government is not.  The truth is that you will almost always have a better experience (in the USA) dealing with a Government Department, than you will with a Corporation, except when they are trying to lure you into giving them money, when of course, nothing is too much trouble....

What I want to do with this "Corporate Horrors" Strand, is to give YOU a space where you can post your horror stories.  My own examples are pretty minor, 'cos my Scottish thrift prevents me from throwing away the little money I have, and I watch these bastards like a hawk; I post them below just to start the discussion.

But we know there are people who are bankrupted, even driven to an early grave, by the antics of these business monsters.  Almost every day, the average citizen is forced to spend long periods on the phone, being jerked around by Corporate Bureaucrats.

My Bank horror story:  (They may have stopped this now, but...) WAMU (Washington Mutual Bank) would deduct all debits from my account before applying credits, so that I appeared to overdraw. Then they'd penalize me for the fake overdraft!

Credit horror:   My credit rating was wrongly downgraded: I challenged a false "ding" to my credit report, and was told twice that it had been removed from my record. But it's still there, and I still get "offers" to pay it off - Nearly 20 YEARS later!

I've written to Sen. Elizabeth Warren before, suggesting that she investigate the whole Credit report system, wherein Corporations are Judge, Jury and Executioner in their own cases, and the citizen has NO recourse!Furthermore, I've been told by a banker that one's Credit Rating can be harmed by applying for credit, or for checking too often on one's credit rating!

And don't even get me started on Medical Insurance companies - suffice to say that I no longer bother.

So have at it!  Let's hear your stories!  If we build up a big enough head of steam, maybe we'll even get some action going, to change things.

Remember, when Fascism was invented in Italy, it mean Rule by Corporations!