________________________________
________________________________
[lbo-talk] Fwd: [PEN-L] Kevin Phillips: declinist
B.
________________________________
C 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."
C
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.
_______________________________________________
Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
[email protected]
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
