3/7/2023 0 Comments Sure cuts a lot torrent![]() *A national group that brings together lobbyists and Republican state politicians to write and introduce legislation in every state in America. *And to place "business-friendly" professors in schools and colleges to train up a new generation of rightwing ideologues.Īfter Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court in 1972 and the Court then legalized political bribery in a decision Powell himself authored ( Bellotti), billionaires and corporations got to work creating a nationwide political infrastructure that has absolutely no match on the Democratic or progressive left. *Rightwing media empires that would help elect Republicans and influence political discussion across the American political spectrum *A filtering organization to help pack the courts with young rightwing ideologues *A network of think tanks to change and eventually control public opinion His solution, as history shows, was for big corporations and the morbidly rich to create: on our government, our system of justice, and the free enterprise system." This was no less, Powell declared in his next paragraph, than "A frontal assault. He emphasizes that he is not talking just about 'fly-by-night hucksters' but the top management of blue-chip business." He thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great many corporate executives belong in prison - for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer. "The passion that rules in him - and he is a passionate man - is aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power. Powell then quoted a May 1971 article profiling Nader in Fortune magazine: "Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader who - thanks largely to the media - has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans." Today, as Powell's work has borne fruit, the Pew Research Center says only 17 percent of Americans say they trust their government.Īs Lewis Powell wrote in his infamous 1971 memo arguing that businesses and very wealthy individuals needed to mobilize to stop this "assault" on American business: In that era, Americans had a lot of trust in their government- around 80 percent of Americans said they trusted government-as did the citizens of virtually all the western European countries. It started back in 1971 when tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a memo to his friend and neighbor Eugene Syndor, the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, warning that the end of capitalism was on the horizon because of Ralph Nader's consumer movement and Rachel Carson's environmental movement. That alternate reality would eventually include a Republican Party that no longer believes in American democracy, and actively works to promote the interests of billionaire oligarchs and foreign dictators over those of America. Just like in the movies, a good con requires establishing a strong setup, kind of an alternative world that will bring in the rubes and help you convince them of your alternate reality. This scam has two parts and one giant mechanism to make it possible.įirst came the con's funding and administrative infrastructure. They've been running a money-and-power scam on white voters since Nixon's "Southern Strategy" of the 1960s, a long con that went hypersonic with the election of Ronald Reagan. ![]() He played his role in that GOP con, of course, setting up the very richest Americans to get more billions of dollars a year in tax breaks for the foreseeable future, but he's a Johnny-come-lately to the GOP game. ![]() Those two parts are money and political power, and the mechanism is a nationwide conservative media infrastructure for which there is no match on the Democratic or progressive side.īut when you compare Trump's cons with the $50 trillion that the GOP has conned out of the American working class and given to the top 1 percent since 1980, Trump looks like a piker. Haberman documents it all in excruciating detail. The title of Maggie Haberman's new book about Donald Trump is " Confidence Man" and, truth be told, Trump has been a con man his entire life.
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