Dissecting the Powell Memorandum

Stoney Bird is a former international corporate business lawyer. He changed course after moving to the Skagit Valley in 1990. He has lived in the York neighborhood in Bellingham since 2011, and endeavors to use his corporate legal skills to reduce corporate power over local communities and expose the inadequacy of the so-called “environmental” laws, which are basically there to grant permits for harmful projects. For about five years before moving to Bellingham, he was involved in community organizing under the auspices of the Industrial Areas Foundation.

This essay is the second in a series begun with the January, 2014, issue of Whatcom Watch. For an overview of the series, see that issue.

In my conversations with people across the political spectrum, I find a conviction that corporations have too much power. On the left, people tend to emphasize the corporate role, on the right the fact that government is doing the wrong things and needs to be reined in. When you get down to it, they amount to the same thing: a breakdown of the values on which a just society, a republic, should be based.

What is not so clearly understood is that this state of affairs came about because of an explicit and, as we will see, secret plan. The author of the plan was one Lewis Powell, who was within months to become a member of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1971, Lewis Powell was 64. He was a partner in a Richmond, Virginia, law firm, and had made a long and prosperous career representing tobacco, railroad and other corporate interests. He had been the president of the American Bar Association in the mid-sixties, and had served on the board of Philip Morris since 1964. Talking with a friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce one day, he explained his views on what he characterized as “broadly based and consistently pursued” threats to the free enterprise system, and what businessmen should do about it. The friend, Eugene Sydnor, asked him to write down his thoughts. This Powell duly did.1 The result was a roadmap for corporate America to re-structure American politics, the judiciary, the media, large segments of our universities, and the overall framing of public discussion.

The results of following this plan now include ecological and social devastation, the 2008 financial bust-up, bail-outs in the trillions for the profiteers, the business/banking interests cementing their power and influence, and continuing scape-goating of the poor, immigrants, and people of color.

Powell often used the word “balance” in his call to fight back against “… the Naders, the Marcuses, and others who openly seek destruction of the system.” It is a strange and inequitable balance that he and his followers aimed for and have in fact achieved.

Some doubt that Powell’s memorandum was the cause of this entire story, but what it did do is lay out the broad outline that corporate America has since employed to haul in their big bucks no matter what the harm to society and the environment. What is clear is that he had a vision for a long-term, strategic, consistently followed campaign. Whether his plan was what big business followed or not, it is what has been happening.

For us viewing the wreckage in 2014, the important things are a) to see what the elements of the plan were, b) to mark how they contributed to a transformation of our society, c) to see the value of this kind of comprehensive, long-term, unified campaigning, certainly toward better ends and without corporate secretiveness, and d) to stand up and start doing it!

Lewis Powell:

Counter-Attack!

What Powell was responding to was what he perceived as a “broad attack”2 on the “American economic system.” The attack was coming not only from the traditional, “fringe” sources (Communists, and “other statists”), but also from “perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” Some of the “attackers” were the environmental and consumer movements. In Powell’s view labor had been among the adversaries for a long time. In Congress he saw “stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment.’”

To protect the “American way of life” according to Powell, what was necessary was a multi-pronged, sustained, coordinated, well-financed counter-attack. For that, businessmen large and small had to change their attitude to the attacks from the left — hitherto far too much tending to appeasement and conciliation — and “to confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management.” The prize? “The survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.”

In this proposed effort, the Chamber of Commerce could serve as one of the main coordinators, and could be the place where corporate funds were combined to produce the most effective net result.

He began with the universities. Characterizing what he found there as a combination of committed opponents of the capitalist system and “misguided individuals parroting one another and unwittingly serving ends they would never intentionally promote,” 3 Powell prescribes a number of remedies. The first is for the Chamber and other business organizations to establish a staff of scholars and speakers sympathetic with the business4 position. These would engage in research and in public statements supporting the system. They would comb text-books for offending sections and demand “objectivity.” They would demand equal time when universities brought in speakers who were unsympathetic. Over the long term, they would seek to “correct the imbalance of faculties” in the universities, all under the guise of promoting “balance, fairness and truth.” The same general tactics would be pursued in the secondary schools.

The second target that Powell names is the public at large. In addition to a staff of scholars, the Chamber would need to hire a staff adept at working with the media. As in the universities, every media attack should be answered — and the opportunity to answer should be demanded. “Constant surveillance” would be required. Over time, the answer would be to place sympathetic speakers in the key media positions so that what the public heard in the first instance was not an attack on what he called “the system,” not proposals contrary to the corporate interest, but initiatives that business could support. The same approach would be taken in all the media, encompassing TV, radio, the news magazines and newspapers, the scholarly journals, and in books and pamphlets. Using its great financial muscle, business could purchase advertisements supporting its perspective.

The political arena, Powell says, was where the payoff would occur. The business point of view was not being taken into account. As a result, “Business must learn the lesson … that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination.”

The role of the courts was not to be forgotten, especially given the possibility of an “activist-minded” Supreme Court. The Chamber needed to hire a staff of lawyers that would represent the interests of the free enterprise system in key cases.

What the Business World Did

Big business moved into high gear. According to Bill Moyers, big media companies were brought in along with banks and manufacturing concerns. In Moyers’ words:

The National Association of Manufacturers announced that it was moving its main offices to Washington. In 1971 only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in the capital; by 1982 nearly 2,500 did. Corporate PACs increased from fewer than 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 by the mid-’80s. From Powell’s impetus came the Business Roundtable, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy (precursor to what we now know as Americans for Prosperity) and other organizations united in pushing back against political equality and shared prosperity. They triggered an economic [and political] transformation that would in time touch every aspect of our lives.5

It’s possible to say that the corporate campaign was, practically speaking, hidden in that the very best-informed observers of the national scene were not aware of what was happening. In the late 70s, Pulitzer Prize winner Hedrick Smith was the Washington Bureau Chief of The New York Times. He prided himself on knowing what the score was. In a recent talk to the Bellingham City Club, he acknowledged that at the time, he had been unaware of what the corporate boys were up to, and that he had only in the last few years become aware of Powell’s memorandum. His conclusion now is that “Lewis Powell’s provocative memo triggered a political rebellion that dramatically altered the landscape of power in Washington from then until today.” 6 Even now, many people are aware of at least some of the parts of the campaign, but not of its comprehensive nature or even that it was an explicit campaign.

The first overt sign that something was wrong occurred during the Carter administration, when the Democrats were in control of the House, the Senate and the Presidency. All and sundry expected that legislation to set up a consumer protection bureau and that further legislation favorable to labor7 would both just sail through. Somehow they didn’t. At the time, Smith and others could not figure out what had happened. In retrospect, it is clear. Corporate lobbyists, now representing over 10 times as many companies as at the beginning of the decade and awash with corporate money, had visited legislators of both parties, and laid out what the new rules were. These are the rules by which the political game has been played ever since. The first rule: get some of that corporate money. The second rule: do what it takes to get it, lest it be used against you.

The first beneficiaries of the new corporate largesse were largely Republicans. By the end of the 80s, Democrats in Congress were feeling left out. Styling themselves “New Democrats” they formed the Democratic Leadership Council.8 Bill Clinton was very much part of their scene.

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig describes how the gents (and no doubt, ladies) in Congress accommodated themselves to the new system.9 Their acquiescence began almost immediately. One of the early enactments in the Reagan era was an investment tax credit. It was made temporary because the Democrats in particular wanted to try it out, to see if it worked. It did, all sides agreed. Did they make it permanent? No. To this day, the investment tax credit — the beneficiaries of which are for the most part big manufacturing concerns with lots of money — is passed a few years at a time. Why, according to Lessig? So that there can be some haggling with the donors each time for campaign contributions.

What Congress Spends Time on

A more egregious example: in the first part of 2013, the matter on which Congress spent the most time was not any of the things of most concern to the public or indeed to the well-being of the republic. One might have thought that they would be primarily concerned, for example, with the two wars that the United States was waging, the foreclosure crisis, the lapsing of unemployment benefits, the slashing of social programs to pay for the wars, or even the problem of money in politics. Instead, what our legislators were most preoccupied with was a squabble of financial titans. This was the great question of credit card swipe fees. On one side stood the banks, on the other the big retailers. What they were fighting over was the size of the banks’ percentage when someone uses a credit or debit card. According to Lessig, congressional leadership sat happily in the middle and milked both sides, dragging the whole thing out until even their sense of propriety was exhausted.

In the mid-70s, the U.S. Supreme Court, which now included Powell among its members, had to deal with a number of cases involving money in politics. Far from reducing the effect of money on politics, they pried open the doors that the Citizens United case pulled all the way back to the wall.10 It was at this time that the Supreme Court adopted the notorious concept that money is speech. In the new wonderland, what you could spend on political speech could not be limited. It sounds good, but in practice it means that those with more money get to have more access to the airwaves and the print media, and get to control the framing of our political discussions. Right alongside “one man, one vote” we now had “one dollar, one vote about what people see in the media.” Powell participated in those decisions, and in one of them wrote the majority opinion.11 In this way, he carried out his own part of the Memorandum’s plan, which called for “activist” judges acting in furtherance of the corporate interest.

In the media, the corporate interest made progress also. By the end of the 80s, the “fairness” doctrine had been repealed, so that the Rush Limbaughs of the world could expound without contradiction the fairy tales, not to say rants, of conservative ideology. What was also happening at that time was that the management of network news bureaus was changing. Television news departments had at first been managed by journalists, for whom accurately informing the public was a value. Now the news divisions came under the management of finance or sales people, for whom the main value was ratings — because high ratings lead to increased advertising revenue. The “news” had degenerated into propaganda or highly selective material on the one hand, and entertainment on the other. Instead of engaging in serious investigation, the media became readers and printers of corporate and government press releases. The serious questions of public policy received less and less of the thoughtful attention that they needed.

Even our public broadcasters were affected, and this in at least two ways. Beginning with the Ford-Carter debate in 1976, the debates had been sponsored by the non-partisan League of Women Voters who were concerned to get objective information about the candidates to the public. In 1987, according to Wikipedia, the League withdrew from debate sponsorship, in protest of the major party candidates attempting to dictate nearly every aspect of how the debates were conducted. On October 2, 1988, the League’s14 trustees voted unanimously to pull out of the debates, and on October 3 they issued a press release:

The League of Women Voters is withdrawing sponsorship of the presidential debates ... because the demands of the two campaign organizations [Democrats and Republicans] would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.12

According to the League, they pulled out because “the campaigns presented the League with their debate agreement on September 28, two weeks before the scheduled debate. The campaigns’ agreement was negotiated ‘behind closed doors’ ... [with] 16 pages of conditions not subject to negotiation.” Most objectionable to the League “ ... were conditions in the agreement that gave the campaigns unprecedented control over the proceedings … [including] control the selection of questioners, the composition of the audience, hall access for the press and other issues.” 13

This is the regime under which the so-called debates continue to be conducted. The sad sight of Jim Lehrer playing his part in this charade must have wrenched the hearts of all thoughtful observers. In 2000, Ralph Nader was arrested for attempting to attend the debates as part of the audience!

Too Few Perspectives

The corporate boys achieved another part of the Powell program by having their people be the ones asking the questions or giving the answers throughout the array of media “news” and “analysis” programs. The fact that a few programs (Bill Moyers’ various productions come to mind) had a different perspective allowed the corporate system to preserve the illusion of balance, but all but a tiny percentage of what people heard was from the corporate perspective.

By the 1990s, the result was that the major legislation signed by Bill Clinton could be distinguished little from what a Republican might have signed. Under Clinton we had:

• NAFTA, which subjected labor and environment to the demands of “trade.” By wiping out family farming on both sides of the border,14 NAFTA has increased the pressure for Central Americans to come here to work, creating a class of workers utterly without legal status and subject to every kind of abuse from employers and the rest of society.15

• the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act,16 so that ordinary checking account and savings account banks could be put at the mercy of investment banking gamblers and in effect authorize the Wall Street casino to play with an ever greater share of the world’s financial resources.

• the decision not to require financial derivatives to comply with established standards of transparency, like the repeal of Glass-Steagall, another step on the road to the 2008 financial collapse (see sidebar).17

• the Telecommunications Act, allowing further consolidation of the media, so that in Bellingham, for example, all radio stations are now owned by a single corporation, and The Bellingham Herald has been traded among media giants like a bushel of corn.18

• Welfare “reform” hurrying mothers away from their children into minimum wage jobs and putting further pressure on wages for all workers.19

Board Members and Consultants

As for the universities, those who have watched the excellent documentary "Inside Job"20 will have seen that professors of economics and business have made fortunes in the many millions by serving on the boards of big business and big finance and as their consultants. This includes one Larry Summers, who served as president of Harvard University until he resigned

in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty that resulted in large part from Summers’s conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end,” and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization. After his departure from Harvard, Summers made millions as a managing partner at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co., and through holding speeches for major financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers.21

Summers had served in various financial positions in the Clinton Administration, ending as Secretary of the Treasury in 1999. Along with his mentor Robert Rubin, ex-President of Goldman Sachs and Secretary of the Treasury for much of the Clinton administration, he was a major architect of financial deregulation, paving the way for the 2008 bust-up and for the continuing build-up of his own fortune. One of the many signs of the Obama administration’s complicity in the overall scheme of corporate domination is that Obama hired Summers as the director of the National Economic Council, and even considered appointing him as Chair of the Federal Reserve.

In the courts, the corporate campaign was equally successful, blocking those with contrary views, and supporting the appointment of “free-market” enthusiasts, beginning with Powell himself and ending with current Chief Justice John Roberts, author of the majority opinion in the Citizens United case.22 In the meantime, we had appointments such as those of Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, all of whom concurred in the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v Gore, in effect removing the decision of who would become president to that small group of justices.23 Much more could be said on this count.

What We Can Learn

It’s quite a record. By controlling the airwaves and the rest of the media, and by corrupting the politicians, the political parties and the courts, corporate interests have caused outrageous inequality in society, the continuing economic crisis that began in 2008, and government of the few, by the few and for the few — in short, a corrupted republic.

What are we to learn from this?

The first point is not only that we’ve been had, but that we’ve been had pursuant to a plan concocted by guys in business suits acting in secret. Outside the offices of the United States Chamber of Commerce and the corporate board rooms, nobody knew what the plan was, how it was being implemented, or even that it existed.

What Corporate Shields Hide

In other words, individuals hiding behind the corporate shield which had been created by public legislation and by the actions of the publicly created courts had conspired to restructure American society. Whatever their intentions may have been, the result has been a subversion of the public well-being, of our republic, and through their continuing attacks on nature, of the very basis of life. As law professor Joel Bakan has shown, the corporation as currently constituted fits the psychological profile of a psychopath perfectly. It was corporations that Powell was seeking to put in charge.

The second point is that this was actually a conspiracy. In fact every corporate staff is a conspiracy. From my experience of serving on two corporate staffs, and from observing the operations of our colleagues in other corporations, I can testify that very nearly the primary corporate “virtue” was keeping your lips sealed. This principle operated not only in relationship to the government and the public, but also even in relationship to other divisions in the same company. In other words, our primary business operations, constituted and only existing under public laws, forcibly claim the right to keep their operations secret from everyone else when their operations have nothing if not public effects. I say forcibly because these operations are carried on protected by armed guards.24 If one of the minions of these conspiracies contravenes the mandate of secretiveness, he risks having the violence of the corporation and of the state turned against him. This is what we are seeing in the cases of Edward Snowden and other whistle-blowers, more of whom have been prosecuted by the Obama administration than by all previous administrations combined.25

The third point is that corporate staffers, if they were acting alone, almost certainly would not engage in these shenanigans, not to say crimes. They are ordinary people, like you and me, yet something in the system of secretiveness and groupthink leads them to act collectively in psychopathic ways. The Borg of Star Trek fame has a model in real life. Jerry Mander has captured this dual character, this “corporate schizophrenia,” most eloquently,26 as did Amintore Fanfani, Prime Minister of Italy (see quotation in the sidebar).27

Little Congruence Between Law and Justice

It is not only the corporate staffers who are caught in this moral dilemma, but all those connected with the so-called “justice” system. Police, social workers, prison guards, lawyers, and judges all find themselves embroiled in a system rife with abuse. The system sets up a hierarchy in which those higher on the hierarchy are allowed to commit violence against those lower and label it “justice,” whereas the violence of those lower on the hierarchy is labeled “crime.” 28 Members of the legal profession, who on the whole are intelligent and articulate, and many of whom started their careers with the aim of increasing justice in the world, come to understand sooner or later, as I did, that they are simply part of a great machine of violent social control.29 Many lawyers, of course, knew this from the first, and just wanted to get rich. In the overall system of laws, there is congruence between law and justice from time to time, but its appearance is a matter of chance.

Most importantly, one can see how crucial it is for those who see the destructiveness of our current practices to formulate a long-term, broad-based, strategic and consistently implemented plan to right the balance. At the turn of the millennium, Joanna Macy held up for us the great task that we need to undertake.30 She said that we have three things to change: our ideas, our institutions and our practices. Since that means virtually everything, it is no task to be undertaken lightly, nor to be accomplished in the short term or simply by willing it. Like the transformation that Lewis Powell and his successors accomplished, it will require sustained and thoughtful effort. No one else can do it but us, acting collectively. There may be no greater task in our lives.

What We Need to Do

Many will say: This is all very well. Thanks for the analysis. Now, what do we do?

There is a one-word answer: organize. The people of Bellingham and Whatcom County have already done a good deal of this. There is a plethora of groups devoted both to specific causes and to the general well-being of the community. What I do not detect — here, or indeed anywhere in American society — is the kind of collective, long-term, strategic planning and organizing in civil society that can be seen in business circles, and even at our various levels of government.

In his great work analyzing American society of the 1830s,31 Alexis de Tocqueville observed that there was a counter-balance to both government and market. The counter-balance was an organized and vibrant civil society. Graphically, this relationship can be shown by the three equal circles in Figure 1. What has since happened since then is the lack of balance shown in Figure 2.

There are numerous current organizing efforts which have promise. There is not space to go into them in detail in this essay, though I will endeavor to describe them in more detail in later pieces. Here are a few of them:

• One is a movement of communities being advised by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. There are 150 of such communities around the United States. Ranging in size from central Pennsylvania townships (population in the 100s) to the city of Pittsburgh, they have simply said that they will not adhere to the corporate system, and have banned corporate projects that were harmful to the community. You may wish to visit www.celdf.org. This work was the basis for the effort to adopt a Bellingham Community Bill of Rights in 2012.

• The Industrial Areas Foundation mentors local community organizing efforts and trains people in the necessary techniques. They foster relationships among unions, religious congregations, education associations, and community non-profits so that these (superficially) diverse groups can act together for the common good. Check out www.industrialareasfoundation.org.

• The World Social Forum has been organizing for about 10 years on a worldwide basis to serve as a counterbalance to the World Economic Forum that gathers in Davos, Switzerland every year. By providing a forum for those that the corporate media do not speak about, it gives voice to the voiceless. Local people hosted by Community to Community Development are in the early stages of organizing a Pacific Northwest Social Forum.

• Through the Whatcom Folk School (www.whatcomfolkschool.org) retired political science professor David Maas and I give workshops on the legal, constitutional and political history of why democracy in America is missing in action. We’d love to see you there. The next two workshops are on March 13 and 27.

Many groups are working within the system, and are doing good and necessary work, but because they are doing what the system permits, their work will not achieve the structural changes that we need. What we need are ideas, structures and practices not founded on exploitation of people and nature. I’m aware of some which I believe show promise, and I’ll talk about them in future essays. In a democracy, however, we’re all responsible for everything. So the real task is getting together and making what we need happen collectively. We’re all responsible for that.

Derivatives and the Financial Collapse

By 2000, the financial industry was more concentrated and powerful than ever before. It was dominated by:

• five investment banks: Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs

• two financial conglomerates: JP Morgan, and Citigroup

• three securities insurance companies: AIG, MBIA and AMBAC

• three rating agencies: Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s, and Fitch

Linking them was the Securitization Food Chain, a new system for financing ordinary debt. In the new system, the investment banks would take a mixture of many different kinds and grades of debt and create new securities called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and sell these to investors anywhere in the world. The investment banks would pay the rating agencies to evaluate the CDOs. They were often given the highest possible rating (AAA), making it possible for institutional investors like retirement funds to purchase them. Instead of sending your mortgage check to the local S&L, you would send it to the relevant investor.

In the past when a lender lent money, the lender was the one on the hook if the borrower failed to pay. Since mortgages wouldn’t ordinarily be paid off for 30 years, the lenders were careful.

The new system was an invitation to irresponsibility. Lenders were no longer on the hook if the borrower couldn’t pay. The investment banks didn’t care, since their compensation depended only on the volume of CDOs that they sold. And the rating agencies had no liability if the rating that they assigned to a given CDO turned out to be wrong. In addition to all its other defects, the market in these derivatives was unregulated, meaning that the investment banks could in effect obscure what exactly they were selling.

1 The text of Powell’s Memorandum can be found at various places on the web, including here: http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis.

2 This quotation and the others in this section of my essay are taken from the Powell Memorandum unless otherwise noted. The balance is a paraphrase of the Memorandum.

3 Powell takes the quotation from Milton Friedman’s foreword to Dr. Arthur A. Shenfield’s Rockford College lectures entitled “The Ideological War Against Western Society,” copyrighted 1970 by Rockford College.

4 In his memorandum, Powell uses “business” to describe the point of view (and class) that he is trying to protect and advance. The exact boundaries of this class are unclear, potentially including the titans of Wall Street and also the corner drug store. Still, since his memorandum is addressed to the United States Chamber of Commerce, the members of which consist almost entirely of big business, one must conclude that he means primarily those kinds of companies. My essay follows Powell in this.

5 From the November 21, 2011, issue of The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/article/164349/how-wall-street-occupied-america

6 Smith spoke to the Bellingham City Club on July 24, 2013, describing what he had written about in his new book, “Who Stole the American Dream?,” Random House, 2012. For its political and economic analysis, I recommend the book highly. Like many, Smith sadly ignores the ecological effects of the “American Dream.”

7 The union movement had achieved its first great breakthrough in federal legislation in the Wagner Act of 1935. Since then Congress had been increasingly hostile, notably in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959. What the unions were seeking in 1977 were three points: 1) easing the union organizing process and restricting the most aggressive anti-union campaigning activities of business, 2) allowing common situs picketing, under which multiple unions could picket a construction site if one of them had a grievance, and 3) indexing of the minimum wage to inflation and to general wage levels.

8 An account of the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council.

9 The material in this paragraph and the next are taken from a talk given by Lessig at Google headquarters on October 26, 2011. A video of the talk can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc&noredirect=1.

10 See footnote 21.

11 Powell wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1978), which overturned a Massachusetts law restricting corporate contributions to referendum campaigns not directly related to their business. The Bellotti case together with Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976) originated the infamous “money equals speech” doctrine mostly recently enunciated and expanded in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).

12 Neuman, Nancy M. (October 2, 1988). “League Refuses to “Help Perpetrate a Fraud.” Press release.

13 Same source as footnote 10.

14 Project Censored reported in 2002 that since the adoption of NAFTA:

Corporations who operate throughout the Americas, such as Tyson and Cargill, have since used the farming surplus to drive down costs, pitting farmers against each other and prohibiting countries from taking protective actions. These same corporations have entered into massive farming ventures outside the United States and use NAFTA to import cheaper agricultural products back into this country, further undermining the small farmers in the United States. Since the enactment of NAFTA, 80 percent of foodstuffs coming into the United States are products that displace crops raised here at home. NAFTA has allowed multinational mega-corporations to increase production in Mexico, where they can profit from much cheaper labor, as well as freely use chemicals and pesticides banned in the United States

In both Mexico and Haiti, NAFTA policies have caused an exodus from rural areas forcing people to live in urban slums and accept low-paid sweatshop labor. Farmers in Mexico, unable to compete with the large-scale importation and chemical-intensive mass production of United States agricultural corporations, are swimming in a corn surplus that has swelled approximately 450 percent since NAFTA’s implementation. Haiti’s deregulation of trade with the United States has destroyed the island’s rice industry in a similar manner. Urban slums, engorged with rural economic refugees, are contributing to the breakdown of cultural traditions and public authority, making the growing masses increasingly ungovernable. http://www.projectcensored.org/8-nafta-destroys-farming-communities-in-us-and-abroad

15 . How many undocumented immigrants there are is not known, but the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that the number was 11.7 million in 2013, comprising approximately 7 percent of the total civilian workforce.

16. The Glass-Steagall Act had been passed during the New Deal, and required deposit banks (those that take deposits from their customers and are supposed to protect those deposits) to be under separate ownership from investment banks (which speculate on the stock market, and in other ways). It consists of four specific provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 (Pub.L. 73–66, 48 Stat. 162, enacted June 16, 1933) which limited commercial bank securities activities and affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms.

17. As one of his last official acts, Clinton signed the so-called Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 on December 21, 2000. The Act exempted most trade in derivatives from the transparency rules that had been part of the securities markets since the '30s. It had been concocted by a committee consisting of Larry Summers (referred to elsewhere in this article), Alan Greenspan (the Ayn Rand-trained Chair of the Federal Reserve), Arthur Leavitt (Chair of the SEC), and others, all Clinton appointees.

18. The Wikipedia article on The Bellingham Herald describes the sequence of corporate ownership:

Federated Publications bought The Herald in 1967. In 1971 Federated Publications merged with Gannett Corporation. The Herald switched to morning delivery in May 1997. Knight Ridder acquired The Bellingham Herald in 2005. Knight Ridder was purchased by McClatchy in 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingham_Herald

19. In The Nation, Bryce Covert described the failures of Clinton’s welfare “reform” on September 6, 2012. “TANF” is the acronym for the “reform.” It stands for “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has done excellent work to track TANF’s failures. “While the official poverty rate among families declined in the early years of welfare reform, when the economy was booming and unemployment was extremely low, it started increasing in 2000 and now exceeds its 1996 level,” it reports. “Over the last 16 years, the national TANF caseload has declined by 60 percent, even as poverty and deep poverty have worsened.” In fact, nearly 70 percent of poor families with children received cash assistance in 1996; in 2009, less than 30 percent did. And the families who are able to access benefits aren’t getting much. Their purchasing power is below 1996 levels, adjusting for inflation, in every state but two. They fall below 50 percent of the poverty line in every state.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169788/clinton-touts-welfare-reform-heres-how-it-failed

20 Issued in 2010, the documentary was written and directed by Charles Ferguson.

21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers

22 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010). In this case, the Supreme Court further lightened rules on what could be spend on political campaigns, thus increasing the advantages of the rich and of big business in the political arena.

23 Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000).

24 Here I am drawing on my experience in the corporate world. The two companies where I worked, and nearly every company that I visited as part of my work had some form of control at the front door. If these guards were not themselves armed, and many of them were, it was clear that men with guns were within easy call.

25 www.veteranstoday.com/2013/01/28/obamas-war-on-whistleblowers/

26 Mander, Jerry, “The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System,” 2012.

27 The quotation in the sidebar is taken from an article entitled “Moving to the Left” that appeared in Time Magazine, 14 July 1958. Fanfani had made similar comments about Protestantism in his doctoral thesis, published as “Catholicism, Capitalism and Protestantism” in 1935. He served as prime minister of Italy several times in the 1950s and 1960s, held numerous other ministerial posts, and was President of the U.N. General Assembly during the 1965-66 session.

28 Jensen, Derrick, 2006; “Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization,” “Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance,” 2006.

29 This may explain in part why lawyers are more subject to depression than other professions and a wopping 40 percent are dissatisfied with their jobs. http://www.lawcrossing.com/article/2626/Depression-in-the-Law-Profession

30 “The Great Turning,” an interview with Joanna Macy by Sarah van Gelder, www.yesmagazine.org/issues/new-stories/the-great-turning, posted Mar 31, 2000.

31 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, Bantam Classics, 2000.