Powell Memo

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 10 of a 10-part Series:

What Are We To Do?

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.”

Hannah Arendt

We might ask ourselves whether America is a pathocracy—or might have been a pathocracy on January 6th? I believe we can safely say that America has never been a full pathocracy like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, but has, at various points, demonstrated elements of pathocratic tendencies. Leaving aside the sordid issue of slavery, historical examples are the forced migration of Native Americans and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. More recently, we had official Dept. of Justice documents supporting the torture of detainees in Guantanamo (2003) and the inhumane treatment of migrants at the U.S. border, particularly children. At the local level, I have completely lost count of the number of unarmed Black people killed by police. 

As much as Americans convince themselves of their own exceptionalism, we are nonetheless subject to the same dark side of human nature as everyone else. However, we have avoided becoming a full-blown pathocracy because most of the aforementioned atrocities were eventually subject to popular backlash, investigations, and (sometimes) accountability. The January 6th coup attempt itself was prevented because there were honorable persons still occupying positions of power. Regardless of our own opinions of these individuals, the coup was unsuccessful because former Vice President Pence refused to do anything other than his duty to count the Electoral votes. Election officials in Georgia, Arizona and other states refused to submit to Trump’s threats and certified a valid election. Republican-appointed judges (some appointed by Trump himself) upheld the rule of law. If any one of these individuals had been dishonorable, we would likely not be living in the free United States of America anymore. Fortunately, legislators and other pro-democracy groups are working on “fixes” to our antiquated electoral system to prevent another January 6th-like coup attempt from happening again. 

Although America has not succumbed to a full-blown pathocracy, we seem to be at an unusually high point in a “hysteroidal cycle” (to use Lobaszewsky’s term). A sizeable minority of the population continues to subscribe to the Big Lie that Trump used to perpetuate his coup attempt, and a lot of media (right wing outlets and social media) continue to feed it. Even the right-wing oligarchs who stoked and fed the anger that ultimately resulted in January 6th admit they may have created a monster they can no longer control. Shortly after the 2020 election, Charles Koch admits to “screwing up” —and this was before January 6th 

A significant percentage of the US population subscribes to either (or both) Q-Anon and election denial, which represents a disconnection from the reality that most of the rest of us live in. Cult deprogrammers have been overwhelmed with requests for help from family members concerned about one of their own who has gone down the rabbit hole. Most of us simply do not have the skills and training to deal with this level of delusion. Logic, along with arguments about facts and evidence will not work. Rather, the strategy is to help these folks re-learn to think for themselves and connect the dots using a form of “reverse engineering” of the same tactics that led them into the cult. These folks must be able to see a way back to their old lives, which will never happen if they are confronted with shame and humiliation.

 

In order to heal and recover from a pathocracy, Lobaszewsky advises us to build a society based on an equitable distribution of resources; to promote education, particularly education about the human capacity for evil; and to encourage the formation of social bonds across diverse groups. Ironically, Lobaszewsky urges us to refrain from “moralizing,” but rather view evil from the dispassionate position that it will always be with us and the best we can do is to understand and manage it.  

In essence, we will have to build solidarity out of the post-January 6th remains of a tattered social fabric and a dis-United States of America. It is an understatement to say that this will be hard to do. When doing his own research into the nature of macrosocial evil, Lobaszewsky reported having to suppress his own revulsion and “moralizing impulses” to maintain scientific objectivity. He admits that his training in psychiatry (which most of us don’t have) helped him with this. How can we re-connect people back to reality and the fundamentals of prosocial thinking—especially if they hate us? If we only return the hate, then the dark side will have prevailed.

We can begin by recognizing that many (but not all) of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th are both perpetrators and victims. I personally will probably never find it within myself to forgive the people who planned the coup and knew the “Big Lie” for what it was but continued to push it anyway. Easier to forgive are the folks who simply voted for Trump—perhaps they did not follow politics closely or habitually voted Republican no matter who the candidate was. A little harder (but not impossible) to forgive are those who continued to support Trump even in the face of overwhelming evidence of corruption. Here, the issue of blameworthiness depends on how much of the delusion is the result of willful ignorance (I have to believe Trump is right because he gives me permission to hate the people I don’t like). 

The hardest thing we will have to confront is the huge propaganda machine that continues to poison individual minds and our body politic to this day. The oligarchs are still pumping it out, but now they have been joined by hostile foreign governments, who now have all the evidence they need that America can be destroyed by disinformation. Disinformation that taps into the darkest recesses of the human limbic brain. Disinformation that makes the media oligarchs richer. Disinformation that keeps the rest of us divided, not just on values, but on the very definition of reality. America can be brought to its knees without firing a single missile or sending a single soldier, because Americans can be made to do it to themselves and each other.

Holding those responsible for January 6th accountable to the law and fixing the loopholes in our electoral system is a good start—but it is only a start. The dark side of human nature (what some religions term “original sin”) is probably something we will never be able to fix. But we can come up with ways to contain it. We certainly should be able to find ways to structure society where we don’t reward it. Perhaps we could require some sort of character test (complete with documented history) for every candidate for public office above a certain level. Perhaps we could articulate limits to the First Amendment, permitting (well-defined and narrowly tailored) restrictions on speech that is both false and provably harmful to public health. 

We stand at a crucial juncture in humanity’s history. I do not know what the result will be. But somewhere, a butterfly flaps its wings.

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 4 of a 10-part Series:

Federalists and Dominionists Take Over the Courts

The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Citizens United v FEC

Most of us are no longer surprised by the plutocrat-friendly decisions emanating from the U.S. Supreme Court. Oligarchs like the Kochs have done their part to fulfill Powell’s mandate, sending massive funding to established think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and CATO as well as their own Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. The Koch empire funds a huge and interconnected network of right wing PACS, policy think tanks, lobbying groups and media outlets such that it has been given the name “Kochtopus.”   

It wasn’t enough to own the Congress who wrote the laws and flood the policy agenda with lobbyists representing plutocrats and the corporatocracy, but they had to also own (or at least influence) the place where the laws were interpreted—the Supreme Court. During the civil rights era, the federal courts were in the forefront of expanding rights—especially the rights of the previously marginalized such as workers, women, and people of color. Attorneys who represented marginalized clients were encouraged to file their cases in federal courts, which (at that time) tended to look favorably on these new rights.

However, sometime beginning in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, federal judges became increasingly hostile to plaintiffs with grievances against business. Attorneys representing regular working people injured by defective products, environmental toxins, and employment discrimination were now likely to be better off taking these cases to state courts—notwithstanding broader definitions and expanded damage awards afforded under federal statutes. Some federal judges were openly hostile to these cases/clients. Defendant corporations—represented by expensive “Big Law” firms with armies of lawyers—found ways to have these cases “removed” to federal courts. A cottage-industry sprang up in legal circles on “removal” actions.

In 1976, the Law and Economics Center was established at George Mason University.  The Law and Economics Center is a corporate-funded think tank that sponsored an all-expense paid trip at a Florida resort for judges to “learn” from academic economists. Here federal judges were imbued with the concept that justice always comes at a cost—cost which the judges were required to consider (although there is nothing about this in the constitution or anywhere else) in their decisions. Even former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she appreciated a lesson on regression analysis. This particular program was shut down in 1999 due to the fact that many of its corporate funders appeared before many of the judges and thus created an all-too-obvious conflict of interest. Yet, a recent study that cross-referenced federal judicial decisions (some 380,000 civil cases and 1 million criminal sentences) found a distinct correlation between judges who attended the Law and Economics training and an “anti-justice, pro-cost” bias. 

Following the Powell memo blueprint, the Federalist Society was founded by a group of students at elite law schools (Harvard, Yale, and University of Chicago) in 1982. Although it purports to stand for a “textualist” and “originalist” interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, its main goal was to promote judges in the Federal judiciary who were anti-regulation, anti-environment, and anti-union. According to the American Bar Association, there are over 1.3 million lawyers in the United States—a number which has been relatively consistent over the past decade.  The Federalist Society estimates that it has about 60,000 members, which includes law students and academics as well as practicing lawyers. But even assuming all 60,000 members were admitted to law practice, this would mean they comprise only 4.6% of practicing attorneys. Yet today six Federalists sit on the U.S Supreme Court. So…the outsize influence of Federalists in the U.S. Court system can be analogized to the outsized influence of big money interests in our politics. And…surprise!…both are interconnected!

It is not just the über-right wing Federalist Society that feeds the pipeline to the Federal judiciary, but a small core of elite law firms. Two of the most well-known of these are Jones Day (with 2,513 attorneys) and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher (with over 1,600 attorneys). These are large, globe-spanning, corporate-focused law firms who generally recruit only from elite law schools (who themselves tend to recruit from elite or upper-middle-class families and alums). They are known for defending oil companies (most notably, Chevron), as well as corporations generally. These law firms disproportionately feed both the U.S. Supreme Court (former Justice Scalia) and the federal judiciary as well as Presidential cabinet and other high-level positions. Former Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher attorneys include the currently (in)famous Judge Aileen Cannon (in the Mar-A-Lago documents case) as well as current President Biden nominee Jennifer Reardon (who defended Chevron during her time at the firm) for the Southern District of New York—suggesting that elite capture of the judiciary has been bipartisan.

The conservative right has traditionally been the champion of states’ rights, and the essence of federalism is that states should serve as “laboratories of democracy.” That is, the federal government sets the “floor” of mandatory legal protections, but states are free to expand upon them. Working people found out that they were able to make their voices heard in state legislatures, and so some states raised the minimum wage above the federal mandate, passed more stringent environmental protections, and expanded ways and times for citizens to vote. But now we are seeing a retreat from the absolutist view of states rights. States rights are to be defended when they serve to control the “little people,” (Blacks, women, workers), but can be infringed when they seek to expand or protect the same.

So long as the will of working people was able to be expressed anywhere, owning Congress, the Supreme Court, and exerting outsized influence on both major parties and presidential elections was not sufficient to meet the elite’s goal of total domination. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was founded in 1973 for the purpose of drafting “model legislation” to introduce in state legislatures. Today, ALEC is funded primarily by corporate interests and right-wing oligarchs. ALEC-sponsored legislation focused primarily on reducing regulations and taxes on corporations, but it also worked to make voter registration more stringent, weaken labor unions, and pass state “right to work” laws. Unions are viewed as a double threat, because they not only work to insure a more equitable division of collective production between capital and labor, unions also provide a structure that facilitates civic participation among working people, along with pathways to influence larger policies that affect workers. 

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 1 of a 10-part Series:

Introduction to the Powell Memo and Chaos Theory

“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.”

From the 1971 Powell Memo

A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon rain forest, and three weeks later there is a hurricane on the other side of the world. This is the essence of chaos theory. That is, one small and seemingly insignificant event creates a chain reaction that can produce profound effects in the future. Each event creates a juncture of sometimes only several and sometimes nearly infinite possible pathways forward. This phenomenon provides a plethora of plots for science fiction writers looking for “alternate universe” story ideas. It is also what makes the future nearly impossible to predict.

In 1952, the science fiction author Ray Bradbury wrote a story he called A Sound of Thunder. In the fictional year 2055, time travel is possible. An enterprising company called Time Safari, Inc. takes wealthy hunters back to the past to hunt dinosaurs.  Specific animals are selected who are known by the tour company to have died soon afterward. However, hunters are instructed to never leave a levitating path which has been constructed to literally minimize their footprint, because they could potentially cause a disruption in the timeline and change the future. How this levitating pathway was constructed without doing the same is never explained.

In the beginning of the story, we meet a hunter who has paid $10,000 for the privilege of shooting a tyrannosaurus rex. The Time Safari guide is explaining the instructions about “not leaving the path” and potential for disruption to the timeline. The conversation turns to a recent election, where a fascist candidate has been narrowly defeated. Everyone expresses thankful relief and then the hunting party departs in the time machine. When they arrive in the late Cretaceous period and spot a T-Rex, the hunter gets scared. The main guide instructs him to return to the time machine. Meanwhile, the two guides shoot the dinosaur shortly before a tree falls on it (the event that would have killed it in the current time).

The hunter hears the shots and returns to the spot where the dinosaur has been killed.  The guides find out he has stumbled off the path in his haste, and threaten to kill him if anything is “changed” upon their return. They travel back to 2055 and at first, everything seems normal. However, some of the words on signs appear to be misspelled. The head guide inspects the hunter’s shoe and discovers a crushed butterfly. Someone asks who won the election, and they learn that the fascist is now in charge. The “sound of thunder” is the sound of the guide’s gun, as he carries out his threat.

January 6th did not happen in a vacuum, but—as chaos theory suggests—was pushed by something that started a chain of causation that led to its inevitability. Here I make the argument that the “butterfly moment” happened on August 23, 1971, with the publication of a memo written by Lewis Powell and published through the Chamber of Commerce. At that time, Powell was a corporate attorney practicing in Richmond Virginia, where he also represented the Tobacco Institute. As most of us know, Powell was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Nixon less than a year later, where he served until 1987.

The Powell Memo is noted for its brilliant creation of a (mostly) false narrative that is nonetheless extremely compelling. The memo deftly targets the base emotion of fear—more specifically the fear of losing privilege and power—couched in tones of moral righteousness and victimhood. Within this infamous Powell memo is a call to arms that today might seem mild when frothing hate-filled white supremacist groups are roaming public spaces with assault weapons. Yet, the memo contains unambiguous war-themed language: “The American economic system is under broad attack;” The Greening of America, a book by Yale Professor Charles Reich constituted “a frontal assault…on our government.” Powell proclaimed that American business had a duty to “conduct guerilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system.”

Another effective device is the demonization of anyone who opposes you. Powell points a finger at Ralph Nader, labor unions, the ACLU, and anyone else who dared to call out corporate abuse of workers, consumers, or the environment as “shotgun attacks on the system…which undermine confidence and confuse the public.”  The charges incorporated tactics and strategies borrowed from the McCarthy era; e.g., branding one’s enemies as communists, “Leftists,” or Soviet sympathizers.  Indeed, the interests of business elites, Wall Street and the corporatocracy were made synonymous with America and all it stands for.

According to Powell, nothing less than the “survival of the free enterprise system” was at stake. He called for the Chamber of Commerce to make “significantly increased” investments on a broad front of (1) restoring “balance” on university campuses with instructors who would champion the free enterprise system rather than challenge it; (2) train a new generation of intellectuals who would bring the “right” ideology to news media, government, and regulatory agencies; (3) monitor the content of textbooks for “fair” comparisons of socialism, fascism and communism; and (4) maintain a system of “constant surveillance” of textbooks, television, radio and other media.

Notwithstanding the bellicose framing, we can also discern a subtle whine of victimhood in Powell’s memo. The most powerful, wealthy, and privileged members of society are under attack and must defend themselves to survive!!! We see a nascent form of too much and never enough. The rhetoric definitively connects corporate self-interest to national welfare—the “what’s good for GM is good for America” trope. We also see the beginnings of a style of demonization—anyone who is concerned about the environment, working people, consumer safety, voting rights, or anything else that involves the welfare of the “little people” against the corporatocracy is an enemy of America.

In order to accomplish this broad and multi-front war, Powell recommended that “American business” should earmark 10% (an amount that is analogous to religious tithing) of its total annual advertising budget to this purpose. American business also should get over its aversion to “confrontation politics…[and] consider assuming a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena.”  Although nothing changed immediately, we know today that business responded to Powell’s call.

 

Robert Reich explains how the Powell memo launched the “corporate takeover of American politics.”