The Powell Memo: Font of Wingnut Power

A bit of disclosure before we begin: I am fascinated by money, finance, and economics. The way human beings agree to deal with each other on a daily basis has a certain music to it. Granted, we don't usually look at it that way: we tend only to pay attention to the people we like or the people we hate (sometimes those being the same people) and the vast flesh of humanity is something we generally don't think about at all. And as I wrote sometime ago, I am a capitalist at heart. I think that particular economic arrangement has granted millions of people better lives in the material sense more quickly than they might have had otherwise. On balance I think that's a good thing.

That said, my research has pointed me to one conclusion: there is very little "free" about the free market. Everything I have found leads me to conclude markets are imposed and enforced by governing entities, not randomly emergent events (there go my limited libertarian credentials, I suppose.) Even if two strangers make a trade on the spur of the moment, there are certain rules that each must have agreed to follow before the trade goes forth. E.g., both are supposed to be getting something of relatively equal value, in perception if not reality; both have entered into the agreement of their own free will; and neither is going to try to use force to steal back what has been traded at a future moment (such as one guy's friends ambushing the other on his way home.) Markets have enforceable rules, even if those rules are made up on the spot and even if the enforcement mechanism is no more than the good will of each participant. A working market relies on a consistently reliable level of co-operation between the participants. Anything else is mere robbery. Therefore markets can't be free in the sense that they can't be unlimited or randomly emergent events. (I can't trade an unlimited amount of something for a limited amount of something else, and when two people trade, there's a conscious attempt by each to offer something of value for something of equivalent value, not a random exchange for no reason.)

In that vein, the mythology about the so-called free market in this country which has been firmly in place since 1981 in this country didn't arise merely because people got tired of the government making rules--which is what a government is supposed to do, by the way. It happened because it was a planned takeover of our national way of thinking about government, what it was, what it was supposed to do, and why. Henry A. Giroux describes the process and its origns.

From Truthout.org:

The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of Right-Wing Extremists

Thursday 01 October 2009

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t

    Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, echoing the feelings of many progressives, recently wrote in The New York Times about how dismayed he was over the success right-wing ideologues have had not only in undercutting Obama's health care bill, but also in mobilizing enormous public support against almost any reform aimed at rolling back the economic, political, and social conditions that have created the economic recession and the legacy of enormous suffering and hardship for millions of Americans over the last 30 years.[1] Krugman is somewhat astonished that after almost three decades the political scene is still under the sway of what he calls the "zombie doctrine of Reaganism," - the notion that any action by government is bad, except when it benefits corporations and the rich. Clearly, for Krugman, zombie Reaganism appears once again to be shaping policies under the Obama regime. And yet, not only did Reaganism with its hatred of the social state, celebration of unbridled self-interest, its endless quest to privatize everything, and support for deregulation of the economic system eventually bring the country to near economic collapse, it also produced enormous suffering for those who never benefited from the excesses of the second Gilded Age, especially workers, the poor, disadvantaged minorities and eventually large segments of the middle class. And yet, zombie market politics is back rejecting the public option in Obama's health plan, fighting efforts to strengthen bank regulations, resisting caps on CEO bonuses, preventing climate-control legislation, and refusing to limit military spending. Unlike other pundits, Krugman does not merely puzzle over how zombie politics can keep turning up on the political scene - a return not unlike the endless corpses who keep coming back to life in George Romero's 1968 classic film, "Night of the Living Dead" (think of Bill Kristol who seems to be wrong about everything but just keeps coming back). For Krugman, a wacky and discredited right-wing politics is far from dead and, in fact, one of the great challenges of the current moment is to try to understand the conditions that allow it to once again shape American politics and culture, given the enormous problems it has produced at all levels of American society, including the current recession.

    Part of the answer to the enduring quality of such a destructive politics can be found in the lethal combination of money, power and education that the right wing has had a stranglehold on since the early 1970's and how it has used its influence to develop an institutional infrastructure and ideological apparatus to produce its own intellectuals, disseminate ideas, and eventually control most of the commanding heights and institutions in which knowledge is produced, circulated and legitimated. This is not simply a story about the rise of mean-spirited buffoons such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage. Nor is it simply a story about the loss of language, a growing anti-intellectualism in the larger culture, or the spread of what some have called a new illiteracy endlessly being produced in popular culture. As important as these tendencies are, there is something more at stake here which points to a combination of power, money and education in the service of creating an almost lethal restriction of what can be heard, said, learned and debated in the public sphere. And one starting point for understanding this problem is what has been called the Powell Memo, released on August 23, 1971, and written by Lewis F. Powell, who would later be appointed as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Powell sent the memo to the US Chamber of Commerce with the title "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System."

Read the entire article at Truthout.org. I would say "Enjoy!" but this kind of wholesale hijacking of the ideals of the United States of America is stomach-turning, even for me. With that in mind, I will say merely, Endure!