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THE WITNESS
Charlie Cray works with the Greenpeace USA research team. A new investigation by the Center for Public Integrity reveals that Exxon, Dow, the Kochs and other corporations have spent millions to sponsor judicial junkets – weekend seminars where sitting judges are “educated” in conservative legal theory and corporate-friendly topics such as “Corporations and the Limits of Criminal Law.” As if that were not enough, CPI adds that some of judges attending the seminars later presided over cases filed the same companies. Continue reading
With less than a week to go before California voters decide whether they want food that contains genetically engineered (GE) ingredients to be explicitly labeled as such, the board of the American Association for the Advance of Science (AAAS) has proclaimed from its prestigious perch that those who want Frankenfoods to be labeled are little more than emotional nuts who know nothing about science.
That the AAAS would enjoin this battle is hardly a surprise, given its longstanding ties to Monsanto and other companies with a direct interest in the outcome. But the group says that its real motivation for opposing mandatory labeling is because doing so would “mislead and falsely alarm consumers.”
“Our concern is that ideology not trump science here,” AAAS Chief Executive Alan Leshner told the LA Times. “We do regulation of foods to protect the public health.” Continue reading
Barry Commoner, a pioneer scientists in the environmental movement and Greenpeace campaigns adviser, died Sunday.
Barry Commoner (1917-2012) had a deep influence on Greenpeace back in the 1980s and 1990s, and was often way ahead of us on particular fronts. Back then, his books were on shelves all over the office, especially Making Peace With the Planet, a powerful, integrated analysis of the environmental crisis. Barry was an adviser to Greenpeace’s Toxics Campaign who spoke at Greenpeace-sponsored conferences, authored at least one GP report (“Breaking Down the Degradable Plastics Scam” made a point so simple that I still remember it — which is that if a polymer doesn’t break down to smaller monomers that are less than 50 microns in size, they won’t get assimilated into the food web and therefore cannot be called “biodegradable” — the report itself was a very useful challenge to a specific example of what we commonly refer to now as “greenwashing”). Continue reading
Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, joins the People's Summit march during Rio+20 Conference for Social and Environmental Justice in Rio de Janeiro.
The United Nations conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20) was destined to be a corporate clusterfrack that environmental groups walked away from bitter about the over 200 governments’ failure to deliver any significant agreements.
At the same time, there will be a number of announcements – mostly coming from the corporate community and their allies in the UN bureaucracy – that package their own commitments as bold new initiatives along the path to economic and environmental sustainability. Continue reading
Forty years ago, not only was Greenpeace formed, but a then-obscure corporate lawyer (later appointed by President Nixon to the Supreme Court) drafted a memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that forever changed the influence of big business on our political and cultural landscape.
As part of our investigation of the history and subsequent consequences of Lewis Powell’s Memorandum for the Chamber, Greenpeace has compiled a series of references and related analysis that trace specific corporate activities to the overall strategy that Powell sketched out in his memo.
In four inter-related pages, we describe how the Chamber and other leading members of Corporate America targeted specific public areas for increased influence, if not outright takeover:
Politics – With particular focus on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell advocated that corporations take a much more aggressive and direct role in politics. Since Powell’s day corporate lobbying expenditures and donations to politicians have exploded in size and relative importance, pulling elected officials away from various public interests towards the enduring priorities of big business.
Judicial and Legal System – Powell identified the judiciary as one of the most important arenas for business activism. His suggestions led to the swift formation of dozens of corporate-funded legal foundations, many of which succeeded in using strategic litigation and distorted constitutional doctrines to overturn regulations on public health and the environment. The U.S. Chamber and its allies in particular have waged a multi-decade attack on the rights of victims of corporate crime and abuse. Perhaps the most infamous example of how corporate power has been advanced through the strategies seeded by Powell is last year’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate contributions to influence elections.
Mass Media and Communications – Lewis Powell encouraged corporations to leverage their ownership and advertising power to influence mass media. Recent decades have seen massive consolidation of mainstream media, resulting not only in the decline of independent and investigative journalism, but a clear pro-corporate news bias.
Schools and Education – One of the most important themes of the Powell Memo was for corporate America to invest in a long-term effort to influence educational curricula and reduce their most outspoken critics’ influence on campus. Corporations have since used a variety of means to influence university research and campus culture.
Greenpeace has dealt increasingly with the growing corporate-oriented framework that was created in part by the suggestions of Lewis Powell. A broad network of corporate think tanks, trade associations and legal foundations that has rapidly expanded since the 1970s is at the heart of the climate science denial movement, funded by the likes of Koch Industries and ExxonMobil.
Numerous other examples exist of industries harnessing the power of their money and public relations resources to trample scientific integrity and environmental or public health protections. Chemical companies avoid responsibility for looming disasters and are even willing to spy on opponents in order to avoid accountability. Familiar tuna brands turn a blind eye to their role in destructive fishing practices. The nuclear industry continues to push for false solutions to climate change even as Japan continues to struggle with a nuclear disaster. Dirty U.S. coal companies threaten the health of residents in frontline communities and fuel global climate disruption. And global warming is further intensified by U.S. companies that drive deforestation operations around the world.
One wonders if corporations have already crossed a line in dominating the key institutions so crucial to a robust democracy that even Lewis Powell would have been alarmed.
For more on the Powell Memo, check out our previous blog (Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy) written on the 40th anniversary of its release, and be sure to read the Powell Memo yourself.
Greenpeace has the full text of the Lewis Powell Memo available for review, as well as analyses of how Lewis Powell’s suggestions have impacted the realms of politics, judicial law, communications and education.
Forty years ago today, on August 23, 1971, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., an attorney from Richmond, Virginia, drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that describes a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society.
Powell and his friend Eugene Sydnor, then-chairman of the Chamber’s education committee, believed the Chamber had to transform itself from a passive business group into a powerful political force capable of taking on what Powell described as a major ongoing “attack on the American free enterprise system.”
An astute observer of the business community and broader social trends, Powell was a former president of the American Bar Association and a board member of tobacco giant Philip Morris and other companies. In his memo, he detailed a series of possible “avenues of action” that the Chamber and the broader business community should take in response to fierce criticism in the media, campus-based protests, and new consumer and environmental laws.
Environmental awareness and pressure on corporate polluters had reached a new peak in the months before the Powell memo was written. In January 1970, President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which formally recognized the environment’s importance by establishing the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Massive Earth Day events took place all over the country just a few months later and by early July, Nixon signed an executive order that created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Tough new amendments to the Clean Air Act followed in December 1970 and by April 1971, EPA announced the first air pollution standards. Lead paint was soon regulated for the first time, and the awareness of the impacts of pesticides and other pollutants– made famous by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book, Silent Spring – was recognized when DDT was finally banned for agricultural use in 1972.
The overall tone of Powell’s memo reflected a widespread sense of crisis among elites in the business and political communities. “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack,” he suggested, adding that the attacks were not coming just from a few “extremists of the left,” but also – and most alarmingly — from “perfectly respectable elements of society,” including leading intellectuals, the media, and politicians.
To meet the challenge, business leaders would have to first recognize the severity of the crisis, and begin marshalling their resources to influence prominent institutions of public opinion and political power — especially the universities, the media and the courts. The memo emphasized the importance of education, values, and movement-building. Corporations had to reshape the political debate, organize speakers’ bureaus and keep television programs under “constant surveillance.” Most importantly, business needed to recognize that political power must be “assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination – without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”
Powell emphasized the importance of strengthening institutions like the U.S. Chamber — which represented the interests of the broader business community, and therefore key to creating a united front. While individual corporations could represent their interests more aggressively, the responsibility of conducting an enduring campaign would necessarily fall upon the Chamber and allied foundations. Since business executives had “little stomach for hard-nosed contest with their critics” and “little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate,” it was important to create new think tanks, legal foundations, front groups and other organizations. The ability to align such groups into a united front would only come about through “careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and united organizations.”
Before he was appointed by Richard Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court Powell circulated his call for a business crusade not only to the Chamber, but also to executives at corporations including General Motors. The memo did not become available to the public until after Powell’s confirmation to the Court, when it was leaked to Jack Anderson, a syndicated columnist and investigative reporter, who cited it as reason to doubt Powell’s legal objectivity.
Anderson’s report spread business leaders’ interest in the memo even further. Soon thereafter, the Chamber’s board of directors formed a task force of 40 business executives (from U.S. Steel, GE, ABC, GM, CBS, 3M, Phillips Petroleum, Amway and numerous other companies) to review Powell’s memo and draft a list of specific proposals to “improve understanding of business and the private enterprise system,” which the board adopted on November 8, 1973.
Historian Kim Phillips-Fein describes how “many who read the memo cited it afterward as inspiration for their political choices.” In fact, Powell’s Memo is widely credited for having helped catalyze a new business activist movement, with numerous conservative family and corporate foundations (e.g. Coors, Olin, Bradley, Scaife, Koch and others) thereafter creating and sustaining powerful new voices to help push the corporate agenda, including the Business Roundtable (1972), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC – 1973), Heritage Foundation (1973), the Cato Institute (1977), the Manhattan Institute (1978), Citizens for a Sound Economy (1984 – now Americans for Prosperity), Accuracy in Academe (1985), and others.
Because it signaled the beginning of a major shift in American business culture, political power and law, the Powell memo essentially marks the beginning of the business community’s multi-decade collective takeover of the most important institutions of public opinion and democratic decision-making. At the very least, it is the first place where this broad agenda was compiled in one document.
That shift continues today, with corporate influence over policy and politics reaching unprecedented new dimensions. The decades-long drive to rethink legal doctrines and ultimately strike down the edifice of campaign finance laws – breaking radical new ground with the Roberts Court’s decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission – continues apace.
Although many new voices have emerged in the 40 years since it circulated Powell’s memo, the U.S. Chamber has expanded its leadership position within the corporate power movement, leading dozens of judicial, legislative and regulatory fights each year. Measured in terms of money spent, the Chamber is by far the most powerful lobby in Washington, DC, spending $770.6 million since 1998, over three times the amount spent by General Electric, the second-largest spender. At the same time, the Chamber has reinforced its lobbying power by becoming one of the largest conduits of election-related “independent expenditures,” spending over $32.8 million on Federal elections in 2010. The Chamber sponsors the Institute for Legal Reform, which has spearheaded the campaign for tort “reform,” making it more difficult for average people who have been injured, assaulted, or harmed to sue the responsible corporations. Along with well over a dozen legal foundations, the Chamber has also helped shape the powerful “business civil liberties” movement that has been a driving force behind the Citizens United decision and other judicial actions that have handcuffed regulators and prevented Congress from putting common-sense checks on corporate power.
In December, 2009 Greenpeace established a climate crime scene in front of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for their ongoing obstruction to global warming solutions.
Cited Sources:
Jack Anderson, Washington Report, Volume 12, No. 24, November 26, 1973. Available at: http://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=view&d=5972.
Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009
Jeff Krehely, Meaghan House and Emily Kernan, “Axis of Ideology: Conservative Foundations and Policy,” National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2004
Michael Waldman, Executive Director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law cites the Powell memo as the inspiration for the ideological war waged on behalf of the “free market” approach to the First Amendment that has elevated the rights of corporate speakers. See Waldman’s introduction to “Money, Politics and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United,” by Monica Youn (ed.), New York: Century Foundation Press, 2011
Additional References:
Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Papers, Powell Archives, Washington and Lee University School of Law. More information available at: http://law.wlu.edu/powellarchives/
Nan Aron, “Justice for Sale: Shortchanging The Public Interest for Private Gain.” Washington, DC: Alliance for Justice, 1993
Oliver A. Houck, “With Charity for All.” New Haven, CT: Yale Law Journal, Volume 93, No. 8, July 1984.
Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, “No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda,” Temple University Press, 1996.