How/Why we ended up loosing

[Mulkum]

http://www.mediatransparency.org/stories/powell.htm

The Powell Manifesto

How A Prominent Lawyer's
Attack Memo Changed America

Copyright 2002 Jerry M. Landay
for Mediatransparency.org

POSTED AUGUST 20, 2002 --

America's Second Gilded Age has been scoured of its glitter, along with the platitudes that its town criers preached -- "too
much government," "market infallibility," and "prosperity forever." The policies and ethical failures that sprang from this
gospel are under intense scrutiny. After 30 years, the self-serving creed of a right-wing coalition of wealth and power --
ideologues, promoters, corporate executives, and the American aristocracy of money - is under
assault, its system failures increasingly apparent. Their ideology tantalized millions with the
promise of "getting the government off our backs!"

The consequences of this readily marketable guff have led us to drastically altered economic
circumstances -- a ruinous drop in both stock values and ethical standards that has weakened
the economy; far worse, a global loss of confidence in the American economic system, and in a
pro-market administration that is squandering America's good name and credibility among allies
and friends

The troubadours of market fundamentalism argued that free markets work better than
governments. In fact, the underlying problem was the absence of effective oversight by a
government responsive to its people. The market was never "free," instead it was/is the tool of
insiders who tilt the rules in favor of themselves. The current financial cost of this economic
fraud runs to $8 trillion. Numbers cannot, however, measure the incalculable sums in pain and
suffering sustained by the real victims -- small investors, pensioners, fired workers, and their families.

The Idea Apparat

The house that so-called New Conservatism built has operated on the principle that "ideas have consequences." The
principal "ideas" they marketed were individual gain over public good, deregulation, big tax cuts, and privatization. For two
decades, since the installation of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the radical right has run a tightly coordinated campaign to seal
its hold on the organs of power, ranging from the highest law courts to the largest corporations, from the White House to
Capitol Hill, from television tubes to editorial pages, and across college campuses.

They have constructed a well-paid activist apparatus of idea merchants and marketeers -- scholars, writers, journalists,
publishers, and critics - to sell policies whose intent was to ratchet wealth upward. They have intimidated the mainstream
media, and filled the vacuum with editors, columnists, talk-show hosts, and pundits who have turned conservatism into a
career tool. They have waged a culture war to reduce the rich social heritage of liberalism to a pejorative. And they have
propagated a mythic set of faux-economic values that have largely served those who financed the movement in the first
place.

The Greatest Power Grab

Beginning in the early 1970s, a new conservative establishment set a counter-movement in motion to replace the
institutions and expunge the ideas of American liberalism, which had dominated public thought and social policy since the
New Deal. A new breed of conservatives sought to roll back a set of social gains going back to FDR, Truman, Johnson,
and Kennedy.

They shifted the nation rightward; tilted the distribution of the nation's assets away from the middle class and the poor,
the elderly, and the young; they red-penciled laws and legal precedents at the heart of American justice. They aimed to
corporatize Medicare and Social Security. They marketed class values while accusing their opponents of "class warfare."
They loosened or repealed the rights and protections of organized labor and the poor, voters, and minorities. They
slashed the taxes of corporations and the rich, and rolled back the economic gains of the rest. They came to dominate or
heavily influence centers of scholarship, law, and politics, education, and governance - or put new ones in their place.
Their litigation teams nearly overthrew an elected President. And, to maintain power, proclaimed Constitutionalists on the
right, to this day, wage a concerted counter- revolution against such Constitutional guarantees as free speech and
separation of church and state.

Movement conservatism was a power tool formulated by scholars such as Irving Kristol, political organizers like the late
Treasury Secretary William Simon, opinion molders and popularizers such as William F. Buckley, and a phalanx of
think-tank operatives including Edwin Feulner and Paul Weyrich. A highly integrated front of activist organizations has
been generously funded by the banking and oil money of the Mellon-Scaifes of Pittsburgh, the manufacturing fortunes of
Lynde and Harry Bradley of Milwaukee, the energy revenues of the Koch family of Kansas, the chemical profits of John M.
Olin of New York, the Vicks patent-medicine empire of the Smith Richardson family of Greensboro, N.C., and the brewing
assets of the Coors dynasty of Colorado, and others.

Their grants have paid for a veritable constellation of think tanks, pressure groups, special-interest foundations, litigation
centers, scholarly research and funding endowments, publishing and TV production houses, media attack operations,
political consultancies, polling mills, and public-relations operations. The concerted campaigns they run, also underwritten
by such self-interested corporations as those in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and finance, have weakened the AARP, the
Food and Drug Administration, Head Start, Medicare, and welfare programs.

This has amounted to the greatest organized power grab in American political history. Astonishingly, it goes largely
unreported on television, radio, and most newspapers because of the applied political muscle of what Sidney Blumenthal,
in his important history of the movement, has dubbed the "counter-establishment."

Its media-attack tactics have largely silenced the critical attention of the mainstream press. Americans, therefore, remain
largely unaware of the sweeping changes movement conservatism has wrought.

[Melodybe]

1. Damn straight, good stuff, we should keep this kicked!

even though great posts like this have a tendency to fall through the cracks cuz even here some hate a long post.

[Selatius]

2. The apparat is nearly unstoppable in the short term

They've invested three decades into building their political machine (the apparat), and they only now enjoy the fruits of their labor. This is why I also call policy wonks in rightwing foundations and institutes "apparatchiks," the term used to describe bureaucrats in the Soviet machine. They even have their own version of the "fifth column" in the form of the DLC, which is subsidized by corporate money with the purpose of undermining the Democratic Party from the inside-out.

Their motivation is greed. Their goal is power. These guys will never stop because greed cannot be satisfied. We may be able to slow them down presently given our collective resources, but it could be a while before we begin reversing the trend. It took them decades to get here. It could be just as long for us to bring about our era of progressivism.

[Mulkum]

3. Their plan will destroy America

The complaints they have are 30 years out of date, some don't even exist any more.
If they keep on doing what they are doing, the world will place sanctions on the USA and we will be alienated from the rest of the world.
As it stands now, China uses more oil than we do, and they hold the loans our country is taking out as we go into debt. All they have to do is call in the loans and the USA will be bankrupt.

But Bush and co. don't even know how bad off we are, they don't see it.

[chiburb]

4. Because we can't spell? n/t