A Dastardly Duo--and a Secret Memo. (And on a Friday evening, could anything be better?)
The August 30 issue of The New Yorker includes a long article on Charles and David Koch entitled “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.”
Needless to say, the article proves predictably and risibly tendentious. Since George Soros funds the left, he receives only a polite, passing mention. Since the Koch brothers give money to organizations that promote free markets, advocate low taxes, and question global warming, they’re portrayed as sinister, self-dealing, shadowy, and pernicious; a couple of Mr. Bigs intent on taking over the world—and doing a pretty good job of it. (The reporter, Jane Mayer, seems honestly to believe that the Tea Party has more to do with the organizations the Kochs have founded than with the policies of Barack Obama. “The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections,” she asserts, “represents a political triumph for the Kochs.”)
Still, the piece contains a lot of interesting reporting—and almost every word heightens my admiration for the brothers from Wichita. (I knew they’d helped to found the CATO Institute. I had no idea that they had also helped to establish the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and Americans for Prosperity. Good on ‘em.)
One question—or, rather, bleg:
The article mentions a 1971 memorandum that sounds like an interesting piece of work:
The Kochs’ subsidization of a pro-corporate movement fulfills, in many ways, the vision laid out in a secret 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, then a Virginia attorney, wrote two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors, such as Dow Chemical, and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.
Does anyone know anything about that memorandum? Who at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned it, for example? Or, more to the point, how the Chamber responded? (My guess: that the Chamber acted on hardly any of Powell’s recommendations. Then as now, the basic posture of business in any confrontation with the left was supine. But all the same it’d be interesting to know.)
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Aug '10
Re: A Dastardly Duo--and a Secret Memo. (And on a Friday evening, could anything be better?)
Steve Teles talks about the Powell memo in his book The Conservative Legal Movement. the Powell memo was also discussed in a symposium about the book at Crooked Timber (the contribution by Aaron Swartz is particularly good for this question). Pretty much all the people on that symposium (including Teles) agreed that the memo had little practical impact but is often discussed in histories of the modern right because it seems like it should be true (from the perspective of people trying to explain what they see as corporate hegemony).
May '10
Re: A Dastardly Duo--and a Secret Memo. (And on a Friday evening, could anything be better?)
I heard the author interviewed on Fresh Air last night and it was ridiculous. David Koch is a benefactor to the Arts and cancer research AND he gives money to "right wing" causes (a fascinating schizophrenic!) The brothers keep their powerful and secret dealings quiet because they don't want people who buy Brawny paper towels to know they are working to destroy Obama. They do all these good works AND they use formaldehyde in many of their products. (How do they live with themselves?) She didn't get any information from them but talked to at least one person that used to work for them. Hmm,
Jul '10
Re: A Dastardly Duo--and a Secret Memo. (And on a Friday evening, could anything be better?)
I honestly don't see why any conservative would speak to someone from the left wing media, which describes just about all of it. There is a new study out that says 89 percent of the journalists who donated to political campaigns in the last election gave to liberal candidates. That confirms an early survey that showed that 95 percent vote Democrat. And, please, no baloney about that not making a difference because they strive to be fair to both sides. If the polity is polarized it is because the oddly-named mainstream media has thrown in with one side and people finally caught on..
Jul '10
Re: A Dastardly Duo--and a Secret Memo. (And on a Friday evening, could anything be better?)
Unfortunately, it's not surprising this wasn't acted upon. A few things come to mind. First, think about the market situation in the early 70's. There were a lot of entrenched large corporations wanting to hold onto their piece of the pie. It was hardly a business-friendly environment. This, in turn, produces a certain amount of paralysis even today with businesses that deal in regulated markets. I can only guess (born in '73) that most large companies, that is the corporations with the money to wage such a campaign, all felt they were in that category with the wage and price controls put into place by the Nixon administration. This also may have been the start of an American management culture that measured success by the quarter. In such an environment, executive teams don't throw resources to a campaign such as the one proposed by Powell.
I saw this first hand in Chicago. Twice in three years I warned the company I worked for that we should take the lead in lobbying against further regulation in a market. A government entity previously created its own monopoly (through statute) in a similar market. Guess what happened.
Re: A Dastardly Duo--and a Secret Memo. (And on a Friday evening, could anything be better?)
Thanks, anon_academic, for the reference. And, Chris O., for that account of your own experience. Honestly, I do sometimes despair. Lenin was wrong. You don't have to give businessmen the rope with which to hang themselves. Give them time. They'll make it themselves.
Jul '10
Re: A Dastardly Duo--and a Secret Memo. (And on a Friday evening, could anything be better?)
Peter, don't despair. The people I worked for were hardly businesspeople, they were more academic oriented (it was a publishing company). What the boss said was, "Regulation is good, it means we can put more products out there." I pointed out that in a comparable market, the government regulatory body simply required that everyone buy their materials. There was no response.
There are a lot of people out there and you meet many in big cities (makes sense) that either cannot or do not want to look below the surface. Is it denial that there are things going wrong? Is it ignorance? I'm not sure which to hope for. More likely, it is that these people are in a place they consider safe, and they don't want to do anything to rock the boat. But you know what? Out of this frustration, new businesses are born and new leaders emerge.
Aug '10
Re: A Dastardly Duo--and a Secret Memo. (And on a Friday evening, could anything be better?)
I think you meant to say that there is an old--a very old--study just out...
Aug '10
Re: A Dastardly Duo--and a Secret Memo. (And on a Friday evening, could anything be better?)
Wow, Peter, that was good. It also is a very inviting point of reflection why this is so. Who knows, it might even be useful to come up with an answer!