We’ve embedded the text of the so-called Powell Memo, named for its author Lewis Powell, later a Nixon Administration Supreme Court appointment, It set forth a roadmap for an open ended war to roll back New Deal protections and make America more deferential to the pet needs of businesses. It’s been an astonishingly successful campaign. The corporate profit share of GDP has risen to a level nearly twice the level that Warren Buffett deemed to be unsustainable and has remained there. The Supreme Court has deemed corporations to be persons and has given corporate speech the same privileges in campaigns as personal speech. Class action lawyers, one of the important means for preventing big companies from engaging in small-ticket but large scale pilfering, have been neutered. Unions represent a much lower proportion of workers than they did in the 1960s and 1970s, and have vastly less respect and political clout.
One can go on, but you get the idea.
If you read the memo, you’ll see how lawyers like Ralph Nader and William Kunstler are held up as the sort of foe that must be cut down to size because they have the temerity to say bad things about the way businesses work.
— source nakedcapitalism.com | Yves Smith | Aug 23, 2021