August 1971. The American dream is running a fever. The dollar just came untethered from gold.
The Vietnam War is a wound that just won't close. And a guy named Ralph Nader is convincing housewives
that their new Chevrolet might just be a death trap. For the men in the wood paneled boardrooms,
it felt like the apocalypse. So one of them, a quiet, impeccably dressed lawyer for the tobacco
industry, sat down and wrote a memo. It was a confidential battle plan, a call to arms for a
class war. He didn't just want to win an argument. He wanted to rewrite the rules of America. And the
terrifying thing is he did. This is the story of the Powell Memo, the secret blueprint.
That built the world we're living in right now.
And welcome back everyone to the podcast. This is the overlap. I am your co-host Joshua. And with
me is your favorite co-host, William Wilde. Say hello. Hello, everybody. We hope that you are as
excited as we are about this topic. You probably have actually never heard of this. In fact,
unless you do a whole lot of deep digging into right wing historical archives, you probably never
even heard of this guy. He actually was up for Supreme Court justice. His name is Louis F Powell
Jr. But we are excited to talk to you. If you're new to the podcast, welcome. We are a podcast that
talks about the intersection of politics and the intersection of economic and class issues. We talk
about a lot of technology because both of us are technologists in some form or fashion, and we each
have our specialty, mind being technology, and will being predominantly everything else. So we are,
we're happy to have you here today if it's your first time. If it is your first time,
go ahead and give us a thumbs up, maybe a five star rating on whatever podcast format you're
listening to today. We'd love to have you back. And please do remember to like and subscribe.
Not my first time, Joshua, but I'll give you a thumbs up, two thumbs up even.
Thanks for that. Thanks. Who's got two thumbs up for this guy?
Yeah. By the way, fun fact that I actually just remembered, um, not really relevant to anything
except Louis F Powell Jr. But I was actually, back in my days as a litigator, as an attorney,
I was opposite his grandson in a lawsuit in Virginia. It was very exciting stuff.
To me, it's always funny that these things happen in places that you don't associate with like,
you know, progressive tendencies. Right. Like tobacco farms of-
Exactly. It's like, it's like the garbages places in the country. No, no offense. You know,
Virginia's for lovers and everything. And I love Virginia, but like these were like old school,
you know, still had ideas about the civil war and felt that they were, their families were hurt,
but yeah. So there is a connection there, is what you're saying. There is a random unrelated one,
but nevertheless, Hey, it's the, uh, it's the two degrees of the overlap instead of Kevin Bacon.
Well, let's get started to talk about this, uh, piece of work.
So first of all, let me just say this, uh, this specifically relates to a memo, uh, in 1971, we're
going to, we're going to talk about a couple of things in 1971, um, that all kind of culminated
around, um, you know, the end of America, no big deal. Um, and kind of a lot of the origins of
the things that we're literally seeing today, really 1971, there's just, there's just no way
around it, but specifically this, this whole, uh, Powell memo. So we're going to talk a little bit
about, about the man, the myth, the legend, Louis F. Powell Jr. Uh, we're going to talk about kind
of what formed him, what shaped him as well as kind of the sociopolitical, uh, situation that was
surrounding the 1960s in the 1970s and through the lens of how it related to Powell. Um, and then
we're going, we're going to bring it back to the memo, exactly what it says. Now we're not going
to be reading the memo for you today. It's 34 pages long. And I did read the, the memo, you can access
it. It's in the federal archives. It's long, it's convoluted. A lot of it is really, uh, pompous
and written from a very, like, uh, a very high horse, I guess I should say, um, it's sort of a
confidential memo between friends. Yes. Uh, between him and all of the power players in the country,
the U S chamber of commerce, a lot of the things that we're seeing now, we're going to tie them
back. Oh, kind of where they came from, what the strategies were listed and some of the organizations
that we're seeing affect our real world politics every day and how, how that has been actioned
into what we are seeing today. Maybe in a, in a later time, we'll kind of talk about how to
fight that. But I think we do that a little bit all the time anyway, right? I mean, we, we talk
about how to fight these things, but I think it's important to kind of take a rewind and take a
historical look at why these things happened and why they existed. And so when I was broaching this
topic with will to do the podcast, he was receptive to it, but it's, it's just a very lesser known
thing in the, in the world of understanding where we come from, why we're here now from where we
came from. And so, you know, a lot of times it's easy to go, yes, it all started with a Reagan,
but really it started before that. And this is, this is one of those things that actually led to
Reagan really was just like we've talked about Trump being before they were the symptom, right?
We're, we're trying to rewind and figure out the cause because I think that only when you,
you really truly understand history, can you sort of help from repeating it. What are your thoughts?
I agree. I think it's, it's bizarre how important a pivotal a year in 1971 actually was.
I don't think anybody really saw that coming, but it definitely makes a top 10 list of most
influential years in the history of our country. Maybe even a top five, right? A lot, a lot of
forces coming together, opposing forces and various things. I mean, no one will get into it,
so I won't spoil anything, but there's some crazy things that happened that year.
And this was one of the crazier ones. Absolutely. Well, would you like to,
to kind of give us a little background? Sure. So we have Louis F Powell Jr., a future Supreme
Court justice. In fact, he would be nominated two weeks, two months after sending this memo in.
And Mr. Powell was very pleased with the free enterprise system, let's say put it that way.
He found a lot to love there and felt like it was under attack from all sorts of crazies,
like socialists and communists and minorities and just people who didn't like big business and the
way they ran, ran rough shot over its consumers. And so he took it upon himself to contact the,
the powers that be in the form of the US chamber of commerce in order to express his concerns
and recruit them to this plan that he had to save America from, from the lefties,
the leftists and the revolutionaries. Yes.
That's what the memo, that's where the memo is coming from. It's his sort of plan to save America
and his, his playbook for how that was going to happen. So let's talk about, about a little
bit earlier Louis F Powell Jr. Right. He was, he was, he didn't see himself as a, as a big idea
man, ready to go and ready to burn a new path. He was really just a picture of exactly what the
American establishment was going for. He was the epitome of the American dream, so to speak.
Very much the corporate lawyer. Yes, he had his beautiful little pattern tie and, and, uh, was a,
kind of a dangerous display of emotion. So he was born in Virginia. So it's not coincidental that
you might've ran into his grandson practicing law there, but he was an absolute academic powerhouse
superstar. He was magna cum laude. He was in Phi Beta Kappa. He was the president of the student
body at Washington and Lee university. He was first in his class at law school. Uh, and then he,
then he got a master's from Harvard, you know, just for an extra helping of fun. And then after that,
he became a partner at the Richmond law firm and was pretty classic corporate lawyer, exactly what
you'd expect, you know, very polished, very, um, very quiet and on the outside, but, but also a
storm brewing on the inside. He's the kind of person who sits on like the board of kind of
everything, right? All the major companies and, and is kind of considered this pillar of American
legal establishment of, as the law, right. But beneath that, right, was a, was a, I guess a mind
kind of created in a very specific kind of conflict during world war II Powell wasn't,
wasn't like the infantry, you know, he wasn't cleaning guns and eating MREs. He was an
intelligence officer. So he worked on the top secret ultra project, which I'm sure eventually
we're going to cover, but it was a, of MK Ultra fame. Yes. And, and so it was a unit really
dedicated to interpreting the, uh, the German communications, not the drug MK ultra one.
Okay. Different ultra project. Yes, different ultra project. So his job was basically to sit in a
room and analyze signals that were coming in from, from German soldiers, right. And figure out
patterns and map out the enemy strategy, um, from what he could pick up. So that experiment, I mean,
that experience that he had doing that was, was kind of pivotal in the memo that we kind of see
later. So when he looked out at the, the goings on in the 1960s and seventies, we had, you know,
student protestors and consumer advocates and, and, um, civil rights leaders, you know, he,
he didn't see this like messy democratic society trying to figure out how to change. He saw a
coordinated attack. He saw it as a specific vector. He saw enemy combatants sort of engaged in
what he actually called guerrilla warfare. I think already we're starting to see a pattern
in what we're dealing with now. So much like everything the hammer sees as a nail,
everything the soldier sees is an enemy combatant, right? Exactly. The warrior for the free enterprise
system. A hundred percent. Okay. So long even before then powell was, was deeply troubled by
another person who, who sort of challenged the system that as we think of it and that person
was the both the famed and the troublesome Martin Luther King jr. throughout the 1960s. And I mean,
I'm sure if you're listening from our audience, you, you are familiar with the works of Dr. Keefe,
but throughout the sixties when he served as the Powell served as the president of the American
bar association, he delivered a series of like speeches and wrote articles, basically denouncing
the core tactic of the civil rights movement, which was civil disobedience. And he called it heresy,
specifically said it was fundamentally inconsistent with the rule of law.
And he thought it was a threat to the foundations of our system of government.
He was very, very upset, especially by King's letter from a Birmingham jail,
because the idea that an individual had some sort of, and to quote Dr. King, a moral responsibility
to disobey unjust laws. Powell felt like it was absurd, right? He, he mocked it, even called it a
doctrine of anarchy that provided kind of no basis for an organized society. So for Powell,
the constitution was not a vehicle for reform, like, like progressive see it. He thought of it
as a sacred set of procedures. So once the, the Supreme court in Brown versus board of education,
sort of dismantled educational segregation, Powell believed that the law had done all it could for
black Americans. Absolutely hands down. He thought that that Brown versus board of education was the
epitome of what the United States could do for black Americans. Anything else, anything else,
economic justice for what King called compensatory justice to make up for centuries of slavery and
Jim Crow were in his views. And to quote him, we're reckless extremists. So this kind of reveals the
underlying river of his worldview, right? His primary allegiance was not to justice or quality,
but it was to order and the preservation of our existing system. So. The system of itself was
ultimately sound, right? The problem was that people were attacking it from the outside and
that's kind of the way he saw it. Sounds like his position was sort of that there's no such thing as
an unjust law. If it's the law, it's his justice. It is inherently perfect. Right. Just fine when
you're on the inside, but you find yourself on the wrong side of an unjust law. It's a little
different. Exactly. So if you, if you even did so much as like appealing to a higher moral law,
he was like, no, that's not possible because the law is the highest moral law. And Dr. King
frequently cited the Bible, which most of his persuasion would say is a higher moral law,
and that doesn't fly for Powell. Exactly. So now I want to, I want to kind of throw in here. He was
working for big tobacco during, during all of this. Okay. So and granted, you know, we didn't know
then, well, I don't know, it was the sixties, right? Like, I mean, ultimately we were starting to know
then. I think some people knew. Yeah. At the time he was meeting in. Yeah. They knew. For sure. That,
yeah. Well yeah, that's right. They had that big expose, right? Where they, they have like recordings
and like notes where they, they were being told at this time that it was, it was directly linked to
cancer. So yeah, along that vein, right? The, the world in his eyes was kind of being bombarded and
under siege by this hardened strategic doctrine, right? Like in the trenches of the, the great
corporate culture war. So you had this big tobacco versus kind of the American public situation,
right? So 1964, Powell actually joined the director board of directors of Philip Morris.
So this was not like some quiet, you know, like, oh, he's on the board of so and so. No, no, no, it
was, it was enormous in 1964. That year, the U S surgeon general released the big report
that definitely linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer and to death. Clearly a leftist extremist,
U S general. Exactly. Uh, as they mostly were, and most still are apparently, uh, minus 30%.
So for the next seven years, right? Like 64 to 71 and until his appointment to the supreme court,
Powell was a key player in that tobacco industries, uh, counteroffensive against the narrative that
it causes cancer as a director and member of that executive committee. He was directly responsible
for the campaign to ultimately lie and hide the truth and a manufacturer doubt to fighting
regulations to curb the effects of it. Purportedly we have sources. Be clear, sorry, peaceful civil
disobedience, not okay. Lying in, in reports and correspondence with the federal government. Fine.
That's what we're saying. All right. Okay. Just check it. Exactly. So he actually like personally
reviewed and signed off on the annual reports from Philip Morris actually, uh, containing
statements that were found to be knowingly false. One of them he was cited as, as agreeing to was
there is no biological proof that smoking is causally related to human disease or that
scientific information indicting smoking is quote of dubious validity. Right. Even more revealing
Powell, as a lawyer advising the tobacco Institute began actually testing the legal arguments
that would kind of become central to the conservative movement. So in a case,
he actually argued that because the science linking smoking to cancer was controversial,
a controversy that he literally created with his own company that the first amendments free
speech protections required news organizations to give tobacco companies equal time to counter
anti-smoking. It isn't the playbook. If you don't like what the other side says,
make something up this opposite and claim that they're on equal footing.
Yes. So this is kind of the beginning of using the language of free speech and balance
as a shield for corporate propaganda. He is the, the, the literal lawyer who,
who created it as, as we're seeing it play out today. So the memo, the 34 page diatribe,
let's be honest, it's not a memo. It's a diatribe was not some like abstract political
philosophy that he cooked up from his little ivory tower. Right. It was, it was a field manual
that he, he created from doing it. And he valid was validating it in real time as he was preparing
this, this sort of doctrine. Right. And the strategies that it would lay out for the entire
business community from funding friendly scholars to create a counter narrative, from aggressively
using courts, from demanding that balance in the media and organizing a United political front.
Those were all tactics kind of pioneered, but perfected by the tobacco industry.
When it was trying to fight for survival, kind of like we're seeing happen with, I don't know,
healthcare kind of like we're seeing with, I don't know, every other major corporation,
the United States who has a monopoly on our general welfare. Yeah. Powell kind of had seen firsthand
how if you were powerful and you had enough money and you were organized enough that you could
essentially block any reference or block at least contest and create doubt about any scientific
consensus, any public opinion, any, any government regulation, then he said, how do we scale this up?
How do we go from this just applies to tobacco to how do we apply this to the entire American free
enterprise system from this existential threat? Right. Now keep in mind in his head, Martin Luther
King Jr. with his doctrine of anarchy and Ralph Nader with his attacks on corporate power were
just two of the same kind of two-headed monster that were threatening the established order of
the way Powell saw the United States. Right. Those terrible threats of seat belts,
mandatory seat belt laws and integrated schools, the twin destructive powers that ruined America.
Finally, someone tells it tells it as it is. No, we're not that kind of brocast.
Hopefully the tongue firmly planted in cheek right now is coming through.
Exactly. Hopefully. You know, audio is the perfect methodology behind that actually
is trying to, if you want to get that tongue in cheek, audio is definitely the perfect medium
for that. I don't have a face for video, so that's why our podcast is mostly audio.
All right. So that takes us to 1971. Will, do you want to give us kind of some background on
the point at which we came to this explosive 1971 year? Let's do it. This is right on the heels of
the free love era. You know, at this point we've got, we're hopelessly mired in Vietnam
and dealing with all of the issues related to that. You know, this is why you can sort of start to see
why Powell reaches the level of hysteria that's actually in the memo. If you go back and read it,
you'll you'll you can feel it. It's palpable in his words. He's panicking. He's angry. He's angry,
he's afraid, he's lots of things. But, you know, it wasn't just any year, right? This is like a
turning point in history. The things that are going on along with this, yeah, for most people,
this is where history really changed for a lot of people. And as I'm researching this, I'm realizing
it's not just in America. You know, we kind of, our focus is on America, but I mean, the Bangladesh
was in war with Pakistan. Idi Amin was coming into power. I mean, just there was some crazy stuff
going on all for one year. I mean, it really packed it in. 1971 was a banner year for some things,
and a detrimental year for many things. But I mean, he saw this as a turning point, right?
This is why he felt the need to get the word out to his friends and allies. And, you know,
historians have now begun to recognize although I noticed there's a dearth of actual writing on the
year of 1971. Like I expected there to be a book just titled 1971, and I'm surprised there isn't.
I think. Right? I know it's, and it makes me feel kind of, you know, it makes me feel a little
conspiracy theorist that like I'm drawing this thread. But these are just dates. Like, you know
what I mean? Like if you're reading about like the worst parts in American history, and you keep
coming across 1971, that's not a conspiracy theory. It's just the year that all these things happen.
Exactly. Exactly. So I mean, I just, and I had to go back. Speaking of sounding conspiracy
theorist, I really went back and checked the sources on this and I was like, all right,
let's make sure this is legit. The AI is not hallucinating or finding all those things. I'm
like checking every source I can because I mean, it's unbelievable what happened that year.
Yes. We went through the 30 year mortgage. Yeah. In order to prop up the free American economy from
unaffordable housing. Like, I mean, that's the year that started too. We'll get to that at a
different time. But it's just anytime we start talking about 1971, I start thinking about all
the connected things. But go ahead. Right. I thought about just going down a list of things
that we must be talking about. Like just bring up, we're talking about 1971 and we must be talking
about, there's like 50 things that any other year might have made headlines. But they all happen in
the same year. Yeah. It just doesn't even make the radar in this year because of the craziness that
was going on. But if you've ever noticed, I think there's actually a website out there and I should
have gone back and validated this. Maybe we could drop in the show notes if we do. But there's a
website actually, I think about 1971. It's like just focused on how everything changes in 1971.
It's just a bunch of charts, just a bunch of economic charts. And you can see the impact of
all the various things that happened. It's WTF happened in. There it is. Yeah.
And just a collection of visuals to see all the things that went crazy in 1971.
Everything exploded. It's almost unbelievable. I mean, it really does test rigidity that you've
got to get in there and look all this stuff up. But it's all legit. So I mean, we have economic
inequality hitting on never before seen levels. Now compare that to 2025 and maybe they're not
so crazy. Mild. Right. But for that world, that world there was a staggering economic inequality,
wage stagnation, which I'll often accompany that and is both a symptom and a cause of inequality.
Productivity was dropping. Sorry, productivity was going up. Wages were stagnant. So they kind of
diverged, which had never been done before. I mean, usually before when people produced more,
they got paid more. That seems pretty straightforward, but that doesn't happen
when you think. Yeah. You think. Right. It's the year that's been called the beginning of
the end, which is pretty ominous and not far off as far as I can tell. We're just waiting on the
end, right? Like any day now. But again, getting back to these things that would have made headlines
or I mean, they did make headlines, I guess, but the Manson family was, was sentenced at this time.
Yeah. So you have other things sort of grabbing the attention and grabbing the news headlines.
You have the hundreds of thousands of people marching on Washington to protest the Vietnam
War. The soundtrack of the year wasn't happy. This is not the sixties anymore. This is not,
you know, the sitcom sixties that we see portrayed. This is the, what's going on? You know,
Marvin Gaye's What's Going On was like the critique of police brutality and war. That's the music
everybody's playing, right? I mean, we took a hard left turn from the 1960s. And of course, intellectuals
were all, all are, you know, a Twitter with revolutionary ideas. You had John Rawls publishing
a theory of justice, which is like, it's still the textbook and political ethics and political
philosophy. And then feminist texts like Sisterhood is Powerful were challenging these ideas that have
been long part of the social structure of the United States. And now it's just, everything's up for grabs.
So you can sort of start to see why Powell was panicking at this point.
Well, and I think, I think it's important to note too, that up until then, right, every time there
was some sort of major, major issue, major, you know, it was, it was a war and anytime there was a
world or world war one, world war two, the country would just rally and they would, they would put
aside all differences and they would work together toward a common cause and they would have a purpose
right. That was driving them to be cohesive. And Vietnam was not that, I mean, I'm not saying
Vietnam was manufactured. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying it was a real war, but our
involvement in it was definitely not cohesive, especially with the draft, you know, we didn't
really even mention that part in there, but, but with the draft going on, like it was enormous
and it was the first time that we had a major conflict that the United States didn't buck up
and band together and figure out how to, to, to hurt a common enemy because half of the country
was like, these people aren't our enemy. Why are we doing this? We're going to war on behalf of
somebody else's country. Good thing they had the war on drugs waiting in the wings to unite everybody
against some common enemy, right? Finally, something that there wasn't anything racist or
classist about the war on drugs while they were importing it from Mexico. Yeah. So, yes. I mean,
the world's falling around collapsing around Powell's years and, you know, that's just one
part of the picture. But the economy, I mean, there's just, I mean, you can't overstate the
importance of the fact that we dropped off the gold standard this year, right. And this year, 1971,
and that's the day many of us have said the day the dollar died, right? On the day the dollar
officially became a fiat currency and a floating valuation. And that's again, while these economic
charts show things change in 1971, although I did find this keeping track, that's another one to
put on the bullet list. Yeah, we removed ourselves from the gold standard. Thanks, Nixon, which,
and this is, I didn't validate this. So I'm a little, I can't even believe I've never heard
this in history class, but did you read it in your research that apparently France sent a battleship
to pick up the gold that they were entitled to take in exchange for dollars? Like they showed up
to get their gold in a battleship in New York City is my understanding. Yes, actually. So, so Ms.
Sherer when I went to high school down in Lafayette, Louisiana, Ms. Sherer did teach us about this. It
was not in the history book, but she told us about it. So yes, I do remember this. That's being a very
French state. It was a big point of pride for her, I think. Yeah. So I mean, keep in mind, these are
our revolutionary allies, right, that helped us become a country, showed up with a battleship in
our harbors to come pick up the gold that they were entitled to according to our treaties, because
the US was spending money writing checks its gold reserves couldn't cash, so to speak. So yeah. So
I mean, that's happening here. This ended an agreement that followed the world wars,
that was stabilizing the economies of the world as everything, and everybody's recovering from World
War II, which just decimated so many economies. And now you have the iron curtain coming into play
and people that are near that saying, "Hey, look, we don't trust the US dollar anymore. We want our
gold." And they were coming to collect and there wasn't going to be enough, there was a run on US
gold and there just wasn't enough to back up the notes. So they saw the only alternative as
leaving the gold standard and basically quitting on that alliance, that treaty. Yeah, creating a
fiat currency. Creating a fiat currency, so there you go. And for those who aren't familiar with
how all this, what we're talking about here, imagine that the dollar is a casino chip,
right? So you know, it's just one of those chips you get at the casinos where you can change it
in for money. In theory, you could cash in the chip for a little bit of gold, mostly held in Fort Knox.
Although there's some questions about that. We're not even going to conspiracy theories on that.
Don't worry. Yeah, I don't want to talk about that. But on August 15th, basically Nixon announced that
the casino was keeping the gold. Those chips were no longer good for gold, but we still use the chips
as currency. So you still have to play with our chips. You just can't ever turn them in for anything
of equal value, anything tangible. Outside of this system, right? Right, outside of this system.
So suddenly nobody has any way of knowing what a dollar is worth. And that's kind of a problem when
you're trying to get dollars or give dollars for tangible goods. And as a worldwide currency, right?
Like at this point, we were the worldwide currency because our economy was backed by gold.
Right. But unfortunately, we were fighting a very expensive war, this time without the allies that
we fought in the previous wars with. And so we were spending very quickly and spending more than we had
available. And then combine that with a high unemployment and stubborn inflation coming in.
The inflation numbers up until recently were some of the highest historically. And you get a sense of
fear and a sense of America being in decline that we had not seen up to this point. This is starting
to sound very familiar, right? Yes. Now one thing I want to point out here, if it's okay, Will, I'll
kind of take it from here. Any time there is a division, right, in a nation,
for some reason, leadership always creates a straw man, creates an enemy, creates
a new focus of our ire rather than necessarily the system. Powell was no different in this scenario,
right? But we inherently throughout time, I mean, and not just the United States, right, Stalin,
Hitler, I mean, all of the big ones that we spout about all the time, they all created an enemy
rather than looking at the system and going, you know, maybe these small decisions are adding up to
something bad. But the economic chaos that was happening here was only a piece of the panic,
right? It wasn't just that. The real problem for people like Powell came from a new breed of what
he called attacker, right, that couldn't just be dismissed as, oh, they're a communist, or they're
an anarchist who just wants to blow everything up or light cities on fire. These were highly effective,
very media smart crusaders who were kind of winning the court of public opinion. And also,
they were winning in the halls of Congress, right? They started to sort of lobby about these things
on behalf of the people. There was the kind of consumer as commando Ralph Nader. He wrote a book
in 1965 called unsafe at any speed that had kind of taken down a peg GM that launched this national
movement. And then by 1971, only six years later, he was kind of a rock star. If you haven't heard of
Ralph Nader, it's a really interesting story. We might even do a little thing on him. I really
enjoy the story of Ralph Nader. And honestly, I think in a lot of ways, what we need is a Ralph
Nader type of person today to sort of like, at least get enough rallying behind to make even some
small amount of change. But he had founded an advocacy advocacy group called the public citizen.
And he had he called the group the Nader's Raiders, which I think is hilarious. And I really enjoy it.
I actually think it's kind of cute. But these were were really intelligent, sort of idealistic
lawyers and students that were churning out report after report after scientific study,
after study exposing kind of all of this horrible stuff that corporations were doing
on everything from from food safety to water pollution to air quality. And they were getting
results. Right. So Nader's work was kind of the the pinpoint of the passage of legislations like
the OSHA Act. Right. Of 1970. Now, keep in mind, this is only like one year before this Powell memo.
So OSHA created this giant new federal agency to regulate workplace safety.
In that in Powell's memo, though, he singled out Nader specifically, calling him the most perhaps
the single most effective antagonist of American business. A man who wanted to smash utterly
corporate power. Kind of hard to disagree with that right now. Because there's for Nader.
Exactly. You know, it is high praise for Nader because when someone who is your opposite comes
out and says you're really doing well at the thing you set out to do, that's not a bad that's not a
bad day. Right. And then literally, the the earth itself got pissed off enough that it struck back
to before 1970s. The the the environment in the US was in a lot of places kind of a horror show.
And we're not just talking like Flint water crisis. Right. The the Cuyahoga River in Ohio
was so polluted with industrial waste that it literally caught on fire. It's a river.
The river like that's supposed to be water, body of water, water catch on fire smog in
cities like Pittsburgh was so thick that streetlights who were on daylight sensors
would turn on during the day to stop accident that that's how thick the smoke and smog was in
cities like Pittsburgh. Right. So this really visible, very out there crisis led to the first
Earth Day in April 1970. It was a gigantic demonstration nationwide. And it really sort of
steeled the modern environmental movement and the political result was very positive.
The public pressure was so intense that in December of that same year 1970, Richard Nixon,
a Republican president with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress created the EPA. In that
creation, very large federal bureaucracy was born. Not necessarily a bad thing in this scenario.
These were regulations with broad authority that can regulate pollution from factories from every
power plant and every car, every automobile in the country. So this is all very, very pivotal
context for the Powell memo, the sort of the true shock for business CEOs, the C suite wasn't really
just that the economic instability of the market or the protesters in the streets. Like it was the
realization that political establishments, including the people who were on their Republican side,
were beginning to side with the people who opposed what these companies were doing. Right. So
all of a sudden, people had been gung ho straight forward on capitalism all the way until the point
where we go, Oh, wait a minute. It's starting to literally affect the air that I breathe. It's
starting to literally affect the water that I'm drinking. We maybe have to do something about
this. And there was enough pushback that something started to get done. And one thing we haven't
mentioned yet, but it is a significant political shift as well. Is that this 1971 was also the year
the 26th amendment was ratified, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, which nobody knew.
Yeah, that's, that's a big deal. Right. It's a big deal. No matter who, which side you're on,
right? At least one side, if not all politicians are going to be unpopular with the youth, right?
These are the people being drafted. They're being told, you're going to go fight this war,
like it or not, over in a country you've never heard of and couldn't find them a map.
You're going to go fight this war for us. But by the way, you don't have any say in our government
if you're 18 to 20. So, I mean, giving them that vote, that although it was widely supported, it was
sort of a necessity. Like, you know, you could imagine things getting really violent if they had
not done that. So, I mean, these moves were not made willingly, no matter what the, you know,
rhetoric was around them. They didn't know, they didn't know what was going to happen when they
opened up, you know, the additional, the lower age group, you know, for voting. It's a big, big shift.
Yes. And it was a sign to the, this, the C-suite in the, in the corporations of the 70s,
that this consensus that they had been operating on, and, and it was a very, very powerful consensus,
couldn't just be contained through the normal lobbying process and paying lobbyists and paying
off senators or partisan politics, right? Saying, oh, it's a Republican thing, or it's a, it's a
Democrat thing. They were basically, like, came to the, the belief that they had to launch an entire
counter revolution to change the entire intellectual and political climate of the country. Right.
We thank you so much for listening thus far. We have come to the conclusion of the first half of
this episode. We have basically covered all of the history, all of the sociopolitical environment
that led up to the actual Powell memo. Tune back in next week while we tackle the actual memo itself,
and how it plays out, uh, to today. Thanks so much for listening to the overlap. Please make sure to
check out our socials, the overlap podcast on blue sky, on Macedon, check out our website, HTTPS colon
slash slash F O F dot foundation. Thanks so much. And we'll see you next week.
and we'll see you next week.
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