If you want to understand why corporations seem to have so much influence over our politics today, start with the Powell Memo.
Back in 1971, Lewis Powell wrote a memo warning that business interests needed to organize, influence public opinion, shape education, fund think tanks, and become much more active in politics and the courts. What followed wasn't a short-term campaign—it was a decades-long strategy.
Whether you see it as protecting free enterprise or expanding corporate power, it's hard to ignore the results. Corporate lobbying exploded, think tanks multiplied, money poured into politics, and business interests gained enormous influence over public policy.
People often act like all of this happened by accident. It didn't. There was a plan, there was patience, and fifty years later we're still living with the consequences.
If you're interested in modern politics, understanding the Powell Memo helps explain why discussions about corporate influence, dark money, think tanks, and judicial appointments often trace their roots back to 1971.
Who’s really behind the Supreme Court’s attack on the so-called “administrative state.”
Robert Reich's Substack:
Friends,
For years, conservatives have railed against what they call the “administrative state” and denounced regulations.
But let’s be clear. When they speak of the “administrative state,” they’re talking about agencies tasked with protecting the public from corporations that seek profits at the expense of the health, safety, and pocketbooks of average Americans.
Regulations are the means by which agencies translate broad legal mandates into practical guardrails.
Substitute the word “protection” for “regulation” and you get a more accurate picture of who has benefited — consumers, workers, and average people needing clean air and clean water.
Substitute “corporate legal movement” for the “conservative legal movement” and you see who’s really mobilizing, and for what purpose.
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[...]
Last week, the Supreme Court made it much harder for the FTC, the Labor Department, and dozens of other agencies — ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Food and Drug Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and National Highway and Safety Administration — to protect Americans from corporate misconduct.
On Thursday, the six Republican-appointed justices eliminated the ability of these agencies to enforce their rules through in-house tribunals, rather than go through the far more costly and laborious process of suing corporations in federal courts before juries.
On Friday, the justices overturned a 40-year-old precedent requiring courts to defer to the expertise of these agencies in interpreting the law, thereby opening the agencies to countless corporate lawsuits alleging that Congress did not authorize the agencies to go after specific corporate wrongdoing.
In recent years, the court’s majority has also made it easier for corporations to sue agencies and get public protections overturned. The so-called “major questions doctrine” holds that judges should nullify regulations that have a significant impact on corporate profits if Congress was not sufficiently clear in authorizing them.
[...]
In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then a modest business group in Washington, D.C., asked Lewis Powell, then an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, to recommend actions corporations should take in response to the rising tide of public protections (that is, regulations).
Powell’s memo — distributed widely to Chamber members — said corporations were “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.
In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of World War II, ensuring that corporations be responsive to all their stakeholders — not just shareholders but also their workers, consumers, and the environment.
[...]
The so-called “conservative legal movement” of young lawyers who came of age working for Ronald Reagan — including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — were in reality part of this corporate legal movement. And they still are.
Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court emerged from the same corporate legal movement.
The next victory of the corporate legal movement will occur if and when the Supreme Court accepts a broad interpretation of the so-called “non-delegation doctrine.”
Under this theory of the Constitution, the courts should not uphold any regulation in which Congress has delegated its lawmaking authority to agencies charged with protecting the public. If accepted by the court, this would mark the end of all regulations — that is, all public protections not expressly contained in statutes — and the final triumph of Lewis Powell’s vision.
Robert Reich wrote an interesting Substack piece on the history of the right-wing war on regulatory power that began with the infamous Powell Memo by Lewis Powell, and culminated with the recent Loper Bright Enterprises, Jarkesy, and Trump rulings.
