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The Powell Memo: A Blueprint for a Class War - Part 1 · The Overlap

• 0:00
  August 1971. The American dream is running a fever. The dollar just came untethered from gold.
• 0:11
  The Vietnam War is a wound that just won't close. And a guy named Ralph Nader is convincing housewives
• 0:20
  that their new Chevrolet might just be a death trap. For the men in the wood paneled boardrooms,
• 0:26
  it felt like the apocalypse. So one of them, a quiet, impeccably dressed lawyer for the tobacco
• 0:33
  industry, sat down and wrote a memo. It was a confidential battle plan, a call to arms for a
• 0:41
  class war. He didn't just want to win an argument. He wanted to rewrite the rules of America. And the
• 0:49
  terrifying thing is he did. This is the story of the Powell Memo, the secret blueprint.
• 0:56
  That built the world we're living in right now.
• 1:24
  And welcome back everyone to the podcast. This is the overlap. I am your co-host Joshua. And with
• 1:31
  me is your favorite co-host, William Wilde. Say hello. Hello, everybody. We hope that you are as
• 1:37
  excited as we are about this topic. You probably have actually never heard of this. In fact,
• 1:42
  unless you do a whole lot of deep digging into right wing historical archives, you probably never
• 1:49
  even heard of this guy. He actually was up for Supreme Court justice. His name is Louis F Powell
• 1:57
  Jr. But we are excited to talk to you. If you're new to the podcast, welcome. We are a podcast that
• 2:04
  talks about the intersection of politics and the intersection of economic and class issues. We talk
• 2:10
  about a lot of technology because both of us are technologists in some form or fashion, and we each
• 2:17
  have our specialty, mind being technology, and will being predominantly everything else. So we are,
• 2:24
  we're happy to have you here today if it's your first time. If it is your first time,
• 2:29
  go ahead and give us a thumbs up, maybe a five star rating on whatever podcast format you're
• 2:33
  listening to today. We'd love to have you back. And please do remember to like and subscribe.
• 2:40
  Not my first time, Joshua, but I'll give you a thumbs up, two thumbs up even.
• 2:44
  Thanks for that. Thanks. Who's got two thumbs up for this guy?
• 2:48
  Yeah. By the way, fun fact that I actually just remembered, um, not really relevant to anything
• 2:53
  except Louis F Powell Jr. But I was actually, back in my days as a litigator, as an attorney,
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  I was opposite his grandson in a lawsuit in Virginia. It was very exciting stuff.
• 3:05
  To me, it's always funny that these things happen in places that you don't associate with like,
• 3:11
  you know, progressive tendencies. Right. Like tobacco farms of-
• 3:17
  Exactly. It's like, it's like the garbages places in the country. No, no offense. You know,
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  Virginia's for lovers and everything. And I love Virginia, but like these were like old school,
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  you know, still had ideas about the civil war and felt that they were, their families were hurt,
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  but yeah. So there is a connection there, is what you're saying. There is a random unrelated one,
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  but nevertheless, Hey, it's the, uh, it's the two degrees of the overlap instead of Kevin Bacon.
• 3:48
  Well, let's get started to talk about this, uh, piece of work.
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  So first of all, let me just say this, uh, this specifically relates to a memo, uh, in 1971, we're
• 3:59
  going to, we're going to talk about a couple of things in 1971, um, that all kind of culminated
• 4:05
  around, um, you know, the end of America, no big deal. Um, and kind of a lot of the origins of
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  the things that we're literally seeing today, really 1971, there's just, there's just no way
• 4:16
  around it, but specifically this, this whole, uh, Powell memo. So we're going to talk a little bit
• 4:23
  about, about the man, the myth, the legend, Louis F. Powell Jr. Uh, we're going to talk about kind
• 4:29
  of what formed him, what shaped him as well as kind of the sociopolitical, uh, situation that was
• 4:37
  surrounding the 1960s in the 1970s and through the lens of how it related to Powell. Um, and then
• 4:44
  we're going, we're going to bring it back to the memo, exactly what it says. Now we're not going
• 4:49
  to be reading the memo for you today. It's 34 pages long. And I did read the, the memo, you can access
• 4:55
  it. It's in the federal archives. It's long, it's convoluted. A lot of it is really, uh, pompous
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  and written from a very, like, uh, a very high horse, I guess I should say, um, it's sort of a
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  confidential memo between friends. Yes. Uh, between him and all of the power players in the country,
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  the U S chamber of commerce, a lot of the things that we're seeing now, we're going to tie them
• 5:19
  back. Oh, kind of where they came from, what the strategies were listed and some of the organizations
• 5:25
  that we're seeing affect our real world politics every day and how, how that has been actioned
• 5:31
  into what we are seeing today. Maybe in a, in a later time, we'll kind of talk about how to
• 5:36
  fight that. But I think we do that a little bit all the time anyway, right? I mean, we, we talk
• 5:40
  about how to fight these things, but I think it's important to kind of take a rewind and take a
• 5:44
  historical look at why these things happened and why they existed. And so when I was broaching this
• 5:50
  topic with will to do the podcast, he was receptive to it, but it's, it's just a very lesser known
• 5:56
  thing in the, in the world of understanding where we come from, why we're here now from where we
• 6:02
  came from. And so, you know, a lot of times it's easy to go, yes, it all started with a Reagan,
• 6:07
  but really it started before that. And this is, this is one of those things that actually led to
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  Reagan really was just like we've talked about Trump being before they were the symptom, right?
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  We're, we're trying to rewind and figure out the cause because I think that only when you,
• 6:23
  you really truly understand history, can you sort of help from repeating it. What are your thoughts?
• 6:29
  I agree. I think it's, it's bizarre how important a pivotal a year in 1971 actually was.
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  I don't think anybody really saw that coming, but it definitely makes a top 10 list of most
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  influential years in the history of our country. Maybe even a top five, right? A lot, a lot of
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  forces coming together, opposing forces and various things. I mean, no one will get into it,
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  so I won't spoil anything, but there's some crazy things that happened that year.
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  And this was one of the crazier ones. Absolutely. Well, would you like to,
• 6:59
  to kind of give us a little background? Sure. So we have Louis F Powell Jr., a future Supreme
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  Court justice. In fact, he would be nominated two weeks, two months after sending this memo in.
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  And Mr. Powell was very pleased with the free enterprise system, let's say put it that way.
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  He found a lot to love there and felt like it was under attack from all sorts of crazies,
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  like socialists and communists and minorities and just people who didn't like big business and the
• 7:29
  way they ran, ran rough shot over its consumers. And so he took it upon himself to contact the,
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  the powers that be in the form of the US chamber of commerce in order to express his concerns
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  and recruit them to this plan that he had to save America from, from the lefties,
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  the leftists and the revolutionaries. Yes.
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  That's what the memo, that's where the memo is coming from. It's his sort of plan to save America
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  and his, his playbook for how that was going to happen. So let's talk about, about a little
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  bit earlier Louis F Powell Jr. Right. He was, he was, he didn't see himself as a, as a big idea
• 8:15
  man, ready to go and ready to burn a new path. He was really just a picture of exactly what the
• 8:23
  American establishment was going for. He was the epitome of the American dream, so to speak.
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  Very much the corporate lawyer. Yes, he had his beautiful little pattern tie and, and, uh, was a,
• 8:36
  kind of a dangerous display of emotion. So he was born in Virginia. So it's not coincidental that
• 8:41
  you might've ran into his grandson practicing law there, but he was an absolute academic powerhouse
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  superstar. He was magna cum laude. He was in Phi Beta Kappa. He was the president of the student
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  body at Washington and Lee university. He was first in his class at law school. Uh, and then he,
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  then he got a master's from Harvard, you know, just for an extra helping of fun. And then after that,
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  he became a partner at the Richmond law firm and was pretty classic corporate lawyer, exactly what
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  you'd expect, you know, very polished, very, um, very quiet and on the outside, but, but also a
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  storm brewing on the inside. He's the kind of person who sits on like the board of kind of
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  everything, right? All the major companies and, and is kind of considered this pillar of American
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  legal establishment of, as the law, right. But beneath that, right, was a, was a, I guess a mind
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  kind of created in a very specific kind of conflict during world war II Powell wasn't,
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  wasn't like the infantry, you know, he wasn't cleaning guns and eating MREs. He was an
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  intelligence officer. So he worked on the top secret ultra project, which I'm sure eventually
• 9:59
  we're going to cover, but it was a, of MK Ultra fame. Yes. And, and so it was a unit really
• 10:07
  dedicated to interpreting the, uh, the German communications, not the drug MK ultra one.
• 10:12
  Okay. Different ultra project. Yes, different ultra project. So his job was basically to sit in a
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  room and analyze signals that were coming in from, from German soldiers, right. And figure out
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  patterns and map out the enemy strategy, um, from what he could pick up. So that experiment, I mean,
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  that experience that he had doing that was, was kind of pivotal in the memo that we kind of see
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  later. So when he looked out at the, the goings on in the 1960s and seventies, we had, you know,
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  student protestors and consumer advocates and, and, um, civil rights leaders, you know, he,
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  he didn't see this like messy democratic society trying to figure out how to change. He saw a
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  coordinated attack. He saw it as a specific vector. He saw enemy combatants sort of engaged in
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  what he actually called guerrilla warfare. I think already we're starting to see a pattern
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  in what we're dealing with now. So much like everything the hammer sees as a nail,
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  everything the soldier sees is an enemy combatant, right? Exactly. The warrior for the free enterprise
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  system. A hundred percent. Okay. So long even before then powell was, was deeply troubled by
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  another person who, who sort of challenged the system that as we think of it and that person
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  was the both the famed and the troublesome Martin Luther King jr. throughout the 1960s. And I mean,
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  I'm sure if you're listening from our audience, you, you are familiar with the works of Dr. Keefe,
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  but throughout the sixties when he served as the Powell served as the president of the American
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  bar association, he delivered a series of like speeches and wrote articles, basically denouncing
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  the core tactic of the civil rights movement, which was civil disobedience. And he called it heresy,
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  specifically said it was fundamentally inconsistent with the rule of law.
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  And he thought it was a threat to the foundations of our system of government.
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  He was very, very upset, especially by King's letter from a Birmingham jail,
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  because the idea that an individual had some sort of, and to quote Dr. King, a moral responsibility
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  to disobey unjust laws. Powell felt like it was absurd, right? He, he mocked it, even called it a
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  doctrine of anarchy that provided kind of no basis for an organized society. So for Powell,
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  the constitution was not a vehicle for reform, like, like progressive see it. He thought of it
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  as a sacred set of procedures. So once the, the Supreme court in Brown versus board of education,
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  sort of dismantled educational segregation, Powell believed that the law had done all it could for
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  black Americans. Absolutely hands down. He thought that that Brown versus board of education was the
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  epitome of what the United States could do for black Americans. Anything else, anything else,
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  economic justice for what King called compensatory justice to make up for centuries of slavery and
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  Jim Crow were in his views. And to quote him, we're reckless extremists. So this kind of reveals the
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  underlying river of his worldview, right? His primary allegiance was not to justice or quality,
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  but it was to order and the preservation of our existing system. So. The system of itself was
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  ultimately sound, right? The problem was that people were attacking it from the outside and
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  that's kind of the way he saw it. Sounds like his position was sort of that there's no such thing as
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  an unjust law. If it's the law, it's his justice. It is inherently perfect. Right. Just fine when
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  you're on the inside, but you find yourself on the wrong side of an unjust law. It's a little
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  different. Exactly. So if you, if you even did so much as like appealing to a higher moral law,
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  he was like, no, that's not possible because the law is the highest moral law. And Dr. King
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  frequently cited the Bible, which most of his persuasion would say is a higher moral law,
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  and that doesn't fly for Powell. Exactly. So now I want to, I want to kind of throw in here. He was
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  working for big tobacco during, during all of this. Okay. So and granted, you know, we didn't know
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  then, well, I don't know, it was the sixties, right? Like, I mean, ultimately we were starting to know
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  then. I think some people knew. Yeah. At the time he was meeting in. Yeah. They knew. For sure. That,
• 15:07
  yeah. Well yeah, that's right. They had that big expose, right? Where they, they have like recordings
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  and like notes where they, they were being told at this time that it was, it was directly linked to
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  cancer. So yeah, along that vein, right? The, the world in his eyes was kind of being bombarded and
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  under siege by this hardened strategic doctrine, right? Like in the trenches of the, the great
• 15:29
  corporate culture war. So you had this big tobacco versus kind of the American public situation,
• 15:36
  right? So 1964, Powell actually joined the director board of directors of Philip Morris.
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  So this was not like some quiet, you know, like, oh, he's on the board of so and so. No, no, no, it
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  was, it was enormous in 1964. That year, the U S surgeon general released the big report
• 15:58
  that definitely linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer and to death. Clearly a leftist extremist,
• 16:05
  U S general. Exactly. Uh, as they mostly were, and most still are apparently, uh, minus 30%.
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  So for the next seven years, right? Like 64 to 71 and until his appointment to the supreme court,
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  Powell was a key player in that tobacco industries, uh, counteroffensive against the narrative that
• 16:27
  it causes cancer as a director and member of that executive committee. He was directly responsible
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  for the campaign to ultimately lie and hide the truth and a manufacturer doubt to fighting
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  regulations to curb the effects of it. Purportedly we have sources. Be clear, sorry, peaceful civil
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  disobedience, not okay. Lying in, in reports and correspondence with the federal government. Fine.
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  That's what we're saying. All right. Okay. Just check it. Exactly. So he actually like personally
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  reviewed and signed off on the annual reports from Philip Morris actually, uh, containing
• 17:12
  statements that were found to be knowingly false. One of them he was cited as, as agreeing to was
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  there is no biological proof that smoking is causally related to human disease or that
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  scientific information indicting smoking is quote of dubious validity. Right. Even more revealing
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  Powell, as a lawyer advising the tobacco Institute began actually testing the legal arguments
• 17:40
  that would kind of become central to the conservative movement. So in a case,
• 17:46
  he actually argued that because the science linking smoking to cancer was controversial,
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  a controversy that he literally created with his own company that the first amendments free
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  speech protections required news organizations to give tobacco companies equal time to counter
• 18:04
  anti-smoking. It isn't the playbook. If you don't like what the other side says,
• 18:09
  make something up this opposite and claim that they're on equal footing.
• 18:13
  Yes. So this is kind of the beginning of using the language of free speech and balance
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  as a shield for corporate propaganda. He is the, the, the literal lawyer who,
• 18:26
  who created it as, as we're seeing it play out today. So the memo, the 34 page diatribe,
• 18:33
  let's be honest, it's not a memo. It's a diatribe was not some like abstract political
• 18:39
  philosophy that he cooked up from his little ivory tower. Right. It was, it was a field manual
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  that he, he created from doing it. And he valid was validating it in real time as he was preparing
• 18:53
  this, this sort of doctrine. Right. And the strategies that it would lay out for the entire
• 18:59
  business community from funding friendly scholars to create a counter narrative, from aggressively
• 19:06
  using courts, from demanding that balance in the media and organizing a United political front.
• 19:14
  Those were all tactics kind of pioneered, but perfected by the tobacco industry.
• 19:20
  When it was trying to fight for survival, kind of like we're seeing happen with, I don't know,
• 19:25
  healthcare kind of like we're seeing with, I don't know, every other major corporation,
• 19:30
  the United States who has a monopoly on our general welfare. Yeah. Powell kind of had seen firsthand
• 19:38
  how if you were powerful and you had enough money and you were organized enough that you could
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  essentially block any reference or block at least contest and create doubt about any scientific
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  consensus, any public opinion, any, any government regulation, then he said, how do we scale this up?
• 20:02
  How do we go from this just applies to tobacco to how do we apply this to the entire American free
• 20:09
  enterprise system from this existential threat? Right. Now keep in mind in his head, Martin Luther
• 20:19
  King Jr. with his doctrine of anarchy and Ralph Nader with his attacks on corporate power were
• 20:27
  just two of the same kind of two-headed monster that were threatening the established order of
• 20:35
  the way Powell saw the United States. Right. Those terrible threats of seat belts,
• 20:41
  mandatory seat belt laws and integrated schools, the twin destructive powers that ruined America.
• 20:47
  Finally, someone tells it tells it as it is. No, we're not that kind of brocast.
• 20:55
  Hopefully the tongue firmly planted in cheek right now is coming through.
• 20:59
  Exactly. Hopefully. You know, audio is the perfect methodology behind that actually
• 21:05
  is trying to, if you want to get that tongue in cheek, audio is definitely the perfect medium
• 21:09
  for that. I don't have a face for video, so that's why our podcast is mostly audio.
• 21:15
  All right. So that takes us to 1971. Will, do you want to give us kind of some background on
• 21:26
  the point at which we came to this explosive 1971 year? Let's do it. This is right on the heels of
• 21:34
  the free love era. You know, at this point we've got, we're hopelessly mired in Vietnam
• 21:41
  and dealing with all of the issues related to that. You know, this is why you can sort of start to see
• 21:48
  why Powell reaches the level of hysteria that's actually in the memo. If you go back and read it,
• 21:53
  you'll you'll you can feel it. It's palpable in his words. He's panicking. He's angry. He's angry,
• 22:00
  he's afraid, he's lots of things. But, you know, it wasn't just any year, right? This is like a
• 22:06
  turning point in history. The things that are going on along with this, yeah, for most people,
• 22:11
  this is where history really changed for a lot of people. And as I'm researching this, I'm realizing
• 22:15
  it's not just in America. You know, we kind of, our focus is on America, but I mean, the Bangladesh
• 22:21
  was in war with Pakistan. Idi Amin was coming into power. I mean, just there was some crazy stuff
• 22:28
  going on all for one year. I mean, it really packed it in. 1971 was a banner year for some things,
• 22:34
  and a detrimental year for many things. But I mean, he saw this as a turning point, right?
• 22:38
  This is why he felt the need to get the word out to his friends and allies. And, you know,
• 22:43
  historians have now begun to recognize although I noticed there's a dearth of actual writing on the
• 22:49
  year of 1971. Like I expected there to be a book just titled 1971, and I'm surprised there isn't.
• 22:55
  I think. Right? I know it's, and it makes me feel kind of, you know, it makes me feel a little
• 23:00
  conspiracy theorist that like I'm drawing this thread. But these are just dates. Like, you know
• 23:05
  what I mean? Like if you're reading about like the worst parts in American history, and you keep
• 23:10
  coming across 1971, that's not a conspiracy theory. It's just the year that all these things happen.
• 23:16
  Exactly. Exactly. So I mean, I just, and I had to go back. Speaking of sounding conspiracy
• 23:22
  theorist, I really went back and checked the sources on this and I was like, all right,
• 23:25
  let's make sure this is legit. The AI is not hallucinating or finding all those things. I'm
• 23:30
  like checking every source I can because I mean, it's unbelievable what happened that year.
• 23:35
  Yes. We went through the 30 year mortgage. Yeah. In order to prop up the free American economy from
• 23:44
  unaffordable housing. Like, I mean, that's the year that started too. We'll get to that at a
• 23:50
  different time. But it's just anytime we start talking about 1971, I start thinking about all
• 23:55
  the connected things. But go ahead. Right. I thought about just going down a list of things
• 23:59
  that we must be talking about. Like just bring up, we're talking about 1971 and we must be talking
• 24:03
  about, there's like 50 things that any other year might have made headlines. But they all happen in
• 24:08
  the same year. Yeah. It just doesn't even make the radar in this year because of the craziness that
• 24:13
  was going on. But if you've ever noticed, I think there's actually a website out there and I should
• 24:17
  have gone back and validated this. Maybe we could drop in the show notes if we do. But there's a
• 24:21
  website actually, I think about 1971. It's like just focused on how everything changes in 1971.
• 24:28
  It's just a bunch of charts, just a bunch of economic charts. And you can see the impact of
• 24:32
  all the various things that happened. It's WTF happened in. There it is. Yeah.
• 24:40
  And just a collection of visuals to see all the things that went crazy in 1971.
• 24:46
  Everything exploded. It's almost unbelievable. I mean, it really does test rigidity that you've
• 24:51
  got to get in there and look all this stuff up. But it's all legit. So I mean, we have economic
• 24:55
  inequality hitting on never before seen levels. Now compare that to 2025 and maybe they're not
• 25:02
  so crazy. Mild. Right. But for that world, that world there was a staggering economic inequality,
• 25:08
  wage stagnation, which I'll often accompany that and is both a symptom and a cause of inequality.
• 25:14
  Productivity was dropping. Sorry, productivity was going up. Wages were stagnant. So they kind of
• 25:20
  diverged, which had never been done before. I mean, usually before when people produced more,
• 25:25
  they got paid more. That seems pretty straightforward, but that doesn't happen
• 25:29
  when you think. Yeah. You think. Right. It's the year that's been called the beginning of
• 25:34
  the end, which is pretty ominous and not far off as far as I can tell. We're just waiting on the
• 25:40
  end, right? Like any day now. But again, getting back to these things that would have made headlines
• 25:45
  or I mean, they did make headlines, I guess, but the Manson family was, was sentenced at this time.
• 25:51
  Yeah. So you have other things sort of grabbing the attention and grabbing the news headlines.
• 25:55
  You have the hundreds of thousands of people marching on Washington to protest the Vietnam
• 25:59
  War. The soundtrack of the year wasn't happy. This is not the sixties anymore. This is not,
• 26:05
  you know, the sitcom sixties that we see portrayed. This is the, what's going on? You know,
• 26:12
  Marvin Gaye's What's Going On was like the critique of police brutality and war. That's the music
• 26:17
  everybody's playing, right? I mean, we took a hard left turn from the 1960s. And of course, intellectuals
• 26:25
  were all, all are, you know, a Twitter with revolutionary ideas. You had John Rawls publishing
• 26:32
  a theory of justice, which is like, it's still the textbook and political ethics and political
• 26:38
  philosophy. And then feminist texts like Sisterhood is Powerful were challenging these ideas that have
• 26:44
  been long part of the social structure of the United States. And now it's just, everything's up for grabs.
• 26:49
  So you can sort of start to see why Powell was panicking at this point.
• 26:52
  Well, and I think, I think it's important to note too, that up until then, right, every time there
• 26:58
  was some sort of major, major issue, major, you know, it was, it was a war and anytime there was a
• 27:05
  world or world war one, world war two, the country would just rally and they would, they would put
• 27:11
  aside all differences and they would work together toward a common cause and they would have a purpose
• 27:17
  right. That was driving them to be cohesive. And Vietnam was not that, I mean, I'm not saying
• 27:23
  Vietnam was manufactured. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying it was a real war, but our
• 27:28
  involvement in it was definitely not cohesive, especially with the draft, you know, we didn't
• 27:35
  really even mention that part in there, but, but with the draft going on, like it was enormous
• 27:40
  and it was the first time that we had a major conflict that the United States didn't buck up
• 27:45
  and band together and figure out how to, to, to hurt a common enemy because half of the country
• 27:51
  was like, these people aren't our enemy. Why are we doing this? We're going to war on behalf of
• 27:56
  somebody else's country. Good thing they had the war on drugs waiting in the wings to unite everybody
• 28:02
  against some common enemy, right? Finally, something that there wasn't anything racist or
• 28:07
  classist about the war on drugs while they were importing it from Mexico. Yeah. So, yes. I mean,
• 28:16
  the world's falling around collapsing around Powell's years and, you know, that's just one
• 28:22
  part of the picture. But the economy, I mean, there's just, I mean, you can't overstate the
• 28:27
  importance of the fact that we dropped off the gold standard this year, right. And this year, 1971,
• 28:34
  and that's the day many of us have said the day the dollar died, right? On the day the dollar
• 28:39
  officially became a fiat currency and a floating valuation. And that's again, while these economic
• 28:46
  charts show things change in 1971, although I did find this keeping track, that's another one to
• 28:51
  put on the bullet list. Yeah, we removed ourselves from the gold standard. Thanks, Nixon, which,
• 28:57
  and this is, I didn't validate this. So I'm a little, I can't even believe I've never heard
• 29:01
  this in history class, but did you read it in your research that apparently France sent a battleship
• 29:07
  to pick up the gold that they were entitled to take in exchange for dollars? Like they showed up
• 29:12
  to get their gold in a battleship in New York City is my understanding. Yes, actually. So, so Ms.
• 29:17
  Sherer when I went to high school down in Lafayette, Louisiana, Ms. Sherer did teach us about this. It
• 29:23
  was not in the history book, but she told us about it. So yes, I do remember this. That's being a very
• 29:29
  French state. It was a big point of pride for her, I think. Yeah. So I mean, keep in mind, these are
• 29:35
  our revolutionary allies, right, that helped us become a country, showed up with a battleship in
• 29:41
  our harbors to come pick up the gold that they were entitled to according to our treaties, because
• 29:47
  the US was spending money writing checks its gold reserves couldn't cash, so to speak. So yeah. So
• 29:55
  I mean, that's happening here. This ended an agreement that followed the world wars,
• 30:01
  that was stabilizing the economies of the world as everything, and everybody's recovering from World
• 30:06
  War II, which just decimated so many economies. And now you have the iron curtain coming into play
• 30:14
  and people that are near that saying, "Hey, look, we don't trust the US dollar anymore. We want our
• 30:19
  gold." And they were coming to collect and there wasn't going to be enough, there was a run on US
• 30:23
  gold and there just wasn't enough to back up the notes. So they saw the only alternative as
• 30:30
  leaving the gold standard and basically quitting on that alliance, that treaty. Yeah, creating a
• 30:34
  fiat currency. Creating a fiat currency, so there you go. And for those who aren't familiar with
• 30:41
  how all this, what we're talking about here, imagine that the dollar is a casino chip,
• 30:46
  right? So you know, it's just one of those chips you get at the casinos where you can change it
• 30:50
  in for money. In theory, you could cash in the chip for a little bit of gold, mostly held in Fort Knox.
• 30:58
  Although there's some questions about that. We're not even going to conspiracy theories on that.
• 31:01
  Don't worry. Yeah, I don't want to talk about that. But on August 15th, basically Nixon announced that
• 31:05
  the casino was keeping the gold. Those chips were no longer good for gold, but we still use the chips
• 31:11
  as currency. So you still have to play with our chips. You just can't ever turn them in for anything
• 31:15
  of equal value, anything tangible. Outside of this system, right? Right, outside of this system.
• 31:21
  So suddenly nobody has any way of knowing what a dollar is worth. And that's kind of a problem when
• 31:26
  you're trying to get dollars or give dollars for tangible goods. And as a worldwide currency, right?
• 31:33
  Like at this point, we were the worldwide currency because our economy was backed by gold.
• 31:40
  Right. But unfortunately, we were fighting a very expensive war, this time without the allies that
• 31:46
  we fought in the previous wars with. And so we were spending very quickly and spending more than we had
• 31:51
  available. And then combine that with a high unemployment and stubborn inflation coming in.
• 31:58
  The inflation numbers up until recently were some of the highest historically. And you get a sense of
• 32:05
  fear and a sense of America being in decline that we had not seen up to this point. This is starting
• 32:11
  to sound very familiar, right? Yes. Now one thing I want to point out here, if it's okay, Will, I'll
• 32:17
  kind of take it from here. Any time there is a division, right, in a nation,
• 32:26
  for some reason, leadership always creates a straw man, creates an enemy, creates
• 32:38
  a new focus of our ire rather than necessarily the system. Powell was no different in this scenario,
• 32:46
  right? But we inherently throughout time, I mean, and not just the United States, right, Stalin,
• 32:53
  Hitler, I mean, all of the big ones that we spout about all the time, they all created an enemy
• 33:01
  rather than looking at the system and going, you know, maybe these small decisions are adding up to
• 33:07
  something bad. But the economic chaos that was happening here was only a piece of the panic,
• 33:18
  right? It wasn't just that. The real problem for people like Powell came from a new breed of what
• 33:26
  he called attacker, right, that couldn't just be dismissed as, oh, they're a communist, or they're
• 33:33
  an anarchist who just wants to blow everything up or light cities on fire. These were highly effective,
• 33:40
  very media smart crusaders who were kind of winning the court of public opinion. And also,
• 33:47
  they were winning in the halls of Congress, right? They started to sort of lobby about these things
• 33:53
  on behalf of the people. There was the kind of consumer as commando Ralph Nader. He wrote a book
• 34:00
  in 1965 called unsafe at any speed that had kind of taken down a peg GM that launched this national
• 34:09
  movement. And then by 1971, only six years later, he was kind of a rock star. If you haven't heard of
• 34:16
  Ralph Nader, it's a really interesting story. We might even do a little thing on him. I really
• 34:21
  enjoy the story of Ralph Nader. And honestly, I think in a lot of ways, what we need is a Ralph
• 34:26
  Nader type of person today to sort of like, at least get enough rallying behind to make even some
• 34:34
  small amount of change. But he had founded an advocacy advocacy group called the public citizen.
• 34:41
  And he had he called the group the Nader's Raiders, which I think is hilarious. And I really enjoy it.
• 34:48
  I actually think it's kind of cute. But these were were really intelligent, sort of idealistic
• 34:54
  lawyers and students that were churning out report after report after scientific study,
• 35:01
  after study exposing kind of all of this horrible stuff that corporations were doing
• 35:08
  on everything from from food safety to water pollution to air quality. And they were getting
• 35:13
  results. Right. So Nader's work was kind of the the pinpoint of the passage of legislations like
• 35:22
  the OSHA Act. Right. Of 1970. Now, keep in mind, this is only like one year before this Powell memo.
• 35:31
  So OSHA created this giant new federal agency to regulate workplace safety.
• 35:39
  In that in Powell's memo, though, he singled out Nader specifically, calling him the most perhaps
• 35:46
  the single most effective antagonist of American business. A man who wanted to smash utterly
• 35:55
  corporate power. Kind of hard to disagree with that right now. Because there's for Nader.
• 36:01
  Exactly. You know, it is high praise for Nader because when someone who is your opposite comes
• 36:07
  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
• 36:12
  bad day. Right. And then literally, the the earth itself got pissed off enough that it struck back
• 36:21
  to before 1970s. The the the environment in the US was in a lot of places kind of a horror show.
• 36:29
  And we're not just talking like Flint water crisis. Right. The the Cuyahoga River in Ohio
• 36:36
  was so polluted with industrial waste that it literally caught on fire. It's a river.
• 36:43
  The river like that's supposed to be water, body of water, water catch on fire smog in
• 36:48
  cities like Pittsburgh was so thick that streetlights who were on daylight sensors
• 36:54
  would turn on during the day to stop accident that that's how thick the smoke and smog was in
• 37:01
  cities like Pittsburgh. Right. So this really visible, very out there crisis led to the first
• 37:07
  Earth Day in April 1970. It was a gigantic demonstration nationwide. And it really sort of
• 37:15
  steeled the modern environmental movement and the political result was very positive.
• 37:24
  The public pressure was so intense that in December of that same year 1970, Richard Nixon,
• 37:30
  a Republican president with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress created the EPA. In that
• 37:37
  creation, very large federal bureaucracy was born. Not necessarily a bad thing in this scenario.
• 37:45
  These were regulations with broad authority that can regulate pollution from factories from every
• 37:51
  power plant and every car, every automobile in the country. So this is all very, very pivotal
• 38:00
  context for the Powell memo, the sort of the true shock for business CEOs, the C suite wasn't really
• 38:11
  just that the economic instability of the market or the protesters in the streets. Like it was the
• 38:18
  realization that political establishments, including the people who were on their Republican side,
• 38:28
  were beginning to side with the people who opposed what these companies were doing. Right. So
• 38:35
  all of a sudden, people had been gung ho straight forward on capitalism all the way until the point
• 38:42
  where we go, Oh, wait a minute. It's starting to literally affect the air that I breathe. It's
• 38:47
  starting to literally affect the water that I'm drinking. We maybe have to do something about
• 38:51
  this. And there was enough pushback that something started to get done. And one thing we haven't
• 38:56
  mentioned yet, but it is a significant political shift as well. Is that this 1971 was also the year
• 39:02
  the 26th amendment was ratified, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, which nobody knew.
• 39:11
  Yeah, that's, that's a big deal. Right. It's a big deal. No matter who, which side you're on,
• 39:15
  right? At least one side, if not all politicians are going to be unpopular with the youth, right?
• 39:21
  These are the people being drafted. They're being told, you're going to go fight this war,
• 39:25
  like it or not, over in a country you've never heard of and couldn't find them a map.
• 39:28
  You're going to go fight this war for us. But by the way, you don't have any say in our government
• 39:32
  if you're 18 to 20. So, I mean, giving them that vote, that although it was widely supported, it was
• 39:38
  sort of a necessity. Like, you know, you could imagine things getting really violent if they had
• 39:44
  not done that. So, I mean, these moves were not made willingly, no matter what the, you know,
• 39:49
  rhetoric was around them. They didn't know, they didn't know what was going to happen when they
• 39:53
  opened up, you know, the additional, the lower age group, you know, for voting. It's a big, big shift.
• 39:59
  Yes. And it was a sign to the, this, the C-suite in the, in the corporations of the 70s,
• 40:07
  that this consensus that they had been operating on, and, and it was a very, very powerful consensus,
• 40:12
  couldn't just be contained through the normal lobbying process and paying lobbyists and paying
• 40:19
  off senators or partisan politics, right? Saying, oh, it's a Republican thing, or it's a, it's a
• 40:24
  Democrat thing. They were basically, like, came to the, the belief that they had to launch an entire
• 40:33
  counter revolution to change the entire intellectual and political climate of the country. Right.
• 40:44
  We thank you so much for listening thus far. We have come to the conclusion of the first half of
• 40:50
  this episode. We have basically covered all of the history, all of the sociopolitical environment
• 40:56
  that led up to the actual Powell memo. Tune back in next week while we tackle the actual memo itself,
• 41:05
  and how it plays out, uh, to today. Thanks so much for listening to the overlap. Please make sure to
• 41:12
  check out our socials, the overlap podcast on blue sky, on Macedon, check out our website, HTTPS colon
• 41:19
  slash slash F O F dot foundation. Thanks so much. And we'll see you next week.
• 41:24
  and we'll see you next week.
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