How the worst memo in history gave us the disaster that is President Donald Trump

Last week marked the start of the slide that ended in the catastrophe of Trump.

On August 23, 1971, less than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

It was titled “Attack On American Free Enterprise System” and it outlined ways in which corporate America should defend and counter attack against “disquieting voices” — environmentalists, consumer advocates, and labor unions. Powell warned that their voices were growing louder and their influence was gaining in the halls of Congress.

I remember the time very well. The nation was witnessing a flowering of reform. Just as the “muckrakers” of the first years of the 20th century had spawned the Progressive Era in response to the wide inequalities and corruption of the first Gilded Age and its “robber barons,” the reformers of the 1960s were on the verge of spawning another progressive era that would rebalance the American economy in favor of all its stakeholders.

Louis Powell thought so, too, but he was deeply alarmed by it. He told corporate America that businesses must pour money into political campaigns, public relations campaigns, and litigation all aimed at putting an end to this wave of reform.

Corporate America duly followed Powell’s advice. An entire corporate-political complex was born, including tens of thousands of lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, and public relations flacks.

Within a few decades, big corporations became the largest political force in Washington and in most state capitals. The number of corporate political action committees (PACs) mushroomed from under 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 four years later. Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, corporate PACs increased their expenditures on congressional races nearly fivefold. Labor union PAC spending rose only about half as fast.

I saw Washington change. When I arrived there in 1974 to work in the Ford administration, it was a rather seedy town. By the time I returned as secretary of labor in 1993, it had been transformed into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, major conference centers, beautiful townhouses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor, most of whom were Black, out of the increasingly upscale Northwest portion of the city and made two of Washington’s adjoining counties among the wealthiest in the nation.

By that time, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them, including registered lobbyists and lawyers. That came to more than a hundred lobbyists for each member of Congress.

That tsunami of big money from giant corporations and their CEOs, top executives, and major investors was engulfing American politics. It not only sank reform; it began to rig the entire system in favor of the moneyed interests and against average working people.

In subsequent years, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates, ruling absurdly that money was speech under the First Amendment and corporations were people.

And America is in a second Gilded Age of near-record inequality and corruption, featuring robber barons like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the biggest robber of them all, Trump.

What’s the answer? No easy one, of course, but we have to get big money out of politics. Start with campaign finance reform — public funds matching small-donor contributions to candidates who agree to limit their campaign spending.

Here’s a video my talented team and I created about all this:

- YouTubeyoutu.be

Should you wish for more detail — and to understand how the Powell memo fit into subsequent decades of widening inequality and mounting corruption and what we must do to reverse course — you might want to read my new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America. You can support local bookstores by ordering it at bookshop.org.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/