Lewis Powell was a well-to-do, but relatively obscure, attorney in 1971. He was a corporate lawyer who worked with the Tobacco Institute and various tobacco corporations while they marketed and sold their cancer-causing products to unsuspecting customers. Management knew tobacco use caused cancer and denied it for decades.
In 1971, Powell wrote what has become known as the Lewis Powell memo, which advocated a corporate “guerrilla war” of misinformation and corporate take over of our schools, courts and other institutions. That war has been successfully waged. A few months after Powell wrote the memo and presented it to the United States Chamber of Commerce, then-President Richard Nixon successfully nominated Powell to the United States Supreme Court. You already know where Powell’s sympathies lay. He was the rich man’s class warrior. So fast forward to 1978.
That year “First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti” came before the Supreme Court. The state of Massachusetts had a law banning corporations from spending money in elections. Some corporations sued the state. Although the United States Constitution only provides people with individual rights and does not mention corporations at all, Powell and his other corrupt corporate sympathizers on the court decided to hell with the United States Constitution and nearly two hundred years of legal precedent and argued business corporations had a legal right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution. Powell just made up this corporate free speech right out of thin air, or more appropriately, it was a lie disguised as make-believe, or perhaps you could call it complete fiction.
Needless to say, Powell and his fellow non-justices were waging class warfare on behalf of their rich friends when they made this decision. The decision was based solely off the Powell Memo and the needs of the rich to control every facet of the lives of the 99 percent so that corporations could maximize the profits, share prices and dividends of the well-to-do.
Corporations are simply ideas, given a legal structure to operate by state law, with limited purposes. They are not people. But they do provide the rich with considerably more legal rights than the founding fathers could ever have imagined or wanted since they are vehicles for organizing rich people’s money into a single powerful entity and using that money to rig the markets for goods, services, finances, politics, and court justices. This was not lost on Lewis Powell and his fellow corporate Supreme Court non-justices. Their decision was based totally on waging war against the 99 percent and on behalf of the wealthy. You only need to read the Lewis Powell memo to understand the truth of this.
This was one of a series of Supreme Court decisions which have replaced the United States democracy with an oligarchy, and with both major political parties controlled by big money. Lewis Powell completely did what he set out to do, which was to subvert democracy and the U.S. Constitution to the will of the rich. The current representatives of the billionaires on the court (John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch) continue their mission of subverting and perverting the US Constitution on behalf of the billionaires and the class war they wage against democracy and the rest of us.
Reblogged this on Armory of the Revolution.
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