Lewis F. Powell

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Lewis F. Powell (1976)

Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. (born September 19, 1907 in Suffolk , Virginia - † August 25, 1998 in Richmond , Virginia) was a judge on the United States Supreme Court .

biography

After attending school, he studied at Washington and Lee University , which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1929 , and then at the Law School of the WLU, which he finished in 1931. He finished another postgraduate course at Harvard Law School in 1932 with a Master of Arts (MA). He then worked as a lawyer .

During the Second World War he did his military service in the US Army and was promoted to colonel after assignments in Europe and North Africa . For his military services he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Croix de guerre .

After the Second World War he again worked as a lawyer and as such also president of the American Bar Association from 1964 to 1965 . From 1969 to 1970 he was also president of the College of trial lawyers (American College of Trial Lawyers).

On January 7, 1972, he was nominated by US President Richard Nixon as Associate Judge at the Supreme Court of the United States . He held this office until his resignation on June 26, 1987. In 1989 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

During his tenure as a judge, he acted as a majority opinion representative in the following major decisions:

memorandum

On August 23, 1971, Powell was assigned by his close friend, neighbor and then Chamber of Commerce director of education, Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., to draft a confidential memorandum entitled "Attack on the American Free Trade System" to bring American businesses back to the Chamber of Commerce . The memo became an anti-communist, anti-fascist, anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests. The work was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist, lawyer, and consumer advocate Ralph Nader . In 1965 he wrote an exposé about General Motors, "Unsafe at Any Speed", in which he placed an emphasis on the fact that the auto industry puts profit above safety. The exposé is considered to be the trigger for the American consumer movement. Powell saw this as an undermining of American confidence in companies and a further step into the imbalance of socialism. Powell's experience as a corporate attorney and director on the Phillip Morris Board of Directors from 1964 until his appointment as Supreme Court Justice by Richard Nixon made him a champion of the tobacco industry, which railed against the growing scientific evidence related to smoking and cancer deaths . He unsuccessfully argued that the rights of tobacco companies would be violated if news organizations failed to give credibility to the industry's cancer denials. It was at this point that Powell began to focus on the media as biased agents of socialism.

The memo called for American corporations to become more aggressive in shaping society's thinking about the economy, government, politics and law in the US. It led wealthy families and their heirs, as well as former American industrialists like Richard Mellon Scaife , who amassed a fortune in the oil business, and founders H. Smith and GJ Richardson of the cough medicine dynasty, to their private charities being used for themselves to join the Carthage Foundation founded by Scaife in 1964. Private charities did not have to report their political activities, so they were ideally suited to funding Powell's vision of a pro-business and anti-socialist America with minimalist federal government influences. An America as it was in the heyday of early American industrialization, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Powell Memorandum thus became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobby organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and it inspired the US Chamber of Commerce to become significantly more politically active . CUNY professor David Harvey attributes the rise of neoliberalism in the USA to this memo.

Powell argued, "The most troubling voices that joined the chorus of criticism came from well-respected elements of society: universities, church pulpits, the media, intellectual and literary magazines, the arts and sciences, and politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant monitoring" of textbooks and television content, and a cleansing of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the main antagonist of the American economy. Powell urged the Conservatives to pursue a sustainable media relations program. This includes encouraging scholars who believe in the free enterprise system to publish books and papers - from popular to scientific journals - and thus influence public opinion.

This memo not only gave insight into Powell's mindset, but also hinted at a number of Powell's future court opinions. In particular, the report on the First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti , who shifted the view of the First Amendment Act by stating that corporate financial impact on elections should be protected through independent spending with the same vigor as individual political freedom of speech. Much of the future court opinions in Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission relied on the same arguments put forward in the Bellotti case.

Although the memo for Sydnor was confidential with the Chamber of Commerce, it was discovered by Jack Anderson, a Washington Post columnist. Anderson reported the content a year later (Powell had already been appointed to the Supreme Court). Anderson claimed that Powell tried to undermine the democratic system. The memo could, however, also be interpreted to mean that it only relates to the companies' view of themselves in relation to government and interest groups and only conveyed the thinking among business people at the time. The actual contribution of the memo was rather the momentous establishment of like-minded institutions, in particular the resumption of efforts by the Chamber of Commerce to influence federal politics. Here it was a driving and motivating force for the Chamber of Commerce and other groups to modernize their lobbying efforts with the federal government. Following the guidelines of the memo, the number of conservative organizations pouring money into think tanks increased sharply. The rise of this so-called conservative philanthropy in the 1970s and 1980s led to the so-called conservative intellectual movement and its increasing influence on mainstream political discourse and made a decisive contribution to the work of the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

Web links

Commons : Lewis F. Powell, Jr.  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mayer, Jane (2016-01-19). Dark Money : The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Kindle Locations 1381-1382). Button Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition
  2. ^ Powell, Lewis F. Jr. (Aug. 23, 1971). "Attack of American Free Enterprise System". Archived from the original on January 16, 2012. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  3. ↑ Mayer, Jane (2016-01-19). Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Kindle Locations 1381-1382). Button Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
  4. ↑ Mayer, Jane (2016-01-19). Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Kindle Locations 1381-1382). Button Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
  5. ↑ Mayer, Jane (2016-01-19). Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Kindle Locations 1381-1382). Button Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
  6. ↑ Mayer, Jane (2016-01-19). Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Kindle Locations 1381-1382). Button Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
  7. ↑ Mayer, Jane (2016-01-19). Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Kindle Locations 1381-1382). Button Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
  8. ^ Charlie Cray (23 Aug 2011). The Lewis Powell Memo - Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy. Greenpeace. January 2014.
  9. ^ Bill Moyers (November 2, 2011). How Wall Street Occupied America. The Nation. January 2014.
  10. ^ David Harvey (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199283273 , p. 43.
  11. ↑ Kevin Doogan (2009). New Capitalism. Polity. ISBN 0745633250 , p. 34.
  12. ↑ Chris Hedges (April 5, 2010). How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too. Truthdig. Retrieved January 1, 2014.
  13. ↑ Documentation 'Trump and the Corporate Coup', Arte, January 22, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Powell, Lewis F.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Powell, Lewis Franklin junior (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lawyer and US Supreme Court Justice
DATE OF BIRTH September 19, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Suffolk , Virginia
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 1998
Place of death Richmond , Virginia