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Monday 28 December 2009

If you want to defeat the right, we must defeat corporatism. This is a truth I thought we’d all learned during the decade now ending, but apparently we did not. The right-wing in the United States is still a fringe movement when you look at its overall numbers. Teabaggers are a noisy but tiny group not worth the concern. Even after 30+ years of right-wing dominance of our politics, their ideas remain fundamentally unpopular. So why do they dominate politics? Because they made an alliance with the corporations. This isn’t some conspiracy theory, this is lived reality and historical fact. In 1971 future Supreme Court justice and right-wing activist Lewis Powell wrote a famous plan, known as the Powell Memo, arguing that corporations needed to fund a network of right-wing institutions in order to protect their profits and their power. Although there is some debate about just how influential the Powell Memo was, we do know that its ideas were indeed taken up in the years after 1971. Billionaires like the Scaifes helped fund some of the key right-wing institutions in this country, just as oil companies have funded groups like the Reason Foundation in order to mainstream far-right ideas. Oil company money is a well-known source of climate denialism; Fox News is still a loss leader for Murdoch, Ailes and co.; and a whole class of movement conservatives make their living on wingnut welfare - people whose books don’t sell and who can’t get real jobs that are instead able to become right-wing pundits because they’re subsidized by corporate power. People like Jonah Goldberg, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, etc, etc, would never have become major figures in our politics all on their own. Without the support of corporate power, right-wing ideas may well have remained on the margins of American life, where they’d been since the 1930s. It was not at all inevitable that those ideas would become mainstream by the late 1970s - corporate power and money put them there, and corporate power and money keep them there. The 1990s Are Over. Has Anyone Noticed?

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