Skip to contentNews Release: Nader Responds to Powell Memorandum of August 23, 1971
In 1971, conservative corporate lawyer and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell issued the notorious “Powell Memorandum” urging the reactionary forces of right-wing corporatism to rally against the social movements that swept the nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s and advising them on how they could succeed in rolling back the progress of that era.
In this memo, Powell wrote:
Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who—thanks largely to the media—has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.
Now Powell’s wildest dreams have come true via the enactment of many of Powell’s suggestions and adoption of proposals in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”.
In light of this, 54 years later, Ralph Nader is issuing a response to the Powell Memorandum. This response lays out the state of play for citizen group movements and charts a path forward to restore democracy to the American political economy.
In a sweeping overview of the corporate capture of American democracy and society, Nader assails the corporatization of all facets of modern life, including direct exploitation of our children.
To counteract this corporate capture of our institutions and the rising tide of “corporate state” fascism, Nader calls for a new populist movement and “a modern-day army of ‘lecturers’ to personally speak with small groups of people from all walks of life in every community in the country.” Three thousand lecturers can speak to 150 million people in one year. This, he argues, will kick start the resurrection of participatory democracy, the only antidote to the corporate-bred complacency that led to the crisis we now face.
Ultimately, Nader warns that inaction “only assures the demise of the human species’ imaginative capacity to foresee and forestall its own extinction.” He closes this piece by forcefully arguing that “We owe our posterity a legacy of deliberately reaching horizons where morality, reason and prudence become the pragmatic sine qua nons of a just society.”