Powell was perfectly situated to make sure there would be no more "neglected opportunities in the judicial arena. Here was a former corporate lawyer who, once on the U.S. Supreme Court, continued as a Justice authoring or siding with rulings consistently in favor of corporate interests, especially their "right" to free speech. And since his time, verdicts of the corporatized Court have loosened antitrust restrictions; severely limited punitive damages; made it harder for workers to sue employers; made it easier to seize private land; made it harder for shareholders to sue for corporate securities-related fraud; and made it harder to obtain patents, and made corporate campaign financing legal. Corporations owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.
The POW! Plan and its Implementation
Powell planted the seed, but it took an amazing amount of money, mobilization, organization, strategy, careful execution, and time to grow the corpocracy into what it is today, the most powerful, domestically ruinous, and globally dangerous entity on the globe. Because of the corpocracy America among advanced nations has the worst socioeconomic conditions (e.g., highest poverty and unemployment rates) and is also the most imperialistic, warring nation on the globe.
What kind of a counteroffensive will it take short of a Second American Revolution, which would be a disastrous mistake, to undo Powell's legacy and reclaim America's democracy and rebuild for her future, one that keeps the Constitution's promise of providing for the general welfare? The odds for doing so seem so remote as to make the question almost laughable. Simply look around. Where is the opposition? Some people are counting on the Occupy movement, but it's scattered, financially poor, basically disconnected from numerous segments of the public that could be prospective allies (e.g., environmentalists, consumer advocates, the many peace and antiwar groups, etc., etc.), and is strategically unguided. Neither can we depend on hundreds of NGOs if they keep on waging their own separate skirmishes with the corpocracy. They have been doing that for years and the corpocracy keeps getting stronger and more ruinous.
In reading Powell's memo while doing the research for my new book, The Devil's Marriage, I decided the answer to my question might be staring me in the face. If Powell's plan was so successful, why couldn't we start with a counteroffensive plan, sort of a mirror image of his but far more detailed and comprehensive? So I wrote what I called the POW! plan. It's obviously a homophone of "Powell" and a metaphor for knocking out the corpocracy. The POW! plan calls for achieving a broad array of strategic reform goals and objectives like those listed below. They target all four of Powell's targeted arenas plus the economic arena:
Orchestrate a blitz in the classroom and in the media about the corpocracy and its woeful opposition.
Mobilize political pressure behind the reform initiatives.
End the political/judicial surrender to powerful corporate interests.
Reform the political party system (e.g. require ranked choice voting).
Oust the lifers and vote peddlers (i.e. career, corporatized politicians).
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