LETTER: Corporate elites declared war on America in '70s

Our conversations have changed in the last 40 years. There was a time of decency. Why has that disappeared? Honest discourse has been replaced by partisan ideology. Critical thinking is no longer sought to ascertain truth. What has changed, and how was that changed? I think the answer begins in the 1970s.

Climbing inside the collective mind of the ultra-wealthy, privileged industrialists of the 1970s requires a journey into a world where hate, vindictiveness, and oppressive recourse rule. These elitists felt under attack and they bristled with hatred. No one was going to tell them what to do, no draft protesters, no media investigators, no civil rights activists, no unions, no EPA, no one. Their reaction is a lesson in child psychology. They hold lifelong grudges and engage in relentless retaliation.

The backlash came in the guise of the Powell Memorandum, written by Lewis Powell shortly before being named to the Supreme Court. The memo nurtured protester hatred, union hatred, media hatred, environmentalist hatred, hippie hatred, welfare hatred (thinly veiled racism), and it utterly consumed the wealthy class during the Vietnam fiasco.

Damn it, they’d had enough, so they organized and began a propaganda campaign that still exists today, against all their perceived enemies. The weapon they chose was money. They sought to control the government through lobbying/campaign financing and the media through consolidation and deregulation (90 percent of all media owned by five corporations). They invested to shut out the unions by plant closings/relocations as part of globalization. Through intense investment in unregulated economies abroad, they have polluted vast areas to an extent unseen since the onset of the EPA. The plan was to do anything they damn well pleased, as long it resulted in profit. Screw Americans. And Ronald Reagan was to become their standard bearer.

The war against the government, the war against the media, the war against labor, the war against public education, and the war against the Constitution was waged against the unsuspecting masses. War rooms operated deep in the bowels of newly established and heavily funded think tanks. The offensive required the establishment of WMD, weapons of mass deceit.

New, unproven theories were to be advanced (disinformation), and old arguments were to be defended with deceit (misinformation). Reality was viewed as a concept that could be manipulated through careful public relations efforts incorporating fear, hate, distrust, and lies. Divide and conquer. Only the outcome mattered. The means and the lack of moral or ethical purpose mattered not. Intentionally or not, decency became the victim of these actions.

Consider this quote by Warren Buffet, America’s richest man, in Nov. 2006: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” —Jerry Straka, Whitefish