The Powell Memo: Saving American Free Enterprise One Voice at a Time – Represent Our Resistance

According to the author, what needs saving is business, for it is business that is under attack and if business is under attack, then the entire American free enterprise system is in danger. This is the problem. And just who or what group is the enemy of the free enterprise system?

While these “attackers” included the usual Communists, New Leftists, and “other revolutionaries who could destroy the entire system, both political and economic,” they are now joined by the most “disquieting voices,” – “perfectly respectable elements of society.” Collectively, these groups are one “chorus of criticism,” representing voices from the college campuses, pulpits, media, intellectual and literary journals, arts and sciences and politicians.” Powell asserts, that while “in most of these groups, the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities, it is these individuals who are “the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.”

The extent to which the “enterprise system” participates in its own destruction is a “bewildering paradox,” writes Powell as he points to examples of the “tone,” “character,” and “intensity of the attack.” He cites how the late attorney William Kunstler was “warmly welcomed on campuses” and how a professor from England lectures to students and faculty at Rockford College on the “Ideological War Against Western Society.” There’s the “passion that rules” a Ralph Nader, Powell notes, as he rants about “shoddy merchandise” and a poisoned “food supply,” poisoned, Nader claims, with “chemical additives.”