Welcome to the Sunday Discussion segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Sunday Discussion will feature a serious topic that needs to be featured and talked about. You can “discuss” it on your own social media networks as comments are banned here on Geek Alabama.
On the 23rd of August 1971 a well respected lawyer from Virginia mailed a letter to his friend complaining about how hard it was becoming for businesses to get anything done in America under the growing weight of endless new red tape, worker protections and “anti corporate sentiments”. Now a high end lawyer complaining about the problems his wealthy business clientele paid him to deal with, wouldn’t really be that interesting by itself…
The difference was though, that this letter also included a plan to fix these problems.
Within eight pages, one man outlined a lot of ideas that will probably sound eerily familiar to you today. He said that in order to put corporate interest back on top they would have to work together to nudge the media, shape minds through education, capture the courts, create think tanks to “tailor the truth” and above all else, convince people that they were shareholders, and that what was good for business was ultimately good for them.
Even this still might not sound that crazy with the benefit of hindsight today, except that both the man that sent this letter, and the man that received it, went onto fill positions where they could execute on this wishlist of corporate interests.
Now this document was never meant to be seen by the general public and even when it was made public by journalists a year later, it didn’t really get that much attention because the ideas it set out simultaneously sounded too radical to be taken seriously and too subtle to have any real impact.
But by exploring the difference between the economy and the business landscape back then, and the same fields today it should become pretty clear to you that through meticulous and consistent execution by some of the most powerful names you’ve never heard, this letter basically predicted the next half century of politics and the almighty corporations position at the center of it.
