E08: Attack on the Free Enterprise System - part 2

Monopolies Killed My Hometown

The "Attack on American Free Enterprise System" memo, or as it's better known The Powell Memo. Lewis Powell wrote this memo for the education committee of the American Chamber of Commerce two months before he was nominated to sit on the US Supreme Court.

This is part 2 of my analysis of this memo and its impacts on us and our communities.

In part 1, I look at how this memo read like a moral panic.

In part 2, I talk about the four areas Powell suggests the business community focus on to make sure they are "fair" to the business community - the campus, the media, politics and the courts.

The ideas laid out in The Powell Memo have influenced Canadian universities. For instance, Tom Traves (president of Dalhousie University from 1995 to 2013) was a founding board member of the Atlantic Institute of Market Studies, a think tank that was promoting research to benefit the business community; Ray Ivany (president of the Nova Scotia Community College from 1998 to 2005 and Acadia University from 2009 to 2017) was the Chair of the One Nova Scotia Report, which promoted similar ideas to what Powell promoted in this memo. I spend the bulk of the episode discussing the college campus, and quickly cover the media, politics, and the courts.

Links from this episode:

• The Powell Memo
• Board of Directors of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce
• Some of the wealthy donors to the Ottawa Freedom Convoy
• 'Political Correctness', You're Wrong About Podcast
• One Nova Scotia report and dashboard
• The fight against CRT continues and math text books are the latest victim, Indianapolis Recorder
• History of Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS)
• AIMS Annual Report 1996-1997
• AIMS merges with the Fraiser Institute
• Biography of Ray Ivany
• The Ivany tower, whose One Nova Scotia?: A critical discourse analysis of the "Ivany Report"
• Voluntary Planning Board of Nova Scotia
• Running with a discman - my post on comparing the 1991 and 2014 economic strategies.
• Creating Our Own Future - A Nova Scotia Economic Strategy - my scanned copy of the 1991 report.