Talarico Invoked Infamous Powell Memo To Highlight Just How Far America Has Fallen Into Right-Wing Chaos

"The top 1% put the American Dream behind a paywall."

Terms like “affordability” and “cost of living” get tossed around a lot these days, as Americans struggle through what is likely the most difficult economic era of many of their lives. Depending on which side of the political fence you’re listening from, the concept of “affordability” can be defined as anything from a made-up Democratic word to discredit and attack the Right to the most massive and glaring political problem in this nation.

But James Talarico just gave it teeth, for the first time in a long time.

Standing before 1,300 Texans in the city of Arlington, Democratic Rep. James Talarico pulled a sort of rabbit from his hat, invoking a confidential blueprint hailing from 1971 that many people perhaps have never even heard of to truly contextualize the crisis that is facing American voters.

Putting on his history teacher hat for a moment, Talarico offered Americans a lesson on just how deep this vein of Capitalism Hell runs in the United States of America. While most politicians play a modern-day blame game — with his opponent Ken Paxton pointing the finger at the Biden Administration for insurmountable rising costs across the country while many on the Left (rightfully) point the finger at the current Commander in Chief, who seems to be more obsessed with ballrooms and airplanes than his struggling nation — Talarico went deeper. Much, much deeper.

“This affordability crisis isn’t something that happened over the last five years. This affordability crisis has been 50 years in the making.”

Standing before his fellow Texans as he introduced his “New American Dream” economic platform, Talarico grabbed his audience and didn’t let go as he reached all the way back to the 1970s and pulled the Powell Memo out of the dust.

The Powell Memo

The Powell Memo — a document that was formally titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System” — was penned in 1971 by Virginia-based corporate lawyer Lewis Powell in service of his client, the US Chamber of Commerce.

Lewis Powell, 1976

Talarico explained to the crowd that the memo served as “a blueprint for how corporations could amass political power, reverse the gains of the Great Society and the New Deal, and rig the system for themselves.”

Tucked within the pages of the memo was an urgent message to corporate America, warning them that they were soon to lose the political and cultural war to the 1960’s rising of Leftists, progressives, and environmental movements.

Not only did Lewis Powell fear monger capitalists into believing that they were losing the culture war and must mobilize their financial power in defense of the free-enterprise system, he handed them a fine-tuned blueprint to do so.

Powell stuffed his memo full of instructions for burgeoning and established Capitalists, advising them to pore through college textbooks, heavily monitor professors, and install pro-Capitalist scholars throughout college campuses. He urged them to sink their capital into the media, advertising, and PR networks, allowing them to corner the market on the very core of information and knowledge made available to the American public, allowing them to mold and bend public perceptions to their agenda. And, perhaps most terrifying of all, he laid out instructions for harnessing the power of the court of law in their favor, using his years of experience as an attorney to outline strategic litigation and form powerful conservative legal organizations.

He gave explicit instructions to frame the interests of corporate, Capitalist America as “individual freedom” that the country must vehemently protect.

It is the very blueprint that is still being utilized today as the foundation, the very building blocks of some of America’s worst and most terrifying hits, including the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and even the infamous and horrifying Project 2025 plaguing this nation.

Talarico explained to his crowd, “The Powell memo outlined a strategy. Unite corporate special interests, privilege corporate perspectives in the media, appoint sympathetic judges to the court, and buy politicians in both political parties. And it worked. Republicans and some Democrats sold the false gospel of trickle-down economics.”

Powell wrote that private companies should “aggressively and with determination” harness their political influence to stop “the stampedes by politicians to support any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment,” and they must never show “reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose” their efforts.

“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations,” the memo reads.

Just months after penning and delivering his gut-churning memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell was catapulted into the United States Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon.

“Trickle-down economics is not a theory; it is theft.”

Talarico explained that the current political system woven so deeply into the very fabric of America is a direct result of that “long-range planning” and “consistency of action over an indefinite period of years” outlined by Lewis Powell.

Corporations pour countless billions into elections to sway political power in their favor; Congress cannot produce and pass bills and policies fast enough to fill the coffers of billionaires with unfathomably massive tax breaks, all while regular Americans are left to choose between paying for their life-saving medications, putting their child in daycare so they can work to pay for daycare, or feeding their families even a basic meal — because in today’s world, almost no one can comfortably afford all three.

“Trickle-down economics is not a theory; it is theft,” the Texas Democrat thundered. “Since the late 1970s, megadonors and corporate special interests have been buying politicians in both political parties. And then those politicians turned around and rigged the economy to benefit their wealthy donors at our expense. We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.”

Even now, 5 full decades after the infamous Powell Memo first came to fruition, “the top 1% put the American Dream behind a paywall,” taking a pointedly sharp stab at the likes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the world’s first trillionaire Elon Musk, while “one in five Texas children live in poverty.”

“People are working hard every day,” Talarico told not just his crowd of Texans, but Americans from coast to coast. “They’re playing by the rules. But those rules of today weren’t written for us. They were written for billionaires.”

This isn’t Left vs. Right anymore, and it hasn’t been for a very long time. This is a deep-seated and long-standing tradition of billionaires vs. us, with roots that stem back to well before many of us were even born.

They don’t care about you. And to this day, they are functioning on a blueprint that told them exactly how to fuck you over.

It’s time to wake up.