We Live In The Emotional And Economic Wreckage Of This Broken Home....

[highplainsdem]

111. Please don't forget the right wing's deliberate role in that wreckage since the 1970s.

And yes, this is what Hillary Clinton was referring to as the vast right wing conspiracy.

From the History News Network's site, a 2003 article by Dave Johnson :

http://www.hnn.us/article/1244

In 1971 the National Chamber of Commerce circulated a memo by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell among business leaders which claimed that "the American economic system" of business and free markets was "under broad attack" by "Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic." Powell argued that those engaged in this attack come from "the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians."

According to the Powell memo, the key to solving this problem was to get business people to "confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management" by building organizations that will use "careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available in joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations." It helped immeasurably, Powell noted, that the boards of trustees of universities "overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system," and that most of the media "are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the free enterprise system to survive."


-snip-

In 1973, in response to the Powell memo, Joseph Coors and Christian-right leader Paul Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation. Coors told Lee Edwards, historian of the Heritage Foundation, that the Powell memo persuaded him that American business was "ignoring a crisis." In response, Coors decided to help provide the seed funding for the creation of what was to become the Heritage Foundation, giving $250,000.(1)

Subsequently, the Olin Foundation, under the direction of its president, former Treasury Secretary William Simon (author of the influential 1979 book A Time for Truth), began funding similar organizations in concert with "the Four Sisters"--Richard Mellon Scaife's various foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation--along with Coors's foundations, foundations associated with the Koch oil family, and a group of large corporations. (In this article, I will refer to this group of funders as the "Four Sisters Funding Group" or FSFG.)

-snip-

Now, after 30 years of effort, this core FSFG has built a comprehensive ideological infrastructure. There are now over 500 organizations, with the Heritage Foundation at the hub, all funded by this core group. David Callahan's 1999 study, $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s, found that just the top 20 of the organizations spent over $1 billion on this ideological effort in the 1990s.

-snip-

Johnson quotes a 1996 study from People for the American Way, "BUYING A
MOVEMENT: Right-Wing Foundations and American Politics."

http://www.pfaw.org/sites/default/files/buyingamovement.pdf

The result of this comprehensive and yet largely invisible funding strategy is an
extraordinary amplification of the far right’s views on a range of issues. The various
funding recipients do not march in ideological lock-step, but they do promote many of the
same issues to their respective audiences. They have thus been able to keep alive in the
public debate a variety of policy ideas long ago discredited or discarded by the
mainstream. That, in turn, has been of enormous value in the right’s ongoing effort to
reshape American society. The success of the right-wing efforts are seen at every level of
government, as a vast armada of foundation-funded right-wing organizations has both fed
and capitalized on the current swing to the right in Congress and in the state legislatures.

Emphasis added.

That study was nearly 20 years ago, and the effect of right-wing media, combined with the effect of organizations such as ALEC

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x591230

only intensified since then.

There's been a very well-funded wrecking ball behind that wreckage.