Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (32 page)

Before Rachel Carson published
Silent Spring
in 1962, the interaction of corporate business with the natural world was not much at issue—worries such as those of Vogt and Osborn (discussed in chapter 3) were marginal. By 1970, however, when the Cuyahoga River burned in Cleveland, Ohio, there were disturbing signs that the environment was in trouble. The establishment of environmental watchdogs and other government institutions to deal with pollution began in both the United States and the UK in the 1960s and proceeded apace. This process instituted a regime of oversight and regulation for business and rested on the confident expectation that the newly visible environmental problems were amenable to technological solutions. The growth of these institutions and the introduction of the environmental impact study as a precondition for most new developments drew significant sections of a critical scientific community into careers within the new structures.
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Some scientists, the MIT
Limits to Growth
researchers included, began to warn that economic expansion could not go on indefinitely. Around the same time, increasing numbers of citizens became concerned about pollution and the degradation of the natural environment. The coordinated apparatus of persuasion outlined in chapter 10 was at hand: spin skills, propaganda ploys, and PR professionalism developed over sixty-five years stood ready to respond to all perceived threats to corporate values and corporate control, buttressed from the 1970s by the proliferation of conservative think tanks.

The promotion of economic growth was largely implicit rather than argued. As a shared value of mainstream economists, it was a preanalytic assumption for all, and there was little need to defend it. It was and continues to be presented by media of almost all persuasions as the indispensable underpinning of all realistic solutions to social problems big and small. The immediate postwar years saw it embraced as the answer to every awkward question about distribution. We did not need to consider how to share the pie since, by making it bigger, the crumbs would also increase. Economic growth became the principal yardstick for success in economic policy.

While economic growth rarely received explicit endorsement or defense at this time, warnings about environmental dangers were systematically countered and an entire machinery of denial was established through the think tank apparatus. The attack included the demonization not just of environmental activists but of science and scientists as well—an unthinkable situation just a few decades earlier.

Business Raises its Voice

The Powell Memo Recommends Guerrilla Scholars

The great majority of the peer-reviewed condemnation of
The Limits to Growth
in the 1970s (chapter 4) came from economists, and many of them preferred ridicule and personal attack to a rational examination of the book’s arguments. In the mainstream press, several reviewers touched explicitly on the necessity of economic growth to deal with third world problems, and some stressed the centrality of growth to the functioning of any capitalist economy. Both arguments were seen as decisive against limits thinking. Economists also supplied most of the reviews published in the popular press. There is little evidence of businessmen or corporate spokespeople making explicit attacks on the idea of limits to growth or on the book itself in the first fifteen to twenty years after publication, though some, such as the agricultural economist Karl Brandt, a founding member of the Mont Pèlerin Society, were already engaged in the MPS project to set the market free. The immediate attacks were conducted by members of economics faculties in mainstream tertiary institutions, in the English-speaking world in particular.

However, as part of a broader reaction to the introduction of regulation and to criticism of business practices, the 1970s saw the relaunch and concerted extension of a well-rehearsed campaign to sell and resell private enterprise. On August 23, 1971, not long before
Limits
came out, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell sent a memorandum to his friend Eugene Sydnor, the director of the US Chamber of Commerce, urgently recommending such a campaign.
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The memo was symptomatic of a sense of threat among America’s businessmen, and of a mood for the renewal and extension of ideological warfare.

Powell, who was nominated to the US Supreme Court by President Nixon two months later, identified an escalating “assault on the enterprise system” that was, he warned, gaining momentum. He claimed that half the nation’s university students “favored socialization of basic US industries” and quoted Milton Friedman’s contention that “the foundations of our free society are under wide-ranging and powerful attack … by misguided individuals parroting one other.” Powell named Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate—an avocation never popular with business—and Charles Reich, the author of the 1970 pop counterculture bestseller,
The Greening of America
, as examples of people conducting the frontal assault on the private enterprise system. Even more dangerous, he believed, were the social science faculties in most universities; he decried the malign influence of Marcuse, who was at the University of California at the time, and went on to claim that “Yale is graduating bright young men who despise the American political and economic system.” This is at best a partial truth; soon afterward, the majority of Yale’s bright young graduates were seeking employment in merchant banking.
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The fear that business was losing its grip on power had already reappeared throughout the twentieth century, as outlined in the last chapter. Powell, recapitulating his predecessors’ themes, painted businessmen as the backbone of US prosperity and as the well-meaning victims of sabotage by propagandists. “The time has come for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.… The ultimate issue may be survival—survival of what we call the free enterprise system.” To this end, corporate chiefs must focus beyond the selling of their products; they “must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.” This demanded collective organization, and Powell thought the National Chamber of Commerce with its plethora of local cells could be an ideal vehicle for the project.

In order to address the priority task of countering “the campus origin of this hostility,” Powell recommended that the Chamber of Commerce establish a staff of highly qualified and sympathetic scholars, especially in the social sciences, a stable of reputable speakers who would pursue “equal time” on the college circuit, and a program of monitoring and evaluating textbooks at all levels. These strategies would be aimed at “restoring the balance essential to genuine academic freedom” and ensuring “fair and factual treatment of our system of government and our enterprise system” and its accomplishments. Additionally, a “steady flow” of scholarly papers for journals should be provided, as well as articles for mainstream magazines like
Harper’s
and the
Atlantic
; the “increasingly influential graduate schools of business” should be cultivated, and secondary schools also needed intervention. These activities should be embedded in a multifaceted media campaign that would include a pervasive demand for “equal time” and a program to monitor television and other media along the same lines as textbooks. Complaints should be lodged wherever necessary. This demand for “balance” and “equal time” was to play a key role in the ideological wars of the next forty years.

Politicians, Powell complained in his memo, stampede to support “almost any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment.’” In this unhappy situation, “business must learn the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously [
sic
] cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively … without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”
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As outlined in chapter 10, however, there had been scant evidence of this alleged reluctance through the greater part of the twentieth century.

Billionaires to the Fore

Joseph Coors, the billionaire brewer, told the official historian of the Heritage Foundation that Powell’s memo had “‘stirred’ him up and convinced him that American business was ‘ignoring’ a crisis.” In 1973, Coors provided seed money to the Heritage Foundation (which became one of the most influential of the new breed of US think tank).
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His $250,000 contribution was handsomely supplemented, in 1976, by $420,000 from another billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon fortune, derived from banking, oil, and steel. Scaife’s foundations gave $13 million to conservative groups and think tanks in 1980, out of their overall $18 million “philanthropic” budget; in 1998, the Heritage Foundation got $1.3 million from Scaife. It also received early contributions from the Olin and Noble Foundations, which were established by chemical and fossil fuel interests, respectively.
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The Heritage Foundation was one of dozens of free market think tanks to appear in the following decades, establishing a parallel academic universe funded by and sympathetic to private enterprise. Prominent additions were the Pacific Research Institute (1975), the Centre for the Defense of Free Enterprise (1976), the Cato Institute (1977), and the Manhattan Institute (1978),
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followed in the early 1980s by Anthony Fisher’s Atlas Foundation in London (1981), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (1984), and the Heartland Institute (1984).
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The proliferation of such institutions continued rapidly in subsequent decades.

Familiar Tactics: Advertising, PR, and “Economic Education”

Family foundations have been a crucial element in the funding of the modern think tanks. Journalist Lewis Lapham lists the richest conservative US foundations (as of 2001), with assets approaching $2 billion. The “Four Sisters”—Richard Mellon Scaife’s group of foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation—figure in Lapham’s top five, along with the Earhart Foundation, devoted to free market scholarship (Hayek was among its beneficiaries). Numbers six and seven are the Coors foundations and those of the Koch family, prominent in 2010 for their covert funding of the tea party movement through Americans for Prosperity.
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Think tanks founded or funded by these foundations include the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) , the Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution.
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The donations of the principal foundations to the Hoover Institution, the AEI, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute during the period 1985–2002 give an indication of the extent of the funding (table 11.1).

While Coors and other wealthy individuals—and their family foundations—launched, so to speak, a thousand think tanks, Powell’s ideas were also being implemented by the preexisting institutions of business propaganda described in chapter 10. From 1976, the Advertising Council, supported by the Chamber of Commerce, spearheaded the work outlined by Powell, just as it had in the postwar period. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) also played its part. S. Alexander Rippa, a historian of education in modern American society, described the entire campaign to disseminate the “free-enterprise creed” as the “most elaborate and costly PR project in American history.”
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The Advertising Council, still funded and directed by corporations, bankers, and media chiefs, attracted immense amounts of free commercial time, worth an estimated $642 for every actual dollar donated to the council. As well as services donated by the advertising, media, marketing, and PR executives who sat on its board, the council also monopolized the time set aside by the government for public service announcements—about 3 percent of all airtime. It was the largest single advertiser in the country, taking up double the time and space of the top corporate advertiser, Proctor & Gamble. The commercial cost would have been about $460 million, but the Ad Council ran on a mere $2 million a year, thanks to the generous donations of airtime and services.
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The Ad Council ran twenty-eight “public service” campaigns every year. Some, such as the “Future Is Great in a Growing America” campaign, promoted business and growth directly. Others, such as the campaign to prevent forest fires, actually approximated public service, but most held the individual responsible for cleaning up any mess, and all put business in a positive light. In the series on pollution, the campaign pointed the finger at the public and away from industrial pollution: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” The 1970s campaign against inflation held government regulation responsible. In the words of the political scientist Michael Parenti, “collectivist, class-oriented, political actions and governmental regulations are not needed in a land of self-reliant volunteers.”
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