THE BAD: The Slow Bleed
How a 1971 Memo and the US Chamber of Commerce Spent 50 Years Destroying the American Worker
Part II of the Clean Slate 2028 Series
By Randell Hynes, Founder & President, US Workers Alliance
On July 4th, 1976, the United States of America celebrated its Bicentennial. Two hundred years of independence. Tall ships sailed into New York Harbor. Church bells rang from sea to shining sea. President Ford stood at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and told the nation, “The American adventure is a continuing process.” Fireworks lit up the sky over every city in America. It was the proudest day in a generation. Americans believed — truly believed — that this republic belonged to them.
But even as those fireworks faded, even as the last echoes of celebration died in the summer air, a plan was already in motion. A plan not to strengthen this republic, but to steal it. Not with armies or guns, but with money, with lawyers, and with a patience so deliberate that most Americans never saw it coming.
That plan has a name. It has an author. And it has a home.
I. The Memo
Five years before that great Bicentennial — in August of 1971 — a corporate tobacco attorney named Lewis Franklin Powell Jr. sat down and wrote a confidential memorandum. It was addressed to his friend Eugene Sydnor Jr., the Chairman of the Education Committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce. The memo was titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” and it was nothing less than a blueprint for the corporate takeover of American democracy.
Powell was not some fringe radical. He sat on the boards of eleven corporations. He was a pillar of the Virginia establishment, a former president of the American Bar Association, a man of immense respectability and quiet ambition. And in that memo, he laid out — with chilling precision — exactly how corporations should seize control of the institutions that govern American life.
He told the Chamber to take over the universities. To monitor textbooks. To build a speakers’ bureau of corporate-friendly intellectuals and demand “equal time” on every campus in America. He told them to take over the media. To monitor television news broadcasts and file complaints with the FCC when coverage was unfavorable to business. He told them to take over the political arena. He wrote — and these are his words — “Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”
But the most dangerous passage in the Powell Memo was about the courts. Powell wrote: “Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” He told the Chamber to build a legal army. To file briefs in the Supreme Court. To select cases with care. To use the courts not to defend rights, but to create new ones — for corporations.
Two months after he wrote that memo, President Richard Nixon nominated Lewis Powell to the United States Supreme Court. He was confirmed by the Senate 89 to 1. And from that seat — from the highest court in the land — Powell began to execute his own blueprint.
The Chamber took his advice. They built the Heritage Foundation. They built the Manhattan Institute. They built the Cato Institute. They built Citizens for a Sound Economy. They built an infrastructure of think tanks, legal foundations, and lobbying operations so vast and so well-funded that it would reshape the entire landscape of American politics within a generation.
And then they went to court.
II. The Decisions
In 1976 — the very year of the Bicentennial, the very year Americans celebrated two hundred years of government of the people, by the people, and for the people — the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Buckley v. Valeo. That case arose from the Watergate reforms. After Nixon’s corruption scandals, Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act to limit the influence of money in politics. The American people demanded it. Their representatives delivered it. And the Supreme Court struck it down.
In Buckley v. Valeo, the Court ruled that spending money on political campaigns is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment. Money equals speech. The Court looked at the Constitution — a document written by farmers and merchants and soldiers who had just fought a revolution against the concentrated power of wealth — and declared that the more money you have, the more speech you are entitled to. If you are a billionaire, your voice is a billion times louder than the voice of a working man or woman. That is what Buckley v. Valeo means. That is what it has always meant.
Two years later, in 1978, Justice Lewis Powell himself — the author of the memo, the architect of the plan — wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti. Massachusetts had passed a law prohibiting corporations from spending money to influence ballot referenda. The people of Massachusetts, through their elected representatives, had said: corporations are not voters, and they should not be allowed to buy elections. Powell struck that law down. He ruled that the “corporate identity” of the speaker does not deprive it of First Amendment protection. In plain English: corporations have the same right to political speech as you do. A corporation — a legal fiction, a piece of paper filed with a secretary of state — has the same constitutional rights as a living, breathing American citizen.
The man who wrote the blueprint sat on the Court and built the building.
And then, in 2010, the final brick was laid. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations and unions could spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. Not just on ballot measures. On candidates. On attack ads. On the entire machinery of American democracy. The Court overturned decades of precedent. It overturned the will of Congress. It overturned the common sense of every American who understood that when corporations can spend without limit, the voices of ordinary citizens are drowned out completely.
The numbers tell the story. In 2008, the last presidential election before Citizens United, outside spending on federal elections totaled $574 million. By 2012, it had more than doubled to $1.3 billion. By 2020, it reached $3.3 billion. By 2024, it approached $4.5 billion. Super PACs — the direct offspring of Citizens United — spent $62.6 million in their first year of existence. By 2024, they spent over $4.1 billion.
And the dark money — the money whose sources are hidden from the American people, the money that flows through organizations that are not required to disclose their donors — that money hit $1.9 billion in the 2024 federal races alone. Nearly two billion dollars spent to influence elections by people and organizations who refuse to tell you who they are.
Before Citizens United, the top 100 individual donors in America contributed $80.9 million to federal elections — about 1.5 percent of total spending. By 2024, the top 100 donors accounted for 14 to 16 percent of all money spent on federal elections. One man — one single man — spent $280 million in a single election cycle. That is not democracy. That is an oligarchy with a flag on it.
III. The Chamber
And at the center of all of it — from the very beginning, from the day Lewis Powell put pen to paper in 1971 — sits the United States Chamber of Commerce.
The Chamber claims to represent American business. They claim to speak for the three million businesses across this country. But the truth is that 94 percent of the Chamber’s funding comes from roughly 1,500 large corporations. The Chamber does not speak for the small business owner in Reno, the family restaurant in Akron, or the machine shop in Pittsburgh. The Chamber speaks for the corporations that pay its dues. And many of those corporations are not even American.
The Chamber maintains over 100 American Chambers of Commerce — AmChams — in countries around the world, from Albania to Zambia. It operates Business Councils that directly solicit dues from foreign corporations, including foreign state-owned enterprises. The U.S.-India Business Council counts among its members Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro — Indian outsourcing companies that have been fined, investigated, and indicted for visa fraud against American workers. The U.S.-Bahrain Business Council includes Bahrain Petroleum Company and Gulf Air — companies owned by a foreign government. These foreign corporations pay dues into the Chamber’s treasury. And the Chamber uses that treasury to spend over $150 million every single year lobbying Congress and influencing American elections.
They will tell you the foreign money is kept separate. They will tell you they have an accounting system. But when the American people asked to see the books — when journalists and members of Congress demanded proof — the Chamber refused. They have never disclosed their donors. They have never demonstrated how foreign money is separated from domestic money. They have never proven that foreign dollars do not support the largest lobbying operation in the history of the United States.
And look at who sits on their Board of Directors today. The CEO of Cognizant — the single largest H-1B employer in America, a company whose president was federally indicted, a company that pays H-1B workers $48,000 less per year than American companies pay for the same work. The Americas CEO of Wipro, an Indian outsourcing giant. The VP of Government Affairs for Microsoft, a company that laid off 3,426 American workers between 2022 and 2024 while hiring 3,259 H-1B workers in the same period. That is not a talent shortage. That is a swap. And the Chamber lobbied to make it possible.
Infosys paid a $34 million federal settlement for systemic visa fraud. They created a “Do’s and Don’ts” memo teaching their workers how to lie to United States border agents. Their Chief Legal Officer sits on the Chamber’s U.S.-India Business Council Board. Tata Consultancy Services is under a $100 million federal investigation for gaming the H-1B visa lottery. Their representative sits on the same Board. The Chamber took their money. The Chamber used that money to lobby Congress. And in October of 2025, the Chamber filed a federal lawsuit to block a $100,000 H-1B fee — a fee designed to deter the very fraud that its own Board members have been caught committing.
This is not the voice of American business. This is the legal defense fund for foreign corporations committing visa fraud on American soil, funded by foreign money, protected by a Supreme Court doctrine written by a man who wrote the Chamber’s own blueprint before he sat on the Supreme Court.
Powell’s slow bleed of American workers is right on schedule.
IV. The Cost
One hundred and seventy million Americans go to work every day. They drive trucks, write code, teach children, build houses, care for the sick, stock shelves, answer phones, fix machines, and grow food. They are the backbone of the world’s greatest economy. And they have no seat at the table.
Their wages have been stagnant for decades while corporate profits have soared. Their jobs have been shipped overseas or handed to foreign workers brought in on fraudulent visas. Their healthcare costs more every year. Their children graduate with crushing debt into a job market rigged against them. Their towns have been hollowed out by trade deals written by lobbyists and signed by politicians who were paid to look the other way.
And every two years, those same politicians come back to their districts, shake hands at the diner, kiss babies at the county fair, and promise that this time — this time — things will be different. Then they go back to Washington and vote the way the Chamber tells them to vote. Because the Chamber spent $150 million making sure they would. Because the Chamber’s Super PACs ran the attack ads that destroyed their opponents. Because the Chamber’s dark money groups funded the campaigns that put them in office. Because in the America that Lewis Powell built, your congressman does not work for you. Your congressman works for the people who paid for his seat.
This is not a partisan issue. This is not about left or right. Republican voters in Ohio who lost their factory jobs to NAFTA and Democratic voters in California who lost their tech jobs to H-1B fraud have the same enemy. The Chamber does not care about your party. The Chamber cares about its dues. And its dues come from corporations — many of them foreign — that profit when American workers lose.
V. The Antidote
But here is what Lewis Powell did not plan for. Here is what the Chamber did not anticipate. Here is what fifty years of corporate arrogance failed to account for.
Us.
One hundred and seventy million American workers who are done being collateral damage. Who are done watching their jobs disappear while corporate lobbyists pop champagne on K Street. Who are done being told that corporations are people and money is speech, and there is nothing they can do about it.
There is something we can do about it. And we are going to do it.
US Workers Alliance is building the counter-movement that Powell never planned for. We are organizing. We are mobilizing. And we are preparing to do two things that the Chamber and its corporate masters have never faced before.
First, we are taking the US Chamber of Commerce to federal court. We are going to force them to open their books. We are going to prove that foreign money flows into the largest lobbying operation in America and is used — directly or indirectly — to influence American elections and destroy American jobs. We are going to challenge the legal fiction that an organization funded by foreign governments and foreign corporations is an “association of American citizens” entitled to First Amendment protection. We are going to use the very courts that Powell weaponized against us to hold the Chamber accountable for the first time in its history.
Second, we are going to the ballot box. In 2028, we are going to replace every single member of Congress who serves the Chamber instead of the people. Every single one. Republican or Democrat. It does not matter what letter is next to their name. If they took the Chamber’s money, if they voted the Chamber’s way, if they put foreign corporate interests ahead of American workers — they are gone. We are running candidates in every district in America who have signed the American Worker Pledge: no corporate PAC money, no Chamber endorsements, no K Street masters. Citizens who serve citizens. Patriots who serve the people.
We call it Clean Slate 2028. And it starts now.
VI. The Stand
On July 4th, 1976, this nation celebrated two hundred years of independence. The fireworks were beautiful. The speeches were stirring. And while we celebrated, Lewis Powell’s plan was already eating away at the foundations of everything we were celebrating.
On July 4th, 2026 — fifty years later — we are taking it back.
That is the day the US Workers Alliance launches nationwide. That is the day we stand up — all of us, together — and declare that this government belongs to the people. Not to the Chamber. Not to K Street. Not to foreign corporations. Not to the billionaires who spend $280 million to buy an election while a working mother in Nevada cannot afford to take a day off to vote.
This is not a protest. This is not a petition. This is a movement. A movement of 170 million American workers who are done asking permission to be heard in their own country.
The Founders did not write the Constitution for Cognizant. They did not write the Bill of Rights for the US Chamber of Commerce. They did not fight and die at Lexington and Concord and Yorktown so that a corporate attorney could write a secret memo and hand this republic to the highest bidder.
They wrote it for us. They fought for us. And now it is our turn to fight for it.
VII. The Call
Go to cleanslate2028.com. Sign the American Worker Pledge. Join the Stand. Tell ten people. Tell a hundred. Tell everyone you know that on July 4th, 2026, we are launching the largest worker-led political movement in American history. And in November of 2028, we are replacing every member of Congress who forgot who they work for.
They have $150 million a year. We have 170 million Americans. They have lobbyists. We have each other. They have Lewis Powell’s blueprint. We have the Constitution of the United States.
Fifty years ago, they started a plan to take this country from us. Today, we start the plan to take it back.
Clean Slate 2028. Replace every member of Congress.
Join the Stand.
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