Dec. 10, 2010 (CounterPunch) -- Who rules America? Sociologists and political scientists have debated this question since C. Wright Mills published his 1956 book The Power Elite. Writing in the 1950s, Mills argued that the United States was ruled by a triangle of power between the federal government, large corporations, and the military industrial complex (with many people moving between these sectors). Robert McNamara went from CEO of Ford Motor Company to Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy-Johnson administrations (modern examples include Dick Cheney, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, etc). Since the late 1960s, sociologist G. William Domhoff has revised, updated, and increased the sophistication of power elite theory. If we look at the composition of cabinet-level and other White House appoints since the Reagan administration, it is clear that there is a significant movement between Wall Street and the Federal Reserve Bank and Treasury Department. But why? The answers are found in the social and economic crises of the 1960s and 1970s.
The rate of profit in the non-financial sector fell after peaking in 1966 and continued its fall into the mid 1970s. At the same time, the Civil Rights, anti-war, feminist, brown power, black power, American Indian Movement, student revolts, prison riots, and other rebellions against the establishment were taking place. Regulatory victories by Ralph Nader and other challenges to the power of the capitalist establishment were increasingly seen as a threat in the 1970s. Lewis F. Powell (a corporate lawyer, board member, and future Supreme Court Justice) wrote a memo to the Chamber of Commerce in 1971 and opened the document by stating, “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.” But what was most alarming was that “ Although New Leftist spokesmen are succeeding in radicalizing thousands of the young, the greater cause for concern is the hostility of respectable liberals and social reformers.” The great fear was that mainstream liberals were becoming more radical. A further fear was that Yale's graduating classes (composed of old and new money and elites-to-be) in the late 1960s and 1970s included those who were versed in the “politics of despair.”
In response capitalists mobilized politically and ideologically.
