Week 1: Introduction: The US Majority and the Diagnosis
Week 2: The Roadmap: Numbers, Districts, and the 21st Amendment Precedent
Week 3: The 2% and the Voting Booth Trap
Week 4: The Constitutional Case: Article V and State Conventions
Week 5: People Primaries: Community-Driven Candidate Selection
Week 6: The 99-Cent Revolution: Funding the Movement
Week 7: The Powell Memo: Origin of the Corporate Capture Project
Week 8: Midterm + The Slow Bleed and the Broken Family
Week 9: The Chamber of Commerce, Foreign Money, and Political Theater
Week 10: Worker Displacement: H-1B Visas, Offshoring, and the Tech Giants
Week 11: AI, Corporate Personhood, and Constitutional Human Obsolescence
Week 12: Labor Rights, the PRO Act, and the Race Divide
Week 13: Movement Security, Nationalism, and the Policy Platform
Week 14: Veterans, the Covenant, and the Gig Economy
Week 15: The Call to Action: Synthesis and Critical Assessment
Part I: The Destination
Part II: The Map
Part III: The Obstacles
Part IV: The Action Plan
Part V: The Policy Platform
Part VI: The Covenant
Part VII: The Call to Action
Appendices
Participants1
Week 7: The Powell Memo: Origin of the Corporate Capture Project
RandellHynes July 17, 2026
Week 7: The Powell Memo: Origin of the Corporate Capture Project
Lecture slides with audio narration — self-paced. Click “Launch Slides” to begin.
Read from the Book
- UNINCORPORATUS required reading:
- Economic Policy Institute, "The Productivity–Pay Gap" (current data, available at EPI.org)
- Recommended: Mayer, Dark Money, Ch. 1–3
Take the Lesson
Opens a full-screen slide viewer. The AI narrator reads each slide’s script aloud.
Use the arrow keys or Next/Prev buttons to navigate. Toggle auto-advance to move automatically when each script finishes.
Go to Team Chat
After reading and taking the lesson, join the weekly discussion in Team Chat.
Lecture Topics
- Chapter 9: "The Blueprint — How a Single Memo Destroyed the American Worker"
- Lewis Powell: the man, the memo, and the appointment to the Supreme Court two months later
- The memo's institutional strategy in detail: the universities (Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society), the media (corporate communications infrastructure), the courts (Pacific Legal Foundation, Buckley, Bellotti, Citizens United), the political system (Chamber of Commerce lobbying explosion)
- The implementation timeline: 1971 to 2025, institution by institution
- The $30 trillion result: how the book computes the productivity–compensation divergence since 1973
- The RAND Corporation's $50 trillion figure as a cross-reference
Reflect & Discuss
Read the Powell Memo in full. Is the book's characterization accurate? Identify the specific recommendations Powell made and trace each to a present-day institution. The $30 trillion computation: work through the math yourself using EPI's data. Is the 1973 divergence date defensible? Does the book's choice of CPI-U-RS inflation index and total compensation (rather than wages alone) produce a conservative or aggressive figure? Next week opens with a checkpoint — a self-review of Weeks 1–7.