Just months before becoming a Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell sent a scathing confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s major big-business lobby. It was August 23, 1971, and according to Powell, corporate America faced an existential crisis.

In the “Powell Memo,” the corporate lawyer called on the Chamber to solve this problem by using its wealth to capture the country’s most influential institutions: courts, media and universities. Arguing that “reaching the campus” is “vital for the long-term,” Powell instructed the Chamber to fund a “staff of speakers” to articulate its interests.

Two examples from our time at Bowdoin illustrate how, through nominally independent think tanks, wealthy interests have fulfilled Powell’s “staff of speakers”—and why we must create a space dedicated to organic dialogue centered on universal human rights.

The American Enterprise Institute

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has long served the interests of its wealthy benefactors, thanks to whom the institute has amassed an astounding $348 million in net assets. For one, while taking millions from Big Oil, the institute has steadily denied the scientific consensus on climate change. The AEI has also astroturfed for Big Tobacco and against net neutrality, but because the institute refuses to publish its donors, we will never know the full list of special interest donors for whom the AEI has written favorable reports.

The AEI also has an extensive history of supporting militarism. For example, Vanity Fair described its image as “the intellectual command post of the neoconservative campaign for regime change in Iraq.” Additionally, in 2015, the institute gave their most prestigious award, the “Irving Kristol Award,” to Benjamin Netanyahu, who, though recently charged by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity, was already a well-known international villain; days after the AEI hosted Netanyahu’s award speech, a Spanish court issued an arrest warrant for him for crimes against humanity. (Kristol, for his part, joined the AEI in the 60s, shortly after revelations that the magazine founded a decade earlier relied on CIA funding.)

So it should be no surprise that in his November 2023 talk at the College, “America’s Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process,” AEI fellow Michael Rubin vigorously defended Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It certainly coincides with the interests of notoriously pro-Israel donors like Paul Singer, who donated $1.1 million in 2009 alone (we only know due to a filing error—AEI donors are largely kept secret).

It also aligns with Rubin’s experience outside of the AEI, which includes more experience planning warfare than pursuing peace. In the early 2000s, Rubin worked in the Office of Special Plans, which created plans for invading and governing Iraq while Bush pretended to engage in diplomacy. After the invasion, Rubin consulted for the Lincoln Group, a contractor paid to conduct psychological operations in Iraq.

Yet at the College, Rubin was given an air of professional expertise, seen as “ideological diversity” rather than part of a revolving door between think tank, government and private sector that is more interested in promoting certain narratives than in the truth, which becomes evident as his advocacy increasingly diverges from reality. Last October, Rubin even argued for giving Netanyahu the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies

During our time studying abroad last September, Ryan Berg, head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), delivered a lecture titled “Nicolas Maduro and the Future of Venezuelan Politics.” While maintaining a descriptive tone, he justified the United States’ use of crushing oil sanctions, which he has fervently supported in congressional testimony, along with promoting opposition candidates who promise to privatize Venezuelan oil.

While crushing sanctions significantly contribute to—rather than solve—Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, Berg’s narrative and policy recommendations reflect the interests of CSIS’s trustees and donors, who would benefit massively from regime change, given that Venezuela has the most oil reserves of any country on earth. Consider Iraq, which had expelled foreign oil companies until Saddam Hussein‘s ouster—at which point CSIS trustees swept in. According to the Center for Public Integrity, Trustee Brendan Bechtel’s Bechtel Group was the second-largest contractor during reconstruction, and in 2007, trustee Ray Hunt’s Hunt Oil became the first U.S. company to secure an Iraqi oil deal in decades. In 2009, then-CSIS trustee and ExxonMobil CEO and chairman Rex Tillerson led a contract-winning coalition to develop West Qurna, one of the largest oil fields on earth. Two years later, trustee John B. Hess’s Hess corporation won production sharing contracts to 670 square miles of Iraqi oil fields, and current CSIS chairman Thomas Pritzker founded a company specializing in Iraqi oil.

Ultimately, Berg’s criticisms of Venezuelan democracy serve as a more palatable justification for brutal policies that aim to achieve a regime change favored by CSIS donors and trustees. After all, if election fraud in Venezuela justifies crushing oil sanctions, what should the U.S. do with countries that lack elections in the first place? When it comes to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), not much, according to the CSIS. When asked whether its scholars have publicly advocated for sanctions on Saudi or UAE oil exports, the CSIS declined to comment. Instead, the CSIS has heaped praise and urged the U.S. government to send them more weapons.

The center also has significant financial ties with these authoritarian regimes. Saudi Arabia donated at least $450,000 between 2021 and 2022 alone, and the UAE quietly gave more than a million dollars to build the CSIS’s current headquarters. CSIS trustees have personal relationships as well: one was a paid consultant for the Saudi Ministry of Defense, and back in 2016, the Emirati ambassador to the U.S. lobbied Trump to appoint another as his director of national intelligence.

Amnesty Bowdoin

Unsurprisingly, both Rubin and Berg were invited to Bowdoin College by the Eisenhower Forum, a club named for the U.S. president who overthrew the democratically elected governments of Guatemala and Iran at the behest of corporate interests. But U.S. foreign policy need not—must not—be decided by corporations, and foreign policy discourse at Bowdoin ought to be guided by genuine student concerns rather than corporate funders.

We write this not to chastise, but to explain how Rubin and Berg represent a larger movement of special interest-funded think tanks to promote dubious and harmful policies at the behest of big-money donors.

It is not just possible to envision an alternative human rights-centered paradigm of foreign policy, but it is incumbent upon us, as members of a democracy, to use our political rights to actualize that vision. At a time of genocide in Palestine, Myanmar, and Sudan, the invasion of Ukraine and war in the Congo, we direly need spaces for meaningful dialogue on foreign policy guided by universal human rights, rather than donor funding. Centering human rights in foreign policy is particularly timely now that the federal administration, in its efforts to terrorize immigrant communities, is increasingly violating human rights at home.

Mia Lasic-Ellis

Especially since the Bowdoin administration has suspended its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, we must not let big-money interests fill the deepening void in student education and advocacy for human rights. We are thus starting a student chapter of Amnesty International, the world’s largest human rights organization. Our goal is to offer space for education on local and global issues through the framework of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as opportunities for dialogue, community and action.

If this interests you, we invite you to email us at amnestybowdoin@proton.me to share any thoughts you have. Please feel free to reach out to either of us to grab a meal!