The class struggle against the poor in the United States is nothing new—it was formally launched in the early 1970s and has been implemented with great efficiency over the past 40 years. For about 30 years, from 1933 to the late 1960s, the United States followed roughly the same development path as postwar Western Europe, moving towards a social democracy. When former corporate lawyer Lewis Powell entered the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for corporate money to enter politics.