You will never hear any of the inconvenient history related below by today’s “progressives” or their mirror images, the neocons, who dominate the American elite political landscape, court intellectual academia, and the mainstream news media.

Thomas C. Leonard of Princeton University has compiled a terrific power point presentation on the Progressive Era. The presentation is very comprehensive, yet explains in very easy to understand terms why understanding this crucial period is important. This is definitely NOT Glenn Beck at his blackboard superficial stuff. This is the real deal.

Many of Leonard’s explorations and insights are very compatible with the synthesis of analysis developed by economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard:

“The Progressive Era and the Family“: The Progressive Era was the incubation period of the welfare-warfare state – and of all the malevolence that follows.

“World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals“: The Great War was not the end of Progressive “reform” but its fulfillment.

“Origins of the Welfare State in America“: Here Rothbard provides the Rosetta Stone to understanding the origins of the welfare state in America: the role of post-millennial Protestant pietistic intellectuals and evangelical activists born in the crucial decade surrounding the events of the Civil War who, because of the seductive influence of the evolutionary naturalism of Darwinism, came of age increasingly secularized, but who did not forsake their faith in statism and elitist social control.

Until the 1890s, American history was essentially presented as the development of the Eastern seaboard states, seen as an extension overseas of English history or an episode in European overseas expansion. The origins of American ethnopolitical culture were Teutonic (or Germanic) in nature. This type of analysis focused upon the thirteen colonies of the United States, and explained the evolution of America westward through the development of these political communities. This racist Teutonic Germ Theory of History was dominant among the academic and governing elites at the close of the Nineteenth Century in the United States and Great Britain.

Senator Albert J. Beveridge spoke for this generation when he stated in support of an American Empire:

Mr. President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics; deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: “Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many things.”

This was a crucial time in American intellectual history. Scholars as divergent as Murray N. Rothbard and G. William Domhoff have documented the impact of thousands of key academics such as Richard T. Ely, Herbert Baxter Adams, and John W. Burgess who received their graduate training in Germany during this period, dominated by the rise of Bismarck’s welfare-warfare state. They returned home imbued with these ideas, which their apt pupils such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson transformed into hard reality.

This worship of the newly-discovered wonders of statism, combined with the influx of Darwinian evolutionary naturalism,”social imperialism,” Fabian socialism imported from Great Britain, the increasing secularization of postmillennial evangelical pietism, all provided the satanic breeding ground for the incubus that emerged as progressivism – complete with its elite notions of centralized political/economic planning, aggressive nationalism, eugenicsand the idea of “race suicide.”

Ideas truly have consequences.

In the sixty-seven years since the ending of the Second World War it is indeed shocking to find that some persons have a peculiar view of the Holocaust, who believe the systematic mass murder of millions never happened and is a historical hoax.

You’ll find this hard to imagine but there are still people in 2013 who hold such ahistorical beliefs. They generally fall into two broad categories: the arrogantly agnostic (“How do you know it happened? You weren’t there!) and the willfully ignorant motivated not by objective historical evidence but by a predetermined conclusion based upon prejudicial hatred of Jews which they couch in anti-Semitic or feigned ideological language.

I raise this issue because of its relevance to the case of Edward Snowden and the NSA.

Vocal defenders of the National Security State loudly proclaim that such extra-constitutional intrusions into the privacy of Americans, indeed the whole egregious array of invasive and belligerent actions the State has taken since September 11, 2001, are justified on the grounds of “national security” because we are at total war with Radical Islam and its alleged supporters.

9/11 changed everything.

The rule of law and constitutional safeguards are to be suspended during this national emergency. Everything is to be permitted. Operating outside the norms of previously impermissible conduct has become the new standard operating procedure. The Constitution is not a “suicide pact.” Survival of the state is the only thing that counts.

These are precisely the very arguments used by Otto Olendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, and his fellow defendants in their Nuremberg War Crime Trials following World War Two.

The Einsatzgruppen were “special action groups” or SS mobile death squads which accompanied German military forces in the June 22, 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. They systematically butchered over one million persons in this first phase of the Holocaust.

The defendants claimed that they acted under the assumption that the National Socialist Third Reich had been under a state of siege by “Judeo-Bolshevism” since its inception, and that the 1939 preemptive invasion of Poland, the genocidal Holocaust of millions, and all that followed up until May of 1945, were acts of anticipatory self-defense.

These central articles of the Nazi faith were constantly put forth to the German populace by the National Socialist State’s propaganda apparatus via every communication media, reinforced by Adolf Hitler (in his book, Mein Kampf), by the NSDAP chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg (in his book,The Myth of the 20^th Century), in the widely circulated disinformation hoax, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and in virulent anti-Semitic propaganda films which were mandatory viewing and shown in all German theaters, such as Fritz Hippler’s The Eternal Jew.

Here is a pertinent statement from Olendorf’s testimony:

I knew the history of communism. From the theory of Lenin and Stalin and from the strategy and tactics of the Bolshevist world revolution, I knew that bolshevism was to let no rules prevail other than those which would further and promote its aim. The practice of bolshevism in the Russian Civil War, in the war with Finland, in the war with Poland, in the occupation of the Baltic countries and Bessarabia, gave us the assurance and certainty that this was not only theory, but that this was carried out in practice, and in the same manner it therefore was to be expected that in this war no other laws would have any validity. This was true for the international conventions which Russia officially denounced to the German Government, as well as the international customs and usages of war, and it was true because according to this same communist ideology the customs and usages could only develop between partners who were on the same ideological basis. Just as the other class is the opponent internally who must be destroyed at all costs, according to the same ideology the other state which does not represent a Bolshevist system is the external opponent who is to be destroyed, just as the class is to be destroyed internally. The rules in this are adjusted according to the state of emergency of the moment. In this respect it was clear to me that in this war against bolshevism the German Reich found itself in a state of war emergency and of self-defense. What measures are to be taken in such a war in order to fight such an opponent on his own ground — to determine this could be only a matter to be decided by the supreme leadership which waged this war for the life or death of its people; and which, in my opinion, they certainly believed they waged also for Europe and even more for there was no doubt for us that the Four Year Plan, as well as the events of 1938 and 1939, were nothing else for Hitler but the securing of the point of departure for this war against bolshevism which was considered by him to be inevitable . . . The experiences in Russia showed me once and for all that here the propaganda of Goebbels had not stated the truth clearly enough. I was convinced that this state, which in order to gain its ends internally, had torn many millions from their families; in the process of separating the Kulaks [well-to-do farmers] they took the adult population away three times from rural districts. This state would have even less consideration for a foreign population.

It was obvious that the number of Jews in the general population in Russia, in relation to their number in the higher administration, was very, very small. The prosecution has submitted a report from my Einsatzgruppe to the army. In this report in enclosure No. 2 it explained the situation of Jewry in the Crimea. Unfortunately, this enclosure was not available. It would have shown that in the Crimea, for example, up to 90 percent of the administrative and leading authoritative positions were occupied by Jews. The information service in the same field, conversations with innumerable Ukrainians and Russians and Tartars, and the documents which the prosecution submitted show that this was not only the case in the Crimea. For us it was obvious that Jewry in Bolshevist Russia actually played a disproportionately important role.

Three times I was present during executions. Every time I found the same facts which I considered with great respect, that the Jews who were executed went to their death singing the “International” and hailing Stalin. That the Communist functionaries and the active leaders of the Communists in the occupied area of Russia posed an actual continuous danger for the German occupation the documents of the prosecution have shown.

It was absolutely certain that by these persons the call of Stalin for ruthless partisan warfare would be followed without any reservation. Orally and in written form, the Bolshevists have attested enthusiastically to the fact that this partisan warfare was not only waged by the Communist Party and not only by the Communist functionaries; but as Stalin requested, it was waged by the population, by peasants, by workers, men, women, and children. This same literature is proud of the fact that it was waged with great treachery and cunning which the call of Stalin evoked in order to wage this war successfully. Thus our experiences in Russia were a definite confirmation of the Bolshevist theory and of the practice as we had learned about it before.

This is precisely the same sordid rationale or justification for state terror and repression enunciated by both the Bush and Obama regimes and their apologists.

Simply substitute for “Bolshevist” the words “who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” Evidently these “associated forces” includes tens of millions of Americans under the PRISM surveillance program of the NSA, or who are listed in the Terrorist Screening Database.

As I strongly supported impeachment procedures against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as well as Barack Obama and Joe Biden, I fully support in addition their indictment as war criminals before the respected international tribunal established since Nuremberg for this purpose under international law, the International Criminal Court.

Indictment of Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham, John Kerry (as well as other supporters of pre-emptive wars of aggression and crimes against humanity) for aiding and abetting in the commission of war crimes against the Afghan and Iraqi peoples should also be undertaken by these international jurists.

Father of the U. S. Constitution, James Madison, in Federalist Paper Number 47, said that consolidation of legislative, executive and judicial functions into one person or branch of the state was the very definition of tyranny.

The murderous tyrant Barack Obama has continued (and enhanced) the fascist Bush policies of waging aggressive, undeclared and unconstitutional pre-emptive wars abroad, murdering untold numbers in vicious drone attacks.

Via executive orders and presidential kill lists, he has vastly centralized presidential executive authority by claiming the extra-constitutional power not merely to detain citizens without judicial review and legal counsel but to assassinate them.

He supports the indefinite detention of American citizens without charge, trial, or attorney;

He supports the warrantless spying on American citizens, upon their phone calls, emails, financial and medical records;

He has waged an unprecedented war on domestic dissenters and whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Sibel Edmonds, dusting off Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute more than double the number of whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined.

And he has draped his dictatorial executive actions with at least as much deadly secrecy, if not more so, than any other presidents in US history (excepting the tyrants Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR).

Actions have consequences. Let these war criminals bear the full weight of their heinous behavior and conduct.

RT’s Abby Martin talks to LRC contributor Russ Baker, managing editor of WhoWhatWhy.com, about President Obama withholding more than 50 thousand pages of JFK assassination-related documents and outlines the unanswered questions about the case. This is a terrific interview.

The Best of Charles A. Burris

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The Best of Charles A. Burris

Invade the World

The late, great Murray N. Rothbard was particularly prescient and prophetic in this September 1994 essay published in The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, the direct predecessor toLewRockwell.com.

VIDEO: From Boston to Pakistan, Pentagon Officials Claim Entire World is a Battlefield

Pentagon officials today claimed President Obama and future presidents have the power to send troops anywhere in the world to fight groups linked to al-Qaeda, based in part on the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Speaking at the first Senate hearing on rewriting the AUMF, Pentagon officials specifically said troops could be sent to Syria, Yemen and the Congo without new congressional authorization. Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, predicted the war against al-Qaeda would last at least 10 to 20 more years. Senator Angus King (I-Maine) challenged the Pentagon’s interpretation of the Constitution and that the entire world is a battlefield. “This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today,” King said. “You guys have invented this term ‘associated forces’ that’s nowhere in this document. … It’s the justification for everything, and it renders the war powers of Congress null and void.”

Bill Kristol’s Empire of Death

Follow the links in this extremely illuminating article, particularly the one below:

Noble Lies And Perpetual War: Leo Strauss, The Neo-Cons, and Iraq

I learned the basic political philosophy of the ancients and moderns at the University of Tulsa from a Straussian who had studied with the Master at the University of Chicago. We read books (e.g. Natural Right and History) and essays (“What is Political Philosophy?”) by Strauss and his leading initiates such as Joseph Cropsey and Allan Bloom. We deconstructed the Allan Bloom translation of Plato’s The Republic, which is quite different in interpretation and nuance than previous renditions.

The Best of Charles A. Burris

The history of the welfare state is the history of the state’s savage war of aggrandizement and seizure of authority against civil society. Whether in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada, in Scandinavia, or in the United States, the coercive state systematically destroyed the “voluntary sector” of civil society and those intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state [much as the Church did for nearly all of the previous two millennia]. Within the short space of two or three decades the protective sphere covered by workingmen’s social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations, with all other matters taken over by the state apparatus. Henceforth, the workingman and much of the middle class reported directly to the bureaucracy of the state’s intrusive regime. Everything they did was in some way or another regulated, regimented and overseen by the state. The dire effects of this calculated collectivism was malevolence not benevolence, aggression not altruism, genocide not generosity.

Highly recommended as a beginning scholarly examination of this topic is the online Mises Institute article by economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard, Origins of the Welfare State in America.

1. The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850-1914: Social Policies Compared by E. P. Hennock

Hennock examines the array of independent and only loosely connected Friendly Society health and unemployment [social insurance] regime throughout Britain & Wales. He sees that this motley ‘organization’ of free & voluntary organizations that dealt amazingly well with the delivery of social, medical, or burial services should have been ‘rationalized,’ centralized, & brought under state control.

2. British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance 1880-1914 by E. P. Hennock

The title pretty much sums up the contents of this very informative and useful study. The flow of ideas and policies from Germany to England are as important as the slightly later flow of those ideas and policies (as modified by the Brits) from the UK to America. This book also serves, in part, as a foundation and as an introduction to Hennock’s later book, above.

3. No Wealth but Life: Welfare Economics and the Welfare State in Britain, 1880-1945 by Roger E. Backhouse

This is an extraordinary collection; all of the essays are extremely good and helpful towards understanding the first principles and the initial foundation of the welfare state in the UK.

4. Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830-1990 by Geoffrey B. A. M. Finlayson

The state in the UK systematically destroyed the ‘voluntary sector’ and the intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state. Within two or three decades the sphere covered by workingmen’ social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations.

5. The British Political Tradition: The Rise of Collectivism by W. H. Greenleaf

This volume establishes the central theme that the most important feature of British political life since the nineteenth century has been the extension of the role of government at all levels. Part of an outstanding three part series.

6. The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State (Oxford Handbooks) by Francis G. Castles

Described as the authoritative and definitive guide to the contemporary welfare state, consisting of nearly fifty newly-written chapters, a broad range of the world’s leading scholars offer a comprehensive account of the modern welfare state. Divided into eight sections, it opens with three chapters that evaluate the philosophical case for (and against) the welfare state.

7. The Welfare State Reader by Christopher Pierson

The Welfare State Reader has rapidly established itself as a vital source of outstanding original research.

8. The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc

Belloc famously predicted the rise of the ‘Servile State,’ along the lines adopted by Parliament as the Welfare State.

9. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age by Daniel T. Rodgers

While this is a sweeping and substantial study of how the ideas that ultimately created the social welfare state were transferred back and forth between England and the United States, it is an ultimately flawed analysis.

10. Before Beveridge – Welfare Before the Welfare State (Choice in Welfare 47) by David A. Green

These are three works by David A. Greene (items #10, 11 and 12) which must read together in order to get a properly balanced account of the heyday of the mutual society system of social and medical insurance on the one hand, and on the other hand, the complete strangulation of civil society by the British state.

11. Reinventing Civil Society: Rediscovery of Welfare without Politics (Choice in Welfare) by David G. Green

12. Mutual Aid or Welfare State?: Australia’s Friendly Societies by David G. Green

13. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967 by David T. Beito

Just as David Green’s studies above are mainly about the UK, Beito’s study is about the similar story in America. This is a deep and meticulous scholarly study of America’s mutual aid societies and all of the social insurance sorts of personal distresses and misfortunes that often afflicted the workingman and the middle classes [i.e., civil society].

14. Imperialism and social reform: English social-imperial thought 1895-1914 by Bernard Semmel (Studies in society [5]) by Bernard Semmel

The spawning of the welfare state and the warfare state went hand in hand. In particular note the pivotal role of the Fabian Society and race imperialist Viscount Alfred Milner, the force behind Cecil Rhodes’s Round Table movement to consolidate the British Empire (see Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope, and The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden).

15. Fabianism and the Empire A Manifesto by the Fabian Society by Bernard Shaw

Fabian socialists such as George Bernard Shaw supported both the welfare and warfare state as essential to the survival of the British Empire. It was called “Social Imperialism.

16. The British Socialist Ill-Fare State; an Examination of Its Political, Social, Moral, and Economic Consequences by Cecil Palmer

Palmer details how the Fabian-led British socialists of the Labor Party were destroying Great Britain.

17. The Higher Circles by G. William Domhoff

Domhoff details the origins of the welfare-warfare state from Otto von Bismarck to Richard T. Ely to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

18. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs

Higgs charts the accellerated growth and development of the welfare-warfare state in war and peace during the 20th century.

19. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition by Charles A Murray

Murray relentlessly destroys the empirical and ideological basis of the modern welfare state.

20. The Welfare State We’re in by James Bartholomew

This is by far the best book on England’s welfare state. It describes how the welfare system operates, day to day, how it punishes both the young and the elderly just for trying to get ahead, or just trying to keep one’s head above water.

21. Welfare As We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State by Charles Noble

22. Is the Welfare State Justified? by Daniel Shapiro

In this book, Daniel Shapiro argues that the dominant positions in contemporary political philosophy – egalitarianism, positive rights theory, communitarianism, and many forms of liberalism – should converge in a rejection of central welfare state institutions.

23. Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State by Sheldon Richman

Richman further details the orgins of the welfare state in Bismarck’s Prussia and antebellum Civil War pensions in America.

24. A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State by David Kelley

The welfare state rests on the assumption that people have rights to food, shelter, health care, retirement income, and other goods provided by the government. Kelley examines the historical origins of that assumption, and the rationale used to support it today.

25. From Poor Law to Welfare State, 6th Edition: A History of Social Welfare in America by Walter I. Trattner

26. From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order by Marc Allen Eisner

Eisner further outlines the tremendous impact and rationale World War I ‘war collectivism’ played in ushering in FDR’s New Deal welfare state. (see Murray N. Rothbard’s two pivotal essays, ‘War Collectivism in World War I,’ and ‘World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals.’ Both available online.)

27. Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple

Dalrymple’s key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives.

28. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare by Frances Fox Piven

Marshaling a vast array of research, Piven and Cloward persuasively demonstrate how public relief has been used to avert civil chaos during economic downturns and to exert pressure on the work force during periods of stability.

29. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg

Critics such as David Gordon have pointed out its factual flaws in interpretation but Goldberg gets 90% of it brilliantly correct. Not a scholarly treatise but a fast-paced polemic showing the common ideological roots of American progressivism and European fascism, a legacy continuing with today’s welfare-warfare state.

30. As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn

Flynn’s brilliant expose of the fascist orgins of FDR’s New Deal, and its close ideological relationship to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes.

31. Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939 by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

Schivelbusch dares compare the collectivist ideology and pragmatic public policy applications of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Mussolini’s Corporate State, and Hitler’s National Socialist Third Reich. Excellent companion volume to Flynn’s As We Go Marching above.

32. Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State by Götz Aly

In this groundbreaking book, historian Götz Aly addresses one of modern history’s greatest conundrums: How did Hitler win the allegiance of ordinary Germans? The answer is as shocking as it is persuasive: by engaging in a campaign of theft on an almost unimaginable scale – and by channeling the proceeds into generous social programs – Hitler literally ‘bought’ his people’s consent.

33. The Third Reich: A New History by Michael Burleigh

Excellent in documenting the social welfare component of National Socialist Germany under Hitler.

34. New Totalitarians by Roland Huntford

Huntsford dissects the fascist model of the social welfare state of Sweden.

35. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition by Edwin Black

Eugenics was not new in the Progressive Era, but acquired impetus with the advent of a more expansive government. Expansion of state coercion meant that it became possible to have not only eugenic thought, but also eugenic practice. Millions of ‘the unfit’ were targeted for sterilization and elimination. Weimar and National Socialist Germany looked to the US as a model.

36. Ex America: The 50th Anniversary of the People’s Pottage by Garet Garrett

Garrett’s classic expose’ of the destructive nature of the welfare-warfare state under presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

37. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents – The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) by F. A. Hayek

Originally published in 1944, this book was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

38. The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America by David A. Stockman

A searing look at Washington’s craven response to the recent myriad of financial crises and fiscal cliffs. It counters conventional wisdom with an eighty-year revisionist history of how the American state – especially the Federal Reserve – has fallen prey to the politics of crony capitalism and the ideologies of fiscal stimulus, monetary central planning, and financial bailouts.

39. Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse by Thomas E. Woods

America is on the brink of financial collapse. Decades of political overpromising and underfunding have created a wave of debt that could swamp our already feeble economy. And the politicians’ favorite tricks – raising taxes, borrowing from foreign governments, and printing more money – will only make it worse. Only one thing might save us: Roll back the government.

The Best of Charles A. Burris

1. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK by Peter Dale Scott

Crime, ruthlessness, assassinations, and corruption are not aberrations or breakdowns of the American State, but are absolutely endemic to it. A masterful synthesis!

2. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass

The definitive examination of the November 22, 1963 coup d’etat and assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy by the top tier of the National Security State. Why was JFK murdered and who had the power to cover up the coup d’etat?

3. Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard

The State laid bare and exposed as the greatest criminal conspiracy ever perpetuated upon humanity.

4. Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy by Murray N. Rothbard

Without question, this is the best primer on Libertarian Class Analysis or Establishment Studies.

5. American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (War and Peace Library) by Peter Dale Scott

To date, America’s government and policies have done more to foster than to curtail the drug trade. The so-called war on terror, and in particular the war in Afghanistan, constitutes only the latest chapter in this disturbing story.

6. Deep Politics II: Essays on Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba by Peter Dale Scott

7. Not in Your Lifetime by Anthony Summers

8. Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace by Peter Janney

9. The Yankee and Cowboy War by Carl Oglesby

Highly acclaimed by economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard, Oglesby’s grand synthesis of the power elite dynamic between the eastern establishment “Yankees” versus the southwestern Sunbelt “Cowboys” explains much of contemporary history over the past sixty years.

10. Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quigley

Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Lord Milner, J P Morgan, Montagu Norman, Elihu Root, Henry L Stimson, Otto Kahn, Benjamin Strong, Thomas Lamont, Walter Lippmann, Jerome D Greene, John Foster Dulles, Allen Welch Dulles, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

11. The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America by Roger Morris

Las Vegas is the ‘Rosetta Stone’ to understanding the hidden or covert underside of American history.

12. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years by Russ Baker

Russ Baker is meticulous in documenting his path-breaking research on the Bush dynasty, especially the powerful chapters concerning George H. W. Bush’s involvement in the coups d’etat surrounding the Kennedy assassination and Watergate.

13. The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush by Pete Brewton

Well written, exceptionally documented account of the nefarious behind-the-scenes players linked to this powerful criminal family.

14. Spooks The Haunting of America-The Private Use of Secret Agents by Jim Hougan

One of the most powerful, disturbing, and gripping books you will ever read. Excellent on Edward Bennett Williams, Meyer Lansky, Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, Robert Maheu, and Richard Nixon.

15. The Medusa File: Secret Crimes and Coverups of the U. S. Government by Craig Roberts

Buy two copies! One to read and treasure, and one to hurl across the room in anger at what your government has REALLY been up to for decades.

16. Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty by Eric Wilson

This volume explores how covert political activity and transnational organized crime are linked – and how they ultimately work to the advantage of state and corporate power. The book shows that ‘legitimate government’ is now routinely accompanied by extra-governmental covert operations.

17. The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War by Peter Dale Scott

18. Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse

19. The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy

20. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy

Illegal drugs are the superglue which cement the relationship between organized crime and government together.

21. The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs by Douglas Valentine

The book reveals in startling detail how the CIA and FBI were often protecting the FBN’s major targets in the Mafia and the French Corsican underworld. The CIA and its Nationalist Chinese allies were found to be the largest drug-trafficking syndicate in the world, but for political and national security reasons, the FBN was prevented from investigating this overarching conspiracy.

22. The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA by Douglas Valentine

Through interviews with former narcotics agents, politicians, and bureaucrats, this exposé documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) up until the present day.

23. The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR by Jules Archer

Excellent inexpensive paperback edition of the Jules Archer classic. It’s terrific to have this wonderful book back in print which tells how General Smedley Butler was the savior of our Republic from a fascist plot by plutocratic militarists in the early 1930s. Archer is featured in The History Channel documentary, The Plot To Overthrow FDR, a concise summation of this exceptional book.

24. The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed The Jewish People by John Loftus

This international best-seller is an incredible, behind-the-scenes exposure of Establishment infamy and lies. Focuses upon Allen Dulles’ pivotal development of interlocking financial relationships of American oil companies and investment banks with Saudi Arabia and Nazi Germany, before and during WWII.

25. Trading With the Enemy: An exposé of the Nazi-American money plot, 1933-1949 by Charles Higham

Documents treason at the highest levels of Corporate America and the shameful cover-up of their malicious betrayal.

26. America’s Nazi Secret: An Insider’s History by John Loftus

Fully revised and expanded, this stirring account reveals how the U.S. government permitted the illegal entry of Nazis into North America in the years following World War II.

27. Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust by Edwin Black

Key institutional funding and support for the eugenics movement in the United States and Germany came from the Rockefeller Foundation, allied with other elite foundations.

28. The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century by Christopher Simpson

How Wall Street (including President George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, and great grandfather, George Herbert Walker) supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and made the Holocaust a reality.

29. National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union by Antony C. Sutton

How the U. S. and our Western European allies built the Soviet military-industrial complex.

30. The Best Enemy Money Can Buy by Antony C. Sutton

Sutton’s powerful sequel to the above book.

31. Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA by Jim Hougan

Pioneer analysis of the coup that brought down Richard Nixon. Jim Hougan is one of the nation’s top investigative journalists.

32. Silent Coup: The Removal of a President by Len Colodny

Blows away the Woodward/Bernstein mythos of All The President’s Men.

33. The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA by Jonathan Kwitny

After the Nugan Hand bank collapsed in 1980, what emerged was a web of crime, corruption, drugs, and CIA complicity in undermining a friendly nation’s politics and defrauding ordinary people that makes Watergate, if not Contra-gate, look like a Sunday school picnic.

34. The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in Reagan Era by Peter Dale Scott

35. Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (American Empire Project) by Robert Dreyfuss

One of the most important books you will ever read to understand the origins of the terrorist threat of Islamic Fundamentalism.

36. Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (War and Peace Library) by Peter Dale Scott

Scott brings to light the intertwined patterns of drugs, oil politics, and intelligence networks that have been so central to the larger workings of U.S. intervention and escalation in Third World countries through alliances with drug-trafficking proxies. The result has been a staggering increase in global drug traffic.

37. The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America by Peter Dale Scott

Scott shows how America’s expansion into the world since World War II has led to momentous secret decision making at high levels. He demonstrates how these decisions by small cliques are responsive to the agendas of private wealth at the expense of the public, of the democratic state, and of civil society.

38. Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

39. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll

40. Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush by Barry Lando

The seering, uncomfortable truth concerning Iraq you won’t hear from the neocon apologists of the Bush administration or from the deceptive war mongers of the Obama regime.

The above two extremely wry, witty and acerbic lecture presentations by the late Doctor Eugen Weber demonstrate the intimate connection between the rise of compulsory schools and competitive sports as props in the enhancement of the power of the modern welfare-warfare State.

I have always viewed the modern State’s promotion of competitive sports (such as football, tennis, cricket, baseball, basketball, or soccer) as an insidious reintroduction of the ancient Roman concept of “bread and circuses,” a diversionary endeavor to manipulate the masses by enhancing their primal aggressive instincts with false loyalties or allegiances to manufactured idols and tribal teams.

This is the theme of the classic film, Rollerball, one of my favorites.

That the introduction and promotion of such sports is contemporaneous with the introduction of mass compulsory government schooling is not incidental or accidental.

Elite English public schools such as Eton, Rugby, Harrow, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester, etc. which engaged in training the future leadership cadre of the British Empire, recognized the value of instilling certain cultural norms regarding oligarchical domination and coercion via sports.

This ethos was picked up by their trans-Atlantic anglophile brethren at Groton, Phillips Exeter, Phillips Andover, St. Paul’s, etc.and passed onto their Ivy League institutions attended upon completing their larval exercises in rigor, mastery and self-control.

Professor Weber aptly illustrates how spectator sports became the establishment’s release valve or recreational outlet for the masses to both project their aggressive instincts away from rebellious or seditious behaviors, and to instill an artificial sense of camaraderie and loyalty to their rival tribal teams which act as surrogates for the State.

Savvy political manipulators as far back as Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin recognized the pivotal role of motion pictures as a strategic weapon of the State’s predatory policies of war, aggrandizement and exploitation.

Soon after the commencement of the American intervention in the Great War, Hollywood was enlisted in the martial endeavor of shaping and molding misperceptions and disinformation in Wilson’s bloody crusade.

The cinematic struggle for the malleable minds of the masses continued throughout the post-war intermediate years up to the global conflict of the Second World War. Classic movies such as Strike, October, Battleship Potemkin, J’Accuse, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Metropolis, The Public Enemy, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Modern Times, Things To Come, Triumph of the Will, Alexander Nevsky, The Eternal Jew, Young Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, and countless others acted as ideological change agents of the new medium.

Once again during World War II, Hollywood put forth its propagandistic best with such films as The Great Dictator, Sergeant York, Casablanca, Hangmen Also Die, Keeper of the Flame, The Pride of the Marines, Action in the North Atlantic, Sahara, Passage to Marseille, Watch on the Rhine, Mrs. Miniver,To Be or Not To Be, Lifeboat, The Master Race, Commandos Strike at Dawn, Hitler’s Children, The Mortal Storm, The Seventh Cross, Tomorrow, the World, Dragon Seed, Flying Tigers, Blood on the Sun, The Fighting Seabees, The Purple Heart, Destination Tokyo, The Fighting Sullivans, Back to Bataan, The Sands of Iwo Jima, This Is The Army, The North Star, Song of Russia, Mission to Moscow, Moscow Strikes Back, Counter-Attack, and Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series.

After WWII, during the crucial year of 1947 when the National Security State was born, a Congressional investigating committee began its intrusive inquisition of Hollywood Communists and fellow-travelers after widespread internecine disruption and Red-led strikes on the back lots and sound stages of the major studios.

The divisiveness and division of those years has never ceased, as outlined by LRC contributing author David Martin in this perceptive article, “Elia Kazan, American Hero.” The Hollywood wars, both internal and external, continue to shape our national consciousness.

Over the past month Turner Classic Movies, my favorite cable/satellite channel, has been showing a series of films with political themes. But during this past week something dramatically changed. Both TCM hosts Robert Osborne and Ben Mankiewicz were joined by co-hosts PBS anchorman Jim Lehrer and CNN anchorman Wolf Blitzer to repeatedly reassure viewers before the November election that the dramatic stories they were watching were indeed fiction, that “the system” works, that yes there are a few “bad apples” but most politicians are good and decent persons looking to do good for the nation. These movies included All The Kings Men, All The Presidents Men, and Seven Days in May, films about incipient fascism in the USA. I just about puked my guts out having to endure these mendacious mainstream media gatekeepers simply to see the films once again. The Powers-that-be must be really scared to insert such propaganda nonsense on a channel simply showing classic films.

Also a long time friend who knows my tastes for classic cinema sent me the YouTube link for a 1933 film, Gabriel Over the White House, and wondered if I has seen it before. It’s included on this Amazon DVD Listmania! I created. I’ve watched it twice at TCM. The first time over a year ago and the second time just a couple of months ago. The first time I wasn’t very impressed with the plot-line or performances, just curious. But the second viewing I saw a lot of things I had missed before. The anointed dictator from God theme certainly is harrowing and inspired that ghoul from Hyde Park in his fascist ways. The forgotten men marching on DC was straight out of the contemporary headlines concerning the Bonus Marchers, but too early for Smedley Butler and the Wall Street plot to install their own candidate for dictator. That cinematic treatment would come later with Keeper of the Flame, with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, which also aired this past week.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] teaches history in the Murray N. Rothbard Room at Memorial High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Below is an excellent three part BBC series on the English Civil War. I ask that you watch it on two levels:

First, to learn about these extremely important events that are not taught in public schools which dramatically impacted Anglo-American history, particularly regarding the background of the American Revolution, constitutional separation of powers, and the Bill of Rights.

Secondly, watch it as current events unfolding in contemporary America, on the dangers of fanaticism from earnestly-minded bigots from across the religious and political spectrum that fall prey to their ignorance and zealotry. If civil conflict and open warfare in the streets comes to American communities I am afraid that such armed militant groups appealing to the basest of motives of the lowest common denominator will prove dominant.

This series has superb production values with exceptional re-enacted dramatic portrayals of events, like watching a first class feature film.

Blood On Our Hands

Oliver Cromwell

Trial of the King Killers

There was one group of heroic figures discussed briefly in the films which needs further clarification, the Levelers. They were the first organized political group calling for a written constitutional government established for all persons (“The Agreement of the People”), equality of all persons under the rule of law, private property rights and self-ownership (“self-propriety”), and religious toleration.

Forged in opposition to the tyrannical Stuart monarchs and subsequent usurpation of English liberties under Oliver Cromwell’s flawed Commonwealth, such forgotten heroes as Levelers Richard Overton and John Lilburne provided a decisive intellectual impact upon John Locke and Algernon Sidney, who along with John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (the authors of Cato’s Letters), were perhaps the most important influences upon our Founding Fathers.

This long-standing noble tradition has continued on – through the Anti-federalist opponents of empire and national consolidation, the principled Jeffersonians (particularly John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke), the Anti-Imperialist League who fought the original battle against American empire during the Spanish-American War, the Old Right opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s and Harry Truman’s welfare/warfare state, Murray Rothbard and the modern libertarian movement – down to Ron Paul today.

Two must-read books are by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and The Origins of American Politics. These seminal books changed forever the way historians view our American Revolution and how our deepest, most sacred political beliefs came about.

Here are two detailed scholarly articles that further discuss our deep political roots going back to the Levelers:

“‘Come What, Come Will!’ Richard Overton, Libertarian Leveler,” by Carl Watner

“The Growth of Libertarian Thought in Colonial America,” by Murray N. Rothbard

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] teaches history in the Murray N. Rothbard Room at Memorial High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Over the past several weeks at LRC I have written various articles and blogs touching upon my favorite area of commentary: that of power elite analysis and the hidden history related to this subject.

These topics have included Watergate, the Bush dynasty, the 1980 October Surprise, and the 1980s Vatican Banking scandal.

I have received quite a number of enthusiastic responses from readers seeking more information on these concerns. It seems our LRC audience loves stuff which "names names," and details chapter and verse how the power elite covertly operates in ripping them off by bamboozling them.

Accordingly they have asked for book titles and references with which they can further pursue exploring power elite analysis. So here are a dozen principal books which I particularly recommend one starts with which I have found extremely insightful over the past four decades.

Let's begin at the beginning, the beginning of the American Republic.

Two books published contemporaneously in the early 1930s must be at the top of my reading list. They are Albert Jay Nock's Our Enemy, The State; and John McConaughy' Who Rules America: A Century of Invisible Government. The first is readily available, the latter is almost impossible to find (read it and you will know why it has been suppressed). Both are masterfully written, unflinching in their boldness, and authoritative. I have found nothing which supersedes them in dissecting this formative period of the American state.

Moving on to the period after the Civil War (the War of Coercive National Unification), we have three titles that are essential reading: Murray N. Rothbard's brilliant Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy; Senator Richard F. Pettigrew's forgotten memoir, Triumphant Plutocracy: The Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920; and Ferdinand Lundberg's muck-raking classic, America's 60 Families.

The Ur-book of "Establishment studies" is Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, the importance of which I have commented upon previously at LRC.

Unsurpassed in detailed documentation is Philip H. Burch's three volume set, Elites in American History: The Federalist Years to the Civil War, The Civil War to the New Deal, and The New Deal to the Carter Administration. Professor Burch, by his exemplary scholarship and meticulous research into the elite structure of the American Establishment, has written the landmark definitive series in the exploration of power in America.

One would be negligent in not mentioning that much-heralded hagiographic tome of "Establishment studies," The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, by insiders Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas. The authors practically genuflect upon every page in paying homage to these overlords who once reigned supreme in the American presidium of power and privilege.

G. William Domhoff's insightful The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America; and the incomparable Peter Dale Scott's American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan, complete this elementary canon which court historians would no doubt label "the dirty dozen."

But the intellectually curious reader should not stop here. At Amazon.com I have 104 Listmania! Book and DVD lists.

Here are a number of specific lists which delve further into the topic of power elite analysis:

Establishment Studies

Power Brokers, Fixers, and Elite Insiders

Libertarian Class Analysis

The Elite Is Neat, The Masses Are Asses

Hidden History — Where Organized Crime and Government Meet

An Elite Education

Government Is the Enemy of Civilization

The Rockefeller World Empire

Coup d'état and Assassination: Business as Usual

Court Historians — Servile Scribes of State Power

How The U. S. Government Created America's Drug Problem

Theological Canon of the Welfare-Warfare State

Speaking Truth to Power

Conservatism: The CIA's Phony Movement

Political Corruption 101

Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones

Politically Incorrect American History

"Old Republican" Opponents of Federal Tyranny

Southern Secession and Revolutionary Self-Determination

The American Presidency

Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal

J. F. K: Contra-Camelot

Hey, Hey L. B. J.

Richard Milhouse Nixon

Jimmy Carter

Bush Dynasty

Bill Clinton

"Onward Armchair Soldiers" — Neocon War Against the World

Knowledge is power.

Empower yourself by discovering power elite analysis as a crucial tool in understanding your world.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] teaches history in the Murray N. Rothbard Room at Memorial High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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I want to strongly urge everyone watch a fascinating 2011 documentary, The Carpetbagger Project: Secret Heroes, concerning a virtually unknown aspect of World War II history. It details the background activities of a vital secret effort of the Allies in aiding the underground resistance movements throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.

My Dad, Eden C. Burris, was part of this valiant effort until his B-24D crew was shot down and crashed on the night of March 3/4, 1944 at 23.10 hours North of the village of Humbercourt (Somme), France at a place called “Les Emonts.”

There is a monument plaque at Humbercourt commemorating this event erected on May 8, 2000 (the 55th anniversary of V-E Day) by the French. The plaque reads: “A La Memorire Des Lieutenants Aviateurs Americans Lonnie Hammond Jr. Et William D. Rees, Tombes A Humbercourt Le 3 Mars 1944, Au Cours D’Une Mission De Parachutage De Materiel Au Marquis,” honoring the two crew members who died during that mission parachuting materiel to the Marquis resistance. I have pictures of this dedication ceremony, the monument, and of the crash site as it appears today.

This documentary program is excellently produced and presents a broad overview of the Carpetbagger operation. I particularly enjoyed learning about the specific tasks radio operators such as my father were assigned on these covert missions.

For more details on the Carpetbaggers (and what happened to my Dad’s crew) please consult Ben Parnell, Carpetbaggers: America’s Secret War in Europe – A Story of the World War II Carpetbaggers 801st/492d Bombardment Group (H) U. S. Army, Eighth Air Force.

From page 191 of the above book:

Lt. Wade A Carpenter and crew crashed in B-24D 42-63789 on the night of March 3/4, 1944, at Humbercourt (Somme) after being hit by flak while flying at a low altitude. Burris (radio) was seriously wounded in the airplane by a flak burst prior to the crash. Dudley (tail gunner) bailed out at very low altitude and landed safely. The shock of the crash was brutal. Carpenter (pilot), Herdman (waist gunner), and Nesbitt (flying a buddy mission) were not injured. Eshleman (copilot) was wounded in the neck, Burris lost his left eye, and Johnson (engineer) suffered a broken ankle during the crash. Hammond (navigator) was killed in the crash, and Rees (bombardier) was trapped under heavy metal in the airplane with both legs crushed.

Carpenter and Eshleman walked to the village at the bottom of the hill to get help. Dr. Jacquemelle was summoned from a nearby village, Lucheux, and after some time arrived to render all possible aid to the injured. However, they could not get Rees out of the wreckage. Part of the airplane had to be cut away before he was finally pulled out. Rees and five of the crew were taken to a farm in the village of Humbercourt for care.

All eight of the fliers were taken by the Germans about noon on March 4. Hammond was buried on March 5 in the cemetery at Meharicourt. Rees was transferred to the hospital at Amiens, where both legs were amputated on March 5. Unfortunately, he was not able to take the shock and died the same day. Johnson and Burris were also hospitalized for their injuries. Carpenter, Eshleman, Nesbitt, and Herdman were taken to POW camps in Germany. Dudly managed to evade capture for a while with the help of the Bordeau-Loupiac escape network before being taken by the Germans.

Upon capture by the Germans my father was imprisoned for 18 months in three POW camps in East Prussia: Stalag Luft VI, Stalag Luft IV, and Stalag Luft I, until liberated by Soviet troops of the Red Army on May 1, 1945.

I have all the primary document materials such as military correspondence records, telegrams, letters, and newspaper accounts of his capture describing his status first as MIA then as a POW, all the censored communications and letters he wrote to my mother, his German POW camp personnel file, as well as detailed maps and descriptions of the various camps he later obtained. My parents were quite the archivists, which is especially gratifying for their history teacher son.

My father was in personal correspondence with author Ben Parnell as well as with persons in France responsible for the monument plaque who knew precise first-hand details of what happened that night so many decades ago. Several of them who aided the crew that night were still living when it was dedicated.

They had not forgotten what happened there and why.

In 2004 my father died and was buried on March 4, exactly sixty years to the day of the above events.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] teaches history in the Murray N. Rothbard Room at Memorial High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Reading this Daily Beast story, “Vatican Banker Running Scared: Gotti Tedeschi Could Turn Whistle-Blower,” by Barbie Latza Nadeau, I had the most uncanny sense of déjà vu. This account perfectly fits within the broad context of power-elite analysis regarding international banking (frequently discussed by Ron Paul) and the relationship between high governing elites, their possible connections to organized crime, money-laundering, and systemic financial instability of the entire fractional-reserve banking network.

These very topics were of course covered in-depth at the time of the earlier Vatican Banking scandal of the 1980s. That scandal had wide implications both internationally and in Italy and the United States in particular. An excellent example of this type of coverage was Penny Lernoux’s masterful book, In Banks We Trust: Bankers and Their Associates The CIA, The Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians, and the Vatican. Here is an outline of this book.

Lernoux starts her narrative with the Penn Square Bank scandal in Oklahoma City and moves outward from there to the financial world at-large. An excellent companion book is Pete Brewton’s The Mafia, CIA, & George Bush.

I was fascinated (almost obsessed) with all this at the time because it was my first real introduction to how the internecine web of connections within the world of finance, politics, intelligence, and organized crime interlocked. I read almost everything I could get my hands on.

As I have often observed at LRC, the "deep political" history of the 1970s and 1980s is substantially different than presented in popular accounts or establishment court history.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] teaches history in the Murray N. Rothbard Room at Memorial High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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As the fortieth anniversary of the June 17th, 1972 Watergate break-in approaches, the momentous events responsible for bringing about the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon remain a deeply shrouded mystery to most Americans. The revelation and confirmation of former FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt as the legendary whistleblower "Deep Throat" in the Watergate Scandal brings them no closer to solving that mystery. This is because most of what they think they know about Watergate is simply wrong.

As a high school history instructor I have discovered that Watergate is a series of mysterious events to which my students sadly have little or no knowledge (other than Forrest Gump had difficulty sleeping in his Washington, D. C. hotel room because of some flashing lights from the adjacent Watergate complex).

This article will attempt to focus light upon this subject in the hope such illumination will foster understanding of this crucial episode in American history.

To older Americans, Watergate was a vast scandal involving presidential abuse of power.

It was about a Nixon administration out of control — obstructing justice — concocting enemies lists of Nixon critics — soliciting illegal campaign contributions — using "dirty tricks" against electoral opponents — and most importantly — the June 17th, 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Larry O'Brien's office in the Watergate complex by men linked to the Republican's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) and the Nixon White House.

It is this last item which remains the central fact most Americans recall concerning the scandal, for it was the subject of months of televised public hearings by Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate Committee and numerous criminal trials and investigations.

The events surrounding the Watergate break-ins were also the basis of the Academy Award winning film, All The President's Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, based on the acclaimed number one best-seller of the same name, by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who Redford and Hoffman portray. In this Watergate of the imagination, actor Hal Holbrook masterfully captured the cinematic persona of the elusive informant "Deep Throat."

Few Americans, including I daresay most journalists, have read the scores of Watergate-related books and published Congressional committee reports. But they have seen All The President's Men. The movie has become their reality of that series of events that gripped our nation.

The "Good Guys" as seen by the American public: Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein who courageously exposed the details of the Watergate Scandal, the shadowy whistleblower "Deep Throat," and the heroic fired White House Counsel to the President John Dean, who was the chief witness against Richard Nixon.

The "Bad Guys" as seen by the American public: the evil Machiavellian President Richard M. Nixon, his malevolent Attorney General John Mitchell, his manipulative presidential aides H. R. Halderman and John Ehirichman, the sinister G. Gordon Liddy, the enigmatic E. Howard Hunt, and the numerous CREEP/Nixon administration officials and creepy minions who went to prison.

But Larry O'Brien's office was not the target of the break-ins.

John Dean was not the selfless hero testifying to dark deeds of an evil Richard Nixon.

Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein were not all they seemed in the mythos of the Watergate legend.

And "Deep Throat," W. Mark Felt, it has been revealed, may have been more motivated by revenge at not being appointed successor to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by Nixon and by protecting the Bureau's imperial turf from outsider L. Patrick Gray, than by convictions of conscience and dedication to the rule of law. Felt was no Hal Holbrook.

At the epicenter of Watergate was a sex scandal involving a Washington, D. C. call-girl ring. This crucial fact is little known to the vast numbers of the American public who think they know the real story of Watergate but only know the myth created and fostered by secret forces at the heart of the mystery.

1n 1972, at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the vast Watergate complex, the executive director of the Association of Democratic State Chairmen was R. Spenser Oliver, Jr. Oliver was the nephew of Robert F. Bennett. Bennett, president of the public relations firm (and CIA front), Robert R. Mullen and Company, employed two men who were fierce rivals, Oliver's father and E. Howard Hunt, longtime CIA operative and handler of the Watergate burglars (all former CIA operatives) at the time of the Watergate break-in. According to investigative journalist Jim Hougan, Bennett was a key source for Woodward and Bernstein's Washington Post "investigations." His mission was to feed them disinformation to steer them clear of the CIA involvement in the affair and possibly the true significance of his nephew in the scandal.

Bennett was also plugged into Washington super-lawyer and powerbroker Edward Bennett Williams, whose important clients included the Democratic National Committee, The Washington Post, CIA director Richard Helms, and Senator Edward Kennedy. Watergate Judge John Sirica was one of Williams' closest friends — "I owe my career to Ed Williams."

Spencer Oliver, Jr. was a longtime associate of the sleazy attorney/pimp Phillip Mackin Bailey who set up the DNC connection to Heidi Rikin's Columbia Plaza call-girl operation. Bailey arranged with an inside DNC contact to have a secure phone and confidential descriptive information on the call-girls available for potential clients. It was the desk and telephone of Oliver's secretary, Ida Maxine Wells that was the target of the Watergate break-ins. Burglar Eugenio Martinez had a key to that desk when arrested on June 17th, 1972. The key lay in the National Archives for two decades before anyone realized its significance.

Oliver later became chief council for the Senate committee investigating the 1980 Reagan campaign "October Surprise" scandal (which resulted in a similar massive cover-up of evidence and truth of that affair) while his uncle, Robert Bennett went on to a vice presidency of the Summa Corporation, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes's flagship operation.

The CIA had allegedly been secretly running Summa for decades.

Robert Maheu, the CIA's middleman in the CIA-Mafia assassination plots against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, was Hughes's right-hand man and alter ego. According to Jim Hougan, the "super-connected" Robert A. Maheu Associates firm found office space with Kennedy family spook Carmine Bellino, sharing Bellino's secretary and telephone. Many persons assumed Maheu and Bellino were partners. Bellino had served at John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy's side on the McClellan Senate Investigating Committee on Labor Racketeering, targeting New Orleans Mob boss Carlos Marcello, Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana, and Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa. Indeed Bellino was a key figure in RFK's war against Hoffa. Bellino was appointed chief investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee.

Robert Maheu was also closely connected with attorney Edward Bennett Williams.

Earlier in the 1950s, Maheu was instrumental in the multinational oil companies' conspiracy to destroy Greek oil tanker tycoon Aristotle Onassis, which involved Vice President Richard Nixon, CIA director Allen Dulles (former senior partner of the nation's most powerful law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, who represented the Rockefeller's Standard Oil interests), future Chief Justice of the United States Warren Burger, the Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank chairman John J. McCloy, and attorney Edward Bennett Williams.

Nixon nemesis Onassis later married Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the slain JFK.

Dulles and McCloy later served on the Warren Commission.

Warren Commission Special Counsel Leon Jaworski, who investigated Lee Harvey Oswald for possible CIA or FBI connections, and found none, was later selected by Richard Nixon to be Watergate Special Prosecutor, after firing Archibald Cox in what was described as the "Saturday Night Massacre."

In the last days before his death, former CIA official and Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt, in a recorded confession to his son St. John Hunt described his involvement in a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy. Other alleged conspirators named by Hunt included CIA operatives Cord Meyer, David Atlee Phillips, Frank Sturgis, David Morales, William Harvey, and vice president Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Warren Commission member Gerald R. Ford succeeded Nixon as president, pardoning him of all crimes he may have committed. Ford, in an intriguing post-Watergate gesture, offered the Directorship of the CIA to Edward Bennett Williams. Williams declined the position. The appointment was later accepted by Nixon loyalist, George H. W. Bush, the chairman of the Republican National Committee during the unfolding Watergate Scandal.

Again, citing Jim Hougan: "Organized in 1954, Robert A. Maheu Associates became the prototype for the u2018Mission Impossible' television series, handling CIA assignments so sensitive that the federal spooks dared not perform themselves. In short, it was dirty work, involving prostitution, pornography, illegal wiretaps, (and) assassination. . . According to Joe Shimon, one of Maheu's oldest friends, u2018Bob was a pimp for the Cookie Factory. What I mean is, The Agency (CIA) would call him up when Sukarno or Hussein (the late King of Jordan long on the CIA's payroll) was coming to town, and ask him to get some girls." Shimon appeared as the mysterious "Doctor Peters" featured in the A & E documentary, The Plot To Assassinate President Kennedy. He was the chief of detectives for Washington's upscale Northwest quadrant where almost all of our nation's capitol's foreign embassies are located. Shimon was a close friend of Mob figures Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, both involved with Maheu in the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots and both brutally murdered for what they knew. Shimon was at early Miami meetings of these anti-Castro conspirators.

Billionaire Howard Hughes was one of Robert Bennett's principal clients, a contract held earlier by Larry O'Brien, chairman of the DNC at the time of the break-ins. Bennett was the long-time United States Senator from Utah recently defeated in the 2010 GOP primary. (Do not get this Robert F. Bennett confused with Robert S. Bennett, President Clinton's lawyer in the Paula Jones sexual harassment affair, Enron's Washington attorney, Reagan administration Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's Iran-Contra Scandal lawyer, and attorney for the Keating Five in the Reagan administration's 1980's multibillion dollar Savings and Loan Scandal. That Robert Bennett is the brother of Neoconservative warmonger and former Reagan Drug Czar, the crazed William J. Bennett.)

Who Was "Deep Throat?"

For decades, the nation's elite news media played a "parlor game" concerning the Watergate Scandal. The "game" was to keep the nation guessing the true identity of Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein's famous source of information on the scandal, who they labeled "Deep Throat" after a notorious porno movie of the period starring actress Linda Lovelace. In an ironic twist of fate, Richard Nixon and Linda Lovelace both died on April 22nd, the former in 1994, the later in 2002.

Speculation was rife. "Deep Throat" candidates included Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Security Agency, and deputy director of the CIA (who used to be briefed by Bob Woodward when he was communications duty officer of the Chief of Naval Operations, one of the most elite and trusted assignments for a young officer in the National Security Establishment); or Washington powerbroker and fixer Edward Bennett Williams; or CIA counter-intelligence official Richard Ober — a close friend of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee; or former NATO Commander/Nixon White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig (also briefed regularly by Woodward when he as a briefing officer at the Pentagon).

A host of Nixon administration appointees suspected of disloyalty to their chief were also tossed in the ring.

But all that came to an end in 2005 with the May 31st Vanity Fair story revealing that Felt was "Deep Throat." You could see the utter disappointment on the faces of the Cable News Network talking heads and their guests the day the news broke.

This self-interested "parlor game" was part of the media misdirection/disinformation effort to keep the public focused on "Deep Throat," and not on the real story of Watergate — why were the two break-ins undertaken by Hunt and Liddy's burglars?

To paraphrase X (Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty played by actor Donald Sutherland in Oliver Stone's movie, JFK) — "Who planned the break-ins? Who stood to benefit? And who has the power to cover it up? Who?"

The answer: John Dean.

John Dean masterminded the whole Watergate affair, from the break-ins, the cover-ups and obstructions of justice, to ratting out Nixon, and emerging as the hero of the scandal.

Why were the break-ins planned? The first was planned by John Dean to get sexual dirt on the Democrats concerning the Columbia Plaza call-girl ring which had the DNC at the Watergate as one of its contact points for clients. Nine days after this initial break-in, Phillip Mackin Bailey was busted by federal authorities. Upon examination of the evidence compiled by the assistant U. S. attorney in charge of this case, John Rudy, Bailey's address book was discovered by White House Counsel John Dean to have the name and phone number of "Mo Biner" under the reference "clout." Mo was Dean's vivacious blonde girlfriend, Maureen Biner, roommate of Erika L. "Heidi" Rikin (aka Cathy Dieter), the madam of the call-girl ring and mistress of Washington, D. C. Mob boss Joseph Nesline — an associate of the powerful organized crime Syndicate's Meyer Lansky — and also roommate of Josephine Alvarez, Nesline's wife.

Dean quickly married Maureen, for a wife cannot testify against her husband. A photograph of "my very dear friend Heidi" who attended their wedding appears in Maureen Dean's book, Mo: A Woman's View of Watergate. "Heidi" had performed as a stripper at Washington's Blue Mirror Club in the mid 1960s and had long been associated with prostitution in the D. C. area.

The second break-in was necessary for John Dean to find out if Mo's picture and confidential information was in the sexual client book in the locked desk of secretary Ida Maxine Wells in the DNC's Watergate office, and thus possibly lead back to implicating him.

In other words, the real unanswered question of Watergate was never: "Who was u2018Deep Throat?'" or "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

The real question remains: "WAS MO A HO?" But the elite media will never go there in a million years.

And since the infamous John and Maureen Dean/G. Gordon Liddy civil law suit about all this controversy was settled without going to trial, and the wiretap transcripts of Ida Maxine Wells' bugged phone used for the sexual liaisons have been sealed by a federal judge, we may never know the full truth.

On March 27th of this year I had the distinct honor of addressing those two wonderful fabulists, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, spinners of the yarn known as Watergate. These aging gatekeepers of the mainstream media were in town to deliver the University of Tulsa's Presidential Lecture (sponsored by the Darcy O'Brien Endowed Chair). After these gentlemen had once again returned the spell-bound yet geriatric audience to those thrilling days of yesteryear four decades past, re-telling the lurid tales of Nixon, Liddy, Hunt, McCord, Mitchell, Halderman, etc. I expressed to them just how pleased I was to finally meet the Brothers Grimm of our national mythos, and that one day in the future I will perhaps meet Hans Christian Anderson himself, John Dean. Then we may finally address the real question at the heart of Watergate. It was not, of course, the identity of "Deep Throat," or "What did the president know and when did he know it." The real question remains: "Was Mo a Ho?" The audience gasped! You should have seen the look on Woodward's face as he struggled to explain (or as he put it, decode), the meaning of my interrogatory. Priceless! I then stated that my true question was actually directed at Mr. Bernstein, author of the brilliant article, "The CIA and the Media." I pointed out that he had outlined in his piece how the Central Intelligence Agency had engaged in covert activities with the nations' press described as "the Mighty Wurlitzer" or "Operation Mockingbird." Was the intelligence community engaged in such activities today? We can all sleep better tonight since Bernstein reassured me that all that kind of stuff ended at the conclusion of the Cold War. Woodward equally reassured us that "the system worked" because Gerald Ford did the right thing in pardoning Richard Nixon.

The Saturday Night Massacre

Congress had passed legislation providing for an independent special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. Nixon Attorney General Elliot Richardson appointed his former Harvard Law professor Archibald Cox. Cox was the epitome of a card-carrying member of the Ivy League, eastern seaboard, anti-Nixon liberal Establishment. He had served as JFK's 1960 campaign speechwriter and later as Kennedy's Solicitor General in the Justice Department.

Among those present at the ceremony of Cox repeating his oath of office were two longtime friends, Senator Edward Kennedy and his sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy, widow of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, under whom Cox had served.

Eliot Richardson himself came from the liberal Rockefeller-wing of the eastern Establishment, and was chosen by Nixon to placate these elements.

Nixon was deeply suspicious of Cox and his motives in widening his investigation beyond the Watergate break-ins and cover-up, and with good reason: of the thirty-seven lawyers Cox recruited, all but one were Ivy Leaguers, eighteen from Harvard; most were Democrats; many had worked in the Justice Department under Bobby Kennedy or Nicholas dfB. Katzenbach who succeeded Kennedy. They were determined to get Nixon.

On October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Rucklehaus to fire Cox, Rucklehaus refused and was fired. Nixon then ordered the acting Attorney General, Solicitor General Robert Bork to fire Cox, which he did.

The nation was outraged by this series of impromptu actions. Bumper stickers soon emerged around the country proclaiming — IMPEACH THE COX SACKER!

Nixon then appointed Leon Jaworski as Special Prosecutor.

The Tapes Which Brought Down A President

Alexander Butterfield had enjoyed a distinguished career in military intelligence when he went to work for the Nixon White House senior staff. He was one of the most important persons surrounding Nixon. Butterfield was involved in virtually every aspect of activity relating to the day-to-day decisions of the president.

Butterfield was also a CIA plant within the highest echelons of the White House, and his pivotal role in the ensuing outcome of the Watergate Scandal cannot be overestimated. He was not the only such covert agent spying on the Nixon White House for the National Security Establishment. The Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, distrusting certain Nixon foreign policy initiatives, had run an elaborate military espionage operation within the administration. There were secret forces who wanted to see Nixon go.

Butterfield was called to testify before the Senate Watergate Committee. He revealed the existence of a sophisticated White House Oval Office taping system which had recorded every important conversation relating to Watergate and the crimes of the Nixon administration.

The shocking contents of the June 23rd, 1972 Oval Office tape discussing Richard Nixon's and John Dean's strategy for the obstruction of justice regarding the June 17th Watergate break-in has gone down in history as the "smoking gun," which led to Nixon's ultimate destruction and resignation.

The Washington Post and the CIA

The Washington Post has long held a close relationship within the Washington power elite Establishment. In the 1950s under the direction of CIA Director Allen Dulles, the Agency formulated a vast strategic program for infiltrating and manipulating the American news media. The plan was designated "Operation Mockingbird." It was devised by Frank Wisner, director of the Office of Policy Coordination, the covert action arm of the CIA; his aide Richard Helms; and by Washington Post publisher Phillip Graham. Graham committed suicide in August of 1963 after reported mental instability and ravings about CIA manipulation of journalists. His estranged wife Katherine Graham took control of the Post. Katherine was daughter of Washington powerbroker Eugene Meyer, who was chairman of the War Finance Board under Woodrow Wilson, chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under Herbert Hoover, Governor of the Federal Reserve Board under Franklin Roosevelt, and President of the World Bank under Harry Truman. Meyer purchased the Post in 1933.

Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who supervised Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate investigations, was well connected in Washington circles of power. He had been a close friend of President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline. In fact, Bradlee's sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of high-ranking CIA counter-intelligence official Cord Meyer, had a sexual affair with JFK, allegedly involving the use of Marijuana and LSD. Mary Pinchot Meyer was mysteriously murdered in 1964. Richard Helms, instrumental in the creation of "Operation Mockingbird," was a close friend of Bradlee's since childhood. Helms was CIA Director during the Watergate Scandal. He was later convicted for lying to Congress concerning CIA activities in Chile.

Woodward, former Naval Intelligence elite briefing officer of the highest ranking officials of the National Security Council and the Pentagon, is now editor of the Post. In the nearly forty years since the Watergate Scandal he has built his career reputation as author of a series of best-selling books on America's military/intelligence Establishment. Bob Woodward has indeed proved to be a good and faithful servant to those secret forces within the corridors of power of the National Security Establishment responsible for the downfall of Richard Nixon, and loyal to the elusive man which contributed so much to building that reputation, W. Mark Felt.

Recommended Reading: Jim Hougan's excellent books, Spooks: the Haunting of America — the Private Use of Secret Agents, and Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA; Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin's masterwork, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President; Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman's insightful, The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, From Nixon To Obama; and Anthony Summers' superb The Arrogance of Power: the Secret World of Richard Nixon, are essential. In 2005, Bob Woodward authored The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat.

For fascinating links between the JFK Assassination and the Watergate Scandal, see Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War; Jim Marrs, Crossfire; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years; and James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

An excellent website on the Watergate Scandal can be found at: www.watergate.com.

A streaming video version of the classic A & E documentary, The Key To Watergate, which inspired this article, is available at this site.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] teaches history in the Murray N. Rothbard Room at Memorial High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Best of Charles A. Burris

Is it just me or have you noticed all the recent poignant and touching stories in the establishment mainstream media about the Bushes, particularly Jeb Bush and his father George H. W. Bush. It seems that a full court press is on to “humanize” and create a new spin on the legacy of the Bush dynasty. For what purpose? To have Jeb appear as “the man on the white horse” come to save the Party as its legacy nominee and in the name of party unity, seize the GOP nomination from Mitt Romney who is still distrusted by the party’s base of supporters? Jeb’s most recent remarks about the need for moderation are very suspicious. Is he testing the waters for a palace coup attempt in Tampa?

Everyone should carefully study the 1940 GOP Presidential Convention and its “dark horse” nominee Wendell Willkie. The world was at war in Europe. The Republicans held an “open convention” in Philadelphia. There were two non-interventionist candidates, former president Herbert Hoover and Ohio Senator Robert Taft (Ron Paul’s mentor). Thomas Dewey of New York represented the Rockefeller forces, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan (another prominent non-interventionist who was “turned” by covert female British agents), several other lesser candidates, and Willkie (covertly chosen by Thomas W. Lamont of the House of Morgan, FDR, and by British Intelligence).

The story is laid out in full in Thomas E. Mahl’s brilliant book, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44, in his chapter 8, “We Want Willkie.”

Justin Raimondo reviews the book here.

William Jasper discusses the Willkie nomination here.

Was Taft supporter Ralph E. Williams, who headed the committee on arrangements, murdered, allowing Sam Pryor of the Willkie forces to secretly get control of the convention through its credentials process? Pryor latter sabotaged Herbert Hoover’s impassioned anti-FDR, non-interventionist speech to the convention delegates by deliberately installing a defective microphone which distorted and drowned out his address. He also isssued fake duplicate tickets to the gallery to pack them with hired Willkie supporters.

Read the Mahl book, one of the most important (and revealing) I have ever read.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] a history instructor in an American high school.

The Best of Charles A. Burris

I want to share with you my biggest nightmare as a history teacher in a public high school in the United States today. The students in the YouTube video above are not students at my particular school but I believe are unfortunately representative of many students at most of the nation’s secondary educational facilities. This is indeed a frightening prospect.

The students were asked a series of questions, the type of questions that appear on standardized tests or EOI examinations.

Students throughout the nation have been repeatedly exposed to this basic factual material every year in their Social Studies classes since attending the first grade.

So why are these incorrect responses to these simple questions they were asked so uniformly typical across the nation?

Why were the students so “clueless?”

Has “No Child Left Behind” addressed this?

Will “Common Core” address this?

Or will it make these results even more uniform and pervasive?

These are important matters on which all of us need to seriously reflect upon in each of our respective subject areas and disciplines.

How much responsibility for these poor results falls on the shoulders of the educators who have repeatedly exposed students to this factual material every year since the first grade?

How much responsibility for these poor results should be placed squarely upon the individual students and their parents’ unwillingness to take their child’s education seriously due to its compulsory, tax-funded nature rather than as an ultimate responsibility of the parents?

So where do we begin to look for serious answers to these questions?

Here are the incomparable trio of books on the history of tax supported, compulsory government schooling with which every informed and educated person should be familiar:

Murray N. Rothbard, Education: Free and Compulsory

Samuel L. Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary?

John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher’s Intimate Investigation Into The Problem of Modern Schools

• Prologue
• Chapter 1: The Way It Used To Be
• Chapter 2: An Angry Look At Modern Schooling
• Chapter 3: Eyeless In Gaza
• Chapter 4: I Quit, I Think
• Chapter 5: True Believers and the Unspeakable Chautauqua
• Chapter 6: The Lure of Utopia
• Chapter 7: The Prussian Connection
• Chapter 8: A Coal-Fired Dream World
• Chapter 9: The Cult of Scientific Management
• Chapter 10: My Green River
• Chapter 11: The Crunch
• Chapter 12: Daughters of the Barons of Runnymede
• Chapter 13: The Empty Child
• Chapter 14: Absolute Absolution
• Chapter 15: The Psychopathology of Everyday Schooling
• Chapter 16: A Conspiracy Against Ourselves
• Chapter 17: The Politics of Schooling
• Chapter 18: Breaking Out of the Trap
• Epilogue

For the record, the author John Taylor Gatto is a retired American school teacher with nearly 30 years' experience in the classroom, and has written several best-selling books on education. He was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] a history instructor in an American high school.

The Best of Charles A. Burris

Out of the American Revolution emerged a unique political ideology or system of belief — republicanism.

Whether Anti-Federalist or Federalist, Democratic-Republican or Federalist, Democratic-Republican or National-Republican, Democrat or Whig, this vision lay at the center of Americans' beliefs. It remains today the root of what we as a people believe. Political debate then, as now, centers upon who has remained most true to this vision.

Republicanism was a political outlook centering upon the themes of liberty versus power and civic virtue versus political corruption. The main lesson of republicanism was that a virtuous citizenry preserved its freedom by keeping government within strict constitutional bounds. Corruption and big government went hand in hand, for only government could rig the market in favor of an artificial aristocracy. Revolutionary republicanism was nurtured in the early republic by such Virginians as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Randolph of Roanoke, and John Taylor of Caroline.

Of the early republican leaders Jefferson and Madison were the Himalayan peaks which towered over the rest of their contemporaries. Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, while Madison is traditionally known as the "father of the United States Constitution." They were the founders of the Democratic-Republican Party in opposition to Alexander Hamilton's statist program of corporatism and central banking.

John Randolph of Roanoke is unique in American political history. Only twenty-six when first elected to Congress in 1799, he easily became its most forceful figure. When Jefferson became president in 1801, Randolph became majority leader in the House of Representatives. He was "a merciless castigator of iniquity." Booted and spurred, he commanded attention as he swaggered about Congress, whip in hand.

With the exception of Jefferson's first term, Randolph's public career was as a leader of the opposition — the Old Republicans or "Tertium Quids" — to both the Jeffersonians and Federalists. He was devoted to state's rights, the agricultural interest, economy in government, and freedom from foreign entanglements. He fought the drift to war in 1811, the Second Bank of the United States in 1816, the Missouri Compromise in 1820, internal improvements at federal expense, increases in the tariffs at all times — and almost every other principal measure recommended by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. Above All things he cherished personal liberty. "I am an aristocrat," Randolph declared. "I love liberty, I hate equality."

Randolph broke with the Jeffersonians over the Yazoo land scandals, and led the Old Republican faction who felt that Jefferson had betrayed them (and the republican vision) by adopting Federalist means to achieve compromised Republican ends.

John Taylor of Caroline was a model of the virtuous citizen-legislator modern supporters of term limits aim for — one who soldiers, enforces the law, writes in its defense and the life it secures, and serves the government well when called to office — and not as a professional career politician. Originally an Anti-Federalist, he believed the Constitution was basically a law to restrict the conduct of legislators and other government officials — a law to limit law. But his republican vision for the infant republic was subverted from the beginning. Alexander Hamilton's financial plan for supporting the new government was the original of all Federalist mischief. From the moment of their proposal (and especially as senator in 1793 and '94), Taylor fought the idea of a national bank and the assumption of state debts by the central government. He believed such actions created an artificial aristocracy of "paper and patronage" — consolidation of government, monopoly, special privilege, and theft by taxation. This kind of government was not what he had fought for, from the Revolution on.

It was from this radical republican heritage of men such as Jefferson, Madison, Randolph, and Taylor that produced one of the most important political leaders America has ever produced, Martin Van Buren, who succeeded in the extremely difficult task of creating a new second national party when the United States had bogged down into a corrupt one-party country.

Far from being an "Era of Good Feelings," America under presidents' Monroe and Adams was a major period of political corruption. It was during this time when Van Buren forged the Democratic Party.

As Murray N. Rothbard perceptively noted in "Principle in politics," a critical review of John Niven's Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics, published in the September 1983 edition of Inquiry magazine:

Born the son of a tavern keeper in upstate New York, Martin Van Buren early displayed the stubborn integrity that would mark his entire career. For he took the Jeffersonian road in opposition to the Federalist power structure in his own county, and against the Aaron Burrite views of his own patrons in the law. Quickly rising as an eloquent and highly intelligent trial lawyer, he soon manifested the tactical brilliance that would gain him the name of "the Little Magician." Ideologically he was always a Jeffersonian, but in those days his was of an instinctive and inchoate variety, standard for his time and place. Always he always distrusted inflationary bank credit, and always leaned toward minimal government, state's rights, and laissez faire.

In the spring of 1824, Van Buren underwent what amounted to a conversion experience, spending a weekend that would, in the current jargon, change his life. A leading manager for clearly the most Jeffersonian of the presidential candidates, William H. Crawford of Georgia, Van Buren did what he had always wanted to do: visit his hero, the aging, penniless, but still charismatic Thomas Jefferson. He made a pilgrimage to Monticello, where he found the old man brooding over the state of American politics. Even though Jeffersonianism had won in overthrowing the Federalists in "the Revolution of 1800," America emerged from the War of 1812 with the Federalist Party crushed, but Federalist principles triumphant. America was now a one-party, Democratic-Republican, country, but Madison and Monroe had adopted Federalist policies: a central bank, high tariffs, a war machine, and an increasing centralization of power in Washington. Furthermore, the judiciary, led by Federalist Chief Justice John Marshall, was beginning to impose a tyranny of decision-making over the country by a Supreme Court in office for life and hence unchecked by any democratic process. With only one political party in existence, there seemed to be no way to reverse the growing of Federalism in new clothes, and to recapture what was then commonly called the Spirit of u201876" or the "Spirit of u201898" (the time of the active threat by the Democratic-Republicans to nullify federal tyranny by state, or popular, refusal to obey unjust laws. Being all too human, Jefferson did not of course realize that the triumph of Federalism and the abandonment of his own cherished principles were largely the fault of his own drive, begun in his second term, toward war with England.

Nonetheless, Jefferson had put it all together for his young disciple, and he imbued Van Buren with what would become lifelong opposition to a central bank, to inflationary banking, to federal power over the states or the individual, and to loose construction of such power in the Constitution. Van Buren emerged from the weekend dazzled; particularly interested in political parties, he asked the old man, in a follow-up letter, what he thought about the current trend toward amalgamation of the parties into one. In the course of a lengthy reply on other matters, Jefferson concluded with these ringing words: that this was "an amalgamation of name but not principle. Tories are Tories still, by whatever name they may be called."

[Robert] Remini does not exaggerate when he says that these words from his idol struck Martin Van Buren like a "gift from the gods." He quickly sent a letter back to Jefferson expressing his confidence that there remained enough "Old Republicans" (as the rigorous Jeffersonians were then called), "so I hope to rescue their country from misrule. . . "The brilliant political tactician then set out to create out of the morass of a one-party nation a new party, a party designed to take back America of the Old Cause, for the Spirit of '76, and for the minimal-government libertarianism of the great Jefferson. For Van Buren, that crusade was made even more necessary by the triumph in the1824 election of the nationalizing, pro-central bank, protectionist John Quincy Adams, the epitome of a Federalist in all but name.

And so Van Buren began to forge a new party. In control of his own "Albany Regency" in New York, he quickly established an alliance with the remnant of Old Republicans in Virginia, led by newspaper editor Thomas Richie and by the crusty John Randolph of Roanoke. In the West he found Thomas Hart ("Old Bullion") Benton of Missouri, who had had a similar conversion experience at Monticello. But to devise a new national party, Van Buren had to find a sympathetic, charismatic presidential candidate; this he discovered in Andrew Jackson, already embittered at the political establishment and resentful at being deprived of the presidency in 1824. But Jackson, while himself a Jeffersonian in the rough and nobody's fool, was, at least in his pre-presidential period, more interested in ego gratification than in ideology. And he had no interest in the details of party organization. So while Old Hickory remained in Tennessee, Martin Van Buren, more than anyone else, created a new Democratic Party fervently dedicated to Jeffersonian principle, a party so successful that, the first time out, it put Andrew Jackson into the White House.

Rothbard goes on to observe:

Some recent historians, while acknowledging the vital role of Martin Van Buren in establishing a new Democratic Party, have dismissed him as a kind of fanatic caring about "party loyalty" above all else. But these writers have not absorbed the important lessons of the "new political historians" (men like Kleppner, Silbey, and Formisano), who have totally recast our knowledge of the way in which political parties functioned in the United States throughout the nineteenth century (or at least after 1830). For those parties were very different from the mere collection of political hacks, thirsting only for office, and fuzzing over all ideology, that we are all too familiar with today. Nineteenth-century parties were fiercely partisan, devoted not only to gaining office, but to gaining office in the service of strictly demarcated ideological principles. Instead of watering down ideology to appeal to a large floating "independent" electorate, politicians were more partisan and harder-core during campaigns. For there was then virtually no independent vote; and the only way to win was to bring out one's own committed partisans by being (or at least claiming to be) even more intensively devoted to party principles.

More importantly, the political party was the only instrument by which ideology could transcend and override narrow sectional and occupational interests. Now that the political parties have virtually no distinctive ideology, they have become merely floating congeries of special-interest groups, each determined to mulct the taxpayer for its own benefit. Van Buren was dedicated to party loyalty because he realized that only strong political parties could mobilize enough power to make ideology (in his case that of minimal government) triumph over special interests. Therefore, since for Van Buren party loyalty made sense only in service to ideology, he did not hesitate to split with his beloved Democratic Party — and hence to lose all credibility in the party — when in 1848 an issue arose that was to him of the highest moral importance.

In 1828, the Jacksonians prevailed and came to Washington. On the positive side of their program were serious efforts at reform intended to eliminate the bureaucracy while getting government out of the marketplace. The principle of "rotation in office" did not bring about a "spoils system" (a textbook cliché if ever there was one), but was intended to prevent the growth of corrupt and corrupting consolidation of power in the executive branch. Giving jobs to the faithful was a side effect, not the point, of the policy.

As a teacher of Oklahoma History, I would be very remiss in not pointing out that on the negative side was the genocidal ethnic cleansing policy of Indian Removal. Like slavery, an institution that never much troubled the Jacksonians, Indian Removal showed that "republicanism" was to operate only for white males; against all others state intervention was necessary and proper. This was the darkest chapter in the Jacksonian saga.

Indian Removal grew out of the white man's conception of political sovereignty and his lust — in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi — for lands belonging to the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. According to these states, their jurisdiction extended over all the inhabitants within their borders, and had they made this claim stick, they would have gotten the Indians' lands away from them earlier. The Indian tribes insisted that they were self-governing nations. The states called upon the feds to enforce their state sovereignty for them. The old Indian fighter in the White House got the Removal Bill through Congress (after meeting resistance from northeastern states, whose Indians had conveniently and mysteriously been "disappeared." Thus commenced the heart-rending "Trail of Tears" with its tens of thousands of deaths and untold hardship and misery, all because the greedy white man wanted more land and because he was unable to devise a federal theory that would have embraced peoples of more than one race.

So the frugal Democratic administration of Jackson spent $68 million on Indian Removal. Adding in the few small-scale wars necessary to make the ruthless, uprooting policy work, such as that against the Seminoles in Florida swamps led by their great warrior chief, Osceola, the actual cost is incalculable.

Martin Van Buren became Jackson's second vice-president after John C. Calhoun and the South Carolina nullification crisis and the Peggy Eaton affair (the wife of a Jackson cabinet member who was snubbed by Washington society for allegedly being of low birth and loose morals, rumors started by Mrs. Calhoun that angered Jackson fiercely. He saw them as comparable to those vicious slurs previously directed at his late wife Rachel.)

Jackson's opponents merged into the Whig Party, believing that the strong-willed president was becoming an arrogant "King Andrew." The Whigs carried over their Hamiltonian belief in Henry Clay's American System of a powerful central bank, protective tariffs, and corporate welfare ("internal improvements" in transportation infrastructure at federal expense). Clay had championed these beliefs in combat with Jackson in the election of 1832. The issue was the Second National Bank (from which Clay received a monetary retainer — shades of Newt Gingrich and Freddie Mac!). After his re-election, Jackson famously vetoed the congressional renewal of the Bank's charter, pointing the nation in a new direction.

Rothbard continues in his cogent analysis of this period:

By the later 1830s it had become clear that the Democrats were rapidly becoming the majority party. In his term as president, 1837-1841, Van Buren finished the great Jacksonian task of separating banking from the state. Jackson had dissolved the central bank; Van Buren completed the return of hard money by eliminating the specially privileged "pet" banks and by creating the independent treasury system. Moreover, Van Buren, far more pacific than the bellicose General Jackson, defused several foreign-affairs hotspots by bringing peace to the Canadian and Maine border, and by refusing to entertain the explosive Texas plea for admission to the Union. By adopting a policy of strict neutrality, Van Buren kept the peace throughout his term in office.

The Jacksonians had developed a plan: After eight years of Jackson, eight years of Van Buren, and eight years of Benton, the government of the United States would have designedly been reduced to a virtually powerless shell. 1840 was a setback; the Whigs used modern demagogic techniques — including buttons, slogans, and songs — to defeat Van Buren. But it was clear to everyone that 1840 was a fluke, that the Democrats could easily copy Whig campaign techniques, and that the Democrats would then resume their victorious march in 1844. Van Buren was slated to be the candidate that year, but something happened on the way to the triumph of laissez faire. The republic of Texas applied for admission to the United States as a slave state, and the Democrats split wide open. The slaveholder Jackson threw his weight in favor; but Van Buren, horrified at any expansion of slavery into the West, was opposed, and the Democratic Party began its permanent division on the slavery issue. Van Buren was fully aware that, with slavery on the agenda, the Democratic Party could no longer be a truly national party, but he could not countenance the extension of this pernicious institution. Hence, in 1848, when the Democracy nominated for president Lewis Cass, an apologist for slave expansion into the West, Van Buren felt compelled to abandon his cherished party loyalty and to rend the Democracy by running for president on the new, Free Soil ticket.

The republican vision of a decentralized federal republic of sovereign independent states would meet its final demise at Appomattox Court House during Abraham Lincoln's coercive War for National Unification.

But freedom remains the genius of American civilization. Other great nations were born in obeisance to the power of the state. Ours was born with the Declaration of Independence and the enshrining of the inalienable natural rights of man. Ron Paul's powerful Revolution is testimony to that enduring legacy, demonstrating that freedom does indeed bring us together. It remains our answer and our hope.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] a history instructor in an American high school. Before becoming an educator he was involved in over thirty electoral and ballot petition campaigns for third party/independent candidates throughout the country. He served as national ballot drive coordinator in the 1984 Libertarian Party presidential campaign and as state coordinator of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party in 1978.

The Best of Charles A. Burris

Power Elite Analysis (also called Libertarian Class Analysis or Establishment Studies) is a theme I have repeatedly stressed at LRC to understand both present-day and past historical events. Knowledge is power. Empower yourself by learning about Power Elite Analysis and how it impacts specifically upon the welfare-warfare state and the parasitical elites which benefit from this leviathan within our midst.

In July of 2010, Angelo Codevilla's magnificent manifesto, "The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It" was published initially online in The American Spectator (and later in book form). It immediately went viral on the Internet and started a widespread national conversation about America's hubristic power elite and the arrogant way they reign over the rest of us.

When Codevilla's article appeared I stated that it was the most important essay I had ever read. I still believe this because it is a superb synthesis of class analysis with keen insights on contemporary power elite relationships regarding today's rulers and the ruled.

This class division of present-day America into two factions, Court and Country, has absolutely nothing to do with any Marxian view or analysis. It is a reaffirmation of the seminal insights of Bernard Bailyn's Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, and Murray N. Rothbard's Conceived in Liberty.

These books demonstrate that the Founders' world-view saw the crucial struggle of the Revolution as a battle of liberty versus power. Codevilla posits today's battle in the same dramatic terms.

This is the central theme this article will develop below.

An understanding of power elite analysis is the "litmus test" separating real libertarians from alternative lifestyle dilettantes dabbling in free market theory. This examination of causal relationships regarding the nature and scope of political power, who has it and how it is exercised, is crucial to understanding the State as organized crime.

The similarity between this analysis and what researcher Peter Dale Scott calls "Deep Politics," the critical examination of the sub-rosa reality behind surface events, are both attempts to unmask the true face of power, exposing the elite social, economic, and financial groups and individuals who benefit from the exercise of State coercion.

In July of 1978 I had the honor of attending the Cato Institute's First Summer Seminar on Political Economy at Wake Forrest University. The distinguished faculty of libertarian luminaries included Murray N. Rothbard, Leonard P. Liggio, Arthur A. Ekirch, Walter E. Grinder, and Roy A. Childs. This was before the devastating Cato Institute split detailed by David Gordon in his excellent series of articles at LRC.

The curriculum was hard-core Rothbardian — natural rights libertarianism from The Ethics of Liberty, Austrian Economics, revisionist history, and libertarian class analysis.

The Cato organizers gave us each a ton of excellent books (including Rothbard's Power and Market) and photocopy reprints of classic articles including Rothbard's libertarian strategy memorandum which served as the guideline for the Institute's creation.

Rothbard later admitted that these early Seminars were organized as "best and brightest" talent searches for Cato.

But it was the powerful lecture presentations by Walter E. Grinder, "Libertarian Class Analysis" and "American Power Elites" which had the most truly lasting impact upon me. Over the decades Walter has remained my mentor and inspiration in these areas.

As homage to him and his outstanding efforts in helping me and so many others by his gracious and thoughtful guiding hand throughout these years, I have consciously followed in his pioneering pathway blazed by his initial research in drafting this bibliographic outline composition and format.

WHO RULES AMERICA: POWER ELITE ANALYSIS AND AMERICAN HISTORY Part One

1. Realization of the General Aversion of Most Persons to Deal with Classes.

1. General Discussion of Individuals in Groups

2. Groups and Group Interests

2. Why Power Elite Analysis (Libertarian Class Analysis) is Distinct From

And Superior to Marxist Analysis

1. Libertarian Class Theory Antedates Marxist Theory
2. The English Civil War (The Levelers)
3. Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer

1. The Industrial Society Versus the Statist Society
2. The Competitive Free Market Versus the Monopolistic Society
3. The Free Market Pitted Against Mercantilism and Feudalism

4. Henri de Saint-Simon and the Distortion of Class Theory
5. From Saint-Simon to Karl Marx

3. Later 19th Century Libertarian Class Analysis

1. Herbert Spencer: Military Society Versus the Industrial Society
2. Sir Henry Maine: From Status to Contract
3. Richard Cobden: War and the Interests

4. American Libertarian Class Theory

1. From the Beginning: Liberty Versus Power

1. The Impact of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in America

2. Wilkes Liberty in America

3. Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, John Taylor

B. John C. Calhoun: Net Tax Consumers Versus Net Tax Payers

C. Lysander Spooner: Taxes and the Highwayman

5. 20th Century Libertarian Class Analysis

1. Vilfredo Pareto and Ludwig von Mises

1. The Circulation of Elites
2. The State's Role in Freezing Elites into Castes

2. Franz Oppenheimer

1. The Economic Means Versus the Political Means of Gaining Wealth
2. The State as the Organization of the Political Means
3. Smoothing and Legitimizing the Exploitive Transfer of Wealth From the Productive

3. Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov

1. The State Versus Society
2. The History of the United States as a Rise of the State at the Expense of Society (Constitution, Civil War, Progressive Era, Wars, New Deal)

4. Murray N. Rothbard

1. The Anatomy of the State
2. Legitimacy and the Role of Court Intellectuals and National Security Managers

6. 21st Century Libertarian Class Analysis

1. David M. Hart
2. Sheldon Richman
3. Roderick Long
4. David D'Amato
5. Wendy McElroy

7. Implications

1. Free Entry and Competition in the Market Place: No Help or Hindrance (No Special Interest Regulation, Bailouts, or Underwriting)
2. Cut Back Drastically on State Power
3. Recognize Taxation as the Root of All Evil: Slash Drastically, Move to Abolish Entirely

WHO RULES AMERICA: POWER ELITE ANALYSIS AND AMERICAN HISTORY Part Two

1. Early American Historical Overview

Theme of Liberty Versus Power – The Country Party Versus Court Party: The Declaration of Independence and the Revolution (Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; Angelo M. Codevilla, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can do about it)

1. Counterrevolution

1. U. S. Constitution (John Taylor, New Views of the Constitution of the United States; Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States; Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828)
2. Alexander Hamilton and the Plutocratic Federalists: "The Funding Fathers" (John McConaughy, Who Rules America: A Century of Invisible Government; Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — and What It Means for America Today)
3. The Early Nationalist Period (Stanley Elkins & Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800; Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815; Phillip H. Burch, Elites in American History: The Federalist Years to the Civil War)

2. Jeffersonian-Jacksonian Drive to Roll Back the Federalist Program and Rid America of its Powerful Ruling Elite (Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology)
3. Failure of Jefferson/Madison Regimes and the Rise of the Old Republican "Tertium Quids" (Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson)

1. John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia (John Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked)
2. John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia
3. The Panic of 1819, James Monroe, and the "Era of Good Feelings"

4. Martin Van Buren and the Founding of the Democratic Party (Robert V. Remini, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party)

1. After Visiting his Hero Jefferson, Van Buren Prompted to Found the Democratic Party to Reinvigorate the Two Party System
2. The Election of 1824 and "the Corrupt Bargain:" After the Defeat of William H. Crawford, Van Buren Puts his Organizing Skills to Winning the Presidency for Andrew Jackson (Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America)
3. Ideological Focus of the Democratic Party
   1. Anti-Central Bank
   2. Hard Money: "Gold is the People's Money"
   3. Free Trade and Anti-Monopoly
4. The Twenty Four Year Plan
1. Eight Years of Andrew Jackson of Tennessee
2. Eight Years of Martin Van Buren of New York
3. Eight Years of Thomas Hart ("Old Bullion") Benton of Missouri
5. The Rise of the Whig Party: Rebirth of the Hamiltonian Consolidationists
   1. Pro-Central Bank: Opposition to the Separation of Banking and State Proposed by Jackson and Van Buren — the Independent Sub-Treasury
   2. High Protective Tariff: Anti-Free Trade
   3. Corporate Welfare: The "Internal Improvements" System
5. Civil War: Reconsolidation of the Yankee Mercantile Elite (Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln; Joseph R. Stromberg, "The War for Southern Independence: A Radical Libertarian Perspective;" Murray N. Rothbard, "The Civil War and Its Legacy")

1. High Protective Tariffs
2. Abraham Lincoln's "Pro-Slavery" 13th Amendment
3. Income Tax
4. Conscription: Led to Widespread Anti-Draft Riots and Protests
5. Paper Money: Greenbacks
6. National Banking Act of 1863: Eliminated Competing Currencies
7. Suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus
8. Mass Arrests of Opponents of Lincoln and the War in the North
9. Reconstruction: Military Government and Occupation of the South

2. Post-Civil War Period

1. The Roots of America's Modern Power Elite (Murray N. Rothbard, "Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy," Phillip H. Burch, Jr., Elites in American History: The Civil War to the New Deal; Richard F. Pettigrew, Triumph Plutocracy: The Story of American Public Life From 1870 to 1920)
2. Quasi-Free Trade Within the New Constraints

1. Tariffs: The Source of Republican Power
2. Railroad Land Grants and Subsidies (Murray N. Rothbard, "The Railroading of the American People")

3. The Rise of Morgan Power
4. Problems of Free Market for the Post War Elite (Murray N. Rothbard, "The Decline of Laissez Faire")

1. Dynamic Competition Keeps Eating at Economic and Political Power (Murray N. Rothbard, "The Rise and Fall of Monopolies)
2. Pools, Mergers, Holding Companies, Trusts and Voluntary Cartel Movement: Unsuccessful From the View of the Power Elite (Murray N. Rothbard, "Tariffs, Inflation, Anti-Trust and Cartels")
3. Political Parties As Political Churches: Postmillennial Evangelical Protestant Pietistic Republicans Versus Liturgical Democrats: Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Old Fashioned Calvinists (Murray N. Rothbard, "Pietism and the Power Brokers")

3. Regulation to the Rescue of Vested Interests

1. The Progressive Era and the Foundation of the American Corporate State (Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism; Murray N. Rothbard, "Theodore Roosevelt: Master Reformer," "Regulation and Public Utilities," "The Progressive Era?" "Progressivism and the Family")

2. The Role of Increasingly Secular Postmillennial Protestants and German Educated Ph.Ds.' in Formulation of Progressivism
3. The National Civic Federation (James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State 1900-1918)
4. Partial Solidification of Ruling Class Control
5. Federal Reserve as the Central Key of Control and Rationalization (Murray N. Rothbard, The Origins of the Federal Reserve, The Case Against the Fed, "The Fed and the Power Elite," "Cartelization of Banking: The Fed," "The Federal Reserve As A Cartelization Device: The Early Years, 1913-1930;" Ron Paul, End the Fed)

4. Struggle Within the Power Elite (Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families)

1. Rockefeller Versus Morgan (Republicans Versus Democrats)
2. Uses of Anti-Trust Measures by Both

5. World War Solidifies the Power Elite (Murray N. Rothbard, "Woodrow Wilson and World War I")

1. Morgan's Push for War (Morgan Ties with Rothschild and England)
2. America Becomes partner With England and France in Control of the Western Imperial Order (Role of Oil in Foreign Policy)

3. War Industries Board: Culmination of Control (Murray N. Rothbard, "The Great Cooperation")

1. Later Model for the NRA under FDR: Bernard Baruch
2. Food Czar: Herbert Hoover

4. Versailles, "The Inquiry," and the League of Nations

1. The Birth of the Council on Foreign Relations (Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope; Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations From 1921 to 1996; Robert D. Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council on Foreign Relations; Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and Untied States Foreign Policy; James Perloff, The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline)
2. "Colonel Edward M. House, Elihu Root, John W. Davis, Raymond B. Fosdick

6. The Rise of the Foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), Think Tanks

1. Relation of Idea Centers and Public Policy
2. American Economic Association, Brookings Institution, 20th Century Fund, etc.
3. Indoctrination and Control

7. The Emergence of Banking Groups: Struggle Between Industrial Capital and Finance Capital: DuPont, Morgan Versus Rockefeller, Harriman, and Kuhn Loeb (Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems)

8. The Oil War: Rockefeller Standard Oil Versus British Royal Dutch Shell (Ludwell Denny: We Fight For Oil, America Conquers Britain); William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order
9. The Great Depression: Caused by the Fed's Monetary Policies (Murray N. Rothbard, America's Great Depression)
10. The New Deal: The Rise of the Welfare-Warfare State (Phillip H. Burch, Jr., Elites in American History: The New Deal to the Carter Administration)

1. The Fall of the Morgan Bloc and the Triumph of the Rockefeller Bloc

1. End of the Gold Standard: Fiat Currency and the Fed
2. Glass-Steagall Act: Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking Aimed Directly at Morgan Bloc
3. Pecora Congressional Hearings on Chase National Bank
4. Morgan/DuPont Bloc Seeks Revenge: The Plot to Overthrow FDR (Jules Archer, The Plot To Seize The White House)

2. NRA: Corporatism
3. "Old Right" Opposition to FDR's New Deal Domestic Policies and the Rush to War: H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, "Colonel" Robert McCormick (Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right: the Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement)
4. British Intelligence and the eastern seaboard American anglophile establishment's war against American non-intervention (Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44)
5. World War II

1. The Coalition War: Morgan War in Europe, Rockefeller War in Asia

2. CFR Plans the Post-War World
3. The United Nations: Wilson's Dream Now FDR's Realization
4. Bretton Woods: Birth of the World Bank, the IMF, and the Dollar as the World's Reserve Currency: John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White

11. The Cold War and the Emergence of the National Security State

1. Containment, The Central Intelligence Agency, and the American Empire of Bases (Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency; Patrick K. O’ Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of WWII’s OSS; Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA; Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA; Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence; David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government; Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America; L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the World; Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence; John Marks, The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences; W. H. Bowart, Operation Mind Control: Our Secret Government’s War Against Its Own People; Ernest Volkman and Blaine Baggett, Secret Intelligence: The Inside Story of America’s Espionage Empire; Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy; John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Intelligence Betrayed the Jewish People; Bill Moyers, The Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis; Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan; Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs And The Press; Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles; Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA; Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made; Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment; Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms; G. William Domhoff, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America)
2. The Korean War: UN Police Action (Thomas Paterson, ed., Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years; Murray N. Rothbard, "The Foreign Policy of the Old Right," Justus Doenecke, Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era; Ronald Radosh: Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism)

3. "I Like Ike" and the Covert Campaign Against Robert Taft (Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not An Echo)
4. CIA Covert Operations in Italy, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Cuba, etc.
5. William F. Buckley, National Review, and the Death of the "Old Right" (Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right)
6. The Bilderberg Group (Daniel Estulin, The True Story of the Bilderberg Group; John Laughland, The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea)
7. The JFK Assassination and Coup d'Etat by the top tier of the National Security Establishment (James W. Douglass, JFK And The Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters; James A. Dunlap III, "A Rothbardian Power Elite Analysis of Modern American History")
8. Vietnam and the Rupture of the Establishment's Foreign Policy Consensus (David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest)
9. The Neocon Contagion (Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s to the 1980s; Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman, The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama)
10. Richard Nixon and Watergate (Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President)
11. David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter and the Trilateral Commission (Thomas R. Dye, Who's Running America? The Carter Years; Holly Sklar, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management; Murray N. Rothbard, "The Treaty That Wall Street Wrote")
12. The Iranian Hostage Crisis and the 1980 October Surprise

13. The Reagan Revolution (Thomas R. Dye, Who's Running America? The Reagan Years; Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era; Joel Bainerman, The Crimes of a President: New Revelations on Conspiracy & Cover-Up in the Bush and Reagan Administrations)
14. The Fall of the Soviet Empire and the End of the Cold War

12. George Bush, Global Governance, and The New World Order (Thomas R. Dye, Who's Running America? The Bush Era; Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush; "Global Governance;" Peace and World Order Studies: A Curriculum Guide)
13. Lost Decade: The Clinton Years (Thomas R. Dye, Who's Running America? The Clinton Years; Roger Morris, Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America; Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories)
14. George W. Bush, the Neocons, and "Red State Fascism" (Thomas R. Dye, Who's Running America? The Bush Restoration; Robert Parry, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: the Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, And What Their Influence Means For America)
15. Barack Obama: The United States of Goldman, Sachs (Charles Gasparino, Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street)

RECOMMENDED READING:

• Ron Paul, End the Fed
• Ron Paul, The Revolution: A Manifesto
• Ron Paul, Liberty Defined
• Murray N. Rothbard, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy
• Murray N. Rothbard, The Anatomy of the State
• Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty
• Angelo M. Codevilla, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can do about it
• Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State
• Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, It Is Dangerous To Be Right When the Government Is Wrong
• Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan
• Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope
• James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] a history instructor in an American high school. Before becoming an educator he was involved in over thirty electoral and ballot petition campaigns for third party/independent candidates throughout the country. He served as national ballot drive coordinator in the 1984 Libertarian Party presidential campaign and as state coordinator of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party in 1978.

The Best of Charles A. Burris

There is much diversionary discussion by both the establishment mainstream media and by some enthusiastic Ron Paul supporters concerning the possibility of an independent or third party campaign for the presidency if Dr. Paul does not obtain the Republican Party 2012 nomination.

I believe this discussion is entirely counter-productive.

The media shills put forth this effort to further marginalize and diminish the serious electoral threat to the GOP power brokers the Paul grass roots insurgency campaign represents. The loyal Paul supporters, while unquestionably dedicated and enthusiastically behind the good Doctor, are incredibly naïve and clueless as to what such a campaign would entail.

As someone who was intimately engaged professionally in the day-to-day mechanics of these types of efforts during three presidential election cycles I would strongly counsel against further discussion of a Ron Paul independent or third party effort.

Dr. Paul has flatly stated when asked about such campaigns: "I don't want to do it!" That should end all further discussion.

Because of his 1988 experience as the Libertarian Party presidential nominee, he knows firsthand the incredible frustration of hearing America described endlessly by media flacks and League of Women Voter harpies as the land of democratic pluralism and electoral freedom of choice but is fully cognizant of the dark reality behind that myth.

The American electoral system is organized into fifty-two different sets of election laws (the federal laws and those of the 50 states and Guam). Each jurisdiction has entirely different ballot petition requirements for third party and independent presidential candidates.

These requirements are onerous, unduly burdensome, and chilling in their effect of squashing voters choosing candidates other than the Democrats and Republicans who draft and vigorously enforce these laws to protect their duopoly. I have been a litigant to several legal challenges to these restrictive laws at the state and federal level, some cases reaching the United States Supreme Court.

Dr. Paul further knows that the vast majority of campaign funds raised in such efforts must be expended, not in advertisements or campaign promotion of ideas, but on petition campaigns and ballot litigation suits. The administrative overhead and manpower requirements of enlisting squads of reputable professional petitioners (u2018Road Warriors") in all fifty states and in every major (and minor) metropolitan area is beyond the organizational imaginations of most Paul supporters who see only the good doctor and his noble ideas. No successful ballot petition campaign relies entirely on volunteers, which is counter-intuitive to virtually all efforts of the Ron Paul Revolution.

Finally, Ron Paul knows firsthand that such challengers are frozen out of the televised presidential debates and interviews on the mainstream network news and talk shows and delegated to the shadows.

To the political establishment and their regimist media, the only viable or acceptable choices are "Coke" versus "Pepsi." A Dr. Paul in the guise of "Dr. Pepper" is not to be permitted (nor that of a "Mr. Pibb Lite" Gary Johnson or "Red Bull" Jesse Ventura rogue candidacy).

All Ron Paul supporters should therefore dedicate themselves fully to his Herculean efforts to winning the upcoming GOP primary battles and then the November 2012 general election.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] a history instructor in an American high school. Before becoming an educator he was involved in over thirty electoral and ballot petition campaigns for third party/independent candidates throughout the country. He served as national ballot drive coordinator in the 1984 Libertarian Party presidential campaign and as state coordinator of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party in 1978.

The Best of Charles A. Burris

"It
seems fitting that in a country where people aspire to two of everything
– cars, kids, and homes – we should have two histories
as well. And so we do: a public chronicle, or "Disney version,"
so widely available as to be unavoidable . . . and a second one
that remains secret, buried, and unnamed."

~ author Jim
Hougan, Spooks:
The Haunting of America – The Private Use of Secret Agents.

As LRC readers
are well aware, I have a particular interest in this second area
of "history" of which Hougan speaks, and have written
about it quite extensively over the years.

Below is a
fascinating chapter out of that hidden
history with which most of you will not be familiar. I have
been following this story of the "secret team" or shadow
government, and CIA drug running and money laundering for over two
decades. This account is a great summary for those new to these
nefarious affairs.

One particular
note regarding a person at the heart of the "secret team"
discussed in the account below concerns Richard Armitage (Bilderberg
group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations) –
the number two man in the George W. Bush State Department under
Colin Powell, who referred to him as "my white son."

For twenty
five years Richard
Armitage has been my "Professor Moriarty," that elusive
nemesis at the center of government perfidy from one scandal to
another – from CIA-sponsored opium trafficking in the Golden
Triangle and Afghanistan to the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Compare and
contrast Armitage with his remarkable counterpart in the Obama administration:
Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the late Richard
Holbrooke (Bilderberg group, Trilateral Commission, Council
on Foreign Relations, former managing director of Lehman Brothers,
and board director of AIG to July 2008 just before the bailouts).

Both began
their dedicated service to the Empire in Vietnam, soiling their
hands with fresh blood and fecal material. Armitage
began in covert CIA operations (the murderous Operation Phoenix);
Holbrooke with the CIA under cover of the AID in rural pacification
of the Vietnamese. Over the course of their stellar careers serving
various presidential regimes, each gained their reputation as die-hard
negotiators, ubiquitous problem solvers and fixers. When their specific
party was out of power, Armitage and Holbrooke exploited their inside
connections to the power elite and operated lucrative consulting
firms – Armitage Associates and Public Strategies. (Holbrooke’s
partner, James A. Johnson, was CEO of Fannie Mae, later managing
director of Lehman Brothers, and presently board member of Goldman
Sachs). Both of these driven, egomaniacal individuals understood
power, its cold essence and often illusive nature, and how to tenaciously
grasp hold of it. And now the story below:

THE OCTOPUS

by DAVID HOFFMAN

(This chapter
was omitted from the printed edition of Oklahoma
City Bombing and the Politics of Terror by David Hoffman)

"This
underground empire is controlled by a handful of people for money
– that’s the only secret of the temple."

~ Investigative
reporter Danny Casolaro, prior to his murder by the Octopus

The nomenclature
of the Lockerbie and World Trade Center bombings provide a unique
and unparalleled insight into the dynamics of the Oklahoma City
bombing.

Each event
gives the reader a glimpse of how the Shadow Government operates,
utilizing drug dealers, criminals, and terrorists to do its bidding.

All three bombings
were sting operations that utilized, and were utilized by, terrorists
bent on causing destruction.

But the question
still remained: who was controlling the terrorists? To understand
that, one must peer through the doorway of time stretching from
WWII to the present.

To prepare
for the invasion of Sicily during WWII, the OSS (which later became
the CIA) collaborated with the Corsican Mafia.

The arrangement
permitted the Mafia use the port of Marseilles for heroin smuggling
in exchange for its assistance in defeating the Nazis.[1117]

After WWII,
the heroin operation moved to Vietnam and Laos, then to Afghanistan
and Pakistan, as the CIA embroiled itself in a covert war against
the Soviets. Assistant Secretary of Defense for National Security
Affairs Richard Armitage sat on the "208 Committee," which
oversaw military aid to the Mujahadeen.

Fazoe Haq,
the governor of the Northwest Frontier Province (the largest heroin
growing province in Afghanistan), who was originally worth $100,000,
was suddenly was worth $200 million after the war. Armitage was
his main contact.[1118]

Vince Cannistraro
(Mr. "Libya done it") also sat on the 208 Committee, representing
National Security Advisor Robert "Bud" McFarlane, Oliver
North’s supervisor.[1119]

Shortly after
the start of the Afghani operation, the CIA began arming the Contras
in Nicaragua. Cannistraro himself [along with Duane "Dewy"
Clarridge, then Chief of the CIA's Latin American Division] headed
Casey’s original operation to arm the Contras, based on Reagan’s
March, 1981 decision.

As former Green
Beret Andrew Eiva said, "Cannistraro was up to his ears by
1985." This is significant, considering the Boland Amendment,
prohibiting aid to the Contras, was passed in 1984.[1120]

Some of these
are the same players who moved into other Central American countries,
setting up security services (death squads) for U.S.-backed dictators,
and profiting handsomely from the cocaine trade.

If anyone thinks
these are outrageous allegations, consider the statements of Mike
Levine, one of the DEA’s most highly decorated veterans: "For
decades, the CIA, the Pentagon, and secret organizations like Oliver
North’s Enterprise have been supporting and protecting the world’s
biggest drug dealers," including the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan,
the Contras in Central America, the DFS in Mexico, the Shan United
Army in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, and "any of
a score of other groups and/or individuals like Manuel Noriega.
Support of these people has been secretly deemed more important
than getting drugs off our streets."[1121]

Or consider
the words of Lt. Col. Bo Gritz, former commander of the Special
Forces in Latin America and the most decorated soldier in Vietnam.

Gritz made
a trip to the Golden Triangle in 1983 to search for American POWs,
a mission that was ultimately stonewalled. Gritz believes the POWs
are being used as drug mules, and the government doesn’t want them
returned alive, for fear they would expose the Octopus.

As Gritz said:
"[They] would not want the American POWs to come home. Because
when they do, there will be an investigation as to why they were
abandoned. At that time we will uncover this secret organization
and its illicit drug money and financing. The Secret Team would
then be exposed."[1122]

As Gritz later
wrote in Called
to Serve:

If Richard
Armitage was, as Khun Sa avowed, a major participant in parallel
government drug trafficking, then it explained why our efforts
to rescue POWs had been inexplicably foiled, time after time…

If it was true,
Richard Armitage would be the last man in the world who would desire
to see prisoners of war come home alive.[1123]

As "Special
Consultant to the Pentagon on the MIAs," in Bangkok in 1975,
Armitage reportedly spent more time repatriating opium profits then
recovering POWs. In 1976, when Khun Sa was still selling heroin
to CIA officials, the head of the CIA was none other than George
Bush.[1124]

Former presidential
candidate H. Ross Perot, who was appointed presidential investigator
for POW/MIA affairs, came upon the same information, and was warned
by former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci to stop pursuing the
connections to Armitage.

As he sadly
explained to a group of POW/MIA families in 1987: "I have been
instructed to cease and desist."[1125]

Ironically,
between 1987 and 1991, Vice-President Bush served as head of the
South Florida Drug Task Force, and later as chair of the National
Narcotics Interdiction System, both set up to "stem" the
flow of drugs into the U.S. While Bush was drug czar, the volume
of cocaine smuggled into the U.S. tripled.[1126]

Celerino "Cele"
Castillo, the DEA’s head agent in El Salvador and Guatemala from
1985 to 1991, told reporters and Senate investigators of numerous
known drug traffickers who used hangers controlled by Oliver North
and the CIA in El Salvador’s Ilopango military airbase. When Castillo
naively tried to warn Bush at a U.S. embassy party in Guatemala,
Bush "just shook my hand, smiled and walked away…"[1127]

"By
the end of 1988," added Castillo, "I realized how hopelessly
tangled the DEA, the CIA, and every other U.S. entity in Central
America had become with the criminals. The connections boggled
my mind."[1128]

"The
CIA – they’re making deals with the Devil," adds Mike
Levine. "Unfortunately, the Devil is smarter than they are."[1129]

Some of those
devils, like Monzer al-Kassar – "business partner"
of Richard Secord and Oliver North – would be utilized to do
the Octopus’s dirty work.

Another name
Khun Sa mentioned repeatedly was Ted Shackley.[1130] A long-time
CIA player, Theodore G. Shackley (known as "The Blond Ghost")
began his Agency career as CIA Station Chief in Miami, where he
directed the CIA’s JM/WAVE Operation, a post-Bay of Pigs attempt
to assassinate Fidel Castro and wreck havoc within that sovereign
nation. Utilizing Cuban expatriates, the CIA conducted hundreds
of sabotage raids against Cuba in direct violation of the U.S. Neutrality
Act. Shackley also worked in close partnership with Mob figures
John Roselli, Sam Giancana, and Santos Trafficante.[1131]

While the operation
was shut down in 1965, due mainly to revelations of organized crime
connections and drug smuggling, many of the participants remained
in Miami, continuing their illegal activities.

Later, as Station
Chief of Laos, Shackley directed Major General Richard Secord’s
air wing in tactical raids against the Communist Pathet Lao, who
happened to be General Vang Pao’s main competition in the opium
trade.

By keeping
the Pathet Lao busy with the help of the CIA and the American military,
Pao’s Hmong tribesmen were able to become the region’s largest heroin
producers.[1132]

Of course,
Shackley, his deputy Tom Clines (who supervised the air base in
Long Tieng), and their colleagues in CIA front companies like Air
America were only too happy to help, smuggling heroin to the U.S.
in the gutted bodies of dead GIs (with the assistance of their old
Mob buddy Santos Trafficante, who had helped form their ZR/RIFLE
assassination team, and Vietnamese Air Force General Nguyen Cao
Ky), and laundering the profits in the Nugan-Hand bank. As a 1983
Wall Street Journal article stated:

Investigations
following Mr. Nugan’s death and the failure of the bank revealed
widespread dealings by Nugan-Hand with international heroin syndicates,
and evidence of massive fraud against U.S. and foreign citizens.
Many retired high-ranking Pentagon and CIA officials were executives
of or consultants to Nugan-Hand.[1133][1134]*

Shackley, along
with Nugan-Hand’s attorney – former CIA Director William Colby
– directed the infamous "Phoenix Program," a largely
successful attempt to "neutralize" by torture and murder
approximately 40,000 Vietnamese civilians suspected of being Viet
Cong sympathizers. One Phoenix operative, testifying before Congress,
stated that Phoenix was "a sterile, depersonalized murder program…
it was completely indiscriminate." The assassinations would
continue in Nicaragua under the code-name "Operation Pegasus."[1135][1136]

After becoming
the head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere operations (Latin American
Division) in 1972, Shackley supervised the overthrow of the Chilean
government ("Operation Track II") by murdering democratically
elected President Salvador Allende.

With the backing
of the CIA under Shackley, the military led a violent coup by Right-wing
General Augusto Pinochet, which resulted in the abolishment of the
Constitution, the closing of all newspapers save for two Right-wing
dailies, the outlawing of trade unions, the suppression of all political
parties, and the arrest, torture, and execution of thousands.[1137]

After a brief
stint as Director of the Far East Division, Shackley directed CIA
agent Edwin Wilson in training the Shah of Iran’s notorious secret
police, the Savak, who routinely tortured and murdered the Shah’s
opponents. Later Shackley would assist more directly in these efforts.[1138]

In 1975, Shackley
became Associate Director in the Directorate of Operations, which
put him in charge of Covert-Operations, Counter-Intelligence, and
ironically, Counter-Narcotics, all under the command of George Herbert
Walker Bush.

These associations
naturally led to Shackley playing a role in the formation of the
"Secret Team," (to coin a phrase invented by Col. L. Fletcher
Prouty) the covert and illegal enterprise that was the driving force
behind the Iran-Contra operation.

Donald Gregg,
one of Shackley’s subordinates during his Saigon tenure, would later
become Assistant National Security Advisor during Iran-Contra, reporting
directly to Vice-President Bush.

It was against
this backdrop that Shackley served as a "consultant" to
players such as Bush, Secord, North, and Casey in their illegal
and bloody guns-for-drugs network that resulted in tens of thousands
of deaths and the flooding of our streets with tons of drugs.

As Wall Street
Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny writes about Ted Shackley in his
book, The Crimes of Patriots:

Looking at
the list of disasters Shackley has presided over during his career,
one might even conclude that on the day the CIA hired Shackley it
might have done better hiring a KGB agent; a Soviet mole probably
could not have done as much damage to the national security of the
United States with all his wile as Shackley did with the most patriotic
of intentions.

Between Shackely’s
Cuban and Indochinese campaigns, more dope dealers were probably
put onto the payroll of the United States Government, and protected
and encouraged in their activities, than if the government had simply
gone out and hired the Mafia – which, in the case of the Cuban
campaign, it did.

CIA Director
Admiral Stansfield Turner forced Shackley to resign from the Agency
in 1979, due to his "unauthorized" dealings with rogue
agent Edwin Wilson, who was selling plastic explosives to Libya
(with Shackley’s approval).

Had he not
left, Shackley would likely have become head of the Agency.[1139]

George Bush,
who headed the Agency in 1976, strongly desired to continue in that
post. He was not reappointed when Jimmy Carter took office.[1140]*

Moreover, Turner,
who had little faith in HUMNIT (Human Intelligence) sources, decided
to reshape the CIA along more advanced technological lines. As a
result of Turner’s infamous "Halloween Massacre," the
CIA cut its field agents from several thousand to just over 300.

As President
Jimmy Carter would later state, "We were aware that some of
the unqualified and incompetent personnel whom he discharged were
deeply resentful."[1141]

The old hands
of the Agency, who formerly had at their disposal almost unlimited
"Black Budget" funds for covert operations, were suddenly
forced into retirement, or forced into lockstep with Turner’s new
guidelines.

Although CIA
Director William Casey hired 2,000 new covert operators in 1980,
many CIA critics felt Turner’s actions had already caused the secret
cells of the good-old-boy networks to bury themselves – and
their illegal activities – even deeper.

It is this
element, birthed in the hysteria of the Cold War, legitimized by
the paranoia of the National Security state, and nurtured by the
politics of greed, that has buried itself in the core of American
politics.

As long-time
Army Criminal Investigator Gene Wheaton defines it: "An elite,
very clandestine, very covert group within the intelligence community….
The CIA and DIA is just the lightening rod for the people who really
control things."

Those who could
accept the idea of government foreknowledge of the Oklahoma City
bombing would be hard-pressed to accept the notion that certain
factions within the government might have orchestrated the bombing
itself.

Those who have
a difficult time accepting this are stymied by what they perceive
as "government."

As Wheaton
explains, "The government is just a bunch of monuments, office
buildings, computers, and desks. They don’t see the crazies in the
government – the little conspiratorial cliques within the government."[1142]

These little
conspiratorial cliques – the same players that Shackley intersects
with, going back to Cuba, Laos, Afghanistan and Nicaragua –
have been involved for decades in everything from drug and gun-running,
to assassinations, covert warfare, and outright terrorism.

It is a terrorism
that increasingly has no particular face, no ideological credo,
no political goal. It is a terrorism motivated by power and greed.[1143]

By no means
the lone man behind the curtain, Ted Shackley represents one of
the more visible of this lexicon of covert operators upon whom the
powers that be depend on for their endless supply of "black
ops" and dirty tricks.

Perhaps this
is how Shackley knows, or seems to know, the complex truth behind
Oklahoma City.

It is a truth
that remains hidden behind a sophisticated labyrinth of covert operatives,
all of whom converge at similar times and places. They are, as David
Corn writes, "the little faceless gray men we never see and
seldom hear about."

Those we call
the "Shadow Government," the "Parallel Government,"
the "Enterprise," the "Octopus," or a half-a-dozen
other names, are carefully hidden behind an endless roster of official
titles and duties, and a plethora of familiar-sounding organizations
and institutions.

These same
faceless little gray men would pop up in the Oklahoma City bombing
conspiracy like interminable weeds between the cracks of the pavement.

From the Bay
of Pigs to Iran-Contra to Oklahoma City, the names, faces, and players
would coalesce for a brief moment in time into an indistinguishable
menagerie of politicos and spooks, terrorists and assassins –
to commit their terrible deed, then fade into the seamless world
were little distinction is made between assets and criminals.[1144]

Ted Shackley
was officially forced to resign from the CIA due to his dealings
with friend and renegade agent Edwin Wilson. Wilson and former CIA
employee Frank Terpil had smuggled two tons of C-4 to Libya, and
at the behest of Shackley, had set up terrorist training camps there
utilizing Green Berets led to believe they were working for the
Agency.

The ostensible
purpose of this maneuver was to permit the CIA to gather information
on Soviet and Libyan weapons and defense capabilities, and to learn
the identities of foreign nationals being trained for guerrilla
warfare.

Upon obtaining
their passports and travel plans, Shackley would alert their home
country’s secret police, who would then assassinate them upon their
return.[1145]

While Wilson
was sentenced to a long prison term, Terpil fled to Cuba, and has
since been involved in numerous dealings with the PLO and other
terrorists, supplying them with sophisticated assassination weapons,
detonators, and communication systems.[1146]

Terpil also
supplied torture devices to Ugandan Dictator Idi Amin, who used
a bomb supplied by Terpil to assassinate Kenyan cabinet member Bruce
McKenzie.[1147]*

One month later,
Terpil was implicated in the murder of three executives of the IBEX
corporation – a high-technology company that was doing business
with the Savak. John Harper, IBEX’s former director of security,
said that while in Tripoli, he saw a mock-up of the ambush site
at the training facility that Terpil and Wilson had set up.[1148]†

Readers will
recall this is the same Frank Terpil that was seen by Cary Gagan
in Mexico City with Omar (Sam Khalid?), six months before the Oklahoma
City bombing. "I saw him down in Mexico," recalled Gagan,
"in November of ’94, in Mexico City… with Omar."

Gagan said
he and Omar met Terpil at the Hotel Maria Isabelle in the Zona Rosa
district. Gagan didn’t know who Terpil was at the time, but described
him as a fat, balding, 60ish fellow, who was "terribly dressed."
In other words – Frank Terpil.

"I heard
the name because I knew Wilson’s name from the Florence Federal
Penitentiary in Colorado." Gagan said that one of his intelligence
contacts, a man named Daniel, told him about Terpil. "The conversation
came up in reference to the Gander, Newfoundland crash," said
Gagan.

Was Terpil
in Mexico to supply explosives to Omar? While Gagan wasn’t privy
to the conversation, he believes that was the purpose of the meeting.

When Wilson
and Terpil were selling arms and explosives to Libya, they were
reporting to none other than Ted Shackley. Kwitny notes that Wilson
and Terpil were hiring anti-Castro Cubans from Shackley’s old JM/WAVE
program [and Green Berets] to assassinate President Qaddafi’s political
opponents abroad:

Some U.S. Army
men were literally lured away from the doorway of Fort Bragg, their
North Carolina training post. The GIs were given every reason to
believe that the operation summoning them was being carried out
with the full backing of the CIA.…[1149]

Readers will
also recall that while Timothy McVeigh was still in the Army, he
wrote his sister a letter telling her that he had been picked for
a Special Forces (Green Beret) Covert Tactical Unit (CTU) that was
involved in illegal activities. These illegal activities included
"protecting drug shipments, eliminating the [Octopus's drug]
competition, and population control."

This is exactly
what Shackley, Clines, and Secord did in Laos – assassinating
and bombing Vang Pao’s opium competition out of existence.

Could this
CTU McVeigh claims he was recruited for be a latter-day version
of Shackley’s assassins? Former federal grand juror Hoppy Heidelberg
said McVeigh’s letter indicates that he turned them down, while
former FBI SAC Ted Gundersen claims McVeigh actually worked for
the group for a while, then became disenchanted.[1150]

If McVeigh
had actually been recruited for such a group, the question arises
of what cover-story he was given. As discussed, it is highly likely
he was told that he was on an important mission – to infiltrate
a terrorist organization and prevent a bombing. Considering McVeigh’s
background and character, it is unlikely he is a terrorist who set
out to murder 169 innocent people.

Also recall
that McVeigh was seen with Hussain al-Hussaini. The Iraqis would
provide a convincing and plausible excuse if McVeigh was led to
believe he was part of a sting operation: "Son, you were a
hero in the Gulf War. Your country needs you now in the fight against
terrorism." It is a story a young, impressionable man like
McVeigh would fall for.

It is also
possible that McVeigh was sheep-dipped as disgruntled ex-GI for
infiltration into the neo-Nazi community, which would provide a
doorway into the bombing conspiracy through places like Elohim City.

Or perhaps,
as a result of his becoming "disenchanted" and "leaving"
the CTU, he became targeted for "termination," and was
set up as a fall-guy. Such is standard operating procedure for those
who attempt to leave the world of covert operations.

Either way,
the fact that there appeared to be two "Timothy McVeighs,"
just as there were two Oswalds, would suggest a sophisticated intelligence
operation, one that was designed to put McVeigh in the wrong place
at the wrong time.

Like Oswald,
McVeigh probably believed himself to be a government agent, part
of a secret project.

Like Oswald,
McVeigh was not told what the plan really involved, and was trapped,
framed, and made a patsy.

This goes a
long way towards explaining why an armed McVeigh didn’t shoot and
kill Officer Charles Hanger when he was stopped on the Interstate
after the bombing.

Why would a
man who had just killed 169 men, women, and children balk at killing
a cop (a member of the system that McVeigh allegedly hated) on a
lonely stretch of highway?

The only possible
answer is that McVeigh believed he was part of a sting operation
– a government asset – and would be protected.

Whatever McVeigh’s
actual purpose and intent, it is curious, to say the least, that
Ted Shackley would tell D’Ferdinand Carone that the perpetrator
of the bombing was somebody from here.

How did he
know?

Roger Moore,
the mysterious gun dealer whom the government claimed McVeigh and
Nichols robbed to "finance" the bombing, ran a company
next to Bahia Mar Marina in South Florida (a popular hang-out for
the Iran-Contra crowd), which manufactured high-speed boats. The
boats – sold through Intercontinental Industries of Costa Rica
(an Ollie North "cut-out") – were used to mine Nicaragua’s
harbors in "Operation Cordova Harbor."[1151]

One source
I spoke to said Moore had direct contact with Oliver North. "I
don’t know who his [Moore's] contact was on Iran-Contra beyond Don
Aranow. I know he had access and would talk directly to Oliver North.
He knew Felix Rodriquez pretty well, he knew Nester Sanchez, Manny
Diaz, all those guys around Jeb [Bush] pretty well."

This source
also claimed that Moore was a "paymaster" for Tom Posey’s
Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) – the covert paramilitary
operation that served as the primary nexus for arming the Contras.

A retired CIA/DIA
agent I spoke to in Arkansas, said "[Moore] was an Agency contractor."

Other sources
say Moore was an informant for the FBI. He allegedly tried to sell
heavy weapons to the Militia of Montana (MOM) as part of an FBI
sting operation.

A call to MOM
indicated that Moore had indeed stopped by for a friendly chat.
He told Randy Trochmann, one of MOM’s leaders, that he was traveling
the country meeting with militia groups in an attempt to verify
black helicopter sightings and rumors of UN troop movements. This
seems a peculiar pastime for a man who worked for a network of spooks
devoted to bypassing and subverting the Constitution.[1152]*

What is also
peculiar is a letter written by Moore to McVeigh in early 1995.
Introduced at the trial of Terry Nichols, the letter, speaks of
"a plan… to bring the country down and have a few more
things happen."[1153]

Robert "Bud"
McFarlane went on to form his own consulting firm, and joined the
board of American Equity Investors (AEI), founded by Prescott Bush.

AEI’s board
of directors reads like a Who’s Who of the spook world, including
former CIA officials George Clairmont and Howard Hebert, and CIA
lawyer Mitch Rogovin, who was George Bush’s legal counsel when he
was Director of the Agency.[1154]

AEI invested
in a Tulsa, Oklahoma company: Hawkins Oil and Gas, from 1988 to
1991.

McFarlane was
a "consultant" for Hawkins and several other companies
on the Ech power project in Pakistan, which required frequent trips
to that country.[1155]

This was during
the tail end of the largest covert operation the U.S. ever conducted
– the arming of the Mujahadeen, who trained in Pakistan.

McFarlane sat
on the "208 Committee," who’s job it was to procure weapons
for the Mujahadeen, and arms contracts for the Pakistani government.

Recall that
Richard Armitage, who was the contact for Fazoe Haq, governor of
the Northwest Frontier Province, also sat on the "208 Committee."

As Alfred A.
McCoy writes in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia:

It’s known
that the CIA paid the Afghan guerrillas, who were based in Pakistan,
through BCCI.… That the Pakistan military were in fact banking
their drug profits, moving their drug profits from the consuming
country back to Pakistan though BCCI. In fact the boom in the Pakistan
drug trade was financed by BCCI.…

BCCI also served
as a conduit for the Iran-Contra operation, largely through Gaith
Pharon, former head of Saudi Intelligence, who operated out of Islamabad,
Pakistan.

The Saudis
played a major role in funding the Mujahadeen and [via the request
of Secord and McFarlane] the Contras.

McFarlane –
who former Mossad official Ari Ben Menashe claims is a Mossad asset
– worked with the president of Hawkins’ International Division,
Mujeeb Rehman Cheema, on the Ech project.

Was Hani Kamal’s
supposed statement that Khalid was connected to the Mossad accurate?
A prominent Muslim community leader, Cheema claims he does not know
Sam Khalid.[1156]

Interestingly,
Gagan said that at one point, Terry Nichols rendezvoused with his
Middle Eastern friends at the Islamic society of Nevada. Cheema
is chairman of the Islamic Society of Tulsa. Is there a connection?
And what of Cheema’s links to McFarlane? Was McFarlane using Hawkins
as a front for CIA activities in Pakistan?

It is perhaps
prophetic that many of the terrorists implicated in the major bombings
of the last decade attended the terrorist conference held in the
Northwest Frontier Province town of Konli, Pakistan in July of 1996.

As noted, Osama
bin Ladin, a Saudi who funded the Mujahadeen and was implicated
in the Riyadh and Dhahran bombings, (a close associate of Sheik
Abdel Omar Rahman, implicated in the World Trade Center bombing),
Ahmed Jibril (who bombed Pan Am 103), and senior representatives
of Iranian and Pakistani intelligence, and Hamas, HizbAllah, and
other groups attended the conference.[1157]

Stephen Jones
claimed he had learned through the Saudi Arabian Intelligence Service
that Iraq had hired seven Pakistani mercenaries – Mujahadeen
veterans – to bomb targets in the U.S., one of which was the
Alfred P. Murrah Building.[1158]

Just who were
these "Pakistani mercenaries," and were they really working
for Iraq?

1118. (*) General
John Singlaub, a former OSS agent, has the distinction of being
the first U.S. officer to pay his indigenous personnel at Kinming,
China with five pound bags of opium. Ray Cline (Iran-Contra) was
a member of Singlaub’s team at the time. (Wall Street Journal, 4/18/80)

1119. (*) After
the Contra torture manual scandal, McFarlane was fired, then kicked
upstairs to the NSC to become Armitage’s Deputy. Among those who
participated in the original to plan "privatize" the Contra
operation were: Gen. John Singlaub (Ret.), Andrew Messing, then
of the Conservative Caucus, Ted Shackley, Harry (Heinie) Aderholt,
Edward Luttwak, Gen. Edward Lansdale (Ret.), Seal Doss, and Col.
John Waghelstein, former head of the U.S. military groups in El
Salvador.

1120. (824)
Andrew Eiva, former Green Beret, part of lobby effort for Mujahadeen,
interview with author; Christic, Op Cit. Reagan’s March, 1981 decision
was formalized in November as National Security Decision Directive
17, and hidden from Congress.

1121. (825)
Levine, Op Cit.

1122. (826)
Roberts, Op Cit.

1123. (827)
Bo Gritz, Called to Serve, 1991.

1124. (*) The
real reason that Britain went to war against the Chinese (The Boxer
Rebellion) was to prevent the emperor of China – concerned
about the spread of drug use among his people – from destroying
China’s opium crop. The British, who were making huge profits from
the opium trade, had Parliament declare war against the Chinese
for interfering with their profitable "commerce." One
of the spoils of that war was that Hong Kong became British territory,
resulting in a port controlled by England for the transshipment
of drugs.

1125. (828)
Speech given to the Arizona Breakfast Club in Phoenix in 1989, quoted
in Craig Roberts, The
Medussa File: Crimes and Cover-Ups of the U.S. Government
(Tulsa, OK: Consolidated Press, 1996), p. 200.

1126. (829)
Jack Colhoun, "The Family That Preys Together," Covert
Action Quarterly, date unknown. President Bush later appointed
former Florida Governor Bob Martinez as head of the U.S. Office
of National Drug Control Policy. Martinez had accepted campaign
donations from drug trafficker Leonel Martinez (no relation). Bush’s
son Jeb also had links with the Contra drug supply line through
Leonel Martinez; In November 1984, two years after Reagan announced
his "bold, confident plan" promising to "be on the
tail" of drug traffickers, cocaine imports had jumped 50 percent
and heroin was more plentiful than at any other time since the late
1970s. An estimated 63 tons of cocaine glutted the U.S. market in
1984. (James Mills, The
Underground Empire, p.1125.)

1127. (830)
Dennis Bernstein and Robert Knight, "DEA Agent’s Decade Long
Battle To Expose CIA-Contra-Crack Story," Pacific News Service,
10/96; "Will Whitewash Of CIA-Cocaine Connection Continue?
Revelations Of CIA’s Connection To Crack Shouldn’t Come As A Surprise,"
The Birmingham News, 9/29/96. "Richard Gregorie, one
of the country’s top narcotics prosecutors in Miami… had aggressively
pursued big-time cocaine bosses and drug-corrupted officials in
and out of the United States. But as he began going up the drug-business
chain of command, he targeted foreign officials friendly with the
U.S. government, and the State Department started interfering with
his investigations, telling him to stay away from certain sensitive
areas. Gregorie’s operations were subsequently stopped at the request
of the State Department and he quit in protest." ~ Project
Censored, 1989. NSC memos discovered during the Iran-Contra investigation
revealed that Bush’s NSC advisor Donald Gregg was aware early on
of Contra involvement in the drug trade. Could ex-CIA chief George
Bush, at that point Vice President and Drug Czar, be unaware of
such goings-on when his reporting subordinate was quite aware of
Contra involvement in the drug trade?

1128. (831)
Celerino Castillo III and Dave Harmon, Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras
and the Drug War (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press), 1988. As ex-CIA
field officer John Stockwell noted: "We cannot forget the Senate
Kerry Committee findings of cocaine smuggling on CIA/Contra aircraft,
the DEA reports on the number of prosecutions in which the CIA has
intervened to block prosecution of drug smugglers, the note that
escaped Lt. Col. Oliver North’s shredder that $14 million of drug
money had gone to the Contras, or the CIA’s 20-odd-year relationship
with Manuel Noriega."( (Austin American-Statesman, op-ed
editorial)

1129. (832)
Mike Levine, interview with author.

1130. (*) Shackley’s
main contact was Richard Armitage.

1131. (*) Edward
G. Lansdale, working with Shackley, headed a subset of JM/WAVE called
"Operation Moongoose." The assassination team was called
"Operation 40." Shackley’s later partners in the "Enterprise,"
Tom Clines and Edwin P. Wilson, also worked on JM/WAVE and Operation
40. Roselli and Giancana were murdered only days before they were
to testify before Congress regarding their alleged roles in the
Kennedy assassination.

1132. (*) Shackley
and Clines also directed an assassination program to eliminate Vang
Pao’s heroin competition. A CIA officer addressing a group of Green
Berets in Vietnam claimed that Shackley had been responsible for
250 political murders in Laos. Shackley would later become CIA Station
Chief of Saigon.

1133. (833)
Wall Street Journal, March, 1983; quoted in Cockburn, p.
103. Michael Jon Hand was a U.S. Green Beret who served under Shackley
in Laos.

1134. (**)
In fact, Nugan Hand rented adjoining offices with the DEA in its
Chiang Mai, Thailand branch, even sharing the same secretary! The
overall operation resulted in the huge heroin epidemic that swept
the country in the late 1960s and ’70s, not to mention the U.S.
troops in Vietnam who became addicts.

1135. (834)
Although Congress declared Phoenix unlawful in 1971, and ordered
the military to prosecute the guilty parties, the assassinations
continued until 1975. One operative – a Mr. Reaux – was
ultimately arrested and hung out to dry.

1136. (*) As
Marchetti stated regarding William Colby, "Colby is a very
dangerous man. I think he’s got the mentality of a Heinrich Himmler.
He would have made – and might still from the way he’s going
– a very good Communist. I mean that he’s the kind of guy who
is best qualified to run a concentration camp, not an agency like
the CIA."

1137. (835)
Michael Parenti, Inventing
Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media (New York, NY: St.
Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 178. Also responsible for the squelching
of trade unions in Chile was the American Institute for Free Labor
Development (AIFLD), a CIA front, supported by corporations like
W.R. Grace and ITT.

1138. (*) Col.
H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr., the father of ‘Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf,
was an intelligence operative in Iran in the 1940s and 50s, and
helped set up the dreaded Savak.

1139. (*) It
is rumored that he was looking forward to inheriting the Italian
Fascist P2 account.

1140. (**)
It is interesting to note that Bush had been implicated in "October
Surprise," the backdoor deal with Iranian terrorists to hold
the 66 American hostages seized by pro-Khomeini forces until after
Carter’s defeat. It is therefore not surprising that Shackley and
Bush – both groomed for CIA directorships, but forced to resign
– would work together on covert and illegal deals such as October
Surprise and Iran-Contra.

1141. (836)
Weiner, Op Cit.

1142. (837)
Gene Wheaton, interview with author.

1143. (*) Victor
Marchetti aptly summed up this philosophy by examining former Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger: "He’s power-mad, a manipulator of
events. I don’t think he does it for any ideological reason, just
out of instinct. I don’t think he understands what this country
is all about. To him, everything is a deal…"

1144. (*) As
Al Martin, an Iran-Contra player, said, "Oklahoma City begins
with Iran-Contra. If you want to understand Oklahoma, start with
Iran-Contra."

1145. (838)
Affidavit of Colonel Edward P. Cutolo, commander of the 10th Special
Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces, 3/11/80, copy in author’s
possession.

1146. (839)
Maas, p. 286. The C-4 came from J.S. Brower & Associates.

1147. (**)
On July 3, 1976, Israeli commandos raided the Ugandan airport at
Entebbe after one of their airliners had been hijacked by the PLO.
McKenzie was instrumental in helping the Israelis, who had used
Kenya as a staging area. In his book, Manhunt, Peter Maas describes
what McKenzie got for his efforts: "Although he had been counseled
not to, McKenzie went to Uganda as part of a Kenya trade mission
to patch up relations with Idi Amin. The warnings seemed unnecessary.
Amin himself was on hand to bid McKenzie good-bye, presenting him
with the traditional Ugandan friendship gift, an African Antelope’s
head. Soon after McKenzie’s plane took off, it blew up. Inside the
Antelope head was a bomb, placed there by Frank Terpil."

1148. (†
Gene Wheaton, IBEX;s subsequent director of security who investigated
the murders, claims Shackley, Clines, Hakim, Rafael "Chi Chi"
Quintero, and Secord are all linked to the murders. John Harper
would later show up in Honduras training the Contras in the use
of explosives.

1149. (840)
Kwitny, Op Cit., p. 103.

1150. (841)
Hoppy Heidelberg and Ted Gundersen, interviews with author. Recall
that Heidelberg heard McVeigh’s sister Jennifer read the letter
into testimony.

1151. (*) Dewy
Clarridge and Oliver North were in charge of the harbor mining operation.
Moore’s friend Don Aranow, owner of Magnum Marina, which had the
original contract to build the boats, gave the contract to Moore.
Aranow was killed one day before he was to testify at the Iran-Contra
hearings.

1152. (**)
My source told me that Moore’s FBI contact was Tom Ross out of Hot
Springs, Arkansas, one of Ollie North’s "damage control"
men. "

1153. (842)
Nolan Clay, "Robbery Victim’s Alliances Promise Drama in Nichols’
Trial," Daily Oklahoman, 11/9/97.

1154. (843)
AEI articles of incorporation. The president of AEI, Harry Huge,
was a partner in the law firm of Rogovin, Huge, and Schiller.

1155. (844)
Cliff Lewis, interview with author. Mujeeb Cheema, interview with
author.

1156. (*) Interestingly,
some of Khalid’s workers were spotted in a Tulsa nightclub, The
Ocean Club, which is curious, since Tulsa is 100 miles from Oklahoma
City. McFarlane would not return repeated calls.

1157. (845)
Indeed, a major terrorism summit sponsored by Tehran in June of
1996 saw delegates from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
and other Mid-East and African states, as well as Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Germany, France, Britain, Canada, and the U.S. come together to
form a joint working committee under the command of the new HizbAllah
International – transforming that group into "the vanguard
of the revolution" of the Muslim world.

1158. (846)
Timothy McVeigh’s Petition for Writ of Mandamus, 3/25/97, p. 81.
Jones points out, given the issue of the credibility of the information,
that the head of Saudi Intelligence is the King’s own son.

1159. (*) As
former high-ranking CIA official Victor Marchetti explained, "They’re
smart enough always to work through other parties. Generally, the
dirtier the work is, the more likely it is to be farmed out."

1160. (**)
Some of the members of ZR/RIFLE, such as Felix Rodriguez (AKA: Max
Gomez), and the leader of CORU, Frank Castro, would go on to form
the nucleus of the Contra drugs-for-guns operation.

October
17, 2011

Charles
A. Burris [send him mail]
is a history instructor in an American high school.

The
Best of Charles A. Burris

As there are ages of cultural renaissance and enlightenment, so are there, on the critical evidence of history, ages of cultural sterility and degeneration.

Today's mass youth Rock/Rap culture, with its consecration of the trivial, the sexually perverse, and the infantile, is characterized by the debasement and corruption of language.

In his book, The Second Sin, Thomas Szasz observes:

To concepts like suicide, homicide, and genocide, we should add ‘semanticide’ – the murder of language. The deliberate (or quasi-deliberate) misuse of language through hidden metaphor and professional mystification breaks the basic contract between people, namely the tacit agreement on the proper use of words. Thus it is that the ‘great’ philosophers and politicians whose aim was to control man, from Rousseau to Stalin and Hitler, have preached and practiced semanticide; whereas those who have tried to set man free to be his own master, from Emerson to Kraus and Orwell, have preached and practiced respect for language.

Social Media and the Internet, hailed by some as visionary tools of liberation and empowerment, are the new digital Platonic caves of false reality and noble lies. They are the vehicles where vulgar manipulation of a generation formed linguistically around the primitivism of tribal Rock music by atavistic poseurs and the monotonous dirge of Rap by nihilistic gangsters, will not be a difficult generation to enslave politically, socially and culturally.

Imagine willfully ignorant cybervultures (digital progeny of O'Reilly, Olbermann, Hannity, Maddow, Coulter, Uygur, or Savage) leading thuggish illiterate mobs via Facebook and Twitter.

For four decades my mentor in political and culture matters has been the magnificent Albert Jay Nock, while Nock himself turned to the high Tory essayist Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy as his seminal guide.

But Nock and Arnold did not always see eye-to-eye.

Arnold, as a second generation educational bureaucrat, believed that in order to move his sterile Victorian culture towards "sweetness and light," the defining civilizational appreciation of the best cultural achievements that the West had produced, a vast network of state-sponsored schools must be created to educate the "barbarians," "philistines," and "populace," (his famous labels for the aristocracy, the middle class, and the toiling masses of his day).

Nock was adamantly opposed to this compulsory imposition of coercive egalitarianism and regimentation. He believed (gleefully standing Karl Marx upon his head) the much-heralded u2018universal literacy' of the statists would bring further immiseration of Arnold's "populace," while lowering the cultural common denominator of the hapless bourgeoisie and the predatory "barbarians."

As a state-controlled enterprise maintained by taxation, virtually a part of the civil service (like organized Christianity in England and in certain European countries) the system had become an association de propaganda fide for the extreme of a hidebound nationalism and of a superstitious servile reverence for a sacrosanct State. In another view one saw it functioning as a sort of sanhedrim, a leveling agency, prescribing uniform modes of thought, belief, conduct, social deportment, diet, recreation, hygiene; and as an inquisitional body for the enforcement of these prescriptions, for nosing out heresies and irregularities and suppressing them. In still another view one saw it functioning as a trade-union body, intent on maintaining and augmenting a set of vested interests; and one noticed that in this capacity it occasionally took shape as an extremely well-disciplined and powerful pressure group. (The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, pages 263-264)

In this day of the triumph of the Idiocracy, Nock has the last haughty and disdainful laugh at the naiveté of Arnold and the progressive educational reformers who followed in his wake.

In the Arts, the modernist and postmodernist projects are exhausted. No more tiresome Épater la bourgeoisie (Shock the middle classes). The avant-garde novelty of Rimbaud, Klimt, Schoenberg, Joyce, Dada, Ligeti, Pollock, Sartre, and Mapplethorpe has degenerated into boorish louts such as Eminem, Lady Gaga, and Kanye West.

Yet in a measured bow towards the underclass lumpenproletariat, mainstream media moguls market this filth as the authentic, spontaneous outpouring from "the streets." But then, so is dog excrement.

Good music should be an elevating celebration of the human spirit. It is an affirmation of life, of the richness and texture of being.

Much contemporary literature and music is an unintelligible exercise in the pathetic and the phallic performed by "trousered apes" (to use Duncan William's excellent descriptive title from his now woefully archaic exposition on related cultural and literary subject matters.)

Weaken, corrupt, dissolve the cohesive authority of language in a society and the rest follows rather easily — a life nasty, brutish, meaningless; an existence void of beauty or purpose.

Perhaps this old curmudgeon could be tragically wrong in my baneful prognostications. I hope I am so.

Our future may indeed be vastly freer and more just, as brilliantly sketched by libertarian visionary Stefan Molyneux, in his powerful, inspirational remarks delivered recently before the Free State Project's PorcFest 2011.

Let us hope that the optimistic brave new world he describes will also be characterized by more civility and simple decency and respect towards one another.

Pioneer communications analyst Marshall McLuhan famously observed, "The medium is the message." McLuhan’s most celebrated work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, was a revolutionary study in media theory. He said that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the primary focus of analysis.

McLuhan’s brilliant insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself.

And in today’s world of Social Media and the Internet, erudite, principled, strait-laced, grandfatherly, wonderfully middle class Ron Paul is that medium towards the brighter future outlined by Molyneux.

Such are the humble confessions of a cultural reactionary.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] is a history instructor in an American high school.

The Best of Charles A. Burris

Anders Mikkelsen
has written an excellent review
of Andrew Bacevich's recent book, Washington
Rules, which summarizes and lays out the "rules"
and "credo" of the American foreign policy Establishment.
It is another fine example of power
elite analysis or "establishment
studies."

The concept
of the Establishment was first used in England referring
to the established (or official) state church, the Anglican Church
or Church of England, created by the usurper and schismatic Henry
Tudor during the
Protestant Reformation.

Nineteenth-century
writer William
Cobbett later expanded the concept to include those networks
of financial institutions related to the Bank of England, elite
public schools and clubs, and publishing entities (such as "the
bloody old Times") the ruling aristocracy used to train
and sustain its oligarchic bureaucracy who manned the
British empire. Cobbett labeled this power elite as "the
Thing."

As Leonard
and Mark Silk observed in their masterful book, The
American Establishment, twentieth century British historian
A. J. P. Taylor later adapted Cobbett's "the Thing" into
"the Establishment" in a 1953 article in The New Statesman,
followed by journalist Henry Fairlie's usage of the term in The
Spectator in 1955.

The broad concept
was soon adopted by wide-ranging American analysts of the powers-that-be,
such as Richard H. Rovere, C. Wright Mills, Dan Smoot, Phyllis Schlafly,
Carroll Quigley, John Kenneth Galbraith, and G. William Domhoff.

These authors
recognized that while the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
prohibits an establishment of religion, our nation does indeed have,
like
its British cousins across the pond, an Establishment,
complete with its own theological
canon and doxology
of statecraft and spy
craft. Its “Vatican” is the Council
on Foreign Relations.  Its primary source of treasure and
alms has been the
Morgan and Rockefeller financial empires, which created
the Fed, the great enabler of the Welfare-Warfare State. 
Many of its elite
seminarians have studied at Ivy League institutions such as
Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia; some in particular, at
Yale where they were initiated into Skull
and Bones.

Bacevich concentrates
on the immediate post-World War II period of history, tracing the
Establishment's bipartisan "foreign policy consensus"
on the Cold War to the present Bush/Obama war on terrorism. He see
this as the crucial gestation period, a time implementing “the American
Century” of Henry
Luce, of the Truman administration’s creation of the National
Security State and its doctrine of Containment as a public
rationale for global intervention and the military-industrial complex
(and George F. Kennan's, Robert A. Lovett's, and the Dulles
Brothers’ clandestine policy of Rollback or Liberation
through covert operations of the OPC and CIA). 

But the Establishment's
rules and credo were sketched on papyrus long before 1948. They
were put forth by visionary
prophets of pelf, plunder and empire fifty years earlier, during
the
Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection.

A central figure
was the sinister Elihu
Root, later founding chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations,
who like his fellow interventionists and war criminals Theodore
Roosevelt and Barack Obama, was recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
He was the archetype of the Establishment's much-abused "Wise
Man" category, the mainstream media's designation of select
servitors of power stretching from Root to the recently departed
Richard
Holbrooke – Special Representative for Afghanistan
and Pakistan, Bilderberg group, Trilateral Commission, Council on
Foreign Relations, former managing director of Lehman Brothers,
and board director of AIG to July 2008 (just before the bailouts).

Before the
acclaimed “Wise
Men” of the Truman regime came the “Four Evangelists” of an
earlier era. Led by Elihu Root, his protégé “Colonel”
Henry L. Simpson, along with “Colonel”
Edward M. House and Raymond
B. Fosdick, these little-known four were the real architects
of the American Establishment and its interventionist gospel of
the Welfare-Warfare State. It is they who wrote its rules and drafted
its credo which has transformed the American republic into a squalid
and overstretched empire.

In a recent
LRC
article I wrote of how today's libertarians must become the
new abolitionists.

We must also
continue our role as non-interventionist heretics to the CFR's church,
working for its disestablishment and demise.

December
28, 2010

Charles
A. Burris [send him mail]
is a history instructor in an American high school.

The
Best of Charles A. Burris

There is an
ominous historic parallel between the way taxation is viewed today
by our three major political groupings — Democrats, Republicans
and Libertarians — and the way those same groups looked upon chattel
slavery on the eve of the nation’s most disastrous civil conflict
— the War for Southern Independence.

In 1861, America
faced a crossroads.  The issue was slavery — the forcible confiscation
and ownership of other human beings and the fruits of their labor. 
The Democrats believed slavery essential to the economy, that you
could not run the economy without it.  Slavery was in the nature
of things.

The Republicans,
a minor party of diverse, disaffected elements, thought there was
something wrong with slavery, but they did not want to take any
drastic action.  They did not want to abolish anything. 
They just wanted to slow the further extension of slavery into
the territories. Republicans then, as today, were composed of craven
corporatists, belligerent nationalists, "Know Nothing"
nativists, fanatical moral reformers, and a few wayward, courageous
souls dedicated to the constitutional vision of a decentralized
republic of the framers.

Republicans
called for a decrease in the increase of slavery — much as
modern Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan, never really wanted
to cut taxes, but only decrease the increasing amount
that is taken out of your paycheck each week.  Reagan sponsored
the largest tax increase in American history in a move which pleased
the pro-tax bipartisan majority in Congress.

Present-day
embryonic "tea partiers" within the GOP are comparable
to this "free-soil"
element within the party of yesteryear. They know something
is not right about confiscatory taxes and run-away spending but
have not quite worked out a comprehensive frontal attack strategy
and systematic analysis of the problem.

Now if Mississippi,
Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and all the rest of the South wanted
slavery — fine.  Lincoln
and the Republicans supported a constitutional amendment to permanently
guarantee slavery in the South.  In fact, this amendment
passed the Congress, and was ratified by three states before the
war began at Fort Sumter.

Today it is
impossible for us to imagine that a majority of our fellow Americans
held these opinions on this barbaric institution, that slavery virtually
went unquestioned for thousands of years.

The Libertarians
of that day — the abolitionists — were vilified and attacked by
the press as impractical idealists or worse.  As the conscience
of America, they
believed that slavery was an affront to Almighty God and a
gross violation of the essential individual human rights and dignity
that were the glories of America’s heritage.  The abolitionists
demanded that slavery be immediately and unconditionally ended.

In 1861, America
was at a crossroads.  Today we are again at a crossroads. 
The paramount issue we face is a parasitic system of taxation draining
the economic lifeblood of our ability to feed, care for and clothe
our families.

Politicians
have long led us to believe that individual freedom and self-reliance
can only bring chaos, while taxation and centralized government
planning are essential to impose order.  In truth it is liberty
and the competitive free market that gives us a productive and harmonious
economic order; it is government and confiscatory taxation that
bring chaos, corruption, and arbitrary power.

According to
published accounts, millions of Americans are engaged in active
tax resistance, refusing to participate in their further enslavement
by a government out of control; millions more are engaged in passive
tax resistance in the “underground economy” — much as their predecessors
used the “underground railroad” to escape slave masters and their
governmental hirelings.

(On a personal
note, genealogical research of my ancestral roots shows that my
great-great-great-great-great grandfather John
C. Burris was a soldier in the French and Indian War, later
in the American Revolution, who became a Quaker and married a Cheraw
Indian woman Ester.
Their son, my great-great-great-great grandfather, Daniel
H. Burris, was also a Quaker and an abolitionist who fiercely
opposed slavery and who helped runaway enslaved persons escape on
the Underground Railway. Daniel and his wife Mary had sixteen children.
Fourteen
of their grandsons served in the Union Army during the Civil
War, including my great-great grandfather, Eden
Henry Burris, who fought with Company A, 57th Indiana
Infantry regiment. He and his wife Rebecca had thirteen kids.)

The choice
today is quite clear.  It is between peace, freedom and prosperity
on the one hand, taxation, tyranny and impoverishment on the other. 
Faced with this fundamental choice, we should see clearly that what
we desperately need to do is not limit or reform the tax system,
but to abolish it — and breathe the fresh, clean air of freedom.

Immoral taxation
must be made to go the way of immoral slavery.

Contemporary
libertarians must proudly and unashamedly embrace
our abolitionist roots in the struggle against the
welfare-warfare state and the
Fed which enables it.

We must eagerly
study and learn from its grand
strategic and tactical history, as well as that of its sister
movements of nullification
and secession,
in formulating our concentrated assault on the systematic destruction
of our rights and liberties, whether TSA tyranny, the
war-making of our imperial narco-state empire, and the erosion
of economic freedom and private property.

December
20, 2010

Charles
A. Burris [send him mail]
is a history instructor in an American high school.

The
Best of Charles A. Burris

As the publishers explain on the back of this book: “In this hard-hitting and controversial new book, the author examines the foundation texts of socialism to find out what they really say… and the result is blasphemy against its canon of saints. This study, the first review of socialist literature since 1945, reveals how closely socialism was linked to conservative, racist, and genocidal ideas. As a literary critic the author’s concern is to pay a due respect to the works of the founding fathers of socialism, to attend to what they say rather than to what their modern disciples wish they had said. The book forces the reader to abandon long-standing assumptions in political thought, enabling a genuine debate to be revived.”

In this brilliant work examining the foundation texts of socialism, Watson provides a powerful indictment of their reactionary, racist and genocidal ideas. There is a direct line from Marx and Engels to Hitler and the Holocaust; to Lenin and Stalin and the liquidation of the Kulaks and the extermination of the Ukrainians; to Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and to Kolima, Vorkuta and Karaganda.

What distinguishes “socialism,” the political/economic ideology, and its ideological twin, “sociology,” the social science, are their common inheritance and origins from backward, reactionary ideas (anti-individualism, collectivism, anti-capitalism) and thinkers (Hegel, Comte, de Bonald, de Maistre, Southey, Saint-Simon). Scholars such the sociologist Leon Branson, The Political Context of Sociology, and Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, have thoroughly traced and documented this non-liberal lineage. These horrific ideas were explicitly formulated and conceived against those of classical liberalism, individualism, and free market (laissez-faire) capitalism. But today, according to established authorities in academia and the media, they are the height of “progressive” thought. How did this all come about? Here is how Murray Rothbard put it in his magnificent For a New Liberty:

“(W)e must first remember that classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to the political and economic interests — the ruling classes — who benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military machines, the State bureaucracies. Despite three major violent revolutions precipitated by the liberals — the English of the seventeenth century and the American and French of the eighteenth — victories in Europe were only partial. Resistance was stiff and managed to successfully maintain landed monopolies, religious establishments, and warlike foreign and military policies, and for a time to keep the suffrage restricted to the wealthy elite. The liberals had to concentrate on widening the suffrage, because it was clear to both sides that the objective economic and political interests of the mass of the public lay in individual liberty. It is interesting to note that, by the early nineteenth century, the laissez-faire forces were known as “liberals” and “radicals” (for the purer and more consistent among them), and the opposition that wished to preserve or go back to the Old Order were broadly known as “conservatives.”

“Indeed, conservatism began, in the early nineteenth century, as a conscious attempt to undo and destroy the hated work of the new classical liberal spirit — of the American, French, and Industrial revolutions. Led by two reactionary French thinkers, de Bonald and de Maistre, conservatism yearned to replace equal rights and equality before the law by the structured and hierarchical rule of privileged elites; individual liberty and minimal government by absolute rule and Big Government; religious freedom by the theocratic rule of a State church; peace and free trade by militarism, mercantilist restrictions, and war for the advantage of the nation-state; and industry and manufacturing by the old feudal and agrarian order. And they wanted to replace the new world of mass consumption and rising standards of living for all by the Old Order of bare subsistence for the masses and luxury consumption for the ruling elite.

“By the middle of and certainly by the end of the nineteenth century, conservatives began to realize that their cause was inevitably doomed if they persisted in clinging to the call for outright repeal of the Industrial Revolution and of its enormous rise in the living standards of the mass of the public, and also if they persisted in opposing the widening of the suffrage, thereby frankly setting themselves in opposition to the interests of that public. Hence, the “right wing” (a label based on an accident of geography by which the spokesmen for the Old Order sat on the right of the assembly hall during the French Revolution) decided to shift their gears and to update their statist creed by jettisoning outright opposition to industrialism and democratic suffrage. For the old conservatism’s frank hatred and contempt for the mass of the public, the new conservatives substituted duplicity and demagogy. The new conservatives wooed the masses with the following line: “We, too, favor industrialism and a higher standard of living. But, to accomplish such ends, we must regulate industry for the public good; we must substitute organized cooperation for the dog-eat-dog of the free and competitive marketplace; and, above all, we must substitute for the nation-destroying liberal tenets of peace and free trade the nation-glorifying measures of war, protectionism, empire, and military prowess.” For all of these changes, of course, Big Government rather than minimal government was required.

“And so, in the late nineteenth century, statism and Big Government returned, but this time displaying a proindustrial and pro-general-welfare face. The Old Order returned, but this time the beneficiaries were shuffled a bit; they were not so much the nobility, the feudal landlords, the army, the bureaucracy, and privileged merchants as they were the army, the bureaucracy, the weakened feudal landlords, and especially the privileged manufacturers. Led by Bismarck in Prussia, the New Right fashioned a right-wing collectivism based on war, militarism, protectionism, and the compulsory cartelization of business and industry — a giant network of controls, regulations, subsidies, and privileges which forged a great partnership of Big Government with certain favored elements in big business and industry.

“Something had to be done, too, about the new phenomenon of a massive number of industrial wage workers — the “proletariat.” During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, indeed until the late nineteenth century, the mass of workers favored laissez-faire and the free competitive market as best for their wages and working conditions as workers, and for a cheap and widening range of consumer goods as consumers. Even the early trade unions, e.g., in Great Britain, were staunch believers in laissez-faire. New conservatives, spearheaded by Bismarck in Germany and Disraeli in Britain, weakened the libertarian will of the workers by shedding crocodile tears about the condition of the industrial labor force, and cartelizing and regulating industry, not accidentally hobbling efficient competition. Finally, in the early twentieth century, the new conservative “corporate state” — then and now the dominant political system in the Western world — incorporated “responsible” and corporatist trade unions as junior partners to Big Government and favored big businesses in the new statist and corporatist decision-making system.

“To establish this new system, to create a New Order which was a modernized, dressed-up version of the ancien rgime before the American and French revolutions, the new ruling elites had to perform a gigantic con job on the deluded public, a con job that continues to this day. Whereas the existence of every government from absolute monarchy to military dictatorship rests on the consent of the majority of the public, a democratic government must engineer such consent on a more immediate, day-by-day basis. And to do so, the new conservative ruling elites had to gull the public in many crucial and fundamental ways. For the masses now had to be convinced that tyranny was better than liberty, that a cartelized and privileged industrial feudalism was better for the consumers than a freely competitive market, that a cartelized monopoly was to be imposed in the name of antimonopoly, and that war and military aggrandizement for the benefit of the ruling elites was really in the interests of the conscripted, taxed, and often slaughtered public. How was this to be done?

“In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas. Now, throughout history, as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of States have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens in a free society. For States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that the “emperor has clothes.” Until the modern world, such intellectuals were inevitably churchmen (or witch doctors), the guardians of religion. It was a cozy alliance, this age-old partnership between Church and State; the Church informed its deluded charges that the king ruled by divine command and therefore must be obeyed; in return, the king funneled numerous tax revenues into the coffers of the Church. Hence, the great importance for the libertarian classical liberals of their success at separating Church and State. The new liberal world was a world in which intellectuals could be secular — could make a living on their own, in the market, apart from State subvention.

“To establish their new statist order, their neomercantilist corporate State, the new conservatives therefore had to forge a new alliance between intellectual and State. In an increasingly secular age, this meant with secular intellectuals rather than with divines: specifically, with the new breed of professors, Ph.D.’s, historians, teachers, and technocratic economists, social workers, sociologists, physicians, and engineers. This reforged alliance came in two parts. In the early nineteenth century, the conservatives, conceding reason to their liberal enemies, relied heavily on the alleged virtues of irrationality, romanticism, tradition, theocracy. By stressing the virtue of tradition and of irrational symbols, the conservatives could gull the public into continuing privileged hierarchical rule, and to continue to worship the nation-state and its war-making machine. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the new conservatism adopted the trappings of reason and of “science.” Now it was science that allegedly required rule of the economy and of society by technocratic “experts.” In exchange for spreading this message to the public, the new breed of intellectuals was rewarded with jobs and prestige as apologists for the New Order and as planners and regulators of the newly cartelized economy and society.

“To insure the dominance of the new statism over public opinion, to insure that the public’s consent would be engineered, the governments of the Western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries moved to seize control over education, over the minds of men: over the universities, and over general education through compulsory school attendance laws and a network of public schools. The public schools were consciously used to inculcate obedience to the State as well as other civic virtues among their young charges. Furthermore, this statizing of education insured that one of the biggest vested interests in expanding statism would be the nation’s teachers and professional educationists.

“One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels. For example, the laissez-faire libertarians had long been known as “liberals,” and the purest and most militant of them as “radicals”; they had also been known as “progressives” because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers. The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words “liberal” and “progressive,” and successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of being old-fashioned, “Neanderthal,” and “reactionary.” Even the name “conservative” was pinned on the classical liberals. And, as we have seen, the new statists were able to appropriate the concept of “reason” as well.

“If the laissez-faire liberals were confused by the new recrudescence of statism and mercantilism as “progressive” corporate statism, another reason for the decay of classical liberalism by the end of the nineteenth century was the growth of a peculiar new movement: socialism. Socialism began in the 1830s and expanded greatly after the 1880s. The peculiar thing about socialism was that it was a confused, hybrid movement, influenced by both the two great preexisting polar ideologies, liberalism and conservatism. From the classical liberals the socialists took a frank acceptance of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution, an early glorification of “science” and “reason,” and at least a rhetorical devotion to such classical liberal ideals as peace, individual freedom, and a rising standard of living. Indeed, the socialists, long before the much later corporatists, pioneered in a co-opting of science, reason, and industrialism. And the socialists not only adopted the classical liberal adherence to democracy, but topped it by calling for an “expanded democracy,” in which “the people” would run the economy — and each other.

$30 $27

“On the other hand, from the conservatives the socialists took a devotion to coercion and the statist means for trying to achieve these liberal goals. Industrial harmony and growth were to be achieved by aggrandizing the State into an all-powerful institution, ruling the economy and the society in the name of “science.” A vanguard of technocrats was to assume all-powerful rule over everyone’s person and property in the name of the “people” and of “democracy.” Not content with the liberal achievement of reason and freedom for scientific research, the socialist State would install rule by the scientists of everyone else; not content with liberals setting the workers free to achieve undreamt-of prosperity, the socialist State would install rule by the workers of everyone else — or rather, rule by politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats in their name. Not content with the liberal creed of equality of rights, of equality before the law, the socialist State would trample on such equality on behalf of the monstrous and impossible goal of equality or uniformity of results — or rather, would erect a new privileged elite, a new class, in the name of bringing about such an impossible equality.

“Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve the liberal goals of freedom, peace, and industrial harmony and growth — goals which can only be achieved through liberty and the separation of government from virtually everything — by imposing the old conservative means of statism, collectivism, and hierarchical privilege. It was a movement which could only fail, which indeed did fail miserably in those numerous countries where it attained power in the twentieth century, by bringing to the masses only unprecedented despotism, starvation, and grinding impoverishment.

“But the worst thing about the rise of the socialist movement was that it was able to outflank the classical liberals “on the Left”: that is, as the party of hope, of radicalism, of revolution in the Western World. For, just as the defenders of the ancien rgime took their place on the right side of the hall during the French Revolution, so the liberals and radicals sat on the left; from then on until the rise of socialism, the libertarian classical liberals were “the Left,” even the “extreme Left,” on the ideological spectrum. As late as 1848, such militant laissez-faire French liberals as Frdric Bastiat sat on the left in the national assembly. The classical liberals had begun as the radical, revolutionary party in the West, as the party of hope and of change on behalf of liberty, peace, and progress. To allow themselves to be outflanked, to allow the socialists to pose as the “party of the Left,” was a bad strategic error, allowing the liberals to be put falsely into a confused middle-of-the-road position with socialism and conservatism as the polar opposites. Since libertarianism is nothing if not a party of change and of progress toward liberty, abandonment of that role meant the abandonment of much of their reason for existence — either in reality or in the minds of the public.

“But none of this could have happened if the classical liberals had not allowed themselves to decay from within. They could have pointed out — as some of them indeed did — that socialism was a confused, self-contradictory, quasi-conservative movement, absolute monarchy and feudalism with a modern face, and that they themselves were still the only true radicals, undaunted people who insisted on nothing less than complete victory for the libertarian ideal.”

As classical liberalism underwent a “crisis of faith,” in the late nineteenth century, so to did socialism: the “crisis of Marxism.”

The “crisis” developed out of the failure of Karl Marx’s prediction regarding the increasing immiseration of the working class. This impoverishment of the proletariat, as the result of economic recessions, was not occurring.

In fact, just the opposite was happening. Working conditions in industrial countries were improving. Standards of living and purchasing power for consumers was increasing due to the innovations and entrepreneurship of capitalism.

These predicted economic recessions under capitalism, said Marx, would result because the working class is unable to buy the full product of their labors. The ruling capitalists would continue to consume all of the surplus value created by the proletariat. A proletariat or socialist revolution must occur, according to Marx, where the state (the means by which the ruling class forcibly maintains rule over the other classes) holds its tight reins.

It was out of this late 19th century “crisis of Marxism,” that four new major strands of thought or ideologies developed:

Revisionist Marxism, or Social Democracy, tried to come to terms with these contradictions of the orthodox Marxist faith, and put forth a program of adaptation and revision we have come to call “the welfare state.” In contemporary America, these are the neoconservatives goosestepping behind Bush and the Republican party, and the progressives marching in lockstep behind Obama and the Democrats.

Marxism/Leninism, or Bolshevism, ignored these inherent contradictions, and put forth a program for the seizure of power by a revolutionary vanguard elite acting in the name of the people (“the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”); Fascism, emerging explicitly from the far left-wing socialists during this “crisis of Marxism,” combined elements of syndicalism and elite rule, and put forth a program of revolutionary populism and nationalism, which over time once established in power, became known as “the Corporate State,” or corporatism.

And finally, National Socialism. George Watson, in his The Lost Literature of Socialism, has an intriguing chapter on Adolf Hitler, where he cites evidence from published accounts of Hitler’s private conversations and remarks to confidants and followers such as Hermann Rauschning and Otto Wagener, that National Socialism was based on Marx. His version of socialism based upon nationalism and race would unify Germans and be successful. Communism, based upon internationalism and the class struggle, only sought to divide and would consequently flounder and fail. Both socialist visions had a common enemy, the bourgeois individualism and classical liberalism of democratic capitalism. National Socialism was the true expression and fulfillment of the Marxian vision. Watson refers to a seminal article by Friedrich Engels, “The Hungarian Struggle,” published by Marx in January, 1849 in his journal, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where Marx’s valued collaborator and financial angel explicitly calls for the genocide of Serbs and other Slavs, as well as Basques, Bretons, and Scottish Highlanders. “The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide,” Watson observed, “for reasons implicit in its claims that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers’ revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.” Another excellent volume exposing these racist, imperialist and genocidal ideas of Marx and Engels is Nathaniel Weyl’s Karl Marx: Racist.

A very good article on Benito Mussolini and the origins of fascism resulting from this “crisis of Marxism,” is David Ramsay Steele’s “The Mystery of Fascism.”

Four excellent books which further explore these subjects are:

• As We Go Marching, by John T. Flynn (1944)
• Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, by Ludwig von Mises (1944)
• The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, by Guner Reiman (1939)
• Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, by Bertram Gross (1980)

What we are fighting against is the corroded, diseased vestige of reactionary ideas of two centuries ago, ideas which have brought untold death, destruction, and misery to millions.

We must never fail to point out to our adversaries this central fact.

Never concede, never retreat, never surrender.

This originally appeared on StephenKinsella.com.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] is a history instructor in an American high school.

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“Judge Sotomayor seems to think that inherent racial and sexual differences are not simply quirks of genetics, but make some better than others. Consider her 2002 speech at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said. “I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

“She also accepted as potentially valid the idea that the “different perspectives” of “men and women of color” are due to “basic differences in logic in reasoning” due to “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”

The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, mentor of Congressman Ron Paul and economist/historian Murray Rothbard, discussed this Marxist nonsense in his magnum opus, Human Action, under the category of polylogism.

This is the bogus idea that the logical structure of the mind is different based on one’s class, race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual preference, etc.

This skewed Marxist concept lies at the root of all “politically correct” notions of cultural relativism and multiculturalism fashionable in academia, the elite media, and critical legal theory circles today.

And if President Obama has his way, upon the highest court in the land.

This is more than the widely-accepted idea that our various life experiences shape our world view, or influence our value judgments in making ethical and moral decisions.

Again, polylogism specifically holds that the logical structure of the mind is different based on one’s class, race, nationality, gender, sexual preference, etc. There is no objective reality independent from these fixed determinative factors of causality.

The notion of a Constitutionally-driven independent judicial temperament or impartiality becomes impossible.

All we have left is “sociological jurisprudence” which was (is) an attempt to get away as far as possible from the Framers’ original intent of the Constitution, and to adopt the doctrine of “the Living Constitution” shaped by socioeconomic causal factors.

It was one of the bogus concepts to come out of the so-called Progressive Era a hundred years ago and has eroded our legal system in ways beyond belief.

Another way to look at it, it’s the old Marxist concept of “the sociology of knowledge” applied to law and public policy.

Marxism as a rationale for state aggrandizement and empire (as in the former Soviet Union) may be dead but as an ideological prop it is very much alive in such widely-accepted notions as multiculturalism, “cultural imperialism,” sociological jurisprudence, and environmentalism.

Here is an article by a prominent “Progressive Democrat” who precisely articulates in his defense of Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor all the things I mention above.

He sees the “conservative” attack on Sotomayor as an attack on Obama, upon the social concept of “empathy” at the heart of progressivism, upon the notion of “sociological jurisprudence” as the basis of progressive legal theory (although he doesn’t employ the specific term) as opposed to “strict construction” or the original intent of the Framers in formulating the Constitution.

This author uses all the pejorative Bogey man names (Dick Cheney, G. Gordon Liddy, Newt Gingrich, etc.) to stir up progressives to see this battle as a Manichean struggle between the angelic forces of light and the satanic forces of darkness (in a sanitized, secular humanist sense, of course).

But he can’t let outdated “God language” tarnish his post-Enlightenment, modernist or progressive exposition. Only reactionaries resort to such antiquated terminology.

There is much more to this fight than whether Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed.

Her nomination is a key battle in the on-going Culture War which lies at the heart of what America is all about.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] is a history instructor in an American high school.

Charles A. Burris Archives

“Where Have You Gone, Ferdinand Pecora,” by Michael Winslip

“Time for a Grand Inquest on the Financial Crisis,” by Robert L. Borosage

Pecora, Part 2? Bill Moyer’s Journal

“Where is Our Ferdinand Pecora,” by Ron Chernow, The New York Times.

Establishment “court historian” Chernow is the laudatory biographer of J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Alexander Hamilton.

“A New Pecora Commission,” Time Magazine

“US Senate Approves Panel To Investigate Financial Crisis,” The Wall Street Journal

Now for the actual reality and historical truth about what was going on during the early New Deal with Ferdinand Pecora:

“Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal: An Annotated Bibliographic Guide,” by Charles A. Burris

The Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking: The Morgans versus the Rockefellers,” by Alexander Tabarrok

A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II, by Murray N. Rothbard In particular see, Part 3: From Hoover to Roosevelt: The Federal Reserve and the Financial Elites, beginning on page 259, where Rothbard provides a detailed background analysis of key persons and events leading up to the Great Depression and the Pecora investigation.

The single most important factor to consider about this crucial historical period is the fierce internecine rivalry between the two dominant financial politico-economic blocs, the House of Morgan versus that of the Rockefeller-Harriman-Kuhn, Loeb group.

Franklin Roosevelt’s’ New Deal was a savage declared war against the J P Morgan bloc.

Ferdinand Pecora was a shill for FDR and the latter group against their Wall Street rivals, the Morgans.

Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, key administration functionaries, and the leading congressional figures who call for and would direct a new investigation of Wall Street’s complicity in bringing on the present crisis, are all captives of the very Wall Street banksters they would be investigating. Such a farcical investigation, if it comes off, will make the bogus Warren Commission and Senator Joe McCarthy’s controversial hearings on Communist spies in government, exercises in veracity and moral clarity.

And all the time, the real culprits of the crisis at the Federal Reserve will remain ensconced and undisturbed. Greenspan and Bernanke will continue to enjoy uninterrupted nights of slumber and blissful hubris.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] is a history instructor in an American high school.

Charles A. Burris Archives

War, urban riots, campus protests and student alienation, assassinations, inter-generational mistrust, monetary inflation, the growth of the welfare-warfare state, and the “Sexual Revolution,” were the background sociopolitical issues driving this sea change.

While 1968 was the pivotal year in this process, I want to focus upon 1970.

This was the year I entered college as a political science student, and began my own personal ideological odyssey.

In November of 1970, Republican Richard Nixon was president. He and his outspoken vice president, Spiro Agnew, had been aggressively waging war on what they described as “Radical Liberals," or “Radiclibs” during this off-year midterm congressional election.

While staunchly portrayed by the media as “anti-Communist,” many conservatives never really trusted Richard Nixon. Spiro Agnew came from the “Nelson Rockefeller-wing” of the GOP. Detente’, Nixon’s trips to the Soviet Union and China, and Watergate were still two years in the future.

Strategists and analysts dictated that a political realignment was needed. “Demographics is destiny” became the formula of the day.

The Republicans made as their centerpiece in this campaign the disingenuous slogan of “Law and Order.” Liberal Democrats were said to be weak on this issue, cowardly advocating withdrawal of American troops from the war in Vietnam, and coddling student protesters against the war on college campuses.

“Law and Order” were actually GOP code words to angry, status resentful working class and middle class whites who made up the ethnocultural base of the Democratic Party.

“Law and Order” meant “getting tough” on urban blacks who had rioted in the cities and believed in expansion of the welfare entitlement programs such as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

“Law and Order” also meant class warfare against upper-class antiwar student protesters at elite Ivy League universities.

These new Republican “conservatives” were said to represent the patriotic “Silent Majority” of Americans who believed in God, Country, and the State against the effete “radical chic” Democratic “limousine liberals” who championed Peace (appeasement), Non-intervention (isolationism), and Pluralism (permissiveness).

Those “Radical Liberals” were driven from office in a GOP midterm electoral victory.

This pejorative labeling set the ideological tone for politics for the next several decades. It continues today in the mindset of what commentator Lew Rockwell has described as “Red State Fascists.”

This watershed period saw a battle of the books trying to explain what was happening in American politics. There was Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg’s The Real Majority, Kevin Phillips’ The Emerging Republican Majority, Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Majority, Kenneth M. and Patricia Dolbeare, American Ideologies: The Competing Political Beliefs of the 1970s, Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America, Arnold S. Kauffman’s The Radical Liberal, and Jerome Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism: A Right-Wing Alternative. As a young college student I heard Scammon, Phillips, and Goldwater address these issues on the University of Tulsa campus, while the Dolbeare book was a key text in a poli-sci class.

In that fall of 1970, since I considered myself a “radical liberal,” I had eagerly read Kauffman’s The Radical Liberal. In it he championed the “New Left” ideas of opposition to the war in Vietnam, participatory democracy, and community control of local institutions.

I was singularly unimpressed.

However, next to this book on the shelf of the local library was Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism: A Right-Wing Alternative. Right-Wing Alternative? I almost dropped the book in disgust. And what in the world was a “libertarian?” I curiously opened this book, scanned through it, and stared at the photo of the author on the back flyleaf cover.

With his debonair mustache and fashionable turtle-neck sweater, he did not resemble your typical “right-wing” spokesman of the day. Neither did the contents of this slim volume.

I took it home, read it in about an hour and a half, and as they say, the rest is history. This amazing book changed my perceptions about politics and the world about me. It was my “red pill.”

In 1974 I had the opportunity to personally thank Jerome Tuccille for writing this seminal book that changed my life.

So what was going on in America? What was changing? How were ideas, perceptions, and ideological concepts being remolded and refashioned? The two works providing the best, most thoughtful answers to these questions are Murray N. Rothbard’s The Betrayal of the American Right and Jeff Riggenbach’s In Praise of Decadence.

Both books tackle the same basic subject but their analytical framework or approach is very different. However, each work compliments the other in this search for the truth. Rothbard’s book was originally written during this period (but only published in 2007), while Riggenbach’s was published in 1998.

I commend them both to you as able guides to this ideological odyssey that both America and I have undertaken in the past four decades.

But our journey is not yet over.

A Brief Addendum:

After writing Radical Libertarianism: A Right-Wing Alternative, Jerome Tuccille went on to describe his own ideological odyssey towards libertarianism in his hilarious and insightful book, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand.

Tuccille cogently recognized that in the early 1970s, most persons alienated by the sterile conventional politics of left and right who had made the same intellectual quest towards libertarianism as himself, arrived via acquaintance with the published works of the controversial novelist-philosopher Rand.

But as I described above, for me it began with Jerome Tuccille, for which I am eternally grateful.

Tuccille has gone on to author more than twenty books, including best-selling, highly acclaimed biographies of Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Alan Greenspan, and the Hunts of Texas, as well as several novels.

In the pages of The Libertarian Forum, Tuccille and Murray N. Rothbard debated the merits of Charles A. Reich’s phenomenal best-seller, The Greening of America.

Tuccille hailed this revolutionary work celebrating the birth of a new political awareness, or “Consciousness III,” provided by the New Left’s counterculture and its critique of liberal corporatism.

Rothbard savagely attacked the book as “the Conning of America,” defending the values of traditional middle-class America (Consciousness I) against both the liberal onslaught of the Corporate welfare-warfare State (Consciousness II), and the misguided communitarianism and loopy egalitarianism of Reich’s Consciousness III counterculture.

(The best, most thorough examination of the Reich book and its powerful impact is The CON III Controversy: The Critics Look At The Greening of America, edited by Philip Nobile.)

Looking back in hindsight of how our technocratic society has actually evolved over the past several decades, I believe Tuccille and Rothbard posed a deceptive Hobson’s choice. It was never really a matter of either/or, of insisting one choose between Consciousness I or Consciousness III, in opposition to the dreaded, stultifying Consciousness II of the bureaucratic Corporate State.

What has emerged can only be described as a bold synthesis of seemingly disparate elements, of Consciousness I entrepreneurial savvy and dynamic capitalistic innovation combined with Consciousness III’s holistic vision of self-realization and celebration of freedom.

These ideas are put forth in one of the most brilliant, and under-appreciated books of our time, Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

What a refreshing and incredibly illuminating book. There is absolutely nothing like it.

This fascinating volume tells more about what has really been going on for the past fifty years to shape our digital present and cyber future than anything else I’ve encountered.

More than anything else, it confirms Ron Paul’s liberating assertion that "Freedom Brings Us Together."

Exactly the powerful and reassuring message we need on our continuing ideological odyssey.

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] is a history instructor in an American high school.

Charles A. Burris Archives

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Here is an interesting article by Norman Solomon on Barack Obama’s supposed betrayal of his “progressive” electoral agenda. I love the last sentence.

But the author has it all wrong. Obama’s adoption of the pragmatic “ideology of no ideology” is the oldest flim-flam scam in the book.

Barack Obama, by his tentative appointments and statements since the election, has demonstrated his true colors: he is an old-school corporate liberal, an Ur-Progressive in the mold of Herbert Croly or Walter Lippmann. Such Progressives, influenced by British Fabian “Social Imperialism” and Bismarckian state socialism in Germany, believed in government by paternalistic “experts” or “wise men” who were above ideology. In England, these were the members of Viscount Alfred Milner’s “Kindergarten,” who fashioned the welfare-warfare state and plunged the empire into the abyss of two World Wars. Likewise in Germany this Hegelian “ideology of no ideology” was a precursor of what later emerged as National Socialism. FDR was hailed in the media as a great pragmatic leader, willing to try anything to get the country back on its feet and moving again. The same rhetorical clichs are being trotted out again, now applying to Obama. Its as though he and his handlers are using John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching as their Machiavellian playbook. Flynn analyzed the "good fascism” of Roosevelt’s New Deal, comparing and contrasting it with the “bad fascism” of Hitler and Mussolini:

“The test of fascism is not one’s rage against the Italian and German war lords. The test is — how many of the essential principles of fascism do you accept and to what extent are you prepared to apply those fascist ideas to American social and economic life? When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarkical corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government — then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.

“But let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that we are dealing by this means with the problem of fascism. Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing millions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. There is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy.”

Will no one in the mainstream media call Obama and his emerging regime by its rightful name?

Charles A. Burris [send him mail] is a history instructor in an American high school.

Charles A. Burris Archives

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The Professor
and the President

“As a teenager
I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. And as a student
at Georgetown, I heard the call clarified by a professor I had named
Carroll Quigley, who said America was the greatest country in the
history of the world because our people have always believed in
two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be better than today,
and second, that each of us has a personal moral responsibility
to make it so.”

When Bill Clinton
spoke these stirring words to millions of Americans during his 1992
acceptance address before the Democratic National Convention upon
receiving his party’s nomination for President of the United States,
the vast multitude of his television audience paused for a micro-second
to reflect: Who is Carroll Quigley and why did he have such a dramatic
effect on this young man before us who may become our country’s
leader?

Carroll Quigley
was a legendary professor of history at the Foreign Service School
of Georgetown University, and a former instructor at Princeton and
Harvard.

He was a lecturer
at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the Brookings Institution,
the U. S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, the Foreign Service Institute
of the State Department, and the Naval College.

Quigley was
a closely connected elite “insider” to the American Establishment,
with impeccable credentials and trappings of respectability.

But
Carroll Quigley’s most notable achievement was the authorship of
one of the most important books of the 20th Century: Tragedy
and Hope — A History of the World in Our Time.

No one can
truly be cognizant of the intricate evolution of networks of power
and influence which have played a crucial role in determining who
and what we are as a civilization without being familiar with the
contents of this 1,348-page tome.

It is the “Ur-text”
of Establishment Studies, earning Quigley the epithet of “the professor
who knew too much” in a Washington Post article published
shortly after his 1977 death.

In Tragedy
and Hope, as well as the posthumous The
Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, Quigley
traces this network, in both its overt and covert manifestations,
back to British racial imperialist and financial magnate Cecil Rhodes
and his secret wills, outlining the clandestine master plan through
seven decades of intrigue, spanning two world wars, to the assassination
of John Kennedy.

Through an
elaborate structure of banks, foundations, trusts, public-policy
research groups, and publishing concerns (in addition to the prestigious
scholarship program at Oxford), the initiates of what are described
as the Round Table groups (and its offshoots such as the Royal Institute
of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations) came
to dominate the political and financial affairs of the world.

For the ambitious
young man from Hope, Arkansas, his mentor’s visionary observations
would provide the blueprint of how the world really worked as he
made his ascendancy via Oxford through the elite corridors of power
to the Oval Office.

The Conservatives
Discover Carroll Quigley

Published in
1966, Tragedy and Hope lay virtually unnoticed by academic
reviewers and the mainstream media establishment. Then Dr. W. Cleon
Skousen, the noted conservative author of the 1961 national best-seller,
The
Naked Communist, discovered Quigley, and the serious implications
of what Quigley had revealed. In 1970, Skousen published The
Naked Capitalist: A Review and Commentary on Dr. Carroll Quigley’s
Book Tragedy and Hope.

This was soon
followed by None
Dare Call It Conspiracy. This slim volume by Gary Allen
(and Larry Abraham) provided the massive paradigm shift of grassroots,
populist conservatives from mere anti-Communism to a much larger
anti-elitist world-view.

Millions of
copies of these books came into print, and the conservative movement
changed forever.

Copies of Tragedy
and Hope began disappearing from library shelves. A pirate
edition was printed. Quigley came to believe that his publisher
Macmillan had suppressed his book. Dr. Gary North, the esteemed
writer well known to readers of LewRockwell.com, has an interesting
discussion of these curious facts in the chapter, “Maverick ‘Insider’
Historians,” in his book, Conspiracy:
A Biblical View, available on-line.

However some
persons believe Carroll Quigley was simply amplifying earlier research
in conservative authors Emanuel Josephson’s Rockefeller
‘Internationalist’: The Man Who Misrules The World, and
Dan Smoot’s The
Invisible Government, or that of the radical sociologist
C. Wright Mill’s The
Power Elite, which had outlined these same elite networks
of power.

I disagree
with that narrow assessment. Although there is much to disagree
with in interpretation in Quigley’s book, the originality and titanic
scope of the work cannot be doubted or disparaged.

In a book much
praised by Murray Rothbard, author Carl Oglesby’s The
Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies From Dallas To Watergate,
has a fascinating discussion of Quigley within a wider framework
of American power politics and subterranean intrigue.

And in a volume
hailed by Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, before he morphed from
Trotskyist man of letters to Neocon mouthpiece, had some insightful
musings along the line of Quigley in his Blood,
Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies.

YouTube
Potpourri

I’m becoming
convinced that every piece of film ever produced, no matter how
small or insignificant, eventually ends up on YouTube. That site
is simply amazing.

With this in
mind, here is a YouTube potpourri of items I discovered that introduce
the viewer to the incomparable Carroll Quigley and his book, Tragedy
and Hope. These brief videos focus upon the Federal Reserve,
the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, and the North
American Union.

After viewing
them, I hope you will be prompted to read Quigley’s book and unlock
many mysteries that have puzzled your understandings of the world
about you.

The first two
clips are from an ancient documentary filmstrip, The Capitalist
Conspiracy, by Fed critic and Ron Paul supporter, G. Edward
Griffin, author of The
Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve.