Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

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Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Apr 16, 2012 1:11 pm

Most of you will be interested to learn of this site, if you have not seen it already, created by our own christs4sale. He is gradually archiving all of Mae Brussell's radio broadcasts and a wealth of scanned print material.


http://www.worldwatchers.info

About

Mae Brussell was one of the best and most prolific anti-fascist political researchers of the latter half of the 20th Century. She was born on May 29, 1922 in Beverly Hills, California, the great-granddaughter of Isaac Magnin, founder of the I. Magnin west coast department store chain, and daughter of Edgar Magnin, rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. A philosophy major at Stanford, she left several credits short of graduation to be married.

On November 22, 1963, Mae began her investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The following year, she purchased the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission as a “Christmas present,” which lead to her cross-indexing the 26 volumes and making over 27,000 pages of textual analysis. In 1967, she went to New Orleans to assist DA Jim Garrison in his investigation of the death of JFK.

One of the viewpoints and avenues of research that Mae pioneered was the importation of Nazis into the United States post-World War 2 and their connection to various crimes and political murders since that time.

In 1971, Mae began her radio show “Dialogue: Assassination” on the independently owned radio station, KLRB. The show was later called “Dialogue: Conspiracy” and then “World Watchers International.” She mailed tapes of her broadcasts all over the world and provided bibliographies for each tape to show her sources.

Her first article was published in Paul Krasser’s The Realist magazine and was titled “Why Was Martha Mitchell Kidnapped?” It provided the background of the individuals connected to the DNC burglary at the Watergate and the implications of the event.

Mae became connected to Larry Flynt because of her investigations of his 1978 Georgia shooting, which lead to Flynt creating a magazine for Mae called The Rebel. The initial January 1984 issue of the shortly lived magazine contained what many regard to be Mae’s signature article, “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination.”

One of the key individuals that Mae fingered as a high perpetrator of the sour direction the country had taken since the death of JFK was F. G. A. Kraemer, Plans Officer for the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. Through extensive research, Mae hypothesized that he was the same person as SS-Brigadeführer Fritz Kraemer, who was tried at Dachau in 1946 for his involvement in the Malmedy Massacre.

Her work amounted to 851 broadcasts and 39 four-drawer filing cabinets. She also influenced a generation of anti-fascist political researchers, who called themselves Brussell Sprouts, through her broadcasts and articles.

Mae Brussell died of cancer in Carmel, California on October 3, 1988. She was 66.

**If you have any corrections, advice or any material to share, please let me know. I would rather this tribute be a collaborative effort.**

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

Postby Project Willow » Mon Apr 16, 2012 1:21 pm

Thank you and well done christs4sale.

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Re: Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

Postby elfismiles » Mon Apr 16, 2012 5:01 pm

:thumbsup :yay
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BBC: The Women of Watergate

Postby MinM » Thu Jun 21, 2012 4:07 pm

JackRiddler wrote:Most of you will be interested to learn of this site, if you have not seen it already, created by our own christs4sale. He is gradually archiving all of Mae Brussell's radio broadcasts and a wealth of scanned print material.


http://www.worldwatchers.info

About

Mae Brussell was one of the best and most prolific anti-fascist political researchers of the latter half of the 20th Century. She was born on May 29, 1922 in Beverly Hills, California, the great-granddaughter of Isaac Magnin, founder of the I. Magnin west coast department store chain, and daughter of Edgar Magnin, rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. A philosophy major at Stanford, she left several credits short of graduation to be married.

On November 22, 1963, Mae began her investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The following year, she purchased the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission as a “Christmas present,” which lead to her cross-indexing the 26 volumes and making over 27,000 pages of textual analysis. In 1967, she went to New Orleans to assist DA Jim Garrison in his investigation of the death of JFK.

One of the viewpoints and avenues of research that Mae pioneered was the importation of Nazis into the United States post-World War 2 and their connection to various crimes and political murders since that time.

In 1971, Mae began her radio show “Dialogue: Assassination” on the independently owned radio station, KLRB. The show was later called “Dialogue: Conspiracy” and then “World Watchers International.” She mailed tapes of her broadcasts all over the world and provided bibliographies for each tape to show her sources.

Her first article was published in Paul Krasser’s The Realist magazine and was titled “Why Was Martha Mitchell Kidnapped?” It provided the background of the individuals connected to the DNC burglary at the Watergate and the implications of the event...

Mae Brussell died of cancer in Carmel, California on October 3, 1988. She was 66.

**If you have any corrections, advice or any material to share, please let me know. I would rather this tribute be a collaborative effort.**


more Martha Mitchell:
fruhmenschen wrote:Bremer Sirhan Gifford

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAwallaceG.htm

On 15th May, 1972, Arthur Bremer tried to assassinate Wallace. at a presidential campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland. Wallace was hit four times. Three other people, Alabama State Trooper Captain E. C. Dothard, Dora Thompson, a Wallace campaign volunteer, and Nick Zarvos, a Secret Service agent, were also wounded in the attack.

Mark Felt of the Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately took charge of the case. According to the historian Dan T. Carter (The Politics of Rage), Felt had a trusted contact in the White House: Charles Colson. Felt gave Colson the news. Within 90 minutes of the shooting Richard Nixon and Colson are recorded discussing the case. Nixon told Colson that he was concerned that Bremer “might have ties to the Republican Party or, even worse, the President’s re-election committee”. Nixon also asked Colson to find a way of blaming George McGovern for the shooting.

Over the next few hours, Colson and Felt talk six times on the telephone. Felt gave Colson the address of Bremer's home. Colson now phoned E. Howard Hunt and asked him to break-in to Bremer's apartment to discover if he had any documents that linked him to Nixon or George McGovern. According to Hunt's autobiography, Undercover, he disliked this idea but made preparations for the trip. He claimed that later that night Colson calls off the operation.

At 5:00 p.m. Thomas Farrow, head of the Baltimore FBI, passed details of Bremer’s address to the FBI office in Milwaukee. Soon afterwards two FBI agents arrived at Bremer’s apartment block and begin interviewing neighbours. However, they do not have a search warrant and do not go into Bremer’s apartment.

At around the same time, James Rowley, head of the Secret Service, ordered one of his Milwaukee agents to break into Bremer’s apartment. It has never been revealed why Rowley took this action. It is while this agent is searching the apartment that the FBI discover what is happening. According to John Ehrlichman, the FBI was so angry when they discovered the Secret Service in the apartment that they nearly opened fire on them.

The Secret Service took away documents from Bremer’s apartment. It is not known if they planted anything before they left. Anyway, the FBI discovered material published by the Black Panther Party and the American Civil Liberties Union in the apartment. Both sets of agents now left Bremer’s apartment unsealed. Over the next 80 minutes several reporters enter the apartment and take away documents.

Charles Colson also phoned journalists at the Washington Post and Detroit News with the news that evidence had been found that Bremer is a left-winger and was connected to the campaign of George McGovern. The reporters were also told that Bremer is a “dues-paying member of the Young Democrats of Milwaukee”. The next day Bob Woodward (Washington Post) and Gerald terHost (Detroit News) publish this story.

The following day that the FBI discovered Bremer’s 137-page written diary in his blue Rambler car. The opening sentence was: "Now I start my diary of my personal plot to kill by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace." Nixon was initially suspected of being behind the assassination but the diary gets him off the hook. The diary was eventually published as a book, An Assassin's Diary (1973).

Wallace survived the assassination attempt. He gradually developed the view that one Nixon’s aides ordered the assassination. To gain revenge he announces he is to become a third party candidate. However, Wallace’s health has been severely damaged and reluctantly he had to pull out of the race.

In May, 1974, Martha Mitchell visited Wallace in Montgomery. She told him that her husband, John N. Mitchell, had confessed that Charles Colson had a meeting with Arthur Bremer four days before the assassination attempt.

Wallace ordered his own investigation into Bremer. He told friends that he was convinced that Nixon’s aides had arranged the assassination. Wallace gave an interview to Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times. Wallace told Nelson that the man seen talking to Bremer on the Lake Michigan Ferry looked very much like G. Gordon Liddy.

Wallace was partially paralyzed as a result of the attack by Arthur Bremer. After a long spell in hospital Wallace was able to return to politics. He apologized for his previous stance of civil rights and during the 1982 won the governorship with substantial support from African American voters.

Ill-health forced Wallace to retire from politics in 1987. He continued his support of integration and in March, 1995, Wallace attended the re-enactment of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march.

George Wallace died on 13th September, 1998.

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Re: Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

Postby MinM » Sat Jun 23, 2012 9:51 am

Douglas Caddy wrote:Posted 22 June 2012 - 05:16 PM

Watergate Lies Multiplied
The Fiction of Frost/Nixon


by David Martin
DCDave.com
Published on http://www.lewrockwell.com
June 22, 2012


We are now in the midst of a grand celebration of itself by the mainstream media. Forty years ago this summer, through their great investigative reporting, they began the process that drove a president from office for the crime of lying about his participation in the cover-up of a political “black bag” operation. To the more perspicacious young people among us who just became aware of their political surroundings in the 21st century, this so-called Watergate story, this morality play, must have them greatly confused. Isn’t this the same mainstream press that shows not the slightest interest in big-time hush-ups like, say, the omission of any mention at all in the official 9/11 report of the collapse, demolition-style, of World Trade Center Building 7 or of who might have been behind the forgeries of documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein was attempting to obtain raw material from Niger for building nuclear weapons? Could our mainstream press really have come down so far so fast?

The answer, of course, is no. As you might expect, our press in the Watergate episode was not the great knight in shining armor that they would have us believe they were, rather, they were the same old blackguards that are currently covering our current presidential race as if the American people have actually been presented with legitimate choices. As it turns out, almost everything they have told us about Watergate is about 180 degrees from what actually happened. For a good introduction to the real story, I recommend two recent contributions by Charles A. Burris on LewRockwell.com, his article “Watergate Plus Forty” and his LRC Blog entry “Russ Baker and Jim Hougan on Watergate.”

Watergate might have been a small time burglary, but the entire episode was a big time spook operation...

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=19217

Above is one of the most recent postings by Douglas Caddy @ The Education Forum on Watergate...

Below is from Mae Brussel on Douglas Caddy:

Why Was Martha Mitchell Kidnapped?

part I

by Mae Brussell, from The Realist August 1972

...Whenever a populist candidate appears to win an election which could bring about economic or social improvements for the masses, that person must be removed. The CIA that killed President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy did a test case in Greece on canceling elections.

Andreas Papandreou, often compared with John Kennedy, appeared to have a good chance of winning Greek elections in 1967. The U.S. Army, the CIA and government agencies helped replace their elections with a coup d'etat. A fascist dictatorship returned to Europe, the first since World War II.

The same CIA that helped fund the canceling of elections in Greece offered Richard Nixon the money he needed for his 1968 elections if he took political unknown Spiro Agnew as vice president.

Money to manage an election campaign is difficult to separate when you mix CIA funds with republican party dollars. Robert Mullen, chairman of Mullen & Company, shared his office space at various times with Howard Hunt, Robert Bennett and Douglas Caddy, all possibly CIA agents.

Robert Bennett, through this office, raised $10 million in secret funds for John Mitchell.

In 1968 Nixon was offered, through CIA conduit Tom Pappas and other sources, the funding he needed for elections if he took Agnew as vice president.

Robert Mullen played a large role in the campaign of Nixon-Agnew in 1968. Did the money four years ago come from the same secret funds, possibly CIA money, to Nixon for his last election?

These questions are important to ask now. Douglas Caddy, CIA attorney for the Watergate Five, was co-founder of the extremely right-wing republican group called Young Americans for Freedom. YAF was infiltrated in the fall of 1962 at the home of Robert Morris in Dallas.

A group of nazi-American military experts intended to help certain forces, by whatever means necessary, "to secure the White House by 1970 for the conservatives. A large number in this group support Agnew for president this year.

If security agents allow some members of YAF close to Richard Nixon, through important contacts in the White House, Agnew would not have to be elected. He would be the next president.

Can CIA funds, promised for the election campaigns, force Agnew on the republican ticket? Can CIA funds, channeled from Washington to Chile, to Mexico, then Miami, end up in the pockets of men at the Watergate Hotel who connected directly to a weapon and walkie-talkies in the White House?

Can persons associated with the extreme radical right-wing factions of the republican party, who think Nixon is a pinko because he went to Russia and China, or didn't invade Cuba, be financed through the CIA to create martial law and then kill Richard Nixon?

How many of the persons connected with secret funding of the Nixon team are associated with the more reactionary republicans?

Is the same CIA that offered Greek colonels assistance in their coup d'etat working with a large organization to create martial law in the U.S., having selected Agnew as their man?

The significance of the Watergate Affair is that every element essential for a political coup d'etat in the United States was assembled at the time of their arrest. The team of men represented at the hotel went all the way from the White House with its Emergency Contingency Unit, walkie-talkies and private radio frequency, to the paid street provocateurs and troops who would create the emergencies.

Was the target of their associations the cancellation of elections in 1972? ...

http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brusse ... -%201.html
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Re: Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

Postby harry ashburn » Sat Jun 23, 2012 11:05 pm

Always loved Mae Brussel sprouts....
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Re: Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 11, 2017 10:05 pm

Trump Ambassador Beat and ‘Kidnapped’ Woman in Watergate Cover-Up: Reports

By Jeff Stein On 12/11/17 at 4:41 PM
Updated | American presidents have a long history of awarding ambassadorships to colorful characters as a way to thank them for their campaign donations. Roughly a third of U.S. ambassadors have no diplomatic experience beyond rounding up cash for successful presidential candidates.

Among them is Stephen King, 76, a longtime confidante and booster of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is the new U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. King, who is also a former business partner of Ryan’s brother Tobin, has no diplomatic experience and had never spent a day in Prague before taking up his post there on December 7. Radio Prague, the official state news outlet, called him “a rich Republican businessman…who worked for the FBI early in his career.”

Left unsaid was that King played a crucial role in the 1972 Watergate affair—and not a good one. According to several accounts over the years, King helped cover up ties between President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and the burglars arrested inside the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex—and in a particularly violent fashion. None of that came up during his confirmation hearing.

Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now

In June 1972, King was an ex-FBI agent working as a security aide for the Committee to Re-elect the President, or CREEP, Nixon’s campaign arm. His duty on the week of the break-in was to protect—and keep a close eye on—Martha Mitchell, the talkative wife of Nixon’s campaign director and former attorney general John Mitchell, while the Mitchells were on a campaign swing in California.

An outspoken Arkansan dubbed “the Mouth of the South” in press reports, Martha Mitchell had been complaining vaguely to anyone who would listen about campaign operatives carrying out “dirty tricks” against the Democrats. So when she learned that James McCord, the security director of CREEP, who had served as her bodyguard, was among those arrested at the Watergate—and described by her husband as a private security contractor who was “not operating either on our behalf or with our consent”—she picked up the telephone and called a favorite reporter, UPI’s Helen Thomas.

Mitchell Martha Mitchell with her husband, former Attorney General John Mitchell, one of Richard Nixon's top aides, when he was being sworn in at the Senate on May 11, 1973. Keystone/Getty Images

Enter King. He “rushed into her bedroom, threw her back across the bed, and ripped the telephone out of the wall,” wrote veteran Washington reporter Winzola McLendon in her 1979 biography of Martha Mitchell, to whom she was close. But Thomas was still on the phone and taking notes. “The conversation ended abruptly when it appeared someone took away the phone from her hand,” Thomas reported. “She was heard to say, ‘You just get away.’”

Thomas added that when she called back, the hotel operator told her, “Mrs. Mitchell is indisposed and cannot talk.”

Related: Inside the battle between Mueller and Trump

Thomas’s story was a sensation. Reporters scurried to find Mitchell for a follow-up. A few days later, one did. Marcia Kramer of the New York Daily News tracked her down where she was hiding out: the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York. A veteran crime reporter, Kramer described Mitchell as “a beaten woman,” with “incredible" black and blue marks on her arms from what looked like a “totally professional job.” A later account in McCall’s magazine said that King “summoned” a doctor who gave Mitchell “a tranquilizing shot” and “[saw] to it that no more of her outgoing calls [would] be taken by the hotel switchboard.”

Yet few took Mitchell’s claims seriously. She was known to like a drink and make “wild” accusations, a reputation that Nixon’s aides exploited. “The Nixon and CREEP people began to spread stories that Martha was crazy, an out-of-control alcoholic, or had had a breakdown,” McLendon wrote.

Mitchell eventually returned to her husband, but only on condition that he resign from CREEP and that King be fired. He did resign, but when Mitchell learned that King had been promoted to security chief for the campaign, she wrote a letter to Parade magazine, the Sunday newspaper supplement, saying that he “not only dealt me the most horrible experience I have ever had, but inflicted bodily harm upon me.”

King’s response in the October 22, 1972, issue of Parade was that he could “no longer talk about the incident,” adding that “all such information must come from” spokesmen for CREEP. Officials there evidently did not respond to Parade’s request for comment.

On Monday, King said, "With due respect to the privacy of the Mitchell family and in light of previous responses I have given to these allegations in decades past, I do not wish to comment further on this old story."

In McLendon’s authorized biography years later, Mitchell told a story that seemed scripted for The Shining. After King ripped the phone from her hand, she related, she ran to another room to make a call. “Again...she was thrown aside while the phone was disconnected,” McLendon writes. “Steve then shoved her into her room and slammed the door.”

Mitchell next tried to get to an adjacent villa via the balcony, but “King ran out and pulled her back inside. She claimed he threw her down and kicked her,” McLendon writes. “The next day...she slipped downstairs, planning to escape, but King spotted her just as she reached a glass door. In the ensuing scuffle, Martha’s left hand was cut, so badly that six stitches were required in two fingers.”

That’s when a doctor was summoned to sedate her. “Before it took effect, she tried to get away,” McLendon wrote, “but according to Martha, King saw her dashing toward the door and ran over and slapped her across the room.”

All this was happening as her husband flew back to Washington, reports about the incident suggest. But John Mitchell, who had stepped down as attorney general months earlier to run the Nixon campaign, had set the events in motion by first keeping news of the Watergate arrests from his wife, then leaving her in Kings protective custody.

In 1973, Martha Mitchell gave sworn testimony about Watergate in support of a civil suit against CREEP officials by the Democrats. King was not a defendant in that suit or criminally charged in the scandal, and two more years passed before anyone came forward to corroborate any Mitchell’s story of what happened after her call with Thomas was abruptly terminated. In 1975, McCord, convicted of conspiracy in the Watergate affair, admitted that “basically the woman was kidnapped.”

“Thank God somebody is coming to my assistance,” Mitchell told The New York Times. “I was not only kidnapped but I was threatened at gunpoint, and you can put that in.”

Mitchell 2 A portrait of Mitchell from the 1970s. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

During his August 1 confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, King was not asked about his role in allegedly roughing up Mitchell to keep her from exposing McCord’s connection to CREEP. But he did raise the issue of security for his wife outside the Prague embassy, telling Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, who chaired the hearing, that he was thinking about hiring a private security force to protect her.

No matter that King’s role in the Watergate affair occurred nearly a half-century ago; he should have been questioned about it, says Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar on public policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

There is “no statute of limitations” against raising troubling allegations in a nominee’s past, said Ornstein, co-author of One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported. “They should have taken this into account, and could have, no matter when it occurred.”

Sean Bartlett, a spokesman for the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said King was asked about the Watergate episode before his public testimony. “After questioning him, and measuring his other qualifications and responses to questions on a range of issues, staff did not believe there was evidence or reason to delay his nomination,” Bartlett said. King’s appointment was approved by the Senate without objection in a voice vote.

“This is a political question, not legal,” said Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush. Since King “was confirmed already by the Senate, he would be hard to remove.”

Not that the Republican majority or Donald Trump’s White House would be inclined to fire him, said Ornstein. The bar to what’s acceptable conduct, he maintains, has been dramatically lowered by congressional Republicans since Trump took office.

“This just one example,” he said, “among many very sordid ones, including judges and Cabinet officers.”

This story was updated with a response from King
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-wa ... ohn-744823
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Re: Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 28, 2017 9:43 pm

Martha

Listen to the podcast at the site


Among them is Stephen King, 76, a longtime confidante and booster of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is the new U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. King, who is also a former business partner of Ryan’s brother Tobin, has no diplomatic experience and had never spent a day in Prague before taking up his post there on December 7. Radio Prague, the official state news outlet, called him “a rich Republican businessman…who worked for the FBI early in his career.”

Left unsaid was that King played a crucial role in the 1972 Watergate affair—and not a good one. According to several accounts over the years, King helped cover up ties between President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and the burglars arrested inside the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex—and in a particularly violent fashion. None of that came up during his confirmation hearing.

In June 1972, King was an ex-FBI agent working as a security aide for the Committee to Re-elect the President, or CREEP, Nixon’s campaign arm. His duty on the week of the break-in was to protect—and keep a close eye on—Martha Mitchell, the talkative wife of Nixon’s campaign director and former attorney general John Mitchell, while the Mitchells were on a campaign swing in California.



Slow Burn
Nobody knew how Watergate was going to end. Our new podcast tells the story of what it felt like to watch a president fall.

NOV 28, 2017 COVER STORY

One day at the end of April 1973, Richard Nixon stood on a porch at Camp David and told John Ehrlichman he wanted to die. Nixon had summoned Ehrlichman, his long-serving domestic policy adviser, to tell him he was being fired from the White House.

Nixon had been dreading the conversation, but he knew it had to be done. The Department of Justice had recently informed the president that Ehrlichman could be facing criminal charges. Nixon felt the walls closing in.

Later, Nixon would tell the journalist David Frost how he gave his old friend the news: “I said, ‘You know, John, when I went to bed last night … I hoped—I almost prayed—I wouldn’t wake up this morning.’ ” According to Ehrlichman, the president then began to sob. It would be 15 months before he resigned from office.

So, that’s how Richard Nixon felt as the Watergate story went from a curious burglary to a national obsession. What was it like for everyone else? That’s the animating question behind my new eight-episode podcast series for Slate, Slow Burn.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... jY4NdjEDEU

Why are we revisiting Watergate now? The connections between the Nixon era and today are obvious enough. But to me, the similarity that’s most striking is not between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon (although they’re both paranoid, vengeful, and preoccupied with “loyalty”), or their alleged crimes (although they both involved cheating to win an election), or the legal issues in the two cases (although they both center on obstruction of justice).

Rather, it’s that people who lived through Watergate had no idea what was going to happen from one day to the next, or how it was all going to end. I recognize that feeling. The Trump administration has made many of us feel like the country is in an unfamiliar, precarious situation. Some days it seems like our democratic institutions won’t survive, or that permanent damage has already been done. Pretty much every day, we are buffeted by news stories that sound like they’ve been ripped out of highly stressful and very unrealistic novels.

The point of Slow Burn is to look back on the most recent time Americans went through this en masse, and to put ourselves in their shoes.

Some of the people whose stories you’ll hear on Slow Burn played key roles in the 26-month saga that followed the Watergate break-in. They investigated it, or they covered it, or they helped cover it up. Others were bit players, and still others weren’t involved at all, except in the sense that, like millions of other Americans, they followed it in real time, and were changed by it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... IHPiVbc3Ko

The first episode, which you can hear by subscribing in your favorite podcast player or clicking the play button below, is about a woman named Martha Mitchell. Mitchell was the wife of Nixon’s first attorney general. In the days after the break-in, she was forcibly tranquilized and held prisoner in a California hotel room so that she wouldn’t tell reporters what she knew about Watergate. When I learned her story a few months ago, I couldn’t believe I’d never heard it before.

Maybe looking backward in this way is an exercise in wishful thinking, as if the fact that the nation made it through Watergate means we’re going to be fine too. Maybe it’s escapism at a time when we should be focused on the present. But it’s worth doing regardless. Whether or not Watergate can “tell” us anything about our present moment, I can promise you, having spent months researching it, that learning about the details, the subplots, and the peripheral characters will change how you perceive what’s going on now. It’s a reminder—a humbling if not an entirely comforting one—that many of the destabilizing events that have been raining down on the country since last November will soon be entirely forgotten. Hopefully someone will make a podcast about them one day.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... rgate.html
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Re: Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

Postby Luther Blissett » Fri Dec 29, 2017 8:21 pm

Triple post!
Last edited by Luther Blissett on Fri Dec 29, 2017 8:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

Postby Luther Blissett » Fri Dec 29, 2017 8:23 pm

Triple post!
Last edited by Luther Blissett on Fri Dec 29, 2017 8:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Mae Brussell archive by christs4sale

Postby Luther Blissett » Fri Dec 29, 2017 8:25 pm

Waiting for Watergate

We would do well to remember that Watergate didn’t lead to working class rebellion, mass resistance, or regime change.

By Tim Horras

Elements within big bourgeoisie are gunning for Trump. A significant section of the capitalist class doesn’t like the administration, because it’s seen as insufficiently deferential to the wishes of international finance capital, and due to some protectionist and anti-globalization stances within the administration which would potentially hurt multinational corporations.

Most recently, this came to light with the announcement that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and business partner Rick Gates had surrendered to the FBI after being indicted in relation to supposed financial and political connections to the Russian government, according to the New York Times.

To get at Trump, they’re dusting off an old law that, according to a recent Politico story by journalist Ken Silverstein, has “been under-enforced or not enforced at all for ages.”

Although Silverstein has reported on foreign lobbying and Manafort for over 20 years, he only ever witnessed “a handful of cases brought against people or organizations accused of not registering as foreign agents.” Silverstein concluded that it was “quite likely that had he not been Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort would be kicking back and enjoying his allegedly laundered cash at this very moment.”

This is bourgeois legality in action: selective prosecution for political purposes. Every once and awhile our betters throw down one of their own as a sacrifice to the mob, so as to better safeguard immunity for the majority of criminal politicians and corrupt lobbyists.

No tears for Manafort, Gates, or other ruling class jackals. But at the same time: no faith in a corrupt justice system. We won’t subpoena our way to freedom.

The only thing palace intrigue offers the working class is the potential to confront an enemy divided among itself. But given the weak state of the left, and the enormous distance between ourselves and political power, our primary goal needs to be cohering a mass base for socialism among the dispossessed classes through agitation, education, and organization.

We can and should oppose Trump and his cronies, but we should have no illusions that the left is in the driver’s seat in this conflict and the resulting Special Counsel investigation. For the moment at least, the working class is a passive spectator in a battle between the moderate and conservative wings of the big bourgeoisie.

Our movement today wastes precious time and energy waiting for Watergate.

We would do well to remember that Watergate didn’t lead to working class rebellion, mass resistance, or regime change. In fact, by the end of the decade, the US electorate had chosen Ronald Reagan as president. The scandal was neither created by nor contributed to working class revolt. If anything, Watergate was a testament to the fact that the immune system of the US government was beginning to figure out how to best counteract the rebellions from below which began in the 1960s — through a coordinated strategy of repression, cooptation, adaptation, and structural reform.

We might easily imagine future breakthroughs in the class struggle may hinge upon any one of what are likely to be increasingly frequent constitutional crises provoked by the inflexibility and irrationality of our regime’s fossil-like legal and political apparatus. But today is not the day of judgement — and thank God, because our side is absolutely not prepared to press the advantage. In what promises to be a protracted struggle, we socialists must patiently gather our strength, consolidate and expand our forces, and advance on our enemy with a hundred small skirmishes from below.

For revolutionaries, hope is our most precious resource. Let us not spend it down frivolously.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
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Luther Blissett
 
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