Anton Chaitkin
McClendon Dinner Speech at the National Press Club, May 1, 2019
“Reviving Promethean America: Why Only Heroic Politics Will Work Now”
I am writing my book because it is how I can best help to break the USA out of its nightmare, out of being a failed society and a menace to the world. I want the book to show what the USA was and what it did to improve the world, by acting as a nation in opposition to the evil we have become.
I want to talk tonight about how a person could act decisively to change the country’s path, and what he needs to know that would motivate and equip him to act.
You have to start by admitting that the country went very bad some time ago.
Many people, such as Trump and Sanders voters, think something is deeply wrong with the country. Many lament the loss of productive industry, and our being ruled by what is rightly termed an oligarchy.
But the prevailing view is that nothing can be done to change the general situation, that the people are too apathetic and the ruling powers are too strong. Some people remain committed to trying to make a difference by proposing alternatives and pushing others to join in their fight. Friends of mine promote re-enacting Glass Steagall, and creating an Infrastructure Bank; and that America should join China’s Belt and Road initiative. Tulsi Gabbard attacks the permanent war. They are right.
How can we make people be more receptive to good ideas? They have been, in the past, when they responded to a great crisis leader -- Washington, Lincoln or FDR. They were inspired by startling progress, such as in the 19th century age of invention, and in the Apollo program, seen as man’s great future.
But our society doesn’t understand its present dangerous crisis, the majority recognizes no inspiring leader. This generation has seen no progress and will see none until we radically change our national direction.
One cannot grasp how deeply wrong and dangerous our present course is without appreciating the complete change in strategy that was imposed on us after the serial murder of our popular leaders in the 1960s.
Before, we made ourselves rich and powerful by promoting industrial and scientific progress. Now, we block our own progress while defining those who push forward as our enemies. On this path, we will inevitably lose our power or go to an exterminating war.
The realistic fear of nuclear war or other end of civilization may spur one to act in a new way to change things.
But if people could see how we thrilled the world with our inventions and national projects, what was the improvement idea guiding those successes, and how we fought for all our progress against the very forces who now misrule society, that might give people courage and creativity to make a real revolution.
So equipped, that revolution would certainly use biting humor against the popular stupor as well as the shallowness of today’s ruling lies. At the conclusion I will say what I believe is the necessary mind-set for a revolutionary today, his objectives and his behavior.
The completed first section of my book is available free to readers as a preview of the whole project. It is a completely new story about two profound changes in the late 1700s, the Industrial Revolution in England and the founding of the American republic.
I introduce Benjamin Franklin and associated English activists in the tradition of Prometheus, working with genius and excitement to create the steam engine, modern steel and precise machines, chemical science, and national infrastructure. I introduce the London financial overlords, their criminal world empire, and their decision to block other countries from having the new industrial powers. Readers will see the falsehood of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx in attributing the progress to the financiers and their system.
This first section then introduces the American nationalists guiding our Revolution against the empire. They create a government geared to transform our country into a great industrial power. They have to fight against the opposition of the British empire and its collaborators and dupes. I have developed completely new material on how the British anarchize the French Revolution, and how they simultaneously play Thomas Jefferson, his turn away from working for our national interests, his affiliation with the imperial apparatus of Lord Shelburne, and his lying attacks on Alexander Hamilton and the Washington administration’s program. That founding program and the nationalist faction are stymied at first, but they would eventually succeed in creating modern times.
The forthcoming 2nd section, the 1800s, will show how America was industrialized by the American System, in a constant battle against the British system.
Franklin’s heirs Henry Clay, Mathew Carey and their close colleagues will revive Hamilton’s nationalist economic program, working together in politics, industry, science and the army. As national projects they will sponsor coal, iron, canals, railroads, the telegraph, the conversion to steam-powered machines, and the development of petroleum. They will begin to reach out to allied pro-nationalists and scientists abroad.
The imperial triangle -- London, Wall Street and the Southern planters -- will counterattack against industrialization. I will conduct a concise tour of London’s political laboratory, breeding anarchism, communism, chauvinism, secessionism. Our progress will be stymied again, until Lincoln and the Union victory will break the imperial hold on our country.
Lincoln and economic strategist Henry Carey will design breathtaking progress in skilled industry and popular living standards; multiple transcontinental railroads, the first U.S. steel mills. The industrial U.S. will race past Britain. We will plan to settle the West and hook up with Asian allies for world progress.
The American nationalist model will spread to Bismarck’s Germany, Meiji Japan, Alexander II’s Russia, Sun Yat Sen’s China, Arthur Griffith’s Ireland, rail-building Peru, Rafael Nunez’s Colombia.
Philadelphia-sponsored Thomas Edison will outrun Wall Street to create public electricity. James Blaine and James Garfield fight Wall Street, and help establish Edison’s partnership with Emil Rathenau to electrify the world.
The London-Wall Street axis will strike back against this American-inspired threat to the imperial world order. In the 1870s London and New York make war against the nationalist leadership center, bankrupting Jay Cooke, usurping the petroleum industry. We introduce J. P. Morgan, the Rockefellers and Vanderbilt, grabbing the American industries. This is the Eastern Anglophile Establishment, countering the American Revolution. We will suffer cartels, Edward VII’s World War, London’s world monetary system, and the creation of fascism as a Bank of England project.
In the final 3rd Section, I will show from new material how FDR becomes a revolutionary by his deep research during his illness in the 1920s. He will return into politics to confront the catastrophic collapse our enemies brought us to. We will see new infrastructure, government credit, labor rights, and electricity as every human’s right. We will see, as was known in 1940, the vast potential for nuclear energy’s peaceful use. FDR will demand progress for Asia, Africa, Mideast and Latin America, and cooperation with America’s Russian ally.
John Kennedy will arise during the dark Truman-Dulles years as America’s anti-imperial spokesman. He will fight for the deep space program; and for all mankind to have nuclear power, cheap electricity, and limitless fresh water. He will help Kwame Nkrumah build the great hydroelectric dam to industrialize West Africa.
I will describe the coup against JFK’s America. including the triple murder of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King; the enemy’s World Wildlife Fund, and radical environmentalism as the imperial philosophy to wreck civilization.
Look there, to these murders and to the wars and anti-industrial philosophy that followed them, to see how our society plunged into failure. And to see why we should now ally with China and Russia to rebuild the world.
Being aware of this history would help us to stir out of the widespread mental paralysis. There is now no serious mainstream discussion on our national strategy; only chattering. Once people see how smart we once were, it won’t seem necessary to conform to the current ridiculous shallowness.
Let’s look at a couple of issues to illustrate our mental problem – first immigration, and then war.
Millions of Central Americans flee northward from poverty and violence. Liberals say, let them come here. Conservatives say, keep them out. No one raises his voice to ask, how shall we change the failed system that causes the poverty and organized crime? Why not solve the problems they flee from? Hint: our politically dominant offshore banking system demands austerity, forbids industrialization, and launders money for the drug cartels and their criminal gangs.
Insane terrorism and regime-change wars are tearing up the world. No one demands a profound inquiry into our national strategy.
We might start by bringing up JFK’s remarks in 1951:
"... [The colonial sector] is an area in which poverty and sickness and disease are rampant, ... injustice and inequality are old and ingrained, ... the fires of nationalism ... are now ablaze.... [F]or 100 years and more [it] has been the source of empire for Western Europe—for England and France and Holland....
"The true enemy of the Arab world is poverty and want....
"Our intervention in behalf of England's oil investments in Iran, directed more at the preservation of interests outside Iran than at Iran's own development.... [O]ur failure to deal effectively … with the … tragedy of the more than 700,000 [Palestinian] refugees, these are things that have failed to sit well with Arab desires and make empty the promises of the Voice of America....
"In Indo-China we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of a French regime to hang onto the remnants of empire….The East of today is no longer the East of Palmerston and Disraeli and Cromer.... We want ... allies in ideas, in resources, even in arms, but if we would have allies, we must first of all gather to ourselves friends."
With this heritage proudly in our minds, we don’t say real change is impossible. We say that the present insanity simply cannot be allowed to continue. The certainty of a great tragedy, from inaction, is a greater reality than any risk to our reputations and careers from breaking up the deadly game.
For example, a small group of legislators can draft a short inspiring factual statement that the Anglo-American financier establishment has put us on the path to poverty, war and extinction, and we must return to our mission of progress, with a national Infrastructure Bank, and the Glass Steagall Act to rein in Wall Street. They can plan a series of seriously bold interventions to release it, in Congress and in state and local centers, at the White House, in the military, at our embassies, and in conjunction with friends abroad – to make the statement’s existence a matter of popular knowledge. Citizens could demand that this be the subject of debate in schools, in churches, on the job, and in the streets.
This spirit is essential to honestly deal with any of our deadly threats.
A failed, deindustrialized society kills itself with opioids and heroin, mass incarceration, mental illness and homelessness. What would happen if we addressed the central problem, head-on, demanding the country be rebuilt and seriously educated, because we have the right to truly human lives?
With history, with humor, and with the courage to discuss our heroic national mission, we could get started on the path back to civilization.
