In DC, Historian Anton Chaitkin Speaks May 1 On 'Why Only Heroic Politics Will Work Now'

The historian and investigative journalist Anton Chaitkin spoke May 1 at the National Press Club on “Reviving Promethean America: Why Only Heroic Politics Will Work Now.”

The Anglo-American establishment reversed the strategy that made America powerful and humane, according to Chaitkin, shown below at right. Chaitkin’s new book-in-progress, American Prometheus: Progress, vs. Empire, from Franklin to Kennedy, shows how Americans challenged imperial economics and built modern times.

His theme: “Only a shocking fight for deeply principled solutions based on industrial and scientific progress could possibly pull us out of the current nightmare.”

The public was invited to his dinner lecture before the club’s Sarah McClendon speaker society, named in honor of the late White House correspondent and former president of the Washington, DC-based club.

The book’s first chapters are available for free online here.

Below is a summary of the book and his talk, with the text of the talk here on his website. Illustrations are from the book, which draws from traditional civic stories to illustrate our current possibilities:

Prometheus defied Zeus, the god-image of those rulers who wish humanity to live in darkness, or to be slaughtered.

Prometheus gave to man heaven’s powerful secret, fire; for which he was tortured by Zeus.

“Prometheus … found the other animals well off for everything, but man naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed … Prometheus therefore … stole from Hephaestus [god of fire and metalworking] and Athena [goddess of wisdom and civilization] the gift of skill in the arts, together with fire – for without fire it was impossible for anyone to possess or use this skill – and bestowed it on man…. Through this gift, man had the means of life.”

                                                                                               — Plato, Protagoras

Prometheus once found a congenial home in America, Chaitkin argues, and may yet again.

Speaker Background

Before addressing Chaitkin’s hopeful scenario on the next page of this column, we provide some of his background.

Chaitkin, who worked in politics with Lyndon LaRouche since 1966 until the latter’s death, is the author of hundreds of scoops on economic and political history, in part via his work as the history editor for Executive Intelligence Review.

Chaitkin’s father, a New York attorney, had fought in the courts to break up the Wall Street and London sponsorship of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany.

Many of the lawsuits were against international Nazi interests managed by Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of the two Bush Republican presidents.

At the elite Wall Street investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott Bush was junior partner to the railroad heir Harriman, a Yale Skull and Bones member who worked, as documented in the book and elsewhere, with his fellow member Bush on helping to fund Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany

Harriman, shown below with President Kennedy in a photo from the JFK Library in Massachusetts) later became New York’s governor and a major kingmaker in State Department, Democratic Party and national affairs.

Chaitkin’s 1985 book on American political history, Treason in America: from Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman documented from archives of “blue-blood” families, among other sources, the takeover of U.S. policymaking by agents and allies of the British empire. The book is regarded as a classic of investigative history in its field, with 100,000 copies sold. It has been long out of print but has been reissued in a Kindle edition.

In 1992, Anton Chaitkin co-authored with Dr. Webster G. Tarpley George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography.

The book revealed and addressed major scandals in the Bush family that helped change the course of American history.

Some analysts suggest that the biography, although widely ignored by the mainstream media, helped thwart Bush’s 1992 re-election effort because some opinion leaders (including supporters of Independent candidate Ross Perot) became better aware of the Bush family’s past and were determined to seek an alternative to the incumbent Bush, who was running against Perot and Democrat Bill Clinton..

Hope For The Future

Chaitkin uses the American story of Benjamin Franklin — “the Prometheus of Modern Times” — to portray hopes for the future, as indicated by the graphic at right from Chaitkin’s Prometheus book.

Put in another way, Chaitkin argues:

Establishment, or imperial, economics claims that progress occurs when societies are ready for it.

By this logic, imperial rulers can keep society from advancing beyond their power to control it, with the excuse that conditions are not right, or not yet right, for the people in question to have a decent life. They demand that the wealthy must decide how to invest society’s resources, and society must never interfere with their decisions.

Left out of such logic is the element of intent by humane and talented leaders to cause sweeping progress.

Imperial economics says such intent, even if it were conceded to exist, could not be effective in causing positive economic change.

This book shows that only such intent has caused human progress in the past several centuries. This story of fundamental economic advances of the modern era confronts and dispels many deep misconceptions and outright lies.

Dinner Logistics

McClendon Dinners, growing out of Sarah McClendon’s outreach to newsmakers beginning in 1946, are open to the public.

The dinners begin with a “no host” (or “Dutch-treat) optional dinner at 6:30 p.m. at the press club. The speaker lecture begins at 7 p.m. The session was in the Cosgrove Room on the club’s fourteenth floor, which is accessible only view the thirteenth floor.

The National Press Club is located at 529 14th St. NW in the city. For those driving, there is free parking after 5 p.m. at the PMI Garage on G Street (between 13th & 14th) if you have a dinner at the Club with the lecture and validate of your parking receipt.

The Justice Integrity Project is a longtime supporter of the McClendon Group and frequently assists McClendon Group Chairman John E. Hurley, a former staffer for McClendon when they covered the White House, in arranging speakers and other logistics for the dinners. Among previous speakers have been James Clapper, Fletcher Prouty, Ralph Nader, Webster Tarpley and Reed Irvine.

Editor’s Note: This column was lightly edited to reflect that the speech occurred as planned.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig