the DON JONES INDEX…

 

 

 

GAINS POSTED in GREEN

LOSSES POSTED in RED

 

 

 

10/22/21…  14,447.45 

10/15/21…  14,405.04 

6/27/13…    15,000.00

 

(THE DOW JONES INDEX:  10/22/21…35,606.36; 10/15/21…34,912.56; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)

 

 

LESSON for October 22, 2021 – “THEY MUST BE DEMOCRATS!” (PART ONE)

 

Again… the disclosure, in “Landslide” by Michael Wolff that, after he abandoned his supporters at the Capitol, ran (or was driven) home to the White House and watched the rest of the riot on television, former President Trump (reportedly) told a sixpack of sidekicks, including family members and aides Justin Miller and Mark Meadows, that his own, much beloved POTheads looked “like a bunch of Democrats.” (See Attachment One)

Parsing this particular truth, Djonald Unaware was far nearer the mark than all of the liberal crybabies in the mass and class media; if anything, he grossly underestimated the comparison.

The mob, despite their ideological differences, shared deep, cultural similarities to the left-wing revolutionaries of their grandfathers’ generation who took to the streets of Chicago and various university communities, boiling over with righteous wrath against global and national inequities like the Vietnam (soon to become the wider Southeast Asian) war, the struggle for civil rights, distrust (if not outright hatred) for the authorities and the concept of authority itself in the person of the cops and the bosses and the politicians whose hegemony they flouted by growing their cranial and facial hair out, exploring “alt” realities in faith and philosophy, taking drugs, having sex and supporting an often-profitable “counter-culture” of art, music, movies and even television (where Rowan and Martin, the Smothers Brothers and a sarcastic platoon of stand-up comedians mocked the men (few girls allowed except for a handful of Kingdom America guns and Bible pushers) who made and enforced the rules and regulations.  Especially those who purported to stand with them but, like Djonald, deserted at the first rumblings of trouble – those moderate to liberal Democrats who professed concern about America’s problems, but ran away to safeguard their careers and watch the debacles on television, now and again attempting to pass useless legislation that was trashcanned from Washington to Chicago to Montgomery to a thousand other points of darkness dotting the great American sun.

“Dump the Hump!” evolved into “Hang Pence!”

Older Dons might even wax nostalgic but for a hoary old chestnut that deems history, especially tragic history, is doomed to be, sooner or later, recycled as farce.  (Or as downward spirals of ever-farcical farce… until it bottoms out in a pit of terror.

 

Consider the origins of right-wing revolution in and liberal counter-revolution in 1964.  “(Barry Goldwater) presented a frightening figure to many at the time,” wrote Commonweal editor Paul Baumann in his tribute to Norman Mailer (seven years dead)  in March, 2016  but, compared to Donald Trump, AuH20 now seems like a paragon of the principle of enlightened greed. It was Goldwater’s personal integrity that made him a hard case for Mailer. “Goldwater was a demagogue,” Mailer conceded. “He was also sincere. That was the damnable difficulty.” 

Can anyone imagine that Donald Trump is sincere about anything other than his unquenchable love of self and need for adulation? asked Baumann. 

 

Four more years ensued.  Years of Lyndon Baines Johnson, his War, his middling success in passing civil rights legislation and of a cultural… how do you say it… explosion?  Young people, perhaps motivated by the spectre of imminent death in Vietnam, grew uppity.  (See Attachment Two)

By 1968, the paranoia within the Empire was flowering.  The year started off with an immediate challenge to the position of the City that residential picketing is “per se a violation of the city ordinance.”  Extremely strong arguments had been advanced for the proposition that the constitutional rights of free speech, free assembly and freedom to petition for redress of grievances do not protect marches, demonstrations and picketing of a residence or residences even of the privately owned homes of public officials and the City duly prosecuted the alleged lader of the insurrection, the comedian (and, by the end of the year, Presidential candidate) Dick Gregory.  Conviction was as swift and predetermined as that in any dictatorial regime… the punishment, however, wobbled…

Mr. JUSTICE HOUSE delivered the opinion of the court:

“These consolidated appeals involve the conviction of 40 civil rights marchers under two provisions of the disorderly conduct ordinance of the city of Chicago. (Municipal Code of Chicago, sec. 193-1.) In cause number 39983 defendant Dick Gregory and four other defendants were found guilty in a jury trial before a magistrate in the circuit court of Cook County and each defendant was fined $200. In cause number 39984 the other 35 defendants were found guilty in a trial before a magistrate on a stipulation of facts adduced at the Gregory trial and each defendant was fined $25. The defendant Gregory was charged with disorderly conduct in that he "did make or aid in making an improper noise, disturbance, breach of peace, or diversion tending to a breach of the peace within the limits of the city." A constitutional question gives us jurisdiction.

“The gist of the occurrence giving rise to the arrest and conviction of defendants was a march by 65 to 85 persons around the home of the mayor of Chicago. The marchers carried signs, sang songs and chanted slogans protesting the retention of Dr. Benjamin C. Willis as Superintendent of Schools of Chicago and his handling of school segregation problems in the city. In order to avert what the police believed would become a riot, the marchers were ordered to stop their demonstration and upon their refusal they were arrested.”  (See more as Attachment Three)

A legal underpinning for the police riot which would commence eight months later being established, another Mailer-ific treatise was penned by Paul Fountain in the Guardian UK during the same year… recalling Norman’s analysis of the Richard Nixon base at his coronation in Cleveland, at once similar (but far more ‘couth than Trump’s) and concluding with this prophecy for the Republican party (circa 1968):

 

 “They were the most powerful force in America, and yet they were a psychic island. If they did not find a bridge, they could only grow more insane each year, like a rich nobleman in an empty castle chasing elves and ogres with his stick.”   (See Attachment Four)

 

Fifty two years and change after “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” (google here for more on Norman Mailer’s opus), a ragged rabble of forgotten and, yes, disgruntled Americans… many in old, cheap thrift-shop clothing and with long facial and tonsorial hair beneath their MAGA ballcaps made their presence known with a far more successful engagement of The Man (in the form of fleeing politicians and, until reinforcements arrived, Capitol police (those pigs!) being beaten and pushed aside as the mob stormed through the building, looking for scalps and trophies.  Some of them even espoused strange beliefs!

Many of those who had participated in the 1968 Convention clamour and/or its corollaries.subsequently developed a curiosity about all things un-American may have dipped into the belief systems of nonwhite, non-Western cultures the way that the old-times hippies and yippies and zippies consumed yoga, astrology, Wicca, voodoo and the such.  And if their explorations took them south, well, there were the creeds and (especially) the calendrical zodiacs of the indigenous Mexicans before Columbus and Cortes… a reckoning of chronology and a historical spiral encompassing predictions of future events based on gleanings from the past.  Here, the 52-year cycle has proven prescient (there are scholarly and popular references by both local practitioners and academic analysts to be had simply by googling “Mexico”, “calendar”, “Aztec”. “Maya” and the such… the Managing Editor encountered plenty of these years ago through the auspices of some knowledgeable and (most) generous teachers, some gleanings of which are to be found in the Generisis serial “The Insurgence of Chan Santa Cruz” – which details some incidents of the early 20th century, many centering upon… wait for the cosmic “O wow!” if you will… 1916.  Fifty two years before Chicago and also at the crux of the “war to end all wars” in the West that generated so many changes in national borders (particularly in Europe), political genesii (Communism, Fascism, imperialism, corporatism and the such) and even disease.  One might finger a date… for example, the last week in August, 1968, the Chicago weekend… and roll forward to 2020 (events) or scroll back, from January 6th, 2020 to 1968, where you shall encounter the launch of Surveyor 7, last of a series of soft landings on the Moon, the accession to prominence of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and… setting into motion the Prague Spring, the Soviet repression that ultimately cracked and rusted out the Iron Curtain as Aleksandr Dubček succeeded the puppet government of Antonin Novotny and inspired of millions of young patriots to commence a revolution that would last a generation, but ultimately succeed.

The occult implications are disturbing… does this mean that MAGA (should it endure and fight on until 2050 or so) will eventually win their day?                                                                                                       

 

But enough of metaphysics, we are dealing with raw, club-to-the-head politics and the partisan divide of the present, as it continues to manifest through vaxxing and masking refusenik-ism… there could be drawn a comparison to certain suicide bombers in other parts of the world, where self-immolation is considered an act of martyrdom for the collateral damage done and the publicity, if any, drawn to a cause.

For, as every Don Jones well knows, even bad publicity is good publicity.

 

To Chicago, then, and what came before and after: the facts and the fiction.

Why would a wicked, stable genius like President Trump compare the likes of the Chicago Seven, SDS, the Weather Underground and the psychedelic lollipops of 1968-9 to the Q-Anon Shaman, the neo-Nazi Proud and Boogaloo Boys, the Oath Keepers and such one calendar round cycle later?

Because: “They look like Democrats!”

Yes, Djonald Unseated said that of the one-six protesters… freedom fighters (right), insurrectionists (left)… while watching the kerfuffle on television in the White House after oath breaking his pledge to lead the 300,000 faithful to victory and glory at the Capitol.

A little more from “Landslide”:

“(Justin) Miller called (Mark) Meadows, still in the West Wing, and then the president.  The president seemed eager to hear from Miller, eager to be on the phone.  Most often for Trump, the phone was a one-way instrument: callers listened.

“How bad is this?” Trump asked, a stark difference form his usual opener, “How are we doing? – which was not, mostly, a question at all, but a preface to Trump’s saying how well everything was going.

“Mr. President, today is literally going to change everything.”

“This looks terrible. This is really bad.  Who are these people?  These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits.  They look like Democrats.  Hold on, our great First Lady is here…”

(Melania was not amused.  Nor, after the beatings and the jailings and the looting and the shooting, were Don and the Jones family… with a handful of nihilistic exceptions and, perhaps, some old, gray leftists roused by the memories of “Kill the Pigs!” and the exhortations: “Hang Pence!”)

 

There would be no rest for the wicked.  Five days after the anniversary, an estimated 700 largely lost souls re-converged on the Capitol to demand “Justice for J6”, the six hundred odd… a few of whom were very odd… Americans who stormed the building in an attempt to overturn the officialization of Joe Biden’s victorious bid for the Presidency.  It ended in a beatdown and/or towel-toss for the POTheads whose icon had whiled away the 25th anniversary of 9/11 at a “celebrity” boxing match at which MMA fighter Viktor Belfort nearly murdered former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield in the first round of that fiasco.

MAGAnation was still insisting that J6 had been plotted, perpetrated and pushed by a cabal of… in descending order of feasibility… Democrats, Antifa, Marxists and/or anarchists (no difference), Islamic terrorists and – sliding into the QAnon swamp – pedophiles, Jews with space lasers and alien reptiles.  "The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton [didn't] kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him,” Newsweek reported former President Trump declaiming a few months before the 2016 election (See Attachment One). “And George [W.] Bush—by the way, George Bush had the chance, also, and he didn't listen to the advice of his CIA," Trump said during a Republican presidential debate to bash the former president's brother and candidate Jeb Bush.

(Djonald, by the way, had been among those vying to build a World Trade Center replacement… which edifice, he promised at a news conference at Trump Tower in New York 18 May, 2005, would be a worthy alternative to the Freedom Tower design ultimately approved by the city to be built on Ground Zero.)

 

There would be no rest for the wicked. 

The docile diehards of September 16th were a less animated, but no less scruffy bunch than the 300 grand Capitol assailants, leading more than a few aging osservatores… left, right and other… to let their minds wander back to the glory days of left wing insurrectionism… an epoch more or less beginning with the assassination of wonderboy President JFK and his replacement by Lyndon Baines Johnson (who did, at least, sign the Civil Rights bill that many Kennedy-haters and perhaps a few conspirators had hoped would be summarily buried but also lost nearly sixty thousand Americans, his mandate, his honor and… one thinks… his mind over the years of an increasingly futile war in Vietnam that would escalate to Cambodia, Laos and (before migrating to Africa and Latin America where we propped up one corrupt and murderous dictatorship after another) the streets of America. (See Attachment One, again)

That 1968 flashpoint occurred between the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago at the end of August, progressing therefrom to the election and inauguration of Richard Nixon on a platform of foreign adventurism, domestic dis-equality and law and order (waged against the usual ethnic minorities but with a soupcon of repression reserved for deployment against a rising generation considered prone to domestic disarray, long hair, loud music and a swag bag of unpopular philosophies ranging from racial and economic justice to concern for the environment, libertarian views on sex and drugs and a distrust of the police).  And always… as it seems not the “always” paradigm of the late Trump and at least early Biden years… foreign fiascos.

To quote the Yankee catcher, manager and malapropriast Yogi Berra, the one-six was “déjà vu all over again.”  And the nine-sixteen added a postscript to another venerable cliché… that what first occurs as tragedy will be repeated as chaos before going under, the third time, as farce.  If the Justice for J6 rally was a washout in the aftermath of the J6 itself, the original tragic upheaval might have been one of many events on a timeline between the JFK assassination and resignation of Richard Nixon – for example the Capitol bombing of March 1, 1971 (which insurrectionary act actually caused more damage, and would result in more arrests than the J6… at least as of now) perpetrated by the Weather Underground.

The W.U. was an early “woke” version of the original Weathermen… one of the three factions resulting from a split in the left-wing behemoth SDS in the wake of Chicago and Nixon’s ascendency, and the most partial to direct action which… because they had no leadership capable of mobilizing the tens or hundreds of thousands of angry Americans to undertake direct revolutionary action… turned to the remedy of the disaffected and the disgruntled: explosives.

On March 1, 1971, two unidentified Weatherpersons left a bomb at the Capitol… a bomb which failed to go off.  So they (or perhaps others… no arrests have ever been made, although suspicious persons have had their suspicions) returned on March 2nd, dropped off another bomb which, this time, did explode – causing considerable property damage (but no fatalities). 

Back in February, Politico published an excerpt from the book MAYDAY 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest by Lawrence Roberts, a former editor for the Washington Post and ProPublica.  An excerpt from his excerpt notes that the grenadiers placed a phone call to the post-midnight security, counseling evacuation of the building which, given the tenor of the times, was duly performed.

(The bomb) exploded at 1:32 a.m. No one was hurt, but damage was extensive. The blast tore the bathroom wall apart, shattering sinks into shrapnel. Shock waves blew the swinging doors off the entrance to the Senate barbershop. The doors crashed through a window and sailed into a courtyard. Along the corridor, light fixtures, plaster and tile cracked. In the Senate dining room, panes fell from a stained-glass window depicting George Washington greeting two Revolutionary War heroes, the Marquis de Lafayette and Baron von Steuben. Both Europeans lost their heads.

 

Shocked lawmakers condemned the attack. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana), called it an “outrageous and sacrilegious” hit on a “public shrine.” House Speaker Carl Albert (D-Oklahoma) said the bombing was “doubly sad” because it would likely lead to tighter security at the Capitol and less freedom for visitors. The Washington Post’s editorial page lamented “the easy contagion of extremism in a time of dark frustrations and deep disillusionment.”

(See more as Attachment Five)

 

The present political divide has not been without cultural congruence to events a calendar-round in the past and the temper of the times exhibits similarities to the overturning of American normality dating… let us presume... from either the election of or assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Probably both.

By the 1960’s, the exuberance and faux prosperity that had accompanied the end of World War Two was beginning to age, and age poorly.  LBJ had signed the civil rights legislation, but Jim Crow was still strutting the boulevards… not only in the South but in a myriad mix of Western, Midwestern and even Northern cities like Boston where the racial composition of neighborhoods and schools was at issue.  The war in Vietnam was heating up (20,000 deaths through 1967); and dividing previously rock-solid Democratic Party strongholds like the West Virginia coal country depicted in Evan Osnos’s "Wildland: The Making Of America's Fury," which examines the now-puzzling enigma that is Senator Manchin, a creature adrift as much in time as in geography. 

The racial and economic disparities eventually escalated into riots… Los Angeles, Detroit and, after the April, 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, in Washington.  Johnson’s abdication that year was followed in June by the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy and freezing-out of (Clean) Gene McCarthy by a weaving web of spiders promulgating Vice President Hubert Humphrey – an old-school liberal corroded by time and That War into an aging neoliberal.

Whereas the Republican Party had more or less committed reactionary suicide by nominating Goldwater in 1964, the many problems in America… complicated by a wedge candidacy of George Wallace (which pried away significant slices of the formerly Democratic “solid south” and drained white working-class votes from what was only then beginning to deteriorate into a “rust belt” where the Don Joneses of the day, losing their grip on the American Dream, wrapped themselves in the flag and drank the Kool-Aid of racism)... augured a change in party, if not, necessarily, in policy as regarded Vietnam and, in fact, a retrenchment of LBJ and the Democrats’ modest racial overtures.

 

The authors of the chicago68.com chronology (see Attachment Six) actually cited a National Student Association convention on August 15, 1967 as being the birth of a nation of hippies and Yippies and Marxists and troubled souls that would coalesce into the armies of the night a year later.  “(V)eteran organizers Allard K. Lowenstein and Curtis Gans formally launch(ed) the Dump Johnson movement” but throughout the Summer of Love, not only Robert F. Kennedy but numerous Democratic heavyweights declined their appeals to treason.

A rather hectic year later, the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, (August 5th to 8th) nominated Richard Nixon even though California governor Ronald Reagan “had received more votes in the 1968 Republican primaries than any other candidate, including Nixon.”  (chicago68.com)  The first foreign policy objective of his administration, said Tricky Dick, would be “to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.” At the same time, not far away in the black neighborhoods of Miami, riots resulted in four deaths and hundreds of arrests.

The DemCon… which the BBC called “a week of hate” (See Attachment Seven)… opened on Monday, August 26th, although some of those protesting the convention had been arriving through the week previous… which week had seen not only the hastily arranged candidacy of George McGovern as an alternative to Clean Gene (McCarthy) and the Hump.  Confrontations, violence and general strangeness were already on the table, as was the angry promise of “law and order” from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and… to add some heat to the stew… the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia which further divided the left-leaning cultural libertarians and orthodox Marxists from one another. 

Rumours were floated by some of the more imaginative protesters, the Brits subsequently reported, “that they were going to inject LSD into the city's drinking water, and send out "stud teams" to seduce the wives and daughters of the delegates - all designed to unnerve the Democrat delegates and keep the Chicago police and investigative agencies guessing.”

But there was little guessing… and a lot more clubbing.

“The violence percolated over the first two days of the convention, and protesters certainly deserved some of the blame for it. They hurled rocks, bottles and garbage at police, as well as insults such as “fascist pig,” “oink, oink” and “seig heil.” But their actions paled in comparison to the violence let loose by police,” editorialized Leonard Steinhorn of the Los Angeles Times in one of many “where were you then, where are they now?” commemorations in 2018.

 

On Sunday, August 25, Walter Cronkite noted on air, "The Democratic Convention is about to begin in a police state. There just doesn't seem to be any other way to say it."  Dan Rather, a well-known journalist covering the convention for CBS television, was assaulted on the convention floor by police and security personnel.

"Journalists felt their press cards would mean they'd be left alone - they were sorely disappointed," said Stephen Shames, who attended the convention both as a journalist for the underground press and as a protester. "The rules changed in Chicago."

To some public officials, the press was as culpable and disdainful as the protesters. “The intellectuals of America hate Richard J. Daley because he was elected by the people — unlike Walter Cronkite,” said the director of public information for Chicago’s police. Daley himself derided “commentators and columnists,” blamed the media for inciting the violence and called the news coverage “distorted and twisted.”

Perhaps taking their cues from Daley, the police had singled out reporters and photojournalists for assault that week. NBC News anchor David Brinkley said: “They’ve had their heads smashed, they’ve been sprayed with tear gas, their cameras grabbed and destroyed.” Brinkley’s partner, Chet Huntley, declared: “The news profession in this city is now under assault by the Chicago police.” In total, according to the Walker Report, 63 journalists were physically attacked by the police.

Newspapers were inundated with letters saying that the TV news “cannot be trusted” and accusing the press of giving radicals a voice while “totally ignoring responsible Americans.” TV networks also heard from viewers directly. “We got thousands of calls from people saying they didn’t believe their eyes, accusing us of hiring cops to beat up kids,” said the Washington bureau chief for CBS News, Bill Small.

Millions of Americans simply couldn’t believe that the police — who defended their communities and reflected their values and way of life — could act in the manner they saw on TV. They didn’t call it “fake news,” but many Americans thought it was.

The city (i.e. Mayor Daley) said, in a year of assassinations and riots, couldn't grant permits to protesters to march on the convention or sleep in city parks CBS reported on Tuesday

Come Tuesday night, even more protesters in Lincoln Park refused to observe the 11 o'clock curfew.

The police poured tear gas into the park, eventually driving out about 3,000 mostly young protesters, arresting 140 of them.

"Police burst out of the woods in selective pursuit of new(s) photographers," Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in the Washington Post.

"Pictures are unanswerable evidence in court. They'd taken off their badges, their name plates, even the unit patches on their shoulders to become a mob of identical, unidentifiable club-swingers."

The police knew they could get away with it.

"The city of Chicago ran on officially sanctioned violence," says University of Texas history professor James Galbraith, who attended the convention as a 16-year-old with his delegate and floor leader father.

"The protesters were an affront to the mayor's management of the convention, Daly was embarrassed and had no qualms about teaching them a lesson."

 

Wednesday night, August 28: The confrontation that had been building all week, probably all year, burst open on the street between Grant Park and the convention headquarters hotel.

Policeman Bill Jaconetti told CBS, "The first deputy said, 'Clear the streets.' After about, I don't know, maybe five or six warnings, and then the final warning, he said, 'If you don't move out of the street, my officers are gonna clear the street.' And that's what we had to do on that night."

One bandaged witness described what happened next: "They were just swinging their clubs like just a bunch of idiots."

"Not all protesters (were) angry, they (had) a point to make, but these protesters regarded the police as pigs, who in turn regarded them as draft-dodging hippies," says photojournalist Dennis Brack who covered the convention.

"It was the most intense week of hate I've ever experienced," Mr. Brack said in an oral history interview given to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History in Austin, Texas, which houses Brack's archives.

"Combat heat is different. This was plain old one group hating another. I always stayed closer to the older cops. They were safer. But the younger cops could really hurt you."

 

Jaconetti recalled, "The problem wasn't the regular people; the problem was the agitators, and there were a lot of them. My partner next to me, he caught a house brick in the chest. They had to take him to the hospital."

By the time the convention ended, 668 protesters had been arrested, and hundreds of people had been injured.  “The public would get to know some of those arrested better during the roughly five-year legal battle that followed…”

 

The Chicago insurrection was widely believed to be the work of the Youth International Party seven young and not-so-young neo-Marxist masterminds duly plucked out of obscurity by the authorities and put on trial after the show… which trial has been the subject of several books and a recent movie entitled, simply enough, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven” starring comedian-provocateur Borat (Sasha Baron Cohen) as Abbie Hoffman who was, with Jerry Rubin, one of the two prime (or at least publicized) instigators.

According to Bruce Ragsdale, writing in "The Chicago Seven: 1960s Radicalism in the Federal Courts" in 2008:

“It was an unlikely group to engage in conspiracy. Dellinger, at 54, had been active in pacifist movements for years before the rise of the student protests of the 1960s. (Tom) Hayden and (Rennie) Davis were skilled organizers with focused political goals, and they had never been interested in the street theater and cultural radicalism of Hoffman and Rubin. John Froines and Lee Weiner were only marginally involved in the planning for the demonstrations, and their participation during the convention differed little from that of hundreds of others. The unlikeliest conspirator was Bobby Seale, who had never met some of the defendants until they were together in the courtroom and who had appeared in Chicago briefly for a couple of speeches during the convention. Seale was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, which federal and state prosecutors had recently targeted in numerous prosecutions around the country. The eight were linked less by common action or common political goals than by a shared radical critique of U.S. government and society.

“Sixteen others were named by the grand jury as alleged co-conspirators, but not indicted: Wolfe B. Lowenthal, Stewart E. Albert, Sidney M. Peck, Kathy Boudin, Corina F. Fales, Benjamin Radford, Thomas W. Neumann, Craig Shimabukuro, Bo Taylor, David A. Baker, Richard Bosciano, Terry Gross, Donna Gripe, Benjamin Ortiz, Joseph Toornabene, and Richard Palmer.

The rest of Chicago’s 668 arrestees appear to have disappeared into history’s misty dungeons… some, no doubt, found a future in the advertising agencies, social service bureaucracies, media trusts and university towers of America; a few may have taken real jobs, making things with their hands to sell to other Americans or providing services… maybe even in the “first responder” sector.. and then there were some who committed suicide or became Republicans.

Former Liberation News Service reporter Raymond Mungo more or less concurred with Ragsdale’s depiction of the conspirators in his autobiography “Famous Long Ago” in which Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is said to have blamed the insurrection on three men: “Rubin, Hayden and Dellinger!  Rubin, Hayden and Dellinger!”  (Poor neglected Abbie Hoffman is left out of Da Mayor’s tirade!)  “Rubin is a brilliant anarchist,” Mungo pointed out, “Hayden a conscientious socialist (if future hubby of Jane Fonda and California state legislator), “and Dellinger an uncompromising pacifist.”

LNS infamously diverged from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), mother of many, if not all variants of the orthodox left on the efficacy of Chicago – seeing it as a glue trap for both professional radicals and innocent wannabees, rather in the way that Q-wazees denounced the Capitol Siege Sequel as a conspiracy by The Man to draw dissidents out into the open where they could be eviscerated (or, at least, injected with mind-controlling nanochips cooked up in pizzeria basements all across America).

Another Chicago chronicler, “Digger” free food distributor and author of “Ringolevio” Emmett Grogan (nee Kenneth Wisdom), expressed a darker view of the Chicago capers and their impresaria… Jerry and Abbie being two “geriatric longhairs” exploiting America’s youth to bolster their “alternative shtick with a made-up title for a make-believe number that was to be the Yippie Festival of Life Convention in Chicago.  (The bad blood, not uncommon among 60’s Leftists as it is now endemic to the 21st century Right, may have resulted from Abbott’s piracy of Digger commiques distributed freely in San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” a year before Chicago’s “Summer of Hate” and their reconfiguration as his “Steal This Book”, published… like “Famous” and “Ringolevio”… by the corporate publisher Grove Press for money. Snarled Grogan, after the fact, if he’d done in in San Francisco, “he would have been killed.”)

Unlike the serious-minded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which organized the biggest anti-war protests and teach-ins at American colleges in the sixties, the Yippies were a loosely held confederacy of anarchists, artists and societal dropouts lead by the theatrical activist Abbie Hoffman and his compatriot Jerry Rubin, a veteran anti-war protester.

By the late 1960s, Hoffman and Rubin had come to believe that American politics and culture had devolved into a state of abject absurdity. The War in Vietnam was absurd. Consumerism and greed were absurd. The political rhetoric coming from both parties was absurd. And the only way to fight serious absurdity, Hoffman and Rubin decided, was with absurdity itself.

 

After a grand jury indicted the infamous Chicago Eight, the winter’s proceedings before Judge Julius Hoffman (who would himself become somewhat of a celebrity and a hero to the “silent majority” who elected Nixon, elected Trump in 2016 and deserted him in 2020) were a frequently theatrical dog, pony (and pig) show compared to the Garlandish water torture of the present day insurrection tribunals.

The eight defendants—Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner—were indicted under the “riot act” provision of a newly-passed Civil Rights Act of 1968, which made it a federal crime to cross state lines with the intent to incite a riot. (Seale later had his trial severed during the proceedings, lowering the number of defendants from eight to seven; thereafter, the group became known as the Chicago 7.)

The riot act, according to John Vile (no relation to “War On Drugs” singer Kurt) of the First Amendment Encyclopedia criminalized interstate travel to commit a number of “overt acts,” including “(A) to incite a riot; or (B) to organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot; or (C) to commit any act of violence in furtherance of a riot; or (D) to aid or abet any person in inciting or participating in or carrying on a riot or committing any act of violence in furtherance of a riot.”

“A number of prominent Americans — including Noam Chomsky, Harvey Cox, Nat Hentoff, Christopher Lasch, Norman Mailer, and Benjamin Spock, dubbing themselves The Committee to Defend the Conspiracy — placed an advertisement in the New York Review of Books, arguing that the law threatened the First Amendment by “equating organized political protest with organized violence,” noted Mr. Vile.  “The committee observed that prosecutors made little attempt to distinguish the defendants who had advocated violence from those who had favored peaceful protests.”

 

From the chicago68.com chronology archives   

February 26: Thirteen individuals, including five who were convention delegates from New York, go on trial in Cook County Circuit Court on disorderly conduct charges related to the delegate-led attempt to march to the International Amphitheatre on Thursday, August 29. The trial takes 26 days—a record for disorderly conduct charges—and all the defendants are found guilty on April 14.

March 18: U.S. bombers hit targets in Cambodia in a covert expansion of the airwar. Nixon ordered the secret Cambodia bombing campaign, Operation Menu, even as he publicly claimed he wants to wind down the war.

March 20: Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner are indicted on Federal charges of conspiring to cross state lines “with the intent to incite, organize, promote, encourage, participate in, and carry out a riot.” Six defendants—Dellinger, Hayden, Davis, Hoffman, Rubin and Seale—are also individually charged with crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Each of the two charges carried a five-year sentence; each defendant thus faces a ten-year prison term. The indictment charges that Froines and Weiner, in addition to the conspiracy charge, “did teach and demonstrate to other persons the use, application and making of an incendiary device.”

The same Federal grand jury that returned these criminal indictments also charged eight Chicago policemen with civil rights violations for assaulting demonstrators and news reporters. None of the cops were convicted. (Forty-one officers of the Chicago Police Department were disciplined after internal investigations, and two resigned, for infractions like removing their badges and nameplates while on duty during Convention Week.)

And then time rolled on…

August 15-17: The Woodstock music festival—the Festival of Life a year late—convenes and communes in upstate New York.

September 24: The Chicago 8 conspiracy trial begins in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman.

October 8-11: The Weatherman faction of SDS—which split off from RYM—holds its National Actions—the Days of Rage—in Chicago. As if seeking revenge for Convention Week, pipe-wielding Weathermen race through the streets, attacking police, windows, and cars.

 

A Town and Country review/exposition of the movie ultimately made and released in April, starring the irresponsible and irrepressible Borat (see Attachment Eight) noted that the trial went on for four months, with many cultural luminaries being called to testify, including popular singers Judy Collins, and Arlo Guthrie; writers Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg; LSD activist Timothy Leary, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

The testimony of Anti-war folksinger Phil Ochs (See Attachment Nine) was typical.  Conspiratorial attorney William Kunstler, prosecutors Thomas Aquinas Foran and Dick Schultz and Judge Hoffman sparred over the genesis of the Youth International Party, who and when did conspirators enter Lincoln Park, the origins and perpetrators of an obscene chant concerning the President of the United States, the propriety of singing the song Ochs warbled during the protests and the proposed nomination of a pig for President…

THE WITNESS: We discussed the details. We discussed going out to the countryside around Chicago and buying a pig from a farmer and bringing him into the city for the purposes of his nominating speech.

MR. KUNSTLER: Did you have any role yourself in that?

THE WITNESS: Yes, I helped select the pig, and I paid for him.

After numerous swine-related objections byForan, Kunstler asked…

MR. KUNSTLER: Would you state what, if anything, happened to the pig?

THE WITNESS: The pig was arrested with seven people.

MR. KUNSTLER: When did that take place?

THE WITNESS: This took place on the morning of August 23, at the Civic Center underneath the Picasso sculpture.

A give and take with Foran ensued over the nature and actions of “Pigasus”, after which Kunstler asked: “Do you remember what you were charged with?

THE WITNESS: I believe the original charge mentioned was something about an old Chicago law about bringing livestock into the city, or disturbing the peace, or disorderly conduct, and when it came time for the trial, I believe the charge was disorderly conduct.

MR. KUNSTLER: Were you informed by an officer that the pig had squealed on you?

MR. FORAN: Objection. I ask it be stricken.

THE WITNESS: Yes.

THE COURT: I sustain the objection. When an objection is made do not answer until the Court has ruled. .

Under cross-examination, Ochs admitted some resentment of Hoffman for being upstaged as he was about to begin singing, and then Schultz asked…

MR. SCHULTZ: Abbie Hoffman is a friend of yours, isn't he?

THE WITNESS: Yes and no.

MR. SCHULTZ: Now in your plans for Chicago, did you plan for public fornication in the park?

THE WITNESS: I didn't.

MR. SCHULTZ: In your discussions with either Rubin or Hoffman did you plan for public fornication in the park?

THE WITNESS: No, we did not seriously sit down and plan public fornication in the park.

Then, after Schultz inquired as to whether the witness, or others, planned to cause “mass disruption”, and “take over hotels for sleeping space”, the Court experienced a flash-forward moment to 2021.

MR. SCHULTZ: Did the defendant Rubin during your planning discussion tell you if he ever had the opportunity and at one of his earliest opportunities he would, when he found some policemen who were isolated in the park, draw a crowd around him and bring the crowd to the policemen and attack the policemen with rocks and stones and bottles, and shout profanities at the policemen, tell them to take off their guns and fight? Did he ever say he was going to do that?

Ochs denied the allegation.  Nonetheless violence happened… separated by 52 years… and certainly there were persons who came to Chicago with the explicit aim of fighting the police.  Ochs was dismissed, with an admonition from Judge Hoffman not to forget his guitar.  (AKA Exhibit D-147)

The terrible two appeared in court “wearing flowing black judge’s robes to taunt the judge” (as in the recent Borat movie) and, when ordered to removed them, wore police uniforms beneath,   Slate Magazine reported that most of Abbie Hoffman’s courtroom antics weren’t even shown in the film. Hoffman did a headstand on a table, for example. The New York Times reported that he told the Judge: “Shande fur de Goyim” [Disgrace for the Gentiles], and would often call him “Julie” instead of Julius.

But Hoffman wasn’t the only one who defied courtroom decorum. According to the Times, Rubin said to the judge, “You’re the laughing stock of the world. Every kid in the world hates you because they know what you represent. You are synonymous with Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler equals Julius Hitler.”

 

While the jury deliberated on the verdict, Judge Hoffman cited all the defendants—plus their lawyers —for 152 contempts of court. William Kunstler was given four years in prison for addressing him as "Mr. Hoffman" instead as "Your Honor;" Abbie Hoffman received eight months for laughing in court; Hayden got one year for protesting the treatment of Seale, and Weiner two months for refusing to stand when Judge Hoffman entered the courtroom.

On February 18, 1970, each of the seven defendants was acquitted of conspiracy. Two (Froines and Weiner) were acquitted completely, while the remaining five were convicted of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. On February 20, they were sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5,000 each.

Of even more controversy, wrote Vile, “Hoffman sentenced the defendants’ attorneys and the defendants for contempt of court as well.”

 

Two years later, on November 21, 1972, as T&C recalls, “all of the convictions were reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which deemed that Judge Hoffman had been biased in not permitting defense attorneys to screen prospective jurors for cultural and racial bias. The court also determined that the FBI had bugged the defense lawyers' offices. The Justice Department decided against retrying the case.” (T&C)

The contempt charges were retried before a different judge, who found Dellinger, Rubin, Hoffman, and Kunstler guilty of some of the charges, but did not sentence them with any fines or prison time.

Most of the rest of the 688 vanished into history.

Fifty years later, we find the nation assessing the physical and psychic wreckage left by another Capitol attack, this one at the hands of the radical right. It would be wrong to give these events equal weight on the historical scale, to simply regard them as insurrections from opposite ends of the spectrum. Dangerous and criminal as it was, the bombing amounted to a kind of guerrilla theater, a symbolic destruction of federal property to protest the disastrous military intervention in Vietnam. The Jan. 6 mob that ransacked the Capitol, causing five deaths, embodied a far more perilous delusion: that a national election was fraudulent and should be overturned with threats and violence against lawmakers. “Stop the War” versus “Stop the Steal.”  (Even the Weathermen aka Weather Underground weren’t so delusional as to believe that Nixon hadn’t bested the Hump.

Or maybe they just didn’t care.

(“You remember Nixon escalated the war, doubled it, and the Left was so angry at the Liberals and Humphrey for their part in the war that they wouldn’t vote,” activist and poet Allen Ginsberg told Studs Terkel… both now deceased… in a 1976 interview. “And that may be why Nixon got in and that may have prolonged the war. So, in a sense, everybody in America is bankrupt, everybody has this funny karma.”)

Still, the attacks do share historical context. Each arose from a cauldron of political polarization and distrust of government. They were carried out by splinter groups that had abandoned faith in American democracy and would have been pleased to see the system collapse. Both led to heightened security in Washington. Thus it may be valuable to examine the events of 1971, and what lessons those days may hold for our new era of extremism.

One big difference is that the 1971 attack was meant to oppose, not support, the sitting president, Richard Nixon. Another is that the case remains cold. While the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in broad daylight, their faces captured by security cameras, their own social media feeds or witnesses with smartphones, the Weather Underground set the bomb in secret. Members were much harder to track down, since they lived together in small cells under false identities.

And then there was that Nazi thing.  A communicant from Colorado cited one Rich O’Connor (perhaps related to Captain Obvious?) in his advising: “I have found that in times of confusion, particularly when emotions are running high and creating tunnel vision, the presence of Nazis can be an extremely helpful indicato… I can always, always, always, rely on the presence of Nazis as a guiding light through a fog of disinformation.” 

 

Politifact (see Attachment Eleven) also vetted… or at least tried to vet… the ex-President’s Iowa allegations.  The results were not encouraging.

But the fact is that Iowa gave the once and future candidate a sweeping majority and polls have only continued to show that he is the strongest of the republican candidates while, at the same time, Afghanistan, the economy and the plague have depressed President Biden’s support.

So if his Restoration is in the cards and a concomitant Civil War, perhaps Don Jones had better hope that there will be plenty of American-made ammunition available at the local firearms emporium.  It wouldn’t do to depend upon important Chinese bullets stranded in some offshore port when the shooting starts.

 

The cultural elites are having a psychotic party over the one-six trials… sometimes portraying the Capitol mobsters as demons from the pit of fiery fascism; or, on the other hand, enjoying a hearty, self-satisfied chuckle at the belief among the unwashed, unwoke and unenlightened that their pitiful protests (howsoever violent at the one-six, plainly pathetic on Saturday) might resonate with the white government-is-your-friend refuseniks in the mostly red states and maybe a few others.

A little twinge, a little tweak might have tugged at these comfortable consciences who, perhaps remembering 1968-9 in all its seedy, smoky glory, paused to ask (or at least consider)…

Did that used to be me?  Could that have been me?

More on this next week!

 

A few codas to the Don…

Contempt is back in vogue as the Capitol Riot inquisitors found Steve Bannon worthy of indictment this afternoon.  Steve-O is a critical link in the chain binding the 1968 election and the subsequent Days of Rage; we will pay him a visit as the legal process grinds through.

And General Colin Powell got it (the plague) and died.  His passing brought out eulogies from both Democratic and Republican politicians (well, at least most of them) as well as a Proclamation by President Joe.  It also generated a sort of tribute from Joe’s predecessor, as well as recapitulations of his famed Thirteen Points of Light.  (See Attachments Twelve through Fourteen)

 

 

 

 

OCTOBER 15 – OCTOBER 21

 

 

Friday, October 15, 2021

 

Infected: 44,899,649

Dead:  723,989

Dow:  35,291.13

 

 

Experts say the supply chainsaw massacre will ruin not only this year’s Christmas, but that of 2022 as well – maybe more.  Lack of truck driving schools and TranSec (that’s you, Mayor Pete!) certification bureaucracy to blame.

   Angry workers are fighting the bosses (who are enjoying record profits) and the scientists (who spark mask/vaxx mandates that menace refuseniks’ “freedom”).  Workers at John Deere, Kaiser Medical, Kelloggs and, imminently, Hollywood are striking.  Greedy banks sparking spiking mortgage rates.  Disgruntled citizens striking the nearest authorities; man who may or may not be a terrorist (hint: an Islamic convert) stabs a British politician to death, woman returns to the Capitol to pound on policeman with a baseball bat.

   Re; the latter… league finals set with the unwokesome Braves versus the Dodgers in the NL, Houston and Boston in the AL.

   FDA said to be poised to greenlight Moderna.  Locals protest lead poisoned water in Benton Harbor, Michigan.  Bill Clinton hospitalized – for a urinary tract infection, not the plague. 

 

 

 

Saturday, October 16, 2021

 

Infected:  44,916,492

Dead:  724,153

 

 

           

 

It’s National Pasta Day.  Police refuseniks… estimated 35 to 40 % of the force… threaten to quit Chicago PD over vaxxing mandate, lose their pensions and eat lots of mac and cheese forever and leave the city to the gangs.  Plenty of violence even antewalkout… 3 officers shot at Houston nightclub, another ambushed in Alabama.  Four civilians gunned down at Mobile AL high school football game.  President Joe says kind words at memorial for martyred cops, while the tabulators say that over sixty percent of police deaths over the past year have been from the plague, not lead poisoning.

   “Squid Game” director claims the pressure of being Number One in 94 counries has cost him six teeth. The Beatles (including John and George from the Great Beyond) join TikTok in airing newly released videos from the vault. 

   Government wakes up… NASA compete with the privage pilgrimages by shooting missile “Lucy” (Beatles, get it?) into the sky with a gift box of diamonds for any ETs on the Jovian asteroid belt.  FDA follows up unanimous Moderna approval with J&J boosters; many doctors say the latter should have been a two-shot rollout in the first place. 

 

 

 

Sunday, October 17, 2021

 

Infected:  44,934,620                          Dead:  724,323

                

 

 

States collecting census data start the process of redrawing district boundaries to reflect demographic changes (and gerrymander more of their own partisans into office).  Donkeys already in power are kicking each other over Joe Manchin and the carbon tax issue.

    17 American missionaries kidnapped in Haiti by the “400 Mawoza” gang, one of many criminal outfits who, after the Presidential assassination and earthquake, are now running the country and driving Haitians to emigrate.

   Plague cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all down except for convicted murderer Robert Durst, who gets it.  Dr. Fauci cites evidence of vaxx effectiveness from Israel… which immediately causes the neo-Nazi wing of MAGA and Q-Anon to declare them “fake medicine”.

 

 

 

 

Monday, October 18, 2021

 

Infected:  45,050,910                          Dead:  726,196

 Dow:  35,258.61

 

               

 

President Joe heeds calls for military action in Haiti and planeloads of FBI agents descend on Port Au Prince to do… what?

   Retailers fear panic buying and predict shortages will last until 2024.  A potential solution: Tu Simple’s driverless trucks (which will make much freeway fun).  Halloween costumes will be in short supply due to supply chain.  “Halloween Kills” kills Brit spy 007 at the box office with $50+M opening weekend.  Brit spy Christopher (Real) Steele defends defense of the Trump piss tape (derived from a Washington analyst, not a Moscow leaker).  Man of Steel’s “Truth, Justice and the American Way” is cancelled, replaced with “A Better Tomorrow” (presumed motive – sell more tickets in China) and his son by Lois Lane hooks up with Robin in new Batman movie (4/22) and DC comix.  (At least the Penguin is back.)

   Chinese secret hypersonic missile surprises US military intelligence and ramps up rumors of war as their economic growth sputters.  Best keep them locked up in theaters!  And also, for that matter, NoKo launches more submarine-based missiles. 

   Djonald UnRudied files suits to overturn denial of his Executive Privilege and block release of J-6 documents.  Kanye West shortens his name to “Ye” as in “Yee Haw”!

  

 

 

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

 

Infected: 45,132,193                    Dead:  728,196

Dow:  35,457.32

 

 

Colin Powell, who enforced the American Way as General, SecState and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (usually rightly, sometimes not) gets it and dies.  (See above)  His self-penned eulogy: “He was a good soldier.”  His wife, Alma, gets it.  Delta “sub-variant” AY4.2 (squeamish doctors refrain from term “Epsilon”) breaks out in the U.K.

   Haitian kidnappers demand $1M ransom for each of the 17 missionaries. 

   SineManchin (with a little help from “progressives”) still blocking President Joe’s two infrastructure bills.  Sen. Joe Coal (W.Va.) points to increased coal usage in electricity generation since 2014 as natural gas price spikes and late snow finally hits the Northeast.

   Angry bison chase tourists at Yellowstone.

 

 

 

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

 

Infected: 45,218,948

Dead:  731,265

Dow:  35,620.53

 

 

 

J-6 riot committee recommends that Trump water-carrier Steve Bannon be indicted for contempt and get a year in prison.  (See Above)  He is also scolded by Liz Cheney (but pollsters say 78% of Republicans still love their Djonald.

   That other guy, President Joe, makes more concessions – slashing climate change funding from his Inf Two bill and angering The Squad (who double down on no Inf One without Inf Two) and, after Hamtramck Mich. joins Benton Harbor and Flint in lead-poisoned water, demand old killer pipes be replaced.

  Also on the chopping block, childcare (shrinks contend kiddie mental health deteriorates and anger swells due to “lack of empathy”).  US Marshals rescue 8 kids and bust 18 evil pedophiles; doctors testing more pig-to-human transplants and Dr. Jill predicts that a quarter of all teachers will (like truckers) quit because of low pay, disrespect and danger.  So what’s there for children to go crazy over?  No Chinese toys for Christmas?

 

 

 

Thursday, October 21, 2021

 

Infected:  45,300,988

Dead:  735,801

Dow:  34,912.56

  

 

 

Infusfferable “person of interest” Brian Laundrie gets introduced to swamp justice.  Foiled, the authorities slap the POI sticker on his parents, who knew where to find his mysterious (planted) notebook that will have the mob salivating for weeks.

   Goofs gone wrong: actor Alec Baldwin shoots on-set crew member with a gun he thought was a prop.  It wasn’t.  “America’s Got Talent – Extreme” stuntman crushed between two burning trucks suspended forty feet up.  He lives… but not well.

   House votes to indict Steve Bannon with nine Republicans defecting including, of course, Liz Cheney.  Despite President Joe cutting back his human infrastructure budget (over the squeals from Duchess Meghan) some more, Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) muses, in public. About leaving the donkeys (which would nuke their majority status).  Krysten SInema (D-Az) reiterates that she does not want more social expenditures paid for by increasing taxes on the poor, persecuted billionaires.

   Djonald Unmuzzled declares that he will start a mass and social media empire all his own and will be taking donations by Monday.  He’ll also run for President again.

 

 

 

After months of plague-imposed quarantine, the Joneses are getting itchy feet… making plans to visit friends and relatives for the holidays, quitting jobs, moving out and moving in.  Home sales were the highest in years, and the Dow kept percolating… government debt crisis?  Meh.  Lingering plague perpetrated by MAGA refuseniks?  Feh!  Inflation?  Gas up and buy more stuff before the prices go up.  Supply chain problems.  Just another reason to do your Christmas shopping early – and often.   

 

 

THE DON JONES INDEX

 

CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000

 

(REFLECTING… approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)

 

See a further explanation of categories here…

 

ECONOMIC INDICES (60%)

 

 

DON JONES’ PERSONAL ECONOMIC INDEX

 

(45% of TOTAL INDEX POINTS)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CATEGORY

VALUE

BASE

RESULTS

SCORE

SCORE

OUR SOURCES and COMENTS

INCOME

24%

6/17/13

LAST

CHANGE

NEXT

 10/15/21

 10/15/21

SOURCE 

Wages (hourly, per capita)

9%

1350 points

 10/8/21

   +0.62%

 10/22/21

1,481.15

1,481.15

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages  26.15 nc

Median Income (yearly)

4%

600

 10/15/21

  +0.035%

 10/22/21

674.58

674.83

http://www.usdebtclock.org/   35,693

*Unempl. (BLS – in millions

4%

600

 10/1/21

   -8.33%

 10/22/21

418.21

418.21

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000/  4.8%

*Official (DC – in millions)

2%

300

 10/15/21

   +0.05%

 10/22/21

464.70

464.47

http://www.usdebtclock.org/      8,408

*Unofficl. (DC – in millions)

2%

300

 10/15/21

   -0.12%

 10/22/21

405.58

406.06

http://www.usdebtclock.org/    14,270

Workforce Participtn.

     Number  

     Percent

2%

300

10/15/21

 

 +0.013%

 +0.008%

 10/22/21

 

 

318.17

 

 

318.29

In 153,279 Out 100,054 Total: 253,333

 

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 60.50

WP %  (ycharts)*

1%

150

 10/8/21

   -0.16%

 10/22/21

152.23

152.23

https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate  61.60

OUTGO

(15%)

Total Inflation

7%

1050

 10/8/21

+0.4%

 10/22/21

973.36

973.36

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.4

Food

2%

300

 10/8/21

+0.9%

 10/22/21

272.56

272.56

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.9

Gasoline

2%

300

 10/8/21

+1.2%

 10/22/21

251.94

251.94

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +1.2

Medical Costs

2%

300

 10/8/21

+0.1%

 10/22/21

285.05

285.05

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.1

Shelter

2%

300

 10/8/21

+0.3%

 10/22/21

287.33

287.33

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.3

WEALTH

(6%)

 

Dow Jones Index

2%

300

 10/15/21

  +1.99%

 10/22/21

379.06

386.60

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/DJIA 35,606.36

Home (Sales) 

   (Valuation)

1%

1%

150

150

 10/1/21

  +16.91%

  -1.09%

 10/22/21

170.87

179.52             

199.77

177.56             

https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics

     Sales (M):  6.29 Valuations (K):  352.8

Debt (Personal)

2%

300

 10/15/21

 +0.08%

 10/22/21

270.38

270.17

http://www.usdebtclock.org/    65,282

 

AMERICAN ECONOMIC INDEX (15% of TOTAL INDEX POINTS) 

NATIONAL

(10%)

 

Revenue (trilns.)

2%

300

 10/15/21

 +0.28%

 10/22/21

331.81      

332.75      

debtclock.org/       3,891

Expenditures (tr.)

2%

300

 10/15/21

 +0.25%

 10/22/21

217.86

217.32

debtclock.org/       6,894

National Debt tr.)

3%

450

 10/15/21

 +0.12%

 10/22/21

318.54

318.17

http://www.usdebtclock.org/    28,910

Aggregate Debt (tr.)

3%

450

 10/15/21

 +0.05%

 10/22/21

372.51

372.32

http://www.usdebtclock.org/    84,921

GLOBAL

(5%)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foreign Debt (tr.)

2%

300

 10/15/21

 +0.14%

 10/22/21

274.97       

274.57       

http://www.usdebtclock.org/   7,647

Exports (in billions)

1%

150

 10/8/21

 +0.42%

 10/22/21

 189.80

 189.80

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html  213.7

Imports (bl.)

1%

150

 10/15/21

 +0.35%

 10/22/21

 114.30

 113.90

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html  287.0

Trade Deficit (bl.)

1%

150

 10/8/21

 +4.37%

 10/22/21

   94.32            

   94.32            

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html    73.3

 

SOCIAL INDICES (40%)  

 

ACTS of MAN

(12%)

World Affairs

3%

450

10/15/21

     -0.2%

 10/22/21

384.04

383.27

Russian movie crew returns from space after 12 days.  NoKo imitates China in firing off missiles.  Afghan people starving to death under Taliban mismanagement.

Terrorism

2%

300

10/15/21

     -0.3%

 10/22/21

220.96

220.39

DoD and DoJ finally respond to calls for military action in Haiti where missionary kidnappers demand $1M per head (they take only 20-25K for domestic hostages).  Taliban bans school for girls over 12, refuseniks take to social media.

Politics

3%

450

10/15/21

     -0.3%

 10/22/21

439.03      

437.71      

Bill Clinton hospitalized for urinary tract infection. Dollmaker sobs it’s too late to save Christmas: blames President Joe and Mayor, ComSec Pete for supply chain.  Bidens braintrust plots packing the Supreme Court; he keeps slicing chunks off Inf. 2 (childcare, free college, climate change) but 78% of Republicans still loyal to Djonald.

Economics

3%

450

10/15/21

     -0.2%

 10/22/21

403.44

402.63

Proctor & Gamble raising prices on razors and toothbrushers.  PayPal to buy out Pinterest.  Bank profits and mortgage rates spiking, sparking labor unrest.  Deere workers reject $30/hr. offer, Kelloggs still dark.  But Hollywood settles with craft unions, so we’ll have something to distract us as Netflix profits keep rising. 

Crime

1%

150

10/15/21

     +0.5%

 10/22/21

236.84

238.02

The week in blood: Pittsburgh police tase/kill black man, three cops shot at Houston nightclub, four shot at Alabama highschool football game, woman belatedly attacks cop with a baseball bat by the Capitol.  Cute, blonde Gabby’s parents hit the interview trail where they say that Brian would “take care of her” and then lead cops into the swamp where… well… RIH, Brian.  At least you saved the taxpayers the cost of a trial and execution.  US Marshalls rescue 8 chiidren, bust 18 pedophiles.  Cuba Gooding Jr. arrested for groping.  MicroSoft says it asked Bill Gates to stop “flirting”.

 

ACTS of GOD

 

(6%)

 

Environment/Weather

3%

450

 10/15/21

      +0.3%

 10/22/21

400.06

401.26

Still warm in the Midwest, but 20° to 30° cooler in East.  Late start for New England snows.  Fat Tire brews bad tasting Torched Earth Beer to call attention to climate change.  FaceBook purges 1.5B scammety-scam accounts.

Natural/Unnatural Disaster

3%

450

 10/15/21

      +0.3%

 10/22/21

403.17

404.38

Lava keeps flowing on LaPalma.  21 survive plane crash in Houston.  Boatniks rescue drowning dog.

 

LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX   (15%)

 

Science, Tech, Education

4%

600

 10/15/21

      -0.2%

 10/22/21

400.06

399.26

NASA launches missile to the Trojan Asteroids; Chinese circle the globe with military apps.  Tik Tok critics say China regulates social media better than Americans.  Fear of autonomous, driverless cars escaping their garages and roaming the streets,

Equality (econ/social)

4%

600

 10/15/21

     +0.1%

 10/22/21

403.17

403.57

50th Anniversary of Native American takeover of Alcatraz.  Black skipper Captain Bill Pinkney inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame.  UNC greenlights pro-black anti-white reverse racism.

Health

     

          

            Plague

4%

600

 10/15/21

     -0.1%

 

 

 

   

     -0.3%

 10/22/21

400.06

 

 

 

 

- 103.33

399.66

 

 

 

 

- 103.64

The Rule of Three: three minutes without oxygen, three weeks without water (Hamtramck MI. joins Flint and Benton Harbor in toxic trouble), three months without food.  Doctors test grafting pig kidney transplants onto humans.  No livers yet… onions recalled for salmonella.  Doctors frantic about children’s mental health – shrinks prescribe more “empathy”. Teen girls blaming their toxic tics on “social media disease.” 

Refuseniks are throwing away their jobs to prove loyalty to Trump… 40% of TSA gropers, big city police (SF, LA, NY, Chicago), teachers, truckers – seemingly everybody.  U.K. detects new variant of Delta variant: AY4.2  (What happened to 4.1 or, for that matter, AYs 1, 2 and 3?)  More policemen die of plague than lead poisoning; MAGAcops call it “fake news”. FDA greenlights J&J despite relative weakness, suggests a booster shot of something else.  HomeSec Sec. Mayorkas gets it as do so many Russians that Mad Vlad imposes a week-long quarantine.

Freedom and Justice

3%

450

 10/15/21

     -0.2%

 10/22/21

461.41

460.88

President Joe speaks at memorial for martyred police officers.  S.C. suicide junkie (maybe killer) lawyer charged with embezzling from the children of maid who “tripped over the dog and fell down stairs”. Trump files suits to restore his “Executive Privilege” and block release of J6 documents. Parkland school shooter pleads guilty.  Oklahoma criminalizes talking about race… ACLU sues.  NYC votes to tear down Thomas Jefferson’s statue (and apply to rejoin the British Empire?)

 

 

MISCELLANEOUS and TRANSIENT INDEX           (7%) 

 

Cultural incidents

3%

450

 10/15/21

      nc

 10/22/21

 530.91

 530.91

Baseball playoffs set: Braves/Dodgers NL, Astros/Red Sox AL.  NBA kicks off first full season since 2018.  Chicago Sky wins WNBA trophy.  “Halloween Kills” strangles Bond at B.O. Cancel culture forces DC to change “Truth, Justice and the American Way” to “T, J and… a better tomorrow?”  Brain bugs force Kanye West to change his name to “Ye”.  RIP Colin Powell (above),  muckraker Russ Kick, Elvis drummer Sonny Tutt.

Miscellaneous incidents

4%

450

 10/15/21

      nc

 10/22/21

 486.46

 486.46

WalMart proposes building a whole new high-tech utopian city, Tulosa, then moves Black Friday up to November 3rd.  U. of Tennessee fined for throwing garbage at Ole Miss during football game.  Angry bison chase tourists out of Yellowstone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Don Jones Index for the week of October 8th through October 14th, 2021 was UP 32.41 points.

 

The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan, Administrator.  The CNC denies, emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers (including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.

Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com

 

 

 

ATTACHMENT ONE – The Daily Mail, UK

 

TRUMP TURNED ON CAPITOL MOB BECAUSE THEY 'LOOKED LIKE IDIOTS' AND THOUGHT THEY WERE DEMOCRATS - WHILE IVANKA DOWNPLAYED RIOT AS AN 'OPTICS ISSUE' WHILE TELLING AIDES ABOUT HER KIDS' PLACES IN PRIVATE SCHOOL, BOOK CLAIMS

 

'This looks terrible,' said Trump as he watched the Jan. 6 violence unfold, according to new book 

'These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits,' he said, adding that they looked like Democrats

Michael Wolff offers detailed account of how the day unfolded in 'Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency'

It describes how advisers urged him to call on supporters to go home 

The book also claims Ivanka was in the West Wing chatting about getting her children into private school on January 6 

She then downplayed the riot as an 'optics issue', Wolff writes  

By ROB CRILLY, SENIOR U.S. POLITICAL REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 11:50 EDT, 28 June 2021 | UPDATED: 15:05 EDT, 28 June 2021

 

In the aftermath of violence that rocked the nation's capital, hours after hundreds demonstrators attacked the U.S. Capitol, and as his power slipped away, President Trump turned on his supporters.

'This looks terrible. This is really bad,' he told an aide by telephone after watching television coverage of his fans ransacking the Capitol and as his small team tried to work out a survival strategy.

'These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits.

The smell of marijuana hung over clumps of protesters, many of whom had dressed for the occasion - some in camouflage gear, some in jackets made from flags, one as Abraham Lincoln and, in images that came to define the protests, another in a horned headdress.

A new book details how Trump responded to unfolding events on Jan. 6, when Vice President Mike Pence refused to follow his orders in overturning election results, and a mob of Trump supporters attacked police officers and stormed the Capitol complex.

In 'Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency' author Michael Wolff delivers a blow-by-blow account.

In the aftermath of violence that rocked the nation's capital, hours after hundreds demonstrators attacked the U.S. Capitol , and as his power slipped away, President Trump turned on his supporters. 'This looks terrible. This is really bad,' he told an aide by telephone after watching television coverage of his fans ransacking the Capitol. Ivanka Trump also downplayed the riot as an 'optics issue', a new book claims It also claims Ivanka Trump was going around the West Wing talking about getting her children into private school on January 6.

'Ivanka Trump had been floating around the West Wing, chatting to a variety of people. Her children had gotten into private school in Florida, and she was pleased about this — an excited topic of conversation. 

'She was pulled away from her discussion about schools to join the increasingly tense debate about how to respond to the news,' Wolff writes. 

Then, as MAGA supporters stormed the Capitol, she allegedly downplayed the issue.

Wolff writes:  'No one in the White House was seeing this as the full-on assault on the Capitol and the nail in the coffin of the Trump administration that the world would shortly understand it to be; they were, for perhaps another 90 minutes or so, still treating this as “an optics issue,” as Ivanka was putting it.

'It wasn’t until later in the three o’clock hour that Trump seemed to begin the transition from seeing the mob as people protesting the election — defending him so he would defend them — to seeing them as “not our people.” Therefore, he bore no responsibility for them.'

As the extent of the violence became clear, advisers urged the president to post a Twitter statement that would encourage people to go home, according to an excerpt published by New York magazine.

'Bad apples, like ANTIFA or other crazed leftists, infiltrated today’s peaceful protest over the fraudulent vote count,' said one, using the voice of Trump.

'Violence is never acceptable! MAGA supporters embrace our police and the rule of law and should leave the Capitol now!'

The other said: 'The fake news media who encouraged this summer’s violent and radical riots are now trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions.

In the event, according to Wolff, he ignored both as he continued to fume that the election had been stolen from him.

In calls to allies he sought assurances that coverage of the protests was overblown.

The book recounts how one of his key advisers was watching the trouble unfold from his home in Arlington, Virginia.

Jason Miller began drafting a statement that would essentially do what Trump had not done so far: Concede that Joe Biden won.

He spoke to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows before speaking to Trump himself.

'How bad is this?' Trump asked, diverging from his usual tactic of seeking assurances that everything was perfect.

'Mr. President, today is literally going to change everything,' said Miller, according to the account.

At that point, Trump turned on his supporters who were all over the TV attacking the Capitol, calling them 'idiots with these outfits.'

The first lady then joined in the call on speakerphone.

'The media is trying to go and say this is who we are,' she said. 'We don’t support this.'

'That’s what we have to make clear,' said Miller, as he read a proposed draft statement.

As they haggled over whether to talk about an 'orderly' or 'peaceful' transition, Trump apparently began to realize that the statement was not just about the protesters. It was about his conduct too.

'The media thinks I’m not going to leave,' he said. 'Do they really think that? That’s crazy.'

Miller responded: 'We’ve never laid that out. I really can’t stress enough how much we have to make it clear that we’re fully onboard with an orderly transition.'

With the president's Twitter account suspended earlier in the day, they had to sent it out via Dan Scavino, Trump's social media guru.

 

ATTACHMENT TWO – From Defense Casualty Analysis System

 

AMERICAN DEATHS in SOUTHEAST ASIA WAR

DCAS VIETNAM CONFLICT EXTRACT FILE RECORD COUNTS BY INCIDENT OR DEATH DATE (YEAR) (AS OF APRIL 29, 2008 ) 

Year of Death

Number of Records

1956 - 1959

4

1960

5

1961

16

1962

53

1963

122

1964

216

1965

1,928

1966

6,350

1967

11,363

1968

16,899

1969

11,780

1970

6,173

1971

2,414

1972

759

1973

68

1974

1

1975

62

1976 - 1979

0

1980 - 1986

0

1987

1

1988 - 1989

0

1990

1

1991 - 1999

0

2000 - 2006

5

Total Records

58,220

 

Researchers may note substantial differences between the above record counts generated from the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files and those previously posted online that were generated from the Combat Area Casualties Current File. The reason for the differences is due to the fact that the date reported for the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files is the date-of-death or the date-of-incident, whereas the date for the Combat Area Casualties Current File is the date-of-death or the date on which the casualty was declared dead.  The difference in the dates reported is reflected in the names of the respective fields for the two files, which for the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the DCAS is named “INCIDENT OR DEATH DATE”, whereas for the Combat Area Casualties Current File the field is named “DATE OF DEATH or DATE DECLARED DEAD”.  

 

ATTACHMENT THREE – From Justia Law

City of Chicago v. Gregory

39 Ill. 2d 47 (1968)

233 N.E.2d 422

THE CITY OF CHICAGO, Appellee, v. DICK GREGORY et al., Appellants.

Nos. 39983, 39984 cons.

Supreme Court of Illinois.

Opinion filed January 19, 1968.

MARSHALL PATNER and PAUL E. GOLDSTEIN, both of Chicago, for appellants.

RAYMOND F. SIMON, Corporation Counsel, of Chicago, (SYDNEY R. DREBIN and HOWARD C. GOLDMAN, Assistants Corporation Counsel, of counsel,) for appellee.

Judgments affirmed.

Mr. JUSTICE HOUSE delivered the opinion of the court:

*48 These consolidated appeals involve the conviction of 40 civil rights marchers under two provisions of the disorderly conduct ordinance of the city of Chicago. (Municipal Code of Chicago, sec. 193-1.) In cause number 39983 defendant Dick Gregory and four other defendants were found guilty in a jury trial before a magistrate in the circuit court of Cook County and each defendant was fined $200. In cause number 39984 the other 35 defendants were found guilty in a trial before a magistrate on a stipulation of facts adduced at the Gregory trial and each defendant was fined $25. The defendant Gregory was charged with disorderly conduct in that he "did make or aid in making an improper noise, disturbance, breach of peace, or diversion tending to a breach of the peace within the limits of the city." A constitutional question gives us jurisdiction.

The gist of the occurrence giving rise to the arrest and conviction of defendants was a march by 65 to 85 persons around the home of the mayor of Chicago. The marchers carried signs, sang songs and chanted slogans protesting the retention of Dr. Benjamin C. Willis as Superintendent of Schools of Chicago and his handling of school segregation problems in the city. In order to avert what the police believed would become a riot, the marchers were ordered to stop their demonstration and upon their refusal they were arrested.

The city in its brief has taken the position that residential picketing is per se a violation of the city ordinance. Extremely strong arguments have been advanced for the proposition that the constitutional rights of free speech, free assembly and freedom to petition for redress of grievances do not protect marches, demonstrations and picketing of a residence or residences even of the privately owned homes of public officials. (See Kamin, Residential Picketing and the First Amendment, 61 N.W.L. Rev. 177 (1966); Cf. Chafee, Free Speech in the United States (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 406-407; Pritchett, The Brief, p. 4 (published *49 by the Illinois Division of American Civil Liberties Union, September 1965); but see Haiman, The Rhetoric of the Streets: Some Legal and Ethical Considerations, LIII The Law Quarterly Journal of Speech 99 (April 1966); Kalven, The Concept of the Public Forum, 1965 Supreme Court Review 1.) Furthermore, our legislature has now enacted a statute prohibiting residential picketing (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1967, chap. 38, par. 21.1-1) based on the following declaration of policy: "The Legislature finds and declares that men in a free society have the right to quiet enjoyment of their homes; that the stability of community and family life cannot be maintained unless the right to privacy and a sense of security and peace in the home are respected and encouraged; that residential picketing, however just the cause inspiring it, disrupts home, family and communal life; that residential picketing is inappropriate in our society where the jealously guarded rights of free speech and assembly have always been associated with respect for the rights of others. For these reasons the Legislature finds this Article to be necessary." Professor Kamin in his article, Residential Picketing and the First Amendment, states that nine other States (Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, Utah and Wisconsin) have enacted statutory prohibitions of residential picketing. 61 N.W.L. Rev. 177, 206.

A review of the record shows, however, that the arrests were not made on the basis of residential picketing nor did the trial proceed on that theory. Under these circumstances, we will assume, for the purposes of this opinion, as did the police and the magistrates below, that the residential picketing was not in and of itself a violation of the city ordinance.

Lieutenant Hougeson testified that on August 2, 1965, he was in charge of the "task force" of the Chicago police department and that his assignment for that day was to protect a group of people who were going to march. He explained *50 that the task force is a unit which provides extra police protection to a district to help handle crowds at a sporting or public event or to combat a high crime rate in a certain district. On this day he had 40 police officers and 4 sergeants. About 4:00 P.M. he went to Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park on Chicago's lake front just east of the Loop, where approximately 65 marchers had assembled. He observed Dick Gregory addressing the marchers and heard him say, "First we will go over to the snake pit [city hall]. When we leave there, we will go out to the snake's house [the mayor's home]. Then, we will continue to go out to Mayor Daley's home until he fires Ben Willis [Superintendent of Schools]."

About 4:30 P.M. the marchers, two abreast, walked out of the park and went to the city hall in the loop. The marchers then walked south on State Street to 35th Street and then proceeded west to Lowe Avenue, a distance of about 5 miles from the city hall. The mayor's home is at 3536 South Lowe Avenue. The demonstrators had increased in number to about 85 and they arrived at the mayor's home about 8:00 o'clock P.M. In addition to the police, the marchers were accompanied by their attorney and an assistant city counsel. At the suggestion of an assistant city counsel, Gregory had agreed that the group would quit singing at 8:30 P.M. Commander Pierson, district commander of the 9th police district which encompasses this area, met Lieutenant Hougeson at the corner of 35th and Lowe and assumed command of the police operations.

There were about 35 people on the corner and a group of about 6 or 8 youngsters carrying a sign "We Love Mayor Daley" tried to join the marchers but the police stopped them. As the demonstrators started south into the 3500 block of Lowe Avenue, Gregory testified he went back through the line to tell everyone just to keep singing and to keep marching. "Don't stop and don't answer any one back. Don't worry about anything that is going to be said *51 to you. Just keep marching. If anyone hits you or anything, try to remember what they look like, but above all means, do not hit them back. Keep the line straight and keep it tight." The demonstrators chanted "Ben Willis must go, Snake Daley, also;" "Ben Willis must go When? Now;" "We are going to the home of the snake, the snake pit is down the street;" "Hey, Hey, what do you know, Ben Willis must go" and "Hey, Hey, what do you know, Mayor Daley must go also." They carried signs which read: "Daley fire Willis;" "Defacto, Desmacto, it is still segregation;" "Ben Willis must go now;" and "Mayor Daley, fire Ben Willis." They also sang the civil rights songs, "We Shall Overcome" and "We Shall Not Be Moved."

The police ordered the taverns closed during the march. Police from the task force, the 9th district and other districts surrounded the block in which the mayor's home is located. There were about 10 officers at each of the four intersections and about 10 officers spread along each of the four blocks. The rest of the 100 police officers assigned to the march accompanied the demonstrators as they marched around the block. The police tried to keep all spectators across the street from the marchers. They were equipped with walkie-talkie radios to relay reports of conditions to each other and they had a bullhorn with which they addressed the spectators and the demonstrators.

As the marchers started around the block the first time, the neighbors began coming out of their homes. On the second time around the block some of the residents had moved their lawn sprinklers onto the sidewalk and the demonstrators went into the street just long enough to get around the water. On the third trip around the block the water sprinklers had been removed, presumably by order of the police. Gregory himself testified to several instances when the police kept the crowd that was accumulating from interfering with the march. "One of the neighborhood people stood in front of the line, and we just stopped. This *52 individual didn't move and we didn't move. After a few minutes, the officer standing on the corner asked him to move and he moved." He said that on their fourth trip around the block (about 8:30 P.M.) people were yelling out the windows and the police made spectators in door ways close the doors. About 8:30 P.M. the demonstrators quit their singing and chanting and marched quietly. Shortly before 9:00 P. M. 100 to 150 spectators formed a line of march ahead of the demonstrators. Gregory said "the lieutenant [Hougheson] asked me if I would hold up the line until they got those people out of the way. I said, I will hold up the line, but they have just as much right to march peacefully as we have." The spectators were ordered to move. In order to avoid the appearance that the marchers were following the 100 to 150 spectators who had been ordered to move, Gregory said his group marched straight south crossing 36th Street thus taking them one block south of the block which they had been marching. They had to stop when they crossed 36th Street while the police opened a pathway through about 300 spectators they had confined on the corner across the street.

Sergeant Golden testified that between 8:00 o'clock and 9:00 o'clock the crowd increased steadily to a few hundred, but that from 9:00 o'clock until about 9:20 o'clock the people just seemed to come from everywhere until it reached between 1,000 and 1,200. During this time the crowd became unruly. There was shouting and threats, "God damned nigger, get the hell out of here;" "Get out of here niggers go back where you belong or we will get you out of here" and "Get the hell out of here or we will break your blankety-blank head open." Cars were stopped in the streets with their horns blowing. There were Ku Klux Klan signs and there was singing of the Alabama Trooper song. Children in the crowd were playing various musical instruments such as a cymbal, trumpet and drum.

Rocks and eggs were also being thrown at the marchers *53 from the crowd. The police were dodging the rocks and eggs and attempted to catch the persons who threw them. Sergeant Golden explained the problem. "You could see these teen-agers behind the crowd. You could see a boil of activity and something would come over our heads and I or my partner would go down to try to apprehend who was doing it. You couldn't see who was doing it. They would vanish into the crowd." He further testified that about 9:25 P.M., "They were saying, `Let's get them,' and with this they would step off the curb to try to cross 35th Street and we would push them back with force. Once in a while somebody would run out, and we would grab ahold of them and throw them back into the crowd."

About 9:30 P.M. Commander Pierson told Gregory the situation was dangerous and becoming riotous. He asked Gregory if he would co-operate and lead the marchers out of the area. The request to leave the area was made about five times. Pierson then told the marchers that any of them who wished to leave the area would be given a police escort. Three of the marchers accepted the proposal and were escorted out of the area. The remaining demonstrators were arrested and taken away in two police vans.

While we have gone into considerable detail in describing the events leading to the arrest of defendants, only a complete reading of the record can give one a true picture of the dilemma confronting the police. During the entire march from 4:30 P.M. until 9:30 P.M. the marchers were accompanied by their attorney who advised them, and the police were accompanied by an assistant city attorney who advised them. In short the record shows a determined effort by the police to allow the marchers to peacefully demonstrate and at the same time maintain order.

The defendants place heavy reliance on a footnote statement in Brown v. Louisiana, 383 U.S. 131, 133, 15 L. Ed. 2d 637, 86 S. Ct. 719, that "Participants in an orderly demonstration in a public place are not chargeable with the *54 danger, unprovoked except by the fact of the constitutionally protected demonstration itself, that their critics might react with disorder or violence;" a statement in Watson v. City of Memphis, 373 U.S. 526, 535, 10 L. Ed. 2d 529, 83 S. Ct. 1314, 1320, quoted in Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 536, 551, 13 L. Ed. 2d 471, 85 S. Ct. 453, 462, that "The compelling answer to this contention is that constitutional rights may not be denied simply because of hostility to their assertion or exercise;" and a statement in Wright v. Georgia, 373 U.S. 284, 293, 10 L. Ed. 2d 349, 83 S. Ct. 1240, 1246, that "* * * the possibility of disorder by others cannot justify exclusion of persons from a place if they otherwise have a constitutional right * * * to be present." They contend that their conduct was peaceful and that they were charged and convicted solely on the reaction of the crowd.

The Supreme Court in recent years has had occasion to reverse a number of breach-of-the-peace convictions based on civil rights activities. In none of these cases has there been a public disorder or imminent threat of public disorder. Garner v. Louisiana, 368 U.S. 157, 7 L. Ed. 2d 207, 82 S. Ct. 248, involved sit-ins by Negroes at lunch counters catering only to whites. The court pointed out, "Although the manager of Kress' Department Store testified the only conduct which he considered disruptive was the petitioners' mere presence at the counter, he did state that he called the police because he `feared that some disturbance might occur.' However, his fear is completely unsubstantiated by the record." (368 U.S. 157, 171, 7 L. Ed. 2d 207, 218, 82 S. Ct. 248, 255.) Taylor v. Louisiana, 370 U.S. 154, 8 L. Ed. 2d 395, 82 S. Ct. 1188, concerned a sit-in by Negroes in a waiting room at a bus depot, reserved "for whites only." The court noted, "* * * immediately upon petitioners' entry into the waiting room many of the people therein became restless and that some onlookers climbed onto seats to get a better view. Nevertheless, respondent *55 admits these persons moved on when ordered to do so by the police. There was no evidence of violence." (370 U.S. 154, 155, 8 L. Ed. 2d 395, 396, 82 S. Ct. 1188, 1189.) Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 U.S. 229, 9 L. Ed. 2d 697, 83 S. Ct. 680, involved a peaceful march by Negroes around the State House. The court commented, "There was no violence or threat of violence on their [marchers] part, or on the part of any member of the crowd watching them. Police protection was `ample'." (372 U.S. 229, 236, 9 L. Ed. 2d 697, 702, 83 S. Ct. 680, 684.) Wright v. Georgia, 373 U.S. 284, 10 L. Ed. 2d 349, 83 S. Ct. 1240, concerned 6 Negro boys playing basketball in a public park. The court noted, "The only evidence to support this contention is testimony of one of the police officers that `The purpose of asking them to leave was to keep down trouble, which looked like to me might start there were five or six cars driving around the park at the time, white people.' But that officer also stated that this `was [not] unusual traffic for that time of day.' And the park was 50 acres in area." (373 U.S. 284, 289, 10 L. Ed. 2d 349, 355, 83 S. Ct. 1240, 1245.) Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 536, 13 L. Ed. 2d 471, 85 S. Ct. 453, involved the conviction of the leader of some 2,000 Negroes who demonstrated in the vicinity of a courthouse and jail to protest the arrest of fellow demonstrators. The court explained, "There is no indication, however, that any member of the white group threatened violence. * * * As Inspector Trigg testified, they could have handled the crowd." (379 U.S. 536, 550, 13 L. Ed. 2d 471, 481, 85 S. Ct. 453, 462.) Finally Brown v. Louisiana, 383 U.S. 131, 15 L. Ed. 2d 637, 86 S. Ct. 719, concerned a sit-in by 5 Negroes in the reading room of a public library maintained on a racially segregated basis. The court mentioned, "There was * * * no disorder, no intent to provoke a breach of the peace and no circumstances indicating that a breach might be occasioned by petitioners' actions." (383 U.S. 131, 141, 15 L. Ed. 2d 637, 644, 86 S. Ct. 719, 723.) *56 The court in two of these cases, Cox and Edwards, in commenting on the lack of violence or threat of violence remarked that the situations were "a far cry from the situation in Feiner v. New York, 340 U.S. 315, 95 L. Ed. 295, 71 S. Ct. 303."

In Feiner v. New York, 340 U.S. 315, 319, 95 L. Ed. 295, 299, 71 S. Ct. 303, 306, defendant was convicted of disorderly conduct when he refused a police order to stop haranguing about 80 "restless" listeners. The court pointed out: "The exercise of the police officers' proper discretionary power to prevent a breach of the peace was thus approved by the trial court and later by two courts on review. The courts below recognized petitioner's right to hold a street meeting at this locality, to make use of loud-speaking equipment in giving his speech, and to make derogatory remarks concerning public officials and the American Legion. They found that the officers in making the arrest were motivated solely by a proper concern for the preservation of order and protection of the general welfare, and that there was no evidence which could lend color to a claim that the acts of the police were a cover for suppression of petitioner's views and opinions." The court concluded, "The findings of the state courts as to the existing situation and the imminence of greater disorder coupled with petitioner's deliberate defiance of the police officers convince us that we should not reverse this conviction in the name of free speech." 340 U.S. 315, 321, 95 L. Ed. 295, 300, 71 S. Ct. 303, 307.

In his dissenting opinion Justice Black stated "The Court's opinion apparently rests on this reasoning: The policeman, under the circumstances detailed, could reasonably conclude that serious fighting or even riot was imminent; therefore he could stop petitioner's speech to prevent a breach of peace; accordingly, it was `disorderly conduct' for petitioner to continue speaking in disobedience *57 of the officer's request." (340 U.S. 315, 325, 95 L. Ed. 295, 302, 71 S. Ct. 303, 309.) He then stated the record failed to show any imminent threat of riot or uncontrollable disorder. He next stated "The police of course have power to prevent breaches of the peace. But if, in the name of preserving order, they ever can interfere with a lawful public speaker, they first must make all reasonable efforts to protect him." (340 U.S. 315, 326, 95 L. Ed. 295, 303, 71 S. Ct. 303, 309.) Finally he disagreed with the majority's "statement that petitioner's disregard of the policeman's unexplained request amounted to such `deliberate defiance' as would justify an arrest or conviction for disorderly conduct. * * * For at least where time allows, courtesy and explanation of commands are basic elements of good official conduct in a democratic society. * * * Petitioner was entitled to know why he should cease doing a lawful act." 340 U.S. 315, 327, 95 L. Ed. 295, 304, 71 S. Ct. 303, 310.

Justice Frankfurter in a concurring opinion summarized the situation this way: "As was said in Hague v. C.I.O., 307 U.S. 496, 83 L. Ed. 1423, 59 S. Ct. 954, supra, uncontrolled official suppression of the speaker `cannot be made a substitute for the duty to maintain order.' 307 U.S. at 516. [59 S. Ct. at 964, 83 L. Ed. 1423.] Where conduct is within the allowable limits of free speech, the police are peace officers for the speaker as well as for his hearers. But the power effectively to preserve order cannot be displaced by giving a speaker complete immunity. * * * It is not a constitutional principle that, in acting to preserve order, the police must proceed against the crowd, whatever its size and temper, and not against the speaker." (Emphasis added.) 340 U.S. 273, 288, 95 L. Ed. 271, 279, 71 S. Ct. 328, 336.

Applying the facts of this case to the rationale of the foregoing opinions we believe defendants were not denied *58 their right to free speech, free assembly and freedom to petition for redress of grievances. First, the record is clear that there was some violence (throwing rocks and eggs) and an imminent threat of extreme public disorder. This immediately distinguishes this case from Garner, Taylor, Edwards, Cox, Wright and Brown discussed above. In fact the violence and imminent threat of a riot appears to have been greater here than in Feiner.

This brings us to the vital issue in the case of whether Justice Frankfurter's appraisal of Feiner that "It is not a constitutional principle that, in acting to preserve order, the police must proceed against the crowd, whatever its size and temper, and not against the speaker" can be reconciled with the statement in Brown that "Participants in an orderly demonstration in a public place are not chargeable with the danger, unprovoked except by the fact of the constitutionally protected demonstration itself, that their critics might react with disorder or violence." We think the statements are harmonious when read in light of Justice Black's observation in his dissenting opinion in Feiner that "The police of course have power to prevent breaches of the peace. But, if, in the name of preserving order, they ever can interfere with a lawful public speaker, they first must make all reasonable efforts to protect him."

The record before us shows that the police made all reasonable efforts to protect the marchers before asking them to stop the demonstration. While no parade permit had been sought by the group and there had been no direct contact between representatives of the group and the police, the police did know of the planned march and a task force of 44 policemen were assigned to maintain order during the march. The 44 policemen went to Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park at 4:00 P.M. and accompanied the demonstrators while they marched to the city hall for a short demonstration and then marched about 5 miles south to *59 35th and Lowe. The police kept hostile spectators from interfering with the march around the block bounded by 35th Street, Union Avenue, 36th Street and Lowe Avenue. The taverns in the area were closed, barricades were placed at strategic points, there was radio communication among the police assigned to the area, and spectators were kept across the street. Water sprinklers which were turned on during the demonstration and interfered with the march were removed, persons in doorways were told to get back and close the doors, counterdemonstrators who tried to join the marchers were ordered across the street, a group of 150 countermarchers were ordered out of the demonstrators' line of march, and a pathway was cleared through several hundred spectators when the marchers deviated from their course around the block in which the mayor lived, and spectators who broke police lines and tried "to get" the demonstrators were forcefully thrown back into the crowd. Before the demonstration was ended there were about 100 policemen trying to maintain order in this one block area.

It is evident that there was adequate and determined police protection for the demonstrators from 4 o'clock in the afternoon until 9:30 in the evening while the demonstrators marched from Grant Park to the city hall and then to the mayor's home on the south side of Chicago. The demonstration around the mayor's home lasted 1 1/2 hours during which the police were able to control the hostile crowd. It was between 9:00 and 9:25 that the crowd grew quickly in size and anger to the point where the police felt they could no longer control the situation.

Furthermore, we do not have here an "unexplained request" by the police as was apparently the case in Feiner. Commander Pierson told Gregory that the situation was becoming dangerous, that he was having difficulty containing the crowd and that there might be a riot. He asked Gregory five times to lead the marchers out. Gregory then went along *60 the line of marchers and said "We will not leave; we have not broken any law; we will not resist if we are arrested." Commander Pierson then told the demonstrators that any of them who wished to leave would be given a police escort out of the area. After three of the demonstrators left, the rest were arrested.

We hold that under the circumstances of this case defendants were not denied any right of free speech, free assembly or freedom to petition for redress of grievances.

Defendants also argue that the disorderly conduct ordinance of the city is unconstitutionally vague as applied to free expression and free assembly. We interpret the ordinance as authorizing the action taken by police under the circumstances disclosed by this record. (See City of Chicago v. Williams, 45 Ill. App.2d 327.) It does not authorize the police to stop a peaceful demonstration merely because a hostile crowd may not agree with the views of the demonstrators. It is only where there is an imminent threat of violence, the police have made all reasonable efforts to protect the demonstrators, the police have requested that the demonstration be stopped and explained the request, if there be time, and there is a refusal of the police request, that an arrest for an otherwise lawful demonstration may be made. As so interpreted we believe the ordinance is not so overly broad in scope as to be unconstitutionally vague or that it delegates undue discretion to the police. This is the type of conduct with which we are here faced and which is prohibited by the ordinance.

It is also argued that the magistrate committed reversible error by instructing the jury that there was an ordinance requiring a permit for a parade or open air public meeting. A reading of the instructions as a whole convinces us that this instruction would not mislead the jury or prejudice the defendants. The instructions clearly state that defendants were charged with disorderly conduct and the forms of verdict dealt only with disorderly conduct.

*61 The judgments of the circuit court of Cook County are affirmed.

Judgments affirmed.

Mr. JUSTICE WARD took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.

 

ATTACHMENT FOUR – From the Guardian U.K.

 

DONALD TRUMP: THE MADMAN in his CASTLE

 

Isolated from power, the Republican party has turned inward and driven itself insane on a toxic mix of fear and rage. Trump is its natural figurehead

by Ben Fountain.  Fri 22 Jul 2016 07.00 EDT

 

The worst thing that ever could happen happened after the worst thing that ever could happen happened after the worst thing that ever could happen happened.

- Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, AKA Chuck D

So after a miserable couple of weeks for everyone who gives a damn about peace, love and understanding, and with more bad news shortly on the way from Baton Rouge, the word came down in Cleveland: no tennis balls.

For the sake of public safety and national security, no tennis balls would be allowed in the cordon sanitaire around the Quicken Loans Arena, site of the Republican national convention, nor would water guns, toy guns, knives, rope, tape, umbrellas with metal tips, light bulbs, gas masks or several dozen other items. Guns, however, were authorized. Guns were OK, a pronouncement that was quickly taken up by groups as divergent in their orientations as Bikers For Trump and the New Black Panthers, among others.

Barely a week after five police officers were shot dead in Dallas at a Black Lives Matter march, Cleveland was duty-bound to follow Ohio’s open-carry statute. “Our intent is to follow the law,” said a stiff-lipped mayor Frank G Jackson. “And the law says you can have open carry, that’s what it says. Whether I agree with it or not is another issue.”

Guns allowed, but no tennis balls. It’s the sort of garishly insane proposition that’s just another normal day in America, the kind of stunt that a bunch of latter-day Dadaists might pull to highlight societal derangement and degradation. Let the word go forth: America has lost its mind! Or maybe dementia serves as a better metaphor, the country shuffling around like a bonkers senior citizen with a Depends on his head and Kleenex boxes for shoes. Walking down Euclid Avenue on the second day of the convention, along a raucous urban stretch of bars and tourist joints and overheated sidewalk peddlers pushing T-shirts and Trump-related campaign junk, I came upon a street preacher raging at the heathen through an amplifier rigged to his God-truck, an apocalypse on wheels decorated with photos of aborted fetuses, starving Africans, scrawl-painted Bible verses and similar visual aids. But that wasn’t God talking back at him from above, no, but a heavyset black woman leaning out her second-storey window bellowing “Preach love! Preach love! Preach love!” and “You don’t know nothin’ about being a woman in this world!” A debate between prophets, while right around the corner MSNBC was broadcasting live from a mobile studio, political blather booming up and down Fourth Street.

What is it about America, where every public happening becomes a carnival of the weird and surreal? Merciful shards of sanity occasionally cut through. When the Art of Rap concert in Dallas was cancelled in the wake of the police shootings, Chuck D, frontman for Public Enemy, had this to say for the Dallas Morning News:

“It’s understandable,” said the man who wrote Fight the Power in 1989. “Those officers were out there securing a Black Lives Matter protest.”

He paused.

“There’s nothing can be said here. We have to let it rest for a while … To go in there Saturday? That would be inappropriate.”

But America can’t shut up or slow down for a second, and so we rolled past Dallas, past black lives and blue lives and Baton Rouge on Sunday morning with three cops dead and three more wounded, this only days after more than 80 dead in France, bombings in Baghdad, Isis attacks in Bangladesh, and an attempted coup in Turkey with hundreds of casualties. Welcome to Cleveland! Where the Trump movement arrived on a rumbling tidal surge (nothing so crisp or cleansing as a tidal wave), a molasses-thick swash carrying all manner of bottom sludge, along with 37 primary and caucus wins, 1,543 delegates amassed, gazillions of dollars worth of “free media coverage”, and the shattered wreckage and random personal effects of what was once the GOP establishment. It all washed up on the shores of Lake Erie and backed into the channel of the Cuyahoga river that so famously burned in 1969, emblem of Rust Belt decline when Cleveland was the butt and punchline of a thousand jokes.

Nobody laughs at Cleveland anymore. It has a spiff downtown, a happening hipster population, and royalty – and an NBA championship – to its name. King James lives here, James as in LeBron, and now another aspirant to a different sort of throne was squalling into town. Trump, one imagines, doesn’t really want to be president; only king will do, and it’s worth trying to picture the American Majesty’s style, the ne plus ultra piss-elegance of a Trump presidency with its slathers of gold-gilt and reflective glass, the aesthetic of, say, a 1970s mid-level mobster from Buffalo, with Real Housewives updates of high-tech and glitz. Richard Nixon, raised a Quaker, went hard for royal pomp, with the presidential seal stamped on everything from cufflinks to golf carts, and toy-soldier trumpeters to announce his entrance and exit. Nixon came within a whisker of madness – is imperial style a marker of mental instability? Safe to say Trump’s would not be a modest presidency.

Norman Mailer, writing in 1968 of Nixon’s nomination in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, had this prophecy for the Republican party:

They had been a damned minority for too long, a huge indigestible boulder in the voluminous ruminating gut of every cow-like Democratic administration, an insane Republican minority with vast powers of negation and control, a minority who ran the economy, and half the finances of the world, and all too much of the internal affairs of four or five continents, and the Pentagon, and the technology of the land, and most of the secret police, and nearly every policeman in every small town, and yet finally they did not run the land, they did not comprehend it, the country was loose from them, ahead of them, the life style of the country kept denying their effort, the lives of the best Americans kept accelerating out of their reach. They were the most powerful force in America, and yet they were a psychic island. If they did not find a bridge, they could only grow more insane each year, like a rich nobleman in an empty castle chasing elves and ogres with his stick.

Mailer missed it by little: instead of an island we have a wall, the wall that’s as close to a defining principle as the Trump campaign has. In Cleveland it was hard to distinguish between the mob rhetoric on the streets and the official, presumably vetted verbiage one heard inside the Quicken Loans Arena. “Build that wall! Build that wall!” could break out anywhere, anytime, and jackboot chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump.” And Chris Christie’s Tuesday night speech to the convention – a sort of rump-court indictment of Hillary Clinton, the acting out of what is surely a pet fantasy of the governor, and an audition for the post of attorney general should a Trump administration come to pass – inspired gleeful outbursts of “Lock her up! Lock her up!”, the voices of the faithful loud, full-throated, blood-lusty, much as the Romans must have sounded as the lions were turned loose on representatives of some poor damned minority.

The same spirit was on display Monday at an “America First Unity Rally” on the banks of the Cuyahoga, an event hosted by, among others, Citizens for Trump, Tea Partiers for Trump, Bikers for Trump, Christians for Trump, Women United for Trump, Vets for Trump, Millennials for Trump, Truckers for Trump … you get the idea. More than once this year I’ve heard the Trump phenomenon described as a peasants’ revolt. Well, here they were, and they were mightily pissed, their anger, however much of it was justified – and much was – matched by their evident inability to manage even the most basic vocabulary of American political life.

The mistress of ceremonies, one Trish Cunningham, a blond, florid woman in a short coral-orange dress who was described as the “godmother of the Pennsylvania Tea Party”, seemed not to understand the difference between a state and US senator. The national anthem was grievously mangled, the soloist missing about every third word (“the rockets’ red flare”). One of the speakers, a former first sergeant in the marines and currently a New Hampshire state rep, insisted that this year the GOP would “take back the hill,” by which I think he meant, Capitol Hill? Congress? Where the Republicans currently hold majorities in both houses.

There on the grassy slopes of Settler’s Landing Park I was informed by my fellow rally-goers that 9/11 was “false”, that Israel “arranged” Barack Obama’s election, that “we’ve got to take our country back” and that “the liberal media is portraying Trump as a racist for wanting to secure our borders, and it’s not right and totally unfair”. In other words: people know when they’re being screwed. They may not know exactly how or by whom or on which end, but sooner or later the signal makes its way up the spinal cord, and is eventually acted upon. For 30 years Republican voters have dutifully nominated every establishment favorite put before them, refusing the primal temptations of a Pat Buchanan, a Rick Santorum, a Michele Bachmann, but on Monday, the first afternoon of the convention, we watched as the last of the last-ditch anti-Trump efforts died a loud and sloppy death. That evening I wandered out for a walk, and taking a seat in Public Square I noted the massive police presence, a wild-eyed pilgrim dragging around an 8ft cross, two fake nuns on stilts advocating a sin tax on meat, and happy kids soaking themselves in surface level fountains. Nearby a sort of anarchist-improv group did a skit satirizing the Trump phenomenon, which ended with this ditty:

If I can get you to fear,

I can get you to hate,

If I can get you to hate,

You won’t think straight,

If you don’t think straight,

That’ll make you a chump,

And then you’ll wind up with Trump.

Well, there’s nothing new about that. Fear has been the driving force of the GOP since the start of the cold war – fear of Commies, fear of black people, fear of Mexicans, gay people, feminists, Muslims, terrorists, feds and so forth, the fear-mongering cultivated to a high art form in the years since 9/11. The difference this time around is economic. The Republican establishment told the base to do one thing, and the base, at long last, did the opposite. “Pluck the chicken but don’t make it scream,” a long-ago New World dictator once told his cronies, but in America in the year 2016, after 35 years of supply-side economics, wholesale globalization, and the biggest redistribution of wealth – not trickle down, but vacuum up – in history, the chicken is screaming.

 “The Bush family – while we would love to have them – are part of the past,” Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, declared at a morning press briefing during convention week. “We are dealing with the future.” But as it’s played out in the 13 months since Trump descended the escalator to announce his candidacy, “Make America Great Again” looks a lot like the idealized Wasp past whose realest incarnation was seated somewhere in Ronald Reagan’s brain, a social order designed to appeal nicely to white males of authoritarian inclination. And as for everyone else – women, “the negroes” and, ah, latins? – well, wasn’t it all very nice for them too?

Here’s some news: we don’t live in that world anymore. On Wednesday night Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan gave fine-sounding speeches extolling the GOP as the party of Lincoln, emancipation, and civil rights, when the fact of the matter is Republicans haven’t been that party since 1964. In July of that year, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, the party chose as its presidential nominee Senator Barry Goldwater, who just a few short weeks before had voted loudly and proudly against the Civil Rights Act. The GOP has worked a sliding scale of racism ever since; for proof, one need only look to the long and twisted history of the Southern Strategy, or voting patterns of the past 50 years, or the coalition of state attorneys general who successfully sued to gut the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

Trump’s genius, particularly suited to a time of financial stress for much of the working and middle class, lies in the way he’s mainstreamed the far end of that sliding scale, forcing blatantly racist propositions onto center stage. He was embraced early by neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the like, and he embraced them back in the form of Mussolini quotes, retweets of white supremacists, and foot-dragging, nod-and-a-wink disavowals of support from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. Any doubts as to whether a critical mass of the Republican leadership would also embrace its nominee vaporized over the course of convention week, and by Thursday evening Trump could truthfully claim that the party was unified. Or unified enough to make the claim without being struck by lightning.

Twice in its history the United States has been forced to re-create itself, both times in the face of existential crises. The abolition of slavery was the first such re-creation, born out of the crisis of the civil war. The New Deal was the second, the formation of the modern welfare state in response to the crisis of the Great Depression; had Roosevelt acted any less radically, the profound unrest that in certain places had already flared into outright insurrection – an episode of US history that’s largely forgotten, or ignored – might well have morphed into re-creation by other means. Now we find ourselves in dire need of a third re-creation, a revolution in the psyche as well as the structure of the country that takes account of realities that are already upon us. A broadening beyond the psychic island, the insane castle, the encircling wall of the Wasp that Norman Mailer wrote about nearly a half-century ago. It has to happen; the country’s changing demographics, and the sheer weight of human experience they represent, demand it. The only way it won’t happen is by the outright subversion of democracy, which by definition would constitute a very different sort of re-creation.

A few years ago I read Gabriel García Márquez’s autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, and I recall being struck by his description of the political tensions in his native Colombia in the late 1940s, just prior to the outbreak of the country’s decades-long civil war. What seemed to begin as more or less professional hardline posturing by liberals and conservatives developed over time into something rawer, hotter, and, ultimately, intractable. I kept making the same note in the margins: US now. US now. US now. It’s worth praying to all the gods we have that it won’t come to that – that the third American re-creation will come by gentler means.

 

 

ATTACHMENT FIVE – From Politico

WHEN THE LEFT ATTACKED THE CAPITOL

Fifty years ago, extremists bombed the seat of American democracy to end a war and start a revolution. It did neither, but it may have helped bring down a president.

By LAWRENCE ROBERTS 02/28/2021 07:00 AM EST

In the winter of 1971, you could still find vestiges of an age of innocence in Washington. The previous decade had been one of the most unstable in the country’s history, rocked by political assassinations, racial violence and explosions at public buildings. But at the U.S. Capitol, it was still easy to stroll through without having to empty your pockets or show a driver’s license. No metal detectors or security cameras. You didn’t need to join a tour. Which is why two young people who melted into the crowd of sightseers were free to scour the building for a safe spot to set their bomb.

They were members of the Weather Underground. Since 1969, the radical left group had already bombed several police targets, banks and courthouses around the country, acts they hoped would instigate an uprising against the government. Now two of these self-described revolutionaries wandered the halls with sticks of dynamite strapped under their clothing. They slipped into an unmarked marble-lined men’s bathroom one floor below the Senate chamber. They hooked up a fuse attached to a stopwatch and stuffed the device behind a 5-foot-high wall.

Shortly before 1 a.m. on March 1, the phone call came into the Capitol switchboard. The overnight operator remembered it as a man’s voice, low and hard: “This is real. Evacuate the building immediately.”

It exploded at 1:32 a.m. No one was hurt, but damage was extensive. The blast tore the bathroom wall apart, shattering sinks into shrapnel. Shock waves blew the swinging doors off the entrance to the Senate barbershop. The doors crashed through a window and sailed into a courtyard. Along the corridor, light fixtures, plaster and tile cracked. In the Senate dining room, panes fell from a stained-glass window depicting George Washington greeting two Revolutionary War heroes, the Marquis de Lafayette and Baron von Steuben. Both Europeans lost their heads.

 

Shocked lawmakers condemned the attack. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana), called it an “outrageous and sacrilegious” hit on a “public shrine.” House Speaker Carl Albert (D-Oklahoma) said the bombing was “doubly sad” because it would likely lead to tighter security at the Capitol and less freedom for visitors. The Washington Post’s editorial page lamented “the easy contagion of extremism in a time of dark frustrations and deep disillusionment.”

Fifty years later, we find the nation assessing the physical and psychic wreckage left by another Capitol attack, this one at the hands of the radical right. It would be wrong to give these events equal weight on the historical scale, to simply regard them as insurrections from opposite ends of the spectrum. Dangerous and criminal as it was, the bombing amounted to a kind of guerrilla theater, a symbolic destruction of federal property to protest the disastrous military intervention in Vietnam. The Jan. 6 mob that ransacked the Capitol, causing five deaths, embodied a far more perilous delusion: that a national election was fraudulent and should be overturned with threats and violence against lawmakers. “Stop the War” versus “Stop the Steal.”

Still, the attacks do share historical context. Each arose from a cauldron of political polarization and distrust of government. They were carried out by splinter groups that had abandoned faith in American democracy and would have been pleased to see the system collapse. Both led to heightened security in Washington. Thus it may be valuable to examine the events of 1971, and what lessons those days may hold for our new era of extremism.

One big difference is that the 1971 attack was meant to oppose, not support, the sitting president, Richard Nixon. Another is that the case remains cold. While the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in broad daylight, their faces captured by security cameras, their own social media feeds or witnesses with smartphones, the Weather Underground set the bomb in secret. Members were much harder to track down, since they lived together in small cells under false identities.

Since the underground group leaned on above-ground radicals for shelter, money and communications, the FBI and Justice Department decided to squeeze the Vietnam antiwar movement for information. Agents interrogated dozens of people and convened grand juries in several cities. Apparently no one cracked. Even as the feds employed increasingly aggressive and unconstitutional tactics, they had little success. Eventually, nearly all the fugitives surfaced. Yet no one ever was charged with attacking the Capitol. A half-century later, the action that the radical group considered “probably the single most important Weather bombing” remains officially unsolved.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 rampage, at least 200 people have been charged so far. Thousands more scattered around the country remain sympathetic to the rioters’ cause. While the bombing of the Capitol represented an apogee of that era’s left-wing radicalism, the lifespan of right-wing violence, powered not by small cells of self-styled guerrillas but the demagoguery of a former president, might well persist longer.

The Weather militants conceived the Capitol bomb as a curtain-raiser for the most intense season of dissent in Washington’s history. Various groups were coming to town for weeks of peaceful protests they’d named the Spring Offensive. It represented a last-ditch effort to end a war that over six years had already claimed the lives of more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of fighters and civilians in Southeast Asia. Picketing, marching and campaigning hadn’t stopped the killing. True, the antiwar movement had chased President Lyndon Johnson from the White House, and his successor, Nixon, had campaigned on a promise to end the war. But instead, Nixon expanded it into Cambodia and then, weeks before the Capitol bombing, into Laos.

In a communique, the Weather Underground said it had attacked “the very seat of U.S. white arrogance” to protest the Laos invasion. It wanted to prove its “solidarity” with the victims of American wars, hoping to “freak out the warmongers” and “bring a smile and a wink to the kids and people here who hate this government. To spread joy.”

Certainly, some on the left were joyful, but opinion within the antiwar movement was sharply divided about extremism. And of those planning the Spring Offensive, few could have been more distressed about the bomb than Rennie Davis.

At the age of 30, Davis, charismatic, serious and stylish—“elegant in a suede jacket,” as one columnist gushed—was one of the country’s more imaginative activists. His talent for oratory had earned him a leading role in Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, the largest component of what came to be known as the New Left. He helped mount big demonstrations like the one in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention, after which the Nixon administration indicted him and seven others for conspiracy to incite a riot.

He would also, as the war and the Revolution wore down, pivot to becoming an advance pitchman and audience warmup sidekick for the child guru Mahara Ji… figurehead and operative of one of the more successful occult/Oriental sideshows of the 70’s.  Mahara Ji now lives in Nigeria and is a motivational speaker  - DJI

In the spring of 1971, Davis was back in Washington, where he’d grown up, to organize the finale of the Spring Offensive. Davis and his colleagues believed the movement needed to escalate tactics. He invented a slogan: “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” Under his plan, protesters who called themselves the Mayday Tribe would hit the streets on the morning of the first workday in May, blockading the city through civil disobedience. Participants would face arrest for obstructing traffic, but Davis and his co-organizers, especially veteran peace activist David Dellinger, promised to remain strictly nonviolent. Quakers conducted training to ensure no one would get hurt.

Now Davis worried the bomb undermined this promise of nonviolence and would bring the full force of the feds down on their heads.

His fears were justified. A few days after the explosion, two agents grabbed him as he left the Mayday headquarters at 1029 Vermont Avenue, a well-worn 11-story building a few blocks from the White House, where most peace groups had their D.C. offices. They pushed him up against a car parked in the alley and grilled him about the bombing. Davis told them what he’d been telling reporters: He was “absolutely not involved.”

One thing he didn’t mention: He’d learned about the attack in advance, and tried to stop it, as he acknowledged to me not long ago.

For Davis, the matter was personal. His younger brother, John, was a member of the Weather Underground. And he knew most of the others, because he’d worked with them in SDS, before the student group had disintegrated in 1969 as its factions battled over the proper path to social and revolutionary change.

The most militant cadres veered into guerrilla action. They saw the U.S. as a pretend democracy, structured to oppress the poor and the powerless at home and abroad. Isolated, intoxicated with self-importance, Weather took inspiration from peasant guerrilla movements in Vietnam and Latin America and from martyrs such as Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Black Panthers who had been shot by Chicago police in their beds, an incident widely viewed as a cold-blooded execution. They felt kinship with John Brown, who led the 1859 antislavery raid at Harper’s Ferry. They taught themselves to make bombs with dynamite— “that most romantic of 19th century radical tools,” as one wrote later.

Even at the time, few leftists bought Weather’s idea that the U.S. had entered a pre-revolutionary condition that only needed some well-placed explosions and other violent confrontations with state power to spark a final uprising by the poor and working class. In the cold light of history, the group’s political and strategic analysis looks even more misguided and wacky. Yet even at its most unhinged, it promoted nothing as bizarre as the fringe theories we hear now about rigged voting machines, space lasers and international rings of satanic pedophiles.

A year before the Capitol bombing, though, Weather did take its own horrific dive down the ideological rabbit hole. One collective assembled a bomb, packed with roofing nails, intended for soldiers and their dates attending a dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Had they succeeded, they would have erased any question about whether they were terrorists. Instead, on the day of the dance, March 6, 1970, it was the bomb-makers who died. Somehow the device went off in their makeshift factory, in the basement of a townhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village. Three people blew themselves to bits. At least two escaped, including Cathy Wilkerson, whose father owned the house, and Kathy Boudin, daughter of a prominent liberal defense attorney.

The disaster didn’t dissuade Weather from building more bombs, but from then on, “we were very careful … to be sure we weren’t going to hurt anybody,” one said later. When Davis caught wind of the D.C. plan, he tried to head it off. He cranked up his considerable persuasive power. As a teenager he’d been famous in his Virginia hometown for talking his way out of a speeding ticket, telling a judge he’d just been racing home to finish homework. Rennie contacted his brother and others in the group. This would be no gift to the antiwar movement, he argued. Quite the contrary: A bombing now would undermine the careful preparations for the Spring Offensive.

Weather wouldn’t budge. “That was a nightmare for me,” Davis told me.

The radical group gave the action a code name: Big Top. At first, it looked like a failure.

It’s unusual that we know so much about this particular attack. Even now, ex-Weather members appear to honor an omertà about their activities. Perhaps it was youthful pride that led them to reconstruct the caper in the mid-1970s for the documentary “Underground,” directed by Emile de Antonio. They identified themselves by name, while keeping their faces obscured. Over the years, additional details have emerged from associates, friends and relatives of the bombers, who spilled anonymously to historians and authors including Susan Braudy (Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left), Ron Jacobs (The Way the Wind Blows), Bryan Burrough (Days of Rage) and Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Destructive Generation).

So we know Big Top became a project for two teams. One team posed as tourists and scouted the building. A trash can? A closet? A tunnel? Finally, they found the 5-foot wall. Full of dust, so it probably wasn’t checked regularly. On Saturday, February 27, 1971, the two members of the other team strapped the dynamite and timer to their bodies and assembled the device in the bathroom. As they lifted it into its hiding place, it didn’t sit securely. “There was a ledge where the people who did it thought there had been a shelf,” Weather member Jeff Jones explained in the documentary. “It fell several feet.” After a sickening few seconds, they let out their breath. The bomb appeared intact, still set to go at 1:30 a.m. They left the building.

The group had mailed copies of a letter to the New York Post and The Associated Press, taking responsibility. Sent by special delivery, it carried the group’s logo, a rainbow with a lightning bolt. That night, they placed their warning call. The Capitol police searched, found nothing. Zero hour came and went, and no bomb exploded. The fall must have broken the timer.

“So the organizers had a series of quick calls around the country and came up with a plan,” Jones said, “which was to take a much smaller device and go back in, and put it on top of the one that had been put there the day before. Sort of like a little starter motor.”

The next day, Sunday, the bombers returned, placed the new device, and called the switchboard again. U.S. Capitol Police searched as many rooms as they could in half an hour. According to an FBI report, one man checked the bathroom that held the bomb, saw nothing, and moved on. Only seven minutes later, it blew. Damage was estimated to be at least $100,000, equivalent to $650,000 today. (This week, officials put the cost of the Jan. 6 riot at $30 million.)

Neither Jones nor anyone else in the documentary named the bombers. However, at least three published accounts have identified them as two women then in their late 20s—Kathy Boudin, one of the survivors of the Greenwich Village explosion, and Bernardine Dohrn, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s law school whose looks, brains and take-no-prisoners attitude had made her a romantic icon within the left. Neither Boudin nor Dohrn has publicly admitted or denied placing the Capitol bomb. Neither responded to questions for this article.

According to Destructive Generation, it was Dohrn who called Rennie Davis in 1971. A few years ago, I visited Davis at his Colorado home as I researched my book MAYDAY 1971, about the clash between Nixon and the antiwar movement. His memories of the old days were generally quite sharp, except when it came to the Capitol bomb. He confirmed he’d been alerted about the attack in advance, but said he wasn’t told where or when it would blow. He also said he didn’t remember who called him, and he didn’t recall, if he ever knew, who actually placed the device. Davis died earlier this month from cancer, at the age of 80.

Three days after the bombing, Dohrn, already on the FBI’s most-wanted list for other crimes, nearly had been captured in the Bay Area, when she and others picked up some money wired to a Western Union office. A federal agent recognized them, but they sped away and later switched cars to elude the authorities. One of the drivers was Rennie’s brother John. His were among the fingerprints the FBI later found in a San Francisco apartment where the band had been handling explosives.

But the bureau hadn’t identified Dohrn as one of the possible Capitol bombers. The FBI and Justice Department remained focused on Washington.

As recent events have borne out, the federal government often underreacts to perceived security threats from the right and overreacts to those coming from the left.

The 1971 bomb blew at a crucial moment for Richard Nixon. On that particular morning he was winging his way to Iowa to shore up political support in the heartland. The president was struggling politically, his approval rating dropping. Republicans had lost a slew of congressional seats and governorships in the 1970 midterms, despite Nixon’s hope that moderates would approve the way he was handling the Vietnam War—stepping up the fighting while slowly withdrawing U.S. troops. Next year’s reelection campaign was looking fierce; polls showed him trailing the presumed leader among the Democratic challengers, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.

Nixon had largely built his career on antipathy to liberals and the left, and he didn’t need any additional fuel for his visceral distaste of the antiwar movement. A successful Spring Offensive threatened to not only complicate his Vietnam policies, and thus his second term, but also could distract from his grand plan to reopen diplomatic ties with China and remake the Cold War world.

One of his aides, Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr., who would later run the notorious White House “Plumbers” unit that plugged damaging leaks to the media and sought to undermine the president’s opponents, fired off a memo suggesting the Capitol bomb could be a rare opportunity. Handled right, it might counter the trend of “softer” support for the administration’s Vietnam policies from “middle of the road Americans.” The explosion, wrote Krogh, “is a chance for us to point out that we have not been tough for nothing. A bomb detonating in the breast of the Senate is as close as one can get to the heart of super-liberal thought in this government.”

Early in his presidency, Nixon had urged the FBI and Justice Departments to crack down harder on the antiwar movement, even contemplating giving written approval to illegal tactics such as burglarizing the homes and offices of activists. Before the Spring Offensive, Attorney General John Mitchell insisted the protests would turn out to be violent, no matter what organizers said. He secretly authorized warrantless wiretaps on the Mayday Tribe and three other groups. Now, the bombing fed the president’s belief that there wasn’t much difference between underground militants and peaceful protesters. Reporting to Nixon on the FBI’s hunt for the bombers, his chief domestic policy adviser listed the suspects: “It’s the Bernadette (sic) Dohrn, Rennie Davis bunch.”

The FBI shifted agents from all parts of the Washington field office to the case. They tailed Mayday activists, including four young people who drove north the day after the bombing, finally stopping them on a Pennsylvania highway. The agents, brandishing shotguns, searched their car but found no reason to detain them.

After all the investigating, only one person was taken into custody in connection with the bombing. She was a tall 19-year-old blonde from California named Leslie Bacon, who had been helping book musicians for the rallies. The FBI found witnesses who said they saw Bacon in the Capitol the day before the blast. When she denied it, she was charged with lying to the grand jury. Weather wrote an open letter to Bacon’s mother, saying she was innocent: “Mrs. Bacon, we cannot turn ourselves in to save Leslie. She is a committed revolutionary and understands this.”

At least a dozen other activists were subpoenaed before grand juries in New York, Detroit and Washington. All refused to answer questions. Some taunted the feds, like Judy Gumbo Albert, the driver of the car stopped in Pennsylvania, who declared of the bombing: “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.” Prosecutors had to decide whether to bring Bacon to trial anyway. But by the time the matter came up, the Supreme Court had issued a decision that effectively would have forced the government to disclose details of its surveillance. The Watergate burglars had just been caught, and the last thing the administration needed was another bugging scandal. Nixon himself ordered the Bacon case dropped. She and the other activists went free. Bacon has continued to say she had nothing to do with the bombing.

The Weather Underground continued to stage nonlethal bombings in the 1970s, notably a blast inside a Pentagon bathroom and at the State Department. (They called ahead on those, too.) When the Vietnam War finally ended, the group lost its center of gravity. By 1980, Weather had effectively disbanded. Dohrn, along with her husband and fellow member, Bill Ayers, came out of hiding. They didn’t go to prison. The government had dropped most charges against them for the same reason they couldn’t prosecute Leslie Bacon, and also because agents on a desperate hunt for clues had been caught conducting illegal break-ins at homes of the fugitives’ friends and relatives. The FBI’s overreach had backfired, but the era of left-wing extremism imploded on its own.

Kathy Boudin was one of the few who remained underground. In 1981, she helped a group called the Black Liberation Army rob an armored Brink’s truck outside New York City. Two police officers and a guard were killed, the militants were captured. Boudin and her romantic partner, David Gilbert, went to prison. She left their 14-month-old son to be raised by her closest friends, Dohrn and Ayers, who became academics in Chicago.

A grand jury subpoenaed Dohrn in the Brink’s case. When she refused to give a handwriting sample, she was jailed for eight months. Her friend Boudin spent 22 years in prison, winning parole in 2003, and now serves as co-director of the Center for Justice at Columbia University.

Neither has disclosed anything specific about Weather’s activities, but Dohrn has spoken in general about those days, with some regret if not quite an apology. “Now, nobody in today’s world can defend bombings,” she said in a November 2008 interview with Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now.” “How could you do that after 9/11, after, you know, Oklahoma City? It’s a new context, in a different context … the context of the time has to be understood.”

In the same interview her husband said: “I think that if we’ve learned one thing from those perilous years, it’s that dogma, certainty, self-righteousness, sectarianism of all kinds is dangerous and self-defeating.”

As a slogan of the 1960s went, what goes around comes around. That 14-month-old son who Dohrn and Ayers raised for Boudin? He became a Rhodes scholar, a lawyer and a public defender. In 2019, he was elected district attorney of San Francisco, a job once held by Vice President Kamala Harris. And on Jan. 6, as the pro-Trump mob attacked, Chesa Boudin sent out a tweet: “Hoping everyone who works in the Capitol is safe from this despicable effort to take down our democracy.”

Fifty years on, it seems remarkable how fast the 1971 attack faded from collective memory, even as it exercised a profound effect on the end of an era of political activism that would be unrivaled until the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The bombing supercharged Nixon’s paranoia, leading the president and his aides to ramp up their crackdown on the New Left. They ordered the biggest, and most unconstitutional, mass arrests in U.S. history during the Mayday protests, rounding up more than 12,000 people. And then weeks later, the White House launched illegal measures to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. On Labor Day weekend, Krogh dispatched operatives to break into the office of Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, searching for compromising material. Nixon’s men were field-testing the tactics they’d soon be caught using against their political opponents in the 1972 election. Thus, you can draw a line, if a dotted one, from the bombing to the demise of Richard Nixon in 1974. Donald Trump, meanwhile, still awaits the consequences of the Jan. 6 attack.

 

 

ATTACHMENT SIX – From http://chicago68.com/index.html

       (Part One – 1967 to 1970… see part two next DJI)

 

1967

August 15: At a convention of the National Student Association, veteran organizers Allard K. Lowenstein and Curtis Gans formally launch the Dump Johnson movement—an effort to oppose the renomination of Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson.

August 31: Five-day convention of the National Conference for a New Politics opens in Chicago. 3,000 delegates from some 200 left, community, and civil rights groups convene to discuss an electoral strategy for 1968. Some want a third-party slate with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., running for President and peace activist Dr. Benjamin Spock for Vice-president. But the conference breaks up in rancor and division. Leftists who want to be active in a presidential race have nowhere to turn but the Democratic Party.

September 23: Allard Lowenstein meets with New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy declines to run as the candidate of the anti-Johnson movement. (In his search for a candidate, Lowenstein will ask California Congressman Don Edwards, Idaho Senator Frank Church, Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith, General James M. Gavin, and South Dakota Senator George S. McGovern; none accept the role.)

October 8: The Democratic Party announces that the 1968 Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago.

October 16: Stop the Draft Week protests begin across the country. In eighteen cities, 12-15,000 young men burn or turn in their draft cards.

October 17: 3,000 militant demonstrators attempt to block access to the Oakland, California, army induction center. Oakland police clear the streets using clubs, injuring 20 protesters, bystanders, and journalists.

October 20: In Oakland, in a final Stop the Draft Week protest, 10,000 demonstrators gather at the army induction center. Running, regrouping, and creating barricades, the demonstrators evade, attack, and attacked by the police. Few injuries or arrests result.

Also on this date, Allard Lowenstein meets with Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy. McCarthy agrees to be the candidate of the anti-Johnson movement.

October 21-22: The National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) organizes an antiwar rally near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, followed by a march to the Pentagon, where another rally would be held in a parking lot, and ending with civil disobedience on the steps of the Pentagon itself. Jerry Rubin, who had been active in antiwar activities in Berkeley, CA, since 1965, was the key MOBE organizer. About 70,000 attend the Lincoln Memorial rally and 50,000 march to the Pentagon. About 650 people are arrested for civil disobedience. Afterwards, MOBE begins to talk about antiwar protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where President Johnson is expected to be nominated for a second term.

November 18: Governor George Romney of Michigan declares his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. “A Republican president,” he says, “can work for a just peace in Vietnam unshackled by the mistakes of the past.”

November 30: Senator Eugene McCarthy officially enters the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, running on an antiwar platform.

December 31: New York activists partying at Abbie Hoffman’s loft—including Jerry Rubin, Nancy Kurshan, Paul Krassner, and Anita Hoffman—resolve to hold a Festival of Life during the Democrats’ “Convention of Death.” Krassner christens the group “Yippies.”

1968

January 2: Dick Gregory, a black comedian who has become active in the civil rights movement, announces that he will organize protests and marches in Chicago before and during the Democratic National Convention to force the City to enact a stronger fair housing ordinance and take other steps to address civil rights issues in Chicago.

January 5: Dr. Benjamin Spock and four others are indicted in Boston on federal charges of conspiring to counsel draft evasion.

January 21: North Vietnamese troops surround the Khe Sanh combat base and begin a seventy-seven day siege of the 6,000 U.S. Marines stationed there.

January 23: North Korea seizes the U.S.S. Pueblo, a Navy intelligence ship which the North Koreans claim had violated their territorial waters. One U.S. sailor is killed and 82 are taken prisoner.

January 30: The Tet offensive begins in South Vietnam; Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops strike at targets across South Vietnam, reaching even the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Often cited as a turning point in public support for the war. American troops will peak at 542,000 during 1968.

February 1: Richard Nixon enters the race for the Republican nomination for President. Nixon says that the war in Vietnam should be prosecuted “more effectively.”

February 8: Alabama Governor George Wallace enters the presidential race as an Independent, his second run at the office. (Wallace had run in three Democratic presidential primaries in 1964, taking 30% of the vote in Wisconsin, a bit under 30% in Indiana, and 40% in Maryland.)

Also on this date, three black students are killed and twenty-seven are wounded on the campus of South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, SC, when state troopers fire on two hundred demonstrators demanding the integration of a local bowling alley. The incident is known as the Orangeburg Massacre.

February 27: CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite concludes a special report on Vietnam and the Tet offensive with an editorial, in which he says: “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” President Johnson is said to have responded: “That’s it. If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

February 28: Romney withdraws from the Republican race.

March 12: Voters in the New Hampshire primary give President Johnson only a narrow victory over antiwar candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy.

March 16: Senator Robert Kennedy reverses his earlier decision and announces his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, criticizing Johnson for his handling of the war.

Also on this date, in South Vietnam, Charlie Company (11th Brigade, Americal Division) enters the village of My Lai and kills over 300 apparently unarmed civilians. The American public will not learn about the My Lai killings until November 1969.

March 21: Nelson A. Rockefeller, governor of New York, announces he will not seek the Republican nomination for president, but will be available for a draft. Rockefeller notes that “a considerable majority of the party’s leaders” favor Nixon.

March 22-23: A MOBE conference in Lake Villa, Illinois brings together MOBE, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and Yippie activists to plan the Convention demonstrations.

March 31: Lyndon Johnson announces a halt to bombing in North Vietnam, deployment of an additional 13.500 troops to Vietnam, and also states, surprisingly, that he will neither seek nor accept the Democratic nomination for president.

April 4: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots break out in more than a hundred cities. On the west side of Chicago, nine blacks are killed and twenty blocks are burned. 5,000 US Army soldiers from Fort Hood in Texas are flown into Chicago to suppress the riot.

April 11: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968. While primarily addressing open housing, the Act also includes a new federal anti-riot law, making it a crime to cross state lines with the intent to incite a riot.

April 15: Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley publicly criticizes Superintendent of Police James Conlisk’s cautious handling of the riots that followed King’s assassination. He said he was giving the police specific instructions “to shoot to kill any arsonist and to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting.”

On the same day, Dick Gregory, citing “inflammatory” conditions in Chicago, says he will not lead any demonstrations during the August Convention.

April 23: At Columbia University in New York, students opposed to the university’s defense contracts and their plans for a new gymnasium to be built on Harlem park land occupy several campus buildings. They are routed by city police a week later: 150 injuries, 700 arrests.

April 26: The Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SMC) organizes a nationwide student strike against the war. One million students participate in this first national student strike since the 1930s.

April 27: An antiwar march in Chicago draws 8,000 people. When the march ends, Chicago police order the crowd to disperse, then wade in with clubs. The unofficial Sparling report criticizes the police and the Daley administration.

Also on this date, Vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

April 30: Nelson Rockefeller, five weeks after taking himself out of contention, now enters the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

May 1: The May offensive begins, a second phase of the Tet offensive, with North Vietnamese and Vietcong striking numerous targets across South Vietnam, most visibly in Saigon. 2,416 American soldiers will die in combat in May, the highest monthly loss of the war.

May 6-30: Student demonstrations in France lead to a general strike throughout the country. Ten million workers strike, 10,000 battle police in Paris.

May 10: Peace talks open in Paris with Averell Harriman representing the U.S. and Xan Thuy representing North Vietnam. Talks soon deadlock over the North Vietnamese demand for an end to all U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.

May 13: In Washington D.C., Resurrection City rises, a demonstration by the Poor People’s Campaign.

May 14: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, sends a memorandum to all FBI field offices initiating a counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) to disrupt new left groups. [The FBI was not the only Federal agency spying on antiwar organizations. The U.S. Army began an intelligence gathering operation in July 1967; Conus Intel placed army agents in antiwar groups. In August 1967 the CIA set up a Special Operations Group to investigate alleged links between antiwar protesters and foreign governments; later called Operation CHAOS, the program included wiretaps, mail openings, and burglaries.]

June 5: Senator Robert Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles moments after declaring victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.

June 14: In Boston, Dr. Benjamin Spock and three other defendants are convicted of conspiring to counsel draft evasion. One defendant is acquitted.

June 23: A group of Connecticut McCarthy supporters, disgruntled at being under-represented in their state’s delegation to the upcoming national convention, meet to create a Commission on the Selection of Presidential Nominees. This commission will submit proposals to the convention’s Rules Committee calling for an end to the practice of winner-takes-all in state delegations. [The 1968 convention agreed to study the issue. The resulting committee, the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection—which would be chaired by Senator George McGovern—made recommendations that were adopted by the Democratic National Committee in 1971 and effectively placed control of the Democratic presidential nomination process beyond the reach of the traditional party regulars.]

June 29: 1,200 disaffected Democrats meet in Chicago as the Coalition for an Open Convention, an effort largely organized by Allard Lowenstein. The group concludes that time is too short to mount a fourth-party bid for the presidency. They pass a resolution opposing Humphrey. The group’s course of action in the event that Humphrey does not get the nomination is unclear; Lowenstein says: “If we get to that bridge, I’ll jump off it.”

July 15: The Yippies apply to the city of Chicago for permits to camp in Lincoln Park (about two miles north of the Chicago Loop) during the convention and to rally at Soldier Field (on the lakefront southeast of the Loop).

July 29: MOBE applies for permits to march to and rally at the International Amphitheatre (site of the Democratic Convention and about five miles southwest of the Loop) and to march to and rally in Grant Park (just east of the Loop). All permits are denied, except one allowing the use of the Grant Park bandshell for a rally. [In 1968 the bandshell was located at the far south end of Grant Park, near the Field Museum.]

August 5: On the day that the Republican National Convention opens in Miami Beach, Florida, California governor Ronald Reagan declares he is a candidate for the Republican nomination. Reagan had received more votes in the 1968 Republican primaries than any other candidate, including Nixon.

August 8: Richard M. Nixon wins the Republican party’s nomination for President. The first foreign policy objective of his administration, he says in his acceptance speech, will be “to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.” At the same time, not far away in the black neighborhoods of Miami, riots result in four deaths and hundreds of arrests.

August 10: Senator George S. McGovern announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

August 20: Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops deploy to Czechoslovakia, bringing to an end the short-lived liberalization of the Prague Spring reform movement.

More than 5,000 Illinois National Guard troops deploy to Chicago in anticipation of marches and demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention.

The Democratic party's credentials committee votes to block the seating of the Mississippi delegation because the all-white delegation does not adequately represent Democratic voters in the state. A delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party is approved for seating.

Convention Week

August 22, Thursday: In early morning hours, Dean Johnson, a seventeen-year-old Sioux Indian from South Dakota, apparently in Chicago for the Festival of Life, is shot dead by police on Wells Street. Police say he pulled a gun. A Yippie-organized memorial march is held later in the day.

The Democratic party's credentials committee compromises on a challenge to the all-white Georgia delegation. The Georgia delegation votes are to be equally split between a group of delegates headed by Gov. Lester Maddox and another group headed by State Rep. Julian Bond.

August 23, Friday: At the Civic Center plaza (located in the Loop and now known as the Daley Center) the Yippies nominate their presidential contender—Pigasus the pig. Seven Yippies and the pig are arrested.

Illinois National Guardsman and special Chicago police platoons practice riot-control drills.

At Fort Hood, Texas 3,000 soldiers are mobilized for riot-control duty in Chicago; about one hundred soldiers hold an all-night demonstration and pledge to refuse the deployment. On Saturday morning forty-three soldiers—all of them African American—are arrested. [With additional troops from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Fort Carson, Colorado, about 5,000 US Army soldiers arrive in Chicago on Sunday and are quartered at Glenview Naval Air Station and the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, both near Chicago. They are not used during Convention Week.]

August 24, Saturday: MOBE’s marshal training sessions continue in Lincoln Park. Karate, snake dancing, and crowd protection techniques are practiced. Women Strike for Peace holds a women-only picket at the Hilton Hotel, where many delegates are staying. At the 11 PM curfew, poet Allan Ginsberg, chanting, and musician Ed Sanders lead people out of the park.

August 25, Sunday: MOBE’s “Meet the Delegates” march gathers 800 protesters in Grant Park across from the Hilton Hotel. The Festival of Life, in Lincoln Park, opens with music. 5,000 hear the MC-5, from Detroit, play for about half-an-hour. Then, police refuse to allow a truck to be brought in as a stage. A fracas breaks out in which several are arrested and others are clubbed. Police reinforcements arrive.

At the 11 PM curfew, most of the crowd, now numbering around 2,000, leave the park ahead of a police sweep and congregate between Stockton Drive and Clark Street. The police line then moves into the crowd, pushing it into the street. Many are clubbed, reporters and photographers included. The crowd disperses into the Old Town area, where the battles continue.

August 26, Monday: In the early morning, Tom Hayden is among those arrested. 1,000 protesters march towards police headquarters at 11th and State. Dozens of officers surround the building. The march turns north to Grant Park, swarming the General Logan statue. Police react by clearing the hill and the statue.

At the International Amphitheatre, Mayor Daley formally opens the 1968 Democratic National Convention. [The convention would have been held in McCormick Place on the Chicago lakefront, but it was destroyed by fire in January 1967.] In his welcoming address, Daley says: “As long as I am mayor of this city, there’s going to be law and order in Chicago.”

As the curfew approaches, some in Lincoln Park build a barricade against the police line to the east. About 1,000 remain in the park after 11 PM. A police car noses into the barricade and is pelted by rocks. Police move in with tear gas. Like Sunday night, street violence ensues. But it is worse. Some area residents are pulled off their porches and clubbed. More reporters are attacked this night than at any other time during the week.

August 27, Tuesday: At 1 PM 200 members of the American Friends Service Committee and other pacifist groups leave a near-northside church to march to the Amphitheatre. Joined by others along their route, the marchers eventually number about 1,000. The police stop the march at 39th and Halstead, about half-a-mile north of the Amphitheatre. The marchers set up a picket line and remain in place until 10 AM the next morning. They are then ordered to disperse and 30 resisters are arrested. This is the only march of Convention Week that gets anywhere near the Amphitheatre—it also gets virtually no publicity.

About 7 PM Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale speaks in Lincoln Park. He urges people to defend themselves by any means necessary if attacked by the police.

An “Unbirthday Party for LBJ” convenes at the Chicago Coliseum. Performers and speakers include Ed Sanders, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Terry Southern, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, and Rennie Davis. 2,000 later march from the Coliseum to Grant Park.

In Lincoln Park, 200 clergy and lay church people, toting a 12-foot cross, join 2,000 protesters to remain in the park past curfew. Again, tear gas and club-swinging police clear the park. Many head south to the Loop and Grant Park.

At Grant Park, in front of the Hilton, where the television cameras are, 4,000 demonstrators rally to speeches by Julian Bond, Davis, and Hayden. Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow sing. The rally is peaceful. At 3 AM the National Guard relieve the police. The crowd is allowed to stay in Grant Park all night.

August 28, Wednesday: 10-15,000 gather at the Grant Park bandshell for the MOBE’s antiwar rally. Dellinger, Gregory, Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Jerry Rubin, Carl Oglesby, Hayden, and many others speak. 600 police surround the rally on all sides. National Guardsmen are posted on the roof of the nearby Field Museum.

In the Convention at the Amphitheatre, the peace plank proposed for the Democratic party platform is voted down.

At the bandshell rally, news of the defeat of the peace plank is heard on radios. A young man begins to lower the American flag flying near the bandshell. Police push through the crowd to arrest him. Then a group, including at least one undercover police officer, completes the flag lowering and raises a red or blood-splattered shirt. Police move in again. A line of MOBE marshals is formed between the police and the crowd. Police charge the marshal line. Rennie Davis is clubbed unconscious.

At rally’s end Dellinger announces a march to the Amphitheatre, while Hayden urges the crowd to move in small groups to the Loop. 6,000 join the march line, but, since it has no permit and the police refuse to allow it to use the sidewalks, the march does not move. After an hour of negotiation, the march line begins to break up. Protesters try to cross over to Michigan Avenue, but the Balbo and Congress bridges have been sealed off by National Guardsmen armed with .30 caliber machine guns and grenade launchers. The crowd moves north and finds that the Jackson Street bridge is unguarded. Thousands surge onto Michigan Avenue. Coincidentally, the mule train of Ralph Abernathy’s Poor People’s Campaign, which has a permit to go to the Amphitheatre, is passing south on Michigan. The crowd joins it. At Michigan and Balbo the crowd is halted again. Only the mule train is allowed to continue.

Shortly before 8 PM, Deputy Police Superintendent James Rochford orders the police to clear the streets. Demonstrators and bystanders are clubbed, beaten, Maced, and arrested. Some fight back and the attack escalates. The melee last about seventeen minutes and is filmed by TV crews positioned at the Hilton. At about 9:30 PM, first NBC News, then the other networks, interrupted their broadcasts of nominating speeches at the convention to play the tape from Michigan and Balbo. What would come to be called “The Battle of Michigan Aveneue” was seen by the nationwide audience watching the convention coverage, as well as by delegates watching monitors at the convention hall.

Inside the Amphitheatre, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, in his speech nominating George McGovern, denounces the “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” Mayor Daley’s shouted reaction was on-camera, but off-mike. Lip-readers later decoded a vulgar rage.

Channing E. Phillips, who had headed the RFK campaign in the District of Columbia, becomes the first African American formally nominated for president by a major poltical party. He recieives 67.5 votes.

Hubert H. Humphrey wins the party’s nomination on the first ballot.

When the convention adjourns for the day, 500 antiwar delegates march from the Amphitheatre to the Hilton; many join the 4,000 protesters in Grant Park. Again, protesters are allowed to stay in the park all night.

August 29, Thursday: Senator Eugene McCarthy addresses about 5,000 gathered in Grant Park. Several attempts are made to march to the Amphitheatre. A group of delegates try to lead a march but are turned back with tear gas. Dick Gregory invites all the demonstrators to his house, which happens to be in the direction of the Amphitheatre. This too is turned back, at 18th Street.

Near midnight, the 1968 Democratic National Convention is adjourned.

August 30, Friday: About 5 AM police raid a McCarthy campaign hospitality suite on the 15th floor of the Hilton Hotel, because objects were thrown from the windows. A relatively small incident escalates as more rooms of McCarthy campaign workers are entered and several people are hit with nightsticks.

The arrest count for Convention Week disturbances stands at 668. An undetermined number of demonstrators sustained injuries, with hospitals reporting that they treated 111 demonstrators. The on-the-street medical teams from the Medical Committee for Human Rights estimated that their medics treated over 1,000 demonstrators at the scene. The police department reported that 192 officers were injured, with 49 officers seeking hospital treatment.

During Convention Week, 308 Americans were killed and 1,144 more were injured in the war in Vietnam.

September 4: Richard Nixon opens his general election campaign with a parade through the Chicago Loop, cheered by about 250,000. The parade ends at the corner of Michigan and Balbo. That endpoint for the parade, says William Rentschler, Illinois chair of the campaign, provides a “strinking contrast with the grim and depressing disarray of the Democratic convention.”

September 7: In a phone call with President Johnson, Mayor Daley discusses prosecuting protesters under the new federal anti-riot law, which Johnson had signed in April. “I think we got the dope on them once and for all on conspiracy to riot,” says Daley. “If the attorney general goes along with us I think we will expose” Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, the Mobe, “and we’ll also include some of McCarthy’s friends.” Johnson cautions that his attorney general, Ramsey Clark, “doesn’t see this the way you and I see it.”

September 9: Chief Judge William J. Campbell of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois convenes a grand jury to investigate whether the organizers of the demonstrations had violated federal law and whether any police officers had interfered with the civil rights of the protestors.

In a press conference, Mayor Daley makes a now-famous slip of the tongue: “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

October 1: The House Committee on Un-American Activities convenes hearings to plumb the extent of Communist subversion in the Convention Week protests. Testifying over the course of the hearings are: Lt. Joseph Healy and Sgt. Joseph Grubisic, both of the Intelligence Division of the Chicago Police Department (the Red Squad); Robert Pierson, a Chicago police officer who went undercover and was Jerry Rubin’s bodyguard; Robert Greenblatt, national coordinator of MOBE; Dr. Quentin Young of the Medical Committee for Human Rights; and soon-to-be-indicted Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and David Dellinger. (The hearings recessed on October 3rd and were concluded December 2 through 5.)

October 5: A march without a permit in Derry, Northern Ireland is stopped by baton-wielding men of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The marchers were protesting discrimination in housing and employment. Images of beaten marchers are broadcast worldwide. The Derry march galvanizes Irish nationalist resistance and is often cited as the start of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland.

November 1: George Wallace holds a campaign rally in Chicago at the International Amphitheatre, site of the Democratic Convention. Ten thousand supporters give Wallace a 20-minute standing ovation at the rally.

November 5: Nixon is elected, defeating Humphrey by 500,000 votes. George Wallace receives about 13% of the vote nationwide and wins the electoral votes of five Southern states.

December 1: Public release of Rights in Conflict, commonly called the Walker Report. The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, charged with studying and reporting on urban riots, formed a Chicago Study Team headed by Daniel Walker, to investigate the Convention Week disturbances. They reviewed over 20,000 pages of statements from 3,437 eyewitnesses and participants, 180 hours of film, and over 12,000 still photographs. The Walker Report attached the label “police riot” to the events of Chicago ‘68. Read an excerpt—the summary to Rights in Conflict.

December 31: U.S. troop strength peaked at 549,500 in 1968. 16,592 American soldiers were killed in 1968, the highest toll for any year of the war.

1969

January 19-20: A counterinagural protest, called by the Mobe and organized primarily by David Dellinger and Rennie Davis, is held in Washington, DC. 10,000 attend a rally on January 19 and several thousand chant slogans and wave signs during the January 20 inaugural parade.

February 26: Thirteen individuals, including five who were convention delegates from New York, go on trial in Cook County Circuit Court on disorderly conduct charges related to the delegate-led attempt to march to the International Amphitheatre on Thursday, August 29. The trial takes 26 days—a record for disorderly conduct charges—and all the defendants are found guilty on April 14.

March 18: U.S. bombers hit targets in Cambodia in a covert expansion of the airwar. Nixon ordered the secret Cambodia bombing campaign, Operation Menu, even as he publicly claimed he wants to wind down the war.

March 20: Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner are indicted on Federal charges of conspiring to cross state lines “with the intent to incite, organize, promote, encourage, participate in, and carry out a riot.” Six defendants—Dellinger, Hayden, Davis, Hoffman, Rubin and Seale—are also individually charged with crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Each of the two charges carried a five-year sentence; each defendant thus faces a ten-year prison term. The indictment charges that Froines and Weiner, in addition to the conspiracy charge, “did teach and demonstrate to other persons the use, application and making of an incendiary device.”

The same Federal grand jury that returned these criminal indictments also charged eight Chicago policemen with civil rights violations for assaulting demonstrators and news reporters. None of the policemen were convicted. (Forty-one officers of the Chicago Police Department were disciplined after internal investigations, and two resigned, for infractions like removing their badges and nameplates while on duty during Convention Week.)

April 5: An Easter weekend antiwar march in Chicago draws 30,000 people.

May 9: A story by William Beecher in the New York Times reveals the secret bombing of Cambodia. Nixon orders wiretaps on National Security Council aides and journalists to find who the source of the story.

Also on this date, William Kunstler, attorney for the some of the conspiracy trial defendants, files a pretrial motion to compel the government to disclose any electronic surveillance (wiretapping) that the government conducted on the defendants.

June 8: Gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam begins as Nixon announces that 25,000 troops will be withdrawn.

June 13: By way of response to the pretrial motion in the conspiracy case, Attorney General John Mitchell submits an affidavit to the trial judge laying out the “Mitchell Doctrine”—that the governemnt could lawfully, by the authority of the Attorney General, conduct warrantless wiretapping of US citizens for reasons of national security.

June 18-22: SDS holds it national convention in Chicago. The organization splits into at least two factions—the Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM).

August 15-17: The Woodstock music festival—the Festival of Life a year late—convenes and communes in upstate New York.

September 24: The Chicago 8 conspiracy trial begins in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman.

October 8-11: The Weatherman faction of SDS—which split off from RYM—holds its National Actions—the Days of Rage—in Chicago. As if seeking revenge for Convention Week, pipe-wielding Weathermen race through the streets, attacking police, windows, and cars.

October 15: An estimated 2 million people across the country participate in the first Moratorium against the war. The Vietnam Moratorium Committee is headed by Sam Brown, David Mixner, and David Hawk, all former youth organizers from the 1968 McCarthy campaign.

November 5: The Chicago 8 becomes the Chicago 7, when a mistrial is declared in the case of Bobby Seale and a new, separate trial is ordered. After repeatedly asserting his right to an attorney of his own choosing or to defend himself, Seale had been bound and gagged in the courtroom. He is sentenced to four years for contempt of court. [The sentence is later reversed and Seale is never convicted of any Convention Week charges.]

November 15: A MOBE-organized march draws 500,000 people to Washington, D.C.; 150,000 attend a march in San Francisco.

December 4: In an early morning raid, Chicago police fire nearly 100 shots into a west side apartment. Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and Party member Mark Clark are killed. One or two shots were fired by the Panthers.

 

ATTACHMENT SEVEN – FROM the bbc

1968 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION: A 'WEEK OF HATE'

 

Published 27 August 2018

 

More than 50 years on, the Democratic Party's national convention of 1968 continues to haunt the party and cast a shadow over US politics, writes James Jeffrey.

The signs before the Democratic National Convention convened in Chicago from August 26 - 29 in 1968 were never good.

Anti-war protesters began arriving in the city the week before, vowing to change the party's policy toward the increasingly hated Vietnam War.

They included New Left radicals, long-haired hippies and so-called Yippies, members of the Youth International Party, a radical youth-oriented and countercultural offshoot of the 1960s' free speech and anti-war movements fomenting against the US government.

Some were bent on disrupting the convention by whatever means necessary, while others focused on more leftfield tactics such as holding a counter convention offering the likes of a nude grope-in for peace and prosperity, and workshops on joint rolling, guerrilla theatre and draft dodging.

Rumours were floated by some of the more imaginative protesters that they were going to inject LSD into the city's drinking water, and send out "stud teams" to seduce the wives and daughters of the delegates - all designed to unnerve the Democrat delegates and keep the Chicago police and investigative agencies guessing.

The city's tough-talking mayor Richard Daley wasn't taking any chances.

The force he mobilised against demonstrators included all the city's 12,000 police, supported by 6,000 armed National Guardsman and 1,000 intelligence agents from the FBI, CIA, Army and Navy. Another 6,000 US Army troops were put on standby.

"Not all protesters are angry, they have a point to make, but these protesters regarded the police as pigs, who in turn regarded them as draft-dodging hippies," says photojournalist Dennis Brack who covered the convention.

The International Amphitheatre hosting the convention was encircled by barbed wire and a long, high chain-link fence, while an 11pm curfew was imposed across the city.

The worst was expected by the city's authorities, and before the convention was over it had happened - a chaotic, bloody shambles from which the Democrat Party never fully recovered, changing and influencing the American political landscape up to today.

"It was the most intense week of hate I've ever experienced," Mr Brack said in an oral history interview given to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History in Austin, Texas, which houses Brack's archives.

"Combat heat is different. This was plain old one group hating another. I always stayed closer to the older cops. They were safer. But the younger cops could really hurt you."

As delegates checked into the Conrad Hilton Hotel near the convention centre, organisers of the protests were placed under electronic and direct personal surveillance, roadblocks barred avenues of entry, and jeeps with barbed wire on their bumpers took armed troops to expected trouble spots.

"It was a city under siege, like the sort of thing you would find in a third-world city," says Stephen Shames, who attended the convention both as a journalist for the underground press and as a protester.

America was on the edge - the decade appeared ensnared in unending violence both abroad and at home.

Detroit had been torn apart during the long, hot summer of 1967 by violent and bloody confrontations between blacks and police.

Riots had broken out in the capital Washington earlier in 1968 following the April assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, which was followed in June by the assassination of senator Robert Kennedy.

"We'd been covering confrontations and riots for two to three years," Mr Brack says. "All the journalists had their own riot gear, it was expected to happen back then. It was just another day at the office."

By Sunday 25 August, the day before the convention started, the city's Lincoln Park has been taken over by anti-war demonstrators waving banners and shouting obscenities about President Lyndon Johnson and chanting "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids have you killed today!"

That night about a thousand demonstrators defied the curfew, resulting in an estimated 500 police wading into the park waving truncheons.

"Their predominantly young prey fled or turned and hurled rocks, bottles and profanities at the enforcers, as reported and cameramen captured the scene," Jules Witcover, a journalist covering the convention, later wrote in his book The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America.

The animosity found its way into the International Amphitheatre when the convention started the next day.

Heated arguments and even scuffles broke out as the convention descended into a convoluted mess over what policy to take on the Vietnam War and who should be the Democratic nomination to run for president. Everything ran over schedule.

Come Tuesday night, even more protesters in Lincoln Park refused to observe the 11 o'clock curfew.

The police poured tear gas into the park, eventually driving out about 3,000 mostly young protesters, arresting 140 of them.

"Police burst out of the woods in selective pursuit of new(s) photographers," Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in the Washington Post.

"Pictures are unanswerable evidence in court. They'd taken off their badges, their name plates, even the unit patches on their shoulders to become a mob of identical, unidentifiable club-swingers."

The police knew they could get away with it.

"The city of Chicago ran on officially sanctioned violence," says University of Texas history professor James Galbraith, who attended the convention as a 16-year-old with his delegate and floor leader father.

"The protesters were an affront to the mayor's management of the convention, Daly was embarrassed and had no qualms about teaching them a lesson."

Clashes continued at other parks around the city, while inside the convention hall the atmosphere didn't improve.

At one point, Dan Rather, a well-known journalist covering the convention for CBS television, was assaulted on the convention floor by security personnel as he attempted to interview a delegate.

"Take your hands off me unless you plan to arrest me," Mr Rather shouted.

"I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan," Walter Cronkite, a CBS colleague with Rather, remarked on air.

Eventually the crowds outside decided to try and march on the convention hall and Conrad Hilton hotel.

The marches converged on Michigan Avenue and Balbo Drive where they met a police block. As protesters began chanting "The whole world is watching!" the police fired gas into the crowd, then charged and started to club whoever was closest to hand.

"Journalists felt their press cards would mean they'd be left alone - they were sorely disappointed," said Stephen Shames, who attended the convention both as a journalist for the underground press and as a protester. "The rules changed in Chicago."

What was later declared a "police riot" was beamed by television cameras into the convention hall itself and millions of American homes.

"In approximately half an hour, the complete breakdown of true law and order, and of the soul of the Democratic Party was shatteringly exposed on Michigan Avenue," Mr Witcover says.

By the end of the convention, the delegates finally managed to vote on Hubert Humphrey, the serving vice-president, receiving the Democratic nomination, although this incensed many protesters who saw it as an endorsement of more of the same, especially in relation to the war in Vietnam continuing.

The damage had been done, and the contrast with the orderly Republican National Convention that had occurred earlier at the beginning of August couldn't have been starker.

"The Democrats gave themselves a deep wound in 1968," Mr Galbraith says. "Scenes of highly telegenic violence conveyed the deep split and breakup of the Democratic party over the Vietnam War."

It was a gift to Republican politicians, including their party's presidential nomination, Richard Nixon, who offered his party as the only alternative that could resolve the Vietnam War dilemma peacefully and restore law and order at home.

"The shaken nation was set on a course of disappointment and division and self-doubt that bred distrust of its leaders and institutions, apathy and ultimately hostility toward both," Mr Witcover recalls in an online exhibition on the events of 1968 by the Dolph Briscoe Center.

"[1968 became the] pivotal year [when] something vital died - the post-World War II dream of an America that at last would face up to its most basic problems at home and abroad with wisdom, honesty and compassion."

Nixon won the subsequent presidential election that year, and then went on to win the 1972 election by a landslide - garnering 520 electoral votes to the 17 of Democrat nominee George McGovern.

Although the Democrats got back into the White House in 1977 with Jimmy Carter defeating Gerald Ford, it didn't last long.

By 1981 the Republicans were back in with the election of Ronald Reagan, who proceeded to reverse much of the Great Society, a set of domestic programmes to eliminate poverty and injustice, envisaged and started by Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party.

"The Democrat party lost its working-class base," Mr Galbraith says.

"Today it appeals to two tails of the economy: well-off urban professionals and minorities, making it hard for the party to have a coherent message, which is what the Republicans have. The Democrat split deepened and led to Donald Trump today."

 

Another lesson from Chicago that persists today, Mr Galbraith notes, was about how authority in America reacts to dissenters.

The sanctioning of official violence against minorities and counterculture has become an "American way of life," he says, which may partly explain why the level of protests seen in 1968 hasn't occurred again.

"Now there are a range of surveillance powers to increase the intimidation of organised street protestors, while the explicit militarisation and increased lethality of the police has been an ongoing issue," Mr Galbraith says.

"In 1968 they went in with tear gas and billy clubs - today if there was a similar situation it's hard to imagine what might happen."

(We imagined… and it happened.  DJI)

 

ATTACHMENT EIGHT – FROM Town and Country

The True Story Behind The Trial of the Chicago 7

 

Aaron Sorkin's film dramatizes one of the most unusual trials in the nation's history.

 

BY LIZ CANTRELL,  APR 19, 2021

The comparisons between America in 1968 and America in the past 12 months are easily drawn: mass protests, brutal clashes with police, calls for racial equity, a contentious presidential election, and a general feeling that the soul of the nation is at stake. With the past feeling less and less distant, the release of Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7—a movie that revisits a pivotal episode from 1968—on Netflix last fall felt particularly timely.

The film—with Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jeremy Strong, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt leading the cast—dramatizes the infamous trial of eight anti-Vietnam war activists in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which had seen violent encounters between police officers and protestors. (One defendant would have his trial severed from the rest, and the Chicago 8 became the Chicago 7.)

The trial was one of the most dramatic in American history, characterized by the judge's uncloaked hatred of the defendants; star testimony from some of the era's cultural icons, including Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Jesse Jackson, and Judy Collins; and disturbing visuals, like the only Black defendant being shackled and gagged in court.

The lead-up to the 1968 Democratic Convention was already heated.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago from Monday August 26 to Thursday August 29 to select the party's candidates for the upcoming presidential election. (President Lyndon B. Johnson was not seeking a second term.) The convention followed a year of violence and turbulence, marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 and Bobby Kennedy (who had been running for the Democratic nomination) on June 5. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine were ultimately nominated for president and vice president, respectively.

The biggest issue at the convention was the United States's ongoing involvement in the Vietnam War. The summer of 1968 had been brutal, with more than 1,000 American soldiers were dying each month. Ahead of the convention, protests were organized by members of the Youth International Party (known as "Yippies") and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE).

Seeking to tamp down dissent, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley denied all protest permits except one: to hold an afternoon rally at the old bandshell at the south end of Grant Park. Military troops were also deployed to the city ahead of the convention; 6,000 members of the National Guard and 6,000 Army troops joined the 12,000 member Chicago Police Department.

Soon, violence exploded between police and anti-Vietnam War protestors.

Thousands began gathering in Lincoln Park on Monday the 26th to camp out, defying an 11:00 pm curfew set by the mayor. That night, armed police in gas masks swept through the crowds, in a sign of what was to come.

The Grant Park rally on Wednesday, August 28 drew nearly 15,000 people. Afterwards, several thousand protesters attempted to march to the convention site at International Amphitheater, but were stopped by police in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, the Democratic party headquarters. Chanting, "the world is watching," the protestors sat down.

Conflict erupted when police used tear gas and batons and protesters retaliated by throwing rocks and bottles. TV networks abandoned the convention coverage for live footage of the street clashes, as a shocked nation looked on. Even inside the convention hall, things got heated: Dan Rather was famously punched in the stomach by security while trying to interview a Georgia delegate being escorted out of the building. The encounter was caught live on the air, and from the broadcast booth above, Walter Cronkite said of the overzealous police presence, "I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan.”

From the broadcast booth, Walter Cronkite said, "I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan."

Over the course of four days and nights, in what became known as the Battle of Michigan Avenue, over 600 protestors were arrested, and nearly 1,000 were injured and treated onsite or at area hospitals. Nearly 200 police officers were also injured. Journalists were also clubbed by police and had their film taken or camera gear destroyed.

Later that year, a comprehensive review by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence found that the police responded to taunts with "unrestrained attacks," and the episode came to be called a "police riot."

In the aftermath of the convention, a grand jury was convened to consider criminal charges against both protestors and police.

On March 20, 1969—after calling nearly 200 witnesses—a grand jury indicted eight protesters with various federal crimes and eight police officers with civil rights violations. By this time, President Richard Nixon was in office, having defeated the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey.

The eight defendants—Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner—were indicted under the newly-passed Civil Rights Act of 1968, which made it a federal crime to cross state lines with the intent to incite a riot. (Seale later had his trial severed during the proceedings, lowering the number of defendants from eight to seven; thereafter, the group became known as the Chicago 7.)

The Chicago 7 were a motley crew of activists.

Though there were police officers named in the indictments, the media attention focused almost wholly on the trial of the eight protestors:

           Rennie Davis, 27, was the national director of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)'s community     organizing programs.

·         David Dellinger, 53, was older than the other defendants and had a long history of activism. He had been arrested in 1943 for failing to report for his World War II draft physical and spent time in federal prison.

·         John Froines, 29, was a chemist.

·         Tom Hayden, 28, was the cofounder of the SDS (and is also known for his marriage to Jane Fonda).

·         Abbie Hoffman, 31, was the cofounder of the Youth International Party (also known as the "Yippies").

·         Jerry Rubin, 30, was the other cofounder of the Yippies.

·         Bobby Seale, 31, co-founded the Black Panther Party along with Huey P. Newton. He was the sole Black defendant in the trial, and the judge would order him to be tried separately.

·         Lee Weiner, 29, was a doctoral candidate, social worker, and teaching assistant. The trial was theatrical and contentious from all sides.

The trial began on September 24, 1969 and was presided over by Judge Julius Jennings Hoffman, United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. (He had no relation to the defendant Abbie Hoffman.)

The Nixon Justice Department's prosecutors were U.S. Attorney Thomas Foran and Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Schultz. All the defendants, except Seale, were represented primarily by William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, though several other lawyers assisted.

Early on, it was clear that this was no ordinary courtroom. Judge Hoffman was widely believed to favor the prosecution: when Bobby Seale requested that the trial be postponed so that his attorney Charles Garry could represent him (as Garry was unable to be present due to an illness), Judge Hoffman denied the postponement, and refused to allow Seale to represent himself. Seale argued this was illegal and racist, and Judge Hoffman ordered Seale to be bound, gagged, and chained to a chair. Seale appeared this way in court for several days, horrifying many onlookers. Ultimately, Judge Hoffman declared a mistrial for Seale and sentenced him to four years in prison for contempt of court (which was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals). The Chicago 8 then became the Chicago 7.

The defendants frequently insulted Judge Hoffman, who often cut off the defense lawyers and made derisive comments about the defendants' long hair. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were particularly vocal and pulled many courtroom stunts, at one time appearing ironically dressed in judicial robes. Abbie Hoffman—who blew a kiss to the jury when introduced—also once verbally equated Judge Hoffman with Adolf Hitler. At one point, the defendants draped a Viet Cong flag over the defense table.

Abbie Hoffman, who blew a kiss to the jury, dressed ironically in judicial robes with Jerry Rubin.

The trial went on for four months, with many cultural luminaries being called to testify, including popular singers Judy Collins and Arlo Guthrie; writers Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg; LSD activist Timothy Leary, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

While the jury deliberated on the verdict, Judge Hoffman cited all the defendants—plus their lawyers —for 152 contempts of court. William Kunstler was given four years in prison for addressing him as "Mr. Hoffman" instead as "Your Honor;" Abbie Hoffman received eight months for laughing in court; Hayden got one year for protesting the treatment of Seale, and Weiner two months for refusing to stand when Judge Hoffman entered the courtroom.

In the end, the Chicago 7 were found guilty of some charges, but their convictions were later overturned.

On February 18, 1970, each of the seven defendants was acquitted of conspiracy. Two (Froines and Weiner) were acquitted completely, while the remaining five were convicted of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. On February 20, they were sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5,000 each.

But two years later, on November 21, 1972, all of the convictions were reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which deemed that Judge Hoffman had been biased in not permitting defense attorneys to screen prospective jurors for cultural and racial bias. The court also determined that the FBI had bugged the defense lawyers' offices. The Justice Department decided against retrying the case.

The contempt charges were retried before a different judge, who found Dellinger, Rubin, Hoffman, and Kunstler guilty of some of the charges, but did not sentence them with any fines or prison time.

Fifty years later, the Chicago 7 story remains relevant.

In the five decades since those violent days at the Democratic Convention, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and David Dillinger have all passed away, while Bobby Seale, Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner are still alive. Last August, Weiner published a memoir about his experience.

Last year, with the ongoing protests against police brutality and the public outcry about the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others—not to mention concerns about the upcoming presidential election— the story of the Chicago 7 and the riots of 1968 felt all too prescient.

 

ATTACHMENT NINE – From the Chicago Trial transcript

 

TESTIMONY OF PHILIP DAVID OCHS

 

MR. KUNSTLER: Will you state your full name, please?

THE WITNESS: Philip David Ochs.

MR. KUNSTLER: What is your occupation?

THE WITNESS: I am a singer, a folksinger.

MR. KUNSTLER: Now, Mr. Ochs, can you indicate what kind of songs you sing?

THE WITNESS: I write all my own songs and they are just simple melodies with a lot of lyrics. They usually have to do with current events and what is going on in the news. You can call them topical songs, songs about the news, and then developing into more philosophical songs later.

MR. KUNSTLER: Now, Mr. Ochs, did there ever come a time when you met any of the defendants at this table?

THE WITNESS: Yes. I met Jerry Rubin in 1964 when he was organizing one of the first teach-ins against the war in Vietnam in Berkeley. He called me up. He asked me to come and sing.

MR. KUNSTLER: Now did you have any occasion after that to receive another such call from Mr. Rubin?

THE WITNESS: I met him a few times later in regard to other political actions. I met him in Washington at the march they had at the Pentagon incident, at the big rally before the Pentagon
.
MR. KUNSTLER: Now, Mr. Ochs, have you ever been associated with what is called the Youth International Party, or, as we will say, the Yippies?

THE WITNESS: Yes. I helped design the party, formulate the idea of what Yippie was going to be, in the early part of 1968.

MR. KUNSTLER: Can you indicate to the Court and jury what Yippie was going to be, what its purpose was for its formation?

THE WITNESS: The idea of Yippie was to be a form of theater politics, theatrically dealing with what seemed to be an increasingly absurd world and trying to deal with it in other than just on a straight moral level. They wanted to be able to act out fantasies in the street to communicate their feelings to the public.

MR. KUNSTLER: Now, were any of the defendants at the table involved in the formation of the Yippies?

THE WITNESS: Yes, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.

MR. KUNSTLER: Can you just point to and identify which one is Jerry Rubin and which one is Abbie Hoffman?

THE WITNESS: Yes, Jerry Rubin with the headband and Abbie Hoffman with the smile.

MR. KUNSTLER: Can you indicate in general to the Court and jury what the plans were for the Yippies in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention?

THE WITNESS: The plans were essentially--

MR. FORAN: I object.

THE COURT: I sustain the objection.

MR. KUNSTLER: Your Honor, one of the central roles in this case is the Yippie participation around the Democratic National Convention.

THE COURT: I don't see that allegation in the indictment.

MR. KUNSTLER: Well, the indictment charges these two men with certain acts in connection with the Democratic National Convention.

THE COURT: These two men and others, but not as Yippies, so-called, but-- as individuals.

MR. KUNSTLER: All right, your Honor, I will rephrase the question. Did there come a time when Jerry and Abbie discussed their plans?

THE WITNESS: Yes, they did, around the middle of January at Jerry's. Present there, besides Abbie and Jerry, I believe, was Paul Krassner and Ed Sanders. Tim Leary was there at one point.

MR. KUNSTLER: Can you tell the conversation from Jerry and Abbie, as to their plans in coming to Chicago around the Democratic National Convention?

THE WITNESS: OK. Jerry Rubin planned to have a Festival of Life during the National Convention, basically representing an alternate culture. They would theoretically sort of spoof the Convention and show the public, the media, that the Convention was not to be taken seriously because it wasn't fair, and wasn't going to be honest, and wasn't going to be a democratic convention. They discussed getting permits. They discussed flying to Chicago to talk with Mayor Daley. They several times mentioned they wanted to avoid violence. They went out of their way on many different occasions to talk with the Mayor or anybody who could help them avoid violence--

MR. KUNSTLER: Now, Mr. Ochs, do you know what guerrilla theater is?

THE WITNESS: Guerrilla theater creates theatrical metaphors for what is going on in the world outside.
For example, a guerrilla theater might do, let us say, a skit on the Viet Cong, it might act out a scene on a public street or in a public park where some actually play the Viet Cong, some actually play American soldiers, and they will dramatize an event, basically create a metaphor, an image, usually involving humor, usually involving a dramatic scene, and usually very short. This isn't a play with the theme built up. It's just short skits, essentially.

MR. KUNSTLER: Did Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman ask you to do anything at any time?

MR. FORAN: I object to that.

THE COURT: I sustain the objection.

MR. FORAN: I object to it as leading and suggestive.

MR. KUNSTLER: Did you have any discussion with Abbie and Jerry about your role?

THE WITNESS: Yes. In early February at Abbie's apartment.

MR. KUNSTLER: Can you state what Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin said to you and what you said to them?

THE WITNESS: They discussed my singing at the Festival of Life. They asked me to contact other performers to come and sing at the Festival. I talked to Paul Simon of Simon and Garfunkel. I believe I talked with Judy Collins.

MR. KUNSTLER: Did there come a time, Mr. Ochs, when you came to Chicago in 1968?

THE WITNESS: I came campaigning for Eugene McCarthy on M-Day, which I believe was August 15, at the Lindy Opera House, I believe.

MR. KUNSTLER: After you arrived in Chicago did you have any discussion with Jerry?

THE WITNESS: Yes, I did. We discussed the nomination of a pig for President.

MR. KUNSTLER: Would you state what you said and what Jerry said.

THE WITNESS: We discussed the details. We discussed going out to the countryside around Chicago and buying a pig from a farmer and bringing him into the city for the purposes of his nominating speech.

MR. KUNSTLER: Did you have any role yourself in that?

THE WITNESS: Yes, I helped select the pig, and I paid for him.

MR. KUNSTLER: Now, did you find a pig at once when you went out?

THE WITNESS: No, it was very difficult. We stopped at several farms and asked where the pigs were.

MR. KUNSTLER: None of the farmers referred you to the police station, did they?

THE WITNESS: No.

MR. FORAN: Objection.

THE COURT: I sustain the objection.

MR. KUNSTLER: Mr. Ochs, can you describe the pig which was finally bought?

MR. FORAN: Objection.

THE COURT: I sustain the objection.

MR. KUNSTLER: Would you state what, if anything, happened to the pig?

THE WITNESS: The pig was arrested with seven people.

Pigasus and the Yippies were charged with disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, and bringing a pig to Chicago. At the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, defense counsel William Kunstler accused the Democratic Party of doing exactly the same thing.[Rubin later said that a policeman came to the jail cell and said "You guys are all going to jail for the rest of your lives—the pig squealed on you!" However, the Yippies were released after each posted a $25 bond.  Sources vary on the fate of Pigasus. There is some speculation that a police officer ate him.  - DJI

MR. KUNSTLER: When did that take place?

THE WITNESS: This took place on the morning of August 23, at the Civic Center underneath the Picasso sculpture.

MR. KUNSTLER: Who were those seven people?

THE WITNESS: Jerry Rubin. Stew Albert, Wolfe Lowenthal, myself is four; I am not sure of the names of the other three.

MR. KUNSTLER: What were you doing when you were arrested?

THE WITNESS: We were arrested announcing the pig's candidacy for President.

MR. KUNSTLER: Did Jerry Rubin speak?

THE WITNESS: Yes, Jerry Rubin was reading a prepared speech for the pig---the opening sentence was something like, "I, Pigasus, hereby announce my candidacy for the Presidency of the United States." He was interrupted in his talk by the police who arrested us.

MR. KUNSTLER: What was the pig doing during this announcement?

MR. FORAN: Objection.

MR. KUNSTLER: Do you remember what you were charged with?

THE WITNESS: I believe the original charge mentioned was something about an old Chicago law about bringing livestock into the city, or disturbing the peace, or disorderly conduct, and when it came time for the trial, I believe the charge was disorderly conduct.

MR. KUNSTLER: Were you informed by an officer that the pig had squealed on you?

MR. FORAN: Objection. I ask it be stricken.

THE WITNESS: Yes.

THE COURT: I sustain the objection. When an objection is made do not answer until the Court has ruled. . .

* * * * * *

MR. KUNSTLER: Now, I call your attention to Sunday, August 25, 1968. Did you have any occasion to see Jerry Rubin?

THE WITNESS: Well, ultimately I saw him at his apartment in Old Town that night.

MR. KUNSTLER: Do you remember approximately what time that was?

THE WITNESS: I guess it was around, maybe, 9:30 approximately 9:30, 10:00. He was laying in bed. He said he was very ill. He was very pale. We had agreed to go to Lincoln Park that night, and so I said, "I hope You are still going to Lincoln Park." He said, "I don't know if I can make it, I seem to he very ill." I cajoled him, and I said, I said, "Come on. you're one of the Yippies. You can't not go to Lincoln Park." He said, "OK," and he got up, and he went to Lincoln Park with me, and I believe Nancy, his girlfriend, and my girlfriend Karen, the four of us walked from his apartment to Lincoln Park.

MR. KUNSTLER: And did you enter the park?

THE WITNESS: Just the outskirts, I mean we basically stood in front of the Lincoln Hotel, and walked across the street from the Lincoln Hotel and stood in the outskirts of the park.

MR. KUNSTLER: Now, did there come a time when people began to leave Lincoln Park?

THE WITNESS: Yes, I guess it was around eleven o'clock at night.

MR. KUNSTLER: What did you do at that time?

THE WITNESS: Continued standing there. We stood there and watched them run right at us, as a matter of fact.

MR. KUNSTLER: Who was with you at this time?

THE WITNESS: The same people I mentioned before.

MR. KUNSTLER: Had you been together continuously since You first left the apartment?

THE WITNESS: Continuously.

MR. KUNSTLER: And from the time you left the apartment to this time, did you see Jerry Rubin wearing a helmet at any time?

THE WITNESS: No.

MR. KUNSTLER: By the way, how long have you known Jerry Rubin?

THE WITNESS: I have known Jerry Rubin approximately four years.

MR. KUNSTLER: Have you ever seen him smoke a cigarette?

THE WITNESS: No.

MR. KUNSTLER: Mr. Ochs, you said there came a time when you left the area. Where did you go?

THE WITNESS: We walked through the streets following the crowd.

MR. KUNSTLER: And can you describe what you saw as you followed the crowd?

THE WITNESS: They were just chaotic and sort of unformed, and people just continued away from the park and just seemed to move, I think toward the commercial area of Old Town where the nightclubs are and then police Clubs were there too, and it was just a flurry of movement of people all kinds of ways.

MR. SCHULTZ: If the Court please, the witness was asked what he observed and that was not responsive to the question. If you would simply tell the witness to listen carefully to the question so he can answer the questions.

THE COURT: I did that this morning. You are a singer but you are a smart fellow, I am sure.

THE WITNESS: Thank you very much. You are a judge and you are a smart fellow.

THE COURT: I must ask you to listen carefully to the questions of the lawyer and answer the question. Answer the questions; do not go beyond them.

MR. KUNSTLER: At any time, did you see Jerry Rubin enter Lincoln Park?

THE WITNESS: No.

MR. KUNSTLER: Now, Mr. Ochs, I call your attention to sometime in the vicinity of 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, August 27. Did you see Jerry Rubin?

THE WITNESS: Yes, in Lincoln Park. He asked me to come and sing at a meeting.

MR. KUNSTLER: Do you know what time approximately you sang after arriving there, how long after arriving there?

THE WITNESS: Approximately a half-hour.

MR. KUNSTLER: Was anything happening in that half-hour while you were there?

THE WITNESS: Bobby Seale was speaking.

MR. KUNSTLER: Did Jerry Rubin speak at all?

THE WITNESS: Yes, after I sang.

MR. KUNSTLER: Did you sing a song that day?

THE WITNESS: Yes, "I Ain't Marching Anymore."

MR. KUNSTLER: Did you sing at anybody's request?

THE WITNESS: At Jerry Rubin's request. .

MR. KUNSTLER: I am showing you what has been marked at D-147 for identification and I ask you if you can identify that exhibit.

THE WITNESS: This is the guitar I played "I Ain't Marching Anymore" on.

THE COURT: How can you tell? You haven't even looked at it.

THE WITNESS: It is my case.

THE COURT: Are you sure the guitar is in there?

THE WITNESS: I am checking.

MR. KUNSTLER: Open it up, Mr. Ochs, and see whether that is your guitar,

THE WITNESS: That is it, that is it.

MR. KUNSTLER: Now, would you stand and sing that song so the jury can hear the song that the audience heard that day?

MR. SCHULTZ: If the Court please, this is a trial in the Federal District Court. It is not a theater. We don't have to sit and listen to the witness sing a song. Let's get on with the trial. I object.

MR. KUNSTLER: Your Honor, this is definitely an issue in the case. Jerry Rubin has asked for a particular song to be sung. What the witness sang to the audience reflects both on Jerry Rubin's intent and on the mood of the crowd.

THE COURT: I sustain the objection.

MR. KUNSTLER: Your Honor, he is prepared to sing it exactly as he sang it on that day,

THE COURT: I am not prepared to listen, Mr. Kunstler.

MR. KUNSTLER: Do you recall how long after you sang in Lincoln Park that you were somewhere else?

THE WITNESS: I arrived at the next place around seven-thirty, quarter to eight at the Coliseum.

MR. KUNSTLER: Were any of the defendants present at that time?

THE WITNESS: Abbie Hoffman was there, and I do not remember if Jerry Rubin was there.

MR. KUNSTLER: Where did you see Abbie Hoffman first that night at the Coliseum?

THE WITNESS: When he raced in front of me on the stage when I was introduced to Ed Sanders. He said, "Here's Phil Ochs," and as I walked forward, Abbie Hoffman raced in front of me and took the microphone and proceeded to give a speech. I was upstaged by Abbie Hoffman.

MR. KUNSTLER: At the time when you first saw Abbie Hoffman there that night, can you approximate as best you can the time it was when you first saw him take the microphone?

THE WITNESS: Approximately 8:30.

MR. KUNSTLER: Your Honor, I have no further questions.

* * * * * *

MR. SCHULTZ: You were at the Bandshell, were you not?

THE WITNESS: Yes.

MR. SCHULTZ: What time did you arrive at the Bandshell?

THE WITNESS: I don't remember. I'd guess it was around three or after in the afternoon.

MR. FORAN: You seem to have a little trouble with time. Do you carry a watch with you?

THE WITNESS: Just lately.

MR. FORAN: As a matter of fact, when it comes to time during that week, it is pretty much of a guess, isn't it?

THE WITNESS: I guess so.

MR. FORAN: And the time you arrived at the Coliseum it was 9:00 or 9:30, isn't that right? Or at 6:00 or 6:30?

THE WITNESS: No, because the normal opening time of the shows was around 8:00 and I think the show was starting when I got there. That is a safer guess than the other time.

MR. FORAN: It is still a guess though, isn't it?

THE WITNESS: Yes, it is a guess.

MR. SCHULTZ: And now you say at the Coliseum, Abbie Hoffman upstaged you, is that right?

THE WITNESS: Yes. I was walking toward the microphone and he raced in front of me.

MR. SCHULTZ: And he led the crowd in a chant of "Fuck LBJ" didn't he?

THE WITNESS: Yes, yes, I think he did.

MR. SCHULTZ: You didn't remember that on direct examination very well, didn't you?

THE WITNESS: I guess not.

MR. SCHULTZ: Abbie Hoffman is a friend of yours, isn't he?

THE WITNESS: Yes and no.

MR. SCHULTZ: Now in your plans for Chicago, did you plan for public fornication in the park?

THE WITNESS: I didn't.

MR. SCHULTZ: In your discussions with either Rubin or Hoffman did you plan for public fornication in the park?

THE WITNESS: No, we did not seriously sit down and plan public fornication in the park.

MR. SCHULTZ: Did Rubin say at any of these meetings that you must cause disruptions during the Convention and on through Election Day, mass disruptions?

THE WITNESS: No.

MR. SCHULTZ: Was there any discussion when you were planning your Yippie programs by either Rubin or Hoffman of going into the downtown area and taking over hotels for sleeping space?

THE WITNESS: No.

MR. SCHULTZ: Did the defendant Rubin during your planning discussion tell you if he ever had the opportunity and at one of his earliest opportunities he would, when he found some policemen who were isolated in the park, draw a crowd around him and bring the crowd to the policemen and attack the policemen with rocks and stones and bottles, and shout profanities at the policemen, tell them to take off their guns and fight? Did he ever say he was going to do that?

THE WITNESS: No, he didn't, Mr. Schultz.

MR. SCHULTZ: Now, Mr. Ochs, you say that on Sunday night you were with Mr. Rubin all night, is that right?

THE WITNESS: From 9:30 maybe, until after 12:00.

MR. SCHULTZ: And of course you have been told by somebody that there is evidence that Mr. Rubin was in Lincoln Park that night, isn't that right? Well, were you told, or not?

THE WITNESS: Yes.

MR. SCHULTZ: Were you told that somebody saw him with a cigarette in his hand?

THE WITNESS: No, I was not told that.

MR. SCHULTZ: Well, what were you told, please?

THE WITNESS: I was told very little. I was told that Jerry was accused of something

MR. SCHULTZ: Who told you all these things?

THE WITNESS: Mr. Kunstler told me the one thing, not all these things, something that Jerry was accused of something in the park on Sunday night, and that's all I was told, nothing else.

MR. SCHULTZ: You don't want to get Mr. Kunstler into trouble, do you?

MR. KUNSTLER: Your Honor, first of all--

MR. SCHULTZ: Suddenly he backs off--suddenly he backs off. It is all too patent, your Honor.

THE COURT: Will the record show that Mr. Kunstler--

MR. KUNSTLER: Yes, I did, your Honor, I think it is a disgraceful statement in front of a jury.

THE COURT: --threw a block of papers noisily to the floor.

MR. KUNSTLER: All right. I dropped papers noisily to the floor.

THE COURT: I shall not hear from you in that tone, sir.

MR. KUNSTLER: I am sorry for putting the paper on the table, and it fell off onto the floor, but to say in front of a jury, "That is too patent" and "What are you backing off for?" I think, your Honor, any Court in the land would hold that is unconscionable conduct, and if I am angry, I think I am righteously so in this instance.

THE COURT: That will be all.
Continue with your cross-examination.

MR. SCHULTZ: In any event, Mr. Ochs, you are absolutely sure you never really went beyond the fringes of the park with Jerry Rubin that night, isn't that right?

THE WITNESS: Yes.

MR. SCHULTZ: You just stood right along the fringes all that night, you never went in to see what was happening at the command post, did you?

THE WITNESS: No.

MR. SCHULTZ: You never walked in to see what was happening at the fieldhouse, did you?

THE WITNESS: No.

MR. SCHULTZ: That is all, your Honor.

THE COURT: You may step down.

(witness excused)

THE COURT: Don't forget your guitar.

THE WITNESS: I won't.

THE COURT: Call your next witness.

 

 

ATTACHMENT TEN – From the Post-independent (Garfield, CO) 

 

GUEST OPINION: NAZIS HAVE NEVER BEEN ON MY SIDE OF A PROTEST MARCH

Jean Perry, January 15, 2021

Protest is an important part of the process in our country. Where would we be today without the hippies, the suffragettes, good ole Samuel Adams … we must use our voice in government, and protest is built into the structure of our history.

However, what happened on January 6th was not a protest.

Whenever I’m at a protest I can’t help but notice the myriad people marching alongside me: women, men, children, older adults, pets — the hoary and the hairy. We’re all usually talking and chanting and there’s a general feeling of safety in numbers, otherwise we wouldn’t bring our mother in a wheelchair or our toddler in his dinosaur costume.

I’ve marched beside politicians and plumbers, veterans and anarchists, transvestites and debutantes. In fact, the only type of person I’ve never seen in the crowd is a Nazi. And that is my sure-fire way to know I am on the right side of history.

“I have found that in times of confusion, particularly when emotions are running high and creating tunnel vision, the presence of Nazis can be an extremely helpful indicator. If I am attending a local demonstration or event and I see Nazis — neo-Nazis, miscellaneous-Nazis, or the latest-whatever-uber-mythology-Nazis — I figure out which side they are on. And, if they are on my side of the demonstration? I am on the wrong side.  I can always, always, always, rely on the presence of Nazis as a guiding light through a fog of disinformation.” — Rich O’Connor

I think it’s safe to say many of the Trump supporters at the Capitol were fed serious disinformation. Not misinformation, which can be a mistake. No, they were downright lied to. And it’s easy to get caught up in the energy of the event; anyone could miss the signs — like, why would zip ties be necessary to express First Amendment rights?

Human instincts are powerful and necessary for survival. Overriding an instinct with contemplation is not easy. The instinct to flee or fight after reading our neighbor’s body language when the lion decides to charge has gotten us this far. And the source of the information we absorb daily contributes to our E.Q. as well as our I.Q.

Back in the day, we would head down to the town square to catch up on the latest news and interact with fellow villagers. Now, we tune in to Fox News or Facebook to watch the latest feeding frenzy, and today’s news is all filtered through corporate consumerism. Sell, Baby, Sell! Which means playing to our base instincts like fear, and loathing.

Trump’s supporters seemed more interested in taking selfies while trashing their own Capitol than effecting real change in the political pendulum process, but image is everything these days — even in a revolution.

Speaking of image, we need to talk about the rebel flag. Personally, I understand the attraction; it’s a catchy design with bold colors, but there’s a real problem with its historical significance and it’s one strike away from representing dismal failure; one civil war lost, one coup botched.

The only positive associations left are southern rock and the Dukes of Hazzard. To those of us who grew up in the 1970s, Bo and Luke Duke were heroes, speeding through their redneck woods, eluding dumb deputies while yakking on a CB radio … But in hindsight, we can set the hero bar a little higher, no?

Like Eugene Goodman, a black Capitol police officer who stood up to an angry white mob.

Officer Goodman shoved a man and then ran up the stairs in a brave attempt to draw attention away from the Senate chambers. Since Washington, D.C. is not a state, there was no governor to call in the National Guard, leaving the police outnumbered and alone in their efforts to defend the Capitol. This was an orchestrated attempt to seize control of the government and bring about our first dictator — Fuhrer Trump.

Hitler’s Nazi party studied America’s systemic racism while writing the Nuremberg Laws, and now I’m afraid some Americans have been duped into believing they are creating a defining moment in our country’s history, when in fact they are being used to perpetuate an old agenda. An agenda for Nazis.

Jean Perry is a freelance columnist from Carbondale.

 

ATTACHMENT ELEVEN – From Politifact

Fact-checking former President Donald Trump’s 'save America' rally in Iowa

 

Conjecture that former President Donald Trump is seeking back the White House job he held for four years continued to generate news— and fact checks — in Iowa on Saturday night, Oct. 9.

Trump’s latest visit was a Save America Rally that drew thousands of people to the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa, and was run by Trump’s Save America PAC.

We checked some of the Republican former president’s Iowa comments. Many are familiar from previous appearances across the country. But, they bear paying attention to because Iowa has held the nation’s first presidential nominating precinct caucuses and, so far, figures to do so again in 2024.

 

"Just this week the latest Des Moines Register poll showed that Biden is a record low, 31 percent approval in Iowa … While your all-time favorite president … is at a record high, the highest we’ve ever been." 

Trump has received high marks among Iowa voters, especially Republicans. The most recent Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, reported Oct. 4, showed that 53 percent of Iowans have a favorable view of Trump, while 45 percent have an unfavorable view. The approval numbers are better than he had when president, The Register reported. The poll questioned 805 adults between Sept. 12-15. Its margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Among Republicans, 91 percent had a favorable view of Trump in the Iowa Poll survey. Another 7 percent viewed him unfavorably, while 2 percent didn’t know, the survey showed. The flipside showed 99 percent of Democrats in Iowa viewing Trump unfavorably, and only 1 percent viewing him favorably. 

Whether it was a mistake or intentional, Trump flubbed the numbers on President Joe Biden’s favorability rating — in the same poll, 37 percent of voters said they had a favorable view of the president, not 31 percent.

Beyond the latest poll, Trump can point to his 2020 electoral performance in Iowa. He won 53 percent of the November vote for president, while Democrat Joe Biden collected 45 percent. Other candidates got the rest.

Few Iowans are ambivalent about Trump. In that latest Iowa Poll, only 2 percent said they were not sure how they feel about him.

But some Republicans in other parts of the United States have been upset by Trump’s rallies. In Perry, Georgia, on Sept. 25, Trump upset members of the Republican establishment by calling Gov. Brian Kemp a disaster and saying he’d prefer Democrat Stacey Abrams, a rising star in her party and a frequent target of derision among Republicans, as governor. 

"They’ve never been so successful as they are now because of what we did," talking about giving billions in subsidies to farmers.

Agriculture income was a mixed bag during the Trump Administration, in large part because of a trade war with China during which the federal government compensated farmers for lost sales. Net farm income – income minus expenses – increased from $75.1 billion to $81.1 billion from 2017 to 2018, went back to $79.1 billion in 2019 and up to $94.6 billion in 2020, U.S. Department of Agriculture data as of Sept. 2, 2021, show. 

That net income was helped by government assistance in 2018 and 2019 to counteract the trade wars and assistance in 2020 for COVID-19 pandemic-related losses. The USDA Economic Research Service reported that federal government assistance to farmers totaled $11.5 billion in 2017 and $13.7 billion in 2018 before jumping to $22.4 billion in 2019 and $45.7 billion in 2020. 

An analysis by The National Foundation for American Policy reported in January 2020 that Trump aid to farmers was exceeding federal spending on several federal government agencies. The nonpartisan research group, which focuses on immigration, international trade and other matters dealing with globalization and the economy, also reported that farm subsidies at that time exceeded how much the federal government spent on building naval ships and maintaining the United States’ nuclear arsenal.

The USDA’s most recent forecast calls for net farm income to increase 19.5% by $18.5 billion from 2020 to $113.0 billion in 2021. 

The Arizona forensic audit of the state’s 2020 presidential election results "showed massive irregularities."

PolitiFact looked into this when Trump previously made the false comment, which the fact-finders ruled to be "Pants on Fire." That report showed that a Republican-led review of the 2020 election totals in crucial Arizona showed Biden with 45,469 more votes than Trump in Maricopa, the state’s largest county. 

Not only was that close to the official results certified in November 2020, Cyber Ninjas, the firm hired to conduct the review, reported that Biden’s margin of victory was 360 votes larger than what the county’s official canvass showed.

Trump claimed that the audit showed "2,500 duplicate ballots," but that claim is misleading. The previous fact check found that duplicate ballots are created when election officials find a ballot has inconsistent signature information and they contact the voter, but only one ballot is actually counted. 

Trump also claimed that "10,324 voters might have voted in multiple counties." This is an exaggeration of what the report says, and Maricopa County officials have said that the report’s criteria were not stringent enough to prove duplicate voting. 

The report said it found 5,047 voters with the same first, middle, last name, and birth date, representing 10,342 votes among all Arizona counties. A report from Maricopa County officials, though, said the criteria used to identify voters resulted in false duplicates, and the firm should have used more specific criteria like social security number and driver’s license number.

"We won by a lot" in Wisconsin.

This is false. Biden won in Wisconsin with more than 20,000 more votes than Trump.

While he didn’t get into specifics, Trump made a similar claim about winning Wisconsin in August, which PolitiFact found to be "Pants on Fire." It involves an email exchange in the early morning hours after Election Day from an election consultant to Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee Elections Commission. 

"Damn, Claire, you have a flair for drama, delivering just the margin needed at 3:00 a.m." the consultant wrote. "I bet you had those votes counted at midnight, and just wanted to keep the world waiting!" 

Woodall-Vogg responded about 10 minutes later: "Lol. I just wanted to say I had been awake for a full 24 hours!"

Right-leaning news organizations published the exchange and commentators jumped on it but Woodall-Vogg said the exchange was a joke, but inappropriate. Republican and Democratic observers were at Milwaukee’s absentee ballot-counting center until all results were tallied and no evidence exists showing ballots deliberately were miscounted. Trump’s efforts to impugn the process lost in both a recount requested by Trump and a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling.

"Illegal aliens and deadly drug cartels are taking over our borders."

This is another topic PolitiFact has researched, as have fact-checkers with other news organizations. Border security drew interest in Iowa before Trump came to the state when Gov. Kim Reynolds joined nine other Republican governors for an Oct. 6 trip to Anzaldaus Park, in Mission, Texas, where the U.S. border with Mexico exists. The governors used the setting to sharply criticize Biden’s handling of border crossings. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show crossings of the Mexican border into the United States are at an all-time high, with 200,599 encounters in July alone and 195,958 in August. Data for September had not been compiled. That compared with 38,536 the previous July and 50,648 the previous August, the data show.

Austin American-Statesman fact-checkers wrote in March that a surge in immigrants was the result of drastic changes between the immigration policies of Biden’s and Trump’s administrations, but also worsening economic circumstances in countries where the migrants have lived, notably Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. 

PolitiFact reported in June that a U.S. Customs and Border Protection status memo on border wall construction between 2017 and 2020 showed about 738 miles of barriers were planned, of which 453 miles were completed. About 17 miles of completed wall were in Texas. 

Another 285 miles were either under construction or in the pre-construction phase when Trump left office. President Biden ordered that the work be stopped on his first day in office, although another some 13 miles of wall is being built in a flood control plan that has pro-immigration activists upset, NPR News reported.

Overall, U.S. Border Patrol total apprehensions at all of the nation’s borders totaled 405,036 in fiscal 2020, which ran from Oct. 1, 2019, through Sept. 30, 2020 on the federal calendar. That was a little more than one-half of the 859,501 apprehensions the previous fiscal year but close to those in fiscal 2018 and up from fiscal 2017, U.S. Border Patrol data show.

You have to go back to fiscal 2000 for the peak of almost 1.7 million apprehensions, the data show. The Border Patrol consistently had, with a few exceptions in the 900,000 to 970,000 range, more than 1 million apprehensions in a stretch from fiscal 1983 through fiscal 2006.

On the Oct. 7 Senate Judiciary Committee report on Trump’s efforts to overturn election: "The left’s new obsession is the un-select committee, I call it the un-select committee."

The Judiciary Committee issued two reports on Oct. 7 on the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 president election. One was from the majority Democrats and one was from minority Republicans, led by ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa. The two reports were based on the same testimony but had different conclusions. 

The majority report said Trump repeatedly asked leaders of his Department of Justice "to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to assist his efforts to overturn the election results." They added that Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asked Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen "to initiate election fraud investigations on multiple occasions, violating longstanding restrictions on White House-DOJ communications about specific law enforcement matters."

"Trump allies with links to the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement and the January 6 insurrection participated in the pressure campaign against DOJ," the report also said.

The report said Rosen threatened to resign and that other Justice Department lawyers would, too, if Trump persisted with his pressure and that Trump forced the resignation of a U.S. attorney so that he could appoint someone who would "do something" about his claims of election fraud, the report said.

The minority report didn’t dispute any of the testimony but said Trump followed the Justice Department staff recommendations and did not take actions that an assistant attorney general, Jeffrey Clark, suggested: sending a draft letter to some states with reported voter irregularities and recommending that their legislatures choose different Electoral College electors. Biden won the states in question.

The Republican report also noted that Trump did not fire anyone over these matters. It said the Republicans believe Trump had legitimate complaints and reports of crimes involving the election, and that he was reaching out to the Justice Department to make it aware of those complaints and doing its job of investigating them. He did not, the Republicans said, issue an order to take any actions.

Multiple audits and reviews have shown no evidence of widespread voter fraud, and have confirmed that Biden beat Trump in the election.

 

ATTACHMENT TWELVE – From Whitehouse.gov

Statement of President Joe Biden on the Passing of General Colin Powell

 

OCTOBER 18, 2021•STATEMENTS AND RELEASES

 

Jill and I are deeply saddened by the passing of our dear friend and a patriot of unmatched honor and dignity, General Colin Powell.  

The son of immigrants, born in New York City, raised in Harlem and the South Bronx, a graduate of the City College of New York, he rose to the highest ranks of the United States military and to advise four presidents. He believed in the promise of America because he lived it. And he devoted much of his life to making that promise a reality for so many others.

As a Senator, I worked closely with him when he served as National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as Secretary of State. Over our many years working together – even in disagreement – Colin was always someone who gave you his best and treated you with respect.

Colin embodied the highest ideals of both warrior and diplomat. He was committed to our nation’s strength and security above all. Having fought in wars, he understood better than anyone that military might alone was not enough to maintain our peace and prosperity. From his front-seat view of history, advising presidents and shaping our nation’s policies, Colin led with his personal commitment to the democratic values that make our country strong. Time and again, he put country before self, before party, before all else—in uniform and out—and it earned him the universal respect of the American people.

Having repeatedly broken racial barriers, blazing a trail for others to follow in Federal Government service, Colin was committed throughout his life to investing in the next generation of leadership. Whether through his care for the women and men serving under his command and the diplomats he led, or through the work he shared with his wife Alma at the America’s Promise Alliance to lift up young people, or through his years leading the Eisenhower Fellowships, Colin’s leadership always included a focus on future.

Above all, Colin was my friend. Easy to share a laugh with. A trusted confidant in good and hard times. He could drive his Corvette Stingray like nobody’s business—something I learned firsthand on the race track when I was Vice President. And I am forever grateful for his support of my candidacy for president and for our shared battle for the soul of the nation. I will miss being able to call on his wisdom in the future.

Jill and I are sending all our love and strength to Alma, their children, Linda, Annemarie, and Michael, their grandchildren, and the entire Powell family.  Our nation mourns with you.

Colin Powell was a good man.

He will be remembered as one of our great Americans.

 

ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN – FROM THE INSIDER

TRUMP CALLS COLIN POWELL A 'CLASSIC RINO' WHO 'MADE BIG MISTAKES' IN IRAQ: 'BUT ANYWAY, MAY HE REST IN PEACE!'

Former President Donald Trump did not allow Colin Powell's death to prevent him from criticizing the former secretary of state, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and national security advisor. 

In a statement reacting to the news of Powell's passing, Trump called him a "classic RINO" (Republican in name only). The former president also went after Powell over his central role in promoting the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 while serving in the Bush administration. Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he was "totally" opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

 "Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media. Hope that happens to me someday," Trump said. "He was a classic RINO, if even that, always being the first to attack other Republicans. He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!" 

Powell, who was a four-star general, in February 2003 delivered an infamous address to the UN Security Council based on faulty intelligence to make a case for the war in Iraq. He repeatedly asserted that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was secretly stockpiling and producing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The US invaded Iraq in March 2003, and it wasn't long before it became apparent that there were no such weapons.

Two years later, Powell called the speech a "blot" on his record, telling Barbara Walters of ABC News that the address was "painful" for him. 

Powell, a lifelong Republican, was heavily critical of Trump and his approach to the presidency. He portrayed Trump as a danger to the country and endorsed Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign season. 

"The one word I have to use with respect to what he's been doing for the last several years is the word I would never have used before, never would have used with any of the four presidents I worked for, he lies," Powell said of Trump last June. "He lies about things."

After Trump provoked a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, Powell told CNN's Fareed Zakaria that he could "no longer" call himself a Republican. During Powell's final interview, which occurred with veteran journalist Bob Woodward in July, he accused Trump of trying to "overturn the government."

Powell died on Monday at the age of 84 from complications from COVID-19. He was fully vaccinated but his immune system had been weakened by treatment for multiple myeloma, which is a cancer of the white blood cells, per The New York Times. He also had Parkinson's. 

Like other government leaders, former Vice President Mike Pence issued a statement on Powell's death that stands in stark contrast to Trump's. 

"Colin Powell was a true American Patriot who served our Nation with distinction in uniform, as a four-star general, National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and as  65th Secretary of State. Karen and I are praying for his wife, Alma, and the entire Powell family," Pence said in a tweet. 

 

ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN – From Slate

As we reflect on former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s legacy, we are reminded of his thirteen rules of leadership which have guided so many of our colleagues and principals. We are grateful for his love of the State Department and his legacy that we still feel in the workplace.

Secretary Powell’s 13 Rules:

It ain’t as bad as you think! It will look better in the morning.

Get mad then get over it.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

It can be done.

Be careful what you choose. You may get it.

Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.

You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.

Check small things.

Share credit.

Remain calm. Be kind.

Have a vision. Be demanding.

Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers.

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.