It's the Opperman Report, and now here is an investigator at Opperman.
Okay, welcome to the Opperman Report. I'm your host, private investigator Ed Opperman. You can get a hold of me at Opperman Investigations and Digital Forensic Consulting if you reach out to me through my email Oppermaninvestigations at gmail dot com. Now I feel like I show. We're going to check out our Patreon, The Opperman Report. Patreon everything you hear monther to Friday our amfrom radio, you can find a red Patreon with all the ads and the commercials cut out.
Aretherwise every Friday night, eight pm Eastern Time standard fourteen years man and I've hardly missed a show. You get one hour solo and then two hours of brand new podcast content consistently for fourteen years. Otherwise. If you go to Spotify or Apple Plays or Spreaker and sign up there for free, I play repeats every single day of the week to all the old classic stuff that people
seem to love. A lot of people haven't even heard of it, so hearing it for the first time and speaking of repeats, our guest today, Rob Mackenzie's been on before. If you search Rob McKenzie El goldbe Us Labor, the CIA and the Coup at Ford in Mexico. But he's back. He's got a brand new book out, and there's a book two about that too called El goldpe Us Labor,
the Cia and the Core at Ford in Mexico. But we got the first interview, then you got the book you can buy, and then he's got a brand new book called The Assassination of Walter Ruther, Why they did it and how we know Rob mackenzie. You could find him at Rob McKenzie dot net and also at Rob McKenzie at Facebook. Mister mackenzie, are you there?
Yes, I am ed. Thanks for having me on again.
Yeah, yeah, right. My interest are getting longer and longer. It's almost as long as you've been away. But remind the audience anybody's been asleep. Who is Rob mackenzie.
Rob McKenzie worked in a Ford assembly plant for twenty eight years, and the last eight years i there, I was president of the local union. And when Ford announced their closing the plan, I took a job on the international staff of the United Automobile Workers Union. Did that for ten years, and when I retired, I started a research project about attack on workers at a Ford plant in Mexico that resulted in the first book, which you mentioned, and that one led me to the second book.
Yeah. Once again, that first book is El golpe Us Labor, the CIA and the Coup at Ford in Mexico, and then in parentheses Wildcat. But also to check out the first interview too, because a lot of great content in that interview, which is why I'm so excited to have you back now about the second book here, which is a I never heard of this guy, Walter Ruther, So what's who was Walter Ruther.
Walter Ruther was the first president and one of the founders of the United Automobile Workers Union, and that emerged in the nineteen thirties with some famous labor events the Flint set downstrike and other really violent conflicts with the auto employers, and he served as president. He was elected president in nineteen forty six and he served till nineteen
seventy and his mysterious death in a plane crash. And he was allies and friends with the Kennedys, with Martin Luther King, a very progressive labor leader who brought the American autoworkers into the middle class. So he was really a famous figure in labor history.
Yeah, if you go to the COVID action article is right here, November third elections are a hoax, us out of Southeast Asia, no negotiations, cops out of the ghetto, support striking auto workers.
So that was the SDS. He provided the first meeting spot for the SDS in Michigan where they had their founding convention. So that flyer was something that SDS had put out about that time.
Do we have any labor organizations today that far left, that that progressive, that of that workers for workers.
You know, there's a few, you know, at the times are different. I mean, the nineteen thirties was really a time of upheaval, and even the more conservative unions then are more liberal than many unions are today and more activists. So you know, there's some great labor people in the country, though overall, I'd say there's nobody that compares to him. And actually he split with the mainstream of American labor with George meaning the AFL CIA CIO in nineteen sixty six.
He over the issue of involvement with the CIA, he split and formed a rival labor federation called the Alliance for Labor Action in nineteen sixty eight, And.
Was it theft loss of the labor movement, the labor unions. Is that because of these assassinations.
Well, now that's a good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of factors that contribute to the decline of the American labor movement. Now, the loss of Walter Ruther was an important one. He had decided that the organized labor had begun to decline in the nineteen sixties and was looking for ways to move the fight for
social justice forward. And one of those was this Alliance for Labor Action, which he was going to have the traditional unions and something he called community unions, which we're going to be organized in cities and towns of workers and poor people and include them in the labor movement. So that was really the kind of thinking we needed to preserve the labor movement, and with his death that really disappeared.
It just seems such a like a no brainer, you know, and organize all the workers, you know, not just the auto workers are yeah, factory all the yeah. But and then you're you're there. You're in the think of it, man, you're in the trenches. You know, is there any hope for us to to.
Well, there's always hope. It looks pretty dire right now with the Fifth Circuit Court has found the National Labor Relations Board to be unconstitutional. So in Texas, Lunisiana, and Mississippi, the National Labor Relations Board and the Nationalbor Relations Act is unenforceable and these and that's going to the Supreme Court late this year or early next year. You know, if they rule in favor of the Fifth Circuit Court, that is the law that all unions are built on.
So what happens in that scenario. Nothing good. That could be the end. So it's precarious suation for organized.
Labor right now. And just imagine we hold all the power, the workers hold all the power. Okay, So back to Ruther, Walter Ruther. So now you're convinced that this was an assassination and by who was behind the assassination?
Well, you know the fact that this was assassination, I believe is completely based on evidence. Now, now, I don't know if you remember you put me in touch with aj Weberman. Oh sure, he in the nineteen nineties did research on the ultimeter that was involved in the Ruther crash. And he turned over all his files to me, a sixty one page report on the ultimeter beyond a shadow of a doubt that had been sabotaged, so it read
two hundred and fifty feet too high. Now, I donated those documents he gave me to the University of Michigan's archives and they are now. So, yeah, the altimeter was sabotage, six wrong missing and missus symbol parts. The threads of the screws were torn out, and the manufacturer said, this
is reading two hundred and fifty feet too high. At the time of this crash, so his private jet was directed to a little runway that didn't have approach lights, the only one at this airport that didn't have approach lights. It was night, it was dark, and that pilot had to rely on that altimeter to land, and of course he hit the top of some trees and the plane crash, killing everybody on board.
Okay, so you're saying that first they put in a dummied up altimeter onto the plane, then they diverted him to an airstrip that didn't have lights.
So right, exactly, so there was a question about how could they have intalved this. His flight. He left from Detroit Metro Airport. It was supposed to leave at seven point thirty. It was delay for an hour and twenty minutes because one of the passengers, an architect named Oscar Stonerov, his flight was delayed from Philadelphia, so that jet sat
there in the runway unguarded for an hour. So no question in my mind that altimeter was put that sabotage altimeter was put in a flight and the plane just before the flight to Pelston Airport.
Oh really, now, isn't there a record of repairs and stuff like that? That has to be documentation, right of.
Course, And there was a maintenance log. The maintenance log had a serial number on the altimeter that put in there six months before. So if you're going to say this was an accident, you have to explain how this altimeter with six wrong missing and missassembled parts, with the threads stripped out from the school hole, breathing two hundred and fifty feet too high, had been in that plane for six months without a problem, and then as soon as it got to Pelston Airport had started reading two
hundred and fifty feet too high. Number two is that altimeter which according to the maintenance log was in that plane. It had a serial number SN seventy eight. The manufacturer's examination of the ultimeter in the crash said there were no identifying marks, no serial numbers on the ultimeter in the crash. Also, that altimeter had been manufactured for the military and it had never been approved to use in civilian aviation.
That's interesting now, So then who would have the ability to pull off an operation like that.
Well, that's seriously, it would be very complicated. It had to be the CIA to do that level of engineering on an ultimeter, very sophisticated work. He also had motive. The CIA had motive because Ruther was involved in this fight in the afl CIO over its involvement with the CIA. That was a big issue, and the Ruthers left the afl CIO over and they weren't afraid to say why. They were talking about CIA involvement and labor. So there's
a motive. They had an air base, a secret airbase in the US which has just come out in the last ten years or so. At this a Nevada test range the area of fifty one that was a secret CIA air base where they were flying the U two out of among other things. And the book about that says, oh, they were doing all sorts of black ops.
There.
There were not eveny roads going into that airport. The engineers were flown in every week and then flown home on the weekends. So they had a method, they had the means, and they had an opportunity. Now, I you know, there's no evidence of what an individual was working on this, but I have theory, and I said, this is speculative that this is who I think was involved. This was a guy named John Leir, who was the son of the manufacturer of the jet. They were in Bill la out of here.
I know John lear He's dead now. I knew John him a couple of times from Nevada. Yeah.
Yeah. He worked for the CIA between nineteen sixty seven and nineteen eighty three. He flew for the CIA and via Team Laos during the Vietnam War, and he was involved in a lot of this UFO stuff around Area fifty one after she supposedly had retired from the CIA. So and he had far right wing politics. I don't know what in case you ran in, but he was in something called the Dark Side movement, which said aliens are working with the government, and a lot of this kind of thing.
Yeah, a lot of his alien stuff he just got off the enginet and he would believe it and repeat it. A lot of his stuff that he got was just a kind of flaky. And and then he had some kind of gold mine in Nevada and his wife ran a colazing here some a talent agency for little kids. Yeah, it was really wha yeah.
You're yeah, that's that was in Las Vegas, right.
Yeah, but what he was like done in Boulder, Boulder City I think area. Yeah, okay, yeah, very strange, yeah guy, yeah, okay. And what makes you think that he was connected to this?
Well, I mean, there can't be, because this is somebody who knew exactly how a commercial private jet would respond to the conditions when they would rely on their altimeter, How how they would do that, How you would get an altimeter into a plane. It's not that hard, right he Really you had to have somebody who was very familiarlier with commercial aviation, and someone who's willing to kill
innocent people. Because there were six people on the plane, so even if you wanted to kill Luthor, five other people died. So I just never thought it could possibly be you know, some Air Force pilot they pulled out of the ranks. I mean, this had to be someone he was probably many people recognize John Lear as the greatest commercial air pilot of all time. He held all sorts of records and commercial jets, so he really knew
his business. So again, there's no evidence connecting him. But you know, when you're talking about this kind of thing, people just don't want you to say, well, the CIA did it. So I really made an effort with him and some other people who I believe could have been involved in this. But again it's speculative.
Yeah you're sure, but you're in research into Leird because there was some speculation he was involved with the October Surprise flying those people around too. Anything drop across the desk on that that.
Well I first first heard his name was on this Octopus murders. Oh really, Well it wasn't him, but it was a podcast that guy did, I think with Moraley on JFA JFK Fax and he talked about the film they showed of the JFK assassination, which showed some bizarre and strange things. He said, And you mentioned, well, John Leir was involved with that film. Said John leear who is this? And then I began looking into him. So, I mean, he's got quite a murky past.
Oh yeah, he was involved in a flying around the rock stars and all kind of you know stuff. But also you know, you know, talk about the Octopus murders. I have three hours exclusive with Bill Hamilton, the president of Inslaw, who wrote the promised software. The guy at the center of the whole story, the one that they smeared on Netflix. They did a smear job on this guy on Netflix. Oh, it's just outrageous and how people
can can admire that documentary. Just I know he was so upset about it and his wife, But that's fasting. I don't know.
There was another story there.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's they were trying to claim that the some craziness that he was. They were getting their information from people at a bowling alley, you know, with this guy, I have yeah, I remember, yeah, I've seen communication with him and the director of the CIA. The guy was ansa himself, but he had communication with the director of the CIA. The guy was in touch with There's a letter with Joe Biden. Have an exclusive letter here from Joe Biden putting the kibosh on a
Judiciary committee investigations, all that stuff. There's a ton of information with Bill Hamilton. I gotta put her up there. It's okay, So back to Ruther. I tell you. It's like, oh home, we here got aj Werman popping out of the woods. You got John Lear, and now you got Bill Hamilton. Look at this. We did a whole nother
part two on this covert action. The covert actions called labor leader Walter Ruther, who was among nineteen sixties liberal leaders who appear to have been assassinated by the deep state. But you don't have anything firm that the Lear had access to this was he in town that.
Well no, but you know, in a deposition and a trial, he said he worked for the CIA from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen eighty three, so exactly, yeah, yeah, so by his own account, he's working for the CIA for at least that long. And of course it's very murky trying to trace his life. I mean, even in nineteen seventy I can't even figure who he was working for. His father fired him and disinherited him in nineteen seventy I believe, or seventy one, which was the same year
that Ruther was killed. And his father of course was involved in the lawsuits around the Ruther death because it was a Lyric jet and he has access to all these documents that I have that were suppressed after that. But he would have known what had happened. In any case, John was disinherited.
Yeah, yeah, it was some murkiness about that. So because there was some kind of a story too, he was getting money from his mother. They somehow it is funny because they had a very nice lifestyle in Veda, he and the wife doing and some gold mine. You know, who knows what was going on there. Okay, So back to Ruther though, Okay, now then even any besides all its okay, the swapping out of the altimeter, the swapping out of the airstrip, anything else really suspicious in all this?
Well, first I want to mention besides, because of the Weberman documents that were turned over, I was able to track down a private investigator who had worked with Ruther's daughter Elizabeth in the nineteen ninety She didn't have any money, He did some pro bona work. He told me there had been a civil suit, okay, turning this and he hadn't been able to get the documents, they wouldn't give him up to him. I got those documents, twelve hundred
and eighty six pages. Again, they very much affirm that this was an assassination. Now, the NTSB, who was the only one who ever did any kind of investigation eight months after the crash, was prohibited from investigating sabotage. Their field agent says, well, no, we don't do that. That's the FBI's job. And of course the FBI didn't do an investigation, and so that leads us to the FBI
documents concerning Walter Ruther. I was able to get a hold of a reporter for Detroit Public Television who spent two years in the nineteen eighties doing a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI and Ruther. And he said he told me he called them every week for two years. They finally admitted to having eighty four hundred pages of documents. Now most of those are withheld or redacted, but he gave what he got to the Ruther Library
in Detroit. So I've been working with They've documents from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy, and I've done freedom of information Act requests with the FBI trying to get reactions removed from documents that the field office in Detroit was notified that there was a contract on Ruther in nineteen sixty nine. They've got the name of the person who allegedly had this contract that is redacted. They will not remove that. I've spent years trying to get them
to do that. They did a background check on this person called an LHM letterhead memo. They will not release that.
That is still classified. They also know, we've learned just this year when Trump released the JFA JFK files, that the FBI and the sixties turned over the authority to redact their own documents to the CIA, and they use the words referred to another government agency written by the reaction in the nineteen sixty seven the nineteen seventy folder I have on there are seventeen pages of reactions that we say refer to another government agency. These are CIA reactions.
We know now. I printed one of those in the book, one of those with that reaction on it that they would release to me. So there's a whole world of information about what the CIA was thinking and saying about Walter Ruther. That the FBI is holding So after all these years, an airplane supposed accident concerning a labor leader, and they've got all this stuff still reacted, and they've lied to me a couple of times. And that's one thing.
This reporter named Bill Gallagher for the public television there he said the FBI lies, and I say, they certainly have lied to me concerning this.
Couple of thanks. Now, first of all, the civil suit, what's the status of that?
That was settled? Well, so that's a long story too. So I've worked very closely with Ruther's family, his daughter, but mostly his son in law, a guy named Bruce dick Meyer, has worked very closely with this on me. So it was settled in nineteen seventy five. Elizabeth did not remember the suit because she was not involved in their will. The Ruthers, her father and mother had assigned a UW official named Irving Bluestone to be the head of the estate, so he was the one that filed
the suit. The suit was against the airport, so that was settled and she got six thousand dollars. But you know, it's just devastating material on what had happened there. I mean, they interviewed. They deposed the airport manager and he had a fifty page deposition. Well he wasn't there a very tiny little airport. He lived nearby. There was only one person at the airport that night, guy named Thomas Or, who directed the flight to land at this sad little
runway approached, the only one that didn't have lights. When they crashed, he called somebody else besides the airport manager. The airport manager was in charge of the fire truck, so when he finally learned about it, he got the fire truck. But they've been given the wrong directions to where the crash was, and the whole thing burned out before they could get to it. The sole employee there that night turned on a recording device only used in emergencies.
Now there was no emergency at the time. He turned it on and he stepped outside to watch it land, which the airport manager said he had never seen him do that before. Highly suspicious behavior at the airport that night. So you know it was recorded. But you know, so you know a lot of people tried to say, well, they are the pilot decided to land at that runway because of the wind. Totally untrue. It was recorded he never had any choice but to land there because those
are the only lights that were on. So he circled around to approach that runway. So these court documents really add a lot. Now. The field agent from the NTSB who did the investigation the altimeter, he came there the next morning, could see the top of the trees were equipped and said, well, this is probably an altimeter problem. Either a pilot read it wrong or it wasn't working. Waded into the warm and still smoldering rubble and pulled out the captain's aultimeter and took it around. He had
a three hundred and fifty page deposition about that altimeter. Again, some of it was using the NTSB report, some of it was suppressed.
The you gotta love it. Then his aj comes along and that does his research and comes up with everything. Now, a couple of things. What about wouldn't it be like the UA to w weren't they looking up in arms and saying, hey, let's investigate this scream into high heaven that hey, boss just got killed.
Very good question, and I think that's what killed it. So it took that NTSB agent two weeks before he got the report from the manufacturer full of this damning information about the ultimeter. That same day the UAW General Council, a guy named Stephen Schlashberg wrote a memo to the guy who'd taken over Ruther after a bitter internal power fight, and said, listen, this is nothing but a tragic accident.
There were no problems with the ultimeter. There's no you know, basically discounting sabotage.
Now.
I found that memo and no one has seen that before either. I got that as a result of these Webermen files. So he convinced Woodcock there was nothing and said, don't you know, you shouldn't support a public inquest. There was a lot of talk about having a public inquest into that. Leonard Woodkeck, the new president, did not support the inquest, and that was probably the only chance to get a real independent investigation of what happened here. So, yeah,
the UAW has a very bad history with this. It's hard for me after they they must they had to have seen all the documents. I have the court documents, the ultimeter report, and they never raised any questions. You know, Slashburg I think was at least a government intelligence asset. He became a under secretary of labor in the Reagan administration, so you know, he had a very crooked path after
he left the UAW. But yeah, I think that the UAW not raising any flags about this really did a lot of damage to any hopes of a true investigation.
And then after the death of Ruth, did the UAW change their politics and their policy? Did they go in a different direction?
Yeah, I think they did. The other thing I used as a source a lot was oral interviews with Paul Schraid. Some people may recognize his name. He was standing next to RFK when he was shot killed in Los Angeles. Trade got hit by a bullet in that attack. So
he says they drove him out of the union. As soon as Ruther died, they forced him out and he and according to him, there was a big change in the way the UAW operated, you know, they said, I mean, Ruth probably had his faults as an autocrat, but he really stayed in close contact with the rank and file and local leaders and you know, never went for the big salaries. And yeah, I think there was a real change after Ruther's death in the uaw's practice and culture.
Now what about reading in the article, I see James Angleton's name comes up. What house did he connected to all lists?
Well, you know again a lot. You know. Yet, there's a guy named Jay Lovestone who was a he'd been the General secretary of the American Communist Party in the late twenties. Stalin removed him and he began by the end of the thirties. He was a bitter anti communist, and he worked with the first president of the UAW to try to drive all the communists out of UAW. And the ruther wasn't the communists. He was working with the communists and supported supported their rights to hold office
and function in the Union. So and Lovestone was the one who was working with this UAW president and directing him. Lovestone went on to become the international Affairs director of the AFL CIO, and the Ruthers fought with him constantly over that. There's I go into that and in some detail in the book now and this has just come
out recently few years. Lovestone was recruited into the CIA in nineteen fifty five by Angleton, and Lovestone's biographer said they had they were in daily communication for twenty years. Lovestone in Angleton and when he was in Washington, Lovestone State in Angleton's home, so they had a very close relationship and they were absolute enemies of Lovestone was absolute enemy with Ruther and Angleton was involved in this whole
labor fight over the CIA involvement in organized labor. So that again points to me that somebody who could had the ability to stage a complex assassination and a motive.
Yeah, I've flowing through the scrolling through the article here. Now what about the pilot? Did did his family sue as well? Was there a civil suit for the pilot? I?
You know, the only any other suits I found mentioned were the architect Oscar Stonerov's. There were six suits filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. I'm assuming that was by his wife, Betty Stonorov. I didn't I didn't try to track all those down and read those. I think I know who the six people she would have suit would have been, But those are still there if somebody
wants to research this further. Now, I did get in touch with Stonhov's one of his daughters, Angie Foster Stonorov, who you know, worked very closely with me about talking about the relationship and the family. This is very hard on her and Elizabeth Ruth. They're about the same age in the early twenties when this happened, and they became very close. But I never heard about a suit from the pilot or the co pilot. But there are six suits sitting out there that I didn't get.
Oh, okay, And this happened after the death of MLK and after the death RFKR.
Yeah, very interesting timeline here which really raised my ackles when I saw that nineteen sixty eight, LBJ wants to run for president. He goes to the UAW and asks for an endorsement. They had a contentious two day board meeting about endorsing LBJ. Ruther actually had a relationship with
LBJ and supported LBJ. Shrede was more than new left type candidate, and the UAW fought for RFK and they fought to a sand still finally Sharede got the votes for no endorsement, which meant that everybody could just go out and endorse whoever they wanted, all the board members. Ten days after that, LBJ withdrew from the race. Four days after that, Martin Luther King was assassinated. A month later,
RFK was assassinated. October that year was the first crash the Ruthers were in and a lear jet involving a failed altimeter. It was a Dulles airport in October of sixty eight. They survived it.
Oh no, yeah, okay, well now wait a second, and now you got it was an alternative in that one too.
Yeah, so you know, yeah, Victor Ruther was on that plane too and talked about that wreck in his autobiography. So yeah, no, it's again people say I'm being speculative. If you're going to say this in an accident, that is what's speculative. If you look at this closely, it's obviously an assassination.
No, man, you're doing great work. They really are. Rob McKenzie dot net you can find on Facebook. And the two books are one is the one we're talking about right now, is the assassination of Walter Ruther, Why they did it and how we know? And then the first one was Algulp a US labor, the CIA and the cou at Ford in Mexico. But let me ask you, Rob McKenzie, you're doing all this work. There's a lot of work. Man, who's funding this? How are you financing all this? It's a lot of work.
Yeah, you know, I'm retired, so I have the time. But after the last book, it took so much. You know, this is it was a big money losing project the first book, because you know, I wanted to get an insurance policy and I didn't. You know, I never thought i'd make money. I didn't want to get sued and go bankrupt. I told my wife, I will never write another book. I promise I will never write another book.
And I probably After I got these court documents and the altimeter report and the FBI filed, I spent eight months trying to find someone else to write the book. I had one publisher who kind of it was interested in. I said, listen, you get somebody to go to write it, they can have all the royalties. They couldn't find anybody, so I reluctantly wrote this book. I mean I actually wrote a article for a journal, academic journal, and they
approved it. They said this is too long. You need to expand this into a book, and just really coached me and urged me, and I finally wrote it. It's a very short book for people who don't want to read a long book. A lot of pictures of the damage, altimeter parts and the Ruthers and very easy read. And this is my last book. I promise I'm never going to write another book.
Well. Well, the thing is, though, is in my audience buys books, you know, and when you got someone like this who's sticking their neck out, and you got any Arizona missions insures almost kind of stufs so cheap, you know, you got to protect your home, you know, all this kind of stuff, your pension. Uh, you got to go out, audience, You got to go out and buy these books, man, in order to support people out there sticking their necks out at Elkolpe, the US Labor, the CIA, and ford
it in in Mexico. And there's an whole interview about that. And in this one here is the assassination of Walter Ruther. Why they did it and how we know? So you got to get out there and buy these books now. And you see Amazon like the oppera import, Amazon like a little cut too, okay, But other why didn't Aj write? If AJ did all this work on it, he never wrote a book? Who Aj Webman? He never wrote a book on it?
Oh? Oh Weberman, yeah, oh yeah, you know he wrote this is the early nineties. He wrote a long article about three different altimeters involved in crash. Now I don't want to take on more. He couldn't get published, you know, this was the days before the Internet was widely used. He couldn't get published. And just by a freak accident for some reason, one of these altimeters, there was a flight that Joe Biden was in. Slate published his article
about that without even telling him. He hadn't known it had been published. That's where I first saw the A. J. Weberman and this information about the altimeter. And I spent the next two years trying to figure out some way to contact him until you helped me. So yeah, no, I stay in touch with him a lot. You know, he couldn't get published. That was just the way this stuff goes a lot of times, unfortunately.
Yeah, he had another beef too with I think it was his book about Rudy Giuliani. One of his sources was that guy Lawrence Ray Sarah Lawrence Pimp.
He w the trial for one of the modern name burglars.
Oh yeah, oh no, yeah, I go back. I was seventeen years old when I was seventeen.
And Hangleton testified in that trial, so he got oh yeah, he told me about that very interesting life. He said.
No, A has had an incredible life, and he got totally banned from Amazon. They took down all of his books. He's been knocked off of Oh yeah, he's been knocked off. You get a different name every week, eight Alan, Jules, different, Nat Jewles Alan, you know, because he gets knocked off, all out of us. That's a real fighter man. He has fight for long.
He did an incredible job on his own. Yeah, no one's financing him tracking down this ultimatear manufacturer's report on my head is off to him.
Yeah yeah, but I mean now you're saying, no next.
Book, no next book. I've written some articles. I may write some articles when it seizes me, but I'm not going to take kind of another book. There's no way.
Well, then give us an idea. What are you working our next? Before you get what do you work in our next? We'll get into that first.
You know, I've been writing about this idea of community unions and you know the current state of labor and what we need to do. And Wade Rathkei, the founder of Acorn, published an article I wrote about that in his journal called Social Policy. I've got a three thousand word article about the Luther assassination that's supposed to be coming out in a journal called Garrison. I thought I was supposed to be out by now, but it's about a deep politics history journal. So that's that's what I'm
working on right now. Now. You know, I'm kind of involved with the UAW. Elections are coming up here in internal UAW politics have got my interest again right now.
That was my next question, because you come out of the UAW and a longtime union leader organizer. Are you bitter? Are you bitter seeing them the weakness of a US labor these days?
Yeah, that's a good question, you know. You know, in some ways I am better because I do not feel that people the leadership has dealt with problems in a straightforward manner. But you know, it's more sad. I mean, you know how far labor has fallen and how fall our working class has fallen, and during my life. Yeah,
so it's more sadness than bitterness really. But it just seems to me when things have been going so badly, we should have been doing some new things and some different things, and it doesn't seem to happen very often.
Well, what's the motive. You know, all the money's on the other side. You mentioned Acorn, you know, Acorn was out of Nevada and the whole attack, the attack on Acorn started with Okeith, who were talking about her off the air. He's the one that started, right. Project Veritas went up to Acorn in Nevada because Acorn was the only people that showed up to Nevada Power and Energy there to protests increases, and they set up all kind of stablished for the elderly to get stabilization and stuff
like that. And o'keith comes in destroys Acorn. There's no one left to protest against Nevada Power, and Warren Buffett comes in and buys Nevada Power.
You know, yeah, No, I think Acorn was really a great organization and they were really afraid of it. I mean, that was my idea. This is what a community union could look like that had a little more backing and support. That's something that needs to be attempted again.
Well, give us an idea, what what is your plan for a community union? What could we get behind?
Well, you know there were several that they started before Ruther's death, I mean once he died, then they abandoned him. But there's the Watts Area Community Organization or something that still survives. Ted Watkins as head of that that's still around. So they organize things around like housing, education, transportation, financial irregularities, you know, issues that are important in the community that affect workers. Not every issue is affects workers at their employer.
And so you have a situation with like seventy percent of people say these support unions. They're only like six percent of private workers are in unions. So you need to reach these people in their communities and organize them around issues that are important. I mean, affordability seems to be a big issue now. Well, of course, these are the type of issues that can be addressed in the community much better than they canada a single employer.
Yeah, across the board, you know what I mean, like general union, general strikes, the General Union. Ah boy, I don't know, man.
Yeah, it's just so discouraging, you know. This is Yeah, remind us though about the first book, the ol golpe give us a little snops SiTime people can run out and get el gopa us labor, the CIA and the coup at Ford.
We did a whole hour about it. So people should go back and check that out. But remind us about that story. What's the deal with that.
I was working at a Ford plant and must have been nineteen ninety and we got involved in supporting a reform movement at a Ford plant in Mexico where around three hundred thugs and tough guys had come in and started a fight with the workers in this plant. Actually one of them was shot and killed and nine or ten others were wounded, and that ended. They went on strike there, occupied the plant and were on strike for weeks before the police finally drove them out. So I said, what,
you know, what happened there? I didn't really understand what happened, what this was about, So I began researching that when I retired, and I believe that these three hundred dougs and tough guys were a CIA sponsored group that a gangster had organized. So I found some documents that linked
the head of that group to the CIA. And this was all through something called the American Institute of Free Labor Development, which was really a government funded CIA managed organization that worked under the cover of the afl CIA
as being a union group. And so I, you know, there would nothing much had been written about that, and I did a history of that organization, and then when I got in touch with some of the workers in Mexico, a researcher from the un University of Minnesota was in Mexico City and helped with that, and you know, got their story about what happened and put the whole story together there about what happened in this forward plant in Mexico in nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety one.
And that's pretty recent, in nineteen nineties, it's definitely yeah.
Yeah, they're still alive, most of the people who were involved in that at that time. Yeah, yeah, very recent.
And you know, I mean there was a government controlled union, the Mexican Confederation of Workers would put it mildly, was not susceptible to democratic reforms, and that's what this group was pushing in the plant there, and some of them were linked with a socialist group and of course AFEL that's what they existed for, was to put those type of groups down and keep them out of the union. So there was their motive for that debacle.
Yeah, And we were talking about before with Growther, how back in those days, you know, you would need the CIA to run an operation like that. But today, like these big powerful tech bros and stuff like that. They got the money, they got the resources, blackwater out there. There's a plenty of guys out there that can pull those kind of things off now and they got money coming out of their ears. Just yeah, yeah, and spy on everybody, manipulate everybody, just a whole new ball game.
You know, what do you see is more more of a danger that the CIA or these tech bros, these these billionaires that are just have more almost more power, more influence in that.
Yeah, these these tech boards are something to fear. I have to say. You know, they can again find their own private armies. But again, we don't really know how much money the CIA has either do it. And in the course of doing this, you know, I've ran in some people that I think they've got operations going on in the US now, the CIA, and they're not supposed to. But I you know, I've had a couple of experiences in the last year that things don't add up and
there's more going on than we think. But again, you know, so much a merger of these billionaires and government intelligence, you don't know where one starts. In the other end, sometimes.
Yeah. That was another one of my questions that has Rob mackenzie. How much repercussions have you suffered? Will you talked to We talked off the air a bit about some hacking and stuff, you know, which which.
I just take away is like another day nowadays. You know, coming at you, then I should have you. I'm happy, But you know, what do you like? What have you experienced? Because you know, these are two serious books.
Was a lot of work dealing with people like ag you attract a lot of attention.
Yeah, yeah, too much. I suppose. I did the book launch on Labor Day in Detroit and had a a zoom, which I was and there was a Google recording that she did for me, and so I was promoting that on Facebook. I had decided that Facebook was the best place to reach out to workers and I was going
to really do that. So I set up a website and so you know, they make you jump through a lot of hoops about you know, verifying yourself and you know, getting approved for social and political postings, which they said this was But I had about sixty thousand views after a couple months, and then I started posting about this community union thing in Ruther's thoughts on that, and my started getting phony charges on my account, and so I had to cancel my credit card and I probably spent
two and a half hours with Meta texts trying to get rid of this hack in my account. I thought we'd done it, and I started posting again. Then these phony charges starting running up again, and then Meta just shut. My whole page just disappeared. I was gone. So it suddenly popped up a few weeks ago. I don't know if I was a past the quarantine or whatever, and I started again running some promotions, and the phony charges
started showing up right again. So it gets really dark now, and I made some mistakes, and I don't really want to go on the air about how they were successful in hacking my account, but I have learned now how this stuff works with passwords and recovery codes and security codes, and I've got all my accounts straightened out and running properly, and I'm fairly lucky to have had that, but I
worked at it. And so I have a Facebook page called Labor Power and History where I'm posting stuff about Ruther, and that's I feel very good that that account is secure at this current time. I came very close to losing my computer and my.
Phone as of this recording with Slipity Labor Power and History on Facebook and then otherwise Rob McKenzie dot net.
And then the two books once again are the first one is El Goope Us Labor, the CIA and the coup at Ford in Mexico Wildcat, and then the other one is the assassination of Walter Ruth, Why they did it and how we know? Mister Rob McKenzie, we are just about out of time. What would you like to leave us with?
Well, I again, I really this society needs worker organization, you know, whether that's the traditional unions are something new. When things get as bad as they are now, it really shows the absence of organized worker political and economic power. And you know, I just hope that the younger generation can find some way to move that forward.
Yeah, you know, And it's in our best interest, is in every single worker out there, it's in our best interest to unite and to come together and form a some type of or I hate to say union, but form some type of cooperative corporative there with each other. And you see now with all this stuff with the Epstein,
you know, everyone is united against that. You know, there's it's the popular opinion that very few people want to take it the other side that you think people could could gather around against their own self interest, you know, to promote their their brothers and their sisters and their children, and their coworkers and their neighbors.
Yeah, you know, yeah yeah, Rob McKenzie, listen, anything you have, what you're working on, get us a call.
We'll put you around on the.
Okay, thanks so much, Ed, it was nice talking with you.
No, thank you, sir, Rob mackenzie dot net. Thank you so much. Good night, don't