Sorry, but I have to post the wiki article on LaRouche before it changes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche
(born September 8, 1922) is an American self-styled economist, political activist, and the founder of several political organizations known collectively as the LaRouche movement.[1] He has been a perennial candidate for President of the United States, having run in eight elections since 1976, once as a U.S. Labor Party candidate and seven times as a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination. He is the founder and contributing editor of the Executive Intelligence Review News Service,[2] and has written prolifically on economic, scientific, and political topics, as well as on history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
He was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment in 1988 for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations, but continued his political activities from behind bars until his release in 1994 on parole. His appelate attorney, Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. Attorney General, argued that the case represented an unprecedented abuse of power by the U.S. government in an effort to destroy the LaRouche organizations.[3] LaRouche and his defenders believe the prosecution was a politically motivated conspiracy involving government officials and a mass-media brainwashing campaign.[4]
LaRouche provokes sharply contrasting views. Antony Lerman writes that his ideology is so extreme and bizarre that it is difficult to categorize.[5] His supporters see him as the greatest living economist, and a political leader in the tradition of Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, while critics regard him as a cult leader, conspiracy theorist, fascist, and antisemite.[6] Norman Bailey, formerly with the National Security Council, described LaRouche's staff in 1984 as one of the best private intelligence services in the world, while the Heritage Foundation has said he leads what is possibly one of the strangest political groups in American history.[7]Contents [hide]
1 Early life
1.1 1922–1940: School, alienation, philosophy
1.2 1941: Expulsion from the Quakers
1.3 1942: University and the army
1.4 1948–1954: Socialist Workers Party, and first marriage
2 1960s
2.1 1960–1965: LaRouche and Trotskyism, divorce
2.2 1967–1969: Formation of the National Caucus of Labor Committees
3 1970s
3.1 1971–1972: New Solidarity, U.S. Labor Party
3.2 1973: "Operation Mop-Up"
3.3 1974: Founding of Executive Intelligence Review; allegations of brainwashing
3.4 1974–1977: Presidential campaign and second marriage
3.5 1979: Allegations that the U.S. Labor Party was a cult
3.6 Mid-1970s: Allegations of fascism, overt and "coded" anti-Semitism
4 1980s
4.1 "October Surprise" allegations
4.2 1982: Dispute with U.S. News and World Report
4.3 Strategic Defense Initiative
4.4 Promotion of space colonization
4.5 1984: Founding of Schiller Institute; reported meetings with NSA
4.6 Other events in the 1980s
4.7 1984–1986: Lawsuit against NBC
4.8 1986: AIDS, opposition to gay rights, and electoral success
4.9 1988: Criminal conviction
5 1990s: Imprisonment, campaigning
5.1 1989–1994: Imprisonment
5.2 1994: Release from prison
6 2000s
6.1 2000: Founding of the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement
6.2 2003: Death of Jeremiah Duggan
6.3 2004–2005: Electoral and lobbying activities
6.4 2005–2009: Chinese and Russian press coverage
6.5 2007: Death of Kenneth Kronberg
6.6 2007–2009: LaRouche on the financial crisis
6.7 2009: LaRouche on Obama
7 Books by LaRouche
8 Notes
9 References
9.1 General
9.2 LaRouche publications
10 Further reading
Early lifeLaRouche movement
Lyndon LaRouche
Views of Lyndon LaRouche
LaRouche criminal trials
U.S. Presidential campaigns
Organizations
BüSo
Citizens Electoral Council
European Workers Party
Executive Intelligence Review
LaRouche Youth Movement
NCLC
Schiller Institute
People
Michael Billington
Anton Chaitkin
Jacques Cheminade
Jeremiah Duggan
Janice Hart
Kenneth Kronberg
Amelia Boynton Robinson
Webster Tarpley
Defunct
California Proposition 64
North American Labour Party
Party for the
Commonwealth of Canada
U.S. Labor Party
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1922–1940: School, alienation, philosophy
LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, the eldest of three children, to Lyndon H. LaRouche, Sr. (June 1, 1896–December 1983)[8] and Jessie Lenore Weir (November 12, 1893–August 1978).[9] His father was the son of a French-Canadian immigrant from Quebec, and his mother a descendant of Elder Brewster from the Mayflower and other prominent Yankee families.“ I survived socially by making chiefly Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant my principal peers, looking at myself, my thoughts, my commitments to practice in terms of a kind of collectivity of them constructed in my own mind.[10] ”
He attended the School Street elementary school until 1936, when the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, after his father resigned from his job as a shoe salesman at the United Shoe Machinery Corporation in Rochester to set up his own business. He described his childhood as that of "an egregious child, I wouldn't say an ugly duckling but a nasty duckling."[11] According to his 1979 autobiography, The Power of Reason, he began to read at "about age five" and was called "Big Head" by the other children at school.[12] He was told by his parents, both of them Quakers (his father had converted from Roman Catholicism to marry his mother), that under no circumstances could he fight with other children even in self-defense.[13] This advice led to "years of hell" for him from bullies at school.[13] As a result, he spent much of his time alone, taking long walks through the woods[14] and identifying in his mind with great philosophers. In contrast, he joked, the childhood peers from whom he had felt so alienated had been "unwitting followers of David Hume."[10]
He elaborated on his early intellectual development in a second autobiography (1987) in which he reports that, between the ages of twelve and fourteen, he read philosophy extensively, embracing the ideas of Leibniz and rejecting those of Hume, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Rousseau, and Kant.[15] He graduated from Lynn English High School in 1940.[16]
1941: Expulsion from the Quakers
By 1940, the Lynn Monthly Meeting of Friends (Quaker) was discussing censuring LaRouche for spreading libelous material and gossip about other members,
and in 1941, the Lynn Meeting agreed to expel him: "We believe Lyndon H. LaRouche [Jr.] is guilty of stirring up discord in this meeting; that he is responsible for circulating material injurious to the reputation of valued Christian workers; and believe that his conduct brings the Christian religion into public disrepute. We recommend the appointment of a committee to deal with him and to endeavor to reclaim him in a spirit of Christian love." His family resigned in sympathy. LaRouche describes the dispute as a quarrel about financial and theological issues.
His parents later formed and led their own congregation in Boston, the Village Street Monthly Meeting, which met from 1964 to 1979, and in which LaRouche was an active member.[17] According to New England Quaker documents, "This was ostensibly as a Quaker meeting, though its relations with New England Yearly Meeting seem to have been decidedly unfriendly. They were never listed in the Yearly Meeting minutes, as most independent meetings were. Lyndon LaRouche seems to have been a key member."[18]
1942: University and the army
LaRouche enrolled at Northeastern University, but left in 1942 after receiving poor grades.[citation needed] As a Quaker, he was at first a conscientious objector during World War II, joining a Civilian Public Service camp, where Dennis King, author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, writes that he "promptly joined a small faction at odds with the administrators."[19] In 1944, he decided instead to join the United States Army as a non-combatant, serving in India and Burma with medical units and ending the war as an ordnance clerk. LaRouche describes his decision to serve as one of the most important in his life.[20] While in India, he developed an interest in and sympathy for the Indian Independence movement. He reports in his autobiography that many GIs feared that they would be asked to support British forces in actions against Indian independence forces, a prospect that he says "was revolting to most of us."[21]
While still in the CO camp, LaRouche had begun discussing Marxism with fellow camp inmates and soon became a Marxist. While traveling home from India on the troopship SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, who was also from Lynn. Merrill won LaRouche over to Trotskyism on the journey home. Back in the U.S., LaRouche attempted to resume his education at Northeastern, intending to major in physics, but left again because of what he called academic "philistinism."[22]
1948–1954: Socialist Workers Party, and first marriage
In 1948, LaRouche returned to Lynn a
fter dropping out of college and began attending meetings of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)'s Lynn branch. He joined the party the next year, adopting the pseudonym Lyn Marcus for his political work.[23] He found work as a management consultant in New York City, advising companies on how to use computers to maximise efficiency and speed up production. In 1954, he married fellow SWP member Janice Neuberger. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1956.
1960s
1960–1965: LaRouche and Trotskyism, divorce
By 1961, the LaRouches were living in a large apartment on Central Park West. His activity in the internal life of the SWP was minimal due to his preoccupation with his career. In 1964, while still in the SWP, he became associated with a faction called the Revolutionary Tendency, which had been expelled from the SWP and was under the influence of the British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, leader of the British Socialist Labour League.[24] For six months, he worked closely with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth, who later wrote:
LaRouche had a gargantuan ego. Convinced he was a genius, he combined his strong conviction in his own abilities with an arrogance expressed in the cadences of upper-class New England. He assumed that the comment in the Communist Manifesto that "a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class..." was written specifically for him. And he believed that the working class were lucky to obtain his services. LaRouche possessed a marvelous ability to place any world happening in a larger context, which seemed to give the event additional meaning, but his thinking was schematic, lacking factual detail and depth. It was contradictory. His explanations were a bit too pat, and his mind worked so quickly that I always suspected his bravado covered over superficiality. He had an answer for everything. Sessions with him reminded me of a parlor game: present a problem, no matter how petty, and without so much as blinking his eye, LaRouche would dream up the solution.[25]
He remained in the SWP until his expulsion in 1965. He maintains that
he was soon disillusioned with Marxism, dropped out of the SWP in the mid-1950s,
and resumed his activism only at the prompting of the FBI citing national security concerns. In an interview on the Pacifica Radio network, LaRouche said that he returned to the SWP because he believed that only the Left was likely to combat what he called the "utopian" danger coming from the Right, typified by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War.[26] His ex-wife and other SWP members from that time dispute this.[27] During these years, LaRouche developed an interest in economics, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, business management, and other subjects. He and his wife separated in 1963 and were subsequently divorced.
In 1965, LaRouche
left Wohlforth's group and joined the Spartacist League, which had split from Wohlforth. He
left after a few months and wrote a letter to the SWP declaring that all factions and sections of the Trotskyist Fourth International were dead and announcing that he and his new partner, Carol Larrabee (also known as Carol Schnitzer), were going to build the Fifth International.[28] In 1966,
the couple joined the Committee for Independent Political Action (CIPA), a New Left/Old Left coalition that was running independent anti-war candidates in New York City elections, and formed a branch in Manhattan's West Village.
1967–1969: Formation of the National Caucus of Labor Committees
He began teaching classes at New York City's Free School on dialectical materialism,[citation needed] and attracted around him a group of undergraduates and graduate students from Columbia University and the City College of New York, several of whom were involved with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), itself prominent in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In the 1988 version of his autobiography, he writes that he was not really a Marxist when he gave his lectures at the Free School, but that he used his familiarity with Marxism to win students away from the New Left counterculture, though he wrote in 1974 that he had been a Marxist since 1945.[29] However, what LaRouche began to write and teach in the late 1960s differed from orthodox Marxism, supplementing the doctrine of class struggle with a strong emphasis on the dangers of a supposedly parasitical finance capital as opposed to industrial capital.[citation needed] He would continue with this latter emphasis in the following decade while abandoning, for the most part, the use of Marxist jargon.
LaRouche's followers were heavily involved in the 1968 student strike and occupation of Columbia University, and
attempted to win control of the university's PLP and SDS branches by putting forward a political program linking student struggles with those of Harlem residents, transit workers, and the tenant movement.[30] Once his following was large enough,
LaRouche created his own "tendency" or faction within the Columbia SDS. There were other factions: the "action faction," which became the Weather Underground, and the "praxis axis," which saw students as the vanguard of the revolution.[31] LaRouche called his faction the "SDS Labor Committee," which became influential within SDS chapters in Philadelphia. He criticized the SDS and the New Left in general, for allowing itself to be influenced by the counterculture, which he abhorred, and for not emphasizing work with trade unionists and tenants. Tim Wohlforth attended one of LaRouche's meetings in New York during this period:
Twenty to 30 students would gather in a large apartment and sit on the floor surrounding LaRouche, who now sported a very shaggy beard. The meeting would sometimes go on as long as seven hours. It was difficult to tell where discussions of tactics left off and educational presentation began. Encouraging the students, LaRouche gave them esoteric assignments, such as searching through the writings of Georges Sorel to discover Rudd's anarchistic origins, or studying Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital. Since SDS was strong on spirit and action but rather bereft of theory, the students appeared to thoroughly enjoy this work.[25]
LaRouche's faction was expelled from the SDS in 1969 for supporting the New York City teachers' strike, and so the SDS Labor Committee became the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), while continuing to function in some SDS chapters outside New York. Despite its name, it had no significant connection with the labor movement and viewed intellectuals as the revolutionary vanguard. According to Dennis King, NCLC's internal life became highly regimented over the next few years. Members gave up their jobs and private lives and became entirely devoted to the group and its leader.
The movement developed an internal discipline technique, "ego stripping", intended to reinforce conformity and loyalty to LaRouche.[32][33]
According to LaRouche's autobiography, it was at this point, in 1969, that violent altercations began between his members and New Left groups. He writes that Mark Rudd's faction began attacking LaRouche's faction at Columbia University. "Other organized physical attacks against my friends would follow, inside the United States and abroad. Communist Party goon-squad attacks began in Chicago, in summer 1972, and continued sporadically up to the concerted assault launched during March 1973. During 1972, there was also a goon-attack on associates of mine by the SWP."[34]
1970s
1971–1972: New Solidarity, U.S. Labor Party
In 1971, LaRouche set up the New Solidarity International Press Service (NSIPS) as a wire service for his publications,[citation needed] and in 1972, he founded the U.S. Labor Party as the political arm of the NCLC.[35] He also co-founded the Fusion Energy Foundation.<--which is?-->
1973: "Operation Mop-Up"
A 1973 internal FBI letter.
Antony Lerman writes that, from 1973, LaRouche began to abandon Marxism and, with little warning, adopted far-right, even neo-Nazi, ideas, a process accompanied by a campaign of violence against his opponents on the left. The violence was accompanied by the development of conspiracy theories and paranoia about his personal safety, often involving alleged attempts to assassinate him.[5]
In 1972, in what LaRouche called "Operation Mop-Up," NCLC members physically attacked meetings of the Communist Party and later of the SWP, and other groups who were classed by LaRouche as "left-protofascists." They attacked Communist Party members on the streets, using nunchaku sticks as weapons.[36] The NCLC argued that they were acting in self-defense, but King writes that their rhetoric suggested otherwise. "From here on in", LaRouche said at a meeting on the east coast, "the CP cannot hold a meeting on the East Coast... We'll mop them up in two months."[37] A New Solidarity editorial said: "We must dispose of this stinking corpse to ensure that it cannot act as a host for maggots and other parasites... Our job is to pulverize the Communist Party."[38] According to King, LaRouche halted the operation after police in New York City, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and Boston arrested several of his followers on assault charges, and after the Communist Party, the SWP, and other leftist groups formed joint defense teams and began to win battles against the Mop-Up squads.[39]
LaRouche wrote in 2000 that the FBI was using the Communist Party U.S.A. to bring about his "personal 'elimination'."[40] He cited a 1973 document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 1992, which noted that the Communist Party USA was conducting a background investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating" LaRouche and the NCLC as a threat to the CPUSA, and suggested helping that the FBI help them anonymously. LaRouche alleges that this was part of COINTELPRO, a series of covert, and often illegal, FBI projects aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States.[41]
1974: Founding of Executive Intelligence Review; allegations of brainwashing
Further information: Executive Intelligence Review
LaRouche founded the weekly newsmagazine, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) in 1974. EIR and the New Solidarity International Press Service were among several publications or wire services LaRouche came to run; others are The New Federalist; 21st Century Science and Technology; Nouvelle Solidarité in France; Neue Solidarität, published by Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität, a LaRouche group in Germany; and Fidelio, the quarterly magazine of the Schiller Institute.
John Rausch writes that EIR was part of LaRouche's plan in the 1970s to form a global intelligence network. He organized the network as if it consisted of news services and magazines, which allowed the LaRouche movement to gain access to government officials and others under press cover. EIR came to be known for its conspiracy theories. It has published inter alia that Queen Elizabeth II is the head of an international drug-smuggling cartel, and that the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 was the first strike in a British attempt to take over the United States.[42]
Also in 1974, LaRouche sued the City of New York, saying that CIA and British spies had brainwashed his associates into attempting to kill him in a Manchurian Candidate–style assassination.[32][43]The LaRouche group announced at a national conference that the plot involved the CIA and KGB and that the brainwashed would-be assassin was Christopher (Chris) White, a 26-year-old British national who had married LaRouche's ex-girlfriend, Carol Schnitzer, before moving with her to London to organize a British branch of the NCLC.[44][45] LaRouche said that White had been tortured and brainwashed in a London basement by the CIA and British intelligence, who had programmed him to kill his wife upon the utterance of a trigger word, then to finger LaRouche for assassination by Cuban exile frogmen.
LaRouche mobilized the entire NCLC. They passed out fliers in New York and other cities, describing White's alleged torture in lurid detail. The NCLC national office issued more than forty press releases in a two-week period. LaRouche and the Whites filed a complaint with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and launched a lawsuit against the CIA.[46]
1974–1977: Presidential campaign and second marriage
Further information: Lyndon LaRouche U.S. Presidential campaigns
LaRouche married Helga Zepp in 1977; Zepp-LaRouche pictured here in 2006
According to the Los Angeles Times, LaRouche said he met with representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 in order to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC, and to propose that the CPUSA be merged into the NCLC. He denied receiving assistance from the Soviets.[47] He visited Baghdad in 1975, during which he made a presentation to the Baath Party conference about what he called his "Oasis Plan", a proposal for Arab-Israeli peace based on the construction of massive water projects. In the same year, New Solidarity began running articles favorable to Iraq and extensively quoting Saddam Hussein, at that time Iraq's vice-president.
In 1976, he ran for President of the United States as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05 percent). The campaign was the first to broadcast a paid half-hour television address, which gave LaRouche the opportunity to air his views before a national audience, something that became a regular feature of his later campaigns. There were protests about the television address: Stephen Rosenfeld wrote in The Washington Post that, "A duplicitous violence-prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public unless there is reason to present it in those terms."[48]
A year later, in 1977, LaRouche married for the second time. His new wife, Helga Zepp, was a leading activist in the German branch of his organization. She went on to work closely with LaRouche for the rest of his career, and founded a branch of his movement, the Schiller Institute in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1984.
1979: Allegations that the U.S. Labor Party was a cult
In 1979, a two-part article by Howard Blum and Paul Montgomery appeared in the New York Times that accused LaRouche of running a cult.[49] Blum wrote that LaRouche had turned the U.S. Labor Party—the political arm of the NCLC, with 1,000 members listed in 37 offices in North America, and 26 in Europe and Latin America—into an extreme-right, anti-Semitic organization, despite the presence of Jewish members. The Times alleged that members had taken courses in how to use knives and rifles,
and had produced reports for South Africa on anti-apartheid groups in the United States. A farm in upstate New York was allegedly being used for guerilla training, attended by LaRouche movement members from Germany and Mexico. Several members also underwent a six-day anti-terrorist training course, at a cost of $200 per person per day, at a camp in Powder Springs, Georgia, run by Mitchell L. Werbell, an international arms dealer, who had served as an advisor to several Latin American dictators and who said he was connected to the CIA.[50]
The Times reported that U.S. Labor Party members were playing a dominant role in a number of companies in Manhattan: Computron Technologies Corporation, which included Mobil Oil and Citibank among its clients; World Composition Services, which the Times wrote had one of the most advanced typesetting complexes in the city and had the Ford Foundation among its clients; and PMR Associates, a printing shop that produced the party's publications and some high school newspapers.[50]
Blum wrote that, from 1976 onwards, party members were transmitting intelligence reports on left-wing members to the FBI and local police. In 1977, he wrote,
commercial reports on U.S. anti-apartheid groups were prepared by LaRouche members for the South African government, student dissidents were reported to the Shah of Iran's Savak secret police, and the anti-nuclear movement was investigated on behalf of power companies. The Times also reported that LaRouche was telling his membership several times a year that he was being targeted for assassination, including by the Queen, "big-time Zionist mobsters," the Council on Foreign Relations, the Justice Department, and the Mossad.[50]
Blum also
wrote that U.S. Labor Party members were exchanging almost daily information with Roy Frankhouser, who called himself the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania, and who had been accused of being a member of the American Nazi Party. Frankhouser had been convicted in 1975 of conspiring to sell half a ton of dynamite and had marched on Fifth Avenue in New York wearing a Gestapo uniform. LaRouche reportedly called Frankhouser a "high intelligence source,"[50] though he later denied this, saying that in fact he had a low opinion of Frankhouser.
Mid-1970s: Allegations of fascism, overt and "coded" anti-Semitism
From the mid-1970s onwards, it was repeatedly alleged that LaRouche and his movement had fascist tendencies.For example, in 1976, Julian Bond called the U.S. Labor Party a group of "leftwing fascists."[51][45][52] LaRouche has argued strongly against fascism, and religious or racial hatred. He wrote in 2006, "Religious and racial hatred, such as anti-Semitism, or hatred against Islam, or, hatred of Christians, is, on record of known history, the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today."[53] His publications say that descriptions of him as a neo-fascist or anti-Semite stem from "the drug lobby or the Soviet operation—which is sometimes the same thing."[54] Tim Wohlforth and Dennis Tourish write:
The parallel between LaRouche's thinking and that of the classical fascist model is striking. LaRouche, like Mussolini and Hitler before him, borrowed from Marx yet changed his theories fundamentally. Most important, Marx's internationalist outlook was abandoned in favor of a narrow nation-state perspective. Marx's goal of abolishing capitalism was replaced by the model of a totalitarian state that directs an economy where ownership of the means of production is still largely in public hands. The corporations and their owners remain in place but have to take their orders from LaRouche. Hitler called the schema "national socialism". LaRouche hopes the term "the American System" will be more acceptable.[55]
Antony Lerman writes that LaRouche's overriding ideology is that,
as LaRouche put it, "History is nothing but conspiracies," and that the main group behind the conspiracies are the Jews, mostly wealthy ones such as the Rothschilds. According to Lerman, LaRouche uses "the British" as a code for Jews to avoid being accused of antisemitism. LaRouche refers to this group as the "Zionist-British organism," and sees them as having, "evolved through moral depravity and inbreeding into a separate species outside the human race," writes Lerman; the British, led by the Jews, are in control of terrorism and drug networks, and it is the mission of LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees to wipe them out.[56]
Dennis King and Chip Berlet say that anti-Semitic writings by LaRouche trace back to 1973, when he wrote that Jewish culture is "merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim."[57] King writes that some Jewish members quit the movement because of anti-Semitic jokes, Holocaust denial, and a perceived resemblance between LaRouche's writings and Mein Kampf. To placate others, King writes, LaRouche redefined the meaning of "Jew": "To be a real Jew, [LaRouche] suggested, one must repudiate the State of Israel, Zionism, and the mainstream leadership of the Jewish community."[58] King compares LaRouche's writings to Nazi and other anti-Semitic tracts going back to the 1890s, where there is a common theme of connecting Jewish power with the British Empire. He points to what he says are assertions by LaRouche that all the main power centers in Britain are controlled by Jewish families,[59] and cites a 1978 illustration in New Solidarity of Queen Elizabeth at the top of a Star of David as an example of what he sees as coded anti-Semitism.[60]
George Johnson writes in The New York Times that King's argument fails to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle are themselves Jewish.[61] Daniel Pipes argues that LaRouche's references to the British really are to the British, though he agrees that an alleged British-Jewish alliance lies at the heart of LaRouche's conspiracism.[62]
1980s
The Wheat Building in Leesburg, Virginia, a national office of the LaRouche movement in the 1980s
Since the autumn of 1979, the LaRouche movement has conducted most of its U.S. electoral activities within the framework of the National Democratic Policy Committee, a political action committee whose name drew complaints from the Democratic National Committee. Party leaders have refused to recognize LaRouche as a party member, or to seat the few delegates he received in his seven primary campaigns as a Democrat.[63]
"
October Surprise" allegations
Steven Emerson writes that, in the early 1980s, LaRouche and his followers started the widely discredited "October surprise conspiracy theory", namely that in 1980 Ronald Reagan's campaign staff conspired with the Iranian government to delay the release of 52 American hostages, in order to help defeat President Jimmy Carter. The Iranians agreed to this, according to the theory, in exchange for future weapons sales from the Reagan administration.[64]
1982: Dispute with U.S. News and World Report
In 1982, U.S. News and World Report sued New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications for damages, alleging that LaRouche reporters were impersonating its reporters in phone calls.
LaRouche and his aide, Jeffrey Steinberg, gave depositions which revealed their policy of pretending to be from non-existent publications and of infiltrating the campaigns of competing presidential nominees. Without admitting guilt, the LaRouche group agreed not to impersonate U.S. News reporters in the future.[65]
Strategic Defense Initiative
In the mid-1980s the LaRouche campaign was noted for its support of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, known as "SDI" or "Star Wars". A LaRouche supporter and former head of West German Military Counterintelligence (MAD), General Paul-Albert Scherer, said in 1992 that LaRouche, whom he described as a "scientific-technological strategic expert", had been the "originator" of the SDI. Scherer also said that LaRouche had been involved in "backchannel" communications between the Reagan administration and the Russian embassy, during the year before Reagan's announcement of the policy in March 1983.[66]
Physicist Edward Teller, a principal proponent of SDI and X-ray lasers, told reporters in 1984 that he had been courted by LaRouche but kept his distance. LaRouche began calling his plan the "LaRouche-Teller proposal" even though they had never met. In Teller's words, LaRouche was "a poorly informed man with fantastic conceptions".[67][68] LaRouche later attributed the collapse of the Soviet Union to its refusal to follow his advice to accept Reagan's offer to share the technology.[69]
Promotion of space colonization
LaRouche's promotion of space colonization included dealings with German scientists and engineers who had worked under the Nazi government of Germany during the Second World War, some of whom emigrated to the U.S. after the war under Operation Paperclip, and ended up with NASA. They included Arthur Rudolph, and several other Peenemunde rocket experts, including Krafft Arnold Ehricke, Adolf Busemann, Konrad Dannenberg, and Hermann Oberth. LaRouche collaborated with Ehricke on ideas about the colonization of the moon and Mars.[70] After Ehricke's death, LaRouche sponsored the "Krafft Ehricke Memorial Conference" and in 1988 delivered a national TV broadcast entitled "The Woman on Mars."[71] LaRouche also had a relationship with Karl-Adolf Zenker and Paul-Albert Scherer, West German Admiral and former head of West German Military Intelligence, respectively, who both served in the German military in World War II.[72][73] When Rudolph was forced to renounce his U.S.citizenship after an investigation into his past, LaRouche supporters formed a defense fund for him.[74]
1984: Founding of Schiller Institute; reported meetings with NSA
Further information: Schiller Institute
In 1984, Helga Zepp-LaRouche founded the Schiller Institute in Germany, with LaRouche, Amelia Boynton Robinson and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade.[75][76] In the same year, LaRouche was able to raise enough money to purchase 14 television spots. In one of them, he called Walter Mondale, the Democratic Party's Presidential candidate, "an agent of influence" of the Soviet intelligence services, triggering over 1,000 complaints about the spot, which CBS was legally obliged to air.[77] On April 19, 1986, Saturday Night Live aired a skit satirizing the ads; it portrayed Queen Elizabeth II and Henry Kissinger as drug dealers.
Ronald Radosh and Dennis King alleged in November 1984 that LaRouche and his aides had been meeting with officials of the Reagan Administration, including several meetings and phone calls with Norman Bailey, then the senior director of international economic affairs for the National Security Council (NSC), and with Richard Morris, then a special assistant to former National Security Adviser William P. Clark, Jr.[78] There were also contacts with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.[79] The LaRouche campaign said the report was full of errors.[78]
According to Bailey, the contacts were broken off after they became public. Bailey himself praised LaRouche's intelligence gathering operation, calling it "one of the best private intelligence services in the world", though he disagreed with the movement's theories and tactics.[80][81] Three years later, LaRouche blamed his criminal indictment on the NSC.[82]
Other events in the 1980s
LaRouche met with Argentine President Raul Alfonsin, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo.[80] (A Mexican official told the New York Times that LaRouche had arranged the meeting by representing himself as an official of the Democratic Party. At the time, one of LaRouche's organizations was the National Democratic Policy Committee, which had no connection to the Democratic Party.[83] However, Portillo continued to maintain a relationship with LaRouche and his movement, and went on to endorse LaRouche's candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1999, according to the LaRouche movement.[84])
1984–1986: Lawsuit against NBC
"Ibykus Farm", LaRouche's home in the mid-1980s.
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) aired a news segment and a "First Camera" report on LaRouche in 1984. Produced by Pat Lynch, the reports included interviews with former members of the movement who gave details about their fundraising practices and alleged that LaRouche had spoken about assassinating U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The report said that an investigation by the IRS would lead to an indictment.
LaRouche filed a defamation suit in federal court against NBC, the Anti Defamation League (ADL), and others. Judge James C. Cacheris presided. One of the main issues was a statement by ADL fact-finding director Irwin Suall on national TV calling LaRouche a "small-time Hitler." The LaRouche organization later alleged that the NBC programs were the result of a series of meetings that were said to have planned a "campaign of defamation against LaRouche".[85][86] On the first day of the trial, Judge Cacheris ruled that Pat Lynch would not be required to name her sources for the "First Camera" program.
LaRouche lost his case and NBC won its countersuit, with the jury awarding it $3 million in damages in what has been called one of the more celebrated countersuits by a libel defendant.[87] The award was reduced by Judge Cacheris to an eventual payment of $258,459.[65][88][89] LaRouche failed to pay the damages, pleading poverty. Federal District Judge Claude M. Hilton described LaRouche's testimony about being almost penniless as "completely lacking in credibility".[90] In 1986, in the same case, LaRouche said that he did not know who had paid the rent on the estate, or for his food, lodging, clothing, transportation, bodyguards, or lawyers since 1973. The judge fined him for failing to answer.[91] After the judge signed an order to allow discovery of LaRouche's personal finances, a cashier's check was handed over to the court to end the case.[92] When LaRouche appealed the outcome of the trial, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in rejecting his arguments, set forth a three-prong test (later called the "LaRouche test") to decide when anonymous sources must be named in libel cases, and concluded that revealing NBC's sources had not been necessary in the LaRouche-NBC case.[4][93][94]
1986: AIDS, opposition to gay rights, and electoral success
Sponsored by the "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC), the so-called "LaRouche Initiative" qualified for the California ballot in 1986, with the signature gatherers mostly paid for by LaRouche's Campaigner Publications.[95]Proposition 64 would have placed AIDS on the state's List of Communicable Diseases. Opponents said the measure could have required universal testing and the quarantine of infected individuals, while proponents denied those would be requirements and said it simply allowed for public health measures to be taken. After its defeat, it was reintroduced two years later and again defeated.
LaRouche has given speeches and written articles in opposition to gay rights that his critics consider homophobic.[96][97] AIDS was a leading plank in his political platform during his 1988 presidential campaign.[95] Saying that "the AIDS issue is going to make me a national folk hero", he vowed to quarantine its "aberrant" victims who are "guilty of bringing this pandemic upon us."[98]
In March 1986, NDPC candidates Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild won the Democratic primary for state-wide offices in Illinois. Their success surprised the political establishment and brought LaRouche national attention.[99] The Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Adlai Stevenson III, temporarily left the Democratic Party rather than run on the same slate as LaRouche movement members, and the LaRouche candidates lost in November.[100]
1988: Criminal conviction
Main article: LaRouche criminal trials
Federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia
The LaRouche criminal trials in the mid-1980s stemmed from federal and state investigations into the activities LaRouche and members of his movement. They were charged with conspiring to commit fraud and soliciting loans they had no intention of repaying.[101] LaRouche and his supporters disputed the charges, claiming the trials were politically motivated.[101]
In 1986, hundreds of state and federal officers raided LaRouche offices in Virginia and Massachusetts. A federal grand jury in Boston, Massachusetts, indicted LaRouche and 12 associates on credit card fraud and obstruction of justice. The subsequent trial, described as an "extravaganza," was repeatedly delayed and ended in mistrial. Following the mistrial, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicted LaRouche and six associates.
On December 16, 1988, LaRouche was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud involving more than $30 million in defaulted loans; 11 counts of actual mail fraud involving $294,000 in defaulted loans; and one count of conspiring to defraud the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced to prison for fifteen years. The judge said that the claim of a vendetta was "arrant nonsense", and that, "the idea that this organization is a sufficient threat to anything that would warrant the government bringing a prosecution to silence them just defies human experience."[102]
At the same trial, his associates received lesser sentences for mail fraud and conspiracy.[101] Jury foreman Buster Horton told the Washington Post (17 December 1988) that it was the failure of LaRouche aides to repay loans that swayed the jury in the Virginia case, and that the jury "all agreed [LaRouche] was not on trial for his political beliefs. We did not convict him for that. He was convicted for those 13 counts he was on trial for." In separate state trials in Virginia and New York, 13 associates received terms ranging from one month to 77 years. The Virginia state trials were described as the highest-profile cases that the state Attorney General's office had ever prosecuted.[103] Fourteen states issued injunctions against LaRouche-related organizations. Three LaRouche-related organizations were forced into bankruptcy after failing to pay contempt of court fines.
Defense lawyers filed numerous unsuccessful appeals that challenged the conduct of the grand jury, the contempt fines, the execution of the search warrants and various trial procedures. At least ten appeals were heard by the United States court of appeals, and three were appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark joined the defense team for two appeals. Clark wrote that that the case involved "a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge."[3] Following the convictions, the LaRouche movement mounted failed attempts at exoneration.[104]
1990s: Imprisonment, campaigning
1989–1994: Imprisonment
LaRouche began his jail sentence in 1989, and was released on parole in 1994. He campaigned while imprisoned at the Federal Medical Center, Rochester in Minnesota. He ran for Congress in 1990, seeking to represent the 10th District of Virginia, but received less than one percent of the vote. He ran for President again in 1992. Reverend James Bevel, a civil rights activist who had represented the LaRouche movement in its pursuit of the Franklin child prostitution ring allegations, was LaRouche's running mate, and did most of the campaigning.[105]
1994: Release from prison
LaRouche continued his political activity upon his release. In 1994, his followers joined members of the Nation of Islam to condemn the Anti-Defamation League for its alleged crimes against African Americans, reportedly one of several such joint meetings held since 1992.[106] In 1996, LaRouche was invited to speak at a convention organized by the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan and Ben Chavis, then of the National African American Leadership Summit. As soon as LaRouche began speaking, he was booed off the stage; one delegate said it was because of his actions against African Americans in the past.[107]
In the 1996 Democratic presidential primaries, LaRouche received enough votes in Louisiana and Virginia to get one delegate from each state. However, before the primaries began the Democratic National Committee chair, Donald Fowler, had determined that LaRouche was not a "bona fide Democrat" because of his "expressed political beliefs... which are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic," and because of his "past activities including exploitation of and defrauding contributors and voters." Fowler instructed state parties to disregard votes for LaRouche.[108][109] LaRouche sued in federal court, claiming a violation of the Voting Rights Act. After losing in the district court the case was appealed to the First District Court of Appeals, which upheld the lower court's decision.[110]
According to the LaRouche movement, he mobilized his supporters in defense of President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, forming a group called the "Committee to Save the Presidency."[111] In 1999, Chinese media reported that LaRouche had criticized the Cox Report, a congressional investigation that accused the Chinese of stealing U.S. nuclear weapons secrets.[112] LaRouche called the report "intrinsically fraudulent" and "a reflection of the kind of scientific illiteracy" of its writers.[113]
2000s
2000: Founding of the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement
LaRouche supporters in Chicago, 2007
Further information: Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement
During the 2000 Democratic primaries, LaRouche scored in double digits in multiple states, with his best showing in Arkansas, where he received 22 percent of the vote to Vice President Al Gore's 78 percent. In the Kentucky primary, LaRouche placed third with 11 percent, behind Gore and Bill Bradley.
He found the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement (WLYM) in 2000.[114], saying it had hundreds of members in the U.S. by 2004, and a "lesser number abroad".[115]
In 2002, in a speech to the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, he discussed his proposal for a Eurasian Land Bridge.[116] Afterwards, he said that the September 11 attacks could not have taken place without connivance from someone inside the Bush administration. He also referred to "Jewish gangsters" and "Christian Zionists" "bought by money, the so-called Zionist money," according to the Anti-Defamation League.[117]
2003: Death of Jeremiah Duggan
Main article: Jeremiah Duggan
LaRouche came to international attention in 2003 when Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish student from the UK attending a conference organized by the Schiller Institute and LaRouche Youth Movement, died in mysterious circumstances in Wiesbaden, Germany. The German police said his death appeared to be suicide; Duggan was hit by several cars after running onto a busy road. A British court ruled out suicide and decided that Duggan had died while "in a state of terror."[118] Duggan's mother believes he died in connection with an attempt to recruit him to the LaRouche movement; a spokesman for the German public prosecution service has said the mother simply cannot accept that her son committed suicide.[119]
2004–2005: Electoral and lobbying activities
LaRouche entered the primary elections for the Democratic Party's nomination in 2004, setting the record for the number of consecutive presidential campaigns. LaRouche was present in Boston during the 2004 Democratic National Convention but did not attend the convention itself. He held a press conference in which he declared his support for John Kerry and pledged to mobilize his organization to help defeat George W. Bush in the November presidential election. In 2005, he campaigned against the privatization of Social Security, asserting that this was an issue that could successfully mobilize the population against the policies of the Bush administration.[120]
2005–2009: Chinese and Russian press coverage
In November 2005, an eight-part interview with LaRouche was published in the People's Daily of China, covering his economic forecasts, his battles with the American media, and his assessment of the neoconservatives.[121] In 2006, Economic Daily, a Chinese newspaper run directly by the Chinese State Council published a biographical article.[122] In December 2008, he was interviewed by China Central Television and Chinese Biz News about his economic forecasts,[123] and in 2009, China Youth Daily reported that he had forecast the 2008 financial collapse in July 2007.[124] LaRouche publications report that he addressed both the Economics Committee of the Russian State Duma and the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2007; also that year, a paper by LaRouche was presented by Jonathan Tennenbaum, a member of the LaRouche movement, at an April 24 conference in Moscow on the Russian plan to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait.[125] On May 15, 2007, he addressed the Russian Academy of Sciences to commemorate the 80th birthday of Stanislav Menshikov.[126]
2007: Death of Kenneth Kronberg
Kenneth and Molly Kronberg in 2001
Main article: Kenneth Kronberg
On April 11, 2007 a longtime LaRouche associate, Kenneth Kronberg, 58, committed suicide. Kronberg was the co-founder and an editor of Fidelio, the now-defunct magazine of the Schiller Institute.[127] Kronberg's printing business was reportedly in "serious arrears in tax payments, including employee withholding, due largely to lack of payment for printing jobs by other LaRouche entities."[128] Following his death the LaRouche movement sources made comments about Kronberg's widow, Molly Kronberg, who had also been a long time member and who had been compelled to testify in LaRouche's 1988 criminal trial. LaRouche implied in an internal memo that Mrs. Kronberg's support for the re-election of George W. Bush may have contributed to her husband's decision take his own life, and also said that Kronberg "provided false testimony" in order to help frame LaRouche.[129][130] In August 2009, Molly Kronberg sued in federal court, alleging that LaRouche harassed and libeled her.[129] A co-counsel for Kronberg is John Markham, one of the federal prosecutors who investigated and prosecuted LaRouche in the 1980s.[131]
2007–2009: LaRouche on the financial crisis
LaRouche was credited by press in Italy, and by a congressman in Mexico, as having forecast the financial crisis of 2007–2009. On December 17, 2008, Ivo Caizzi of Corriere della Sera referred to LaRouche as "the guru politician who, since the nineties, has announced the crash of speculative finances and the need for a New Bretton Woods." The article asserts that Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti is "an attentive reader" of LaRouche's anti-Free Market and anti-Marxist writings.[132] In a translation on a LaRouche website, Italian Europarliamentarian Mario Borghezio of the Northern League Borghezio is quoted as calling LaRouche, "an heretical economist who had forecast the financial crisis much in advance, and who has long since developed a lucid and deep analysis of the distortions in the world economic system."[133] Italian Senator Oskar Peterlini, in a July 2009 speech before the Senate, called LaRouche an expert in the field who had predicted the crisis.[134]
2009: LaRouche on Obama
LaRouchePAC poster, Alhambra, California, 2009
In 2009, LaRouche compared U.S. President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, and the proposed health-insurance reform to Hitler's Action T4 euthanasia program.[135] LaRouche supports a Single-payer health care policy, as opposed to the Obama plan. He has said that Americans must, "quickly and suddenly change the behavior of this president ... for no lesser reason than that your sister might not end up in somebody's gas oven".[136] The movement has printed pamphlets showing Obama and Hitler laughing together, and posters of Obama wearing a Hitler-style mustache.[137] In Seattle, police have been called twice in response to people threatening to tear the posters apart, or to assault the LaRouche supporters holding them.[138] At one widely reported event, Congressman Barney Frank referred to the posters as "vile, contemptible nonsense."[139]
