Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche
Lyndon LaRouche, February 2006
Born	Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. September 8, 1922 (1922-09-08) (age 87) Rochester, New Hampshire
Other names	Lyn Marcus
Political party	U.S. Labor Party, Democratic
Spouse(s)	Janice Neuberger (1954–1963) Helga Zepp (1977–present)
Children	Daniel, born 1956
Parents	Jessie Lenore Weir Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Sr.

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (pronounced /ləˈruːʃ/; 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. 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, 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 defenders believe the prosecution was a politically motivated conspiracy involving government officials and a mass-media brainwashing campaign.^[1] His appellate 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 movement.^[2]

LaRouche's supporters see him as a political leader in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, while other commentators regard him variously as a cult leader, fascist, or anti-Semite.^[3] 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 may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history."^[4]

Contents 1 Early life 1.1 University studies and the Army 2 1960s 2.1 1960–1965: Trotskyism 2.2 1967–1969: NCLC 3 1970s 3.1 1972: U.S. Labor Party 3.2 1973: "Operation Mop-Up" and ideological shift 3.3 "Ego-stripping" 3.4 1974: Executive Intelligence Review 3.5 1974–1975: Soviets, Iraq, FBI 3.6 1976: First presidential campaign 3.7 Criticism of the U.S. Labor Party 3.8 Frankhouser, WerBell, and Carto 3.9 Allegations of fascism, anti-Semitism 4 1980s 4.1 National Democratic Policy Committee 4.2 "October Surprise" 4.3 1982: Dispute with U.S. News 4.4 Strategic Defense Initiative 4.5 Space colonization 4.6 1984: Schiller Institute; NSC 4.7 Meetings with world leaders 4.8 1984: The NBC lawsuit 4.9 1986: AIDS, electoral success 4.10 1988: Criminal conviction 5 1990s 5.1 1989: Imprisonment 5.2 1994: Release on parole 6 2000s 6.1 2000: Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement 6.2 2003: Death of Jeremiah Duggan 6.3 2004–2005: Electoral and lobbying activities 6.4 Reception in Russia and China 6.5 2007: Death of Kenneth Kronberg 6.6 2008: LaRouche on the financial crisis 6.7 2008–2009: LaRouche on Obama 7 Books by LaRouche 8 Notes 9 References 10 Further reading

[edit] Early life

LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, the eldest of three children of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Sr. (June 1, 1896 – December 1983)^[5] and Jessie Lenore (née Weir; November 12, 1893 – August 1978).^[6] 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.[7]	”

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 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."^[8] According to his 1979 autobiography, The Power of Reason, he began to read around the age of five, and was called "Big Head" by the other children at school.^[9] 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.^[10] This advice led to "years of hell" for him from bullies at school.^[10] As a result, he spent much of his time alone, taking long walks through the woods and identifying in his mind with great philosophers.^[11] In contrast, he joked, the childhood peers from whom he had felt so alienated had been "unwitting followers of David Hume."^[7]

He elaborated on his early intellectual development in a second autobiography in 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.^[12] He graduated from Lynn English High School in 1940.^[13]

In the same year, the Lynn Quakers expelled LaRouche's father for reportedly spreading gossip about other members; writing under the name Hezekiah Micajah Jones, LaRouche Sr. allegedly accused the Friends of misusing funds. His wife and the 19-year-old LaRouche resigned in sympathy.^[14]

[edit] University studies and the Army

LaRouche enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston, but left in 1942 after receiving poor grades. He wrote of his geometry class that he "could not accept the axioms and postulates," and of his teachers in general that they "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was willing to tolerate."^[15]

As a Quaker, he was at first a conscientious objector during World War II, joining a Civilian Public Service camp, where Dennis King writes he "promptly joined a small faction at odds with the administrators."^[16] 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 of his life.^[17] While in India, he developed an interest in and sympathy for the Indian Independence movement. He reports in his autobiography that many GIs feared they would be asked to support British forces in actions against Indian independence forces, a prospect he says "was revolting to most of us."^[18]

While still in the CO camp, he had begun discussing Marxism with fellow camp inmates and soon became a Marxist himself. While traveling home from India on the SS General Bradley in 1946, he met Don Merrill, a fellow soldier, 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 because of what he called academic "philistinism."^[19]

LaRouche returned to Lynn in 1948 and began attending meetings of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He joined the next year, adopting the pseudonym Lyn Marcus for his political work.^[20] He battled hepatitis in 1953, and subsequently arrived in New York City, where he took a job advising companies how to use computers to maximize efficiency.^[21] In late 1954 he married fellow SWP member Janice Neuberger. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1956.

[edit] 1960s

[edit] 1960–1965: Trotskyism

By 1961, the LaRouches were living in a large apartment on Central Park West, Manhattan, his activity in the internal life of the SWP minimal as he focused on his career. He and his wife separated in 1963, and 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.^[22] 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.^[23]

LaRouche left Wohlforth's group in 1965, 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 of the Trotskyist Fourth International were dead, and that he and his new partner, Carol Larrabee, also known as Carol Schnitzer, were going to build a Fifth International.^[24] In 1966, the couple joined the Committee for Independent Political Action, 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.

[edit] 1967–1969: NCLC

“	Twenty to 30 students would ... sit on the floor surrounding LaRouche, who now sported a very shaggy beard ... 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. — Tim Wohlforth[23]	”

LaRouche began teaching classes on dialectical materialism at New York City's Free School, and attracted around him a group of students from Columbia University and the City College of New York, several of whom were involved with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which was prominent in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The ideas he began teaching in the late 1960s differed from orthodox Marxism, in that he supplemented the doctrine of class struggle with a strong emphasis on the dangers of a supposedly parasitical finance capital, as opposed to industrial capital. He continued with this emphasis throughout 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.^[25] Once his following was large enough, LaRouche created his own 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.^[26] 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.

LaRouche's faction was expelled from the SDS in 1969 for supporting the New York City teachers' union in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike, and so the former 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 disciplinary technique called "ego stripping" (see below), intended to reinforce conformity and loyalty.^[8][27]

[edit] 1970s

[edit] 1972: U.S. Labor Party

In 1972, he founded the U.S. Labor Party as the political arm of the NCLC.^[28] The party became highly controversial (see below). In a two-part article about it, The New York Times called it a "cult-like right-wing political organization,"^[29] while the National Review called it a "self-styled 'Marxist' organization."^[30] The LaRouche organization described it in 1995 as "an independent political association committed to the tradition of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Henry C. Carey, and President Abraham Lincoln."^[31] It was disbanded in 1979, becoming the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC).

[edit] 1973: "Operation Mop-Up" and ideological shift

According to LaRouche's autobiography, it was in 1969 that violent altercations began between his members and New Left groups. He wrote that Mark Rudd's faction began assaulting LaRouche's faction at Columbia University. "Other organized physical attacks against my friends would follow, inside the United States and abroad," he wrote. "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."^[32]

Antony Lerman writes that, in 1973 and with little warning, LaRouche 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.^[33] LaRouche said in 1987 that, since 1973, he has believed he is under the threat of assassination from a number of sources, including the Soviet Union, the CIA, Libya, drug dealers, and bankers.^[34] According to Boris Mezhuyev writing for a Russian news agency, LaRouche's ideological shift at this time replaced Marxism with what LaRouche called the American System and the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.^[35]

Between April and September 1973, during what LaRouche called "Operation Mop-Up," NCLC members began physically attacking members of other leftist groups, groups that LaRouche had classified as "left-protofascists." Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchaku sticks, they assaulted members of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Progressive Labor Party, and others, on the streets and during meetings. There were 60 recorded assaults in five months.^[36] A New Solidarity editorial said of the Communist Party: "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."^[37] King writes that LaRouche halted the operation when police arrested several of his followers on assault charges, and after the groups under attack formed joint defense teams.^[38]

LaRouche wrote in 2000 that the FBI had been using the Communist Party at that time to bring about his "personal 'elimination'."^[39] He cited an October 1973 document, obtained in 1992 through FOIA, which noted that the Communist Party USA was conducting a background investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating" LaRouche and the NCLC; the memo suggested that the FBI help them anonymously. LaRouche wrote that this took place as part of COINTELPRO, a series of covert, and often illegal, FBI projects aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States which ended officially in 1971.^[40]

[edit] "Ego-stripping"

In the summer of 1973, LaRouche and the NCLC began using confrontation therapy techniques.^[41] LaRouche told NCLC members that they had to face their psychosexual fears in order to become more effective. In The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, he declared that "sexual impotency is generally the causal root of Left political impotency."^[15][41]

In Beyond Psychoanalysis, LaRouche argued that bourgeois elements of a worker's persona had to be stripped away to arrive at a state he called "little me", from which it would be possible to build a new personality, centred on a socialist identity.^[15] In this "ego stripping" process, members would be subjected to verbal attacks and personal criticisms by the entire group, until they broke down.^[41] This, LaRouche argued, was the point at which an individual "abruptly 'breaks free' as if from a drugged state; a sudden personality change occurs, in which the group sees the real person come forth, assume control of himself, or herself, and bring the ego-state under control." LaRouche therefore viewed the process as "an act of social love."^[41]

LaRouche might pick a random candidate for an ego-stripping session, ego-stripping sessions were also sometimes used on workers who had failed to perform some task satisfactorily.^[41] One member who left the movement, Christine Berl, later described the experience as "pure psychological terror."^[42]

One ego-stripping session was recorded—that of a 26-year-old British LaRouche member, Chris White—and the tape was sent to The New York Times by LaRouche activists, who said White had intended to kill LaRouche. According to the Times, "There are sounds of weeping, and vomiting on the tapes, and Mr. White complains of being deprived of sleep, food and cigarettes. At one point someone says 'raise the voltage,' but (LaRouche) says this was associated with the bright lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock."^[43]

White had formed a romantic relationship with LaRouche's former partner, Carol Larrabee. The couple left the States and moved to England, where they tried to form an NCLC branch. In December 1973, LaRouche asked them to return to the U.S. to attend a conference. White knew he would be subjected to an ego-stripping session, and he reportedly broke down during the flight, shouting that the CIA was planning to kill Larrabee and LaRouche.^[42] The ego-stripping went ahead anyway, with LaRouche in attendance. LaRouche can be heard on the tape telling White that a pain he complained of in his arm was not real, but "part of the program."^[15] White reportedly ended up confessing that he had been tortured by the CIA and British intelligence, and had been programmed, in the manner of The Manchurian Candidate, to kill Larrabee and set up LaRouche for assassination.^[42] Group members subsequently underwent training on how to detect other agents like White, and how to withstand the sort of torture they believed White had been subjected to.^[42] In the words of April Witt, writing in The Washington Post, "brainwashing hysteria" took hold of the movement. One activist said he attended meetings where members were writhing on the floor saying they needed de-programming.^[15]

Another activist, Alice Weitzman, expressed skepticism about the CIA claims. According to Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth, LaRouche sent six members to her apartment, where she was held captive and forced to listen to Beethoven at high volume, because LaRouche believed Beethoven's music could de-program agents. Weitzman scribbled a plea for help on a piece of paper, and threw it out of her window. A passer-by contacted the police, who freed her, but she declined to press charges.^[44]

[edit] 1974: Executive Intelligence Review

LaRouche founded the weekly newsmagazine, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), and the New Solidarity International Press Service, in 1974. A strong supporter of fusion power, he founded the Fusion Energy Foundation the same year.^[45]

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 though it consisted of news services and magazines, which gained the LaRouche movement access to government officials under press cover. EIR came to be known for its conspiracy theories, publishing inter alia that Queen Elizabeth II was the head of an international drug-smuggling cartel, and that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the first strike in a British attempt to take over the United States.^[46]

Other publications that LaRouche came to run were 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.

[edit] 1974–1975: Soviets, Iraq, FBI

LaRouche said he met with representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC, and to propose that the former be merged into the latter. He denied receiving any assistance from the Soviets.^[47] He visited Baghdad in 1975, and made a presentation to a Baath Party conference about his "Oasis Plan," a proposal for Arab-Israeli peace based on the construction of water projects. In the same year, New Solidarity began running articles favorable to Iraq, and extensively quoting Saddam Hussein.^[48]

In March 1975, Clarence Kelley, then the director of the FBI, described LaRouche's NCLC as, "a violence-oriented organization of 'revolutionary socialists' with a membership of nearly 1,000 in chapters in some 50 cities ... involved in fights, beatings, using drugs, kidnappings, brainwashings, and at least one shooting. They are reported to be armed, to have received defensive training such as karate, and to attend cadre schools and training schools to learn military tactics."^[48]

[edit] 1976: First presidential campaign

In 1976, LaRouche campaigned for President of the United States as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05 percent). It was the first of eight presidential elections he took part in, attracting $5.9 million in federal matching funds, according to The Washington Post, which writes that he has never won more than 80,000 votes in any election cycle.^[15]

LaRouche's U.S. Labor party platform predicted financial disaster by 1980 and included a three-step proposal to restore the financial health of the nation that it said had been ruined by "the vicious incompetence of the Rockefeller-Ford regime or the foolish babbling of windbags like Hubert Humphrey": a debt moratorium; nationalization of banks; and government investment in industry especially in the aerospace sector. In addition to financial collapse, the party predicted mass starvation and disease, "possibly rendering the human race itself virtually extinct within about 15 years." It called for the creation of an "International Development Bank" based on agreements between the U.S. and USSR governments to facilitate higher food production.^[49]

His 1976 campaign included a paid half-hour television address, which allowed LaRouche to air his views before a national audience, something that became a regular feature of his later campaigns. There were protests in 1976 about his television address, and about the involvement of the NCLC in public life generally. Writing in The Washington Post, Stephen Rosenfeld said LaRouche's ideas belonged to the radical right, neo-Nazi fringe, and that his main interests lay in disruption and disinformation. The NCLC had been terrorizing a number of people on the left, he wrote, including Noam Chomsky, Marcus Raskin, and Lester Brown, and had attacked SWP members in Detroit with clubs, reportedly including a paraplegic member. "We of the press should be chary of offering them print or air time. There is no reason to be too delicate about it: Every day we decide whose voices to relay. A duplicitous violence-prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public," he wrote, "unless there is reason to present it in those terms."^[48] LaRouche wrote in 1999 that this editorial comment "openly declared... a policy of malicious lying" and was part of "the fraudulent hate-campaign" against him.^[50]

A year later, in 1977, LaRouche married again. His new wife, Helga Zepp, was a leading activist in the German branch of the movement. She went on to work closely with LaRouche for the rest of his career, founding the Schiller Institute in Germany in 1984.

[edit] Criticism of the U.S. Labor Party

In 1979, a two-part article by Howard Blum and Paul L. Montgomery appeared in the New York Times that accused LaRouche of running a cult.^[51] Blum wrote that LaRouche had turned the U.S. Labor Party—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 guerrilla training, attended by LaRouche 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.^[29]

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 (see below).^[29]

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. He also wrote 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.^[29]

LaRouche denied the newspaper's charges, and said he had filed a $100 million libel suit. His press secretary said the series was intended to "to set up a credible climate for an assassination hit."^[52]

[edit] Frankhouser, WerBell, and Carto

The New York Times also reported 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 in connection with a school bus bombing that left one man dead, and had marched on Fifth Avenue in New York wearing a Gestapo uniform. LaRouche had organized his defense campaign regarding the dynamite charges. He reportedly called Frankhouser a "high intelligence source," though he later denied this, saying that in fact he had a low opinion of Frankhouser.^[29] It became known that Frankhouser had been an informant for the ATF and other law enforcement agencies. He said he was working on behalf of the government and was sentenced to five years of probation instead of the decades in prison he could have received.^[53]

By the late 1970s, members of the LaRouche movement had begun exchanging almost daily information with Frankhouser, according to The New York Times.^[29] He introduced them to Mitchell WerBell III, a noted Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative, mercenary, accused drug trafficker, firearms engineer, and arms dealer who said he had an ongoing connection to the CIA.^[29] LaRouche developed close ties with WerBell, hiring him as a security consultant for protection against an assassination threat and to train his security staff.^[54][55][56] It was WerBell who arranged for LaRouche movement members to undergo anti-terrorist training. John George and Laird Wilcox say WerBell learned that the way to keep "LaRouche on the hook was to feed his monstrous ego while jerking his paranoia chain".^[57]

In 1979, Frankhouser was also placed on the payroll as a security consultant, after convincing LaRouche that he was actively connected to U.S. intelligence agencies. A government official later said that Frankhouser was one of the few people who could call LaRouche directly.^[58] Forrest Lee Fick, an associate of Frankhouser from the KKK, was added as a consultant in 1982.^[58] Frankhouser and Fick later testified that, to justify their $700-per-week paychecks, they had invented connections to the CIA, written memos purporting to be from CIA agents, and warned of imaginary assassination plots against the LaRouches.^[59] George and Wilcox called Frankhouser's deception "one of the biggest hoaxes in the annals of political extremism" made possible by what they called LaRouche's obsession with conspiracy theories.^[60]

[edit] Allegations of fascism, anti-Semitism

From the mid-1970s onwards, the mainstream press and other commentators repeatedly alleged that LaRouche and his movement had fascist, neo-Nazi, and anti-Semitic tendencies.^[61] 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."^[62] 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," according to one of his publications.^[63]

According to Cyprian Blamires, LaRouche has called for a dictatorship led by a "humanist elite," and has shown hostility toward a range of targets, including feminism, homosexuality, environmentalism, and organized labor.^[64] Tim Wohlforth and Dennis Tourish write that the parallel between LaRouche's thinking and the classic 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 private 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.^[65]

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 anti-Semitism. 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 NCLC to wipe them out.^[66] Daniel Pipes argues against Lerman 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.^[67] George Johnson writes in The New York Times that the allegations fail to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle are themselves Jewish.^[68]

[edit] 1980s

[edit] National Democratic Policy Committee

From the autumn of 1979, with the disbanding of the U.S. Labor Party, the LaRouche movement 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. Democratic leaders refused to recognize LaRouche as a party member, or to seat the few delegates he received in his seven primary campaigns as a Democrat.^[69]

LaRouche's campaign platforms have included a return to the Bretton Woods system, including a gold-based national and world monetary system, fixed exchange rates, and ending the International Monetary Fund;^[70] the replacement of the central bank system, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, with a national bank;^[71] a war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering;^[72] building a tunnel under the Bering Strait; the building of nuclear power plants; a crash program to build particle beam weapons and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI); opposition to the USSR and support for a military buildup to prepare for imminent war; the screening and quarantine of AIDS patients; and opposition to environmentalism, outcome-based education, and abortion.^[73]

[edit] "October Surprise"

In the early 1980s, according to a number of journalists—including John Barry in Newsweek and Steven Emerson in American Journalism Review—LaRouche and his followers started the "October Surprise" allegation 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. The first publication of the story was in Executive Intelligence Review on December 2, 1980, followed up in New Solidarity, on September 2, 1983, alleging that Henry Kissinger, one of LaRouche's regular targets, had "held a series of secret meetings during the week of November 12 in Paris with representatives of Ayatollah Beheshti, leader of the fundamentalist clergy in Iran." The story said that, "Top level intelligence sources in Reagan's inner circle confirmed Kissinger's unreported talks with the Iranian mullahs, but stressed that the Kissinger initiative was totally unauthorized by the president-elect." The allegations were attributed to Iranian sources in Paris. Although ultimately discredited, the story was widely discussed in conspiracy circles during the 1980s and 1990s.^[74]

[edit] 1982: Dispute with U.S. News

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 that 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 future.^[75]

[edit] 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." General Paul-Albert Scherer, a LaRouche supporter and former head of West German Military Counterintelligence, said in 1992 that LaRouche, whom he described as a "scientific-technological strategic expert," had been the originator of the SDI. Scherer also said 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.^[76]

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," though they had never met. In Teller's words, LaRouche was "a poorly informed man with fantastic conceptions."^[77] 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.^[78]

[edit] Space colonization

LaRouche's promotion of space colonization included dealings with German scientists and engineers who had worked under the Nazi government in Germany during the Second World War, some of whom had emigrated to the U.S. after the war under Operation Paperclip, and had ended up working for NASA. They included Arthur Rudolph and several other Peenemunde rocket experts, such as Krafft Arnold Ehricke, Adolf Busemann, Konrad Dannenberg, and Hermann Oberth. When Rudolph was forced to renounce his U.S. citizenship after an investigation into his past, LaRouche supporters formed a defense fund for him.^[77] LaRouche also collaborated with Ehricke on ideas about the colonization of the moon and Mars.^[79] After Ehricke's death, LaRouche sponsored the "Krafft Ehricke Memorial Conference," and in 1988 delivered a national TV broadcast titled "The Woman on Mars."^[80]

[edit] 1984: Schiller Institute; NSC

In 1984, Helga Zepp-LaRouche founded the Schiller Institute in Germany, with LaRouche, Amelia Boynton Robinson and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade.^[81]

In the same year, LaRouche was able to raise enough money to purchase 14 television spots, at a cost of $330,000 each.^[82] 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.^[83] On April 19, 1986, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch satirizing the ads, portraying Queen Elizabeth and Henry Kissinger as drug dealers.

There were reports 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 senior director of international economic affairs for the National Security Council (NSC), and with Richard Morris, special assistant to William P. Clark, Jr.^[84] There were also reported contacts with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA.^[85] The LaRouche campaign said the report was full of errors.^[84] According to Bailey, the contacts were broken off when they became public. Bailey praised LaRouche's staff that year as "one of the best private intelligence services in the world," though he said he disagreed with the movement's ideas and tactics.^[86][87] Three years later, LaRouche blamed his criminal indictment on the NSC because he had been in conflict with Oliver North over LaRouche's opposition to the Nicaraguan Contras.^[88] According to a LaRouche-sponsored publication, court-ordered search of North's files produced a May 1986 telex from Iran-Contra defendant General Richard Secord, discussing the gathering of information to be used against LaRouche.^[89][90]

[edit] Meetings with world leaders

LaRouche met with Argentine President Raúl Alfonsín, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and Mexican President José López Portillo in 1985.^[86] A Mexican official told The New York Times that LaRouche had arranged the meeting with López Portillo by representing himself as an official from the Democratic Party in 1986.^[91] López Portillo continued to maintain a relationship with LaRouche, and endorsed his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1999, according to the LaRouche movement.^[92] Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Özal reportedly met with LaRouche in 1987, then severely reprimanded his aides who had mistaken LaRouche for the Democratic Presidential candidate.^[93]

[edit] 1984: The NBC lawsuit

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. It quoted Irwin Suall, the ADL's fact-finding director, calling LaRouche a "small-time Hitler."

LaRouche filed a defamation suit against NBC and the Anti Defamation League (ADL). The LaRouche organization said the NBC programs were the result of a deliberate campaign of defamation against him.^[94][95] The judge ruled that NBC need not reveal its sources, and LaRouche lost the case. NBC won a countersuit, the jury awarding the network $3 million in damages, later reduced to $258,459, for misuse of libel law, in what was called one of the more celebrated countersuits by a libel defendant.^[96]

LaRouche failed to pay the damages, pleading poverty, which Federal District Judge Claude M. Hilton described as "completely lacking in credibility."^[97] LaRouche said that, since 1973, he did not know who paid the rent on the estate, or for his food, lodging, clothing, transportation, bodyguards, and lawyers. The judge fined him for failing to answer.^[98] After the judge signed an order to allow discovery of LaRouche's personal finances, a cashier's check was delivered to the court to end the case.^[99]

When LaRouche appealed, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in rejecting his arguments, set forth a three-pronged test, later called the "LaRouche test," to decide when anonymous sources must be named in libel cases.^[100]

In 1986, former security consultant Forrest Lee Fick said in an NBC interview that Paul Goldstein, a member of LaRouche's security team, had suggested killing Henry Kissinger. According to Fick, Goldstein said he had information about Kissinger's schedule and said they should place a bomb under his car.^[101] Goldstein denied the charges, and the LaRouche movement tried to obtain the unedited interview, plus information on any payments given to Fick, to impeach Fick's testimony.^[102]

[edit] 1986: AIDS, electoral success

In 1986, LaRouche proposed that AIDS be added to California's List of Communicable Diseases. Sponsored by the "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC), it came to be known as the "LaRouche Initiative." The proposal, Proposition 64, qualified for the California ballot in 1986, with the required signature gatherers mostly paid for by LaRouche's Campaigner Publications.^[103] Opponents said the measure could have required universal testing and the quarantine of infected individuals, while proponents denied this, arguing that it simply allowed for standard public health measures to be taken. It was defeated, reintroduced two years later, and defeated again. AIDS was a leading plank in LaRouche's platform during his 1988 presidential campaign. He vowed to quarantine its "aberrant" victims who are "guilty of bringing this pandemic upon us."^[104]

In March 1986, LaRouche NDPC candidates Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart won the Democratic primary for state-wide offices in Illinois, surprising the political establishment and bringing LaRouche national attention.^[105] The Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Adlai Stevenson III, withdrew his nomination rather than run on the same slate as LaRouche movement members, and formed the Solidarity Party with a new ticket of statewide running-mates for purposes of the general election. All the Solidarity and the LaRouche candidates lost in November.^[106]

On April 10, 1986, LaRouche held a press conference at the National Press Club, attended by up to 200 reporters, during which, according to the Associated Press, he accused the Soviet government, British government, drug dealers, international bankers, and journalists of being involved in a variety of conspiracies.^[107] Flanked by bodyguards,^[108] he said that "If Abe Lincoln were alive, he'd probably be standing up here with me today," and that accusations by the ADL that he was anti-Semitic, and other criticism of him, were made on behalf of the drug lobby or a Soviet operation. He said that he had been in danger from Soviet assassins for over 13 years, and had to live in safe houses.^[109] He refused to answer a question from an NBC reporter, saying "How can I talk with a drug pusher like you?" He called the leadership of the U.S. "idiotic" and "berserk," and its foreign policy "criminal or insane." He warned of the imminent collapse of the banking system and accused banks of laundering drug money, saying, "you have to jail the bankers who do that—like Donald Regan, presently chief of staff of the White House—put them in jail where they belong."^[109] (The White House issued a statement saying LaRouche's charges against Don Regan were "absolutely groundless and as outrageous as the source they come from."^[110]) Asked about the movement's finances, he said "I don't know. ... I'm not responsible, I'm not involved in that."^[111]

[edit] 1988: Criminal conviction

In October 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. Roy Frankhouser was tried separately and convicted of obstructing the investigation. The trial of the remaining defendants was repeatedly delayed and ended in mistrial. Following the mistrial, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicted LaRouche and six associates with conspiring to commit fraud, and soliciting loans they had no intention of repaying. They disputed the charges, and alleged that the trials were politically motivated.^[112]

A number of LaRouche entities, including the Fusion Energy Foundation, were alleged by the government to have defrauded supporters and were shut down with an unusual involuntary bankruptcy proceeding in 1987.

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 political vendetta was "arrant (total) 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."^[113]

LaRouche's associates received lesser sentences for mail fraud and conspiracy.^[112] Jury foreman Buster Horton told The Washington Post that it was the failure of LaRouche's 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." ^[114] 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 the state Attorney General's office had ever prosecuted.^[115] Fourteen states issued injunctions against LaRouche-related organizations, three of which 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 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."^[2][116]

LaRouche had the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) register number 15204-083, and he was released from BOP custody on January 26, 1994.^[117]

[edit] 1990s

[edit] 1989: Imprisonment

LaRouche began his jail sentence in 1989 and served it at the Federal Medical Center located in Rochester, Minnesota. From there 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 with James Bevel, a civil rights activist who had represented the LaRouche movement in its pursuit of the Franklin child prostitution ring allegations, as his running mate.^[118] It was only the second campaign for president from prison ever, following the 1920 campaign of perennial Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs.^[119]

During part of his imprisonment he shared a cell with televangelist Jim Bakker. Bakker later wrote of his astonishment at LaRouche's detailed knowledge of the Bible. According to Bakker, LaRouche received a daily briefing each morning by phone, often in German. Bakker reports that on more than one occasion LaRouche had information days before it was reported on the network news. Bakker also wrote that his cellmate was convinced that their cell was bugged. In Bakker's view, "to say LaRouche was a little paranoid would be like saying that the Titanic had a little leak."^[120]

[edit] 1994: Release on parole

LaRouche was released on parole in 1994. That year, 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 since 1992.^[121] 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.^[122]

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.^[123][124] 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.^[125]

In 1999, the Xinhua News Agency reported that LaRouche had criticized the Cox Report, a congressional investigation that accused the Chinese of stealing U.S. nuclear weapons secrets.^[126] LaRouche called the report "intrinsically fraudulent," and "a reflection of the kind of scientific illiteracy" of its writers.^[127]

On October 13, 1999 LaRouche, during a press conference to announce plans to run for president, predicted a collapse of the world's financial system, stating, "There's nothing like it in this century.... it is systematic, and therefore, inevitable." He added that the US and other nations had built the "biggest financial bubble in all history" which was close to bankruptcy.^[128]

[edit] 2000s

[edit] 2000: Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement

LaRouche founded the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement (WLYM) in 2000, saying it had hundreds of members in the U.S. by 2004, and a "lesser number abroad."^[129] During the 2000 Democratic primaries, he 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, he placed third with 11 percent, behind Gore and Bill Bradley. These showings came after Bradley had ceased contesting the nomination and the race was generally considered settled.

In 2002, in a speech to the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, he discussed his proposal for a "Eurasian landbridge."^[130] Afterwards, he said that the September 11 attacks could not have taken place without connivance from someone inside the Bush administration. According to the Anti-Defamation League, he also referred during the question-and-answer session after his speech to "Jewish gangsters," and "Christian Zionists" who were "bought by money, the so-called Zionist money."^[131]

[edit] 2003: Death of Jeremiah Duggan

LaRouche's movement came to international attention in March 2003 when Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish student from the UK attending a conference organized by the Schiller Institute and LaRouche Youth Movement, died in Wiesbaden, Germany, after he ran down a motorway and was hit by several cars. The German authorities declared his death a suicide. A British court ruled out suicide and decided that Duggan had died while "in a state of terror."^[15] Duggan's mother believes he died in connection with an attempt to recruit him to the LaRouche movement. In 2006, LaRouche described the reports as a press "hoax" orchestrated by Dick Cheney, then Vice-President of the United States, and Cheney's wife.^[132] A spokesman for the German public prosecution service said in 2007 that Duggan's mother simply cannot accept that her son committed suicide.^[133]

In May 2010, the High Court in London ordered a second inquest, based on evidence collected by the family suggesting that the traffic accident might have been staged.^[134] The inquest was opened and adjourned in June 2010. The coroner passed the family's evidence to the Metropolitan Police's serious crime directorate, and invited the LaRouche organization to attend the inquest and view the evidence as an interested party.^[135]

[edit] 2004–2005: Electoral and lobbying activities

LaRouche again entered the primary elections for the Democratic Party's nomination in 2004, setting a 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[136]

[edit] Reception in Russia and China

Tatania Shishov, writing in Russia Today, describes LaRouche as "the greatest American economist, a prominent politician, one of the first to struggle with the financial oligarchy and its major institutions—the World Bank and IMF. He has no equal in the field of economic and financial forecasts."^[137] GG Pirogov of the Russian Academy of Sciences calls him "one of the greatest original thinkers of the twentieth century."^[138]

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 a conference in Moscow on the Russian plan to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait.^[139] On May 15, 2007, he addressed the Russian Academy of Sciences to commemorate the 80th birthday of Stanislav Menshikov, according to LaRouche PAC.^[140] 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.^[141]

[edit] 2007: Death of Kenneth Kronberg

In April 2007, Kenneth Kronberg, a longtime associate of LaRouche and co-founder of the Schiller Institute's Fidelio magazine, committed suicide. Kronberg ran a printing service for the LaRouche movement in Sterling, Virginia, and was in arrears with tax payments, because groups within the movement were late with their payments for his services.^[142] On April 11, Kronberg leapt off a Route 28 overpass in Sterling shortly after seeing the movement's so-called "morning briefing," a daily summary of material members are expected to read, which reflects the outcome of executive committee meetings held at LaRouche's home.^[143] The briefing attacked "Baby Boomers" like Kronberg, and singled his print shop out for criticism, adding, "The Boomers will be scared into becoming human, because you're in the real world, and they're not. Unless they want to commit suicide."^[144] Kronberg's widow filed suit against LaRouche and others in August 2009, charging that they had libeled her by implying that her support for the re-election of George W. Bush drove her husband to suicide, and that she had committed perjury at LaRouche's trial in 1988 to help secure his conviction.^[145]

[edit] 2008: LaRouche on the financial crisis

In 2008, LaRouche was credited by press in Italy 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 said that Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti was "an attentive reader" of LaRouche's anti-Free Market and anti-Marxist writings.^[146] In a translation on a LaRouche website, Italian Europarliamentarian Mario Borghezio of the Northern League was 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."^[147] Italian Senator Oskar Peterlini, in a July 2009 speech before the Senate, called LaRouche an expert in the field who had predicted the crisis.^[148]

[edit] 2008–2009: LaRouche on Obama

In 2009, during discussion of U.S. health care reform, LaRouche compared President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, and the proposed health-insurance reform to Hitler's Action T4 euthanasia program.^[149] He said 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."^[150] The movement printed pamphlets showing Obama and Hitler laughing together, and posters of Obama wearing a Hitler-style mustache.^[151] In Seattle, police were called twice in response to people threatening to tear the posters apart, or to assault the LaRouche supporters holding them.^[152] During one widely reported public meeting, Congressman Barney Frank referred to the posters as "vile, contemptible nonsense."^[153]

[edit] Books by LaRouche

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

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Persondata
NAME	LaRouche, Lyndon Hermyle, Jr.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American political activist
DATE OF BIRTH	September 8, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH	Rochester, New Hampshire
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH