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Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922) is an American economist and politician, and a perennial candidate for President of the United States.

Biography

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LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire. He was raised as a Quaker and educated at Northeastern University in Boston, but dropped out in 1942. He broke with the Quakers in 1944 to join the United States Army, serving in medical units in India. At the conclusion of the war, LaRouche remained for some time to participate in the Indian Independence Movement.

Following his return to the U.S., LaRouche developed his basic theories of economics (see Basic Theory and Policies), and became active in the American Left. He had come to believe in a Marxist analysis of Capitalism, regarding it as the main obstacle to the technological and cultural advances that he was convinced were necessary. In 1949 he joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a small Trotskyist party. In the SWP he adopted the pseudonym Lyn Marcus. However, he found the SWP unreceptive to his ideas, and he and the SWP parted company in 1966. He participated briefly in other leftist groups, and began giving a series of lectures on campuses around the East Coast. These lectures attracted a following, which coalesced into a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society which was called the "SDS Labor Committee," because LaRouche criticized SDS, and the New Left in general, for being too oriented toward the counterculture, and not enough toward Labor. The "SDS Labor Committee" broke from SDS to become the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC).

The 1970s

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LaRouche had forecast the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, and following August 15-16, 1971, when President Richard Nixon made the decision to "float" the dollar, effectively ending the Bretton Woods System as originally conceived, there was a major wave of recruitment to the NCLC. LaRouche charged that the powerful financial institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund) were committed to a policy of looting the living standards of the world's populations through austerity and speculation, while contracting the actual productive base of these economies -- a policy that he claimed was a revival of the economic approach of German Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht, who held office both before and during the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler. On December 2 of that year, LaRouche had what was to be his first, and only, public encounter with a representative of the academic establishment: a debate at New York's Queens College with a leading Keynesian, Professor Abba Lerner. During this debate, Lerner stated that "if Germany had accepted Schacht's policies, Hitler would not have been necessary." Afterward, Lerner's closest political associate, Professor Sidney Hook, avowed: Yes, LaRouche had defeated Lerner in the debate, but LaRouche would pay a price for that success.

LaRouche claims that, following this encounter, the Establishment and its press organs made a collective decision that never again would they debate LaRouche or his ideas, but instead would brand him a fascist-- which was, of course, the charge he was making against them. LaRouche insists that a further expression of this policy was announced in a September 24, 1976 op-ed by Stephen Rosenfeld in the Washington Post, entitled "NCLC: A Domestic Political Menace," in which he set out a media policy for dealing with LaRouche: "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 unless there is reason to present it in those terms."

During this period, conflicts increasingly arose between the NCLC and other leftist groupings, which culminated in a series of violent altercations between the NCLC and the Communist Party, which have been referred to as "Operation Mop-up." Stories appeared in the press [1], in which CPUSA members and others charged that these were unprovoked attacks, initiated by the NCLC. The CPUSA and other Left organizations began to denounce LaRouche and the NCLC as fascists. The NCLC charged that the CPUSA intitiated the attacks, and produced an FBI airtel, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), from the FBI station head in New York City, written to national headquarters on November 23, 1973. It states that the FBI had noted that the "CPUSA is conducting an extensive background investigation" of LaRouche, "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him." The memo states the intention of the N.Y. FBI office, to "facilitate" the CPUSA in this endeavor [2].

In the mid-1970s, LaRouche began to meet with leaders of Third World nations to discuss a reform of the international monetary system. LaRouche maintained that institutions such as the International Monetary Fund were suppressing the development of these nations, saddling them with a fraudulent debt burden, and re-imposing a disguised version of colonialism, forcing these nations to provide cheap labor and raw materials. Following a trip to Iraq and Israel in 1975, LaRouche proposed an International Development Bank to supercede the I.M.F.; on September 8, 1975, LaRouche's proposal for debt moratoria was presented to the United Nations General Assembly by Dr. Frederick Wills, Foreign Minister of Guyana, and then discussed in August of the following year at the Colombo, Sri Lanka conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. During this period, branches of the LaRouche movement were founded throughout Western Europe and Ibero-America, as well as in India.

By this time, LaRouche had begun to abandon the idea of presenting his theories in a Marxist context. He changed his assessment that Capitalism was the agency blocking the scientific and cultural advances that he maintained were necessary for economic progress; instead, he began to focus on an oligarchic principle which he said pre-dated capitalism, and which was active within the COMECON countries as well. NCLC researchers began to investigate a current of economic thought, prevalent in the U.S. during the 18th and 19th centuries, called the American System, and LaRouche adopted the view that this current was superior to both British-style free trade (or Laissez-faire), and to Marxism.

In 1976, LaRouche formed a minor party called the U.S. Labor Party, which he described as an "American Whig" party, and ran for President on that ticket. He got virtually no votes, but raised enough funds to purchase air time for a very controversial half-hour campaign broadcast.

The 1980s

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In 1980, LaRouche registered as a Democrat and participated in the Democratic Presidential Primaries, to the consternation of the Democratic National Committee. He raised enough funds to purchase numerous half-hour broadcasts.

Following the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980, LaRouche and his representatives met with numerous officials of the Reagan administration, including Deputy CIA director Bobby Ray Inman, Science Advisor George Keyworth, Energy Secretary Donald Hodel, and National Security Council official Richard Morris. LaRouche was asked by the NSC to conduct back-channel diplomacy with embassy official Yevgeni Shershnev of the Soviet Union, to gauge their response to LaRouche's proposal for an Anti-Ballistic Missile defense, first presented in 1977 with the title Sputnik of the Seventies: the science behind the Soviet beam weapons. LaRouche maintains that it was his version of the policy that was later adopted by Reagan, as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). LaRouche posed the policy both as a means for escaping the deadly cul-de-sac of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.), and also as a science driver to rejuvenate the industrial economies of both the East and West blocs. Although the Soviets rejected the proposal, SDI was adopted by President Reagan in a nationally televised address on March 23, 1983.

In the early 80s, LaRouche also continued to develop ties to leaders of Third World countries. He met with numerous heads of state from these countries, consulting in particular with leaders that wish to pursue development of infrastructure in opposition to the austerity demands of the International Monetary Fund. LaRouche developed particularly close relationships with the President of Mexico, José Lopez Portillo, and the Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, who was also head of the Non-Aligned Movement.

LaRouche's contacts with influential personalities did not go unnoticed by his opponents, who convened a sort of "council of war" to check his growing activity. Eyewitness reports and court testimony have established that a series of meetings were held in 1983 at the Manhattan home of investment banker John Train, with the participation of reseachers Dennis King and Chip Berlet; John Rees, of the John Birch Society; Roy Godson, then a consultant to the National Security Council and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB); Mira Lansky Boland, head of Fact Finding at the Washington, D.C. offices of the Anti- Defamation League of B'nai B'rith; at least one representative of Freedom House, a private research organization headed by PFIAB Chairman Leo Cherne; Richard Mellon-Scaife, a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, whose tax-exempt foundation would later come under federal criminal investigation for illegally financing the arming of the Nicaraguan Contras (Mellon-Scaife later became notorious for his involvement in the Paula Jones case, and other activities intended to discredit President Bill Clinton); and several dozen journalists from major national media outlets, including NBC-TV, Readers Digest, Business Week, The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal. Out of these meetings came a wave of news coverage that was highly critical of LaRouche, describing him variously as a fascist, communist, racist, anti-Semite, cult leader, and conspiracy theorist. Stories circulated that LaRouche had orchestrated the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and that he had attempted to assassinate U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Similar articles began to appear, as well, in the Western European and Soviet press. These articles were coupled with calls for the investigation of LaRouche's fundraising, to see whether he was obtaining funding through illegal means. Sovetskaya Kultura magazine asked, "Why isn't the Internal Revenue Service interested" in prosecuting LaRouche?

Meanwhile, in 1984, LaRouche once again ran in the Democratic Presidential Primaries, and was able to raise sufficient funds to purchase 17 half-hour national broadcasts.

In 1986, two LaRouche supporters, Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild, won the Illinois Democratic Primary election for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State, respectively. The calls for an investigation of the LaRouche movement escalated, and on October 6 that year, a raid was carried out at the offices of LaRouche-controlled publications in Leesburg, Virginia, in which 450 armed representatives of the FBI, IRS, ATF, Virginia State Police, and other agencies seized documents and records. Shortly thereafter, leaders of the LaRouche movement were indicted in Boston.

In July of 1987, LaRouche was indicted in Boston on conspiracy charges (see Criminal Record, below).

In 1988 LaRouche ran for President for the fourth time. Once again, LaRouche was able to purchase numerous national campaign broadcasts.

In 1989, despite having been imprisoned, he proposed major infrastructure plans for the Eurasian land mass, following the demise of the Warsaw Pact. These were entitled the Productive Triangle and Eurasian Land-Bridge plans.

1990s to the present

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In 1992, LaRouche ran for President once again, from prison. Active campaigning was carried out by LaRouche's running mate, the Rev. James Bevel. In the early 1990s, branches of the LaRouche movement were founded in Australia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

LaRouche was paroled in January of 1994, which was highly unexpected, because it was widely believed that he would never be paroled.

LaRouche immediately resumed his international activities, travelling and meeting with leaders of countries including India, Brazil, and especially Russia, where he has on numerous occasions addressed both the Duma and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In May of 1996, LaRouche's wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche presented the Eurasian Land-Bridge proposal at a conference sponsored by the Government of the People's Republic of China, in a debate format with British member of the European Commission, Sir Leon Brittan, who opposed it. The proposal was subsequently adopted, and is presently under construction, by the PRC and neighboring nations.

LaRouche resumed his campaign activity, participating in Democratic Presidential Primaries during the elections of 2000 and 2004. During this period, his organization, which had dwindled in size after its high point in the early 1970s, began another major wave of recruitment, primarily among young people, resulting in the formation of the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM).

In April of 2003, LaRouche presented groundbreaking research on the role of a group of followers of German political philosopher Leo Strauss, who had managed to gain policy control of the administration of President George W. Bush, and used that control to implement radical shifts in policy, including a commitment to a preventive war doctrine which included suspension of the Geneva Accords. The following month, similar articles appeared by James Atlas in the New York Times, and Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, and since that time, the question of the so-called "Straussians" and their role in the Bush administration has been discussed throughout the world.

Basic Theory and Policies

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LaRouche's theory, developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is that the principal subject of economics is the ability of the cognitive powers of the individual human mind to make new discoveries of universal principles. These discoveries lead to revolutions in technology, which re-define Man's relationship to Nature in a non-linear way. Such revolutions are contingent on the viability of the culture, on its capacity to absorb and transmit new ideas: LaRouche asserts that the most historically successful variety of culture is what he terms the classical culture of Greece during the time of Plato, or the culture of Europe in the centuries following the Renaissance. LaRouche draws upon the ideas of mathematicians Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann to describe the non-linear effects of the technological revolutions he describes, and uses the term potential relative population density to describe a measure of the success of a given economy/society. The late Russian scientist Pobisk Kuznetsov proposed that the unit for measuring this parameter be called the "La" (for "LaRouche".)

LaRouche advocates policies consistent with the outlook of the American System: he sharply opposed deregulation, beginning with the deregulation of trucking in 1979, followed by other transportation sectors, telecommunications, banking, public utilities, and so forth. During this period, both the Democratic and Republican parties supported deregulation. LaRouche also opposed Free Trade (including NAFTA), and globalism. LaRouche campaigned in favor of government-issued credits for infrastructure, and has often praised the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, calling for the revival of FDR's outlook both on domestic policy, and foreign policy (referring to Roosevelt's intention to end colonialism following World War Two). LaRouche also supports greater federal investment in science and technology, calling for greater federal investment in NASA as well as a greater commitment to education (not education which trains students to successfully take standardized tests, but education where students re-live important discoveries of the past, in order to learn the method of generating new discoveries).


Criminal record

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The first conspiracy trial, in Boston, ended in a mistrial on May 4, 1988. Judge Robert Keeton had issued subpoenas for the personal files of LaRouche opponent Oliver North, which produced a May 1986 telex from Iran-Contra defendant General Richard Secord to North, discussing the gathering of information to be used against LaRouche. The judge then issued a subpoena for the files of Vice President George Bush, at which point the government shut down the trial. The jurors conducted a poll amongst themselves, and gave a press conference where they unanimously reported that they would have voted to acquit, having heard only the prosecution's case.

On October 14, 1988, LaRouche was re-indicted in a different venue: the so-called "Rocket Docket" in Alexandria, Virginia. The alleged conspiracy, was a conspiracy to obtain loans in the alleged amount of $294,000, with no intention to repay.

To prepare for the trial, the government first filed, on April 20, 1987, an unprecedented involuntary bankruptcy petition against two LaRouche-controlled publications companies on whose behalf the loans had been solicited. Federal trustees were placed in charge of the companies, and they immediately suspended repayment of loans to creditors (who were, for the most part, political supporters of the LaRouche movement). LaRouche and his associates were then indicted for a conspiracy to fail to repay those loans, and the judge in the trial, Albert V. Bryan ruled that the defense would not be permitted to discuss, or even allude to, the involuntary bankruptcy.

In December of 1988, LaRouche was convicted in the conspiracy trial.

On October 25, 1989, Judge Martin V.B. Bostetter ruled that the government's bankruptcy action was illegal. Bostetter said the government acted in "objective bad faith" and the bankruptcy was obtained by a "constructive fraud on the court." However, the appeal on the conspiracy and fraud charges, which were a case completely separate from the involuntary bankruptcy, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; at each stage of the appeals process, the courts declined to hear the appeal.

Prominent radical political figure and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has tried to clear LaRouche's name, arguing that investigators and political opponents had abused the legal process to eliminate him. Clark wrote in 1995, in a letter to then serving Attorney General Janet Reno: "I bring this matter to you directly, because I believe it involves 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]

In the early 1990s, while LaRouche was in prison, full page advertisements, calling for LaRouche to be exonerated, appeared in papers such as the New York Times and Washington Post. Among the signators were heads of state and cabinet-level officials from around the world, including:

  • RNDr. Jozef Miklosko, former Vice-Prime Minister of former Czechoslovakia
  • Prof. Dr. Hans R. Klecatsky, former Justice Minister, Austria
  • Gen. (ret.) Edgardo Mercado Jarrin, former Prime Minister and former Foreign Minister of Peru
  • Gen. (ret.) Joao Baptista de Oliveira Figueredo, former President of Brazil
  • Nedzib Sacirbey, M.D., Ambassador at Large, Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina
  • Arturo Frondizi, former President of Argentina
  • Manuel Solis Palma, former President of Panama
  • Dr. Abdelhamid Brahimi, former Prime Minister of Algeria (1984-1988)

Veteran leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, including:

Also adding their names were many elected officials, including former Minnesota Senator and Presidential Candidate Eugene McCarthy; and prominent artists, such as violinist Norbert Brainin, former primarius of the Amadeus Quartet.

It is interesting, and perhaps puzzling, that these individuals came to the defense of a man who has been so universally condemned in the press throughout the English-speaking world.

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References

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