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Lyndon LaRouche

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Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922), American political activist, leads political organizations in the United States and other countries. He is a perennial candidate for President of the United States, but has never gained significant electoral support. His opponents depict him as an extremist or a cult leader, and frequently accuse him of being a fascist and anti-Semite. His followers, however, regard him as an important economist and a major political figure. In 1988 LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment on charges involving illegally soliciting unsecured loans and tax code violations.

Early career

LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, where his father, an immigrant from Quebec, was a shoe salesman. He was raised as a Quaker and educated at Northeastern University in Boston, but dropped out in 1942. As a Quaker, he was at first a conscientious objector during World War II, but in 1944 he joined the United States Army, serving in medical units in India. During this period he read Karl Marx and became a Communist.

After leaving the Army in 1946, LaRouche attempted to resume his university education, but again dropped out of Northeastern and took a factory job in Lynn, Massachusetts. By now LaRouche was disillusioned with orthodox Communism and in 1949 he joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a small Trotskyist party. In the SWP he used the pseudonym Lyn Marcus. In 1954 he moved to New York City and married a fellow SWP member, Janice Neuberger.

LaRouche remained in the SWP until 1966, making him a veteran member in a group which always had a high turnover of members. During these years LaRouche developed interests in economics, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, business management and other subjects. He separated from Janice in 1963 (they had one son, Daniel, born in 1956).

In 1966 LaRouche left from the SWP and became a supporter of the British dissident Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, leader of the British Socialist Labour League (ancestor of the later Workers Revolutionary Party). He was briefly linked with the U.S. Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth and also with the Spartacist League, another Trotskyist group.

In the late 1960s LaRouche moved in the growing radical milieu of New York as an independent Trotskyist, giving classes on "dialectical materialism" to members of Students for a Democratic Society, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and other radical groups. He was heavily involved in SDS despite not being a student, and in the PLP's internal battles despite not being a member.

LaRouche and NCLC

The turning point in LaRouche's career came in 1969, when he formed the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), a grouping of ex-SDS activists and other ex-Trotskyists. Despite its name, the NCLC had no connection with the labor movement, being composed mainly of students, ex-students and professional activists like LaRouche.

In the 1970s LaRouche began to warn that the U.S. was drifting toward fascism.

Presidential bids

From the late 1970s to the present, LaRouche has pursued a dual strategy. He has continued to promote his apocalyptic conspiracy theories and to make regular predictions of imminent economic catastrophe. These are a staple of the extreme right, although also characteristic of Trotskyism. At the same time he has sought to enter the political mainstream by contesting elections and primary elections. In 1971 he founded the U.S. Labor Party as a vehicle for electoral politics, but this achieved no success and was wound up in 1979. In 1976 he ran for President of the United States as a U.S. Labor Party candidate, polling 40,043 votes (0.05%).

In 1980 LaRouche abandoned the "third party" approach, and joined the Democratic Party. In 1981 he formed a body called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), a polical action committee. Since 1980 LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States six times. He is running again in 2004, although as a convicted felon he is not eligible to be a registered voter in the state of Virginia, where he lives. The Democratic National Committee has consistently asserted that LaRouche is not a Democrat, but the U.S. electoral system makes it possible for him and his followers to enter Democratic primaries. LaRouche himself has polled negligible vote totals, but continues to promote himself as a serious political candidate, which is sometimes accepted by elements of the media and some political figures.

LaRouche followers have competed seriously in Democratic primaries for lesser offices, and even occasionally won them. The best known example was in 1986, when two LaRouche candidate, Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild, won the Democratic primary for the posts of Lieutenant-Governor and Secretary of State in Illinois. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Senator Adlai Stevenson, III, refused to run on the same ticket as Fairchild and formed a new party for the election. Fairchild's victory was attributed to low voter turnout and a poor "regular" candidate, but also to some genuine support for the LaRouche anti-establishment message. LaRouche candidates have won several other Democratic primaries in various states, but LaRouche's organizations have never suceeded in entering the mainstream.

The LaRouche organization has involved itself in the controversy over the AIDS epidemic. In 1974, it published a report warning that one consequence of the International Monetary Fund's austerity demands upon Africa would be the return of old, previously conquered epidemic diseases, as well as the potential emergence of new pandemic diseases. In 1985 LaRouche wrote: "It is in the strategic interests of Moscow to see to it that the West does nothing to stop this pandemic; within a few years, at the present rates, the spread of AIDS in Asia, Africa, Western Europe, and the Americas would permit Moscow to take over the world almost without firing a shot." In 1986 and 1987, the LaRouche organization placed propositions on the California State Ballot, which would have restored HIV infection to the state list of communicable diseases, subject to public health law. These measures were defeated after being opposed by the California Medical Association, among others. However, in the early 1990s, the CMA reversed its position on public health measures with respect to HIV.

Criminal charges

By the mid-1970s LaRouche and his second wife, the German-born Helga Zepp-LaRouche, had built a extensive political network in western Europe. In 1984 Zepp-LaRouche founded the Schiller Institute in Germany. The International Caucus of Labor Committees claimed to have affiliates in France, Italy, Sweden, Canada and several South American countries. In Australia LaRouche operatives took over an older extreme-right group, the Citizens Electoral Councils (CEC), and regularly contest elections. The LaRouche organization published a twice-weekly newspaper, New Solidarity and a monthly science magazine, Fusion, which were both closed, in an unprecedented action, by the U.S. Government in 1986. It presently publishes a weekly newspaper, The New Federalist, a weekly newsmagazine, Executive Intelligence Review, and two quarterly journals: Twenty First Century Science and Technology, and Fidelio, a "journal of poetry, science and statecraft." The LaRouche publishing house, Benjamin Franklin Books, issues a steady stream of works by LaRouche and his followers. The real membership of LaRouche's organization is not known.

The size of the LaRouche empire led to investigations of the source of its apparently extensive financial resources. LaRouche fundraisers were accused of fraudently soliciting loans from LaRouche supporters, for which prosecutors alleged there was no intention to repay. In October 1986 the FBI and Virginia state authorities raided the LaRouche headquarters in Leesburg in search of evidence to support the persistent accusations of fraud and extortion made against LaRouche. He and six associates were charged with conspiracy and mail fraud, and LaRouche was also charged with conspiring to hide his personal income since 1979, the last year he had filed a federal tax return.

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.

The prosecution alleged that LaRouche and his staff solicited loans with false assurances to potential lenders and showed "reckless disregard" of the facts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Robinson presented evidence that LaRouche's organisation had solicited US$34 million in loans since 1983, of which $294,000 was not repaid. The most important evidence was the testimony of lenders, many of them elderly retirees, who had lost thousands of dollars in loans to LaRouche that were never repaid. Several witnesses were LaRouche followers who testified under immunity from prosecution.

In addition to LaRouche, his chief fund-raiser, William Wertz, was convicted on ten mail fraud counts. LaRouche's legal adviser, Edward Spannaus, and several other fundraising operatives were convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. LaRouche denied all the charges, calling them "an all-out frame-up by a state and federal task force," and said that the federal government was trying to kill him. "The purpose of this frame-up is not is not to send me to prison. It's to kill me," LaRouche said. "In prison it's fairly easy to kill me... If this sentence goes through, I'm dead." This proved to be a false prediction: LaRouche was released unharmed in 1993.

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."

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