I have given Lyndon LaRouche more sustained thought than I ever thought I could, and now I am coming close to the point where I can exile him out of my head for a good little while.  I’m almost done, except for some additions to add to the previous 8 chapters of the story.  I am going to have to figure out where to slide his work on behalf of lowering the standard operatic tuning pitch to A=432.  In 1989, The “Schiller Institute” rented Lisner Auditorium and put on perfermances of scenes from “Aida,” “Don Carlos,” “Rigoletto” and other operas sung slightly and consistently off-key, off-key compared to the standard pitch of A=440.  A bill was pending through the Italian Parliament, urged on by LaRouche, to to make A=432 the mandatory pitch standard for all Italian music schools, opera houses, orchestras, public radio and television and other musical organizations “in any way subsidized by the State or public agencies.” Use of tuning forks, etc., that do not conform to this standard would be punishable by fines ranging from 100,000 to 1 million lire (approximately $75 to $750) and “confiscation of the non-standard object.” — (that’s a cut and paste job from The Washington Post explanation on what the hell is going on here.)  Opera Fanatic Magazine published a 14 page article that accused LaRouche of cherry-picking Verdi’s 19th century settlement on A=432 as the universal standard pitch.

And thus went the most placcid controvery LaRouche ever involved himself in.  I presume that the students who attend LaRouche’s “cadre schools” are taught to sing from the A=432 pitch.

Hey!  Cadre Schools!  You know about those things, don’t you?

As for the LaRouchites being “surprisingly tuneful”, they are. And, they do practice their singing at LaRouche Camp, aka Cadre Schools… When I attended one of these cult like weekend getaways, I saw them practice endlessly. That’s pretty much all they did the one day I stayed. They where practicing from like 8 in the morning to 12, then there was this “representative” who would give a class on Schiller or Plato (one of those) for 7 (SEVEN!) hours, then they where singing again… All they sing is opera and Negro Spirituals for some fucking reason. And don’t even think about talking rock and roll music in front of them, to them, or in “The House of LaRouche”, you may as well fart in their faces cause they find it highly offensive. And I am not kidding that when they sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” they changed the lyric of “my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord” to “my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of LaRouche”! That was so creepy! For a moment I thought ‘o Lord, they’re gonna feed us apple sauce or Kool-aid laced with arsenic once they’ve brainwashed us all’…

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that they hold these “cadre schools” which is a trip they take up to the mountains for a weekend full of “enlightening, earth shattering ideas”. Anyway, my pal dragged me to one of these once and all they do is talk about the golden ration, the doubling of the square, the British royal family (it’s so funny, they claim the queen is a drug smuggler lol), and all these conspiracies and how Larouche is the only one who can make a difference. After this cadre school, I NEVER wanted to know about them ever again and I along with five other people took off. When they started talking about rock music, one of the members said that he had hoped they’d make John Lennon’s day of assasination a holiday, we said screw it and drove off in my car. One guy tried to stop us and told us “if you leave, you will have the deaths of hundreds of palestinian children on your conscience.”

It is part of Lyndon LaRouche’s 1999 innovation in creating the “LaRouche Youth Movement”, an organization that plucks college students out of college and puts them to work for Lyndon LaRouche and … his movements.  Anecdotally, the first sighting I ever had of LaRouchites — in the physical flesh — were two elderly and one late – middle aged people hawking LaRouche pamphlets on the edge of a college campus, the words “New Sex Scandal!  Alan Greenspan is Screwing the Economy” draped over their card-table.

Years later, the LaRouchites started to become more a lot more seen and herad on campuses across the nation.  And they are, in bulk, college drop-outs.  The LaRouchites that you see today are, in the main, products of the “LaRouche Youth Movement”.  It’s an interesting little tweak, particularly seeing as they have no memory of LaRouche’s entry into public conciousness through the 1980s.  Presumably a lot of things are simply re-assorted from previous LaRouche techniques, and I’m guessing that there is a lot of the under-current that pops through this odd little “Ask the Boston Globe” letter from 1980 proving there’s nothing new under the sun:

From “Ask the Globe”, Boston Globe, 11-8-1980:

Can you give me an address for former US Labor Party cheif Lyndon LaRouche, who entered several state primaries last spring as a Democratic candidate? My dauther has been working for him for several years but has stopped writing home and I am trying to locate her. — JM

I can get to the explanation for the “LaRouche Youth Movement’s” genesis from something a LaRouchite recently blogged.  I’ll take the word for it.:

The decision by the 80-year-old Lyndon LaRouche, the leading scientific and political figure of our age, to form an international youth movement, as an absolutely essential instrument for the success of his efforts to turn the United States, and the world, back from the abyss of a New Dark Age, has raised new, fascinating questions about the role of youth movements in history. Clearly, as LaRouche himself has said, like revolutions, not all youth movements have been positive forces for mankind. But there is one leading example of an indispensable youth movement which did play a positive role: That youth movement was that of the American Revolution itself.

Understand that Larouche wrote in his 1979 autobiography “If a small group not only accurately assesses the nature of this lawful course of [historical] developments, but is able to chart the merging course of events, that relatively small group can exert an unusaul influence upon larger groups.”  It all starts to gain a similar repetitive cadence.  The Cadre Schools are just another adjustment of “ego-stripping”, with what I imagine the vision of the various LaRouchites running for school board positions, a return to the “classics”, which in this case is largely focused on the mystical properties inherent in Doubling the Square.  (Interesting progression of links when you google “Double the Square”.)

The techniques are faintly familiar.  Park yourselves on college campuses and cast your net.  Plan a Day of Disruption where a horde of LaRouchites attend lecture classes and disrupt it to the LaRouche agenda.  And take students who express interest or curiositity to the cadre schools.

I have to admire LaRouche’s timing.  The LaRouche Youth Movement was right there in place to take advantage of the post 9/11 era and ensuing Bush Era.  I have listened to a local LaRouchite on the radio — to his discredit, Clyde Lewis interviewed one a couple of times.  He made sure to interject that “The government committed 9/11.”  I have asked a LaRouchite why he took this cause.  He provided an answer of figuring out the world’s problems, not getting anything good at school, recognizing the upcoming economic crisis, and awkwardly stuffed in “the government committed 9/11” — in a manner that suggested he wanted me to take offense, which I did not.

You can move on from there right into the “Neo-Con Agenda”.  After all, didn’t you know about the PNAC Document and the call for a “Pearl Harbor type event”?

In large areas, the Bush Administation was making it easy for them.  The LaRouchites charged Bush with being an empty-headed puppet of the real man in charge — the evil Dick Cheney.  Who can disagree?

The Weekly Standard, National Review, and other conservative magazines now had a handy rhetorical device to bludgeon critics of the march to War in Iraq: You sound a lot like Lyndon LaRouche with your crazy conspiracies.  (There are historical precedents: such was the case with Iran — Contra.)  It can be spun further in any direction — Prescott made business deals with the Nazis, you know.  (For the record, I do not know whether this is the case or not.  A LaRouche publishing house published a book saying as much.  And more credible newspapers have reported as much.)  The implication being… hereditarily speaking, of course…

The blockbuster trilogy of pamphlets in the “Children of Satan” series could be peddled in the corners of war protests.  The name has stuck well. 

It was in this political environment that Jeremiah Duggan was coaxed into the cult, and met his suspicious death. 

WHEN Erica Duggan picked up the phone, her blood ran cold to hear her terrified son crying: “I’m in deep trouble… I’m frightened.”  Hours later, Jeremiah Duggan was found dead on the hard shoulder of a busy dual carriageway in Germany.  Police concluded he had committed suicide. But his family refuse to accept that verdict, insisting the talented 22-year-old student was hounded to death – or even murdered – by a sinister cult.

Today:

Almost four years after Jeremiah’s death Germany’s highest court looks set to order a fresh investigation, a breakthrough for Erica’s campaign to find the truth behind her son’s death.

And it goes on from there.

I get the feeling that America entered the 1990s assuming that LaRouche was one of those cultural items that could just be left behind as an artifact from the previous decade… a curious pop culture figure to be sure, but an antiquity nonetheless.  He was in prison, after all, and was not coming out anytime soon — admittedly not much brain space was occupied by an awareness of LaRouche — and even that small allotment of brainsapce was going to fade away to take on other inconsequential items.

As a whole, the 1990s were rather lean years for LaRouche.  The career path lacked any forward momentum.  He had successfully moved from a cult leader off the fringes of the New Left in the 1970s to a cult leader off the fringes of mainstream electoral politics in the 1980s.  He had achieved a sort of notoriety.  And then he reached his peak, and the novelty of his curious place in electoral politics and street theater simply wore off.

So it is that a Simpsons reference is the most important moment in LaRouche’s 1990s era.  The Simpsons has accomplished an amazing saturation where it is easily referenced.  Recently a local alternative newspaper, The Portland Mercury, had the cover blurb for a story on landlord – tenant issues: “Now Pay the Rent!  You Must Pay the Rent!”, probably a direct parody of something else (instead of what I took as a general parody of ham-handed community theater), but most easily identified from The Simpsons.  In LaRouche’s case, you notice that the Washington Post’s 2004 piece on Jeremiah Duggan starts  off immediately by referencing The Simpsons.  The scene is from a Treehouse of Horrors Halloween episode, and has Homer Simpson yelling, “Oh, no! Aliens, bio-duplication, nude conspiracies… Oh my God! Lyndon LaRouche was right!”

Granted, LaRouche continued on his path.  An election campaign in 1992, notable because he was in prison, and also because Ross Perot had borrowed his perchance for running half hour informercials replete with charts.  There was a meeting with George Bush and a LaRouchite that went like this:

LaRouchite shakes hands, does not release grip: “When are you going to release the files on Lyndon LaRouche?”
George Bush:  “He’s in jail.” 
LaRouchite:  “Yeah, and you’re holding him political prisoner. 
(secret service leading LaRouchite away)  Bush:  He’s in jail where he belongs.

That was part of the LaRouchite campaign against Bush where they waved pictures of brocilla and had the words “Hey George!  Eat It!”  Bemusing enough.

An election in 1996.  And one in 2000.  A delegate the DNC had to deny in 1996 from his home state of Virginia, and an eye-opening and staggering 22 percent vote total for Arkansas in 2000 (past the point where the primaries mattered much).  The Democratic Party learned to accept the occasional elected state representative or meaningless nominee as sacrificial lamb to higher office.

Politically, he set himself up in opposing Gingrich — creating a Legislative Dictatorship.  Opposing Clinton’s impeachment — which was a plot by  “The British and the rest of the international financial oligarchy to install Al Gore as president.”  (Why the British and the rest of the international oligarchy preferred Gore to Clinton, I do not know.)  He rallied against Alan Greenspan, and therein lies the trouble: it’s not a particularly sexy figure to push up against to attract a following.  (Whatever the merits or detriments of Alan Greenspan’s tenure, and admist an era where he was essentially knighted, he has his detractors that could conceivably be wormed through to LaRouchite conspiracies.)

Undoubtedly, Larouche’s donors continued to send him the maximum allowed under law, something that has been the norm through his political career.  And while there weren’t many economic downturns to crow about as prelude to the great Economic Disaster, he did get to crow when mainstream media outlets published articles alleging the CIA with being involved in the introduction of Crack into Los Angeles.  But overall, he didn’t come up with an innovation for his cult until 1999, and his innovation didn’t really pull himself forward until the Bush Era and after 9/11.

So the type of scam operation that Lyndon LaRouche was operating to funnel money into his presidential bids, which an ex-LaRouchite explained at trial with “If you’re talking to a little old lady who says she’s going to lose her house, get the money.  If you’re talking to an unemployed worker, get the money.  These people are immoral anyway.” went like this:

Ms. Adel E Bradley, a 75-year old widow who lives in a mobile home in Modesto, California, said in an interview that she stopped at a LaRouche table in the San Francisco airport in 1984 and gave “$20 for magazines”.  Soon after, she began getting calls from LaRouche operatives, soliciting money.  One caller, she said, asked for her credit card number, saying he would check to see what the credit limit was, and the next thing she knew she had lent the campaign $950.Over the following months, she wrote to the Federal Elections Commission.  “I continued to get calls and was talked into making loans of monies that represented my life savings.”  She said that LaRouche representatives warned her that the banking system was about to collapse, so her money would be safer with them.  They promised quarterly interest payments at 15 percent.  One time “a young man from his organization came to my house at 11:30 pm” to pick up a check for #20,000 instructing her to make it out to a LaRouche affiliate organ.  Receipts for #30,000 in loans to that company were submitted with her complaint, and she said it was her understanding that she was making the loans to the LaRouche campaign.  To date she has received no interest payments, just a $500 check on an account that was closed, she said.Mr. Spannus said Mrs. Bradley’s “name is familiar” and suggested that the banks or the Federal government might have prompted her, as well as others, to complain.  Mr. Spannus said that the LaRouche Campaign had repaid the $950 and declined to discuss the remaining $30,000 debt, except to say “our contention is that the FEC has no jurisdiction in the matter.”  (“Fraud Suggested in LaRouche Fund-Raising”, 4-12-86)

(“Fraud Suggested in LaRouche Fund-Raising”, 4-12-86)Anecdotal evidence that I’ve seen here or there or been emailed suggests nothing much has ever changed concerning “campaign fundraising tactics”, even when they veer into the moderately legal category.  There were other methods of fraud being committed.  Money was being siphoned off from LaRouche’s California anti-AIDs ballot initiatives (quarantine the gays) into his presidential bid, and with a panoply of acronyms that matched the two crusades.As various subordinates were charged and convicted, LaRouche striked out in his usual manner.  “The baseless and unconstitutional actions are nothing but a political dirty operation carried out by the parallel government that is behind the Iran – Contra Affair.”  And thus LaRouche was able to narrow-cast an actual government conspiracy into a vendetta against him.  He also made the statement, “Any attempt to arrest me would be an attempt to kill me,” and he was prepared to “Defend myself by every means at my disposal.  I will not submit passively to an arrest, but in such a scenario I will defend myself.  The Reagan Administration will be condemned by history if such a scenario passes.”

When he was arrested and sent to prison, he submitted passively.  A LaRouchian organization sprung up called the “Human Rights Commission”, which once held a fund-raiser where “one leading physicist, acquainted with Albert Einstein, plans to show that LaRouche has contributed far more to science than Einstein.”  The LaRouchians were kept occupied with the activities of this “Human Rights Commission”, a House of Reprsentatives campaign that LaRouche ran, and his 1992 presidential bid.

Disgraced televangelist and fellow – cellmate Jim Bakker described an incident with LaRouche thusly:

In no time at all, our current-affairs discussion group turned into the Lyndon LaRouche Hour.  It was interesting just to watch Lyndon “wow” the unsuspecting listeners who did not know him as he attempted to explain the current Persian Gulf Crisis by reviewing history as far back as the ancient Roman Empire.  Newcomers to the group did not want to appear ignorant, so they often simply sat there nodding their heads in agreement as they listened to Lyndon ramble on, even though they didn’t have a clue what the man was saying. […]One Friday night we had a new member attend our discussion group.  The newcomer was a bald, young, black man, about six feet tall with a muscular physique, wearing dark sunglasses.  As was our custom, the moderator invited the newcomer to introduce himself and tell the group a little about his background.“I am the Messiah,” he announced threateningly, “and I have come to save the world from Ronald Reagan and George Bush.”

The man in question was in prison for breaking into Ronald Reagan’s estate.  Lyndon LaRouche behaved himself well, and despite being remorseless (and constantly paranoid that his cell was bugged) was let out early for Good Behavior at the start of 1994.  Incidentally, when he made a fight against the Senate campaign of Oliver North part of his crusade — roughly the first item on his agenda upon entering back into civilian life — North pointed out that LaRouche was a felon and he wasn’t.

Or you can “garner” “intelligence” , as well as “investigative” “news” “scoops” through less than savory means.

2-15-80: Lyndon LaRouche […] has said that his campaign workers impersonate reporters and others, contending that the covert operation is necessary for his security. […] Mr. LaRouche, who says that he is a counter-intelligence expert[…]“Where a press is running a dirty operation against me like Ewing’s little Keene Sentinel,” Mr. LaRouche said in an interview yesterday, referring to its publisher James Ewing, “That’s an open target. We can impersonate them all we want to because they are doing it to us. It’s just open season.”The Monitor had no immediate comment on Mr. LaRouche’s statements. Mr. Weing also said that he had no comment. Jon Breen of The Telegraph said, “Neither Mr. LaRouche’s comments nor his candidacy are worth commenting on.”

There you have it! Lyndon LaRouche running around the New Hampshire primary, his staff impersonating local news reporters. This would become a habit and a pattern, a tactic in LaRouche’s arsenal.

8-20-82: In a sworn statement Miss [Sara] Fritz [White House correspondent for US News and World Report] said she was called last February 11 by the First National Bank of Boston about an interview that Richard D Hill, the bank chairman, had given a woman who said she was Miss Fritz. A distorted account of the interview later appeared in American Labor Beacon, she said. The bank gave Miss Fritz the New York City telephone number the woman had furnished.“I called this number and asked to speak to Sara Fritz of US News and World Report,” she said in court papers. “My call was transferred, and when a woman answered, I asked ‘Is this Sara Fritz?’ She replied ‘Yes.’ I then asked ‘Of US News and World Report? Fritz?’” She responded by asking, ‘Who is this?’ and when I identified myself as being from US News and World Report, she abdruptly terminated the call.” […]Four months later, Miss Fritz said, she learned she had been impersonated again by someone who got information from the National Association of Home Builders. A dsitorted account of that interview was published in Executive Intelligence Review under the Burdman byline, she said.

And that is how you write a piece for one of LaRouche’s publications! Or, occasionally attack your opponents.  In 1984, LaRouche lost a libel suit against NBC for labelling him an anti-semite and a cult leader, and NBC successfully counter-sued for trying to sabotage an interview with Patrick Moynihan (the Democratic “neo-conservative” for the 1980s, who also had the termerity to take his LaRouche primary opponents deadly seriously) by impersonating network reporters and Senate Aides. He was ordered to pay $3 million, to which he and his lawyers pleaded poverty.

To recap his presidential bids: Walter Mondale was an agent of Soviet influence and was controlled by a Swiss dominated grain cartel.  And “Moscow is committed to establishing world dominance by the Russian Empire by approximately the time of the massive 1988 Thousandth Year celebration of the establishment of Christianity in Russia.”  In 1988, he explained that “AIDs and a coming economic crisis, which could strike as soon as August, will convince the American establishment that we better have someone, even if we don’t like the person, who can handle these problems. Even if he is an outsider. Even if we don’t like his style. Weven if he can’t be controlled. At the same time, the crisis will persuade Americans to turn away from the boob tube, the latest soap, and the clowns now running for the Democratic nomination to elect me. I think the country will want me, not because they like me or love me, but because people want this problem solved.”  AND  “We are on the edge of the biggest financial crisis in hisstory. This is a war. The AIDs issue is going to make me a national folk hero.”

It came to pass just as he said. Larouche drummed the beats of National Defense, fighting any sense of detente, for “Gorbachev has communicated to the US government … that he demands the elimination of me as a precondition of d’etente.”

1988 also saw a reporter for the Executive Intelligence Review inject the rumor that Michael Dukakis had a history of mental illness into the campaign. At a press conference, Ronald Reagan — to his discredit — responded to this suggestion with “I’m not going to attack an invalid.” Dukakis reacted by brushing the issue aside, a tendency that Democratic politicians seem to have which grills them in the end.

Each election cycle, television networks would groan as Federal Election laws and equal time requirements compelled them to sell prime-time commercial slots to Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche repeatedly purchased half hour slots to ramble on the issues of the day, and the impeding apocalyptic economic scenario, and the conspiracy against him. They became ubiqutous to the point where Saturday Night Live had the re-occuring bit “Lyndon LaRouche Theater”, written by Al Franken — playing off on some stylistic similiarites between the informercials and the opening of “Masterpiece Theater”. There was a pattern to the tv ratings for these informercials — up against one of the top rated program, say, for example Cosby sitting at #1, the informercials finished dead last in the ratings — significantly below the next to last rated programs, for instance the weak-signaled Fox’s Saturday night line-up.

At the same time, eyebrows were constantly raised as LaRouche fought through the court system his right to federal matching funds. Still today LaRouche is mentioned as example #1 in the case against the nation’s campaign finance laws or various proposed reforms. In the meantime, LaRouche was racking up campaign finance misdeeds — it appears he was rather lacksadasical in reporting and he did not show much respect for the process — and there his troubles began.

Jim Bakker’s autobiography I Was Wrong includes a five page chapter on his impressions on his prison cell-mate (for a time) — Lyndon Larouche.  It is a strange little chapter, as any chapter on that weird occurence would have to be.  Bakker’s impressions on Larouche are eccentrically positive, albeit telling insofar as Bakker explained he didn’t really always have any idea what Larouche was talking about.

I soon learned a little-known fact about LaRouche: the guy is really funny.  He was always upbeat, even when other inmates made fun of him, which they often did.  And he always had plenty of jokes to tell.  The only problem with his humor was that he was the only one who could understand most of his jokes.  But I laughed along with him, because Lyndon’s telling of the story was hilarious, regardless of whether the punchline made any sense.

This sort of high-end “smile and nod” tendency is replicated in the prison’s “Current Events Discussion Club”, which naturally turned into — for a while — the “Lyndon LaRouche Hour”.  One can only imagine what LaRouche’s jokes would be like, but the impression that another fellow cell-mate had with LaRouche probably gives a hint of where LaRouche was going.

Tom was convinced that Lyndon could not give a guy directions on how to get to the restroom without going back to the time of Rome to explain it.

Formulating an explanation for what LaRouche offers his followers to latch onto, this is where you begin and end.  Recognize the subtitles for his pamphlets as akin to those parodies — and occasionally actual — titles for theses and dissertations.  It is an ability or yearning to connect disparate topics and to always find historical antecedents for today’s events or cultural mores.  The more antecedents the better: if you can slide in something from Ancient Greece , something from the fall of the Roman Empire, an item explaining the decadence of the French Revolution, and a reference to Hitler’s Germany you have a sure-fire impenetrable argument that will leave your opponent dead in his tracks.  For example, LaRouche explains what is wrong with modern science (he truly is a man for all seasons, that Larouche) thusly:

In the 17th century, Bacon, DesCartes, and Galileo came and they reintroduced Aristotelensim into science science under the guise of empericism.  They deliberately mystified science by denying the existence of the continuous manifold, the reality of the generations principle.  They created the London Royal Society, which was a Baconian Society, as a branch of Freemasonry, as a Rosicrucian cult.

The baseline of LaRouche’s world-view, and what he imparts on his “LaRouche Youth Movement”, seems to come down to a supposed generation gap between Plato and Aristotle… of which Aristotle represents the wild unruly generations (the French Revolutionaries and the Baby Boomers) and Plato the rigidly classical.  Plato’s famous quotation, “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions.  Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?”  I think Larouche has extrapulated it into a centerpiece of a black and white good versus evil one side agains the other worldview.

LaRouche maintained what amounts to a shadow-government in his prison-life.  Witness:

Although Lyndon had never been elected to any office that I knew of, the man was well connected to high-level information sources.  While most inmates were still struggling to be fully awake each morning at 6:00 am, Lyndon received a daily news briefing by phone that kept him up to date on world issues.  He also received daily, lengthy, computer-generated intelligence reports through the mail.  I was amazed that at times Lyndon’s intelligence reports told of major news events halfway around the world several days in advances of their happening!  Tom and I would often listen in awe as Lyndon would ramble on, speaking in German, on his long-distance phone calls.  We couldn’t understand a word the man said, but he sure sounded impressive!  Of course, many inmates said that about Lyndon when he was speaking English.

Bakker goes on to describe the daily briefings — focused on the Gulf War crisis and war at that time — as tending to be two days ahead of CNN.  Say what you will about Larouche, the man has himself a sophisticated Intelligence network.  The intelligence is filtered into Larouche’s peculiar ideological prism, and is passed on from there, but there it is.  Sarcastically and cynically I will say that the “filtering into peculiar ideological prism” puts him on par with the world governments.

Piecing together the creation of LaRouche’s Intelligene network is mostly conjecture, though would help one understand Larouche’s small footholds into world governments.  (And go back to my description of Larouche’s operation as a “shadow government”, from his perch in Leesburg, Virginia.)

I can piece together two facets.  Firstly, realize the implications of this, from the New York Times on October 7, 1979:

The Party encourages its members to take jobs outside the party to assist the group’s private intelligence-gathering.  For example, unknown to the Council on Foreign Relations, a secretary was an active member of the US Labor Party.  Among the secretary’s duties last year was to attend the sessions of the Bilderberg Society.  “I’m absolutely floored by this,” said William P Brady, who employed the woman for part of her time at the council.  “It’s like the CIA getting an agent into the Politboro.”

I left out the explicator for the Bilderberg Group, mostly because I assume anyone reading this knows them, and also to explain them myself.  It is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream, because it is a meeting of world elites in various fields — in secret but in the tradition of Skull / Bones not terribly secret in that names are invariably leaked to the press — that indeed conspire in planning global economic trade and world policy.

A bit more germane in explaining LaRouche’s Intelligence Gathering probably comes through his advocacy and the symbiotic nature of politics.  When one floats oneself out to a policy position, one tends to be brought right into the echo-chamber for that policy.  And LaRouche sure advocated a lot of government positions.  Hence, via David Corn of the Nation but probably from New American Fascism:

In 1984, two Pentagon officials addressed a LaRouche rally in Virginia.  A Defense Department spokesman noted at the time that the Pentagon regarded LaRouche’s group, an early advocate of the Strategic Defense Initiative, as a “conservative group … very supportive of the administration.”  During the first term of the Reagan Administration, several members of the National Security Council met with LaRouche.  [When pressed on the matter], spokesman Larry Speckes blathered that the Administration was “glad to talk to” all sorts of American citizens, includeing LaRouche.

Today, LaRouche will tell you that he was an advisor to Reagan concerning the SDI program.  Unless he needs to tell you that he advised John Conyers on Bush’s impeachment.  He’ll tell you lots of things, you see.

So I believe his associates formed contacts with people in world governments, tend to be on the fringes of government agencies but that’s good enough, and from there you can exaggerate your place in the scheme of world politics.  When LaRouche sought to get a foothold into mainstream political currents — away from “Lyn Marcus” and the world of Communist and left-wing politics — he created an anti-drug organization (thus gaining contacts to drug warriors, when you need an echo chamber), a nuclear power advocacy group, the “Schiller Institute” — aping and easily confused and blurred with any other economic think tank.

Understand that his business and intelligence publications were sold as highest end publications to world elites.  I imagine this to be purely for show, but it could fool the best of them from time to time.  Witness this from 1997:

In 1997, Philip Crane, a Republican Congressman on the House Ways and Means Committee, asked Clinton Treasury Secretary questions alerted to him from the “Executive Alert Service” on being “very concerned that severe budget austerity, as presently enforced Maastricht Criteria in the European Union, and Japan’s new auterity budget, threaten to detonate a systematic financial collapse.”

So, Rubin scratched his head, provided a non-answer, and asked to be sent the magazine.  You can guess what “Executive Alert Service” is.  Interestingly enough, “Executive Intelligence Review” is congregated by Google News, which is a demonstration of Google News’s “all inclusive” weakness.

Witness, also,  that In 1985, a Nicaraguan official told the Senate Intelligence Committee that LaRouche was sending Manuel Noreiga intelligence information on US Senators and congressional staffers — who voted to cut aid to Nicaragua.  Of what reliability this intelligence had, I can only speculate.

It’s probably a pathology that infects most bloggers.  I have actually thought “I wonder how I will blog the death of Gerald Ford”.  And then I have formulated, in my head, proposed blog posts about Gerald Ford.

One of the thoughts on the proposed blog posts upon the death of Gerald Ford was the preceeding paragraph.  Also the proceeding paragraph.  This paragraph, I can honestly say, has never crossed my mind in such stray thoughts.

If you line up the five presidents before Gerald Ford and the five presidents following Gerald Ford, what you will find is that Gerald Ford leaves less of a mark than all of them.  And that answers the question, “How will history record Gerald Ford?”  The answer is it won’t.  It’ll skip right past him.  Note him and move right along.  That’s not to say that notable things didn’t happen with Ford — there are precursors and post-cursors everywhere, and certainly during the Ford Presidency — which had ideolouges formulating the “Unitary Executive” theory of governance, for example.  But Ford will never be associated with such items.

Pop culture-wise, Ford’s administration represents a bleak time in American pop-cultural history.  The year 1974 strikes me as horrendous.  Ford’s tenure brings me to mind Pet Rocks.  It’s weird how I have mental snap-shots in my head, and it’s weird how any redeeming qualities from the era commonly known as the 60s fade away right in the year 1974 — as though We no longer have Nixon to kick around, and so there’s nothing to counter-act except blandness, which we must as a culture merge into.  It was a tacky time, and I don’t know if I can pin it entirely on economic hard times or if something else was at play.

The conventional wisdom — pardoning Nixon was good — may not be right and may have set bad precedents for further political chicanery.  Or it may have been good.  Debate amongst yourselves.  I myself hate that conventional wisdom has gelled so perfectly — it is a sign of the establishment forcing something which may or may not be true and probably is only half so down our throats.

So there you have it.  Gerald Ford.  Dead.  Was he in your “dead pool”?  By the 100 minus year rules you would have seven points.  If you already calculated your Dead pool points, run back and add seven points now.  Maybe it’ll be enough to pull you into the lead.

Skipping ahead because I can’t quite wrap my mind around the occurences between roughly 1980 and 1986.  I’ll go back and fill in those dates.  Besides which, I have arrived at a point where I am not serving as a redundancy to anything you can find at wikipedia. For in looking at the question “How does one explain the 1986 victories of Larouchites in the Democratic primary to Illinois State Treasury and Lieutenant Governor?”, one can find some interesting contours in American politics. Frankly, if a book on this election were to be written, and one never will be, I would want to read it. It was a moment in which what was supposed to happen did not happen, and anytime that happens it’s worth looking into to see where the powers that be went haywire.

There had been precursors. 15 percent in a New York mayorial election. 27 percent in a Seattle election. Meanwhile, a number of municipalities were alert to LaRouchites running for school board positions.  Today, the post-script is found in the back of Larouche’s pamphlets — the “Democratic Leaders” who support Larouche — ie: the elected Larouchites — Larouchites to varying degrees, I suppose, as when I’ve seen some been grilled on the subject they’ve ranged from hemming and hawing on the matter, making some distance in the process, to treating Larouche as a typical politician who they admire.

The quick scan on the 1986 elections had a lethargic party with the institutional party assuming their candidates would win as a matter of course, the classic name rule of politics — the Anglo Saxon names of the Larouchites rolling off the tongue better than the ethnic names of the standard Democrats, amplified by the Chicago versus everyone else nature of Illinois politics where the names were easily associated with the corrupt big city Daley machinations of Chicago, and the lower voter turn-out which magnified the by-definition dedicated Larouche workers over the by nature apathetic voting populace.  All of which was probably true enough.   But that in itself is not quite enough to get the Larouchites to win — only create the anomoly of that 27 percent Seattle election.  Here’s how the Larouchites described their victory. “We were successful because we addressed the issues in an economic depression and attacked the myth of the so-called economic recovery.  Many people were sick and tired of corrupt Democratic party politics.  They campaigned on no issues.  We won by hard work.  We traveled the state, visited many farms, wrote about it in our newspapers while the rest of the media ignored us.”  That was Sheila Jones, Illinois Larouche campaign organizer in 1986.

A writer from The Nation, that venerable magaz9ine of the Left, wrote an article entitled “The Democrats Had it Coming”.  In it, he stated that he did indeed vote for the Larouchites, sans any knowledge of what they were about, because (drum roll please) he was sick and tired of corrupt Illinois Democratic party politics who campaigned on no issues — who had no interest in anything other than furthering their political fortunes.  Closer inspection focused on rural resentments.  In rural Illinois, which remains deeply troubled economically, Larouche followers emphasized what they called the villany of banks and the need to protect financially the endangered family farms.  In larger towns, and cities, speakers would demand tougher treatement of drug traffickers and isolation of AIDs victims.

Layer these onto the mere resentment of politically coasting and unresponsive politicians.  If I were to ask who said, “The economic recovery is a fiction to [most/many] [voters/Americans]”, who would pop into your head.  Any number of politicians at any number of points in American history with any amount of truth on their side.  The answer is John Edwards circa 2006, right?  Yes, and also Lyndon Larouche circa 1986.

Never mind what is being referred to with “the banks”.  The nature of the Global Economy that is leaving people dispossed will vary.  Never mind that the drug traffickers include the Queen of England — a politician will get far advocating Law and Order and hence the War on Drugs continues unabetted.  The isolation of AIDs patients — understand AIDs was a new situation and “Drastic Problems call for Drastic Measures” is operable — besides which, it’s a gay disease, right?  (That was a cause celebre for Larouche at this point in his career — and he had it on the California ballot in 1986 and 1988).

In 1976, Larouche figures the voters who would bring him into power were “urban collar union members, blacks from organized labor rather than the ghetto, angry “counter-culture” supporters of George Wallace, and rank and file union members who ‘hate Carter’.”  Mind you, the Union focus came because Larouche was obstensibly connected with the “Labor Committees”, and was also just in the process of shedding his Marxist persona.  Otherwise, the voter you have is a collection of back-lashers — focused onto “George Wallace”.  Indeed, Larouche in 1986 evoked Wallace by name in saying how his people were shaking up Washington.  (In the next breath he would comment on the Anti-Defamation League — understandably a Larouche critic — and say they were working on behalf of the Drug Lobby which was connected to Playbor — but not every statement you can make can be pertinent, I suppose.)

Tactically, it helps to appear as normal people sometimes.  The insanity can get true-believers, but:

The larouche followers’ style was more subdued in rural areas than in airport concourses.  “They just showed up in a sirty pickup truck,” said one radio station manager, “They spoke about the rural crisis.  And then they drove away.”

The election caused a panic in the Democratic Party.  Adlai Stevenson III (and there is no clearer sign of the political inbreeding that Larouche capitalized on than that the governor nominee’s name denoted two prominent figures ahead of him), severed the Democrat off his name and ran as a third party candidate to avoid the Larouchites, whom he labelled “neo-nazis”.  LaRouche denounced Stevenson, and said that “his great-grandfather attacked Abe Lincoln in terms that are not too dissimilar.  If Abe Lincoln were alive, he’d probably be standing up here with me today.”

Stevenson ended up losing by a wide margin to the Republican candidate.

The National Democratic Party instructed state parties to watch the Democratic candidates closely — lest they end up with a Larouchite winning the nomination.  State parties also started to write into their charters a rule stating, vaguely enough but assuredly addressed at LaRouche, barring as delegates any member of “an organization opposed to the philosophy of the Democratic Party”.  These rules would ensure that even if Larouche were to win a handful of delegates here and there in the party primaries, Democrats would keep them out of the convention.  Larouche challenged these rules, and the court system validated them.  Then again, a rule against felons winning anything would end up sufficing, as the law came in at Larouche and landed him in a prison cell with Jim Bakker — basically for bilking the elderly out of their life savings.

Any schadenfreude experienced by the Republicans would evaporate when, a few years later, David Duke was elected to the Louisiana state House, and then won the Republican primary for US Senate and Governor.  Indeed, a review of the book on Larouche New American Fascism asked the question: “Imagine if Louis Farrahkhan or David Duke got as far as Larouche did in 1986.”  David Duke got a lot closer to state-wide elected office than Larouche’s followers ever have.

Strangely enough, the man who may have picked up something in watching the Illinois election may have been Jesse Jackson.  In 1986 he was working to expand his 1984 presidential constituency for 1988 in his “Rainbow Coalition” — moving beyond his black constituency to other economically dispossed in the nation.  To quote Merle Hansen, president of the North American Farm Alliance and resident of Nebraska in 1986, who threw his support behind Jackson, “Farmers are going somewhere.  It’s just a matter of where.  For a lot of them, if Jesse Jackson wasn’t around the alternative will be LaRouche or right wing organizations.”

It’s hard to know what to make of that quote.  LaRouche himself didn’t get far electorally — his followers did… and his followers weren’t exactly created equally, one of the candidates comes out relatively sane and sensible (just thinks a few of LaRouche’s ideas were sensible), while the other was over every edge.  A poll was conducted in 1986 which showed Larouche with a staggering favorability rating of 1 percent.  His unfavorability rating came in at 20 percent.  The other 79 percent had to fall into the two camps of no strong opinion on such a stupid matter and never heard of him.

Political alliances are shifting creatures, and vacuums existed aplenty within the Democratic Party where a Larouchite could rear its ugly head.  The South had long since had a Democratic political cultural split between “National” Democrats and Dixiecrats, and the urban – rural divide in the party had existed pretty much forever.  In 1986, there were plenty of Democrats by habit who were wanting to vote for something other than the standard Democrat.

The more fringier members of the political spectrum will deride Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, Pat Buchanan, and various politicial figures affiliated with the Christian Coalition and organizations of the type as “Gate-keepers”.  To the left and right they man the gates and address various grievances the politican figures of any real power will ignore, and then shove those supporters right back to the power structure.  Larouche can no longer fit this purity spectrum, or maybe he never could: he practically endorsed Ford in 1976, and he backed Kerry in 2004… but that last one may just be a sign of his shifting focus.

Texas Democrats voted themselves a LaRouchite for head of the state Democratic Party.  The party immediately stripped the seat of its power… combined with Moynihan’s reaction to the Illinois debacle, which was to deride the Primary system, and the subsequent stripping of any LaRouchite as delegate to the national convention by rule, it allowed the LaRouchites to declare the Democratic Party “undemocratic”.