A milestone has passed.  Larouche predicted that the dollar would be worth ZERO yesterday.  It is not.  The latest in a long line of predictions on apocalyptic happenings — wandering into a Depression Greater than the Great Depression, and into a new Dark Ages which rivals the second Dark Ages interval of… um…

Anyways, bread will be arriving at Cult Headquarters, apparently.  Feel free to send your own loaf of breads their way.  Just go ahead and send it to the EIR address, relatively easily found online I assume.

I’m told by my fellow Talking Heads fan, who also happens to be a member of the cult, that this is no big deal, because look at Bush and Greenspan.

In other news, Larouche’s Bankruptcy plan is, same as it ever was, essentially to bankrupt the banks for, you know, his control… and so…

Anyone reading this who doesn’t right off recognize the enormity of that is either a brainwashed LaRouche cult follower, or someone ignorant of banking. You, see, banks, like all other companies, have assets and liabilitities. In healthy companies, your assets exceed your liabilities, and you have positive net worth. If your liabilities comes to exceed your assets, you are technically insolvent, and need to correct that condition before it leads to collapse. If it starts leading to collapse, such companies can petition for bankruptcy, and if granted a Chapter 11, most of the liabilities are marked down to cents on the dollar, to where the assets again exceed liabilities. Hopefully, also, there is a business plan to prevent the problems from recurring. But the main service that bankruptcy does, for individuals as well as companies, is wipe out all, or a major portion, of your liabilities, typically in the form of debts.

And get this: if Congress fails to enact this bill, from first unveiling it in committee to passage in both houses and the president signing it into law, in about 2 hours from first hint to the public of what it proposes, it will be even more needed, as every depositor in the country will withdraw, or try to withdraw, their deposits and savings from the banks before the bill passes, in hopes of rescuing their entire savings, such that by the time the bill passes, every bank will in fact be totally bankrupt, destroyed by a universal bank run that will bankrupt every bank in the country simultaneously. Lyn, you have outdone yourself. You have had your eyes set on a crash for decades, and by golly, if your bill ever gets introduced in Congress, you’ll have your crash. 

……………….

[…]  Certainly, future generations would bless his name as the father of a bill that would (1) bankrupt all the banks, (2) destroy all depositors’ savings (as larouchetruth points out), (3) destroy the equity all homeowners have in their homes, and (4) destroy the entire financial system of the country, and then the world. 

But there really isn’t much point in analyzing a Larouche written bill.

go the LaRouchepac website, start the webcast, and if you don’t have the time, or the stomach, to listen to the whole thing, jump to minute 26 and listen for about five minutes on the banking bill, then jump to around minute 38, where Debbie starts the questions, and listen to his answers to the first four questions.

Some other time.

The Democratic leaning groups who are targetting Mitch McConnell like crazy right now, with some relatively boiler-plate anti-war attacks, would do well to drum up some advertisements about the current Mitch McConnell – directed line of attack on the family of the 12 year old who delivered the DNC radio address on behalf of the expansion of the S-CHIP program.

The goal is to get the approval rating of McConnell below 50 before the year is out.  I think the incumbency factor negates the support of the war (which tends to be a mixed bag, as you can always somehow posture up an attack on the “wimps” in this regard) — and that only gets one so far.  So you highlight his sliminess in attacking… um… a 12 year old? — with only the thinnest lines of “plausible deniability” built into the racket.

Mitch McConnell: #11 on the Senate race list of Democratic targets.  (Yes, I have them unscientifically ranked… because I’m a dork.)

Noticing that the 50th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik was coming up, I had to ask myself:

Did I see Sputnik back in 1998?  Specifically, hanging off the ceiling in a corner of Krasnoyarsk State University?  My brother, who lived there at the time and who my parents and I were visiting, pointed it out.  “Sputnik.”  So it was.  Sputnik.

Showing the photograph of a Sputnik to a few of my peers in the following months, I would point to it and say “… and that’s Sputnik.”  A strange location for Sputnik to be, and seemingly a little random.  There was a disconnect, and the response would tend to be a little confused.   The unasked question:  Doesn’t Sputnik deserve better?

Probably.   But that wasn’t the Sputnik, which apparently was incinerated on re-entry.  I probably should have known that.  What I saw was some other Sputnik.  But maybe it is best to suggest that if you’ve seen one Sputnik, you’ve seen them all.

Oh mercy me.

I left that Jeremiah Duggan post incomplete, leaving up simply the Larouche model of crisis management in the parallel lines of one NCLCer’s experience in ’74, what I’ve observed in real time with Kronberg, and what I understand about Duggan. The other part of that picture? Well, I’ve been waiting for the right insult to be delivered to me from the Cult Apologist.*

And this morning I got to do a little mental jig.

Right about here. After expressing puzzlement, his response, “You don’t like to be challenged”, is a complete non-sequitur. Lined up next to a very interesting and useful insult.

So, Jeremiah Duggan attends that conference. Now, I cannot recreate much of what went on with the conference, even with the Washington Post “No Joke” article in hand. (“Question Your False Assumptions.”) There are second hand bits here and there, which at the time I’ll jettison. (In part because I’d have to shift about to find any of it.) But instead I’ll paint an imaginary picture, based off of Larouchite experiences that have been thrown my way. So, maybe there was some singing at some point.

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”!

I don’t know what they would be singing there — it cannot be the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, but let’s just go ahead and figure that Jeremiah is sitting there, the conference meeting room sings… and…

They were there to hear solutions to stopping the War in Iraq. After participating in a rousing spiritual where key lines are changed to “Larouche”, we get the solution for the war. Running down the enemies list, which Jeremiah Duggan surely shared to a great extent (Cheney, the neo-cons, Blair), — that which is why he is there in the first place — he gets stuck on that title “Children of Satan“. He shifts a bit uncomfortably when you rummage into Jewish named bankers, and perhaps policy visa vie Israel.

And we rumble on through the Larouche Doctrine.

Somewhere along the line he gets the soft sell, the positivity expressed in the slogan “Do you know the difference between Man and the Animals?”

He mutters “This is an f’ing cult.” Reportedly he asked any number of questions, and was shunted. Which brings me back to what is the Hard Sell for the cult, the negative manner one urges one to join up:

You can’t even defend yourself? Your thoughts? You would we weak fodder for a real cult you know that? They’d suck you in like an old Hoover vacuum.

He has to get out of there.

And he calls his dear old mum. (“Still teeting off of mother’s milk, are you?“) It is run of the mill intimidation for Larouche’s minions, second nature — almost quaint.

There is one other item I wish I had immediate access to, an account of someone who was simply bored by his experience with his would-be cult recruiters, but I’ll have to move on from that.

I would have to shift through the articles on Jeremiah Duggan for how one gets out of there. At its most innocuous for the Schiller Institute, I imagine he fled out and tried to wave down a semi-truck. Conjecture can be built up from there.

(*He who practices the “1 + 1 = 11” logic; as well has the unfortunate habit of claiming to hear people say “B” when they say “A”.)

From Joey Difatti’s website:

Joey on the issues…

• Defend our conservative values from attacks by extreme liberal groups

Joey Difatti being the man who just dropped out of a Louisiani state senate race due to “health reasons”, or perhaps because the newspaper was about to report that he had two citations for lewd contact in public men’s restrooms.

But this statement about “defending our conservative values” from “attacks” by “extreme liberal groups” makes sense thusly.   Closeted Gay Public Bathroom Sex is a conservative value.  Undercover police officers sitting in bathroom stalls are an extreme liberal group.

Actually, certain libertarians would suggest as much about the undercover police officers being “liberal” — them seeing any echoes of government “entrapment” and labeling it “liberal”.  So maybe I’m not that far afield with that one.

Imagine you are Jeremiah Duggan’s mother. You receive a call from his conference where Jeremiah says, “I’m in trouble.” After that, Jeremiah dies. Placing yourself in her shoes, and THAT is why it is an insult to say that Jeremiah Duggan is being used.

I am tempted to just type out the just over 4 page Chapter 39 of Younger Than That Now, entitled “Epiphany”, appropo of the fact that at the end of the chapter, Ruch Tuttle/Williams walks out and leaves the NCLC, which as my Kirby fan Larouchie points out, one can do — psychologically difficult as it may be. The one important exception to that rule in terms of physical ease is the particular circumstances of that particular Schiller Institute conference which Jeremiah Duggan attended.

Ruth is selling copies of New Solidarity door to door with her fellow NCLCers — Bill, Rodney, and Lorice. While doing so, a mentally ill and deranged woman strikes at and hits Lorice, leaving her bloodied and needing to be taken to the hospital. So as Lorice is being taken away for medical attention, Ruth and Bill soldier on selling New Solidarities at a different location. That night:

“No we didn’t tell anyone we were going to that neighborhood,” she [Lorice] was saying, and Bill and I nodded in affirmation. “Yeah, Rodney’s a new recruit. But I don’t think…” She listened a few minutes. “There was nothing I could do. I know it was my responsibility…” Finally she sighed and handed me the phone. I saw her walk wearily into the front room to join the rest of the group as Arlen read from the
latest briefing updates, giving everyone their evening fix of information from the National Committees.

I told my version of the incident to the man on the phone, adding, “At the hospital the police told me the woman is known in the neighborhood as mentally ill. She’s always hallucinating about the devil, and today she was tripping her brains out, too. They were trying to contact a family member to get her commited.”

“And you believe them?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “You didn’t?”

“Look at the facts: the working class is being systematically destroyed by Rocky’s Trilateral Commission. There’s a psychological holocaust going on out there. This is the direct result of Nelson Rockefeller’s interference in our daily organizing. If you do your job better, the workers won’t be destroyed like this.”

“So it’s my fault?”

“Let’s go over the story again, only this time I want you to tell me more about what Rodney was doing.”

“Look, he was ringing doorbells, just like the rest of us. That’s all.”

There is a dynamic in this account from 1974, shared with both the Jeremiah Duggan situation and the Ken Kronberg situation. The Larouche line is to skip past the human being in trouble and run straight to a conspiratorial spin, conspiracy against HIM — the mentally ill assailant doesn’t exist in that story, for she is a force from Rockefellar. Jeremiah Duggan was simply a figure being used by the British Authorities in their grand conspiracy against Larouche. More lack of humanity is shown in that Larouche never delivered to the Duggans any semblence of condolences until just this month. (Contrary to some observations made recently at FACTNet, a recent news report had the Duggans pointing to something as “the first condolence we’ve ever received from the Schiller Institute” — five years after the fact. Contrary to the larouchepub article recently posted here, Larouche did not “express condolences” from the very beginning) In the case of this 1974 account and Kronberg, we also see the blaming of actual Larouche workers (witness the Larouche penned internal aggrivation at the baby-boomers for their morale problems following Kronberg’s death — which lead to Jeff Steinberg’s invitation for them to seek counseling with … I don’t remember his name).

More can be said about Jeremiah Duggan, and more will be said. The RC Harvey fan / Larouchite actually said “The implication is that the Schiller Institute is a dangerous organization.” This is a false statement. It’s an explication.

……………………………………………………

I find myself mulling the role of Larouche’s Electoral machine. You know that Larouche has an electoral machine, don’t you? He has a dozen or two elected state representatives. They introduce the latest Larouche plan to solve the curenct crisis that Larouche is flogging to their state legislators, which gives the minions that work the street the appearance that something is happening on the front that they are pestering both US congress-critters and average people about — press releases flutter from the Larouche Pub about individual representatives pushing the Larouche Plan to Avert the latest Crisis. Currently it’s the HBPA, the Larouche plan to solve the mortgage crisis.

What happens is that the bills being pursued by normal politicians are denounced as coming from the Felix Rohatyns of the world, ergo absolute evil. Sometimes, after things settle away a politician will speak words that will have Larouche claim as being that politician embracing the Larouche plan. Here, I’m thinking of Chuck Hagel making some remarks about Iraq and foreign policy, and Larouche’s publication saying that that sounds an awful lot like the Larouche Doctrine. (As I’ve said already on this stupid blog of mine, nope, for The Larouche Doctrine specifically had the tenant that it must be called the Larouche Doctrine, and that was nowhere in Chuck Hagel’s comments.)

We’ll just have to wait and see if that part of the occurences comes about.

The Larouchite elected officials also get to introduce Larouche for his speeches and world-historic Internet broadcasts. Must be great fun to be them.

There is nothing much more tedious than reading a bad ham-handed reference to Talking Heads lyrics.  Such as the case with Paul Krugman:

Now, as they survey the wreckage of their cause, conservatives may ask themselves: “Well, how did we get here?” They may tell themselves: “This is not my beautiful Right.” They may ask themselves: “My God, what have we done?”

But their movement is the same as it ever was.

It’s not that those lines can’t be used for this sort of whimsical effect, and indeed I encourage appropriation from “Once In a Lifetime”. But I gather they shouldn’t be altered to a third person perspective. It’s best to keep in second person, or to wind over to first person.

And “This is not my beautify right” as replacement for “wife” simply does not work.

It’s a given that the Susan B Anthony Dollar has a horrible design.  I find myself currently in the possession of a Susan B Anthony.  I needed to break a five for bus fare, so I asked around a bit for five one dollar bills, waving the five.  Eventually I found someone, a family where one person pooled together where one pulled out two ones, and another pulled out her two ones, and somewhere along the line somebody threw in what I thought was a quarter.  I groaned slightly at what I thought was the loss of seventy-five cents in this transaction, sort of rationalizing it mentally as a balance-of-nature thing due to breaking somebody’s one for public phone coins with all the change I had at that time — eighty cents, perhaps — meaning I’d be down — what?   Fifty-five cents?  I’m out a generic cola!
A couple days later, I looked and saw that it was a goddamned dollar.  Looking down at it, the quarter fits into the serated edge, and counting the sides of the coin — a bit tricky, it appears to have eleven sides.

Which brings me to the question: Um. Why? Eleven sided coins? Why? It is nearly a circle, but not quite a circle. If I were designing the Susan B Anthony, I think I’d have, like, maybe a hectagon. Or probably six sides — a sestagon? (Hexagon, dammedit!)  That would make it distinctive enough to be able to separate from the quarter, and would make it thus functional.

Conspiracy mutterings have it that the Susan B Anthony dollar was designed to fail — can’t honor them feminists, or something. I don’t know. Susan B Anthony is sort of the safest suffragist to honor — something of the equivalent of Booker T Washington. But really. Eleven sides?

Sometimes the knocking down of historical figures rings a little bit unfair.  The examples of this are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and various founding fathers — amongst any number of other sins — slave-owners be they.  Regardless, towering figures worthy of respect.

Christopher Columbus is the one figure that is sort of deserving of being knocked off his pedestal.  The worthiness of it is that he more or less has been knocked off — the attack on Christopher Columbus has stuck, to the chagrin of those that complain and yell about “political correctness” coming out of Academia.

Yesterday I was talking with a student at PSU (Portland State University) and a student at PCC (Portland Community College).  The PCC student said he had no class today; the PSU student said he did — and was surprised that the PSU student didn’t have that day off “Columbus Day, isn’t it?” My response was “Columbus Day isn’t a politically correct holiday”, which I needed to quickly come up with an explication that ended up as “Indian Killer”.

Now, I walked by PCC today and saw students lounging about, suggesting that there might have been classes there, but let’s assume they took Columbus Day off.  There is a strange bit of ideological cleavage there, something that suggests why Bush in his two presidential campaigns found his way there and Gore went to PSU.  I don’t know how to further explain it, except that I watched Alan Greenspan explain the “creative destruction” in the death of the manufacturing sector of the economy with “This is why Community College is the fastest growing educational sector” — the training of a workforce (another ideological cleavage; after the 1994 Republican victory, the Congress changed the word “Labor” to “Workforce”; I think after 2006 it’s been changed back) —

and it rings right on back to where Christopher Columbus Day is observed and where it is not.

There are a number of aspects in carrying on about Lyndon Larouche that are a bit of a challenge. For instance, most people do not take him seriously and will never delve terribly deeply into widespread beliefs about him. I refer here particularly to the matter of anti-semitism — in the rare circumstances where an average person encounters a Larouchite diatribe and gives it any brain-span, they will tend to think of it as anti-semitic, what with its references to the Bankers and its odd element of Anglo-phobia– rather vaguely unable to pin-point or quantify why they think so. Something just sort of rings awful with the terminology.

This is more or less all right. But I myself, by dent of rambling on about Larouche (and let it be said that for this blog, due to external events, the year 2007 is sort of the Year of Larouche) — have a bit of a responsibility to delve a tad deeper and quantify it somewhat. Mind you, it’s not very much deeper, but it is more nonetheless.

Another challenge. Something I keep encountering with Larouche supporters, the challenge of which is for me to keep a straight face. Here’s the line: “People have been calling Larouche anti-semitic for 30 years now!” The answer to that, after a bit of a puzzlement is simply “Yes.” I opted for a revision of that matter of fact answer, “35 years, within an inkling before hand.” (The “inkling beforehand” a reference to Tim Wohlsforth looking squinty-eyed at Larouche’s cold Marxist economic interpretation of the Holocaust.)

With that I am charged with believing lies that have been told to me. An invisible question is thus placed before me: “Who are you going to believe: Me or your own lying eyes?” (Just as I do not need Dennis King to tell me about Operation Mop-Up, I do not need Dennis King to tell me that Lyndon Larouche is anti-semitic.)

So, here is that shallow delving into the matter, the one thin example of the flowering anti-semitism, and one example is all I really feel I need for my purposes. I tend to go back to this example because it just sort of slapped at me like a salamandar (and atthe same time the implications of the dual diatribes agaisnt the baby-boomers and the praising of he LYMers struck me) — slimy and smelly.

Synarchist. Felix Royatin.

A conspicuous word choice. A conspicuous figure to cite. Why, in the panoply of words in the English language, would you possibly pluck out “synarchist”? Why, of all the figures with the same ideological position and the same position in the world, would you possibly determine Felix Royatin as the great Evil in the world, pulling strings like a marionette?

Synarchist is a synonym for “International(ist) Cabalist”. Really. Felix Royatin is an investment banker, and Holocaust Survivor. Really. It’s the Jewish International Bankers’ Cabal Conspiracy. That is all. After this, it does not really matter if Larouche himself were Jewish.

This is just sort of second nature for Larouche Inc., and you can take it for whatever its worth — forgive the LYMers, for they know not what they are saying with this.

Without even delving further into this issue, I’ll quote Dianne Bettag back in February or March: “Good game”. I’ll ramble further to the my interpretation of her quote and say “CHECK MATE!” Just as my guess is Dianne Bettag didn’t believe for a moment I was convinced by her comment (“Your source, Dennis King” [WRONG] “High Times Magazine” [Um. He wrote an article.]), I do not believe for a moment a Larouche supporter will let him/herself see this. Nonetheless, I believe I throw my pronouncement of “Check Mate!” out there (tongue firmly held in cheek) with more intelligent backing than Bettag’s “Good Game”.

A while ago, there was a fascinating debate on the FACTNet board amongst those ex-Larouchites regarding Larouche (and Inc)’s anti-semitism. At first it seemed like the gulf of difference was rather large, but as it moved forward it became clear that the gulf was rather slim, and something of a consensus came through. Larouche clearly uses anti-semitic language, it was clearly more pronounced at a time when it was useful in raising funds [in seeking support from the Liberty Lobby] — which suggests a level of cynicism in the anti-semitism — but he is not solely or primarily anti-semitic. All of which falls short of where Dennis King stands on the matter, but that is his preogative, and it suggests somebody else needs to write a book.
With that I am charged with believing lies that have been told to me. An invisible question is thus placed before me: “Who are you going to believe: Me or your own lying eyes?” (Just as I do not need Dennis King to tell me about Operation Mop-Up, I do not need Dennis King to tell me that Lyndon Larouche is anti-semitic.)

So, here is that shallow delving into the matter, the one thin example of the flowering anti-semitism, and one example is all I really feel I need for my purposes. I tend to go back to this example because it just sort of slapped at me like a salamandar (and at the same time the implications of the dual diatribes agaisnt the baby-boomers and the praising of he LYMers struck me) — slimy and smelly.

Synarchist. Felix Rohatyn.

A conspicuous word choice. A conspicuous figure to cite. Why, in the panoply of words in the English language, would you possibly pluck out “synarchist”? Why, of all the figures with the same ideological position and the same position in the world, would you possibly determine Felix Rohatyn as the great Evil in the world, pulling strings like a marionette?

Synarchist is a synonym for “International(ist) Cabalist”. Really. Felix Royatin is an investment banker, and Holocaust Survivor. Really. It’s the Jewish International Bankers’ Cabal Conspiracy.

This is just sort of second nature for Larouche Inc., and you can take it for whatever its worth — forgive the LYMers, for they know not what they are saying with this.

Without even delving further into this issue, I’ll quote Dianne Bettag back in February or March: “Good game”. I’ll ramble further to the my interpretation of her quote and say “CHECK MATE!” Just as my guess is Dianne Bettag didn’t believe for a moment I was convinced by her comment (“Your source, Dennis King” [WRONG] “High Times Magazine” [Um. He wrote an article.]), I do not believe for a moment a Larouche supporter will let him/herself see this. Nonetheless, I believe I throw my pronouncement of “Check Mate!” out there (tongue firmly held in cheek) with more intelligent backing than Bettag’s “Good Game”.

A while ago, there was a fascinating debate on the FACTNet board amongst those ex-Larouchites regarding Larouche (and Inc)’s anti-semitism. At first it seemed like the gulf of difference was rather large, but as it moved forward it became clear that the gulf was rather slim, and something of a consensus came through. Larouche clearly uses anti-semitic language, it was clearly more pronounced at a time when it was useful in raising funds [in seeking support from the Liberty Lobby] — which suggests a level of cynicism in the anti-semitism — but he is not solely or primarily anti-semitic. All of which falls short of where Dennis King stands on the matter, but that is his prerogative, and it suggests somebody else needs to write a book.