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.

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”.

Imagine you are a reporter for the New York Times in 1973. Your editor calls you to the desk, and asks you to do a piece on the fringe party candidates for New York City mayor. You research the parties, write up each candidate, maintaining total objectivity. There’s this novel new third party, the “Free Libertarian Party”, which you dutifully mention had its presidential candidate in 1972 receive one electoral vote from a disgruntled Republican. And then you find yourself typing this:

The strident US Labor Party stems from the National Caucus of Labor Committees, which contends it has “wrested left hegemony” from the Coummunist party, in part by an “Operation Mop Up”. Its weekly newspaper “New Solidarity” says, “many CPers have been sent to the hospital after jumping Labor Committee members in the CPs own meetings.”

The tip off is his use of “an” and the use of quotation marks in explaining “Operation Mop Up”. He could just as easily have cited the number 40 as the number of Communists taken down in “Operation Mop Up”, as it apparently was in the literature, which begs the question, considering what fringes of the political spectrum we’re working with here: ALL 40 of them?

Incidentally, the Labor Party’s mayorial candidate clears up some confusion, and I am inclined to believe Mr. Chaitkin here:

The “Caucus” dates from the 1968 student strike at Columbia University. Some sources call it an offshoot of splits in the leftist Progressive Labor Party and the Students for a Democratic Society. Mr. Chaitkin (the mayorial candidate), however, says it was started as a Greenwich Village discussion group by Lyn Marcus (aka Lyndon LaRouche), now national chairman. (Was he ever not?)

A letter that appeared in the New York Times arguring with a book reviewer for the LaRouche expose New American Fascism over the relative danger of the cult (the book reviewer said King pretty well inflates LaRouche’s threat — which I’m inclined to agree, despite an awareness that individually he’s hit some people hard) in 1989 shed a bit of light on some earlier activities, suggesting that the ideology hasn’t shifted much no matter what part of the political spectrum it is obstensibly attracting, nor has the tactics.

The media found itself covering this strange little cult when the case of Alice Weitzman showed up, an investigation and ensuing court trial over this situation:

Early this month in Washington Heights a young woman slipped away from the intense people who had had been crowding her apartment, folded a desperate note into a paper airplane, and sailed it out the living room. The note twisted down through the winter twilight to the feet of a mother and child out for a walk. While the young woman would frantically from the window, the mother picked up the note and read it.

“Please help to get me out of here. I am being held a prisonerin my own apartment. They’re going to move me soon to some unknown location. I will try to leave some clues in my room if the police get here too late. The note was signed Alice Weitzman.
To use somebody else’s terminology, she was an “Enemy of the People” — too questioning… she needed to be deprogrammed because there was a conspiracy afloat that had programmed her. Or something like that.

Now the group is convinced it is the target of a vast conspiracy embracing, among many other elements, the CIA, the KGB, British Intelligence, the New York City Police Department, the Rocekfellar family (ie: everyone who shot Kennedy) , and the anthropology department at Columbia University (!!!). This conspiracy, they say, has secretly gotten access to various of their members and has “programmed” them like computers to invent spurious identities and assassinate their leaders.

To post the details of the “deprogramming” seems to me gratuitious — there is a perverse and guilty “WTF” amusement in reading this, nubbed away when I realize the implications and that humanity is at stake here. Then again, Gratuitous is posting a never-ending series of posts chronologizing Mr. Larouche’s career. And, in the end, I’m trying to impart information. Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you, and here is one of a few long passages I’ve chosen to pass by in its entirety.
Last summer, Mr. Marcus did his first “deprogramming” of a member in Germany named Konstantin George, who had left his wife and the movement to live with a psychiatrist in East Germany. When he returned to the West, Mr. Marcus said he discovered elements of a vast assassination plot against him implanted in Mr. George’s mind. Through the fall the talk of conspiracies and brainwashing grew in the movement. Mr. Marcus found his second victim at the annual meeting of the Labor Committees here on the last three days of December. He was a 26 year old English member named Christopher White. Mr. White was married last year to Miss Schnitzer, ten years his senior.

Mr. Marcus has taped the deprogramming, and to a layman it appears obvious that the elements of the conspiracy he claims to extract from Mr. White’s mind are either harmless bits of personal history or ideas suggested by Mr. Marcus himself.

When Mr. White resists the questioning at one point, Mr. Marcus shouts at the obviously disturbed youth: “You don’t have to communicate a goddamn thing. I know what your mind is.”

At another point when Mrs. White is in the room and Mr. White has confirmed one of Mr. Marcus’s suggestions, Mr. Marcus says “Now do you see Carol? Do you believe?”

There are sounds of weeping and vomiting on the tapes, and Mr. White complains of being deprived of sleep, food, and cigarettes. At one point someone says “raise the voltage,” but Mr. Marcus says this was associated with the bright lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock. There is also what appears to be an attempt to hypnotize Mr. White by someone not Mr. Marcus in the room.

Mr. Marcus denies that Mr. White was mistreated in any way. He says a phsician, Dr. Gene Inch, also a member of the group, was in attendence throughout.

Mr. Marcus uses a combination of computer terminology and sexology to describe the “programming”. He describes Mr. White as “being reduced to a 8-cycle infinite loop with look-up table, with homosexual bestiality.” […] Mr. Marcus also says that a certain type of drug which his research has as yet been unable to specify is used in the “programming”. One of the iron rules of the labor committees is that members who use drugs are instantly expelled.

During the intensive questioning one day, Mr. White complains of a terrible pain in his arm. “That’s not real,” Mr. Marcus screams. “I have to tell you what’s real and stop this crazy fantasy world because it’s not my fantasy.”

It was at this time that the FBI tightened the restrictions of investigations such that they were unable to continue their search into LaRouche’s — strike that, Lyn Marcus’s — bizarre cult. Lyn Marcus proved an agile litigate on this matter — and shortly the FBI was no longer able to even comment on this case.

Part 3. At the Rockefellar vice president hearings. Attempting to gain support from the Right. The Election of 1976 and a platform that will become eerily repetitive.

Recently I noted that somebody had posted this site to a link on where that then-plagued by LaRouchite commenters can get some information about Lyndon LaRouche. It was a bit galling. I make an unlikely source. I mock it and try to move on. But the problem is that if I’m to be referenced as a source of LaRouche, I may as well have more material on him than what I’d tend to otherwise — a wisecrack smirk followed by a devastating comment from a former member of his cult (taken by a college journalist as my words). If this is linked in that way, I might as well have actual INFORMATION to be used and considered. Thus… welcome to a long series of posts that detail the career of one Lyndon H Larouche, Jr.

Lyndon H LaRouche, Jr. was born to a family of Quakers. They were arch-conservative Quakers who accused their fellow-church-goers of being Bolsehviks. LaRouche, Sr. wrote a rambling tract berating them for a variety of crimes, including failure to react positively to an anti-Jewish speech. Thus, they were kicked out of the congregation. This is according to a review of the book New American Fascism.

LaRouche, Jr. started out a consientous objector during World War II — a biographical bit of information he mentioned when he suited it attracting radical Leftists and would start to leave out when he sought to attract right-wingers (and had his followers hold up signs mocking Jane Fonda). If you know your World War II conscientous objector history, you know they were pretty well rounded up and placed in work camps. It was here that he bunked with a Trotskyite who imparted radical politics onto him. And thus was born “Lyn Marcus”, who after the war joined the Socialist Workers Party.

In the late 1970s, LaRouche would revise the reason that he was a member of a Communist party. The government had wanted him to infiltrate the group, you see. He, being a noble citizen, you see, refused. But he joined to see for himself what was up and what was that all. It is a feeble excuse for someone wanting to distance himself from his past in attempting to appeal to a different segment of the population, and if believed would fall short of explaining all subsequent events in his life, but LaRouche probably believes it.

LaRouche eventually joined the army, and worked as a medical corpsman in India. He attended college, and quit soon thereafter because he believed himself better than his teachers — he was “one of those prodigies”. I can compare this to emails I’ve received telling me LaRouchites are in throe urging college students to quit — he is imparting on them a sense of intellectual superiority onto his would-be recruits.

The most important part of his conventional career path was his employment in computer programming and systems designing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is the language of the computer industry, circa 1960, quickly outdated though it may be, that infects his literature and serves as one of a few factors that make them unreadable. If you’ve ever actually read one of his pamphlets, you are made of headier stuff than I. It is also this training that shadows his “programming” — or “counter-programming” that the “conspirators” had committed (heh heh).

LaRouche was kicked out of the Socialist Workers’ Party for trying to organize a radical shism with well known British schimatic Gerald Healy.  Do not ask me what that means, but it doesn’t seem to bode well for a constructive future.  It was then that LaRouche started teaching Marxist economics  at the Free School of New York, which was the genesis of the cult to come.
I have every reason to believe that LaRouche’s group had as much to do with the SDS as he has now with the Democratic Party, despite media reports suggesting a close lineage. Here is a 1970 antecedent that suggests that, contrary to largely held thought in 1970s reporting on LaRouche (or “Lyn Marcus”) that it was not really “noble at first” until things just started to go haywire.

As a graduate student and lecturer at the City College of New York in 1970, I was an advisor to a new undergraduate group, Students for Environmental Salvage. This was at the time of intense awareness of conservation and pollution issues on compuses in New York City and elsewhere, that led to the first Earth Day. Students in the group were deeply and genuinely concerned about endangered species, oil spills, pesticides, solid waste disposal — in short, the whole range of problems that still haunt us today.

Attendance at the first few meetings was veery high (up to 100 or more) and enthusiastic until, at the third or fourth meeting, one student shouted his way into leadership and into narrowing the agenda to one issue: rolling back the subway fare! This student later proved to be the spokesman of a small group of LaRouche disciples, members of the National Caucus of Labor Committees.

Rolling back the recently raised subway fare was a progressive cause and certainly had an environmental aspect, since public mass transit pollutes less than other alternatives. But all other concerns were ridiculed and labeled “neo-Malthusian.” Subsequent meetings were more and more poorly attended, as the LaRouche people forced themselves into a major role in planning the college’s Earth Day activities.

Cirty College’s first “environmental teach-in” (4-16-70) became a strange forum of speeches and workshops dominated by LaRouche himself (under his Lyn Marcus alias) and his supporters, who peddled their moronic anti-environmental views to a few bewildered students. The college’s participation in Earth Day, six days later, was sparse and disorganized.

What Lyndon LaRouche had done, I realized in shock and disgust, was to sabotage very effectively the student environmental movement at City College, the quintessential urban public institution of higher learning in America.

– George Dale, Armank NY, 7-16-89

Nonetheless, it appears his “Labor Committee” gained some measure of respectibility during a Columbia University Strike, and he either worked in tandem with SDS or parasitically to take credit and lead followers into its corridor, attracted to the strike first, then the World Revolution that it shared in common with SDS, and on to… to… to…

Okay. Cue 1974 New York Times article:

In mid 1972 Miss Schnitzer and Mr. Marcus parted. Early members say that she had served as a target of his wrath at meetings, providing a semblence of debate about theories. After she left, they said, Mr. Marcus increasingly insisted on one man rule, calling dissenters CIA agents or accusing them of having “mother problems”.

Now. First of all, if you go back into my Larouche archives, you will find that “mother problem” idea is still imrinted on LaRouchites as a means of psychological warfare with would-be recruits. Second of all, looking from the outside in it has to be different from how it looks from the inside, visa vie level of controls and the nature of the ideas being sprouted.
Next time: How to wreck a college’s Environmental Movement, Operation Mop-Up, the media discovers something funky, and whatever else I get to.

An interesting little article from April 11, 1986 in the New York Times concering LaRouche’s then new hometown. Of course it’s not online, but if you have access to the New York Times archives, try it and learn such things as:

Mr. LaRouche’s guns have raised eyebrows even here in the hunt country of Loudoun County.  “I have a major personal security problem,” Mr. LaRouche said in one leaflet, written while he was seeking permits for his bodyguards to carry concealed weapons.  Without the permits, he said, “the assassination teams of professional mercenaries now being trained in Canada and along the Mexico bordermay be expected to start arriving on the streets of Leeburg.  If they come, there will be many people dead or mutilated within as short an interval as sixty seconds of fire.”

AND

Local merchants say [The Loudoun News — local publication from Larouche]has run advertisements for their businesses without permission, apparently to give the impression of community support for Mr. LaRouche. Danaura Smith, who with her husband runs R and D Furniture, said she was approached by a salesman for The News but said no. Then the paper reprinted an advertisement she had run in The Washington Post. When she complained to the salesman, she said, “He told me I was harassing him.” Mr. Spannaus, the LaRouche spokesman denied that advertisements had been run without merchants’ permission.

AND

Few Loudoun County residents say they have seen Mr. LaRouche, but when he made a rare visit to town about a year ago — associates of his were opening a bookstore — security guards with walkie – talkies staked out each corner, said a shopkeeper, Molly Mosher.  They were not uniformed, but easy to spot, she said, explaining that all wore sunglasses but were “sort of nerdy looking for Secret Service.”

Miss Mosher, who sells children’s clothing and toys, asked “How can you run a children’s store with armed guards outside?”

AND

Last fall, organizations dominated by LaRouche applied for a zoning variance to open a children’s summer camp at Sweetwater Farm, a 65-acre tract near Neersville in Loudoun County.  At the zoning hearing, a photographer who said he was with Campaigner Publications took pictures of those who spoke against the variance.  The picture-taking was legal, but the sheriff and others said the intent was intimidation.  Mr. Spannaus said the photographer also took pictures of those who spoke for the variance.

Mrs. Harrison spoke against it, as did Pauline Giruin, the lwayer who is now in hiding.  She had collected signatures from neighbors on a petition to stop the camp, fearing that it might become a weapons training ground.

While Miss Giruin was being interviewed on a Leesburg Street by WRC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Washington, someone walked behind her and, according to Miss Giruin, said, “Polly, you’re going to die.” The television reporter said on the air that the comment sounded like a threat. Law enforcement officials said it could not be the basis for an arrest.

Miss Giruin, in a telephone interview from what she said was “a safe house” said she left town after receiving telephone threats and after a car repeatedly pulled into and out of her driveway.

The article also features dead animals in yards — and LaRouche’s libel lawsuit regarding accusations of responsibility, a shop-lifting spree by a group of LaRouchites attending a conference on running for office, and general paranoia aroused by the populace.

Huh.

So.  Um.

Huh.

Do you mean to tell me that Lyndon Larouche is not running for the president?  He’s been running literally my entire life… and then some.

It is here that I feel I must provide a disclaimer.  I have never been in any Larouchite group.  I do not know anyone who has been in any Larouchite group.  I have no particular reason to be interested in the activities of Lyndon Larouche.

Lyndon Larouche, I suppose, is moving into an exciting New Direction.  What is he to do to pull his cadre of supporters along now that he has no presidential bid in the wane?  He can pull his efforts into Initiatives, such as the AIDs Patient Registry Initiatve he had in California in the 1980s.  He can tend to a “political pac” and entrench himself into electing that strange assortment of elected Democrats he is the party boss for.

But I wonder if this item from his news organ suggests where he is going.

The story is completely insane.  It does not really matter, though.  What matters for a cult is to create and form the storylines that your followers are to carry on their lives forward with.  Larouche is here creating a fictional battle with Howard Dean — with Bill Clinton on his side.  But it occurs to me that there was Larouchite who ran for the Texas Democratic chair — didn’t get past the first round, of course, but I think went on to take credit in the Larouche-universe for the role of “king maker” in the second round of voting.  Perhaps Larouche can stoke his followers into having him run for Democratic National Committee chair.  Understand, the Bush years — which have been boon years for him — are two years from being done with, and he must move on to his next great crusade.

In 2004 I saw a Larouche supporter cover himself with John Kerry stickers.  I shrugged and went ahead and asked him, “Why is Larouche supporting Kerry?”  He answered, “We need to take over the Democratic Party.”  This is the Popular Front attitude, and it remains largely non-sensical even with real candidates.  I guess there’s nothing new under the sun, and political rhetoric can end up matching itself voiced by any insurgent element– credible or fringe-lunatic.

Honestly, I am now just waiting for this man to die.  The only thing I want to know about Larouche at this point in time is what becomes of his cult after death.  I don’t believe he can be literally diefied.  Will Larouchites now peddle his past work on street corners and college campuses?  Can it splinter in groups depending on who an individual believes is the rightful Larouche scholar?