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Lyndon LaRouche

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Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922), American political activist, leads political organizations in the United States and other countries.

As a perennial candidate for President of the United States, he has never gained significant electoral support and is not accepted as a legitimate political figure. He is generally seen as an extremist or a cult leader, frequently accused of being a fascist and anti-Semite. His followers, however, regard him as an important economist and a major political figure. LaRouche came to wider public attention in 1988 when he was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment on charges involving illegally soliciting unsecured loans and tax code violations.

Basic Theory and Policies

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

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


Biography

Early years

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

After leaving the Army in 1946, LaRouche attempted to resume his university education, but again dropped out of Northeastern and took a factory job in Lynn, Massachusetts.

Following his return to the U.S., LaRouche developed his basic theories of economics (see Basic Theory and Policies), and became active in the American Left. He had come to believe in a Marxist analysis of Capitalism, regarding it as the main obstacle to the technological and cultural advances that he was convinced were necessary. In 1949 he joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a small Trotskyist party. In the SWP he used the pseudonym Lyn Marcus.

In 1954 he moved to New York City and married a fellow SWP member, Janice Neuberger. LaRouche remained in the SWP until 1966, making him a veteran member in a group which always had a high turnover of members. He now maintains that he was soon disillusioned with Marxism and stayed in the SWP only as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His ex-wife and other SWP members from that time dispute this, saying that he was a loyal and zealous party member, although this is not definitive evidence that he was not an FBI informer. During these years LaRouche developed interests in economics, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, business management and other subjects. He separated from Janice in 1963 (they had one son, Daniel, born in 1956).

In 1966 LaRouche was expelled from the SWP and became a supporter of the British dissident Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, leader of the British Socialist Labour League (ancestor of the later Workers Revolutionary Party). LaRouche was heavily influenced by Healy's conspiratorial world-view and his advocacy of violence and intimidation, something foreign to the intellectual tradition of mainstream Trotskyism. He was briefly linked with the U.S. Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth and also with the Spartacist League, another Trotskyist group.

He participated briefly in other leftist groups, and began giving classes on "dialectical materialism" to members of Students for a Democratic Society, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and other radical groups on campuses around the East Coast. These lectures attracted a following, which coalesced into a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society which was called the "SDS Labor Committee," because LaRouche criticized SDS, and the New Left in general, for being too oriented toward the counterculture, and not enough toward Labor. He was heavily involved in SDS despite not being a student, and in the PLP's internal battles despite not being a member. Once again, LaRouche now maintains that he was an FBI agent during all this activism, but his closest colleagues from this period dismiss this suggestion as absurd. The "SDS Labor Committee" broke from SDS to become the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC).

LaRouche and the NCLC

The turning point in LaRouche's career came in 1969, when he formed the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), a grouping of ex-SDS activists and other ex-Trotskyists. The NCLC soon developed the hallmarks of a cult in the eyes of many outsiders, who saw a charismatic leader (LaRouche), a catastrophist and conspiratorial ideology, and an esoteric vocabulary known only to initiates. NCLC members gave up their jobs and private lives and became entirely devoted to the group and its leader.

In the 1970s LaRouche developed an intense interest in fascism, and began to adopt some of its slogans and practices, while maintaining (as he still does) an outward stance of anti-fascism. He began to regard himself and his followers as "Prometheans," superior to all other people, and under his direction the NCLC adopted the violent and disruptive tactics of fascist groups of the 1920s and '30s, physically attacking meetings of the SWP, the Communist Party and other groups, who were classed as "left-protofascists." During "Operation Mop-Up," NCLC members engaged in a series of well-documented beatings of members of these groups. Some ex-NCLC members who left the group at this time say that LaRouche was studying the career of Adolf Hitler and consciously adopting the tactics of the early Nazi Party.

During the 1970s LaRouche steered the NCLC away from the left and towards the extreme right, while retaining some of the slogans and attitudes of the left (as did the founder of fascism, the ex-Socialist Benito Mussolini, and many others since). The Marxist concept of the ruling class was converted by LaRouche into a gigantic conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a secret cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, the Council on Foreign Relations and other standard villains of the extreme right. LaRouche added some novel variations on this theme, including Queen Elizabeth II on his list of conspirators.

In the 1980s LaRouche's political rhetoric and accusations grew more detached from generally accepted reality. Hitler had been a British agent. Queen Elizabeth was a drug runner. Menachem Begin was a Nazi. The Beatles were "a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications." Both Communism or Fascism were facets of the great overarching conspiracy of the "Synarchy," an oligarchical network of financiers and manipulators who rule the world. Only LaRouche and his "humanist elite" fully understood this vast conspiracy, and possessed the willpower and knowledge to withstand it. LaRouche's personal egotism is a significant force driving his politics. In 1979 he wrote: "My principal accomplishment is that of being, by a large margin of advantage, the leading economist of the twentieth century to date."

Some of LaRouche's conspiracy theories appear to border on self-parody, "Who is pushing the world toward war?" he asked in 1981. "It is the forces behind the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, and the heritage of H. G. Wells and the evil Bertrand Russell."

The 1970s

LaRouche had forecast the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, and following August 15-16, 1971, when President Richard Nixon made the decision to "float" the dollar, effectively ending the Bretton Woods System as originally conceived, there was a major wave of recruitment to the NCLC. LaRouche charged that the powerful financial institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund) were committed to a policy of looting the living standards of the world's populations through austerity and speculation, while contracting the actual productive base of these economies -- a policy that he claimed was a revival of the economic approach of German Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht, who held office both before and during the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler. On December 2 of that year, LaRouche had what was to be his first, and only, public encounter with a representative of the academic establishment: a debate at New York's Queens College with a leading Keynesian, Professor Abba Lerner.

LaRouche claims that, following this encounter, the Establishment and its press organs made a collective decision that never again would they debate LaRouche or his ideas, but instead would brand him a fascist-- which was, of course, the charge he was making against them. LaRouche insists that a further expression of this policy was announced in a September 24, 1976 op-ed by Stephen Rosenfeld in the Washington Post, entitled "NCLC: A Domestic Political Menace," in which he set out a media policy for dealing with LaRouche: "We of the press should be chary of offering them print or air time. There is no reason to be too delicate about it: Every day we decide whose voices to relay. A duplicitous violence prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public unless there is reason to present it in those terms."

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

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

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

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

The 1980s

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

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

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

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Dennis King and "Chip" Berlet

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

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

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

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

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

1990s to the present

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

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

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

The LaRouche movement claims that in May of 1996, LaRouche's wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche presented the Eurasian Land-Bridge proposal at a conference sponsored by the Government of the People's Republic of China when, in fact, it was first proposed by the UN in 1959 and agreed on in 2004.

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

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

Presidential bids

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

Since 1979 LaRouche has concentrated on infiltrating his followers into the Democratic Party. In 1979 he formed a body called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), a name designed to convey the impression that it is part of the Democratic Party. Since 1980 LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States six times. He is running again in 2004, although as a convicted felon he is not eligible to be a registered voter in the state of Virginia, where he lives.

The Democratic Party has consistently asserted that LaRouche is not a Democrat, but the U.S. electoral system makes it possible for him and his followers to enter Democratic primaries. LaRouche himself has polled negligible vote totals, but continues to promote himself as a serious political candidate, a pretension which is sometimes accepted by elements of the media and some political figures.

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

Some of the LaRouche organization's successes have come from exploiting public fears about the AIDS epidemic, which they blame on international conspirators. In 1985 LaRouche wrote: "It is in the strategic interests of Moscow to see to it that the West does nothing to stop this pandemic; within a few years, at the present rates, the spread of AIDS in Asia, Africa, Western Europe, and the Americas would permit Moscow to take over the world almost without firing a shot."

LaRouche and the Jews

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Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

LaRouche has been regularly accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Jewish organisations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith have devoted much time and energy to documenting LaRouche's various writings and speeches on these subjects. LaRouche for his part has denied these accusations, asserting that those who accuse him are part of the oligarchic conspiracy to rule the world.

The truth about LaRouche's attitude to the Jews is not easy to determine. Indeed it is likely that there is no single truth, since many of LaRouche's statements on this as on other subjects have been obscure and contradictory. From the early 1970s LaRouche regularly used the word "Zionist" as a term of abuse. The use of "Zionist" as a code word for "Jew" is a common practice among anti-Semitic groups [3][4]. In the 1970s also, LaRouche developed connections with the Ku Klux Klan and the Liberty Lobby, a leading extreme right group, both well-known for anti-Semitism.

In NCLC publications during the 1970s the Jews were accused of running the slave trade, controlling organized crime and the drug trade. LaRouche also claimed that the "Zionist lobby" controlled the U.S. government and the United Nations: not far short of the "Zionist Occupied Government" rhetoric of neo-Nazi organisations. Any American professing "Zionist loyalties" was, he said, a "national security risk."

In The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach (1973), LaRouche (under the pen name L. Marcus) said that "Jewish culture... is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim." In an editorial in New Solidarity in 1978 he wrote: "America must be cleansed for its righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby and other British agents from the councils of government, industry, and labor."

LaRouche has also been regularly accused of Holocaust denial, widely seen as a hallmark of anti-Semitism. In 1978 LaRouche described the Holocaust as mostly "mythical," and his German second wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, dismissed it as a "swindle." (These references are sourced in Dennis King's book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism.) In 1981 LaRouche said that "only" 1.5 million Jews died during World War II, and that their deaths were not the result of a deliberate campaign of extermination by the Nazis. (This statement is also sourced by Dennis King. In January 1981 LaRouche's New Solidarity International Press Service issued a statement titled "LaRouche Reaffirms '1.5 millions' Analysis". It should be noted that LaRouche has questioned Kings veracity on more than one occasion [5][6]).

In recent years, however, LaRouche appears to have modified his views on these subjects - without of course conceding that he has done so. In a 1999 LaRouche published an article called "A Personal Statement from Lyndon LaRouche on Music, Judaism, and Hitler." In this article he several times refers to "the Jew," a usage typical of anti-Semites and one which he must have known is offensive to Jews.

Nevertheless, in the course of a discussion of Moses Mendelssohn, LaRouche acknowledges the contribution made by Jews to European civilization. He says: "Germany can never be truly freed from the legacy of Hitler's crimes, until the contributions of German Jews, in particular, are celebrated as an integral part of the honorable history of Germany." The article contains several other statements in similar vein. There is even a word of praise for Walther Rathenau, an archetypal Jewish business figure of the kind so savagely denounced by LaRouche throughout his career.

In this article also LaRouche acknowledges that the Holocaust is not mostly mythological or a Zionist swindle. He says: "We can not allow 2,000 years of Jewish survival in Europe to be buried under the faceless stone epitaph which speaks only of a bare 13-odd years of Hitler's Holocaust." He explicity states that "Yes, Hitler killed millions of Jews," a direct repudiation of his 1981 statement that only 1.5 million died and those not as a result of a deliberate plan of extermination. This article can be seen as a significant (if unacknowledged) retreat by LaRouche from his statements of the 1970s and 1980s.

Criminal charges

By the 1980s LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche had built a extensive political network, including the Schiller Institute in Germany, headed by Zepp-LaRouche, and branches in several other countries. The International Caucus of Labor Committees claimed to have affiliates in France, Italy, Sweden, Canada and several South American countries. In Australia LaRouche operatives took over an older extreme-right group, the Citizens Electoral Councils (CEC), and regularly contest elections. The LaRouche organisation publishes a twice-weekly newspaper, The New Federalist and a weekly newsmagazine, Executive Intelligence Review. The LaRouche publishing house, Benjamin Franklin Books, issues a steady stream of works by LaRouche and his followers. The real membership of LaRouche's organisation is not known.

The size of the LaRouche empire led to investigations of the source of its apparently extensive financial resources. Like most cults, the LaRouche organisation devotes much of its energy to the sale of literature and the soliciting of small donations at airports and on university campuses. It also operates more sophisticated telemarketing groups, soliciting donations by phone, usually under the guise of various patriotic front organisations to conceal the real source of the phone calls. More seriously, however, LaRouche was accused of fraudently soliciting "loans" from vulnerable elderly people, sometimes giving completely misleading explanations for the loan ("funding the Strategic Defense Initiative" or "finding a cure for AIDS"). The funds thus raised were then directed into a maze of dummy companies so as to avoid both taxation and attempts to recover the "loans."

In October 1986 the FBI and Virginia state authorities raided the LaRouche headquarters in Leesburg in search of evidence to support the persistent accusations of fraud and extortion made against LaRouche. He and six associates were charged with conspiracy and mail fraud, and LaRouche was also charged with conspiring to hide his personal income since 1979, the last year he had filed a federal tax return. In December 1988 a federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia convicted LaRouche and his associates, and LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, of which he served five.

The prosecution alleged that LaRouche and his staff solicited loans with false assurances to potential lenders and showed "reckless disregard" of the facts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Robinson presented evidence that LaRouche's organisation had solicited US$34 million in loans since 1983. The most important evidence was the testimony of lenders, many of them elderly retirees, who had lost thousands of dollars in loans to LaRouche that were never repaid. Several witnesses were LaRouche followers who testified under immunity from prosecution.

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

One of the most damning aspects of the trial was the revelation of LaRouche's personal corruption. While lenders were told that LaRouche had no money to repay their loans, he in fact spent US$4.2 million on real estate in Virginia and on "improvements" to his 200-acre Leesburg estate. These included a swimming pool and horse riding ring.

See also

See also

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