Part 3
In November of 1974, for reasons that are unclear to me and probably are unexplainable in any event, Lyndon Larouche spoke before the House and Senate committees on whether to confirm Nelson Rockefellar as Gerald Ford’s vice president.
Mr. LaRouche, who also testified before the Senate panel, read a statement calling for the rejection of Mr. Rockefellar because of his “family’s stated program for world reorganization,” which he said was modelled “after the conceptions of Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schocht.” LaRouche also spoke about “Rockefeller’s supernatural conspiracy” and said that “the criminal stupidity and immorality of Rockefellar’s fascist economic programs leads directly to general ecological holocaust.”
LaRouche’s rhetoric was criticized by several members of the committee, with Representative John Conyers, Jr saying that he felt LaRouche had highly overstated the case. “Some of the terminology creates the suspicion that these may be unprovable statement.”
Perhaps he was invited as a matter of courtesy after Larouchites disrupted some Watergate proceedings earlier in the year.
It occurs to me that Nelson Rockeller had long been a man open to conspiracy theories — rich and firmly wedded to the establishment as he. More mainstream conservative Republicans didn’t much like Rockefeller, and still today the term “Rockefeller Republican” is a slur.
LaRouche is generally said to have moved from the “far Left” to the “far Right” at this point in time. I congratulage everyone who is able to ascribe ideological swings of any type, but the collection of political causes that he collected seems irrelevant. The basics remain in place. First, you start with the Grand Unified Theory of everything. He’s the world’s greatest economist, don’t you know, and that’s because he follows Plato and Classical Music instead of the godfather of Baby-boomers and their rock and roll, Aristotle. And, the world is out to get him. And he needs to gain control of the world lest it suffer from the impending economic collapse.
I don’t know what goes on the man’s head. Perhaps he noticed the shift in the political winds, saw that 60s Radicalism was dying, and tossed his lot in pursuing various disaffected groups of the right and conservative persuasions. When I look at his supposed election coalition for 1976, I do notice the spring-born for how his group did manage to wreck havoc on the Democratic Party in 1986 — filling a vacuum.
So he was now fighting anti-Apartheid groups, and peddling dossiers on them. He was advocating nuclear power. He was fighting the Zionist Drug Cabal — or was it the British Royal Family’s Drug Cabal? And he advocated the Gold Standard. As a whole, the John Birch Society shoved him aside, but he gained a foothold in certain black helicopter segments (such that today he can make appearances on Jeff Rense’s radio show).
I finally have found the concrete steps LaRouche took to get from the far left to the far right. The Liberty Lobby advertised and sold copies of a 129 page report from the Labor Council that exposed the “Carter / Rockefeller/ CIA” plot to “deindustrialize” America and go to war with the Soviet Union by 1978. That Bircher-like organization’s news organ, Spotlight, called NCLS “probably the only honest Marxist group in the US because it is not supported by Rockefeller money.” Politics makes for strange bed fellows, perhaps, by more appropriately, Conspiracy theories do. The other item is LaRouche hiring a former Batista security advisor to help him agains the assasination plots from the Maoist “Bader Mernhof Organization”. If he says so.
In 1976, LaRouche made his first run for president. And the following would be repeated in all subsequent runs:
“In about mid-September an international monetary crisis will threaten the dollar and every other currency, accompanying the complete collapse of United States assets in banks abroad. At that time, national politics will become one of the most prominent features of the new situation. Jimmy Carter will be eliminated as a credible figure. The people will have a choice between two credible candidates: Ford and LaRouche. My qualifications in international economics will become important; I’m probably the world’s leading expert, in all modesty.”
He never did win the election. And while the economy was pretty darned sluggish, it didn’t quite collapse. I imagine at the heart of the perpetual apocalyptic economy is a stringing along of his followers, though he’s likely internalized the bad fever-dream.
Preparing for the 1980 election, he wrote in his autobiography about the political forces that were coming against him, and how “Whatever doesn’t kill you”… well… apparently makes you President:
The most powerful adversary presently available to anyone in the “Western World” has not only expressed his wish for my early demise, but has visibly deployed a coordinated force of slander and physical harassments, and has set into motion specialized capabilities of an assassination of a relevant sort. If I survive the months immediately before me at this moment of writing, it will become reasonable — at a rapid rate — that I might be iaugurated president of the United States in January of 1981.
I note for the record that he never said “elected”, which makes the other routes his mind hatched up to become president intriguing.
Lyndon LaRouche was just about to become a Democrat, starting (drum role please) the Democratic Policy Committee. The media would always have to place a disclaimer on the obvious that the DPC is not afffiliated with the DNC. This was probably a wise decision, all things considered, the Democratic Party route. People don’t vote for third party candidates. Here, LaRouche ran for president in 1980, and receiving two percent in the New Hampshire primary, challenged for a recount, believing he received 20 percent of the vote. The recount showed up an additional nine votes for him– and additional thousands for the right-in candidate Ronald Reagan, a sign of the Democratic Party’s troubles come November.
The Larouchites went to work attacking and confusing the Democratic establishment. Wilcox Brown, New Hampshire’s widely respected Democratic National Committeeman, received a telephone call reently from a campaign worker for Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon H LaRouche, Jr. “Mr. Brown,” said the young woman who called, “if you don’t do anything about it when LaRouche is assassinated and you’ve done nothing to prevent it, then his blood’s going to be on your hands.” (Boston Globe, 2-17-1980 “Freinge Candidate or Threat?”) Also, by the way, the New Hampshire House Democratic leader, Chistos Spirou, had links to organized crime circles in Quebec, Montreal, and Greece that LaRouche was busy tracing and exposing. But you already knew that.
The genius of the name LaRouche gave his new parasitic organization, “Democratic Policy Committee” — is shown that when a spokesperson calls up the Mexican government and states that they are from the “Democratic Policy Committee” — the Mexican government obliges the offer.