- Meet the Candidates -
- Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. -
$Economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche has been a
highly controversial international public figure for
two decades, because of his opposition to
neo-Malthusian economic and population policies; his
insistent campaign for global monetary reform based on
equity for the Third World; and his role in exposing
the powerful financial interests which control
international drug-trafficking.
As of March 9, 1992, LaRouche had been held as a
political prisoner of the Bush administration for 1,133
days, serving a 15-year sentence at Rochester,
Minnesota federal prison as a result of one of the most
shocking judicial railroads in U.S. history. The United
Nations Commission on Human Rights announced on
February 7, 1992 that it is investigating the LaRouche
case as a possible violation of human rights by the
U.S. government.
LaRouche was born on September 8, 1922 in
Rochester, New Hampshire. He was educated in the
Massachusetts public school system and attended
Northeastern University from 1940-42 and from 1946-47.
Mr. LaRouche served in the China-India-Burma theater
during World War II. He has been employed as an
industrial consultant to footwear manufacturers and
other industrial concerns.
Mr. LaRouche was married on December 29, 1977 to
German political leader and author Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
Mrs. LaRouche is the founder and director of the
Schiller Institute, and the founder of the
international Club of Life. She is a published
authority on the work of 15th century churchman and
philosopher Nicolaus of Cusa, and 18th century German
poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, who repeatedly
treated the theme of the American Revolution.
- The LaRouche-Riemann Method -
LaRouche describes himself as an economist
specializing in physical economy, and lists as a
leading accomplishment of his adult life his
contributions to the advancement of economic science.
He is the discoverer (1952) of what is today known as
the LaRouche-Riemann method of economic analysis, the
most accurate method of economic forecasting in
existence. His work in economics is an advancement of
the American System of political-economy (of Gottfried
Leibniz, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, and Matthew
and Henry Carey). The central feature of his
contribution to economic science is the successful
application of work of leading 19th century
mathematical physicist Bernhard Riemann, to solve the
problem of correlating rates of technological progress
with rates of economic growth: the LaRouche-Riemann
method. He is the author of the 1984 textbook, {So,
You Wish to Learn All About Economics?} and the
1992 trilogy {The Science of Christian
Economy}, written while in prison, among hundreds
of other book,s magazine articles, and economic policy
proposals for governments.
In 1974, LaRouche founded and became an editor of
the hard-hitting international weekly news magazine,
Executive Intelligence Review (EIR). EIR has
established a reputation among governments and business
circles in various parts of the world as one of the
more influential publications in its price-class ($396
per year), and the news organization behind EIR is
rated by some specialists as among the most outstanding
private intelligence capabilities in the publishing
field.
In 1976, LaRouche was among the founding members
of the Fusion Energy Foundation, a nonprofit scientific
foundation which lobbied for the rapid development of
nuclear energy technologies, a revitalization of the
space program, and increased American participation in
experimental work on the frontiers of science. LaRouche
was a frequent contributor to the popular
{Fusion} magazine, until that publication was
forcibly closed down by the U.S. Department of Justice
in April 1987. He was a founding editor of {New
Solidarity}, a mass-circulation weekly newspaper,
also closed by the DoJ in April 1987.
In 1977, Mr. LaRouche first publicly proposed the
U.S. crash-basis development of anti-ballistic missile
systems based on new physical principles, what later
became the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI). In the months leading up to President
Reagan's March 23, 1983 announcement of the SDI,
LaRouche and associates collaborated with the White
House National Security Council in formulation of the
policy.
- - The LaRouche Candidates' Movement - -
LaRouche ran for the presidency in 1976, 1980,
1984, and 1988, and campaigned for Virginia's 10th
congressional district seat in 1990. In 1986--having
already announced for the White House run of 1988--he
led a slate of more than 2,000 LaRouche Democrats in
local, state and federal elections. On March 18, 1986,
LaRouche associates won Illinois Democratic primary
elections for the posts of lieutenant governor and
secretary of state. Other candidates in 1986 primaries
and elections received between 15% and 25% of the vote
in a number of states, as an average of winners and
losers.
LaRouche names as a leading enemy the
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) and its
collaborators within the U.S. Department of Justice and
federal executive--a combination he has nicknamed the
``Get LaRouche Task Force.'' This animus developed
following an April 1975 visit by LaRouche to the nation
of Iraq, at the invitation of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath
Party. In consultations with Arab leaders, LaRouche
proposed a Middle East peace plan based on Arab-Israeli
cooperation for the development of the region. En route
back to the United States from this trip, LaRouche
proposed his International Development Bank program for
global monetary reform and development at a press
conference in Bonn, West Germany. Mr. LaRouche later
met with Israeli leader Abba Eban in New York, to
discuss the peace plan.
In 1978, LaRouche commissioned the book {Dope,
Inc.}, which exposed the ``citizens above
suspicion'' on the financial side of the global drug
traffic, and traced ADL ties to the international drug
cartel. A best-seller, Dope, Inc. is now in its third
edition.
LaRouche has also been associated with the
National Anti-Drug Coalition; the National Democratic
Policy Committee, a bipartisan political action
committee; the Club of Life, the leading institutional
opponent of the neo-Malthusian Club of Rome; the
Schiller Institute, an international think tank; and
the International Caucus of Labor Committees, a
philosophical association on the model of American
founding father Benjamin Franklin's ``junto''
organization.
- National Goals for America -
LaRouche has emphasized the need for a return to
classical art, music, science, and culture as an
antidote to today's prevailing moral degeneration and
cultural pessimism. He has outlined three goals for our
nation: 1) eradicating poverty across the globe; 2)
establishing a durable peace among nations; and 3)
colonization of the Moon, Mars, and the solar system
beyond. To produce the citizens of the 21st
century--who can meet these goals, as young Americans
of the 1960s met the goal of landing a man on the
Moon--LaRouche urges an immediate return to the
classical curriculum which trained the geniuses of the
Renaissance, and an end to cultural relativism and
environmentalism in our nation's schoolrooms.
During February and March of 1992, in two national
television broadcasts and a series of 11 full-page ads
in the {Washington Times}, LaRouche presented
to American voters his unique program to reverse
today's deepening economic depression, with the
creation of 6 million new jobs within the first year of
his presidency. LaRouche's approach features the
reshaping of the Federal Reserve System into a new
National Bank of the United States, to direct $300
billion dollars of low-interest credit each year into
desperately needed government-funded infrastructure
projects of water management, transportation, energy
production, health care, and education services. Jobs
created on these projects, and spinoffs in private
industry, will put 6 million Americans back to work in
1993, says LaRouche.
In conjunction with this economic recovery program
at home, LaRouche urges deepened economic collaboration
with the western Europe and the nations now emerging
from under the yoke of communism in large-scale
development programs to end the famine and disease now
engulfing the Third World. The Bretton Woods economic
system which has enslaved the developing sector and
created economic crisis in the West, and the Versailles
system upon it was based, says LaRouche, are rotten
beyond repair, and must be replaced with a just, new
world economic order.
- The Reverend James L. Bevel -
The Reverend James L. Bevel, 55, who has agreed to
run as Lyndon LaRouche's vice presidential candidate
(see article, p. 1), is a prominent name in the history
of the American civil rights movement, in the history
of the movement against the Vietnam War, and other
milestones of 20th-century American political life.
Born Oct. 19, 1936, in Itta Bena, Miss., he is an
ordained Baptist minister, having attended the American
Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tenn. from
1957 to 1961. He has pastored churches in Tennessee,
Illinois, Ohio, and New York.
In his theological studies, and later as a
minister, the Rev. Bevel came to the understanding of
Christianity as what he characterizes as the ``science
of human consciousness,'' underlying and mandating each
and every individual citizen to take responsibility for
the human community overall. It was on the basis of
that outlook that he came to non-violence, and came to
assume responsibility for the pivotal role in the civil
rights Movement of the 1960s.
At the same time, he says he came to see expressed
in the Declaration of Independence the fullest
sociological manifestation of scientific human
consciousness, the goal toward which all people must
strive.
It was those two concepts, he says, that
formed--and form--the twin bases of his thinking,
social action, and educational and economic development
theories and processes.
- Non-Violence -
As a young pastor of a congregation, the Rev.
Bevel was introduced to Leo Tolstoy's ``The Kingdom of
God is Within You'' and Mahatma Gandhi's ``My
Experiment with Truth,'' and as a result, his ministry
turned in a radically different direction as he became
involved with a non-violent study group in Nashville in
1959. In 1960, he became a leader of the sit-in
movement in Nashville; from that day forward, he says,
he was involved in consistently applying the theology
of the Sermon on the Mount to social problems and
personal needs alike.
It was under his chairmanship of the Nashville
Student Movement that the Freedom Rides were
continued--the Freedom Rides which led to the ending of
segregation in interstate transportation.
As a member of the Student Nonviolent National
Steering Committee, the Rev. Bevel assumed the
responsibility for the Mississippi Project, one of three
projects being set up in 1961-62 by the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the other two
being the Albany Project and the Selma Project. It was
his work in, and his success in, these non-violent
projects that led Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to ask
him to function as the Mississippi field organizer for
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),
and, later, as the director of the SCLC's Direct
Action.
It was while serving in this capacity that the
Rev. Bevel developed the Children's Marches in
Birmingham and initiated the world-famous March on
Washington in 1963.
After the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, he proposed, developed,
and executed the Alabama Right to Vote Movement, which
culminated in the Selma campaign and the March on
Montgomery in 1965. Those movements led, in turn, to
the passage of the 1965 federal Civil Rights Voting
Act.
Wanting to test the theory of non-violence in a
Northern context, he developed the Tenant Unions and
the Open Housing Movement in Chicago in 1965 and 1966,
which led to a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to
outlaw racial segregation in housing. He had previously
challenged the non-violent movement to oppose the use
of violence in foreign policy. As a result, in 1966, he
became the director of the Mobilization to End the War
in Vietnam. Under his directorship, the Mobilization to
End the War in Vietnam produced the largest
demonstration in the history of the United States to
that date, at the United Nations building in New York,
on April 15, 1967.
Bevel was the director of Non-Violent Education in
the Poor People's Campaign, and was present with Martin
Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. on
April 4, 1968, when King was shot.
- Leaving the SCLC -
His insistence on a fair trial for accused Martin
Luther King assassin James Earl Ray led to his
departure from the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference.
About the same time, Bevel was also attempting to
get the SCLC to fight against the buildup of militarism
around the world, and to fight for the scientific
education of American children. Not finding support in
the SCLC leadership for his ideas for a fair trial for
Ray, or for a worldwide citizens' movement to fight the
military buildup and to fight for scientific education
for all American children, he was voted out of the
organization; thereupon, he attended Vanderbilt
University Divinity School to further his theological
studies.
Discovering that psychology and psychoanalysis
were not sufficient to address the problems of mental
disorder created by segregation and oppression, Bevel
developed the Man Non-Violent Clinic in Baltimore, Md.,
to study and rectify the psychological damage done to
both European-Americans and African-Americans by the
practice of slavery and racial segregation. It was out
of this study that Bevel developed the Human and
Community Development Institute in Nashville, Tenn.,
and the Organic Farm Project in Hiram, Ohio.
In 1984, Bevel ran for Congress in the 7th
Congressional District in Illinois, introducing the
Precinct Council as a means for character,
institutional, and economic development. Running as a
Republican, he received 33% of the vote in a
predominantly Democratic district where Republicans
normally receive 8-10% of the vote.
After the murder of a young basketball star in
Chicago, Bevel developed the SEED (Students for
Education and Economic Development) Process, to give
inner-city children a tool that is more powerful than
gang membership.
He has recently been elected as the Director of
the Bettis Academy in Trenton, S.C., where he is
developing a comprehensive educational and economic
development curriculum that will leave students
economically independent and institutionally sovereign.
----
John Covici
[email protected]
