Talk:Views of Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche movement/Political views


 * This article is about the political views of Lyndon LaRouche. For an overview of his organization, see LaRouche movement, and for the man himself, see Lyndon LaRouche.

Lyndon LaRouche has expressed views on a wide variety of political topics.

LaRouche's campaign platforms
The campaign platforms of LaRouchehave included these elements:
 * A return to the Bretton Woods system, including a gold-based national and world monetary system, and fixed exhange rates;
 * A crash program to build particle beam weapons and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI);
 * Opposition to the USSR and support for a military buildup to prepare for imminent war;
 * The screening and quarantine of AIDS patients;
 * Growth in food production and a farm debt moratorium;
 * Low interest rates and opposition to the Gramm-Rudman balanced-budget law;
 * Opposition to environmentalism, health maintenance organizations, gay rights, and the nuclear disarmament movement.

In the late 1990s, LaRouche proposed a global infrastructure plan involving a version of the Eurasian Land Bridge. It would be a network of "infrastructure corridors", comprising high-speed rail (preferably Maglev trains), combined with other infrastructure such as oil and gas pipelines and fiber-optic cables. The plan has been called a "new Silk Road."

Later orientation
According to a 2009 interview in China Youth Daily Online, LaRouche used to follow Marxism but now supports American-style capitalism. He said that the USA could return to a spirit of innovation if there is public control of financial capital and low-interest loans.

LaRouche argued that the banks which were presently being bailed out should be placed in receivership by the state. Public money should save only commercial banks which are necessary for the financing of productive enterprises. He said that a "firewall" should prevent state aid from being diverted to speculative entities, which should be allowed to fail to clean up the financial markets.

LaRouche said that he believes in the principles of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and favors state intervention in the economy. LaRouche also said that he supported the approach of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who established a banking system geared to develop production.

Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti, said that he had encountered LaRouche at a debate held in 2007 in Rome, and that he appreciates LaRouche's writings. According to an article by Ivo Caizzi in Corriere della Sera, a group of Italian Senators led by Oskar Peterlini asked the Berlusconi government to tackle the financial crisis using legislation developed by LaRouche in 2007. The legislation proposed that public money should save only the commercial infrastructure required for the financing of productive enterprises.

Since 2000, LaRouche has:


 * According to EIR, "LaRouche has consistently called for reregulation of utilities, transportation, health care (under the "Hill-Burton" standard), the financial (especially the speculative markets) and other sectors..."
 * He asserts that the September 11, 2001 attacks were comparable to the 1933 Reichstag fire.


 * In 2007, LaRouche proposed a "Homeowners and Bank Protection Act". This called for the establishment of a federal agency that would "place federal- and state-chartered banks under protection, freeze all existing home mortgages for a period of time, adjust mortgage values to fair prices, restructure existing mortgages at appropriate interest rates, and write off speculative debt obligations of mortgage-backed securities". The bill envisioned a foreclosure moratorium, allowing homeowners to make the equivalent of rental payments for an interim period, and an end to bank bail-outs, forcing banks to reorganize under bankruptcy laws. A LaRouche spokesman said that bank bail-outs "reward corrupt swindlers with taxpayer money". The proposal attracted support from Democrats at city council and state legislature level. Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski opposed the bill, stating it would involve government seizure of "every American bank". Mike Colpitts of Housing Predictor stated that LaRouche's economic forecasts had been correct, and that he might have received more mainstream credibility had it not been for his controversial history.

PANIC proposal and AIDS
LaRouche said that the transmission by insect bite was "thoroughly established".

AIDS became a key plank in LaRouche's platform. His slogan was "Spread Panic, not AIDS!"

LaRouche purchased a national TV spot during his 1988 presidential campaign, in which he summarized his views and proposals with respect to the AIDS epidemic. He said most statements about how AIDS is spread were an "outright lie" and that talk of safe sex was just propaganda put out by the government to avoid spending the money required to address the crisis.

Opponents characterized it as an anti-gay measure that would force HIV-positive individuals out of their jobs and into quarantine, or create "concentration camps for AIDS patients."

Nuclear power
In his 1980 presidential platform, LaRouche promised 2500 nuclear power plants if elected. In 2007 LaRouche reiterated his position, saying that only the "massive investment" in fission and fusion technology could prevent the "collapse of human existence on this planet".

Ozone hole
LaRouche was part of what was called the "ozone backlash".

By 1995 LaRouche was noted as calling the ozone hole a "myth".

Gay rights
LaRouche and his supporters frequently wrote articles or made comments containing animosity toward gay people.

LaRouche's 1985 campaign book, "A Program for America", called homosexuality a "filthy and immoral practice", and said that he would get the support of voters who were upset by the Democratic Party's embrace of gays. In 1987 he wrote that homosexuality is a "pathology" and a "terrible affliction", and that homosexuals' human rights could be cared for by curing them of their condition.

LaRouche made a particular campaign of attacking Henry Kissinger as a homosexual. LaRouche called him a "faggot" in a deposition, and in 1982 he issued a press release entitled "Kissinger, the Politics of Faggotry", a phrase that appeared on posters handed out by followers. In 1982, a LaRouche follower shouted to Kissinger in an airport, "Is it true that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?" In response his wife, Nancy Kissinger, seized the young woman by the throat. LaRouche later said he thought it was an appropriate question.

Accusations of fascism against LaRouche
New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan condemned LaRouche's "neo-fascist Jew-baiting conspiratorial ideas",  The New Alliance Party broke with LaRouche movement when, according to a spokesperson, they found he was "fascistic and brutal". LaRouche has said that accusations of him being neo-fascist and anti-Semitic "originate with the drug lobby or the Soviet operation - which is sometimes the same thing".

Dennis King, a former Marxist-Leninist and member of the Progressive Labor Party in the 1960s and early 1970s, used this thesis in the title of his book-length study of LaRouche and his movement, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989).

As for moving from the left to the right, historically a number of fascists started out as socialists, and some writers argue this is the case with LaRouche. According to research conducted by King, LaRouche developed an intense interest in fascism in the 1970s, and began to adopt some of its slogans and practices, while maintaining an outward stance of anti-fascism. King states that LaRouche's public statements do not reflect his actual views.

George Johnson, in a review of King's book in The New York Times, argued that King's presentation of LaRouche as a "would-be Führer" was "too neat", and that it failed to take into account that several members of LaRouche's inner circle were themselves Jewish, while acknowledging that LaRouche's "conspiracy theory is designed to appeal to anti-Semitic right-wingers as well as to Black Muslims and nuclear engineers". In his 1983 book, Architects of Fear, Johnson described LaRouche's dalliances with radical groups on the right as "a marriage of convenience", and less than sincere; as evidence he cited a 1975 party memo that spoke of uniting with the right simply for the purpose of overthrowing the established order: "Once we have won this battle, eliminating our right-wing opposition will be comparatively easy." At the same time, Johnson says, LaRouche also sought contact with the Soviet Union and the leftist Baath Party in Iraq; failing to recruit either the Soviets or right-wingers to his cause, LaRouche attempted to adopt a more mainstream image in the 1980s. Laird Wilcox and John George similarly stated that King had gone too far in trying "to paint LaRouche as a neo-Nazi" and that LaRouche's most severe critics, like King and Berlet, came from extreme leftist backgrounds themselves.