November 1987

1988 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

LaRouche: The Only Candidate Qualified To Address the Onrushing Depression

Editor’s Note: EIR is publishing this interview with Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. for the first time.

Feb. 7—The following is an edited transcript of a November 1987 interview with presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., conducted by Renée Carkin of Londonderry, New Hampshire Cable TV. Subheads have been added.

Renée Carkin: With me now is Lyndon LaRouche, a Democratic presidential hopeful from Leesburg, Virginia. Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. has been a political activist since the 1950s. He attended Northeastern University with special studies in the classics of Judeo-Christian civilization.

He served our country in the Burma-China-India Theater during World War II. Lyndon is a former management consultant, an economist of the American System, and founder of a magazine called the Executive Intelligence Review. He has published five books, one of which is an autobiography.

In the political arena, he’s perceived many ways by many people, and he has sponsored many controversial measures, such as Proposition 64 on the subject of AIDS last year in California. Lyndon LaRouche is running for President now for the fourth time, his third time as a Democrat, having tried for that office in 1976, 1980, and 1984. His wife, the former Helga Zepp, is chairman of Patriots for Germany, and they have one son, Daniel.

Lyndon LaRouche: Oh, no, I have a son by a former marriage.

Carkin: Okay, and I believe—correct me if I’m wrong—that you are the only one of the major candidates that is a New Hampshire native.

LaRouche: Right, I believe so, yes.

Carkin: Okay, you were born in Rochester, New Hampshire in 1922. Welcome!

LaRouche: Thank you.

Carkin: Okay. I’ve done extensive reading on you, pro and con, all kinds of interesting things. And before getting into the discussion of the issues, which is the main purpose of this program, to talk about issues and let people see who you really are, I would like you to clarify something for me and for our viewing audience, as I am a little bit confused in reading about you.

According to the Kansas City Missouri Times of April ’86, you were a 1950s and ’60s Marxist, and supposedly a member of the Communist Party. You’re running now as a Democratic candidate for President, and you seem to espouse Republican philosophies in many arenas, such as SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative]. Where exactly do you fit in, in the political spectrum?

LaRouche: Well, it’s the usual thing when you get newspapers that rely on gossip; they don’t get their facts straight, and sometimes they invent a few.

I was never associated with the Communist Party, for example. I did, in the 1960s, I did have an association with a small group, the Socialist Workers’ Party; it was a 200-member Trotskyist group at that time.

I saw the national leadership, and we didn’t get along, and I went the other way. But in the 1960s, I believed that what was called the New Left philosophy, which was then being brought into this country from Europe, through the Socialist International, was probably the greatest danger to society, not because the individuals themselves were dangerous, but because the philosophy was a particularly poisonous one. And therefore, I did engage in dealing inside the anti-war movement, in contesting this element inside the anti-war movement.

And since I was an expert in Marx, among my other few expertises which I have, I dealt with them on that issue, and we had a lot of fun. I set out to try to rescue as many people who I thought might be seduced by that stuff as possible, because I thought they were very intelligent people, and I succeeded, to a modest degree, not as much as I’d have liked, and I’m very happy about it.

Carkin: Okay, now you’re running as a Democrat, but in reading your literature, you almost sound right-wing.

LaRouche: Well, not really.

If you go back a bit, and you subtract from the Democratic Party those in the party leadership who are very close to Armand Hammer and his friends, such as Paul Kirk, the present Democratic National Chairman, you will find the base of the party, the ordinary Democrat voter, will tend in large part to agree with me, or they’re concerned with the same things I’m concerned about.

As to the Republicans, I have many friends on that side, many of whom I agree with on many issues, but the Republican Party as a whole is insensitive to the effects of policy on the conditions of life of ordinary people, including minority groups, including people who have been— For example, the President is saying that he’s created eight million jobs or something of nonsense, which in large part represents the downgrading of people from a job at which they had a respectable income, down—

Carkin: Okay, then accordingly, your views on social issues are more Democratic than they are Republican.

LaRouche: On the condition of life of the average person, I’m much more concerned with that, and therefore, I’m much more at home with Democrats of that type than I am with Republicans.

A Politics of Philosophy

Carkin: Considering you’re a very colorful political character, and you claim that there has been some unfair treatment of you in the press, what recourse does a presidential candidate have against the press if they feel, if you feel that you have been unfairly treated?

LaRouche: Well, see, when you’re in my position, an advantageous position—I’m one of these extraordinary fellows who has no money, but I have the privilege of having access to a lot of things in a lot of parts of the world. And when you look at it, get on the mountaintop and look down on it, you realize that’s not something that I’m particularly victimized by.

Our entire society is victimized by what has grown up, particularly since the end of the last war, as the manipulation of popular opinion by a press which has become largely an instrument of psychological warfare operations against populations. Most of the press on nearly every issue of any major national or international importance does not tell the truth, or they manipulate it in such a way as to mislead people.

And therefore, why should I complain if they misrepresent me? They misrepresent so many other things. What happens is, eventually, as in Aeschylus’ famous tragedies, as Prometheus pointed out to the gods of Olympus: Those who set themselves up as gods of Olympus, and try to defy the laws of the universe by their will, sooner or later come afoul of the laws of the universe, and then they fall. And then, eventually justice comes back to ordinary people.

Carkin: Okay, so yours is a politics of philosophy, it sounds.

LaRouche: Well, I think that if a politician is not a philosopher, they’re never going to be a statesman. I think that politicians should not be boxes of cereal that are sold with advertising slogans.

Carkin: Okay, among the other Democratic and Republican contenders at the moment, how many of them would you consider as statesmen?

LaRouche: Well, really none of them. George Bush wants to be a manager, running on no policy at all. Bob Dole is weaker than Bush. Kemp’s a nice guy, but he’s got an attention span like a grasshopper. (You can’t really get into any issue in depth with him, though he’s sentimentally nice sometimes.) Jesse Jackson is a faker who I don’t attack too much, because a lot of good people support him, even though they don’t trust him too much.

The rest of Democrats are a mess. Cuomo might come in; he’s unqualified. Nunn might come in. Well, you know, after ten little Indians fall, then there were none. You’ve got this kind of thing.

Carkin: An interesting way of looking at it.

Have the Democrats distanced themselves from you, or have you, yourself, distanced yourself? Because you are almost in a category of your own. In fact, when I did a couple of interviews with Libertarian-type candidates and spokespersons, everybody seems to think—I don’t know whether it’s the alliteration of L, Lyndon LaRouche—that they think you’re the Libertarian. But when I tell people, “No, Lyndon LaRouche is a Democrat,” people are surprised. And you don’t seem to be included in any of the seven little Indians’ meetings.

What is the difference between you and the other Democratic candidates?

LaRouche: Well, I really don’t want to be in the same class with them. Let me put it this way: I’m not concerned with being President; I never have been. I’m concerned with the country. Now I think I should be President. I thought so last time; I thought we could have avoided some problems if I had been. We wouldn’t be in the present financial crash, for example, if I had been.

Biggest Crash in History

Carkin: Okay, what do you feel are the most critical issues, political issues facing this country today?

LaRouche: Well, it depends. The issues will break down differently as they affect people differently. The lead issue right now, immediate issue on which everything else hangs, is we’re in the midst of the onset—

Carkin: of an economic—

LaRouche: biggest crash in history.

Carkin: You really believe that?

LaRouche: Oh, everyone, I think everyone in financial circles knows that. There are some debates whether the thing can be delayed for x number of months or x number of weeks, but everyone knows that. Some people don’t like to face it politically. They say, “Let’s put it off until after the election, and let’s hope”—

Carkin: How can you put something off like that? If you can actually manipulate the market to put things off, then you should be able to manipulate it indefinitely so that it doesn’t happen.

LaRouche: No, you can’t. What’s happening is, what’s crashing is a financial bubble. Now, if you print money, and use the regulatory powers of government and central banks in a certain way, you can buy a certain amount of time at a price. The price is the crash when it comes finally will be—

Carkin: will even be worse. Okay, quite interesting.

LaRouche: So, what you’ve got in Washington, for example: I’ve almost never agreed with Volcker, but last Spring and Summer, Volcker and I agreed on an issue, which I thought was very interesting. We both agreed that the world was headed for the biggest crash you ever saw, unless the President dumped Reaganomics and got down to some basics. And so the President said, “Well, I don’t like to hear that kind of talk around my White House. Let’s get rid of him and replace him, replace him with this funny fellow Greenspan, sort of the Ayatollah of the Federal Reserve now.”

And they just like to put it off and say, “Let’s put it off. Let’s let Ronnie Reagan go out with signing a peace treaty, and without a depression. And let’s postpone everything until after we’ve gotten a Republican in, in ’88, then let them have the crash, and we’ll figure it out from there.”

Carkin: Okay. Let’s say the Republicans don’t get in, and you manage to become President of the United States. What will be your two top priorities in the first six months?

LaRouche: Oh, I have a whole bunch of them.

Of course, I’ve been working at this a long time, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, a lot of time to talk to foreign governments about these matters: it’s a package, which will probably lead off immediately with a—if it hasn’t already happened, and I think it might happen—I think you might see sometime very soon that the President will have to recognize he’s got an economic crisis on his hands.

Carkin: What do you think: he doesn’t know that?

LaRouche: He doesn’t really know. He doesn’t— The President’s a funny fellow. What he wants to listen to, he listens to. What he wishes to fog out on, he sort of fogs out on. And he’s fogged out on this so far, though he knows there’s something going wrong out there.

But what you might see is a Cabinet committee, maybe Cap Weinberger would be the man that would head it, or a special committee to take emergency action.

If that action order is not taken, by the time I become President, in January of ’89, it’s going to have to happen, and I’ll do it immediately: first thing, a declaration of national emergency, regulatory powers to keep the financial system from collapsing, particularly local banks, which mustn’t collapse.

Carkin: Okay, is there any other Republican or Democratic candidate do you think that is advocating that kind of an action?

LaRouche: Oh, no, no. They wish to stay as far away from talking about it as possible. They don’t wish to—

Carkin: Okay, because it could be a political football.

LaRouche: Well, because they say they don’t know what to do about it. They think that if they become President, their economic advisors will figure something out. They figure that if they say something, what they say will have a downside to it politically, that they might lose somebody.

Carkin: Lose votes.

LaRouche: So, therefore, they say, “Since I’m not going to deal with it, I’ll deal with it if I become President; my economic advisors will tell me what to do. In the meantime, why should I talk about something and lose votes because I bet the wrong way with somebody?”

A Man of Ideas—And Action

Carkin: Okay, I sort of get the feeling that you’re running for President. Maybe you know that you don’t really have a chance, even though you’re building up a lot of steam, and you probably have a lot more support percentage-wise now than you did in 1976. But I think you’re a man of ideas.

LaRouche: Well, both. I’m also a man of action. I can handle this problem in Washington. I don’t think anybody else can.

Carkin: Okay.

LaRouche: It’s— I’m not a genius, and qualified at everything, but I happen to be good at a few things, and the kinds of problems that we’re facing right now are the ones I’m good at.

Carkin: Okay, let’s talk about the issue of homelessness in America. They say it’s going to be about 35 percent worse this Winter. How would you handle that?

LaRouche: Well, you have to take that as a part of an overall picture, which— What you have to have is a policy, and then include on your shopping list of what you’re going to accomplish with a policy, all the things you have to accomplish.

Carkin: Okay, that would come under your economic policies.

LaRouche: I mean, homelessness is essentially a social policy. It’s also a policy of a problem of our economy; the spiraling crisis of real estate, part of the factor. A cold indifference by governments under pressure of a collapsing tax-revenue base that governments that would have on the federal, state, and local level, that would have responded to this with social-service action, don’t now. They will put token programs up, but they won’t say we’ve got to— They won’t say we’ve got to get these homeless off the streets and in some place where they’re fed and taken care of.

In the former times, we would have said that, particularly in the post-war period, after going through the depression. But the people say, “Well, we don’t have the money, therefore we’ll do something that looks as though we’re trying. If it isn’t enough, that’s too bad.”

But, if you have an adequate program of recovery, you have to put things like this on your shopping list of things that must absolutely be taken care of.

Carkin: Okay. How about the issue of AIDS?

LaRouche: AIDS? That’s going to bust wide open.

We’ve been coasting along. Governments have not wished to tell the people the truth about this issue, because—

Carkin: Why is that?

LaRouche: Money. For example, right now, we have in the United States between 5 and 10 million people at least infected. For example, one person out of six—

Carkin: carriers.

LaRouche: They’re infected. They are all, at present, with our present medical and biological knowledge, they’re now all doomed to die of AIDS. The span of the infection will be from three to ten years before they come down with symptoms which lead to terminal illness.

The medical bill for an AIDS carrier during all the time that they require medical treatment for the sickness that they acquire is between $100,000 and $200,000 per person. So, on the basis of people presently infected with AIDS, the United States faces a health bill of $1 trillion during the next ten years for those persons alone, if no one else were infected.

The research costs for AIDS, the best I’ve been able to figure out— I’ve been working with international teams of scientists, biologists, and so on, on this as well as medical people.

Carkin: Is it to the government’s advantage to keep this kind of thing under wraps?

LaRouche: It’s what Don Regan said, it’s what Koop said, as close to honest as they came on this thing. They said, “Look, this is a terrible problem.” Koop said—the Surgeon General—“This is the worst epidemic mankind has ever faced, but we can’t afford to spend money on it.” We should be spending in the United States about $3 billion a year on research alone. We should be building new medical facilities.

Carkin: Okay, so if you should become President, where would you get the money? Out of what budget would you take money to reapply it?

LaRouche: Oh, forget the budget! All people who are trying to balance the federal budget are out of their heads. The Depression is going to wipe out about $400 billion of federal tax revenue in this fiscal year. It will wipe out a comparable amount in the next fiscal year.

Carkin: You don’t paint a pretty picture at all.

The Lessons of Franklin Roosevelt

LaRouche: No, look, we went through the Depression with Roosevelt. We should have learned from that experience, and from comparable experiences before in our national history, what under our law, in our system of economy, we can do to start a recovery. There’s no way to meet these problems under conditions of depression and financial crash unless you go back to a reformed version of what Roosevelt did.

And you have to do it promptly: You have to mobilize new sources of credit. You have to get credit out to manufacturing and farmers and industries and federal and state and local agencies and public utilities, and get things moving. Get people back to work. Build up the tax-revenue base.

Then you find you have the money to deal with these problems. Even today, if I were to be President today, we would still have two years, tough years ahead of us. No one need suffer extremely as human beings, but it would take us about two years before the mill of economic recovery would begin to move, and it would cost us about $4 trillion of new credit at low interest rates, generated by the government to get us out of it.

Carkin: Okay. We’ll continue with more of this in just a minute. You’re watching Insights Campaign ’88 here in Londonderry, Windham, and Pelham, New Hampshire. Sit tight.

[Commercial break]

Carkin: This evening, our guest host is David Carl. He is a public education high school teacher in Pelham, teaches contemporary history, world affairs, and he is from Goffstown, and he is here to help me question Lyndon LaRouche on a few issues. Dave?

David Carl: Thank you. I was wondering, reading in the Christian Science Monitor in 1986, April 10, you were speaking about your Credit America program on rebuilding American factories and American cities and taking people out of the fast-food business and putting them into the steel mills. I was wondering if you could first tell a little bit about that program, and second, what effect this will have on taxes, and more specifically on the environment?

LaRouche: Well, the environment is second, not the leading one. The basic problem we face now is, in 1946, we had about 62 percent of the total labor force employed in producing physical goods as operatives. Today, we have about 20 percent.

We are now employing people in what amounts to economic overhead, overhead burden, which is economically inflationary. And our factories are collapsing, productivity is collapsing, energy supplies are down. There’s only one thing to do: get back to work.

Now, the means to do that is to make a reform of the tax program to restore, with some improvement, the investment tax credit program that we had under Kennedy back in the early 1960s.

Number two, at the same time, the federal government must generate about $2 trillion per year in the next couple of years in terms of credit. Use the Federal Reserve System’s banking as a mechanism for making this credit available through the local banks, with a federal rate of between 1 and 2 percent to the local banks for fiduciary accounts, which handle this; getting it out to farmers, getting it out to manufacturing, other industries, physical-goods industries; getting it to federal, state, and local agencies, which are engaged in capital improvements and public works, and to public utilities for the same purpose. Also, export-loan production credit.

If you do that and do a few other things, which are technological stimulants, where a government says to groups of industries, “Why don’t we get together, you and us and labor, each of us does our part. The government will help facilitate your doing it, and the government is committed, if you wish to go ahead to do everything to facilitate the success of this kind of venture in our economy.” You do that, you’ll get action.

We learned from the period 1939 to ’43 how to do that. Most people have buried that under the assumption it was a war economy. Actually, it was the other way around: Roosevelt cranked up the economy because he knew he was going to war, but his economic program was a sound one, apart from the fact that any kind of war expenditure is highly inflationary, because it’s war goods, which are not real goods.

Treat the Environment as a Garden

On the environment, that’s not a problem. The problem of the environment— Take the case of this tree problem. I said this is phony, the so-called acid rain, and it is, because apart from Mount St. Helens, which put out more pollutant in the atmosphere than all the industries in the world—volcanoes are nasty that way; we won’t be rid of that for a long time.

But we checked the trees in Germany, where there was supposed to be the greatest intensity of this tree death. Very simple: The forests are owned by people who are chiselers. They don’t realize that trees are a form of living organism. The trees require nutrients. If you crop land again and again and again for foresting, and you don’t put back the nutrients the soil requires, the trees get sick. They’re hungry.

An experiment was run by some scientists who agreed with me, and they took some of these sick trees and did a control program on nutrition. And if a tree was not too far gone, the tree would come back as a healthy tree.

The basic point being, is that we have to treat the environment as a garden. We have to garden it. We have to put into it what’s required. There’s no need to have filth in our air. There’s no need to maintain and put up with filth in our water. We can clean it up. It’s going to cost money. But if we want to live on this planet, we’ll just have to spend the money to do it.

Carl: Where’s the money coming from, again, on this cleaning up the water?

LaRouche: It’s not money. We’re going to lose a lot of money. A lot of paper is going to be wiped out. And the fetishism of money will—

Go back a little bit in priorities. What’s important is, we have either existing, or new productive workplaces. We have unemployed people, or we have people who are working at 40 percent of the income they require to sustain a family, in some fast, low-skilled service occupation.

Just transfer the thing. Put the unemployed in there. Take the unemployed youth from the streets and put them into programs, an improved version of the CCC [FDR-era Civilian Conservation Corps—ed.]. Get them off the streets, training and education on three-year programs, something like that, and we’ll save a lot of young human beings. Put people to work, use the technology, create the workplaces, and count on the amount of physical wealth we produce that we need per capita.

We find we have enough to do it with. If we slide along the way we’re going now, yeah, no one can solve the problem.

Free Trade Doesn’t Work

Carl: Okay. Tied within this, though, is the declining dollar, which is still declining, and the issue of trade, which seems to be a jumble of figures on both sides. Is the free market dead or alive?

LaRouche: The free market was never any good. In the history of the United States, we started out as a nation opposed to free trade, except for the slave-holding faction in the United States and some of the New England cotton manufacturers who went along with the slaveholders on this issue. We were always protectionist, not in the modern, the Smoot-Hawley sense, but in the Whig sense, the American Whig sense and Federalist sense.

It doesn’t work. People who think in terms of free trade never produced anything. For example, when an entrepreneur produces, he knows that prices aren’t arbitrary things. Prices have a relationship to the necessary unavoidable costs of production. These include wages, these include materials, they include equipment, and so forth.

So that when you drive prices down below the cost of producing, then what happens? You lose your industries. What we’ve done is we have allowed our industries to collapse under that process.

Carl: Isn’t this the theory of capitalism?

LaRouche: No, it is not. It’s the Karl Marxist theory, which some of our monetarists have taken over in various guises—like Milton Friedman is sort of a poor Marxist, simplified. He doesn’t know it, but that’s one of his shortcomings.

No, the American System of political-economy is defined by people like Hamilton, the two Careys, Friedrich List, that whole group up through the 1870s. And even though what we teach as economics in universities has gone over entirely to the monetarist side, the Mill and the utilitarianism, all this nonsense, but nonetheless we maintained in the institutions of our economy, we were, until recently, an entrepreneurial economy, not a rentier economy.

The free-market system applies to a rentier form of economy, not an entrepreneurial one. I don’t like rentier kinds of economy. I prefer to live in a society which is entrepreneurial, of independent farmers, independent manufacturers, and independent and strong people who work for a living. It’s a healthier society where people can stand up on their hind legs and say, “I don’t owe anybody except what I owe them. And I can stand up and say, anything I choose, do anything I please within moral limits. I’m on my own feet. I don’t have to go around grabbing a forelock and kowtowing to some other kind of authority.” It’s a healthier society.

Carl: Okay. Being associated with, in the past, whether righteously or wrong, as in the Marxist camp, and now being on the edge of conservative right in some ways—

LaRouche: Not really.

Carl: But I mean, I’ve heard the discussion—

Cultural Paradigm Shift

LaRouche: You’ll hear the generalizations, but that’s because— See, as you know, in the past 20 years, in particular, but since 1963, actually, we’ve gone through in the United States what would be called a cultural paradigm shift. We were an entrepreneurial society. We had certain values of family, an emphasis on technological progress, scientific progress, that sort of thing. And beginning in 1963, but especially from 1968, ’69 on, we’ve undergone a change, so that anyone who says we were better off—with a lot of room for reform back in 1966, for example—than we are today in terms of policy, well, someone will say that’s conservative. But the word “conservative” usually means “neo-conservative,” which is a truly kind of I-hate-people movement, which I don’t have any sympathy for.

Carl: I can understand that. And going along with this is, I guess, because of your views, and because of who you are, how do you feel that if elected President, especially with the recent Robert Bork nomination to the Supreme Court and turndown, how your judgeships and your governmental appointees might fare in the Congress?

LaRouche: That’s not really going to be a problem. First of all, the Bork nomination—he was a decent fellow with bad law, and I wish we had Bork up there instead of this new fellow now I think they’ve got in; a better man, or a sleaze around this fellow.

Carl: We’re not quite sure about the nomination.

LaRouche: But it was a bad appointment. But what was done in handling the appointment in the Congress and elsewhere, well, I think the President was right in calling it a lynch mob. It’s not the way you do it. You should examine a man for Supreme Court judge on the basis of their qualifications in law, and their personal character. Because what they did in the past may be an indication of what they might do in the future, but when you put a person on the Supreme Court who’s qualified to be there, they become part of an institution and respond to that position. They will act differently, usually, than they acted before. So, you want someone who’s sound in law, and who is a man of good character: those two qualifications, and some maturity as well.

But when it comes to that time, the Congress is going to be transformed. It will be transformed in many ways. Most of the population is going to throw out anything that reminds them too much of the past two sessions of Congress. Washington is hated around this country.

Carkin: Do you think that the average Joe-citizen is an activist enough to where they’re going to start a movement to change the make-up of Congress?

LaRouche: No, no. They’ll do it instinctively. What they will do is the—

Carkin: Are you giving the American public more credit than they deserve?

LaRouche: No, no. I know the American people. After all, I am one. But no, the American people have been withdrawn to escapism, the boob tube, and other things.

Carkin: Right.

In a Crisis, People Will Change

LaRouche: Right. Now, but that’s normal. That’s not— It’s bad, but it’s not as definitive as people might think it is. People change.

In our history, our people will vote for a baboon for President if they think he’s going to win, on the assumption that he won’t leave government much worse than he found it when he entered office. We’ve voted for a number of Presidents that way. In fact, most of our Presidents have gone in that way, with a little Boola Boola, but nobody really cared about what they were going to do in government. And so they say, “Okay, look, no matter what happens, you vote for these jerks, you vote for that jerk, you vote for this jerk, but life goes on. What difference does it make?”

Then you come to a crisis, and these fellows who were sitting in front of the boob tube, just watching Dynasty or something—escapism, pure escapism—they say, “I’ve got to do something.”

Now, they are not leaders. Now, some of them are. You’d be surprised how many of the average people out there are potentially leaders, given a chance. But they look around, and they think, “What am I going to do? The house is coming down, the mortgages are being taken in, the jobs are collapsing, everything is— Now, something does have to happen in Washington,” and their response is based on the belief that something must happen.

Normally, they say they hope that Washington won’t make things too bad for them. Now they’re going to change their mind. They’re going to demand that government do something about this depression. And they’ll take everyone who they think is a bum, and at every chance they have, they’re going to scorch him at the polls. And they’re going to vote for somebody who they think is different.

The next Congress will be on one side, much more conservative by present standards of conservatism than the last one. It will be predominantly Democratic. The Democrats will sweep it, except in the case where they can’t find a Democrat they want to vote for. But it won’t be conservative in the Reagan sense. It will be pro-people. In other words, it will be back to family values: Let’s save what we’re about to lose. That’s where the conservatism will lie.

When it comes to other things, they’re going to say, “We are going to spend what it takes to get this economy moving again, and to save people from the horror show that’s coming down.”

Carkin: Okay. Dave, do you have any final questions?

Carl: One quick one.

I found an interesting article in the New York Times, and it stated that you have said that you have been threatened by the Communists, Zionists, drug gangsters, the Rockefellers, the Trilateral Commission, the Queen of England, and international terrorists, according to the New York Times.

LaRouche: Don’t believe the Times!

Carl: My question is, with all these people after you, will we have a President?

LaRouche: Not all those people are after me. That’s the Times’ imagination.

Carl: Okay. But it’s an interesting paper.

LaRouche: Sometimes it’s interesting. It’s clinically interesting, I find it. I read it for clinical reasons when I have to.

But no, I do have a major problem with the Soviets. They do wish to get rid of me, and they say so openly in their leading publications.

Carkin: Why is it they have singled you out?

Strategic Defense Initiative

LaRouche: Well, there are many reasons.

Just to make it brief, one of the reasons is that I was in negotiation with the Soviets for the Reagan Administration from the beginning of 1982 into April of ’83. What I was negotiating with them was the possibility of their coming to terms with what was then later proposed as the SDI. Now, therefore, the Soviets know from that and from Armand Hammer’s friends in the Democratic Party, know that I designed the SDI as a policy.

So, when the SDI was adopted—to the Soviets’ surprise, they thought it would never be adopted—and on March 23 of ’83, the Soviets said, “Get rid of him. He’s a danger.”

Well, it’s true. The SDI totally fouls up all Soviet war plans. If we have the SDI installed and a comparable installation in Europe, there will not be a World War III. No one can start a war, at least not within the foreseeable future.

And they don’t like that, because they don’t want a war, necessarily, but they would like to have such overwhelming military power, that they can get what they want.

Carkin: But the rest of these threats appearing in the Times.

LaRouche: Oh, the Queen would never threaten me. She’s got other problems to worry about.

Carkin: Okay. Dave, I want to thank you for being a guest host this evening.

We will pick up on more of this discussion after a short break. Stay tuned.

[Commercial break]

Welcome back to Insights.

Today’s guest is Democratic presidential hopeful Lyndon LaRouche of Leesburg, Virginia, continuing our conversation.

Each of the presidential candidates that I have had an opportunity to meet and speak with, such as yourself, brings to the campaign a particular flair, a particular interest, a particular area of expertise.

Should you become President of the United States, what strengths do you think Lyndon LaRouche will bring to that office?

LaRouche: Well, as an organizer of scientific efforts, as in strategic matters, I’m probably a pretty good policymaker in strategic matters. In terms of foreign policy, I don’t need a Secretary of State, except to take care of consular affairs; I can handle it all myself. I know many of these governments around the world.

Carkin: Okay. What would the weaknesses be in a LaRouche candidacy?

LaRouche: Well, if you do it properly, there are no weaknesses. If you know how to pick people to take care of areas that you don’t want to be personally deeply involved in, except as having policy oversight, then you’re covered. And we have a lot of talented people in this country.

Carkin: So, it’s the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people.

LaRouche: And the fact that probably I know more about the areas of government than any President of the post-war period. That is, in the number of areas in which I do have expertise: Economics, very good; strategic considerations, the best, probably better than Eisenhower in some respects, because he had some bad policies.

But in that area, which I’ve been working in, in scientific projects, well, I was one of the founders of this proposal to colonize Mars; I’ve been involved in that area. I’m involved in AIDS research in terms of pulling teams of people together internationally, that sort of thing.

Why Colonize Mars?

Carkin: Why at this particular point in time would a presidential candidate be interested in colonizing Mars? I know Jules Verne was ahead of his time, and Michelangelo was ahead of his time. Do you think Lyndon LaRouche is ahead of his time?

LaRouche: No, not at all. It’s going to take us 40 years to establish permanent colonization of Mars, the beginning of it.

Carkin: Okay, why Mars?

LaRouche: Well, there are scientific reasons and economic reasons for doing it, which pertain to the second half of the next century. We have to do that.

In the meantime, the Mars program requires the rapid development of every technology we now have coming up. Now, what that means, is that if I hook a Mars program to the machine-tool industry, what I’ve done is, while putting in cheap borrowing power into the economy, and at the same time, I’m cranking up our machine-tool industry to deliver kinds of technologies which have never been used before, the most advanced technologies mankind has ever—the biggest technological elite mankind has ever known.

Carkin: Okay, so it’s more than just the arbitrary thing of saying we should colonize Mars. It’s the idea that you have to sort of set yourself a goal, and in setting that goal, you are essentially giving yourself a system, a way of achieving it.

LaRouche: That’s right. You’re setting a policy for 40 years. I want to be sure that the United States has the highest rate of technological progress and rise of standard of living for the next 50 years. So, therefore, let’s put a policy in now which does that now, but also continues to have the same effect for the next 40 years. It seems like a pretty good idea.

Carkin: It’s interesting. Okay, Norman Bailey, who is a former economics official with the National Security Council, says that you have one of the best private intelligence services in the world. How does an individual citizen acquire the best intelligence service in the world?

LaRouche: Well, I mean, in a very informal basis, partly formal, I’m sort of a primus inter pares of an international group of journalists and investigators. I set up the system years ago as a suggestion to friends of mine back in ’71 when I said we’ve got to do something about this. So, we set up what looked like a news bureau, organized like Time magazine or Newsweek or something like that in terms of organization.

But I did something else. I said, in most publications, you have the editorial function and the intelligence function is combined. That’s a mistake. You set the thing up so you have an intelligence function, which works without prejudice as to what the editorial department is going to use. They just have their ongoing work on the intelligence work. Then the editorial department comes over and dips into what the intelligence department does, takes what they want and goes up and runs an editorial function.

So, I set up this double, two-track system: intelligence independent of editorial control, and editorial control separate from intelligence. And the system was used by my friends in various countries. It works. We maintain daily links. We run a sophisticated news bureau. We don’t get into everything in the world, but we get into things that we think are more important.

Carkin: Do you send Christmas cards to all these people?

LaRouche: No, we’re involved. You know, we have friends in heads of government, some former Presidents of states, people who are leaders in government in various parts of the world. I’m in daily contact with them. For example, I’m in contact with the situation in Brazil personally.

Carkin: Okay, how do foreigners perceive Lyndon LaRouche?

LaRouche: Oh, you would think I was a great hero, if you will, the greatest hero in the United States, sometimes if you hear what some of these fine people say about me overseas. As a matter of fact, the United States would be much more liked in the world if I were President.

Carkin: Okay, you feel that internationally speaking, you would have a built-in set of diplomacy?

LaRouche: We are too insular. Our politicians reflect that. And you have to go out in other countries, and you have to care about them. And you have to realize that what’s good for us, is good for them, and what’s good for them is good for us. It’s not a matter of taking a cake and cheating on them to get more for ourselves.

For example, if we trade with them, help them grow economically, they become bigger markets. They benefit, we benefit. The trick in foreign policy is to devise policies where both parties benefit. And you find that these things are the things you should do, and they begin to solve a great number of problems.

A New Era of U.S.-Soviet Relations

Carkin: All right. Now, U.S.-Soviet relations are touchy at best. If you feel that they are out to get you, what would that do to U.S.-Soviet relations in a LaRouche Administration?

LaRouche: Oh, no. If I’m President, the Soviets are— We either start a war immediately, which I don’t think they’re likely to do, or they will have another plenary session of the Central Committee. They will fire a great number of their Soviet officials, and they will come out with a hagiolatric doctrine.

Carkin: A what?

LaRouche: Well, you know, hagiolatric. They arrange the saints and devils in different configurations. That’s the way they run their society over there. And, you know, Stalin’s up, Trotsky’s down, this sort of thing. That’s how they adjust their policies. It’s a very strange little device.

But what they would do, is they would declare that a new period of history, temporary, of course, has entered, and the Soviet Union now has to adapt to the reality of this period as defined by this U.S. Presidency.

Carkin: And you really feel that you would make that kind of an impact in the Soviet Union?

LaRouche: Oh, I don’t even have to be President. You see the impact I make now?

Carkin: Okay. So, obviously, you wouldn’t feel comfortable sitting across the table from Gorbachev?

LaRouche: Oh, sure, sure. I’d know how to deal with Gorbachev.

Carkin: You’d be comfortable with him?

LaRouche: Well, they’re very nasty people. They’re a little bit satanic and very nasty. What do you do to Satan? You tweak his tail and you say, “Now look, you cut that out. Now, you want this? You can get this, but don’t do that.”

And, you know, the Soviets are very realistic. If they’re convinced that they can’t get something, and they can’t bully you into conceding it, they’ll say “okay,” and they’ll sit back and try to figure some way to get even.

And so, you have to learn to, if you’re going to deal with them, you have to understand what they are, deal with them realistically, and realize that you’re looking at Satan across the desk there, or a fellow who’s got a little bit of Satan in him. And you’re just going to say, “Satan, look, no. This, yes, Satan you’ll do this, not for you, but for your people.”

Carkin: Okay, now this is your fourth time running for President.

LaRouche: Well, I wasn’t too serious about getting elected the first time. I was just pushing monetary reform.

Carkin: Okay, but, nevertheless, it is your fourth time. How has the political climate changed? What insights have you gained as a presidential candidate? How have you grown?

LaRouche: Well, you get— I find you grow with every experience. It’s one of the reasons I never really try to avoid trouble if I think I have to face it, because I’ve never gotten into any trouble where I didn’t learn tremendously. And the more intense the situation, the more you learn from it. So, I would have to say I’ve learned a great deal over the years.

But not just from that. This has been intermingled with experiences in various countries, with seeing governments overthrown, being involved in that, trying to save governments, that sort of thing.

I think that I’ve lived a very good life in the sense that I’m constantly learning. And I’m very happy to have the kinds of experiences, including presidential campaigns, from which I learn a great deal.

Carkin: Who are some of the figures in history or contemporary American politics that you admire?

LaRouche: Well, of course, there’s some in history. I admire Washington for reasons I don’t think most people would understand, because they don’t know the real George Washington. Of course, I admire Benjamin Franklin, also, I think, for reasons which are undervalued or under-noticed today. Abraham Lincoln is, as a character, the outstanding President in our national history. I think he’s that side of him. I think if somebody would actually get through his collected writings, particularly that last great public address he gave before he was shot, in which he said, with a question about the reunification of the United States, he said, “Let the states be readmitted to the Union as if they had never left it.” This man had real moral greatness.

Carkin: Vision. What is your vision for America?

To Restore America as a Beacon of Hope

LaRouche: Well, get us out of the mess. Realize that this nation was created not only by its own people. It was created by the efforts of a great number of people in Europe who saw that building this new kind of republic was, as Lafayette described it in 1783, as a beacon of hope and temple of liberty to the benefit of all mankind.

Our specific mission as a nation is to solve an uncompleted task on this planet, or to take the lead in doing that. We have a great number of people, the majority of the world’s population is hungry, suffering in underdevelopment. We have demonstrated that we’ve created a system of economy—which we ourselves have abused—which is the best in the world. We can take—as Roosevelt proposed actually during the war for the developing sector—we can take American methods of economics. We can assist these countries which aspire to economic parity to reach it. We can cause the greatest growth in productivity and elimination of poverty and privation of all kinds throughout this planet.

Carkin: You don’t think that’s pie in the sky?

LaRouche: No, we can do it. It’s a highly practical thing. It means big infrastructure projects to give people water systems.

Carkin: Sounds like high taxes.

LaRouche: No, it’s not. What you’re doing is, for example, I could go into most countries in South America or Africa (Africa’s a little different). Actually, a development project of this type in most countries involves 95 to 96 percent domestic resources, resources that are otherwise idled in terms of particularly labor resources, masses of unemployed people. What do you mean they can’t produce? Of course they can. All they need is that four- to five-percent margin on a line of credit of the technology they don’t have available in their own country, and that four percent leverages the 95 percent of their idle resources. If we cooperate with them to help them do this, they’ll do it for themselves.

But we have to help shelter the program so they have the freedom to do what they want to do for themselves. We can do it, and that’s our function.

Our function is, you know, as a nation lives, as a person lives, he dies. Now, what’s important to that person is what they contribute while they live to those who come after them. It’s so with a nation. A nation is a personality, longer-lived than any individual, and a nation is judged in history as it contributes to the general welfare of mankind, as well as taking care of its own affairs in the process. And that’s what we should do.

Carkin: Okay, on a lighter side, this is some presidential snack food of our current President. [points to bowl of snacks on table]

LaRouche: Oh, yes, yes!

Carkin: Should Lyndon LaRouche become President of the United States, what will be your snack food in the Oval Office?

LaRouche: Well, I’m not much on snacks. As a matter of fact, I tend to— I used to be a very skinny fellow, but I tend to put on some avoir de bois [firewood] recently, since the past ten years or so, since I’ve been— the security problems limit my moving around a bit, so I don’t do the walking. I used to walk, you know; I used to walk 15, 20 miles a day sometimes. I just liked to do that. And so now I can walk occasionally, but I can’t walk with the freedom, you know, I used to walk. If I wanted to go someplace, I’d walk there, just because you’re better in shape at the end of the day if you do that regularly. But no, I don’t think so. But there are some—

You know, I think the White House is a wonderful institution for one thing. Yes, the personal life of the President is important to the people. I think that we should bring into the United States, through the White House, the best recipes from all over the world, make them available to everyone, so that everyone can familiarize themselves with the best food, the best preparation of food from every part of the world. Why not?

I think that the greatest artists of the world should be in the White House, received there, performing there, also for the benefit of the American people. The American President must set in the personal life in office, the highest standard of culture, and also with a little sense of Falstaffian good fun at the same time. It shouldn’t be too heavy; there should be a few jokes now and then.

Carkin: Okay, no presidential snack food for Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche: No, I’ve got enough weight.

Carkin: An austerity diet, okay.

Do you have any parting words for the viewers in southern New Hampshire that might be seeing this show?

LaRouche: Well, things are bad, but it’s going to get worse.

But really, if we think about fundamentals, there’s no reason we have to go through a long depression. We can actually come out of this mess, having been spanked by the crash, to learn our lesson. And we can quickly get things back to where they’re better than before.

So, don’t be despondent. As Roosevelt said, “There’s nothing we have to fear so much as fear itself.”

Carkin: What would you like the history books to say about you?

LaRouche: Well, I haven’t thought much about that. I don’t think in those directions. I would prefer that the history books would concentrate on useful things and concepts that I’ve created, which may be useful to somebody in the future. I’d rather be known for the content of my ideas, as intelligible representation of ideas that others can learn for themselves, than to have some label stuck on me.

Carkin: Okay, Lyndon, thank you very much for joining us tonight.