LaRouche Youth Open
Campus 2004 Campaign

Directly calling on the "no future generation" of the nation's college-age students to build their own future "on the idea of a general economic recovery of the world," Lyndon LaRouche held the inaugural national campus Internet webcast of his Presidential campaign on April 24.

Audio archives of the webcast are available:

The webcast, organized in two weeks by the rapidly growing national LaRouche Youth Movement, involved college newspapers and journalists from about 20 campuses, and many listening groups in classrooms and student unions around the country, particularly in the West Coast states. Coverage of the webcast in campus press began in some cases before it occurred. Questions and dialogue with the candidate, by newspaper journalists and Youth Movement leaders alike, went on for two hours following a brief statement in which LaRouche stressed: "We have two issues: war and the economic crisis. If we solve the economic crisis, I believe we can control the war crisis."

Campuses represented by journalists from their publications included the universities of Massachusetts, Indiana, Connecticut, West Virginia, Georgia, Southern Illinois, Alabama, and Florida, as well as Purdue, Ohio State, and Northeastern Universities, Cornell, UCLA, and a dozen others. The national participation of groups of students and journalists constituted an effective rebuke to the insane attempt by the media and party leaderships to keep LaRouche out of Presidential debates, when his campaign has demonstrated national support exceeding that of many other candidates.

The fight, under such adversity, for the truth, and the leadership the nation needs, was a recurring theme in the dialogue, which ranged from Middle East peace to the educational system in the United States. The first questioner asked why there had been no youth movement behind a Presidential candidate since Eugene McCarthy 35 years ago. LaRouche answered that a "break in intergenerational morality" had been caused since that time, by the abandonment of a producer society for today's sinking consumer society; the "sense of knowing the truth and sharing it" had been replaced by subservience to popular opinion. "Campuses are a place to fight for the truth!" LaRouche answered a University of Connecticut journalist who asked about standards of education—and only if that fight is occurring can the nation's and the world's future leaders emerge. That, he said, was the concern that moved him to launch his LaRouche International Youth Movement over the years since the 1999-2000 Presidential campaign.

'I Believe We Can Secure Peace'

Beginning with the second question, from a UCLA group which wanted to know how Israeli-Palestinian peace could be secured, much of the student dialogue focussed on the current "war-hawk" policy of the Bush Administration so widely opposed by the nation's students, and where it came from—including the question of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. LaRouche pointed to his January 2001 international webcast in which he forecast that the incoming Bush Presidency would be hit with an economic catastrophe, of a force it could not comprehend or handle. "Secondly, I warned that, comparing the present situation with what happened in the world and particularly in Germany between 1928 and 1933, that we had to fear under these circumstances that some forces behind the scene, some desperate forces, would do what was done with Hitler, with the Reichstag Fire ... which made Hitler a dictatorship, and essentially caused World War II to become more or less inevitable. On Sept. 11, 2001, of course, we had our Reichstag Fire. We had the bombing in New York and in Washington, D.C. with aircraft.... We have since then, at that point, the same day and the following day, Vice President Cheney, who had been Secretary of Defense in the previous Bush Administration, back in the early 1990s, came out with a proposal for a war against Iraq and similar kinds of warfare."

"I believe we can secure peace on this planet," LaRouche said. "If we succeed in building around an idea of a general economic recovery of the world, that idea itself becomes an overriding interest; that overriding interest can be the basis for securing peace on this planet."

LaRouche was asked by the Ohio State Lantern) what separated him from the rest of the Democratic Presidential candidates ("Everything—especially competence"), and by a Youth Movement organizer in Arizona, how he would take the Democratic Party back from the organized crime circles which control its policies at the top. "I think we're at a point," he responded, " in which the political party formations will, in a lawful way, undergo a transformation," because of the force of the U.S. economic collapse and the refusal of either party's leaders even to admit it—the "Herbert Hoover" phenomenon. The upper 20% of income brackets have dominated both parties in recent years, he told the students, "but now the poor and seniors are being abused beyond belief, and even the middle income people face losing everything. The political parties must regroup," and the corrupt and cowardly existing leaders will be run out. "The lack of participation of youth, in either party's meetings and functions, is a typical signal of this."

Student groups wanted to know how LaRouche saw the alternative to Herbert Hoover, the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in today's economic crisis—which, as one Kansas journalist pointed out, was slashing higher education budgets nationwide. "I am in his [FDR's] tradition, though I don't copy him," the candidate said. "The American people loved FDR" because he was a leader they could trust to put the general welfare first in his responsibilities; and he was competent to deal with the Depression. LaRouche answered the Kansas journalist's question by explaining a "Hill-Burton" approach to higher education—referring to the 1946 legislation which mandated the provision of quantity and quality of hospital care to every county in the United States. "To raise the money for that, we have to restart the economy" through the kind of "Super-TVA" infrastructure program LaRouche has designed. Meanwhile, he said, the youth movement he started is informally fighting for real education—both fighting for its facilities and funding, and fighting for the truth in education, through restoration of Classical teaching curricula.

Beyond education as such, the candidate promised to "return the world to the kind of measures that Franklin Roosevelt took back in the 1930s, and to create, again, based on the lessons of that experience, a new monetary system, a fixed-exchange rate monetary system, using the lessons of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, to build a system of reconstruction, which will get us out of the mess, and which will build a basis for economic cooperation around the planet under which we can survive."

Reversing the Cultural Shift

LaRouche's fundamental message to the students was that they had to reverse the "cultural paradigm shift" begun with their Baby Boomer parents, when the economic decisions of 1967-71 wrecked a traditionally proud producer society. "Back in the beginning of the 1960s," he explained, "the world, and especially the United States, was put through an agonizing experience, which started slowly with the Bay of Pigs incident, went into the major crisis of 1962, the so-called Cuba missile crisis, then the assassination of Kennedy, and the plunge into the Indochina War.... In the course of this shock ... there was the introduction of a cultural paradigm shift from what the United States had been, as the world's leading producer society per capita, into becoming a parasitical consumer society, in which we today live largely on our ability to get cheap goods imported to us, without actually paying for them, from other countries, rather than producing ourselves. This ... is the root cause of the terminal phase of the present international monetary financial system now going on today."

The big problem we have is to take the problems faced by the "no-future" generation, the young people 18-25 years of age, who are willing to master things they must master, but who see no future before them under present conditions; or, if they see a future, they are usually pretty disillusioned about what the future is. So, our problem is to move these younger people. Remember the American Revolution was a youth movement."