PRESS RELEASE
LaRouche: Defeat Ashcroft in Philadelphia
Oct. 28, 2003 (EIRNS)—This statement by Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche was released today at a press conference called by State Representative Harold James (D-Philadelphia).As in the case of the California Recall election, the Republican Party, faced with the plunging loss of credibility of the Bush-Cheney government, has resorted to a pattern of unusual bureaucratic tricks to try to pre-rig the results of the 2004 Presidential election by capturing control of key positions of state and municipal government. The governorship of California, the key state for the next Presidential election, and the thuggish role of Attorney General John Ashcroft's ham-fisted recklessness in the Philadelphia mayoralty campaign, are reflections of these dubious maneuvers.
There is much more than an election-result as such at stake in this. The U.S. today is gripped by a general financial-monetary collapse which is far more dangerous than the 1929-1933 Depression dumped on us by foolish and cruel policies of the successive Coolidge and Hoover Presidencies. Unless we return now to the philosophy of government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the condition of our nation, especially the lower 80 percentiles of family-income brackets, will be far worse than during the 1930s Depression.
We might wish that the Administration of President George W. Bush would change its ways; but, are you willing to gamble your family's, your community's life on that hope?
Let us make sure that in Philadelphia, we do not have a repeat of those shameful performances by my fellow Democrats, which allowed Ashcroft to become Attorney General in January 2001, and allowed Arnie "Beast-man" Schwarzenegger to take over California earlier this month. Let us deliver a devastating blow to Ashcroft's Gestapo methods, by a massive turnout to re-elect Mayor John Street. This election has taken on national and worldwide significance, as the result of John Ashcroft's filthy effort to steal an election through his all-too-familiar methods of terror, deceit, and brutal abuse of governmental power.
I call on all my fellow Democrats—including my rivals for the party's Presidential nomination—to join me in this effort to send John Ashcroft packing. This is not a partisan issue. The kind of Hitlerian Gestapo tactics being employed by this Attorney General, in league with the Dick Cheney-led neo-conservative war party in Washington, cannot be tolerated if America is to remain a free society. Our Constitution, the greatest living document in modern history, was crafted in Philadelphia. Let us perform an act of grateful service to our Founding Fathers, by delivering a crushing blow to the Ashcrofts and Cheneys, who would trample on those sacred principles of the general welfare and the common good, which our Founders worked to establish on these shores.
