Candidate saw plots aplenty in politics
Lyndon LaRouche, who saw rampant conspiracy in politics, spent five years in prison for tax fraud and accumulated 1.3 million votes during eight bids for the U.S. presidency, has died. He was 96. LaRouche died Tuesday, his political-action group LaRouche PAC wrote on its website, without describing a cause of death. He had lived since 1983 in Loudon County, Va.
LaRouche called for a return to fixed exchange rates, expansion of nuclear power, quarantine of AIDS patients, a global restoration of railroad transport and the colonization of Mars.
While announcing his seventh presidential campaign in 1999, he warned the world economy was built on a speculative bubble and was approaching collapse — a prediction his supporters later cited as evidence of his credibility.
During the 1984 presidential campaign, he accused Democratic candidate Walter Mondale of being “a Soviet agent of influence.” In a January 2010 article, he said a “massmurderous partnership between the British monarchy and President Barack Obama” sought “to reduce the world’s population, rapidly, from nearly 7 billion persons to less than 2.”
LaRouche said his economic forecasts correctly predicted major turns in the U.S. economy from 1957 to 1994.
An organization cofounded by LaRouche to promote fusion energy said it helped President Ronald Reagan’s administration formulate the space-based anti-missile system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative.
The Anti-Defamation League called LaRouche “a longtime anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist” and “leader of a fringe political cult that defies categorization.”
In 1988, a federal jury in Virginia convicted him of conspiracy to commit mail fraud in a case involving $30 million in loans that were in default. Sentenced to 15 years in prison, he was released on parole in 1994.
LaRouche ran for president in 1976 as the candidate of the U.S. Labor Party, which he’d founded three years earlier, and collected about 40,000 votes. He ran in the Democratic presidential primaries in the next seven elections, from 1980 to 2004, drawing as many as 596,422 votes in 1996.
He ran his 1992 campaign from prison.
LaRouche was born Sept. 8, 1922, in Rochester, N.H., one of three children of Quaker parents.
LaRouche attended Northeastern University in Boston before and after a stint in the U.S. Army, serving in Burma and India during World War II. News reports said he was a conscientious objector at the beginning of the war and was assigned to a work camp in New Hampshire.
He began his publishing career in 1971 by founding a news bureau called the New Solidarity International Press Service. Executive Intelligence Review, his weekly news magazine, began in 1974.
Also in 1974 he co-founded the Fusion Energy Foundation, which advocated development of fusion power as a cleaner alternative to nuclear fission.