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This article appears in the December 18, 2009 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

LaRouche Youth Candidates
To `Educate' Mass Strike

[PDF version of this article]

by Harley Schlanger

Dec. 11—A new era in U.S. politics was initiated on Dec. 3, when Lyndon LaRouche announced, at his webcast, that three members of the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) will run for Congress in Democratic Party primaries (LaRouche's speech was published in EIR, Dec. 11, 2009; the video is archived at http://larouchepac.com/webcasts/20091203.html). The three candidates, who were introduced later in the webcast, will provide a programmatic focal point for the millions of Americans who are angry, and want a real change in the direction of the nation, but are unclear as to what to do.

The three are:

Rachel Brown, who will run in the 4th Congressional District in Massachusetts against blowhard and bailout maven, Barney Frank, who is an incumbent Democrat;

Kesha Rogers, intends to unseat the incumbent Republican, Pete Olson, in the 22nd Congressional District in Texas, which includes NASA's Johnson Space Center; and

Summer Shields, who will take on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in the 8th Congressional District in San Francisco, Calif.

According to LaRouche, the function of their campaigns "is to coordinate and create a national campaign ... in order to create a pivot around which to begin to mobilize the population now, for what it must do now." This will be something new, he added, saying "We're not going to wait until November of next year, for new candidates to be elected, or for January (2011), for these candidates to enter office. We're going to organize now, to get people ready to clean the mess out in Washington, to replace a lot of key people. But the campaign is now, is essentially creating the three points of reference, for creating a national organization to straighten out the Democratic Party, by setting forth and defining a policy, a national policy."

Nation in Crisis, Party in Disarray

These campaigns are necessary given the devastating economic and political crisis facing the nation, and the failure of the Democratic Party to bring about a real transformation, following its re-emergence as the dominant party in 2008, after the disastrous two terms of President George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. As LaRouche detailed during his webcast, the policies being pushed by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership represent no change, despite his campaign slogan, but are, in reality, a continuation of the worst of the Bush regime, and threaten to plunge the world into a New Dark Age.

In particular, Obama's slavish adherence to the bailout of bankrupt financial institutions, and his open promotion of fascist austerity, allegedly to "cut the deficit," which has grown enormously due to the hyperinflationary bailout, is already destroying what remains of the once-productive industrial and agricultural sectors of the U.S. economy. To reverse the 40-year collapse of production in the U.S. economy, LaRouche presented a coherent set of solutions, incorporated in the "LaRouche Plan." LaRouche's proposal includes an end to the bailouts, and the return, through seizure if necessary, of the bailout funds from the banks, financial institutions, and insurance companies; a return to the Glass-Steagal banking standards, putting the financial system through bankruptcy reorganization, freezing the trillions of dollars of worthless derivative and related obligations, rather than attempting a bailout; and the utterance, by the Congress, of credit, which would be directed to investments in large-scale, necessary infrastructure projects, such as building new power plants—especially nuclear; high-speed rail; water management; and a science driver; which would be centered around upgrading the space program, through a mission to colonize the Moon and Mars.

Instead of adopting the LaRouche Plan, which has been gaining support among Americans, who are losing jobs, homes, and general security at an accelerating rate, the President has chosen to go along with policies authored by the financial oligarchs of the City of London, which threaten to reduce the planet to a depopulated rubbish heap. Obama's foolish cheerleading for a policy of drastic population reduction, through a top-down fascist, global, anti-technology dictatorship, as pushed by the Copenhagen "Climate Change" conference, and promoted directly by the British royal family, combined with his insistence on a "health care" plan modeled on the T-4 genocide policies of Hitler's Nazi regime, makes it evident that representatives within the Institution of the Presidency must move to either place him under supervision of responsible officials, or remove him from office.

Despite growing anxiety among Democratic Members of Congress, who have seen an eruption of anger among their constituents, both against themselves, and the President, there has been no serious, concerted effort, to follow LaRouche's counsel, and place the President under "adult supervision."

The Mass Strike

The anger, which was highly visible, especially during the August recess, when thousands of constituents attended Congressional town meetings and confronted their elected officials, leaving many members of Congress visibly shaken, has not only not subsided, but has deepened, in the ensuing months. Although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have kept lawmakers in Washington, thus allowing them to avoid their angry constituents, those who have ventured out to recent town hall meetings have found it is not safe to appear in their districts. Their constituents are aroused, and are demanding answers to questions, such as, why are there trillions of dollars from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to bail out bankrupt banks, but not a penny to create jobs, keep people in their homes, or provide health care?

Polls show that respect for Congress is continuing in a near-free fall, and that all incumbents, in both parties, are in trouble. Election results in November 2009 produced major defeats for Democrats in two gubernatorial races, including the defeat of an incumbent Democrat, Jon Corzine, in New Jersey; and the loss of Virginia, by a wide margin, even though Obama won the state handily in November 2008. Obama personally campaigned aggressively for the Democratic Party candidates in those states, and that was a factor in their defeat.

Fueling the anger is the recognition, among many citizens, that the health-care "reform" pushed by the President and his supporters will not expand and improve health care; and a growing awareness that so-called climate change is not only based on a scientific fraud, but that the "green" policies adopted by leading Democrats will mean the end of scientific and technological growth in the U.S., to be replaced by low-wage, non-productive "green" jobs—provided the bankrupt government can scrape together any money to subsidize them!

LaRouche organizers in the field have encountered not just increased skepticism about these policies, but an increasing minority of people who are asking what can be done, to address this crisis, as they are running out of patience with the present course of the nation.

Enter the LYM Campaigns

It is this reality—of a deepening crisis, a failure of leaders in both parties to offer solutions, and a heightened awareness among the population that "something must be done"—that is the driver behind the decision to launch the three campaigns of LYM members for Congress. Each of the candidates is a veteran organizer, with experience in the recruitment of members to the LYM. That recruitment process involved their intense engagement in the rigorous intellectual curriculum that Lyndon LaRouche has developed for the LYM, giving each organizer a depth of understanding of history, through study of key scientific discoveries and cultural breakthroughs.

Through this work, they are prepared to bring into U.S. politics a new generation of leadership.

It has never been more clear that such a new generation must step onto the stage of history. The Baby Boomer generation, typified by the bellowing and often incoherent grunting of Rep. Barney Frank, has proven itself dangerously incompetent in positions of leadership. Frank, through his chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee, personally served as a bully, under Pelosi's direction, against LaRouche's Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, in 2007-08. As many officials in local and state governments urged passage of this legislation, to provide a moratorium on home foreclosures, while putting banks through a Franklin Roosevelt-style bankruptcy reorganization, Frank publicly, and repeatedly insisted that LaRouche is wrong, that the crisis is "not systemic." Instead, he worked with Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, and with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, to provide trillions of dollars in bailout funds to the banks, knowing full well that this bailout would not save a single homeowner, nor create a single job.

Or, if he did not know this, and believed that his plans would work, he has proven to be incompetent. Either way, whether he is ignorant or a liar, he should no longer represent his district in Congress. While he ducked Rachel Brown before, at a town meeting, during which he did an infamous impersonation of Elmer Fudd, ranting about debating a dining room table, he will not be able to duck her during the coming primary campaign.

Nor will Speaker Pelosi be able to ignore Summer Shields, who will challenge her as the leader who deployed the thuggish Frank, to do the dirty work of the Wall Streeters who gave Pelosi the backing to become House Speaker. Recent polls show that Pelosi's popularity as Speaker has collapsed, and organizers are finding her San Francisco constituents unhappy with her leadership of the House.

And the Rogers campaign in Texas will offer the best opportunity for young people to fight for a future, as she will emphasize the potential of space exploration to shape the scientific and technological challenges for the next two generations. She has called for removing troops from Afghanistan, and putting them into space!

Her opponent in the general election, Rep. Pete Olson, is a hard-core neocon. In addition to his support for privatizing NASA, he played a leading role, as a Congressional staffer, in the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999. The 22nd district was once the home of House Minority leader Tom DeLay, whose brutal style of leadership earned him the contempt of the nation. Rogers played a role in his ouster. She also ran a strong campaign, in 2006, for chairman of the Democratic Party of Texas.

As Lyndon LaRouche identified at the outset of his webcast, these three campaigns, in three very different parts of the nation, will provide a unifying direction for all those others running for Congress in 2010—as well as those endangered incumbents looking for solutions, if they wish to be re-elected—and will serve as a rallying point, for those Americans who now know that they can no longer afford to sit on the sidelines, while their nation, and the world, is threatened by a crazed and endangered financial oligarchy, and its foolish narcissistic puppet in the White House.

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