Views of Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche movement

Lyndon LaRouche began his political career as a Trotskyist[9] and praised Marxism, but he and the National Caucus of Labor Committees abandoned this ideology in the late 1970s. From then on, LaRouche no longer opposed private ownership of the means of production, and his analysis of political events is no longer phrased in terms of class.[10]

According to Tim Wohlforth, during and after his break with Trotskyism, LaRouche's theory was influenced by what he called his "Theory of Hegemony" derived from Vladimir Lenin's view of the role of intellectuals in being a vanguard helping workers develop their consciousness and realize their leading role in society. He was influenced by Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony as an intellectual and cultural elite which directs social thought. LaRouche's theory saw himself and his followers as becoming such a hegemonic force. He rejected Gramsci's notion of "organic intellectuals" being developed by the working class itself. Rather, the working class would be led by elite intellectuals such as himself.[4]

LaRouche was influenced by his readings of Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital and Karl Marx's Capital developing his own "theory of reindustrialization", saying that the West would attempt to industrialize the Third World, particularly India, and attempt to solve the economic crisis both by developing new markets in the Third World and using its cheap and surplus labor to increase profits and minimize costs (see neocolonialism.) To oppose this, LaRouche argued for a "reindustrialization" of the United States with himself at the vanguard of the effort allowing him to personally resolve the crisis of capitalism. Though his arguments had since been stripped of their quasi-Marxist language and citations, his core theories had remained essentially the same since the late 1960s.[4]

In the book Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy, which was published in 1975 by D. C. Heath and Company under the pen name Lyn Marcus, LaRouche tried to show that numerous Marxists—ranging from the Monthly Review group to Ernest Mandel, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and the "Soviet economists"—had failed to understand and to interpret correctly Marx's writing. Marxists he admired—apart from Marx himself—were Rosa Luxemburg and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky.

According to a review by Martin Bronfenbrenner in The Journal of Political Economy, about half of the book was devoted to dialectical philosophy, "with a strong epistemological stress", with the other half devoted to discussions of economic and general history, anthropology and sociology, and actual economics, including a surprisingly large helping of business administration—Bronfenbrenner noted that LaRouche seemed to have "more private-business experience than the great majority of academic economists", including a familiarity with the way speculative overcapitalization, operating at the borders of white-collar crime, creates "fictitious capitals" that later do not match their actual earning power. Like Thorstein Veblen, LaRouche subscribed to an overcapitalization theory of economic depression.[11][12]

According to Bronfenbrenner, LaRouche viewed conventional economics as a "withered arm of philosophy", which had taken a wrong turn toward reductionism under the influence of British empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume.[12] LaRouche's definition of reductionism was as follows:

The fundamental fallacy of ordinary understanding is the delusion that the universe is reducible to simple substance, or—the more Hume-like view—that the content of human knowledge is limited to simple-substance-like, self-evident sense perceptions. This discredited outlook—whether it takes the naive mechanistic [form] or the equivalent mechanistic outlook of empiricism—is termed reductionism. All varieties of reductionism are formally premised on the fallacious assumption of formal logic, that the universe can be represented as discrete points interconnected by formal relations.[12]

From this it followed, Bronfenbrenner said, that LaRouche viewed bourgeois economists' concern with prices as reductionism, versus the Marxian concern with values. The reductionist fallacy then lies in adjusting a value theory like labor theory to fit in with price theory; in LaRouche's view, economists should work in the opposite direction.[12]

According to Bronfenbrenner, LaRouche viewed capitalist America as headed for a kind of fascism not much better than that of the Nazis; but he noted that LaRouche's own vision of socialism, and the trade-off between necessity and freedom in a centrally planned economy, seemed apt to result in the justification of a different kind of dictatorship:[12]

Judging from his controversial manner, [LaRouche] impresses at least one reader as a Me-for-Dictator type to whom it would be dangerous to entrust the task of drawing any boundary between the domain of freedom and that of necessity or order.[12]

The campaign platforms of LaRouche and his followers have included these elements:

• A return to a gold-based national and world monetary system, and fixed exchange rates;[13] and replacement of the central bank system, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, with a national bank;[14]
• A war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering;[15][16]
• An emphasis on large-scale economic infrastructure, including the building of a world land bridge of railroads and a tunnel under the Bering Strait,[7] the building of nuclear power plants,[15][16] accelerating research on fusion energy, the North American Water and Power Alliance,[17] and rebuilding or nationalizing the country's steel industry;[18]
• A crash program to build particle-beam weapons and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI);[19][20]
• Opposition to the USSR and support for a military buildup to prepare for imminent war;[21][22]
• Growth in food production and a farm debt moratorium;[23]
• Low interest rates and opposition to the Gramm–Rudman balanced-budget law;[24]

According to China Youth Daily Online, LaRouche was once a Marxist, but later supported heavily regulated capitalism. He supported public control of financial capital and low-interest loans.[25]

LaRouche said banks should not be bailed out, but be placed in receivership by the state. He said that a "firewall" should prevent state aid from being diverted to speculative entities, which should be allowed to fail, and that such failures would clean up the financial markets.[26]

LaRouche believes in the principles of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and favors state intervention in the economy. LaRouche also said that he supported the approach of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who established a banking system geared to develop production.[26]

Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti said that he had encountered LaRouche at a debate held in 2007 in Rome, and that he appreciates LaRouche's writings. According to an article by Ivo Caizzi in Corriere della Sera, a group of Italian Senators led by Oskar Peterlini asked the Berlusconi government to tackle the financial crisis using legislation developed by LaRouche in 2007. The legislation proposed that public money should save only the commercial infrastructure required for the financing of productive enterprises.[26]

The "Triple Curve", or "typical collapse function", is an economic model developed by LaRouche which tries to illustrate the growth of financial aggregates at the expense of the physical economy and how this leads to an inevitably collapsing bubble economy. According to the China Youth Daily Online interview, LaRouche's main point is that the real economy (production) is dropping while the nominal economy (money and financial instruments) is going up. As the nominal economy greatly overreaches the real economy, an unavoidable economic crisis ensues.[27]

Since 2000, the LaRouche movement has:

• Called for a moratorium on Third World debt.[6][28]
• Opposed deregulation.[8] According to LaRouche's publications, "LaRouche has consistently called for reregulation of utilities, transportation, health care (under the "Hill-Burton" standard), the financial (especially the speculative markets) and other sectors ..."[29] They support the renewal of Glass–Steagall Act regulations on banks.[17]
• In 2007, LaRouche proposed a "Homeowners and Bank Protection Act". This called for the establishment of a federal agency that would "place federal- and state-chartered banks under protection, freeze all existing home mortgages for a period of time, adjust mortgage values to fair prices, restructure existing mortgages at appropriate interest rates, and write off speculative debt obligations of mortgage-backed securities". The bill envisioned a foreclosure moratorium, allowing homeowners to make the equivalent of rental payments for an interim period, and an end to bank bail-outs, forcing banks to reorganize under bankruptcy laws. A LaRouche spokesman said that bank bail-outs "reward corrupt swindlers with taxpayer money". The proposal attracted support from Democrats at city council and state legislature level. Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski opposed the bill, stating it would involve government seizure of "every American bank". Mike Colpitts of Housing Predictor stated that LaRouche's economic forecasts had been correct, and that he might have received more mainstream credibility had it not been for his controversial history.[30]

LaRouche is known for alleging conspiracies by the British. LaRouche has said that the dominant imperialist strategic force acting on the planet today is not the United States, but the "Anglo-Dutch liberal system" of the British Empire, which he asserts is an oligarchic financial consortium like that of medieval Venice, more like a "financial slime-mold" than a nation.[44] According to this theory, London financial circles protect themselves from competition by using techniques of "controlled conflict" first developed in Venice, and LaRouche attributes many wars in recent memory to this alleged activity by the British.[45]

According to Chip Berlet and Dennis King, LaRouche has always been stridently anti-British and has included Queen Elizabeth II, the British Royal Family, and others, in his list of conspirators who are said to control the world's political economy and the international drug trade.[37][38][46] According to Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, LaRouche is the "most illustrious" Anglophobe.[47] These views are reflected in three books authored by members of his organization:

• Dope, Inc. by David P. Goldman, Konstandinos Kalimtgis and Jeffrey Steinberg, 1978 (ISBN 0-918388-08-2): this book discusses the history of narcotics trafficking, beginning with the Opium War, and alleges that British interests have continued to dominate the field up to the modern era, for example through money laundering in British offshore banking colonies. The heart of the conspiracy, according to LaRouche, is the financial elite of the City of London.
• The Civil War and the American System by Allen Salisbury, 1979 (ISBN 0918388023): alleges that British interests encouraged and financed the secession movement and supported the Confederacy against the Union in the American Civil War, because they preferred North America to be a primitive agrarian economy that they could dominate through policies of free trade.
• The New Dark Ages Conspiracy by Carol White, 1980 (ISBN 0-933488-05-X): alleges that a group of British intellectuals led by Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells attempted to control scientific progress in order to keep the world backward and more easily managed by Imperialism. In this conspiracy theory, Wells wished Science to be controlled by some kind of priesthood and kept from the common man, while Russell wished to stifle it altogether by restricting it to a closed system of formal logic, that would prohibit the introduction of new ideas. This conspiracy also involved the promotion of the counterculture.

According to book critic and columnist Scott McLemee:[48]

The emergence of the [LaRouche Youth Movement] is all the more surprising, given that LaRouche himself has long since become the walking punchline to a very strange joke. He is known for some of the most baroque conspiracy theories ever put into circulation. Members of the LYM now deny that he ever accused the Queen of England [sic] of drug trafficking—though in fact, he did exactly that throughout the 1980s. At the time, he won admirers on the extreme right wing by denouncing Henry Kissinger as an agent of the KGB and calling for AIDS patients to be quarantined.[49]

In 2004, in a segment about the death of Jeremiah Duggan during a LaRouche Youth Movement cadre school in Wiesbaden in March 2003, BBC's Newsnight re-broadcast a BBC interview with LaRouche from 1980, in which he said about the Queen: "Of course she's pushing drugs. That is, in the sense of a responsibility, the head of a gang that is pushing drugs, she knows it's happening and she isn't stopping it."[50]

A 1998 editorial in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review cited a statement by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph that described LaRouche as the "publisher of a book that accuses the Queen of being the world's foremost drug dealer", characterising it as a "bit of black propaganda" and a "reference to the book Dope, Inc., ... which laid bare the role of the London-centered offshore financial institutions and allied intelligence services, in running the global drug trade, from the time of Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars against China."[51] Evans-Pritchard further said LaRouche had claimed that the Queen was involved in the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales.[52] The Executive Intelligence Review responded that Evans-Pritchard's article was "pure fiction", written in response to EIR reporter Jeff Steinberg's appearance on a British ITV television program about the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. In a brief part of an interview with Steinberg broadcast the following day by Channel 4's Dispatches, Steinberg said that while there was "no smoking gun proof" that Prince Philip asked British intelligence to assassinate Diana, he could not "rule out" the possibility.[53]

LaRouche's initial essay on the influence of Leo Strauss within neoconservatism and the George W. Bush administration, "The Essential Fraud of Leo Strauss", was written in March 2003.[54] In the same year, a series of pamphlets entitled "Children of Satan" later consolidated into a book, began appearing. LaRouche charges that there was a conspiracy dominated by what are called Straussians (followers of Leo Strauss) within the Bush administration, and that the dominant personality in this conspiracy was Dick Cheney (whose photo appears on the cover of the book.) LaRouche claimed that these conspirators deliberately misled the American public and the US Congress in order to initiate the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He writes that the Straussians created the Office of Special Plans in order to fabricate intelligence and bypass traditional intelligence channels.[55] According to LaRouche movement member Tony Papert, an important part of this theory is the LaRouchian analysis of the ideas of Leo Strauss which borrows heavily from the writings of Shadia Drury.[56]

Robert Bartley of The Wall Street Journal has condemned LaRouche's views on this subject, and says that it may have influenced other commentators who subsequently published a similar analysis, such as Seymour Hersh and James Atlas in their articles for The New York Times. Bartley quotes the assertion by LaRouche movement member Jeffrey Steinberg that a "cabal of Strauss disciples, along with an equally small circle of allied neo-conservative and Likudnik fellow-travelers" have plotted a "not-so-silent coup" using the September 11 attacks as a justification, similar to the Reichstag fire of 1933. Bartley complains that Strauss's "words are twisted from their meaning" in order to justify the theory.[57] Canadian journalist Jeet Heer has commented that LaRouche's followers "argue that Strauss is the evil genius behind the Republican Party".[58] Political science scholars Catherine and Michael Zuckert say that LaRouche's writings were the first to connect Strauss to neoconservatism and the Bush foreign policy and initiated the discussion of the topic, though the views about it changed as it percolated through to international journalism.[54]

The Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) published an article by Anton Chaitkin alleging that Prescott Bush "had persevered with his comrades in the old Auschwitz gang" and that "the smoldering bodies in Auschwitz followed logically upon the race propaganda festival which had been staged by the Harriman-Bush enterprise a decade earlier in New York."[59]

EIR published a book, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, in 1992, which said that "virtually all the Nazi trade with the United States was under the supervision of the Harriman-Bush interests", and that "Bush's family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results. ... The President's family fortune was largely a result of the Hitler project. The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father's partners in the Hitler project."[60][61]

In 2006, The Larouche Political Action Committee and EIR published "Larouche to Rumsfeld: FDR Defeated the Nazis, While Bushes Collaborated".

LaRouche blasted Rumsfeld, reminding him that it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who defeated Hitler and the Nazis, while many American right-wingers of the 1930s and '40s were promoters of Mussolini, Hjalmar Schacht, and Hermann Goering. And among the extreme American Fascists and Nazis of the period, there were some who openly sympathized with Adolf Hitler, by intention or practice. "Let us not ignore the role of George Shultz, the man behind the Bush Presidency, the power of Vice President Cheney, and the promotion of Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Even leading Republicans know Shultz to be an outright totalitarian, who has used the Bush Presidency to impose a 'Pinochet Model' of top-down dictatorship and radical free-market economics upon the United States. Shultz's promotion of the privatization of war, on the SS model, has been backed", LaRouche noted, "by Felix Rohatyn."[62]

LaRouche asserts a concept energy-flux density, which is the rate of energy use per person and per unit area of the economy as a whole. He asserts that an increase in energy flux density as a fundamental principle of the universe in general (contrary the second law of thermodynamics), and the appropriate destiny or goal for mankind in general. Consequently, policies or ideologies deemed to oppose this increase must be opposed and are foolish and dangerous: for example, moves to decrease energy consumption or improve efficiency, or to reduce consumption, or to reduce population; policies deemed increase it should be pursued: higher energy fuels such as nuclear fuels, higher populations, higher consumption.[95]

LaRouche says that nuclear and especially fusion power is necessary for the continued growth of civilization. He founded the Fusion Energy Foundation, which published the journal Fusion (later renamed to 21st Century Science & Technology). In his 1980 presidential platform, LaRouche promised 2500 nuclear power plants if elected.[93] In 2007 LaRouche reiterated his position, saying that only the "massive investment" in fission and fusion technology could prevent the "collapse of human existence on this planet".[96]

The movement has targeted opponents of nuclear power. Members of the Clamshell Alliance, non-violent protesters at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire, were called "terrorists" in 1977. Representatives of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party gave incriminating information to law enforcement about them,[97] which the FBI later determined had been fabricated, according to King.[98] During a large demonstration against the plant in 1989, an airplane carried a banner overhead which read, "Free LaRouche! Kill Satan – Open Seabrook".[99]

The movement blames cabalists, including then-congressman Dick Cheney, for inciting anti-nuclear sentiments during the late 1970s.[100] LaRouche sources described the incident at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island as sabotage, since they considered the control systems too sophisticated to fail by accident.[101]

21st Century Science & Technology's managing editor, Marjorie Mazel Hecht, called the campaign against DDT the "'mother' of all the environmental hoaxes".[102] Other articles compared anti-DDT campaigner Rachel Carson to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.[102] 21st century, which is produced by LaRouche supporters,[103] has published papers by entomologist J. Gordon Edwards, including one that urged the return of the insecticide DDT because he said it has "saved more millions of lives than any other man-made chemical".[104] Rogelio (Roger) Maduro, an associate editor, wrote that the ban on DDT was part of a plan to reduce the population and had caused the deaths of 40 million people via a resurgence of malaria.[105]

LaRouche was part of what was called the "ozone backlash".[106][107][108] 21st Century Science & Technology, which conducted what has been called "a very effective campaign of misinformation on the issue of ozone depletion",[109] published The Holes in the Ozone Scare in 1992.[110][111] The book, by LaRouche followers Rogelio Maduro and Ralf Schauerhammer, said that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were not destroying the ozone layer and opposed the proposal to ban them. It asserted that most chlorine in the atmosphere came from oceans, volcanoes, or other natural sources, and that CFCs were too heavy to reach the ozone layer.[103][108][109] It went on to say that even if the ozone layer were depleted there would not be any harmful effects from additional ultraviolet radiation.[112] It predicted that a ban would result in an additional 20 to 40 million deaths due to food spoilage.[113] Lewis DuPont Smith, an heir to the DuPont Chemical fortune and a LaRouche follower, told Maduro that the DuPont Company had schemed to ban CFCs, which they had invented but which had become generic, in order to replace them with more expensive proprietary compounds.[114][115] It has been called "probably the best known and most widely quoted text aimed at debunking the concept of ozone depletion".[116] Its assertions were repeated by Dixy Lee Ray in her 1993 book Environmental Overkill, by Rush Limbaugh, and by Ronald Bailey.[108][116] Some atmospheric scientists have said that it is based on poor research.[108]

At a 1994 shareholder's meeting, Smith called on Dupont to continue producing CFCs, saying there was no evidence of their harmfulness and that "This is nothing less than genocide".[117] By 1995 LaRouche was noted as calling the ozone hole a "myth".[118] Maduro's writings were the basis for the Arizona legislature's passage of a 1995 bill to allow the production of CFCs in the state despite federal and international prohibitions.[119]

The "Greenhouse effect" hoax: a world federalist plot, another book by Maduro, says that the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a plot by the British royal family and communists to undermine the U.S.[120][121] It was cited by science writer David Bellamy.[122]

LaRouche followers have promoted the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle and attacked Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, infiltrating showings to promote their viewpoints.[123][124] They have stood on street corners proclaiming the falsity of global warming,[125] and have protested Gore's appearances.[126]

21st Century Science & Technology has published papers by climate change contrarians including Zbigniew Jaworowski, Nils-Axel Mörner, Hugh Ellsaesser, and Robert E. Stevenson. A 2007 article by LaRouche science advisor Laurence Hecht suggested that the varying levels of cosmic rays, whose change is dependent on Earth's motion through the galaxy, has a larger effect on the climate than local factors such as greenhouse gases or solar and orbital cycles.[127] Christopher Monckton was praised as the leading spokesman of the "global warming swindle" in the introduction to an Executive Intelligence Review interview with him in 2009, but he was also considered to have a relatively limited view of the cabal behind the hoax.[128] A movement newsletter says that environmental groups seek to "force ... CO2 emissions agreements down the throats of governments as a way of finishing off the nation-state system" on behalf of synarchist networks.[100]

During the 1980s, LaRouche and his supporters made comments that were seen as anti-gay.[70][143] A LaRouche-affiliated newspaper wrote that demonstrators against the LaRouche-sponsored AIDS initiative in California were from the "lower sexual classes."[144]

British journalist Roger Boyes wrote, "Anti-Semitism is at the core of LaRouche's conspiracy theories, which he adapts to modern events -most recently the war in Iraq."[133] Daniel Levitas wrote in 1995 that LaRouche "has been consistent in creating and elaborating conspiracy theories that contain a strong dose of antisemitism".[145] As an example of LaRouche's alleged antisemitism, Dennis King cited LaRouche's statement (under the pen name L. Marcus) in The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach (1973), "Jewish culture ... is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim."[146]

The charge of antisemitism in the LaRouche network resurfaced in the media in 2004 in accounts of the death of a Jewish student, Jeremiah Duggan, who had been attending a Schiller Institute event in Germany. British press reports described LaRouche as "the American leader of a sect with a fascist and antisemitic ideology".[147]

LaRouche denied over a long period that his movement is antisemitic.[148] In 2006, LaRouche said, "Religious and racial hatred, such as anti-Semitism [is] the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today."[149] Debra Freeman, a spokesperson for LaRouche, told a newspaper in 2010 that, "Hitler was a lunatic, but his policies were based principally on economic policy and staying in power. We mourn the loss of six million Jews and countless others."[150]

LaRouche's critics have said he is a "disguised anti-Semite", in that he takes the classical antisemitic conspiracy theory and substitutes the word "Zionist" for the word "Jew", and ascribes the classical antisemitic caricature of the "scheming Jew" to particular Jewish individuals and groups of Jews, rather than to the Jews as a whole.[37][38][39][151] "Modern Zionism was not created by Jews, but was a project developed chiefly by Oxford University", LaRouche says. He says, "Zionism is not Judaism."[152] In 1978, the same year LaRouche's article cited The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the LaRouche group published Dope, Inc.: Britain's Opium War against the U.S., which cited the Protocols and defended its authenticity, likening the "Elders of Zion" to the Rothschild banking family, the British Royal family, and the Italian Mafia, and the Israeli Mossad, General Pike, and the B'nai B'rith. (Dope, Inc.) Later editions left out cites to The Protocols. This is the genesis of the claim that LaRouche has said Queen Elizabeth runs drugs. When asked by an NBC reporter in 1984 about the Queen and drug running, LaRouche replied, "Of course she's pushing drugs ... that is in a sense of responsibility: the head of a gang that is pushing drugs; she knows it's happening and she isn't stopping it."[153]

Chip Berlet argues that LaRouche indirectly expresses antisemitism through the use of "coded language" and by attacking neoconservatives.[151] Dennis King maintains, for example, that words like "British" were really code words for 'Jew.'"[154] Other critics of LaRouche believe that LaRouche's anti-British statements disparage the British system rather than the Jewish religion. Laird Wilcox and John George write that "Dennis King goes to considerable lengths to paint LaRouche as a neo-Nazi, even engaging in a little conspiracy-mongering of his own."

Manning Marable of Columbia University wrote in a 1997 column that LaRouche had a "long attempted to destroy and manipulate black leaders, political organizations and the black church".[155][156]

During LaRouche's slander suit against NBC in 1984, Roy Innis, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, took the stand for LaRouche as a character witness, stating under oath that LaRouche's views on racism were "consistent with his own." Asked whether he had seen any indication of racism in LaRouche's associates, he replied that he had not.[157] Innis received criticism from many blacks for having testified on LaRouche's behalf.[158][159]

The African-American civil-rights leader James Bevel was LaRouche's running mate in the 1992 presidential election, and in the mid-1990s, the LaRouche movement entered into an alliance with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.[160] Another LaRouche movement member with a record in civil-rights issues is Amelia Boynton Robinson, who is vice-president of the Schiller Institute, a LaRouche organization; she has described the movement as following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr.: "Mr. And Mrs. LaRouche built a movement, taking up where Dr. King had left off. They realized ... there must be an universal image of mankind, which transcends all racial differences and barriers."[161]