- Meet the Candidates - - Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. - $Economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche has been a highly controversial international public figure for two decades, because of his opposition to neo-Malthusian economic and population policies; his insistent campaign for global monetary reform based on equity for the Third World; and his role in exposing the powerful financial interests which control international drug-trafficking. As of March 9, 1992, LaRouche had been held as a political prisoner of the Bush administration for 1,133 days, serving a 15-year sentence at Rochester, Minnesota federal prison as a result of one of the most shocking judicial railroads in U.S. history. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights announced on February 7, 1992 that it is investigating the LaRouche case as a possible violation of human rights by the U.S. government. LaRouche was born on September 8, 1922 in Rochester, New Hampshire. He was educated in the Massachusetts public school system and attended Northeastern University from 1940-42 and from 1946-47. Mr. LaRouche served in the China-India-Burma theater during World War II. He has been employed as an industrial consultant to footwear manufacturers and other industrial concerns. Mr. LaRouche was married on December 29, 1977 to German political leader and author Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Mrs. LaRouche is the founder and director of the Schiller Institute, and the founder of the international Club of Life. She is a published authority on the work of 15th century churchman and philosopher Nicolaus of Cusa, and 18th century German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, who repeatedly treated the theme of the American Revolution. - The LaRouche-Riemann Method - LaRouche describes himself as an economist specializing in physical economy, and lists as a leading accomplishment of his adult life his contributions to the advancement of economic science. He is the discoverer (1952) of what is today known as the LaRouche-Riemann method of economic analysis, the most accurate method of economic forecasting in existence. His work in economics is an advancement of the American System of political-economy (of Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, and Matthew and Henry Carey). The central feature of his contribution to economic science is the successful application of work of leading 19th century mathematical physicist Bernhard Riemann, to solve the problem of correlating rates of technological progress with rates of economic growth: the LaRouche-Riemann method. He is the author of the 1984 textbook, {So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics?} and the 1992 trilogy {The Science of Christian Economy}, written while in prison, among hundreds of other book,s magazine articles, and economic policy proposals for governments. In 1974, LaRouche founded and became an editor of the hard-hitting international weekly news magazine, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR). EIR has established a reputation among governments and business circles in various parts of the world as one of the more influential publications in its price-class ($396 per year), and the news organization behind EIR is rated by some specialists as among the most outstanding private intelligence capabilities in the publishing field. In 1976, LaRouche was among the founding members of the Fusion Energy Foundation, a nonprofit scientific foundation which lobbied for the rapid development of nuclear energy technologies, a revitalization of the space program, and increased American participation in experimental work on the frontiers of science. LaRouche was a frequent contributor to the popular {Fusion} magazine, until that publication was forcibly closed down by the U.S. Department of Justice in April 1987. He was a founding editor of {New Solidarity}, a mass-circulation weekly newspaper, also closed by the DoJ in April 1987. In 1977, Mr. LaRouche first publicly proposed the U.S. crash-basis development of anti-ballistic missile systems based on new physical principles, what later became the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). In the months leading up to President Reagan's March 23, 1983 announcement of the SDI, LaRouche and associates collaborated with the White House National Security Council in formulation of the policy. - - The LaRouche Candidates' Movement - - LaRouche ran for the presidency in 1976, 1980, 1984, and 1988, and campaigned for Virginia's 10th congressional district seat in 1990. In 1986--having already announced for the White House run of 1988--he led a slate of more than 2,000 LaRouche Democrats in local, state and federal elections. On March 18, 1986, LaRouche associates won Illinois Democratic primary elections for the posts of lieutenant governor and secretary of state. Other candidates in 1986 primaries and elections received between 15% and 25% of the vote in a number of states, as an average of winners and losers. LaRouche names as a leading enemy the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) and its collaborators within the U.S. Department of Justice and federal executive--a combination he has nicknamed the ``Get LaRouche Task Force.'' This animus developed following an April 1975 visit by LaRouche to the nation of Iraq, at the invitation of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party. In consultations with Arab leaders, LaRouche proposed a Middle East peace plan based on Arab-Israeli cooperation for the development of the region. En route back to the United States from this trip, LaRouche proposed his International Development Bank program for global monetary reform and development at a press conference in Bonn, West Germany. Mr. LaRouche later met with Israeli leader Abba Eban in New York, to discuss the peace plan. In 1978, LaRouche commissioned the book {Dope, Inc.}, which exposed the ``citizens above suspicion'' on the financial side of the global drug traffic, and traced ADL ties to the international drug cartel. A best-seller, Dope, Inc. is now in its third edition. LaRouche has also been associated with the National Anti-Drug Coalition; the National Democratic Policy Committee, a bipartisan political action committee; the Club of Life, the leading institutional opponent of the neo-Malthusian Club of Rome; the Schiller Institute, an international think tank; and the International Caucus of Labor Committees, a philosophical association on the model of American founding father Benjamin Franklin's ``junto'' organization. - National Goals for America - LaRouche has emphasized the need for a return to classical art, music, science, and culture as an antidote to today's prevailing moral degeneration and cultural pessimism. He has outlined three goals for our nation: 1) eradicating poverty across the globe; 2) establishing a durable peace among nations; and 3) colonization of the Moon, Mars, and the solar system beyond. To produce the citizens of the 21st century--who can meet these goals, as young Americans of the 1960s met the goal of landing a man on the Moon--LaRouche urges an immediate return to the classical curriculum which trained the geniuses of the Renaissance, and an end to cultural relativism and environmentalism in our nation's schoolrooms. During February and March of 1992, in two national television broadcasts and a series of 11 full-page ads in the {Washington Times}, LaRouche presented to American voters his unique program to reverse today's deepening economic depression, with the creation of 6 million new jobs within the first year of his presidency. LaRouche's approach features the reshaping of the Federal Reserve System into a new National Bank of the United States, to direct $300 billion dollars of low-interest credit each year into desperately needed government-funded infrastructure projects of water management, transportation, energy production, health care, and education services. Jobs created on these projects, and spinoffs in private industry, will put 6 million Americans back to work in 1993, says LaRouche. In conjunction with this economic recovery program at home, LaRouche urges deepened economic collaboration with the western Europe and the nations now emerging from under the yoke of communism in large-scale development programs to end the famine and disease now engulfing the Third World. The Bretton Woods economic system which has enslaved the developing sector and created economic crisis in the West, and the Versailles system upon it was based, says LaRouche, are rotten beyond repair, and must be replaced with a just, new world economic order. - The Reverend James L. Bevel - The Reverend James L. Bevel, 55, who has agreed to run as Lyndon LaRouche's vice presidential candidate (see article, p. 1), is a prominent name in the history of the American civil rights movement, in the history of the movement against the Vietnam War, and other milestones of 20th-century American political life. Born Oct. 19, 1936, in Itta Bena, Miss., he is an ordained Baptist minister, having attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tenn. from 1957 to 1961. He has pastored churches in Tennessee, Illinois, Ohio, and New York. In his theological studies, and later as a minister, the Rev. Bevel came to the understanding of Christianity as what he characterizes as the ``science of human consciousness,'' underlying and mandating each and every individual citizen to take responsibility for the human community overall. It was on the basis of that outlook that he came to non-violence, and came to assume responsibility for the pivotal role in the civil rights Movement of the 1960s. At the same time, he says he came to see expressed in the Declaration of Independence the fullest sociological manifestation of scientific human consciousness, the goal toward which all people must strive. It was those two concepts, he says, that formed--and form--the twin bases of his thinking, social action, and educational and economic development theories and processes. - Non-Violence - As a young pastor of a congregation, the Rev. Bevel was introduced to Leo Tolstoy's ``The Kingdom of God is Within You'' and Mahatma Gandhi's ``My Experiment with Truth,'' and as a result, his ministry turned in a radically different direction as he became involved with a non-violent study group in Nashville in 1959. In 1960, he became a leader of the sit-in movement in Nashville; from that day forward, he says, he was involved in consistently applying the theology of the Sermon on the Mount to social problems and personal needs alike. It was under his chairmanship of the Nashville Student Movement that the Freedom Rides were continued--the Freedom Rides which led to the ending of segregation in interstate transportation. As a member of the Student Nonviolent National Steering Committee, the Rev. Bevel assumed the responsibility for the Mississippi Project, one of three projects being set up in 1961-62 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the other two being the Albany Project and the Selma Project. It was his work in, and his success in, these non-violent projects that led Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to ask him to function as the Mississippi field organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and, later, as the director of the SCLC's Direct Action. It was while serving in this capacity that the Rev. Bevel developed the Children's Marches in Birmingham and initiated the world-famous March on Washington in 1963. After the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, he proposed, developed, and executed the Alabama Right to Vote Movement, which culminated in the Selma campaign and the March on Montgomery in 1965. Those movements led, in turn, to the passage of the 1965 federal Civil Rights Voting Act. Wanting to test the theory of non-violence in a Northern context, he developed the Tenant Unions and the Open Housing Movement in Chicago in 1965 and 1966, which led to a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw racial segregation in housing. He had previously challenged the non-violent movement to oppose the use of violence in foreign policy. As a result, in 1966, he became the director of the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Under his directorship, the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam produced the largest demonstration in the history of the United States to that date, at the United Nations building in New York, on April 15, 1967. Bevel was the director of Non-Violent Education in the Poor People's Campaign, and was present with Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. on April 4, 1968, when King was shot. - Leaving the SCLC - His insistence on a fair trial for accused Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray led to his departure from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. About the same time, Bevel was also attempting to get the SCLC to fight against the buildup of militarism around the world, and to fight for the scientific education of American children. Not finding support in the SCLC leadership for his ideas for a fair trial for Ray, or for a worldwide citizens' movement to fight the military buildup and to fight for scientific education for all American children, he was voted out of the organization; thereupon, he attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School to further his theological studies. Discovering that psychology and psychoanalysis were not sufficient to address the problems of mental disorder created by segregation and oppression, Bevel developed the Man Non-Violent Clinic in Baltimore, Md., to study and rectify the psychological damage done to both European-Americans and African-Americans by the practice of slavery and racial segregation. It was out of this study that Bevel developed the Human and Community Development Institute in Nashville, Tenn., and the Organic Farm Project in Hiram, Ohio. In 1984, Bevel ran for Congress in the 7th Congressional District in Illinois, introducing the Precinct Council as a means for character, institutional, and economic development. Running as a Republican, he received 33% of the vote in a predominantly Democratic district where Republicans normally receive 8-10% of the vote. After the murder of a young basketball star in Chicago, Bevel developed the SEED (Students for Education and Economic Development) Process, to give inner-city children a tool that is more powerful than gang membership. He has recently been elected as the Director of the Bettis Academy in Trenton, S.C., where he is developing a comprehensive educational and economic development curriculum that will leave students economically independent and institutionally sovereign. ---- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com