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LaRouche Interview on
WMJI-FM Radio in Cleveland, Ohio

On Oct. 27, 2004, Lyndon LaRouche was a guest on the popular radio talk show "Lanigan and Malone" on WMJI-FM, Magic 105.7, in Cleveland, Ohio for a 15-minute interview. Below is the transcript:

Host: Lyndon LaRouche is with us. Good morning, Lyndon.

LaRouche: Good morning.

Host: How are you?

LaRouche: Well, I'm frisky, I think.

Host: Are you frisky? Well, frisky's a good word at this point. How old are you?

LaRouche: I'm 82.

Host: 82 years old. Unbelievable! You're still going strong, and you still love it, don't you?

LaRouche: Yup. Well, I do my job.

Host: What is your job?

LaRouche: Well, my job is as an economist, and I've become a political figure. I'm also, by virtue of that, I'm also a philosopher.

Host: A philosopher, now. Okay.

You're in town also to address a town hall meeting tonight, 7 o'clock at the Wyndham Hotel, is that right?

LaRouche: That's right.

Host: Are you a Democrat or a Republican?

LaRouche: I'm a Democrat. I've been a Democrat, pretty much all the way through.

Host: All right.

LaRouche: I'm a Roosevelt product.

Host: A Roosevelt product? What's the first time you ran for President?

LaRouche: Oh, it was 1976; I ran on an independent ticket. After that, I've always run as a Democrat.

Host: I think a lot of people have an image of Lyndon LaRouche as a third-party candidate—at least, I did. I certainly did. And you really were running as a Democrat.

LaRouche: That's pretty obvious. I never pretended otherwise.

Host: I don't doubt that, sir. If you said "Lyndon LaRouche," I would have said, "Oh yeah. One of the third-party candidates." You know, a lot of it's perception, I think, Lyndon. And the perception was the same—that he's a—. And you're not on a ticket any more, right?

LaRouche: No. I'm supporting Kerry, at this point.

Host: But, in the old days, did you not appear as a third-party candidate on most of the ballots?

LaRouche: No.

Host: Okay, 'cause I can remember going in and seeing Democrat, Republican, and Lyndon LaRouche listed. And I'm not talking about the primaries. If you said, "Name a candidate outside the Republican and Democrat, that was always there," I got a feeling half the public would go, "Lyndon LaRouche."

LaRouche: Well, that's probably true, because I had a certain extensive personal following, extending to a few million people. And that's had an impact. And of course, the international, the major press, which was organized pretty much against me from actually before I became a candidate—the New York Times was the first—had spread a lot of propaganda. And therefore, people were hit by the mass-media propaganda, rather than the actuality.

Host: What was the biggest lie they ever told about you?

LaRouche: Oh, I suppose—about everything! I don't think they've missed a bet.

Host: Give an example of some of the things they lied about.

LaRouche: Oh, they would call me an "anti-Semite," which I was not. That was because I was negotiating a peace effort between the Palestinians and Israelis, back in 1975.

Host: Okay, you were working to make peace in that part of hte world, and that made you an anti-Semite?

LaRouche: Well, of course, I was allied with the Labor Party, Israeli Labor Party people, not with the right wing. And the right wing in the United States—the opponents of the Labor Party—were pretty much against me, because at that time, even though I got along with some of the people there on the right side, my affinities, I was a follower, in a sense, of Nahum Goldmann, in terms of my views of what Israeli policy should be.

Host: Where'd you grow up? Where're you from?

LaRouche: I was born in Rochester, N.H. I was raised most of the time after that in Lynn, Mass.—Boston area. Moved to New York, and then, because of the entanglements with the Reagan Administration, I moved down to Virginia.

Host: Didn't people call you a communist, at one point?

LaRouche: They've call me all kinds of things. Anything they thought would fly and have a damaging effect. They're pretty much afraid of me. It wasn't ordinary people. You know, I've stepped on the toes of some financial interests very hard. They thought I was a credible threat, and when you step on the toes of certain financial interests, they react very nastily. They send their thugs after you.

Host: You probably did find out, though, the many years you've been doing this, exactly how mean it can get out there, and what kind of power people can throw at you to try to destroy you.

LaRouche: I know! I'm well aware of it. But, you know, if you're in a war, you don't complain about the fact that the enemy has bad habits, or bad breath.

Host: Yeah. I guess not. All right. You're supporting Kerry now. In all areas? Are there areas where the two of you would differ, big-time?

LaRouche: Well, it's not all areas. I'm supporting Kerry as a Presidential candidate, along with Edwards.

Host: Okay, what areas do you find him not to your liking?

LaRouche: Well, the point is, he's not made himself clear—even though he did what he did at Wilkes-Barre, for example: He came out for an FDR approach, which of course is where we agree. The question is, what does he mean? Now, he's going to face a situation, if he's elected, very soon, where the banking circles of Europe and the United States are going to come down on him hard, and say, "Get away from LaRouche." Because they're going to cut a deal, an austerity deal for people in the United States and Europe, and they're going to support that austerity measure. In fact, they're already doing it in Europe. And I'm going to say "No." I'm going to say, we do the FDR approach.

Host: When you say "austerity," what kind of—what are you talking about?

LaRouche: Well, in the extreme, I'm talking about what led into Hitler in Europe, and what Hoover did to the people of the United States, at the time of the 1929 crash, until Roosevelt got in there.

Host: You're talking about a Great Depression?

LaRouche: Sure. We're in for something much worse than a Great Depression. We can solve the problem, but we've got to take the right approach to it.

Host: So, we would go from the most powerful and highest lifestyle on Earth, to a poor nation?

LaRouche: I don't know; we could. We could go to a very poor nation, but I guess most of the world would go there, too.

Host: Now, you're saying this is only if Kerry gets elected? Or would they put this on Bush, too?

LaRouche: No, this has been going on for some time. We've been headed in this direction for about 40 years, or so. And, we finally have to pay.

Host: My question is: Is it Bush—will they do that to him too, or just Kerry?

LaRouche: Oh, Bush will get the same treatment. Bush will do it willingly. I don't think he knows what he's doing, but he'll do what they tell him.

Host: Okay. Why hasn't he done it already?

LaRouche: He's done pretty much in that direction. He's ruined—we're bankrupt as a nation, as a result of the measures he took. We could've—we were already in trouble before he was elected, but as I forecast in January of 2001, because the man is so dumb, he was going to obviously worsen the depression, which he's done quite nicely, and he probably will face things like some kind of a crisis, like a terrorist incident.

Host: Okay. Well, we had a terrorist incident. Uh, the war in Iraq: Did you feel that was a total mistake?

LaRouche: That was—it was a piece of absurdity which was pushed by Cheney. I don't know if Bush knew what he was doing, but Cheney was pushing it. He intended to do it. He was not going to let anybody stop us from going to war in Iraq. He didn't care what the issues were; he was going to war with Iraq.

Host: Why?

LaRouche: Because that's been his program since 1991.

Host: Okay, even if it was his program, Lyndon, I'm still trying to figure out why. What was the purpose of it? Was it just that he didn't like Iraq, or what's the purpose?

LaRouche: No. The purpose—Cheney's policy, since 1991, was, he argued within the first Bush Administration, against the opinion of the leading members of that Administration. While he was Secretary of Defense, he argued that the United States should adopt the policy of preventive nuclear war, using this in terms of the failure, the collapse of the Soviet Union—that we had no more rival, therefore we would use a nuclear arsenal, an enhanced nuclear arsenal, to go beat up around the world, and create an Anglo-American empire. That was his policy, and has been his policy, up to the present time.

Host: An Anglo-American empire?

LaRouche: He and his wife's buddy, Tony Blair.

Host: Which sounds to me a great deal like Hitler sounds.

LaRouche: It moves in that direction. I'd say that Cheney may be dumber than Hitler, but he leans in the same direction.

Host: Okay, we're talking to Lyndon LaRouche. He's giving us his views here.

Are you in favor, or opposed to the Electoral College?

LaRouche: Oh, I'm—to keep it. The Electoral College is fine. It's what's being done to it recently that's bad.

Host: You mean the Supreme Court?

LaRouche: The Supreme Court, I think we should get rid of that right-wing in the Supreme Court. That's one of the biggest problems we have right now.

Host: There's gonna be, probably, in the next four years, resigning, I would assume, from the Supreme Court, which makes this election even more important to a lot of people, right?

LaRouche: Exactly.

Host: So, you'll be speaking tonight, 7 o'clock, town hall meeting, at the Wyndham Hotel—it's open to the public I assume, right?

LaRouche: Precisely.

Host: To basically endorse Kerry, and to get people out—

LaRouche: People know I've endorsed Kerry—

Host: Right. But—the wrong word to use. To simply support and promote Kerry. We're getting close to the end of this election. This is going to be awful close. Do you think we'll know who the President is, come the next day?

LaRouche: No, I don't. I think, we're so close, we're within one to two, or three Electoral College votes of the decision. It could go either way. Florida is crucial. Arkansas is crucial. Otherwise, Kerry has enough support to come close to winning. He needs a couple of other states in order to get that one-to-three Electoral College votes margin out of the way.

Host: What could be interesting: If Colorado went ahead and approved this dividing the Electoral College votes, they would have to change the way they're gonna go, and those would be challenged immediately by law, to say you can't actually do that—that could hold it up even longer.

LaRouche: Well, it could happen. But, there are a lot of unknowns here, because we're not dealing with the election by the rules. We're dealing with people who are prepared to break the rules.

Host: On both sides.

LaRouche: Not so much on both sides. No, I think from the standpoint of Kerry's side, it is advisable not to break the rules. If you want to go in and re-establish confidence of the American people in law, in lawfulness, at a time that you're facing a great crisis, you don't want to fool around with the real rules. I think that Cheney is the kind of guy who would really break the rules, if he were frustrated.

Host: You think these people will do almost anything to stay in power, then?

LaRouche: Absolutely.

Host: Okay, Lyndon LaRouche. Lyndon, good to talk to you this morning. Tonight, 7 o'clock, Wyndham Hotel. 82 years old, and still got strong opinions, and going strong. Lyndon, it's great to talk to you this morning.

LaRouche: Thank you.

Host: Thank you so much.

LaRouche: Have fun.