We’re gonna pimp slap Dick Cheney!” says political activist Steve Brenden, distributing flyers beneath a large Monterey Pine at SF State University. Buses and trains rumble by while students hustle to class. “Because this guy’s making a mess of this world, and the Democrats are just bending over and taking it!”

Brendan is one of the persistent followers of perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche Jr. Since the 1970s, LaRouche has preyed on naive idealists, twisting their passions to his purposes. By funneling them into his mysterious hydra of profit and non-profit corporations, he fuels his bevy of publications and lines his pockets.

LaRouche was convicted of tax evasion and $30 million in credit card fraud in 1989 – followers don’t DENY this, but say the charge was conspiracy to commit mail fraud. A 15-year sentence didn’t stop LaRouche’s quest for the presidency – he ran in 1992 from behind bars. Released on parole in 1994, he still somehow, for private reasons, continues to run for the White House. He has raised millions of dollars and holds the record for failed campaigns: Eight. Oddly, his followers maintain a zero-press policy.

Here, for your understanding and protection, is the basic recruitment technique used by LaRouche and his minions:

Step One: Find a rube/sucka.

Step Two: Ask him or her a prepared question like, “Have you heard about LaRouche’s plan to turn our nation’s debt into credit?” and flash a newspaper or a colorful pamphlet.

Step Three: When your target stammers, “Uh, no. What do you mean?” reply with a statement deriding the unpopular political party of the day like, “Bush and Cheney are selling our country to mercenary corporations!” Show them a graph and explain that LaRouche has a fifty-year plan to avoid “the oncoming crisis,” then CHANGE THE SUBJECT. Keep them confused!

Step Four: Repeat steps two and three as necessary until your mark, although extremely baffled, has heard enough shit-talking about Bush and Cheney to think that you’re “pretty swell.”
Step Five: Get them on your mailing list and invite them to a weekly meeting. Make sure you get their phone number so you can call and remind them about meetings.

“They will call,” says Walter Crasshole, a local DJ. “Repeatedly. One girl sang ‘The 12 Treasons Dick Cheney Gave to Me,’ on my answering machine, set to the tune of ‘The 12 Days of Christmas.’ “
Weekly meetings in the Bay Area are held above a Mercedes repair shop in Oakland. Odd political posters from the 2004 campaign adorn what little wall space is not covered by floor-to-ceiling stacks of LaRouche pamphlets. There’s also a bust of Beethoven – LaRouche has a kind of obsession with German culture.

Meetings are a longer version of the street recruitment method, with veteran recruits backing up the meeting leader. They laugh heartily at lukewarm jokes and field prepared questions like some damned info-mercial. Abstract solutions are presented, like the need to save America’s manufacturing industry. But there is rarely a clear conclusion.

Once drawn in heavily, recruits are encouraged to quit their jobs and/or drop out of school. “I dropped out nine months ago,” says Brent Bedford at SF State, as other recruiters sing a German choral in the background. “I was going to Cal State Northridge. It was cool. It was fun. But it just was a fantasy; it wasn’t real.”

New recruits are put to the task of field organizing – slinging LaRouche pamphlets at schools and airports. They solicit campaign donations and offer subscriptions to LaRouche’s many publications. You can receive Executive Intelligence Weekly, an online newsletter, for only $25 a year.

After a couple of years of this hazing they are given a job at one of LaRouche’s many organizations. Followers have traditionally wound up working for thousands of dollars less than they would be paid elsewhere.

“To sacrifice part of such income levels for a purpose related to a world-historical purpose,” said LaRouche in a 1981 financial report, “is morally acceptable, and worthwhile.”

LaRouche, however, keeps his own motives well hidden. Independently wealthy, he lurks in the wings like a political bogeyman, sometimes seeming liberal, sometimes ultra-conservative. He runs on the Democratic ticket but was once an unofficial advisor to Ronald Reagan. And his actions frequently benefit the corporate capitalists he claims to fight, inciting bickerment amongst the working class. As he was quoted as saying by one of his own publications, “...‘left’ is sometimes a name for ‘right’.”

CONTACT DEVINE AT SSDEVINE@SFSU.EDU