Politics & Government

LaRouche PAC Activists Make Par-Troy Stop

Even without a candidate in this area, the LaRouche movement came to town to warn Parsippanians to avoid Obama and Romney.

It must be election season. 

If you make a stop at the on Route 46, you just may see a sign featuring President Obama wearing a Hitler-like mustache. That poster, plus other anti-Obama objets d'art, was on view Tuesday at a table manned by supporters of the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee.

"It's not a party," said self-described activist John Scialdone, who hails from Hackensack but travels across the state to reach voters. "We are a movement."

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Indeed, it is a long-standing movement of an estimated few thousand people across the nation who support the work of Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche, whom his supporters liken to a modern-day Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is a former Marxist who ran unsuccessfully for president eight times between 1976 to 2004. (He usually ran as an anti-Democrat Democrat, though once, LaRouche ran on the Labor Party ticket.)

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In 1988, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison after being convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations. LaRouche was paroled in 1994.

Over the years, he has been accused of supporting fascism, racism and anti-Semitism, charges the man continues to reject publicly. 

Now 89, he still speaks out against both the Democratic and Republican parties. His followers do the heavy lifting, though, traveling from town to town to spread the LaRouche message, which encompasses national economic protectionism and government control of  exchange rates, capital and currency, much the way FDR revived the nation after the U.S. depression in the 1930s.

"We support restoring Glass-Steagall," which came into being during Roosevelt's presidency, he said.

The Glass-Steagall Act was the 1933 law that established the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, imposed banking reforms and limited commercial bank securities activities and affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms. Many of its provisions were repealed in 1999, which, according to Scialdone, paved the way for the banking meltdown of 2007.

LaRouche and his supporters did not agree with the bailout plan that prevented the banking and auto industries from collapse.

And so, Scialdone and a colleague positioned themselves outside the Parsippany Post Office to "educate" township residents on economic matters, including a move to revive Glass-Steagall.

The pair called out to people walking in or out of the Parsippany post office in the hopes of leading them into a discussion of the issues of the day. 

On their table, among the various PAC position papers, were campaign postcards for Diane Sare, who is running in the 5th District June 5 primary election for Congress as a LaRouche Democrat.

Told that he is stumping in the 11th Congressional District, Scialdone shrugged.

"We need to get the word out far and wide against Obama and Romney," he said. "They work for the same people."

The activist alluded to the one-world concept of globabilzation, a concept that does not find favor in the world LaRouche envisions, and brought up Europe's financial troubles, which are hitting Greece and Spain particularly hard.

Scialdone said similar problems could cripple the U.S. financial system if Americans continue with the status quo. To that end, he is advising voters to turn away from both Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Obama in the upcoming primary and in the November general election.

"This is not about left and right," he said, and it is true that LaRouche worked with former President Reagan in the 1980s and later endorsed Sen. John Kerry in his Democratic bid for the White House in 2004.

Still, Scialdone did not mention a candidate for president that he or other LaRouche supporters would back. He said the PAC is focusing on its national slate of five congressional candidates covering New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, Washington state and Texas.

The slate's shared platform includes impeaching the president, reviving Glass-Steagall, disempowering the British empire, investing in space exploration and restoring the nation's economic climate by instituting a North American Water and Power Alliance.

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