US LABOR PARTY, PART IV

Shortly after Lyndon LaRouche returned from a visit to Baghdad, Iraq's capital, he embarked on a plan of cooperation with America's Far Right. This marked his first step breaking through the thin political ice between the Lunatic Left and Raving Right.

LaRouche had been invited to Baghdad by officials of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party. Could they have actually taken him seriously? Perhaps they advised him, in jest, "Turn Right," where he might be more effective to their interests.

Whatever may have occurred in Baghdad, LaRouche returned with a new plan. It began with a "Security Memorandum" to Party lieutenants which said, in effect, that the time had come to cooperate with the Right "to defeat this common enemy" (the Brits and the Rockefellers).

Security Staffer Scott Thompson was assigned the task of coordinating the operation. In this capacity, he made the acquaintance of Willis Carto, owner of Liberty Lobby.

In the March 3oth, 1979 issue of National Review, former Labor Party member Gregory Rose wrote: "Thompson met regularly with Carto through 1975 and 1976. Sources close to the Labor Party report that these meetings centered on join anti-Rockefeller actions and Carto's use of his connections to procure funding for these operations. These sources further report that Carto's Liberty Lobby was a conduit for extremist right-wing contributions to LaRouche's campaign for the Presidency, including part of more than $90,000 used to purchase half-hour prime time commercials on NBC on the eve of the 1976 election."

A further result of the Thompson-Carto relationship was the placement of Labor Party advertisements in The Spotlight, Liberty Lobby's weekly tabloid. Favorable reviews of Labor Party material began appearing in Spotlight.

Former Spotlight staffer Vincent Drosdik told me: "We on the paper's staff were always disturbed about Carto's love affair with the Labor Party." Drosdik contemptuously referred to the Labor Party as "a bunch of idiots even more crackpot than Liberty Lobby."

The transition became final in 1976 when LaRouche announced the Labor Party's renunciation of Marxism and declared that henceforth the Party would be a patriotic organization in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin.

Overnight, the masthead of New Solidarity was changed from "Newspaper of the USLP" to "Non-partisan National Newspaper of the American System." Stories in New Solidarity actually began to defend the CIA.

This was Larouche "going respectable" (or trying); attempting to overcome the embarrassment of his Marxist/Trotskyist pasty. Today he describes himself as "American as apple pie."

Konstandinos Kalimtgis a.k.a. Costa Axios, the Party chairman, tried to explain LaRouche's new philosophy to Washington Post reporter Paul Valentine: "We are socialist, but first we must establish an industrial capitalist republic and rid this country of the Rockefeller anti-industrial, anti-technology, monetarist dictatorship of today."