LaRouche PAC offers Kool-Aid to Hopkins students

Representatives of the LaRouche Political Action Committee paid a visit to Homewood on Tuesday, setting up camp at the corner of North Charles Street and East 34th in a well-traveled spot in front of Charles Market. Though physically unobtrusive-their exhibit consisted of a table littered with one to two dozen packets of hand-outs-it can only be said to be politically provocative, decorated with their defining Obama-Hitler Mustache poster and a number of others on subjects ranging from impending nuclear holocaust to the necessity of presidential impeachment in order to save the global economy.
At arm's length, history does not paint a particularly bright picture of the LaRouche movement.  Formed in the turbulence of the 1960s as a conglomeration of counterculture student groups, it spent its early years as a Marxist union bent quite literally on world domination. This did not go quite as planned, and it instead became an organization with the sole purpose of advancing the ideas of its namesake: Lyndon LaRouche, a longtime political activist whose agenda is, for lack of better words, unusual to the point of being wholly indescribable and unclassifiable. Suffice it to say, the LaRouche movement has stuck around since then, their activities now largely defined by demonstrations, information sessions and unsuccessfully running hundreds of candidates for public office.
So in the midst of all this, what do they stand for? Well, that's a pretty good question. Having chatted with the two gentlemen representing the movement, I can only offer some conjecture; I was left with a mixture of fascination, bemusement and utter terror. Their answer seems to be everything and nothing. Economically, they make a great deal out of their support for the reenactment of Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and created a separation between investment banking and commercial banks.
This seems sensible at first blush, but is confounded by their notion that repeal is contingent upon impeachment of the "Obama dictator." Toss in their advocacy for a return to the gold standard, a belief that all nations (stressing China and Russia) would cooperate happily and completely with global financial reform, and a mortifying fear of the evil and manipulative British Empire, and one is left to wonder if their agenda really makes any sense.
That is to say nothing of their political policy, which currently revolves around the impeachment of President Obama not only to save the global economy but also to prevent an impending nuclear holocaust. To paraphrase the LaRouche movement, this holocaust is the work of the drug-dealing Queen Elizabeth II and manipulative Prince Philip, and the United States is but a puppet in the hands of the all-powerful British Empire. Removing Obama, according to their theory, would prevent the British from continuing their campaign of global domination, which, left unabated, would render the earth an apocalyptic wasteland.
I hope nobody on campus drank their Kool-Aid.