Roadside LaRouche advocates try to win support

By Alice Waugh

Waving and smiling at passersby in front of a poster depicting President Obama with a Hitler-style mustache, two supporters of Lyndon Larouche’s policies  set up at kiosk at the side of the road next to the Lincoln mall this morning hoping to win support.

Ian Brinkley, 23, and Alan Demers, 27, both of Quincy, set up signs on Lincoln Road calling for Obama’s impeachment and advocating re-passage of the Glass-Steagall Act. They’ve done this in Lincoln before, as well as other area towns. “We go all over the place,” Brinkley said.

The two men were hoping to win support for LaRouchePAC.com, a group headed by eight-time presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. Among other positions, the group decries Wall Street as “fascist” and is pushing for reintroduction of the Glass-Steagall Act, a 1933 law that limited affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms. Major provisions of the law were repealed in 1999, a fact which some critics blame for the financial crisis in the late 2000s, but there are now bills pending in the House and Senate to restore those laws.

One of the flyers he handed out alleged that JP Morgan was behind an unsuccessful armed coup in 1934. Another flyer about the Glass-Steagall Act claims that the British monarchy is trying to control the world’s political economy and wants to reduce the population of the planet from seven billion to one billion.

The LaRouche movement is a fan of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “who always put the people before the bankers,” Brinkley said.

Asked what he objected to about Obama, Brinkley decried the current “police state” where “every single phone call, email and text message is monitored by the NSA, which is not exactly in line with our Constitution.” He also criticized bailouts “from Detroit to Cyprus” and said Obama is guilty of treason for allegedly arming Al Quaeda in Saudi Arabia and “covering up” the role of the Saudis in 9/11. Asked if he believed Al Quaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks, Brinkley said, “That’s kind of like asking if Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for the assassination of JFK… it’s not an easy answer.”

Brinkley, who said his group does not support any particular political candidate for office, said people in Lincoln have been “receptive.” Reactions in town “have ranged from ‘I love what you’re doing, you guys are my heroes’ to ‘get out of here’ and rose,” he said.

“Do you want to help get rid of Obama today?” he cheerfully asked a passerby.

“Absolutely not,” the man replied.

“Not even a tiny bit?”

“He’s the best thing we’ve had,” the man said as walked away.