LaRouche Tackles Dem Party Racism:
Stop Treatment as 'Human Cattle'!

LaRouche expressed his commitment to this fight in his short speech from the floor at the banquet of the Alabama New South Coalition on May 14:

"I'll say one thing: In the history of humanity, there's been a long struggle to free man from the conditions in which a few have held the rest, the majority, as hunted or human cattle. This fight has not yet been won. But the particular fight we have, is to get the citizens who are in the lower 80% of family-income brackets, who are following what they're told to vote for, to get them not to be called out to vote for somebody, but to vote for themselves. And they have to get the spirit: That they have a right to vote for themselves, and demand that they be informed to the degree that they can make competent choices, and not make impulsive choices that kill us.

"We are in the most dangerous period in modern history, right now. A great depression is descending upon us. A $41.50 a barrel of oil is a warning. $50 is a disaster.

"We have a war, which is not an Iraq war. It's a policy of war.

"We've got to fight these issues. But I know in politics most of our people are not moving! They're treating themselves as self-condemned to accept the status of being human cattle, and following a few leaders. We need the people to stand up on their hind legs, as JL [Chestnut] referred to it, on the question of the Pettus Bridge. We need people who will stand up, and know they have the right as human beings not to be human cattle!

"I'm sick and tired of seeing people being human cattle, and that's really what I'm about!" - Vote Bears It Out -

The fact that people are continuing to march passively to the slaughter, and the party leadership is rejecting the concerns of the common man, were both evident in the outcomes of the Democratic primary elections held May 18. Turnout for the primary reached the abysmal level of 13% in Arkansas's Little Rock area, and reached a "high" of under 25% elsewhere, due to people voting in local races, many of whom passed up the Presidential primary altogether. In Kentucky the turnout ranged from 15% down to 7%!

Nor should anyone jump to the conclusion that this abstention was due to the great enthusiasm for the "inevitable" candidacy of John Kerry. In Arkansas, where only Kucinch, LaRouche, and Kerry were on the ballot, there was a huge "uncommitted" vote (25%), which led to Kerry's receiving only about 60% of the vote. There were similar such "anti-Kerry" votes for candidates long since out of the race in many other states, which brought him down to 60-70% of the total in many cases.

LaRouche's vote in Arkansas was reported unofficially as 6%, with somewhere around 15,000 votes. In Kentucky he was credited with about 1%, or 1,815 votes. In Oregon the vote total known so far, without full compilation of a massive write-in vote, is between 8 and 9,000, about 2% of the total.

What these votes reflect, as LaRouche has continually stressed, is, first of all, the deliberate failure of the Democratic Party to mobilize the ordinary man and woman. The fact that the Kerry campaign and other leading Democrats continue to float the idea that Kerry should have warmonger John McCain as his running mate, underscores the disaster. But also the vote shows the refusal of most people to realize that they have to vote for themselves, in order to create a future for this nation, and the world. - LaRouche in Alabama -

LaRouche's tour to Alabama, where he had previously made his famous Martin Luther King birthday address in Talladega this past January, centered in the state capital, Montgomery. There he gave a press conference with civil rights heroine Amelia Boynton Robinson, and attended candidate screening sessions and meetings of two leading civil rights organizations in Alabama, the New South Coalition and the Alabama Democratic Conference. Both meetings drew hundreds of African-Americans.

With Alabama's primary coming up June 1, these groups had invited all three Democratic Presidential candidates to address them. LaRouche was the only candidate to attend, although Kerry and Kucinich sent representatives. LaRouche was very well received at both events, as his record in fighting for the poor and disenfranchised is widely known. The LaRouche campaign has also had a contingent of the LYM working in Alabama off and on for the last couple months.

LaRouche's speeches and discussions with these leaders focussed on the two major crises facing the nation, the onrushing financial collapse and depression, and the war in Southwest Asia. He stressed the crucial nature of his personal role, as the only candidate qualified to deal with the financial crisis, due to his 40-year record of accurate forecasting, and as the author of the LaRouche Doctrine for Southwest Asia, the only U.S. proposal for getting U.S. troops out of Iraq safely. LaRouche's own words were reinforced through accurate press coverage in the Birmingham News.

But while many of those he met were very receptive, the outright hostility of the Democratic Party leadership to bringing to the fore the interests of the forgotten men and women continues, especially in the form of excluding LaRouche from the party's political process, which maintains this section of the party in the "back of the bus." The Democratic Party cannot afford to tolerate another August Belmont-style party, LaRouche said. The racist Democratic National Committee has to go.