Kenneth Kronberg

Kenneth Lewis Kronberg (April 18, 1948 – April 11, 2007) was an American businessman and long-time member of the LaRouche movement, an organization founded by American political activist Lyndon LaRouche.

He was president of PMR Printing Co. and World Composition Services Inc., in Sterling, Virginia, printing businesses set up in 1978 to print material for the LaRouche movement, which received most of the money the LaRouche organisation spent on producing pamphlets; but the companies also worked for other clients including the United Nations and the Ford Foundation. from a highway overpass on April 11, 2007, in what a spokesman for the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office said was an apparent suicide—the cause of death also recorded on the death certificate.

He did graduate work in economics at the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty in New York, in 1971 after reading a LaRouche newspaper (New Solidarity) at a friend's house. A friend told Avi Klein of Washington Monthly: "He was sold on the guy from the beginning."

Despite his misgivings, Kronberg believed LaRouche was a genius. Klein writes that Kronberg "rationalized his leader's seemingly crackpot ideas," telling family members that LaRouche didn't really believe all the things he was saying. In 1978, he founded World Composition Services, which typeset material for LaRouche; according to Klein, Kronberg's companies also worked for other clients such as the United Nations and the Ford Foundation, as "low-cost printing" for LaRouche in reality often meant "free printing". Kronberg also played a leading role in promoting the ideas of Heinrich Heine and the Yiddish Renaissance. He did research, wrote, and taught classes on the English scientist William Gilbert, and on the Roman Empire. His poem honoring Indira Gandhi was given to her son, Rajiv Gandhi, then the Prime Minister of India, who had it published in the April 1987 issue of Congress Varnika, the magazine of the then-ruling Congress Party. But his greatest love was Shakespeare, LaRouche's views about whom Kronberg disputed.

Kronberg's widow and family maintain a website dedicated to him that can be found at http://www.kennethkronberg.com/kk/.

Print shop's financial problems Nicholas F. Benton, owner of the Falls Church News-Press and himself a former member of the LaRouche movement, writes that at the beginning of 2007, the LaRouche movement realized Kronberg's printing company (PMR) was on the verge of bankruptcy. He says that the financial problems stemmed from the movement's failure to pay the print shop for its services, as a consequence of which the company was in arrears with its tax payments, including employee withholding. and which Benton writes they regard as authoritative.

Personal life Kronberg's wife, Marielle ("Molly") Hammett, was for years deeply involved with the movement, being elected to the National Committee in December 1982. As part of the LaRouche trials of the late 1980s, starting with LaRouche's own federal trial, conviction, and imprisonment, Molly Kronberg was tried with other LaRouche followers in 1989 in New York and convicted of one count of scheme to defraud. She was sentenced to five years probation and later sued LaRouche.