This article appears in the June 17, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
‘A Positive Vision for the Future’
Joel Dejean Escalates His Campaign in Texas for U.S. Congress
[Print version of this article]
June 9—The Dejean for Congress campaign will be filing the required 500 valid petition signatures on June 23, for ballot status in the November 8 general election for Federal office.
In northwest Harris County, Texas, a new Congressional District, the 38th, was carved out in 2021 specifically to send Republicans to Washington, beginning with the 2022 election cycle. That intention is being challenged by the Independent candidacy of Joel Dejean. A legal immigrant with his family from Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, at six years old, Dejean was without schooling and spoke no English. He learned it. He was accepted by the famous Bronx High School of Science, graduated from the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a degree in electrical engineering, and took a job with a defense contractor in Texas. Since 1987 he has been a collaborator of Lyndon LaRouche, and now lives in Houston.
Dejean is providing a strong voice for “a positive vision for the future” from a foremost energy, agriculture and space travel state, that has fallen, like the rest of the nation, into chronic crises of energy shortages, farming limitations from lack of water, and a slowdown in space. Worst of all is the social breakdown—mass shootings, drugs, despair—among the 30 million residents of Texas, the second most populous of all the states.
The Dejean campaign locates what is needed for Texas in terms of what is needed for the United States and the world, to end the war danger coming from Global NATO’s aggression, and to work to create a new financial-economic reorganization of the world economy, now in worsening crisis. Dejean stands out among the contestants for all of the 38 Congressional Districts in Texas, and he conveys joy in the mission.
Since filing his intent with the Texas Secretary of State in Austin Dec. 1, Dejean has assembled a small, dedicated staff, attracted volunteer supporters, and deployed across the District with increasing intensity, speaking at community colleges, mosques, city councils (there are eight in the District), before various organizations, and otherwise intervening at events too numerous to mention. Palm cards in the thousands and other campaign literature are trickling into the kitchens and living rooms of the District’s over 700,000 residents.
He is making use of national platforms, appearing many times, for example, on the weekly online “New York Symposium” run by the campaign of Diane Sare for U.S. Senate in New York. Dejean is a regular on EIR’s national Monday night Activists’ Conference Calls.
Dejean’s LaRouche Message
On his campaign website, www.joeldejeanforcongress.com, Dejean continues to post videos of his interviews, interventions, and statements refuting the plague of geopolitics and endless war; and the Malthusian anti-science of “climate change” and the consequent suicidal drive toward decarbonization, providing instead workable and durable solutions.
At the first public meeting of his campaign at the end of April, held at a local restaurant, for example, Dejean compared the Thirty-Years’ War in Europe (1618-1648), ended by the Treaty of Westphalia, with today’s endless war of 30+ years:
You don’t see armies sweeping across Texas or the Central Plains or the big cities of America, but there has been a 30-years’ war, which began after the Berlin Wall came down, and after the Soviet Empire and the Warsaw Pact disintegrated.
He delivered a sweep of our awful current history, beginning in 1990—using U.S. Secretaries of State as the focusing agency—from James Baker III through to Antony Blinken: How the personalities changed, but not the policies. Dejean then aimed his fire at his Republican opponent, Wesley Hunt, and concluded with the solutions incorporated in Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws:
But that’s exactly the road my opponent Wesley Hunt promises to continue on. On his website he says that the reason he wants to go to Congress, is that he wants to do on Capitol Hill what he did in Operation Iraqi Freedom. And what did he do in Operation Iraqi Freedom? He flew 55 Apache attack helicopter combat missions, and was awarded for that service by being appointed a diplomatic liaison to Saudi Arabia.
My campaign has issued a challenge to Wesley Hunt: “What were you doing in Saudi Arabia? Did you not know that Saudi Arabia financed and supplied the hijackers that killed thousands of Americans in the 9/11 attacks, and launched the 20-year war in the Middle East? Were you aware that it was the U.S. State Department that financed the overthrow of the President of Ukraine, Yanukovych, in 2014?
We’re going after this guy. We’re not letting him get away with the fact that he was a West Point graduate, who served in Iraq, and therefore deserves to be Congressman representing this new District 38. I have that challenge out, and have heard nothing back from Wesley Hunt. Oh, one of my supporters here did receive an email from Captain Hunt, saying, “They’re doing everything in their power to beat me! They’re committed to spending MILLIONS to attack me and destroy my reputation. Chip in now to help me fight back.” [audience laughter]
Now, I don’t know where those millions of dollars are. Maybe they went into those tacos you’re eating. [audience laughter]. Joe [Jennings], have you seen those millions of dollars? I haven’t.
If we keep doing what James Baker, Wesley Hunt, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and all these flunkies who have been Secretaries of State over the last 30 years have done, we are guaranteed to have a war that would be the last war, because no one wins a nuclear war. That would be the end of not only human civilization, but possibly, of life on Earth.
What should we be doing? Well, Lyndon LaRouche laid out four laws [shows a photo of Lyndon LaRouche on a large-screen monitor] to save the economy back in June 2014:
LaRouche’s 1st Law is we have to go back to Franklin Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act, where we separate the commercial banks from the speculative vultures like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs.
No. 2. We have to make sure that the Federal Reserve system is transformed into a third National Bank.
No. 3. Long-term, low-interest credit from the National Bank could go into infrastructure projects, like building high-speed rail. We could be building up water management systems. There was a proposal to build the Ike Dyke to protect the Houston-Galveston region. In 2017, we had Hurricane Harvey, and before that, it was Hurricane Ike, in 2008. There was a proposal by the Army Corps of Engineers to build gates, to make sure any strong storm surge wouldn’t just go up Galveston Bay and wipe out all the refineries, all of the oil installations that span the Houston Ship Channel. That would cost a mere $29 billion. We’re about to send $29 billion of weapons into Ukraine to escalate that war over the coming months. So, we have to get people the alternative.
LaRouche’s 4th Law, possibly the most important, is that we have to give children a future. Not only should we continue the Artemis Space Program, to return humans to the Moon, but we should have a full-scale program to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion in the coming decade. If we do that, with helium-3 as the fuel, which is abundant on the Moon, we can build fusion rockets that will get us to Mars in a matter of days instead of months.
That is the future I saw when I first heard Lyndon LaRouche speak in Manchester, New Hampshire in 1987. That is the future we have to give the children and youth of today, not only in the 38th District, but in the State of Texas, in the United States; and working with Russia, China, India, and other countries, that will give a future to the whole world—a win-win situation.
That is the alternative. I’m sure if the constituents in the District hear about this, they’ll know which way to choose.
That is what I will guarantee, if I’m elected your congressman!
EIR, in Vol. 49, No. 18, May 6, 2022, pp. 33-40, published an interview with Joel Dejean, conducted by Mike Billington.
