Diane Sare’s Presidents’ Day Conference Shows Campaign Is Mobilized and Growing

by EIR Staff

[Print version of this article]

Feb. 24—For the 2022 general election, the New York State legislature tripled the state’s already very high bar for candidates seeking ballot status, setting it at 45,000 valid signatures—explicitly to keep any and all independent candidates off the November 2022 ballot. LaRouche independent candidate for U.S. Senate Diane Sare did what no other independent, or even established third parties, were able to do: She mobilized 200 active campaign supporters and gathered 66,000 unchallenged signatures from the public in the state.

Then, Sare was running against Sen. Chuck Schumer; now, she is campaigning against New York’s other Senator, Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand. On Feb. 18, Sare convoked a Presidents’ Day conference on “America’s Next 50 Years,” which again showed a growing campaign mobilization. Though by invitation and not live-streamed on the Internet, this all-day hybrid conference had a live audience of 100 in Manhattan and more than 200 registered participants on Zoom, including heads of “Friends of Sare” groupings which are forming in half a dozen other U.S. states—Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Utah. More are in formation.

Moreover, the event’s two panels featured speakers from the United States and five other countries from Europe to Africa, speaking broadly on peace through economic development. For example, Princess Mthombeni, the founder of Africa4Nuclear, addressed the conference live from South Africa. Her presentation is published in the March 1 issue of EIR, in the special section “Development in Africa.”

Diane Sare’s Senatorial campaign conference, in other words, was presidential in character. And music, both as a metaphor for harmonious social collaboration and an actual practice of voice-placement, was the keystone element of the day’s proceedings.

We report here brief sketches of addresses to this important event, and note that the entire conference is archived.

‘Elect Yourself’ To Do Good

Diane Sare began with a video presentation of Lyndon LaRouche speaking in 2013 on the question of “leadership.” He made the point that it is uniquely human to act from the standpoint of the future, as Sare’s conference was doing, as opposed to acting from a merely “realistic” assessment of the present. Sare noted that the now-pervasive inability to recognize such a future-oriented concept of what is economically possible, is traceable to a simple decline in morality in the United States, in comparison to the prevalent culture at the time of the Kennedy space program. Thus, Sare applied LaRouche’s philosophical conception of time to her assessment of what is necessary and possible in order to return the United States to a sane economic policy of development in service of the General Welfare.

Another LaRouche candidate running for Congress from a South Bronx district, Jose Vega, has become widely followed on the worldwide web for his bold public interventions against U.S. officials who are supporting NATO’s war against Russia and Israel’s war on Gaza. He spoke about a Bronx gang leader who became a peacemaker when he realized that the youth of the district, and the South Bronx as a whole, were dying. Vega’s highly provocative presentation, also using Francisco Goya’s Capriccio drawings of oligarchical oppression, focused on the question of what electoral politics actually should consist of today: self-governance, “elect yourselves” to turn terrible situations to the good.

Reporting on one nexus of the global dimension of this state of affairs, Vanessa Beeley, an award-winning independent journalist based in Damascus, Syria, then addressed what she called “the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy, since before 2011, to collectively punish the Syrian people.”

Diane Sare’s and Vanessa Beeley’s presentations are published in this issue of EIR.

Robert “Bob” Baker, Schiller Institute Agriculture Commission Director, gave the conference an update on the uprisings of farmers around the world, with mass protests in more than 15 European countries since January. Farmers in India have also again had to take to the streets against transnational food conglomerates and “green” bureaucrats. Showing the audiences photos of tractorcades and rallies, Baker said,

They are leading the charge for a totally new economic framework, so that national economies function again.

Farmers cannot operate at a loss; the world’s food supply is at stake. Baker focused on the “agro-financial complex” that is behind this situation. The cartel producers of fertilizer, chemicals and other inputs, as well as food processors and retailers, are companies in which Wall Street’s “Big Three”—BlackRock, State Steet and Vanguard—are the top investors, as they are among the “military-financial complex” companies.

Baker reported on the huge drop in numbers of family farmers. It means an unreliable food supply, and destroys the countryside. “We need more farms, more factories, more food, and a better future!” he said, proposing Lyndon LaRouche’s “four economic laws” of the American System of economy, as the guideline.

World Citizens and Patriots

Fouad Al-Ghaffari, Advisor to the Prime Minister of Yemen on BRICS Affairs, addressed the conference via video-link. Al-Ghaffari began by noting the unique role of the Schiller Institute in the sphere of the BRICS, since its 2014 launching of the report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge. Al-Ghaffari offered spirited commendation to the conference in the form of three principles: One, “unequivocal support for the people of Gaza”; two, “multilateralism based on global security and development,” which he identified with Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Ten Principles for a New Security and Development Architecture”; and three, the concept of global citizenship. On the last point, Al-Ghaffari dedicated the booklet “BRICS for a Citizen and a Layman” to Helga Zepp-LaRouche, “as she is the source for the idea of global citizenship.”

Next, written remarks sent in by a member of the Iraqi Parliament, the Hon. Mustafa Sanad, were read aloud. Sanad addressed his remarks to “American and British mainstream media outlets, particularly the Washington Post, Reuters, and The Guardian, as well as the American people.” To them, he said:

Whatever news from the White House claims that U.S. airstrikes are directed at “Iranian-backed” armed factions targeting U.S. bases in the region, and that these airstrikes are effective––be sure that they are fake news. All of the strikes are aimed at Iraqi National Forces, associated with the Popular Mobilization Forces, an official government entity. These strikes have no negative impact on the resistance factions, but rather on the Iraqi people, who hold the Popular Mobilization Forces in high regard.

Radio host and journalist Don Debar then gave a report on his travels in China. Debar polemicized: “While we’re watching an actual genocide take place in Gaza, … China stands accused of committing genocide in the northwest of the country in Xinjiang province … the idea being that Islam is being banned in China.” Debar noted the history of the Old Silk Road in developing much of the Islamic population within northwest China:

Some of the cities in the interior part of China are a product of a thousand years or more of that…. If you walk through the old towns or the new parts of town in these cities, and you meet people every day who are Uyghurs, or Kazakhs, and Uzbeks, and Muslims from all of Islam really—they run the place! It’s not just that they’re not oppressed; it’s not just that they’re not in concentration camps; they own and run it.… These cities, you would die to live and work in, coming from New York.

A highlight of the conference ended the morning session: The Oasis Plan video created by Jason Ross, Executive Director of The LaRouche Organization, was screened for the first time. It develops upon the basis of Lyndon LaRouche’s 1975 proposal to desalinate water, green deserts and build modern transportation networks and new cities across Israel and Palestine—development as the name of peace.

The Real Issue of Relations with China

The afternoon panel began with a strategic overview provided by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who began her remarks noting the waning hegemony of American mainstream media’s control over the world-narrative:

I want to tell you that there is a completely different world happening, and a tectonic shift in history, where totally different dynamics are going that are actually much more promising and optimistic than anything you can come to as a conclusion if you are just looking at it from the U.S., or even from Europe for that matter. [The shift] does not only pertain to the building of a new economic system … it also involves a completely different outlook, different values, … more like the values which used to be common for Americans.

Zepp-LaRouche noted that “the Global South has not bought at any time the NATO narrative”; those nations see the effect of interventionist U.S. wars and compare that to economic win-win cooperation when they are trading with the Chinese: “They see very clearly that their only chance to become fully developed countries lies with the latter.” She emphasized that there is a connection between this general resistance within the Global South, and “farmers in the hundreds of thousands in the streets in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Portugal, Holland, Hungary and other countries.”

Zepp-LaRouche recommended the recent interview with Michael Benz on the Tucker Carlson Network, which describes how the NATO war narrative has been imposed in America, using the cyber tools previously employed in “regime-change” coups and color revolutions abroad.

Dai, a social media influencer in politics originally from China, gave the event a presentation on common misconceptions in the West about the Communist Party of China. Noting the ascendance of China to being the “largest economy in the world measured by purchasing power parity” and the “Chinese economic miracle” that lifted 800 million people out of poverty, Dai asked the question, “Why didn’t the CPC fail as the West had anticipated?” Dai’s answer:

The first and foremost misconception about the CPC is that it is a political party. To be clear, the CPC is not a political party, at least not in the Western sense.

Dai explained that the word “party” comes from the Latin “partiri,” meaning “divide into parts.” Therefore, Dai noted, “a political party, in essence, is the political representation of interest groups”:

So, for example, in the U.S. the Democrats represent, at least at face value, Silicon Valley, environmentalists, feminists, LGBTQ+, immigrants, and urban liberals; while the GOP mostly represents business owners, gun rights advocates, the oil and gas industry, and the conservative Christians; and both parties are controlled by the military-industrial complex and the Zionist lobby.

Around this point one conference attendee stormed out of the room, but Dai continued to make the point that the CPC, in addition to its capacity for consensus building, is capable of incorporating various dissenting political opinions into a unified mode of governance.

Anastasia Battle, co-founder of the International Peace Coalition (IPC), told the attendees that the IPC’s aim is “to bring people together, above their ideologies, above their disagreements, … on how do we create true peace in the world.” Battle lives and organizes in the Detroit, Michigan area, which has the largest U.S. Muslim population. Battle invoked the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., and in particular the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote in his “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence”:

The tension in [Montgomery] is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And if there is a victory, it will not be for fifty thousand Negroes, but a victory for justice and the forces of light. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust.

Battle shared “Six Principles of Nonviolence” written by Dr. King, with special emphasis on King’s insistence that people are not the enemy against which a just struggle is undertaken but evil itself is the force which must be opposed. In this spirit, Battle led the conference in James Weldon Johnson’s anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Next, Charles Gracia from Seattle 4 Assange reported the current status of the case of Julian Assange, whose final hearing before his likely extradition to the United States was to be in the days following the conference. Gracia noted that the vast majority of the charges against Assange are on the basis of the Espionage Act of 1917. He briefed the conference on House Resolution 934, introduced by Rep. Paul Gosar, with eight other co-signers, on Dec. 13, 2023, which states “… that regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment, and that the United States should drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange.” Gracia noted that Assange is not a U.S. citizen, but Australian; the activities of WikiLeaks under Assange’s direction were not carried out on U.S. soil, but in Europe; so that the U.S. Department of Justice is extending its legal jurisdiction beyond its own territory and to a non-U.S. citizen. He added, in keeping with the tenor of the entire conference, that “it does call into question whether we can actually run a society of self-government if … the First Amendment is undermined.”

Dennis Speed brought the conference to a conclusion with an invocation of the American Revolution. Speed noted that “for a long time before” the official beginning of the American Revolution, it had been prepared by Benjamin Franklin, particularly:

It was created in combination with a series of people—James Logan who ran the largest library in the colonies, who was an opponent of Isaac Newton and a proponent of the scientist Gottfried Leibniz….They began a conspiracy. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were going to establish this nation, although they thought they might be able to win over larger portions of the British population with that endeavor. Now, our situation is considerably better.

Then bringing in Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin, Speed said:

He had been prevented from doing that interview for years by the U.S. intelligence agencies. That’s what he said. This was the most powerful—supposedly—media figure in America, who had been bounced off his network. He told you he wanted to do this interview three years ago and he was prevented from doing that by the U.S. intelligence agencies. You want to know what the implications are, of what’s happening to Julian Assange? The implications are what is about to happen to you and me, unless we can do something utilizing the purported existence of elections in the United States, a process that has not existed since September 11, 2001. But there’s a pretext that it exists; therefore, what we’re going to do is actualize it, and that is our American Revolution. The independent candidacies that we are talking about prosecuting in this country are a way of resurrecting that process of the American Revolution. We owe it to how we got here.