This interview appears in the March 18, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
[Print version of this article]
LaRouche Candidate Diane Sare vs. Sen. Chuck Schumer:
Make New York the Center of Global Peace Through Development
Diane Sare, a longtime associate of former U. S. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, is a candidate for the United States Senate from the State of New York. Sare, a musician, who founded the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus, is running against Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader of the Senate, and a leading spokesman for the bankrupt institutions on Wall Street and the City of London. Currently serving on the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, Schumer has been a leading supporter of every one of the illegal “regime change” wars of the past two decades. He is also one of the major proponents of nationwide legalization of recreational marijuana, in spite of the fact that the United States surpassed 100,000 drug overdose deaths in the last year. He is now a leading backer of financial warfare against the Russian people in the form of draconian sanctions and other measures, as well as being the prime sponsor of the anti-China “Innovation and Competition Act,” which are driving the United States and NATO toward a potential nuclear confrontation with both of these nations, while doing massive damage to our own economy. Sare’s campaign against Schumer is already demonstrating the potential to unite patriots of the nation and citizens of the world to bring about a new paradigm for mankind based on peace through development, in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon LaRouche, ending the British geopolitical divisions of the world once and for all.
Mike Billington: Greetings! This is Mike Billington. I’m a co-editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, and I’m here today, March 11, with Diane Sare, who is a candidate for the U.S. Senate versus Senator Chuck Schumer in the state of New York. Diane is also the founder of the Schiller Institute New York City Chorus and a longtime associate of Lyndon LaRouche. Welcome, Diane.
Diane Sare: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Billington: Your opponent, Chuck Schumer, has been called the Senator from Wall Street—and he’s been called a lot of other things! Running against him clearly has both local and national and, in fact, international implications. How do you see the role of your campaign in the extreme strategic and economic crisis of the world today?
Sare: I think we definitely need a voice nationally for the policies of Lyndon LaRouche, particularly since everything that he warned about throughout his many years of economic forecasting, political forecasting, is now occurring. Most recently, one of our associates, Paul Gallagher, brought up Mr. LaRouche’s comments after the murder of Qaddafi in Libya, saying that the intent of this was to go for war with Russia, not because of anything Russia had done, but to create a major conflagration so that the City of London and Wall Street, the great financial interests which Schumer represents, could in effect blow out the system under the cover of war, and then write off all of their debt. So LaRouche was warning of this already in 2011. Schumer, as the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, is the hatchet man, the front man for these policies. He actually bragged at an event—I attended a cocktail reception at City and State magazine where he bragged that a hip-hop band on Staten Island had given him the nickname “Killer Chuck.” I think it is a very appropriate moniker for his activity.
Billington: You’re running as a LaRouche Independent candidate in New York. What does that mean exactly, and why are you not running in one of the major parties?
Sare: I’m glad you asked. This is really very important. As LaRouche said on his 90th birthday, the party system—or the “potty” system—is dead. It’s finished. You see the unity of both major parties in the mobilization and build up for World War III, for example, and on sanctions on Russia, for which Schumer has been one of the leading proponents, as he is on sanctions against China. Ninety-eight out of 100 senators always seem to vote the same way—that is a broken system. There is no such thing as a two-party system. Roger Stone has called it the “duopoly,” and I think the American people, frankly, have had it. I think they’re smart enough in the state of New York to realize that it’s over.
One of the peculiar aspects of the very corrupt election system here is that there is no such thing as “running as an independent candidate.” You actually have to create a body, which they call an “independent body,” and you then have your own party line on the ballot. You’re allowed to have a name of 15 letters. I’ll have to have an abbreviation for independent since my independent body is going to be called “LaRouche Independent.” Then you have an emblem for your party, your independent body. My body’s emblem will be a treble clef, because I want the musical aspect of the campaign to be there on the ballot for everybody to see. That’s the situation. The state has made it extremely difficult for a non-major-party-affiliated candidate to get on the ballot. Just recently, in the 2020-2021 budget, they arbitrarily increased the number of signatures that an independent statewide candidate needs to get on the ballot from 15,000 to 45,000, in the same six-week period of time as in the past!
Billington: That’s rather ironic, given all the talk about voting rights these days, that they’re making it virtually impossible for independents to even get on the ballot, to give voters options. Do you have more to say on that?
Sare: Yes. They also got rid of two very significant parties. You can call them minor parties, but the Green Party and the Libertarian Party have had many candidates over the years. The Libertarian Party just celebrated its 50-year anniversary. They have organization in every county in the state. The previous law said you needed 50,000 votes every four years—for example, the presidential election years—to keep your ballot line. They changed that to two percent of the vote, or 130,000 votes! The Libertarian candidate, I think, had 104,000 votes last time when he ran for governor. The Greens had something similar, about 98,000. They both were thrown off the ballot with this this new law! They are therefore now required to get 45,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot like independent candidates. Another party, Serve America, was also thrown off. Alternative views to the mainstream duopoly are essentially denied to the voters.
Billington: The Schiller Institute, which was founded by Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has issued a petition in 11 different languages calling for the convocation of an international conference to establish a new security and development architecture for all nations. How is your campaign acting on that concept and that petition?
Sare: Interestingly, this war drive and the insanity of it all, and the fact that we installed a pro-Nazi regime in Ukraine in 2013-14 under the Obama-Biden administration, has caused many people to start listening to us and all of the spokesmen for LaRouche. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, myself, Schiller Institute spokesman Harley Schlanger, LaRouche’s French associate Jacques Cheminade in Europe, are all reporting that we’re each getting massively increasing numbers of viewers of our posts on YouTube, Facebook, social media, etc. In my case, my Friday symposium, I’ve had a tenfold increase in the number of people watching, and some of my videos have gone to 70,000 views. People are developing, and are hungry, clearly, for a more profound conception, which Helga brings into this: the idea of the Treaty of Westphalia. First of all, it is a beautiful, timely idea, because people who would argue, “Oh, we’re too far gone, you’ll never stop war. They’ve always been killing each other,” etc. Well, have we been killing each other longer than the one hundred and fifty years of religious fighting in Europe that led to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia? What would cause people to adopt such an agreement as the Treaty of Westphalia could only be that they are considering the future rather than saying, “Well, I have to get revenge for this, that, and the other thing which was done to me or my nation.” Instead, they say, “Where is this behavior leading us?” When you put it in that perspective, as we can see right now, the behavior of the British, the Biden administration, NATO, is surely leading us into World War III.
Perhaps people can say, “Well, we would like a different goal. We need to change the trajectory of this,” and therefore people may be able to put aside their pragmatic or vengeance-driven motivations. Emphatically in this approach is LaRouche’s Four Laws, because there is no such thing as a static, no-war situation. You only have motion, either forwards or backwards, so you must have economic development. And you must have an economic platform that goes with that, starting with the bankruptcy of the rotten financial system, which the reimposition of the Glass-Steagall Act would allow to occur.
What I’ve seen happening with my social media posts as I’ve been promoting this petition, many people are writing in the comments: “I signed, I signed.” So we’re gathering signatures that way. We will also be releasing this week a listing of over 130 VIP signers representing institutions around the world. I think this is an urgently needed initiative, because you have to have a sense of where you want to end up. You never should enter a war if you don’t have a conception of victory. We didn’t choose the war that we’re in, but if we want to have an idea of how to solve it, we must have in mind an arrival point which we must achieve. And I think this petition is really brilliant in that regard, because it gives people a sense of how to get out of this crisis.
Billington: The state you’re running in includes one of the great cities of the world, New York City. I would suspect that people who have lived in New York or know New York are very much aware that there’s been a degeneration of that city, which would cause people to perhaps agree more with you, that we need an international agreement to stop not only the strategic crisis, but also the economic crisis. New York was a symbol of the melting pot idea of the United States. What is your approach to the question of New York City and its condition today?
Sare: There was a reason why Lyndon LaRouche in 2014 called for the creation of the Manhattan Project. The idea was not only that New York City was a melting pot, but that it was also the point for unifying the nation. The first president, George Washington, was sworn in there. Alexander Hamilton was based there when he made the proposal at the end of the American Revolution that the war debt of the thirteen states should be taken on by the government as a whole, and not by each state separately. He had a huge brawl with Thomas Jefferson on that point. That was critical. While we did celebrate Evacuation Day, and many of the British left, all of them didn’t. There were certain British sympathizers then, and had the debt not been taken on by the federal government as a whole, it would have been easy to pull the states apart and destroy our new Republic.
So New York was really a center of that, and also of the fight against slavery. Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, and Hamilton were very active proponents of ending slavery as an economic practice. New York developed to be the most important city in the world. The United Nations is located there, and the New York Stock Exchange, which used to have a relationship to productive enterprise—not anymore.
Manhattan has also been a target for people who want to destroy the Republic. I have to say, what we’ve seen since the pandemic in particular—and there was a great ratcheting down in the 1970s with the Municipal Assistance Corporation, Big Mac, and the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people; shutting down the mental institutions, even shutting down the hospitals, that’s been going on for some time—but in the last couple of years, the city has become like something out of a movie. It’s really horrible.
There was a team of LaRouche organizers who set up on the Upper West Side with a table, and during their organizing, two large rats at different points came scurrying across the sidewalk right in the middle of their conversations with passers-by. The city is getting overrun with rats. In Brooklyn, people’s cars are getting destroyed by rats because they’re coming in and chewing up all the wiring. You can imagine, you have an epidemic of mental illness. They tossed many people out of the homeless shelters to alleviate crowding during the pandemic and then put them into hotels, with none of the programs that they would normally have. They paid the hotels the full rate—such a Wall Street rip off. They didn’t pay a discounted rate because of an emergency. They paid the full rate for those rooms, two hundred and fifty dollars a night or whatever, to house homeless people, at great expense, to make sure that the “hotel industry” was funded. Everything is a scam. Nothing is done in the interest of the general welfare of the population, but it is done to bail out the system and to promote this Great Reset, the Green New Deal. The other thing, which started with Mayor Mike Bloomberg, was putting in all these bike lanes, shutting down major streets to traffic altogether. As of two years ago, the average speed that you could drive in Manhattan was 4.9 miles per hour.
And now you have people getting pushed in front of subway cars. We’ve had hundreds of incidents like that, committed by people who are mentally ill, who may have drug addiction problems, who are homeless, who are living in the subways. People are now moving back into the city, so you have a slightly higher ratio of stable people to insane people. But there was a period of time at the height of the pandemic when I really felt like I’d walked into a bad movie. I went into a convenience store where there were three people inside, who I think were addicted to drugs. One of them had turned on the ice cone machine, with the stuff coming out of the nozzle with no cup under it—he didn’t notice. The owner was trying to get them to turn it off, but he was clearly terrified for his life. Just surreal scenes, people in affluent neighborhoods waking up to discover that someone had defecated on their doorstep in the morning. That’s the kind of thing that you have going on in New York City. It’s actually quite shocking. I know people who come in from outside of the United States are actually quite horrified by how filthy and run down the city is. We have a new mayor now. I think Mayor Adams would like to do something about it, but can he break out of the Wall Street run axioms to be able to act to defend the general welfare? That’s another question.
Billington: What is needed to restore New York to its previous position in the world?
Sare: That’s a good question. First of all, LaRouche’s Four Laws, urgently. I think you need a CCC type program, like Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. I think it might even be the case that you would have to be like the Chinese, and build a new city somewhere 30 or 40 miles away and move half the population there, so you can rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up.
One of the things we discovered in the flooding which I was not fully aware of, the whole sewer system is about a century old. In Woodside, Queens, where about a dozen people drowned in their basements during Tropical Storm Ida, it turns out that in the 1970s it had been assessed that they did not have adequate sewer lines for the 50,000 people who lived there. The population there is now triple that, yet they never built the improvements that were recommended in the seventies.
So it’s a massive need. We need more care for people who are mentally ill. We need to stop shutting down hospitals. But you can’t do this outside of the context of a reorganization of the whole system. I think people should ask themselves why they think it’s legitimate that AIG can get an $80 billion bailout in a pop. No one ever says, “Where are you going to get the money?” They just come up with it. But when you say, “We have to rebuild the infrastructure of the city from underground up, as part of a modernization of the entire United States,” people say, “Well, how are you going to pay for it?” They should consider, they don’t give a second thought about bailing out some bankrupt Wall Street speculative garbage, but when it comes to investing in things that actually are going to generate growth and a return, they have questions.
I would like to say, you can’t do it in isolation. People in New York do talk about the infrastructure crisis, but you can’t just rebuild New York City alone. It’s a hub of transportation. You’re going to have to consider the railroad lines of New Jersey, New York into Pennsylvania, up to Massachusetts. You’re going to have to think of it as a region, and rebuild several cities simultaneously—New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston, all of them are going to have to undergo a transformation simultaneously.
Billington: You’ve also campaigned across the state, holding meetings and events in many parts of the state, and you host a virtual event every Friday night during the pandemic for people from around the state and around the country. You’ve drawn in many people from different layers of society and different professions to address various aspects of the crisis in society. You also use social media a great deal to get out your message and to organize people to this effort. How would you describe the response? You mentioned that you’ve had a huge increase in people watching. How do you find the response to your campaign generally now?
Sare: I think people are relieved. It’s not really a matter of agreement. They want to actually be able to discuss through major problems. The topics on the Friday symposium have included the prison situation, the psychological trauma of prisoners—and there’s a lot more to be discussed on that—the housing situation, the floods. We’ve also had people discussing nuclear power. They just shut down the Indian Point nuclear power station, and I understand in these recent weeks they’re beginning the full dismantling, so it cannot be reopened, which is completely insane given that we’re going to have blackouts and brownouts. Not only are they shutting down Indian Point, but Governor Kathy Hochul has yanked the permits for gas-powered plants that were supposed to replace Indian Point, so we can look forward to not having enough energy. So, top engineers, scientists, people who were victims of the floods, the fire in the Bronx, people who have been working on low-dose radiation, farmers, historians—we’ve had all kinds of guests on the Friday Symposium. I have been told by many people that they find it absolutely delightful, that they follow them every week to see what’s next. What happens is that the people involved in prison advocacy end up getting really interested in what’s happening with Indian Point; the people from Indian Point get interested in knowing what happened in the Battle of Cherry Valley with the massacre by the British and their Native American mercenaries. People who are involved in keeping Evacuation Day alive find out that they’re interested in what happened with the floods in Queens.
What I’m finding with the symposium is, contrary to the media narrative, the American people are not really divided. The algorithms of social media are designed to make us divided, by getting an imaginary or a real profile and just feeding you into a certain track. But, you know, do people need food? Do they need electricity? Do they really want their child to be contemplating what gender they are at the age of five? These are things that people are pretty unified on. People don’t want war. The reason Trump got elected, I believe, had a great deal to do with his pledge to end the never ending “forever wars.” There are many areas of major importance around which Americans are united, and the worse the crisis gets, the more united Americans can become, if you have leadership that is putting a solution on the table.
Billington: Let me note that you are an accomplished trombone player. And as we mentioned, you’re the founder of the Schiller Institute’s New York City Community Chorus and co-conductor. Do you think being a musician has a bearing on your activity as a candidate? And is there a relationship between politics and music, or should there be?
Sare: Yes, definitely. There is an incredible paper by Lyndon LaRouche called, “Politics as Art,” which I would really recommend people read. I think musicians are playing an important role in the world today. You have the orchestra in—I’m not sure where it’s based, perhaps in Jerusalem—of Palestinian and Israeli young people, musicians, performing together. You’ve just had concerts in Western Europe of Ukrainian and Russian music together. The point about music in particular, because it’s not visual, because it’s fully in the mind, it allows you to place yourself where human identity really should be. As LaRouche reminded us, so many times, each of us is ultimately going to die. There is no person who has been here on this planet for two hundred years or something like that. So the question is, “what is your identity? What is it that makes mankind immortal? What are those things that actually remain after our life has disappeared?” When you think from that standpoint, you realize that many of the things that we’re all squabbling over are frankly not that important. The question is mankind as a whole. I think you have a similar effect, although all of us can’t participate in it as easily, when astronauts who’ve been in space and look back on the Earth for the first time, they have an overwhelming sense of the smallness of our planet in the scope of the galaxy and how really insignificant all the borders and divisions are among mankind. That is not to say, just to be very clear for our listeners, that I’m advocating a one world government or something like that. But as in a chorus, as in a symphony orchestra, there is a richness in the diversity. The fact that nations have a national culture and national language, a history of contributions that they’ve made—if you’re taking this from the appropriate standpoint of a classical composition, then what you discover is that the whole of mankind is capable of things greater than the sum of its parts. I think this is very, very important and should not be lost. That’s not to diminish in any way the contributions of the individual person or the individual nation, but actually is an augmentation of those diverse creative breakthroughs.
Billington: Well, I think your campaign is a demonstration of that idea, of acting on behalf of mankind. As Schiller said, one must be both a patriot of one’s nation and a citizen of the world, as I think you’re demonstrating. Is there any final thought that you’d like to leave us with?
Sare: My final thought is that people should consider very seriously the moment we’re in, in history. We may get another chance, but I wouldn’t count on it. I think our chance is now, in this moment. So if you’re alive right now, and you probably are if you’re reading or watching this interview, then the time to act is now. Don’t presume it’s going to exist for some future generation. Your life and what you do with it can be exceedingly important.
Billington: Thank you very much, Diane. People can go to your website, SareforSenate.com, and I encourage you to do so, and to tune in especially for the Friday night events, which are at 7:30 EDT.
