LaRouche Independents Sare, Vega Take on the Permanent War Machine

by: Harley Schlanger

"The American people have a moral obligation to be involved in this [anti-war] process, and rather than acting like two-year olds in a sandbox, to realize that they have a voice in the critical issues of the day....The election should be a referendum on whether we're going to plunge to thermonuclear war or peace."

This is the message that U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare took to the voters she encountered during her successful petitioning drive, a no-nonsense appeal for them to stop thinking like victims, and make the cognitive leap that would qualify them to be leaders.  Sare qualified for the ballot in New York state by fielding an army of volunteers, who joined her in a campaign to awaken in the voters a sense of responsibility for the future of the nation.

Polls of U.S. voters continue to show profound unhappiness with candidates in both parties approaching the 2024 election.  Both President Biden and former President Trump, the major candidates, have unfavorability ratings approaching 60%, while the approval rating of Congress has crashed to 15%.  The physical economy continues to decay, and polarization around social issues and "identity politics" has left many voters despairing about the future.  

When it comes to the most pressing issue, however, the danger that ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza are leading to World War III and possibly nuclear war, there is little public debate, as both parties are controlled by neocons, committed to permanent war, and alternative voices are silenced by a media controlled by the same cartels that finance the two pro-war parties.

This bubble has just been popped, by the filing of petitions by Sare and her colleague, Jose Vega, who are running as Independents in the November elections.  Sare is running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, while Vega intends to unseat Democrat Ritchie Torres in the 15th Congressional District.  They will appear on the ballot as candidates from the "LaRouche Party", as New York election law does not allow them to be listed as "Independent".  To qualify, Sare needed 45,000 petition signatures; thanks to the work of a dedicated core of volunteers, she collected 70,000.  Vega gathered more than 10,000 signatures, three times the number needed. To accomplish this, Sare estimates their supporters engaged in discussions with more than 250,000 people.

This kind of intense campaigning is necessary, she said, to overcome the brainwashing done by the media, which she described as part of the war machine. In a recent podcast, in which she was joined by former weapons inspector and anti-war activist Scott Ritter, Sare said people are not aware they're brainwashed. "I tell them Russia and China are not our enemies," and the wars underway are an attempt "to destroy the new paradigm coming into existence with the BRICS and BRICS plus nations [which include Russia and China]....If the United States were acting in its self-interest, we would work with Russia and China and Iran and many nations for the development and freedom of mankind.”

Ritter responded by calling the BRICS the "new club", and said, "We need to get people like Diane into the U.S. Senate to promote peace."

A SOCRATIC CAMPAIGN

Both Sare and Vega apply what she describes as "Lyndon LaRouche’s approach to campaigning, which is really a Socratic dialogue where you’re transforming the people that you’re engaging with by finding those areas of disagreement and developing a higher conception."  Vega has honed this method as an intervenor, challenging officials, including Biden, Vice President Harris, former CIA Director and admitted liar Mike Pompeo, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, exposing their hypocrisy and lies in public forums.  

The problem which must be addressed, he said, is that the people have no voice.  He described his campaign strategy as building an independent force against the war, and for a new strategic and development paradigm, in every Congressional District.  In a June 1 presentation at the LaRouche Organization's Manhattan Project, he said, "We need 435 people in the country—at least one in every Congressional district—standing up to tell the truth, deciding that they are going to be the person in that Congressional district to tell the truth. That doesn’t mean that everybody is going to run for Congress or Senate; although that might include that. It’s just somebody who decides 'You know what? My Congressman is saying a lot of lies; the media is saying a lot of lies. I’m going to elect myself to just tell the truth.' If that’s intervening...if that’s protesting and picketing, whatever it looks like, somebody has to elect themselves to be one of the people, part of this 435 different voice process.”

TAKING ON ADVOCATES OF PERMANENT WAR

Vega is running against incumbent Representative Ritchie Torres, who describes himself as a "champion of Israel," and is an unapologetic defender of Netanyahu's and the Israel Defense Force's murderous campaign against the civilian population of Gaza and the West Bank, which has already taken more than 37,000 lives.   Torres has received $600,000 in campaign funds in the last three years from AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the leading Zionist "lobbying firm", which attacks any criticism of Israeli policy as "antisemitic."

He was identified in a {New York Times} special report, "Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers with Influence Campaign on Gaza War", published June 5, as one of the targets of the campaign.  The article details an Israeli government operation "targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging."   Hundreds of fake accounts were set up on social media platforms, producing posts calling on Congressmen to support funding for Israel's military operations.  The {Times} reported that Torres was receiving messages from fake accounts condemning "antisemitism on college campuses."  The article describes him as "outspoken about his pro-Israel views."

This "champion of Israel" sponsored a bill in Congress designed to intimidate student demonstrators from exercising their constitutional right to free speech, by establishing "antisemitism monitors" on campuses to spy on students, under the false assumption that those students opposing Israel's policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestine are "antisemites", and universities have the responsibility to silence them.  Called the "Columbia Act" after the violent suppression of pro-peace/anti-Zionist protestors at Columbia University, the bill would withhold federal funds from universities not vigorously monitoring, and countering, the beliefs of students!  Vega has pointed out that Torres has taken on a leading role in Congress to assure that Israel's war machine receives billions of dollars -- including $25 billion in Biden's supplemental war package -- while his district is one of the poorest in the country, with constituents suffering from inadequate housing, unemployment, lack of access to health care and broken down infrastructure.

Sare's oppnent, Gillebrand, who took the seat of leading War Hawk Hillary Clinton, is another favorite of the Zionist Lobby, having received more than $875,000 in contributions from Zionist donors for her re-election campaign.

For Sare and Vega, the campaign will be an emergency war-time mobilization, to bring new activists into the fight to insure that the collapsing empire, served by their opponents, may be put to rest peacefully.  Despite the long odds faced by truly independent candidates running against well-funded incumbents protected by a corrupt media, Sare said the battle is to "win the policy," by bringing a growing number of people out of their sleep-walking state into the fight to replace the war machine with a new security and development architecture.