“Once to ev’ry man and nation, comes a moment to decide.”
This is such a moment for the United States. Our Constitution is under a state of siege, from forces, such as those in the present Administration, that are driving us headlong into thermonuclear war. We don’t even know any longer who’s giving the orders in Washington. Biden was forced to abdicate—not resign, but abdicate—because his controllers didn’t want the American people to see that, given his condition, someone else, or some committee, is acting as President—and none of us voted for them. There has been a coup against the American Presidency, and we don’t know, nor are we allowed to know, who is in charge.
In this crisis, we need to declare our independence from the war party. I am running for Congress in New York, as an independent candidate, along with Diane Sare, who is running as an independent candidate for the United States Senate. We call ourselves LaRouche Independents, because the physical economic policies of Lyndon LaRouche to return the U.S. war economy to a manufacturing/mining/owner-operated agricultural economy, that uses energy-intensive advanced technologies for real production, is the only way to reverse a half-century of decline, decay, and theft from 250 million Americans. We say, “Make Wealth, Not War!”
Or, we can continue to have “Brand X Biden.” What is the price of this to the American people? Look closely at the Biden Administration’s response to Hurricane Helene. In the 2005 response to Hurricane Katrina, with all its problems, we had 20,000-plus National Guardsmen, as well as Army support. This time, there are less than 7,000. Where are they? Where is the Army? In Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Poland, Romania, maybe Ukraine—but not here. So our people have died by the hundreds in the Southeast, and the toll could be well over 1,000. Is that what the Biden Administration calls “national security?”
Reporter Malcom Kyeyune wrote in UnHerd today: “Those I have spoken to in North Carolina describe a disaster of ‘biblical dimensions.’ The only thing that comes close to it in recent history is the ‘Great Flood’ of 1916 in North Carolina…. During Katrina, more than 350 military helicopters were involved with the rescue efforts. This time, in a mountain disaster zone where many more helicopters are needed than in a coastal area, well below 100 helicopters have currently been committed.” Outrageously, “A decent portion of the Tennessee National Guard, rather than helping rescue Americans in their own home state, are currently deployed to bases in Kuwait…. This means that even though the victims of Hurricane Helene have found themselves stranded within a stone’s throw of some of the U.S. military’s more significant military bases—Camp Lejeune and Fort Liberty are both located in North Carolina—very little help has been forthcoming.”
I, Jose Vega, will not be silenced in the face of this assault on the General Welfare of Americans. When I interrupted the lying “Nobel Prize-winning” economist Paul Krugman at City College of New York Tuesday night [Oct.1], I said, “Uh oh! ‘No-Ball’ prize-winning economist here to tell us how great the economy is. I certainly wonder how great the residents of Asheville, North Carolina, must be feeling right now with no access to power or water or communication with the outside world!
“I wonder how enthusiastic they are about the economy right now. I wonder how enthusiastic the residents of the South Bronx must be feeling about the economy. Hey, maybe North Carolina should name itself Israel, so it can get $20 billion in aid, or Ukraine, so it can get $300 billion in aid.
“Maybe the South Bronx should do the same thing. I’m sure the economy is great for smug liberals like yourself who make $5 million….” Maybe you heard about this—over 30 million people worldwide did. This apparently stung Krugman so much that he lied about who I was and what I said, then, he wrote an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times. I couldn’t figure out why at first, but now I think I know.
I also had said: “Hey, is anyone going to talk about the fact we could be in a war with Iran in a few days? Or do we need to focus on the S&P 500? Is that what really matters, the S&P 500, when most people may not even be alive in a few days, just because we are on the verge of nuclear war?… All that stock market money goes to the military-industrial complex so that more innocent women and children are dead!”
And that’s what they don’t want the American people to realize. We are inches away from thermonuclear war because of the addiction to murder, mayhem and money by the “War Party.” Why do you think Dick “Halliburton” Cheney, and his evil offspring Liz Cheney would endorse Kamala Harris? There’s a history going back to 2001, of contracts involving the Cheney family and the British Ministry of Defense, including its Minister of State for Defense Procurement, Baroness Symons. And we all know the British role in the Ukraine War, including Keir Starmer’s recent attempt to convince Biden to allow long-range weapons to strike into Russia, as well as Boris Johnson’s destruction of peace talks in March of 2022.
If we are even going to get to the Nov. 5 elections alive, before a nuclear war happens, either by accident, or by design, we had better shut these people down—now—by waking the American people up—now! Do what I do, and intervene!! What you do, not on Nov. 5, but between now and Nov. 5, to stop the wars, cut off the war funds, and use human and material resources to aid Americans in distress, can save the lives of our people—and people all over the world.
This is Jose Vega, New York candidate for the United States Congress from the Bronx’s 15th Congressional District. I have a question for Vice-President Kamala Harris: “Who is stopping NASA from asking for Russia’s help to safely return the two American astronauts currently stranded at the International Space Station?”
The Boeing Starliner spacecraft, flying its first manned space mission this past June, badly malfunctioned. It has left two American astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore, 61, and Sunita “Suni” Williams, 58, temporarily stranded in space for the past two months. Not only do my constituents in the Bronx not know about this—most Americans don’t really know what has been going on, because the real story has been buried by an irresponsible media.
After seven years of delays, and going $1.5 billion above its original budget, the Boeing-designed Starliner spacecraft, on its maiden voyage, failed. This brings up another question, by the way: What has happened to American industrial production capability and quality, including in its space program? Privatization was supposed to make things better, but American companies keep failing—and make no mistake, this is a potentially catastrophic failure.
Kamala Harris is the chairwoman of the National Space Council, as Vice-President. Why isn’t she, or any other Presidential candidate, saying anything about this? Yes, there has been talk about what Space X might be able to do, but there was a failure of the Space X Falcon 9 rocket on July 11. As scheduled now, even when Space X returns to the International Space Station, the two astronauts will have to wait to return on the Space X vehicle in February. They will have to spend eight months in space, instead of eight days!!
I think there is a bigger story here, that everyone is running away from. I think that the $1 trillion American war budget—which is mistakenly called the “defense” budget—may be 75% composed of fraud through price markups, cost overruns, and outright crime. The Stimson Center said in a report issued July 16, “Even with a near trillion-dollar Pentagon base budget, the military leaves service members with equipment that doesn’t work, while padding record-breaking profit margins for military contractors.” Ask yourself: how is Russia able to produce five or six times more ammunition than all of NATO, yet it only spends a fraction of what the U.S. does on its military?
The Russian economy, despite all the sanctions, is doing fine, so that means that the military budget does not represent an oppressive burden on the Russian people, which is about to bankrupt them. But the United States, which is supposed to be saving “democracy” all over the world, is producing far less than Russia, with ten times the acknowledged military expenditure, let alone our secret military budget, which could be twice that size. Dwight Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” is now a military-financial complex, no longer dominated by companies like the once productive Boeing, but by a few multi-trillion-dollar financial predators, like BlackRock.
Are these forces, and their political lackeys, behind the scenes, influencing whether we unnecessarily risk the lives of our astronauts? On Aug 15, Time magazine reported: “You wouldn’t get on a plane if your probability of not making it home alive was 1 in 270. Those odds, however, are what NASA considers an acceptable LOC—or loss of crew—projection for a 210-day stay aboard the International Space Station.” Is that really NASA—or the Biden Administration’s State Department? The Russians have the Soyuz spacecraft, and they have been back and forth to the ISS more times than anyone. Yuri Borisov, head of the Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said on August 15, “American colleagues are having trouble with the Starliner spaceship, they do not know how to land their crew, so we are in constant dialogue.”
Is America gambling with the lives of its astronauts, just to not have to rescue them with the help of Russia? Or is it worse—does Kamala Harris not have time to be bothered, because she’s too busy trying to secure the Democratic coronation—not “nomination”—for President? Or, is it even worse—does she not care, or, perhaps, not even know? Well, I do. The first person I ever intervened against was Kamala Harris back in 2021, when she came to the Bronx with an attitude of “benign neglect” toward America’s inner-city population. She pledged to meet with me right after that meeting, and never did.
I have a plan, called the “Space Civilian Construction Corps (CCC.)” It’s a way to integrate rebuilding places like the Bronx with the Army Corps of Engineers and NASA to simultaneously address the skills and employment crisis among youth, the sorry state of our infrastructure, and the need for a new generation of engineers and others to work, if qualified, on the frontiers of science. It is a program of hope, not of tragedy and despair, like politicians always offer when they want to be elected again by the same people that they deplore and detest the rest of the time.
So I say, let’s start the interventions up again! Our astronauts have been stranded there for two months. Our military is completely corrupt and needs investigation and overhaul. We need “action, and action now.” Lives are in the balance. So: what are you prepared to do, Madame Vice-President?
The reckless actions now being taken in the name of revenge have put the world on the precipice of an out-of-control regional war being unleashed in the Middle East. Namely, the two assassinations this week, of a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut, along with Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
We must act now to prevent the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip and a wider conflagration in the Middle East. Possibly up to 186,000 innocent Palestinians have been killed, according to a report by the Lancet.
To start, I am endorsing the statement by Chandra Muzzafar of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST) based in Malaysia, which is addressed to all member states of the United Nations and calls for them to invoke Resolution 377 or the “Uniting for Peace” resolution. That resolution “resolves that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or active aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with the view to making appropriate recommendations to members for collective measures, including, in the case of a breach of the peace or active aggression, the use of armed force if necessary, to maintain or restore, international peace and security.” Please circulate the following statement to as many people as possible, including representatives of nations, NGOs, human rights groups, and others:
Statement by Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, Founder of the International Movement for a Just World
“Dear Ambassador,
Peace. I am writing on behalf of an international NGO committed to human dignity and social justice based in Malaysia. Like many other citizens groups, the International Movement for a Just World (JUST) is deeply concerned about the continuing catastrophe in Gaza and Palestine.
In spite of numerous calls made by people everywhere to Israel to implement an immediate ceasefire and to facilitate the unhindered flow of essentials — water, electricity, food,fuel and medicines — to Gaza, the Israeli government is impervious to any suggestion that it should end immediately the wanton massacre of civilians especially children and women who constitute the majority of those killed and ensure that famine does not claim any more lives in that narrow, congested strip of land.
Since it does not seem to be possible to restrain the Israeli government, we are now hoping that the UN General Assembly and Resolution 377 can be harnessed to curb Israel. The UNGA as you know can be asked to act if the UN Security Council has failed to overcome a prolonged conflict.
A special session of the GA can be convened and it can take a vote on the catastrophe in Gaza and Palestine in general. It is our hope and the hope of many other citizens groups all over the world especially the NGO, World Beyond War, the initiator of this global campaign, that your government will give wholehearted support to the proposal to adopt 377 or the ‘Uniting for Peace’ Resolution. It will give a pivotal role to the UNGA in bringing to an end the genocide in Gaza. Uniting for Peace can not only impose an embargo upon the flow of arms to both Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian resistance group. It can also disarm both parties to the conflict and send a huge number of unarmed peacekeepers to Gaza,the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. They will ensure that there is no armed clash in all parts of Palestine and even in Israel until a conference of all parties involved directly or indirectly in the conflict reach an agreement on restoring the full rights of the Palestinians, establishing a state where there is equality for all its citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity and the right of return of all Palestinian refugees is recognized and implemented.
JUST is confident given your commitment to peace that you will bring 377 to fruition in the coming session of the GA and help the land of the three faiths to enjoy tranquility and harmony once again.”
In solidarity,
Dr Chandra Muzaffar,
President, International Movement for a Just World (JUST)
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.” –– Frederick Douglass
Independence Day Message from Jose Vega, LaRouche Independent Candidate, 15th CD in the Bronx
July 4, 2024––In his 1852 speech “What to The Slave Is The Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass, with righteous and compassionate patriotism, declared his independence from the stupidity and evil of the polite world, demanding – instead of plausible platitudes – a principled dialogue on the evil problems on slavery:
“Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY.”
By transforming the celebration of the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence into a deliberation on the questions of right concerning every living soul protected by the US Constitution, Douglass demonstrated himself how the nation’s founders “seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense.”
Douglass counterposed the natural lawfulness of the “eternal principles” embodied in the US Constitution against the scandalous treason of the mere opinions of the idiot apologists of slavery:
“But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic… But I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe…
Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple?”
The fact that Douglass warned against this already-commonplace misinterpretation of the US Constitution in 1852 should give any patriotic, or any sane, American citizen pause today in 2024—because the treasonous element is so plainly hegemonic throughout today’s “United States of Amnesia,” with its necrophiliac lust for a three-front World War in Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Palestine, and Taiwan-China.
Our nation’s current folly can be directly traced back to prior treasons in our nation’s history—treasons which involved the gradual political ascendancy of British-centered imperialist oligarchical factions. This endemic evil will never be resolved by any slogan, nor by any ideology, but only by an educated, patriotic, and compassionate electorate seeking to create “a more perfect Union.”
American Independence has never been, at any point, a “thing” to be celebrated, as such. It has ALWAYS been not other than an anti-imperial, anti-slavery process to be undertaken “at whatever cost.” The Declaration of Independence itself, as a document and as an action, is “a link in the chain of our nation’s continuing destiny.”
As Douglass—and President John Quincy Adams before him—rightly noted, such a destiny has, from its inception, been weighed and marred by its issuance from within the rotten husk of a British-controlled Imperial World Empire whose most lucrative commercial enterprises consisted of the colonial rape and traffic of slaves, arms, drugs as well as raw material resources. Such a World Empire had, at the time of the American Revolution, inhumane precedents and inhuman predecessors stretching back into the sordid depths of pre-Renaissance European history, and earlier forms of pre-Christian civilization.
The various families of the rentier-financier oligarchy long predated the American Revolution—and continued to exist throughout and after the American Revolution and Civil War, as treasonous catalytic agents of disunion.
Those who fail to recognize such an obvious continuity in history of anti-Union oligarchical influence in the United States of America are not yet prepared to face up to the menace of what appears to be “U.S. Imperialism” today. Just as there were those factions within the United States who pushed for the nationalization of the slave trade that Douglass called “inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous,” as well as treasonous and un-Constitutional—so, too, today there is an orgy of treasonous factional and foreign-national influence occurring daily within the various “agencies” of our disinformation-addicted post-9/11 “state of exception” permanent bureaucracy.
The problem facing the world emphatically is not “the United States.” If only it were so simple! What we face is the even more grim reality that the true revolutionary spirit of the United States Constitution has largely ceased to exist within the minds, the memories, or the intentions of this country’s inhabitants, so that they accept treasonous monetary tyranny and endless race-supremacist wars as a “necessary evil.”
Meanwhile, those few who adhere to the “saving principles” contained in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, are, most often, like Douglass, distorted, blatantly censored, or simply erased from American public life and institutional memory.
So today when we ask, “What to An American Is the Fourth of July?” — calling to mind Frederick Douglass’s astonishing speech, “What to The Slave Is the Fourth of July?” — an independent mind can do more than hope that an American would grasp the scorching irony of such a title.
Join my Independent Campaign for an unbought and unbossed Bronx.
June 26, 2024—In what is now the most expensive primary in U.S. election history, Rep. Jamaal Bowman was just defeated by his challenger George Latimer in New York’s 16th congressional district. Close to $25 million was poured to oust a vulnerable and impotent representative for what were very mild and toothless remarks made against the horrific butchery of tens of thousands of innocent and defenseless civilians, most of whom were children and women, at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The majority of this $25 million is known to have come from the so-called Zionist Lobby and their enforcers, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to put in their self-appointed prostitute Latimer.
Bowman suffered a brutal defeat of 17 points. Was such a major blowout inevitable? If a major, single-issue lobby group like AIPAC decides to pour unlimited amounts of money to buy a district, can nothing be done?
If that were the case, I would not currently be running right now against another one of AIPAC’s bone-headed “empty suits” like Richie Torres. The so-called Squad, of which Bowman is a member, has chosen to abide by the conventional standards of “going along to get along” by aligning themselves to the impotent, aging infrastructure of the Democratic Party instead of actually declaring their independence within their capacity as representatives of Congress.
A metanoia, or a transformation of conscience, was needed on the parts of Jamaal Bowman, Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and all other members of the so-called “Squad” which came out to supposedly defend the 16th congressional district from AIPAC’s influence.
Instead of endorsing the clearly dementia-ridden Biden, what if Bowman had said, “I cannot support either of these wars, whether in Gaza or Ukraine, which has brought us to the edge of nuclear war. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are the arbiters of endless war, nothing more. The United States must pull out of both those wars, now!” What if Bernie Sanders, the once alluring presidential candidate in 2016, had said, “It wasn’t the Russians that sabotaged my campaign. It was Hillary, using the pretext of alleged Russian interference, who prevented me from winning the Democratic Primary against the desires of my supporters.”
A metanoia of this type did not occur, precisely because of the lack of any real understanding of what an independent campaign is. Don’t they realize that the real “Election Day” isn’t actually on the final day of their so-called congressional, presidential, or gubernatorial races? Election Day is the day that the citizenry decides to elect itself, to stand up for the free and independent right to govern one’s self. That’s what I intend to catalyze within The Bronx. That’s what every person who decides to elect themselves, whether for office or not, should do within their districts. It is time that people intervene to tell the TRUTH, not to appease others. As I’ve always believed, “the Truth defies silence.”
The so-called political uniparty that has been presented to people must be entirely broken with. The ‘forever wars’ now being run in Ukraine against Russia, in Taiwan against China, and other nations that are breaking away with the ‘rules-based-order’ of color revolutions, neocolonialism, interventionist wars, and financial speculation must be opposed from within the United States itself. The poor people of the world, from within the nations of the Global South, have finally been given an alternative, in the form of a just and durable security and development architecture. Nations are now realizing that they can pursue their own economic development. That is the real reason for these wars, and why their backers are willing to pursue full-on nuclear Armageddon to protect themselves from a blowout of their bankrupt system.
This July should mark the “Independent Voice in Congress” month. Those who intend to challenge themselves to this kind of leadership in statecraft must elect themselves not on their ideology, party, or previous prejudices and beliefs, but on their dreams, aspirations, integrity, and loyalty to the General Welfare.
A Juneteenth Message from Jose Vega, LaRouche Independent Candidate, 15th CD in the Bronx
In the 15th Congressional district, where I am running as an independent candidate for Congress, there is an area called Morrisainia. It was once the plantation estate of the Morris family. Why should that name mean something to everyone and America, and why do I bring this up to you on this day?
Everybody has been talking in these recent days and years about Alexander Hamilton, but not many people know about his closest friend, the man who gave the eulogy at his funeral. His name was Gouvenor Morris, and Morrisainia in the Bronx was his home. There’s another reason you should know who he is; he wrote the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States. We used to all know how to recite it: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the General Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
In 1777, at the age of 25, the same age I am right now, Gouvenor Morris wrote a constitution for the state of New York that abolished slavery. He lost. In 1787, at the Constitutional Convention, he challenged the shameful “three-fifths” clause, which counted five black slaves as equal to three whites in order to apportion Southern Congressional representation. Morris instead proposed that the nation as a whole purchase all the slaves from the South, and set them free immediately. He lost. Here is part of what Morris said about slavery, during his losing battle at the 1787 Constitutional Convention:
“It was a nefarious institution-It was the curse of heaven on the States where it prevailed. Compare the free regions of the Middle States, where a rich & noble cultivation marks the prosperity & happiness of the people, with the misery & poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Va. Maryland & the other States having slaves. Travel thro’ ye whole Continent & you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance & disappearance of slavery…..
“Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them Citizens & let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? The Houses in this city (Philadelphia) are worth more than all the wretched slaves which cover the rice swamps of South Carolina. The admission of slaves into the Representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and S. C. who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & dam(n)s them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a Government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of Pa. or N[ew] Jersey, who views with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice.”
He would add that Domestic slavery is the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed Constitution.
“The vassalage of the poor has ever been the favorite offspring of aristocracy….”
That last sentence rings particularly true right now in the Bronx, and all over the United States. Because we have electoral disenfranchisement all over the United States, and if we don’t correct it, this election cycle, we could end up in a world war, even a thermonuclear war, as a result. This is a form of volunteered slavery that is in some ways every bit as vicious as the one that was abolished through 1861-65 in the United States 159 years ago.
Do you know about the $25 million that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent in {one} Congressional district—the 16th C.D., right next to where I am running? In my district, where Gouvenor Morris’ home is, and where he is buried—one of the poorest areas of the Bronx—my opponent is notorious for being bought and paid for. But it’s not just the Bronx—look at the United States Senate.
Did you know that various watchdog groups estimate that, in order to get elected to the United States Senate, in America today—in order to make a race “competitive”—you would have to raise about $45,000 per day, 365 days/year, for six years, just to hope to unseat warlords like Chuck Schumer? My colleague, LaRouche Independent Diane Sare, who ran against Schumer in 2022 and is running this year in 2024, against Kirsten Gillibrand, another creature from the military-monetary war complex, believes, as I do, in freeing America from volunteered slavery!
When Gouvenor Morris used the phrase, “to build a more perfect Union”, he knew whereof he spoke. The government was imperfect, and even immoral in many respects, but it had to be changed by those that refused to accept injustice, though injustice continued to rule. The fact that injustice is the rule in the society does not mean that justice cannot exist. (The African-American Abolitionist and Constitutionalist Frederick Douglass insisted that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were anti-slavery documents, despite flaws.) It means that those who are just, have to practice justice, whatever the unjust do.
The same is true of elections and political power. The fact that the citizens of our nation feel powerless to stop the corruption that they perceive through government, does not mean that self-government, true citizenship and meaningful civic action cannot exist. It means that self-government has to be practiced on an individual level, in order to practice it on an international level. At no time in history has that been easier to do, and harder to do, than now. Easier to do, because a committed individual that believes that “truth defies silence,” can and must be heard; harder, because the pressure to go along to get along is greater than ever.
I don’t go for that. I don’t go along to get along. This Juneteenth, declare your independence from volunteered slavery. Don’t wait for someone to tell you that you are free, as enslaved people were forced to do 159 years ago. Form a More Perfect Union through a New International Security and Development Architecture, and a new United States, freed from the rule of the warlords, that returns to the vision that Alexander Hamilton and Gouvenor Morris fought for. No one need be a slave, who does not volunteer to be so.
A Statement from Jose Vega, LaRouche Independent Candidate, 15th CD in the Bronx
“The Bronx is burning”—remember that phrase from the 1970s? The Bronx is burning once again, but this time, the smoke is coming from the behind of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
The horrific butchery of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children in Gaza in the last several months shocked the world, and the United States, so much, that students, young people, and even strong supporters of Israel, including Israeli citizens, have called for the war to stop, and for American funding of Israel to stop, until the war stops. In response, according to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! “The pro-Israel lobby group reportedly plans to spend as much as $25 million to defeat (Jamaal) Bowman, who was one of the first lawmakers to call for a permanent ceasefire after October 7th.”
If AIPAC is prepared to spend $25 million in only one Congressional district, what is it prepared to spend nationally? And before you assume this is only against “progressive Democrats,” consider what they just tried—but failed—to do against Kentucky Republican conservative Congressman Thomas Massie. “I’m not against Israel. I’ve never voted to sanction Israel. I’ve never said anything particularly, you know,critical of Israel, other than that, for instance, right now,…they’ve killed 1% of the civilian population in Gaza…I vote my conscience, which they won’t tolerate.”
Massie just beat AIPAC’s attempt to prevent him from returning to Congress by throwing a wall of money up against him. AIPAC is an equal-opportunity manipulator of elections. But what will happen in the Bronx? Is the Bronx, is New York City, is the nation being sold on the auction block of the military-monetary complex, because war is the only industry that the bloodthirsty policies of the uniparty will allow to grow and flourish? Did you know that the House of Representatives just passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that includes a provision that, if passed by the Senate, will automatically enroll all males from the ages of 18 to 26 for military service? While discussed as “simply a routine streamlining measure, ””the other, unspoken effect would be removing young men’s choice to engage in civil disobedience.” According to http://Reason.com. And moves of the same nature are now happening in France, Great Britain and other nations, as Ukraine runs out of soldiers, and a new war is planned with Iran, with China, and who knows where else?
I, Jose Vega, suggest to you, that AIPAC is not only doing this for Israel. How many tens of millions, how many hundreds of millions are being spent by AIPAC and other lobbies to promote the cause of war, to turn a blind eye to present and future campaigns of genocide, or if you prefer, deliberate, intentional mass murder of children and women of child-bearing age, {for depopulation purposes, as opposed to any military objectives whatsoever?} As an independent congressional candidate for the Bronx (NY-15), I am directly opposed to the idea that certain financial forces believe they can simply buy a congressional district. Is AIPAC doing its “Congress shopping” with the approval of the people in Bowman’s district? How many of them know that their vote doesn’t actually matter in the face of ‘big money’ lobbyists acting for foreign interests?
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe voters, or non-voters like you, are actually ok with having your Congressional district purchased by the same people that take your money to fight mass-murderous wars, and that, soon, will take your sons—and probably daughters—to fight. Is that what you support? Are you for sale to AIPAC, or to some other would-be political slave-owner? I’m not.
Let’s not be political prostitutes. Let’s not be for sale. Let’s be independent. Let’s be un-bought, and un-bossed, like Brooklyn’s late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. Let’s form a Committee for An Un-Bought and Un-Bossed Bronx. Reject AIPAC, Reject War!!!
The May 28th filing of Diane Sare in Albany, NY. Credit: Jason Ross
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see dangers only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.—George Washington, in collaboration with Alexander Hamilton, Farewell Address, 1797
June 1, 2023—If it weren’t for the widespread censorship, the violent repression of political dissent, and the ubiquitous atmosphere of cultural pessimism, the glaring irony would not escape any conscious person’s notice that it is, today, in the United States of America, generally seen as “radical”––or even downright “crazy”—to run for federal office on a policy platform of promoting the General Welfare, of bolstering the nation’s physical economy, of respecting international law, and of resisting and halting the dictatorial drive via proxy into multiple scandalous, suicidal, rapacious, imperial Malthusian wars.
Yet this is exactly what the two independent campaigns of Diane Sare for U.S. Senate in New York and Jose Vega for U.S. House of Representatives (NY CD-15) in the Bronx set out to do. Far from being “radical,” Sare and Vega represent, simply, a principled and unwavering commitment to a properly dynamic, revolutionary conception of the significance of the continued existence of the United States Constitution.
Drawing on the “capital of mind” stored within the various national and international layers organized around Lyndon LaRouche over the past fifty years––and drawing especially on an historical assessment of the cultural preconditions required for the political realization of the foundational principles of the constitutional republic of the United States of America in 1789––these twin candidacies have reached, and far surpassed, the egregious signature-requirements imposed by the State of New York on candidates who refuse to affiliate themselves with the increasingly criminal and hysterical “two-party system.” Though not yet officially “certified” by the party-run Board of Elections in Lower Manhattan, both candidates’ petitions have passed the challenge-period unscathed, and have thus become some of the only candidates in the state of New York to successfully gather the required signatures with a combined total of 85,000.
Diane Sare in Albany, NY, May 28Sare turned in 70,000 signatures to the New York Board of Elections
To accomplish this patriotic feat, hundreds of volunteers flooded into the state of New York, and into the poorest Congressional District in the United States—the Bronx—some taking off weeks of work, with the revolutionary intention to uphold our constitutionally-protected electoral process, and to dispel the miasma of despair that has been induced in the population through decades of de-industrialization, and the consequent ravages of abject poverty and drug-affliction that have “trickled down” there from the official policies of “benign neglect” (Fn. 1) and “planned shrinkage.”
Vega characterizes his campaign as an instigation within the population for people “toelect themselves” in order to reverse these destructive policies and to rebuild the country.
Leadership To Uplift a Nation
As Diane Sare has publicly remarked on numerous occasions, the crisis facing the country urgently requires qualified leadership, yet there is no competent statesman either in office or in the running for president. Indeed, as the general petitioning results have shown, there is no high-profile candidate backed by a viable political movement who represents even the most basic standard of the continuation of the life of the species as U.S. policy.
What does exist is a sort of hellish zoo spread throughout the government’s various branches and “agencies,” of various factions of anti-American, anti-human, pro-oligarchy, pro-usury cowards, criminals, and imbecilic puppets of the likes of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Ritchie Torres, all of whom are capable, apparently, of little more than parroting the chauvinist lies they incestuously beget in one another’s otherwise-empty minds.
Jose Vega campaigning in the Bronx, NY, April 16. Credit: Pamela Drew
Meanwhile, “NATO” has perpetrated multiple drone strikes against the early-warning radar detection capacities of Russia’s anti-missile nuclear defense systems, to the insane howling cheers of the likes of Dubya-clone Adam Kinzinger.
This bleak reality makes the principled rigor of the Sare and Vega campaigns all the more crucial. A quick calculation shows that the whole petitioning process involved several hundreds of thousands of unique conversations between Sare and Vega organizers and New York/Bronx residents, just within the last six weeks. These conversations were all undertaken in good faith with citizens of all stripes by campaign volunteers, directly subverting the factionalized ideological groupthink of today’s cancel-culture.
During a meeting of the International Peace Coalition on May 31, Sare described one such interaction: “We met people who said, ‘What do you stand for?’ And I would say ‘Peace.’ And they would say ‘What? Well, don’t you think this war is really necessary?’” Sare described how people would then go through a litany of reasons of why the U.S. should be at war today, whether it was “supporting” Ukraine, Israel, or both. The irony is that the vast majority of people have not thought through how this actually benefits them as American citizens. Once such conversations are actually in process, the doors are open for a real discussion on doing away with the manufactured acceptance in a system of endless wars.
We must shatter the popular delusions pushing the U.S. into a nuclear showdown with Russia today, Sare said, and added:
The American people have a moral obligation to be involved in this process, and, rather than acting like two-year olds in a sandbox, to realize that they have to 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.
We have to quickly create in the United States, and in the West in general, a stronger connection to the paradigm of the BRICS-Plus—what Helga [Zepp-LaRouche] has been calling for in terms of a new strategic architecture. The fact that this is actually emerging, and has been picked up by China, Russia, Brazil…. What is uniform about them? Their religion? Their language? Their form of government? Virtually nothing. But they find they can come together in a common interest for their mutual benefit, for the advancement of mankind. That was something that the American people used to believe in. So I would say that my intention, our intention here in the U.S., is that we have to bring the people into the debate.
Think Like LaRouche
Such a tragic situation as the current political crisis would in all probability have been averted, had Lyndon LaRouche been allowed to exercise his constitutional right to freely run for office, without the interference of the “dupes and tools” peddling the fallacious logics of the “invisible hand of the free market,” “British geopolitical strategy,” “the noble lie,” “the limits to growth,” and “the lesser of two evils.”
With LaRouche, our nation would have had a president who knew how to think like Ludwig van Beethoven, as Lincoln knew how to think like Shakespeare. As LaRouche identified Beethoven’s genius as that of an “epistemologist,” likewise, LaRouche’s unique contribution as an American philosopher and statesman grew out of his ability to sublate ideologies and revolutionize an epistemology through which the subject of universal history could be globally reassessed throughout the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st Centuries.
LaRouche identified what he called the “theological implications of the science of physical economy.” He thus saw the lawful interconnection of the cultural, religious, economic, scientific, military, and historiographical crisis induced within the United States of America by the abandonment of its own constitutional mandate to develop strictlyits own national interests, and its consequent assumption of hegemonyover the imperial domain of the NATO-aligned West, and its colonial outgrowths––none of which properly belongs to the U.S.
This wrongful possession took place through decades of terror-backed political jingoism, rampant historical erasure and revision, foolish abandonment of scientific progress, unthinking adoption of Nazi-derived cultural precepts, and military-strategic jumboism. In the aftermath of such folly is where we now stand, the crisis into which Sare and Vega have committed themselves to intervene.
The direness of the current world strategic situation, however, itself presents an opportunity to reawaken the nation’s true culture, and activate its true patriotic spirit.
The kaleidoscopic ironies involved all center around the undeniable fact that the United States itself––the very constitutional republic which had, in principle and in deed, dealt the first death-blow to the internationally-extended usurious oligarchical influences then operating through the auspices of the British Empire––has, through the now-rampant oligarchical and foreign-national influence within its own globally-extended military and monetary capabilities, become the enforcer of today’s analogous oligarchical faction.
Yet, despite the real threat of thermonuclear war, Sare and Vega both demonstrate through their commitment to the creation of political freedom, that the fatal aspect of these ironies does not need to predominate in our thinking. Through their optimistic adherence to the concept that mankind is fundamentally good, both maintain and prove that the world is surely on the brink of peace as well as it is on the brink of war.
Thus, just as the American sanctions of recent years against Russia have not only failed to “turn the Ruble into rubble” (as “Genocide Joe” expected), but have rather induced the political-economic circumstances in which Russia’s military standing has shifted decidedly in her favor––this despite the NATO sabotage of the enormous Nord Stream pipeline; so, too, the oligarchical financial interests parasitically lodged within the corrupted remains of the two-party system in Lower Manhattan, and the gangster-like control over the electoral process thus held there, have failed to contain the now-broadening political ferment surrounding the Sare and Vega campaigns.
Like the student encampments on campuses across the United States and the world, those hundreds of thousands of conversations undertaken by hundreds of dedicated volunteer campaigners in what is essentially an emergency war-time mobilization “to promote the General Welfare,” represent the outbreak of sanity in a world threatened by a grave concatenation of systemic crises. The patriotic world-citizens who reoriented their lives, putting everything on hold to drive and fly from Ohio, Missouri, New Mexico, California, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Canada, and elsewhere, into New York to put Jose Vega and Diane Sare on the ballot, prove by example that such an outbreak of sanity is what is actually meant by “the pursuit of happiness”—the American insistence on bringing about that which is better. Such an example is what must now be emulated and actuated, and that rapidly.
Campaigning, April 20. Credit: X/Jose Vega
With the leadership of Diane Sare and Jose Vega, eminently viable solutions, representing the culmination of centuries of the ingenious development of that most precious, infinite resource––“capital of mind”––can become again, against all odds, the international currency of a new American political discourse. Free-traders and their two-bit slavery-addicted theories be damned; the United States must join hands with the majority of humanity and fulfill its contribution to the common destiny of Humankind.
In that sense, the petitioning period represented just the beginning. The real work of continuing to transform the nation is still to come. As Sare said in the press release announcing her petitioning success:
Coming out of here we are going to be doing banner deployments, street deployments, field deployments…. We have to have the image of what the United States will do when it joins the Belt and Road Initiative, when we [in the United States] come back to our real patriotic revolutionary identity…. Whether we control what happens to the election or not, we have to win the policy, because if we don’t, none of us may be here to commemorate Memorial Day in the future.
Footnotes
1. The Democratic party incumbent, “Richy” Torres, describing himself as the “champion of Israel,” releases a daily logorrheic stream of AIPAC-laundered propaganda for the State of Israel, which recently culminated in his shameless endorsement of increased campus surveillance in his “Columbia Act,” directly on the heels of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech demanding just such increased militarization of our nation’s campuses. The much blathered-about “drastic rise of anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses,” is obviously in fact a rise in concern for the besieged people of Palestine, the majority of whom are, of course, Semitic. The only thing “Richy” Torres “represents” is the truth of the statement made by Washington in his prophetic Farewell Address, that, “The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is to some degree a slave.”
That is not even to mention the increasingly realistic fears of an actual thermonuclear confrontation between NATO and Russia, which Torres has also idiotically voted up during his term. As the case of the aggrieved self-immolation of U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell exemplifies, the actual citizens of the United States of America (as opposed to the various actuated puppets of foreign influence sleep-walking through the halls of our government)––or at least those citizens who still have enough mental courage and intelligence to figure out the basic contours of their own complicity in a synarchic program of global terror––are being pushed to the brink of absolute despair by their monetarily-coerced complicity in what is a military policy so self-doomed that it would make the goddess Ate herself cry out, “Stop! For God’s sake, stop!”
