A preamble to our policy outlook
“Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken—the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
–– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence
To propose policy promoting the General Welfare in the United States today is to directly face decades and centuries of historical revisionism and ideological “disinformation campaigns” backed by state-sponsored terror and assassinations.
Not only do we face the challenge of discovering and communicating those principled forms of thought and action through which we can as a nation bring ourselves to a condition of universal betterment, we face the even more daunting task of healing the ideological disintegration in our Union that King so eloquently warned against when he demanded the necessity of an entire “revolution of values” for the survival of the United States of America.
In that historic speech, King made clear that he would not let his position as “merely” the representative of a movement for Civil Rights stop him from unleashing his spiritual and intellectual power against the homicidal and suicidal insanity of the post-WWII Anglo-American military establishment:
“For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.”
Today, sixty years after those words were spoken, America’s soul has become nearly totally “poisoned,” and the autopsy does not only read Vietnam––but Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Iraq, and Panama, and Afghanistan, and Libya, and Syria, and Yemen, and Serbia, and Guatemala, and Chile, and Palestine, and Ukraine, and many others besides. King: “We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.”
Of necessity, therefore, in proposing policy as a candidate for federal office, I am steadfastly committed to retaining the optimistic global strategic vision of leaders like Dr. King and Lyndon H. LaRouche. Both unwaveringly committed to bringing about a universal brotherhood of humankind, neither man allowed himself to be cornered into small-minded thinking about what one minority community needs, because both understood that – by the very laws of nature – what occurs in the macrocosm ultimately determines in large part what occurs in the microcosm. There is simply no way to renew and repair our communities and our shared life within the Bronx without also making it a strategic mission, as King and his colleagues at the SCLC had it, “To save the soul of America.”
As the current global developments demonstrate, the “minority communities” around the world, including what has been called the “developing nations” are, in fact, increasingly, the majority of humankind in terms of aggregate population––as well as in terms of economic power, measured in “purchasing power parity.”
Of necessity, therefore, by demanding a national vision for our efforts as Americans, we rediscover the very solidarity with the Global Majority of Humankind that we were assumed to have been leaving behind by demanding to have a dialogue about more than simply the “local” conditions.
The United States will only be able to provide a better standard of living for its communities, including in the Bronx, when We, as a nation, become part of a Community of Shared Principle with the hundreds of other sovereign nation-states around the globe, by repenting of our imperialistic economic and military doctrines. For this to occur, the People must demand this.
This is how you solve the homelessness-and-housing crisis, the immigration crisis, the drug crisis, the education crisis, and the over-arching cultural crisis of our “thing-oriented society.” King was assassinated because he understood this, and because he moved to implement this understanding as a method of policy.
LaRouche often stated that “the content of policy is the method by which it is made.” If we intend to create the “revolution of values” King demanded, if we intend to create a society that is economically viable and founded on Justice, we ourselves, in our daily process of living, thinking, and working, must become revolutionary in precisely King’s exalted sense of that word.
That is how we will create “good policy.”