Presidents’ Day Conference

U.S. Senate Candidate Diane Sare: Revive the Intention of Our Nation To Be and Do Good

Feb. 28—Diane Sare, independent candidate for U.S. Senate from New York, gave the keynote of the day-long conference she convened Feb. 18, “America’s Next Fifty Years,” held both in person in New York City, and online. The full transcript of her presentation follows; subheads, embedded links and illustrations have been added by EIR. The video is available here.

I would like to begin by playing an excerpt from Lyndon LaRouche, who set this up nicely, and me nicely as he always did, by putting you out on a limb. We’re going to hear a few minutes from him about the question of leadership.

Lyndon LaRouche (video): Well, the first thing you have to do, which is my special principle, you start from the future and work backwards. That’s the only way to do anything competently. The problem is, people will try to work their way from today to the future. That’s a mistake. You have to work backwards from the future. Now, of course that’s been my practice in business matters and other relevant matters since the 1950s, when I was first in the forecasting business. It worked then and it still works, the principle always works.

Human beings, unlike animals, start from the future. Now, I admit, an egg does tend to grow, it does tend to hatch. But the point is, that also happens in the future, the hatching comes in the future. So, the point is, you have to start from the future. You have to come up with an estimate of what is possible. You have to foresee the catastrophes which are awaiting you, and so forth and so on. So, you have to start from the future, and generally that means you’ve got to think at least a decade or two decades ahead. That’s what it takes to get any major change in technology through in any nation. Therefore, you start from the future.

This is a peculiarity of the human mind which does not exist in the animal mind. The animal mind can only work on the basis of working from the present to the future. The human mind, when it’s functioning, works from the future to begin with the present. And that’s the difference.

So it’s a way of thinking that’s important, because there’s the way of thinking of the animal, which is what most people do when they talk about forecasting. They will project, they will project from the present into the future, but from the present. They will determine what they can do from the present. The scientist who is competent works from what he can do from the future to the present. The difference between the two for a human being is credit.

In other words, what happened? Kennedy started a space program. How does a space program work? How does it continue to work? The space program operates only on the basis of proceeding from the future goal to the present achievement. You get to Mars, or you get to the Moon first. Now, we didn’t finish that job, but the intention was to finish it. The intention has been, that the way you can live on the Moon under any condition, you’re going to go underground. You’re going to be an underground movement on the Moon, because all this garbage keeps coming down on the surface of the Moon, and it’s not a good place to play.

So, you have to take these tunnels that you can get in the Moon, and you put your apparatus and your system inside these tunnels. And hope that you get them down deep enough, so that you’re going to resist any of the kinds of things you expect might hit on the surface. So, you will plan, first of all, to build a myriad on the Moon in tunnels. And there you will begin to build, largely with some human participation, because it’s sort of a short hop to the Moon if you’ve got good systems. But the point is, you’re going to have to build up a complete apparatus in the tunnels of the Moon. And this is going to be the way you’re going to build, economically, the kinds of devices that will go to places in space, among the asteroids and things like that out there. And that’s the way you’re going to do it.

You must start from planning from the future to the present.

Now, I did a little thing like that in “The Woman on Mars.” It was just a kick in the butt for some people who were too lazy about getting on the horse on this one. But that’s the way it works; you have to point in the future for something that’s going to happen. You will then work your way backward from the future to see if you can do every step on the way to that point. Therefore, what we want is, we want to get young people out of the dumps, out of the drug-yards and similar places, and get them into technological training and university training of a good quality—good quality means it starts from the future. You take the most advanced conceptions in physical science, or an approach to physical science, take the most advanced, advantageous standpoint. You define that, cross-check it, think about it. Now you figure out how you can work your way back to reaching the point that you want to get to, from where you are today. And that’s the only way this will work.

That’s the way I work. That’s the way I forecast. Any human being can forecast effectively if they go through the kind of training and concessions to what they should know, that’s required. If you’re starting from today to build your way to a future, you’re going to find yourself sliding backwards more than going forward.

So, what we need is, we need to get people who have a competence and imagination to match, who will pick points in the future which are achievable. First of all, you start with things that you can know will work. Something that will work five years from now, or over a period of five years where we’re taking it, something like that. But I would say we have to take two generations—50 years. And the general perspective should be programs which are based on a 50-year perspective, with increments in between.

You won’t finish it up that way, but you will start doing it that way, because you will have given yourself a task, and your experience in trying to accomplish that task, even in the planning phase, will build up your competence, and you’ll probably get pretty close to what you thought you could do.

Diane Sare: I imagine that that sounded shocking to many people here. Why would this person running for Senate have Lyndon LaRouche talking about building a manned colony on Mars? LaRouche said, at a conference some years ago, the fact that people find this odd, that people attacked me as crazy for saying we’re going to Mars, shows how much less moral the population is than when Kennedy was President and announced the crazy plan to land a man safely on the Moon and bring him safely back to Earth. Why does this sound odd today, and it didn’t sound odd to Americans in 1961? I think we have to consider that, because I have to dispense with a few things that are occurring, for which we can do our own kind of forecasting in both directions and see whether LaRouche is right about this.

So, what are we looking at today? We are looking at a situation where, thanks to the identity of the United States being lost in such a way as I just said; thanks to us having a culture which in no way reflects the intentions of our Founders, the world is on a precipice. We are just one mistake away from thermonuclear annihilation. The American people are being forced, like in a Satanic cult, to be complicit in the crime of genocide being carried out right now in Gaza, and made to feel helpless because our elected, or selected, officials do not respond. Is there anybody in the world who doesn’t know that a phone call from Joe Biden to Bibi Netanyahu could stop the slaughter in about five minutes? But that is not happening.

So, then what? How do you get out of this?

The other thing I have to say, because there was a major shift, people probably saw it: The interview that Tucker Carlson did with President Putin of Russia—two hours. So, what happens? First we have the screaming meemie of Congressman Turner from Ohio—“There’s a national security emergency, I can’t tell you what it is. Everyone has to come to my office if you want to know what it is, but I can’t tell you. But maybe Biden will declassify it, oh my gosh!” So, then we hear that the Russians are supposedly going to put nuclear weapons up in space. Do you think our Space Force—remember the Space Force?—wasn’t already planning this? And then that didn’t scare people enough, that didn’t do it.

So, then what happens? Oh, Alexei Navalny suddenly just dropped dead in prison. What use would poisoning or killing Navalny be to President Putin in Russia right now? His popularity is like 90%. The whole nation is unified behind him in defeating the NATO-proxy, pro-Nazi regime in Ukraine. He just did a two-hour interview with Tucker Carlson. Do you think he would want to undermine all of that by bumping off a so-called opposition leader—who, by the way, is a horrible racist himself, which no one here ever talks about? It was so conveniently timed, because Navalny’s wife was at the Munich Security Conference! So she got to get up and give a speech, blaming Putin. They don’t even know the cause of death; there hasn’t even been an investigation yet. Then the United States is completely enraged that the Chinese dared to say that this was an internal Russian affair, that there had been no investigation yet, and therefore they are not commenting. How dare those Chinese respect the sovereignty of some other nation!

We are being bombarded, bombarded, bombarded. I wanted to read you something, given that it’s Presidents’ Day and we have to think about these things. This is a letter from Alexander Hamilton; people may know it. He didn’t admit to it at the time. It’s called “The Farmer Refuted,” from February, 1775. I thought of this. He writes:

The experience of past ages may inform us that when the circumstances of a people render them distressed, their rulers generally recur to severe, cruel, and oppressive measures.

Does that sound familiar?

Instead of endeavoring to establish their authority in the affection of their subjects, they think they have no security but in their fear. They do not aim at gaining their fidelity and obedience, by making them flourishing, prosperous and happy; but by rendering them abject and dispirited. They think it necessary to intimidate and awe them, to make every accession to their own power, and to impair the people’s as much as possible. [Emphasis in original.]

Does that sound to anyone like the United States today? Hamilton warned us about this in 1775.

A Virtuous Nation Is a Happy Nation

Now, in contrast, I will share with you an outrageous quote from George Washington, which I think was influenced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In his Farewell Address, he says—and I won’t read you the whole thing; well, I’ll read you a little more, because it’s beautiful. This is on foreign relations. He says:

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it—It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue?

How do you like that? A nation which is virtuous will also be happy! That’s what George Washington said, that’s what Leibniz said. Is it miserable to do the good? Are we miserable when we do good? Is this like Kant? “Oh, I really didn’t want to help that person, yuck”? No! That’s not generally how you feel about it. It is natural for human beings to delight in doing the good. So, how the heck did we get in the situation where we are, and how do we get out of it? Now, we’re going to go back to what LaRouche said, because, if you say, “I want to get out of here! I want to get out of here!”—what’s the first question that someone asks? Exactly! “Where do you want to go?”

So, we’re stuck, because we’ve been robbed of our culture, so we have millions of people demonstrating in the streets against genocide—which we should be. But for what, for where? Where are we going? How should mankind be living? Where should we be 50 years from now? Fifty years from now, two generations.

Now, if you take the inverse, the way LaRouche said we could not get there, but it’s useful, because we’ll be doing a forecast. So, think of everything you can think of, whether it’s the cost of groceries, the quality of groceries, the quality of school lunches; what’s happening in the schools; what’s happening with the homeless situation; what’s happening with employment; what’s happening with infrastructure. Can you think of anything in our nation, right now, where you can say, “Gee if it just keeps going this way I can’t wait to see what the future looks like”? [laughs] I would say, “No, we probably can’t.” There is not one thing you can think of where you can say, “Gee, it’s going to be so great! There’s a marijuana dispensary in every single building. I’m going to love that.” “When every single child has the opportunity to have gender surgery at the age of three, that’s going to be fabulous.” No! Where are we headed?

If you think about the projection, probably in 50 years most of us won’t be here. We may end up just annihilating ourselves with a thermonuclear war or a biochemical something, or whatever, and all not be here. I hope not. If we are here, on this trajectory, the U.S. might have a million or two people, and a life expectancy of about 35, and you’ll be illiterate. Now, you might get a rebound, because the good thing about having no electricity, no clean drinking water, and living in the mud, is that your cell phone won’t work. That might force people to read books again! And lo and behold, we might have a renaissance, if we can get to the point where all the iPads and cell phones, and all this garbage that we’re bombarded with by people who just want to control us, is stopped. So, I suppose we could have that to look forward to, if you are interested in going through the hell to get there.

Think About Where We Are Going

My proposal is, that we actually don’t do that. We don’t go there. But that means, you have to think about where we are going to go. I will tell you, a dear friend of Helga and Lyndon LaRouche, Krafft Ehricke, a space pioneer, said: “If God had wanted man to be a space-faring creature, he would have given him a Moon.” Well, we have a Moon. The other thing I found very fascinating to think about, because the Moon is the launch point for these other endeavors, is that the Moon’s gravity is about one-sixth that of Earth’s. Now that is extremely fortunate, because everyone knows when you are launching a spaceship and you have to land on the Moon, it is very difficult to slow your rocket down so you don’t collide and break everything. Now, imagine if the gravity on the Moon were six times the gravity of Earth. That would be really tough. We probably wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to land there. So, not only did God give us a Moon, but He gave us a Moon with so much less gravity than we have here on Earth, that we can manage to figure out how to safely land there.

Now what is required in going to the Moon? You hear people: “Why are we going to go to the Moon? We have so many problems on Earth. We have poverty, blah, blah.” Well, is there a bank on the Moon? When we go to the Moon and we spend all this money, are we spending it on the Moon? No! Where is the money spent? Here! People don’t know today that when we had NASA functioning, I think NASA had 40,000 employees. The private sector had 400,000 employees, producing the things that they needed to get to the Moon. And in the course of producing those things that they were trying to figure out—because, what did they do? They had a goal: The goal was, we’re going to get to the Moon.

Then they had to figure out, how do we get from here to the Moon? How do we get out of Earth orbit? Do we have materials? Are we going to develop new kinds of ceramics? And lo and behold, all these things started coming out of the space program. Teflon, Velcro, computers, different ways of treating milk, microwave ovens, all kinds of things that we take for granted today, and that massively raised the standard of living of the American population. LaRouche said that if we had a 40-year plan to colonize Mars, within about a decade, the purchasing power of the average American household would increase by an order of magnitude.

So, instead of having the experience that every time you go to the grocery store, your $100 gets you a smaller and smaller little bag of groceries, you would discover that you did not have to spend six weeks’ income to pay your rent or your mortgage plus property taxes. And then by the time the next month comes around you’re already in debt from the previous month, which is what people are experiencing. And I would say it is, in part, why people find themselves incapable of thinking, and why the government has to resort to these vicious tactics, because everybody is already under it. Everybody is already stressed out. Everybody is wondering how they’re going to survive. Oh, but they raised the interest rates, that helped, right? Didn’t that help? Do you like paying 29% interest on your credit card? How about trying to get a house? The prices are already completely out of control, and then the interest rate on a mortgage—it’s crazy.

So, we are being looted, and looted, and looted, and looted. Everyone here in New York; they’re going to put the cameras in and start charging $15 extra if you want to go south of 59th Street—the congestion pricing. That’s going to really help everything. Everyone who is already paying $16 to cross the George Washington Bridge, and then you’re going to pay $15 for the congestion fee, and then you’re going to pay $100 for parking. Then you go buy a little cup of coffee that big, and it’s going to be $12. Then someone is going to give you a ticket and impound your car, and then you’re homeless. That’s basically the situation! [laughs] So, it’s a little rough, and you have to ask yourself—the question I think we all should be asking is—“Why did we put up with this? Why did we allow it to get to this point?”

Inflection Points

There are a couple of inflection points. One is the Warren Commission, the cover-up of the assassination of Kennedy: Because everyone knew it was a cover-up. But they were too scared to overturn it. And therefore, we had other assassinations. We had Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. We had then Lyndon LaRouche, a genius, a real genius, whom you saw, who was really qualified to become President: He couldn’t become President, because the apparatus that killed Kennedy was still in place. But he built up publications with a quarter of a million subscribers; he ran people for office who began winning elections in 1986. What happened? U.S. Marshals, FBI agents, armored vehicles, helicopters, 400 law enforcement personnel surrounded LaRouche’s home in 1986 with the intent to assassinate him, as we found out later through Freedom of Information releases. President Reagan called that off, so then what?

Robert Mueller indicted LaRouche in Boston on credit card fraud charges. What happened? A document showed up in Oliver North’s safe, saying “our man here has the info against LaRouche,” and the judge in Boston said, gee, it looks like you might be right; this might be a political witch hunt. I give you permission to search then-Vice President Bush, Sr.’s files, because it looks like you may be getting targeted as you said. Because LaRouche was offered that if he would go along with Iran-Contra, they’d let him run for President, and he said no. I know it will come as a shock to everyone here, that as soon as we got permission to search Bush’s files, the case ended—that case. They said, the jury is too tired, we can’t continue with this case. Well, the “very tired” jury went out and had a press conference saying they were so outraged, had the case continued, they would have acquitted LaRouche and everyone of all charges.

And what did they do? They moved the case to Virginia, the rocket docket. You know who lives in Arlington, Virginia: the FBI, CIA, it’s an alphabet soup. And that’s who is on the jury. After exhausting every strike, there was still an FBI agent as foreman of the jury, and lo and behold, LaRouche was given a 15-year jail sentence on conspiracy charges, and a dozen of our associates were sent to prison with long sentences. One had a 77-year sentence—Mike Billington, who served 11 years.

And what else did they do? They shut down LaRouche’s publications. They declared them “involuntarily bankrupt.” Seized everything; cut off communications.

So, come to the future. Do you think anyone who worked with LaRouche would be surprised by what’s happening with the two opposition candidates who aren’t even that good? Donald Trump, who has like 7 million lawsuits; they’re clearly trying to bankrupt and destroy the guy. Or, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who can’t get Secret Service protection, and the Democratic National Committee refused to count his votes, so he became an independent. Now the Democratic National Committee is going after him because his super-PAC might be collaborating too closely with his campaign, even though everyone else does that. If you look at what Trump is charged with, everyone in New York does that, too. So, we’re not allowed to have even an unqualified opposition for President. That’s where we are.

And so, in that context, you say, “Why the heck would you bother running for U.S. Senate? Why would José Vega bother running for U.S. Congress?” I guess you would say, someone has got to do it. [laughs] Someone has to actually act like a Senator. Maybe demonstrate to some of these people on Capitol Hill what a real Senator should be doing in this country. Maybe we can change our standards.

So, back to where we are, our forecast. We already discovered if we look at the trajectory of what we’re doing right now, we’re going to be dead and eating maggots, and it’s not going to be very nice. If we, on the other hand, say, we have to figure out how to get to Mars in 50 years, what is required? One of the first things that is required is the development of thermonuclear fusion power. You cannot move human beings to Mars using chemical rockets. It will take months! There are all kinds of things we don’t know about the radiation, things that affect you, besides the zero gravity of traveling. With fusion rockets, what seems to likely be possible, is that you could actually accelerate at the rate of gravity [a rate creating 1G, or Earth’s gravity, of force—ed.], and then decelerate at inverse the rate of gravity, so you could have a luxurious Earth gravity for your entire trip to Mars, and it would only take a number of days, as opposed to months.

Now, of course, it would be stupid—there are some people I would like to send on that voyage without anything on Mars to sustain them (I shouldn’t say that. But there’s a certain political class in D.C. and on Wall Street that maybe we should let them; there are people who have signed up to take a one-way trip to Mars, and I’m not sure if we should discourage them from that.) So, you have to prepare; you have to do things on the Moon.

What is required if you’re sending people into space? Did anyone ever look at Mission Control? We had three guys up there in an orbiter and lander; three. How many people sitting down there at Mission Control? Hundreds. We know there were 400,000 people employed, building what they needed. Can you imagine how many tens of thousands and millions of people would have to be employed, at highly skilled jobs, if we were actually going to get to Mars? What would that mean for our education system? What would we be trying to teach 3- and 4-year olds? Wouldn’t we want to put a violin in their hands; a piano? Six languages; geometry? Who is going to teach that? That’s the scary part. We’re going to have to quickly create, find people who are going to work their butts off to be able to teach the young people who will do this.

Now, can we teach young people when you have a situation like we have in New York City, where it was 1 out of 10 children in the public schools who are homeless? After the influx of 179,000, or however many migrants have come in, in New York, it’s now 1 out of 9 children who are homeless. If you’re a child who has no security and food, or housing, or an ability to bathe, how well are you going to be able to concentrate in that classroom? If the teacher—and this will not also surprise you, that the children who are homeless are not sprinkled evenly: So a class of 30 children, which is too large, has 3 or 4 homeless children in every school—that’s not how it works. There are areas in the Bronx and Brooklyn, where teachers I’ve spoken with tell me that they have had over 50% of the classroom homeless. The teachers are trying to figure out, do we have toothbrushes, can the child do their laundry here. I had a substitute science teacher tell me the body odor in the classroom was unbearable. Is that a society that allows that? Are we going to survive? That’s our future. What we do to the children of this country is our future.

So, if we say that we have to get to Mars in 50 years, and then we look at the way that we are teaching the people who are the ones who are going to do this, we are going to have to have a radical change. That is not only in what is taught, but the conditions of the schools: Do they have clean water? I spoke with teachers during the COVID pandemic. One of the things they say is you want fresh air circulating through the schools, but they couldn’t open the windows! You’re supposed to wash your hands, but the faucets didn’t work! Again, what does that say about the future of the society?

So, this has to change.

Fusion Power, Getting to Mars

Now, last. Who is working on fusion right now? There are some private people in the U.S., frankly doing an amazingly good job with almost no government funding. We have a little bit; we have the National Ignition Facility, we have a facility here in the University of Rochester that’s working on it. But, China is working on fusion; they’re planning to have a prototype, a hybrid reactor by 2030. Korea is working on fusion. A lot of people are working on it. We have an idiotic amendment passed by our Congress called the Wolf Amendment that says American space scientists are not allowed to even talk to Chinese scientists. That’s really good, that’s really going to help us. We actually were caught sending people to spy on students in China. You don’t hear that in the news. What are the Chinese stealing from us? Well, I don’t know. Learning how to be impoverished? How to destroy your infrastructure? I don’t think so.

So, if we are going to actually get mankind to Mars, then we are going to have to work peacefully with other nations. What role are the children of Gaza going to play in our space mission? Well, we’re going to have to have a huge reconstruction plan for that whole region. We’re going to have to have a Palestinian state; a two-state solution right now seems to be the most appropriate. That’s the last international law, is the 1967 borders. And what is that going to look like? And who is going to design the beautiful new cities that we are going to see in Israel and Palestine? What will be the dynamic of the relations among these people? Will they look back to the work of Ibn Sina and al-Farabi; and in India, Bal Gangadhar Tilak; and in China the ancient astronomers. I was in China not that long ago, and I saw that the first armillary sphere was built by a Chinese scientist in 75 AD. That’s pretty early, 75 AD, and he had invented an armillary sphere.

So, if we’re actually going to move mankind in this direction, we are going to have to talk to each other. We’re going to have to take all these companies that are producing missiles and poison gasses—and by the way, because it is unnatural for human beings to be cruel and destructive, the morale is low, and the things we produce are junk. You have heard of our great F-35 fighter jet? Twenty-nine of them have crashed; it’s great. So, because we’re doing things that are stupid—who grows up saying, “When I grow up I really want to produce missiles that kill lots of people”? Nobody says that! The people working at these places would be thrilled to do things to transform the educational system of every single child on the planet. They would be thrilled to say, we’re going to green the deserts, we’re not going to have floods and droughts anymore. We’re not going to have California washed off a cliff every time it rains. We’re not going to have subways turning into waterfalls, every time it rains here in New York. We’re not going to have lack of food. We’re going to solve all these problems. And people would love to do that.

So, we are in a war. This event that myself and José are addressing, and this movement we’re asking you to join, is a declaration of war; that we have to crush the financial interests that have done this to us and our nation. We have to revive in the United States, immediately and urgently, the intention of our nation to be good, to do good, and that requires each of us, personally, to change what we are doing, and become better. Thank you.