Make America’s Infrastructure Great Again: Join In China’s Global Initiative, Drop the War Threats

The moment is still ripe for Americans to take a lesson from the immense human and economic loss of Hurricane Harvey: Build the new infrastructure which was many decades overdue, to prevent these disasters from robbing Americans of homes, jobs, untold wealth and even their lives. Reverse the slow-motion collapse of the obsolete infrastructure platforms on which the U.S. economy has been working.

Some 50 years ago the State of Texas drafted plans for a comprehensive water and flood management system that would protect its Gulf coastal cities from flooding — and its extreme southeastern coast and upper plains from drought — by linking many dams and reservoirs with a long coastal canal to move excess water between river basins. This was the same decade that JFK and RFK worked for a Western water management plan called the North American Water and Power Alliance — a dozen times the Tennessee Valley Authority — to defeat desertification and irrigate farmland.

The need for building such new and higher technology infrastructure platforms does not diminish because a Wall Street-run economy and many wars have blocked them. Another historic moment arrives when they must be done. That is the point we have been brought to, with three major U.S. cities having been entirely devastated by hurricanes in just over a decade, and losses far exceeding the costs of these great projects.

This requires more than just large expenditures voted by Congress for disaster relief — although FEMA’s available disaster funds will be gone by the end of this week, with another severe hurricane, Irma, approaching. It will be necessary to issue national infrastructure credits in the trillions in the coming few years, something that can only be done by national banking on Alexander Hamilton’s model, and by the kind of large-scale project credit provided by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Congress has to be moved quickly to create both, as outlined in the LaRouchePAC National Policy Statement of Aug. 30. They also have to reinstate Glass-Steagall bank separation to make sure that private banks are pulled out of Wall Street speculation to take part in financing rebuilding. NASA has to be revived and play a leading role as the science driver of the process.

This means organizing for the 2014 “Four Economic Laws To Save the Nation” of EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche. And the Belt and Road Initiative of China and the BRICS countries, for global cooperation in funding and building new great projects of infrastructure, is the framework to join.

Consider that the United States is facing three crises: Wall Street pulling it toward another financial collapse; the threat of nuclear war over the Korean Peninsula; and the collapse of the underpinnings of its economic life, infrastructure platforms. President Trump’s initial plan for his Presidency, to cooperative with Russia and China, and to concentrate on rebuilding America’s infrastructure, would have led to a different, better situation than these crises. Americans have to take action, and action now, to get to that plan.

LaRouchePAC will have to push this emergency policy ahead; others will follow.