Open Letter: Emergency Proposal on NYC “Infrastructure” Crisis

The burgeoning crisis of NYC metropolitan area subway/mass transit/transportation/infrastructure has reached existential proportions. That is, a catastrophic breakdown is inevitable, and imminent…unless we create a “Manhattan Project-type” crash program. Such a program must address the immediate emergency, but from the standpoint of a 50-100 year future-orientation. What conceptual framework for the medium- and long-term platform of NY and national “infrastructure” would work, and would inspire our citizens with confidence that the murderous hardships of the moment will alleviate, as we organize a glorious future?

Decades of deindustrialization and disinvestment in transport, water, power, urban, etc. infrastructure, have led into the post-1999, post-Glass-Steagall nightmare of transition from productive economy and workforce, into globalist, speculative casino economy. Since the London-Wall St. synarchist Felix Rohatyn set up the Big MAC bankers’ dictatorship over NYC in 1975, the foundation for the city’s productive economy and the General welfare of our citizens–only typified by the subway system–has rotted away. Likewise for the nation.

Donald Trump campaigned, and was elected in large part, to build infrastructure and manufacturing capability. He advocated a revival of Glass-Steagall, as did both Party platforms, which could re-establish a banking and credit system for productive growth, as against the last 45 years of Wall St. control. His orientation toward better relations with Russia, and improved economic cooperation with China, could bring us into the One Belt One Road world development, as opposed to nuclear world war III. But the escalating witchhunt, the “Russiagate” drumbeat since before the election, has undercut the electoral mandate, and progress toward these objectives is inadequate or worse. The crises deepen.

The LaRouche movement has organized since the 1970’s, in NYC and worldwide, for a policy of peace through economic development, focussed on FDR-JFK-style Great Projects. The greatest of these, LaRouche’s Eurasian Land-Bridge initiative of 1992, has sparked China’s New Silk Road, the greatest infrastructure program in history. If the United States ends the monetarist, speculative cancer, and re-adopts the Hamiltonian principles of LaRouche’s Four Laws, we will then contribute to, and benefit dramatically from, this new paradigm. Then–and only then–can we address the $4.5 trillion-$8 trillion infrastructure deficit, in the nation, and in New York.

While the Cuomo-de Blasio duo debates new tax and finance proposals for the transit emergency, they and their Establishment cronies continue to protect the criminals of Wall St., who gave us this disaster. At an MTA July 26 Board meeting, LaRouche PAC leader Diane Sare cut through the charade: “The problem is Wall St, which has turned the MTA into a debt farm, charging usurious interest rates, which necessitate more and more borrowing. Public infrastructure does not need to generate a profit at the point of use. It raises the level of productivity of the entire workforce, and therefore should be paid for through public funds and taxes. I am certain that Wall St. is not paying its fair share.

” Everyone in this room should demand that Glass-Steagall be re-enacted immediately, and that the President of the U.S. return immediately to Alexander Hamilton’s program of a National Bank and Public Credit at 1% to 2% interest. Also the China Investment Corporation has already said it wants to invest $50 billion in American infrastructure. China has built 22,000 kilometers of high-speed rail in less than ten years–the same amount of time in which we built the Second Avenue subway. With its help and American union workers, we could completely modernize the entire metropolitan transportation grid in a shorter time than imagined by anyone in this room today. We have to stop allowing Wall St. usury to dictate infrastructure policy.”

(see the LaRouche PAC pamphlet, “America’s Future on the New Silk Road: LaRouche’s Four Laws–The Physical Economic Principles for the Recovery of the United States” for a comprehensive, scientific elaboration of this process.

This set of crises must be taken as the opportunity for the people of the United States to assemble and urge the President to pull together the country around this perspective, beginning with the re-instatement of the Glass-Steagall Act.

America can no longer slowly address the problem of its crumbling and largely-dysfunctional infrastructure. We must imagine a new economic platform, wherein New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston and other once-proud producer cities are integrated with the world’s urban centers through a network of high-speed rail, magnetically-levitated trains, and “vacuum tube” trains that travel underground, and faster than commercial jets (far less frictional drag caused by wind shear), reaching speeds as fast as 1,000 mph.

To do these things, Glass-Steagall must be enacted. Why? The United States Presidency must possess the ability to deploy credit at will, applied through a capital budget, for thousands of past-essential building projects and repair projects. These things are not inflationary, because their costs balance out against the expenses in breakdowns and lost labor productivity that are presently being incurred. And because the enhanced productivity of the economy, and increased productive employment, more than pays for the initial debt (as, for example, in the Apollo Project).

Yet the President cannot simply decree this. As in war, an outcry, and a demand for action, must be heard from the American people. The re-enactment of Glass-Steagall is the indispensable first step to physically, not merely “financially”, jump-start the process of putting the entire country on a successful road to recovery.