Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 46, Number 27, July 12, 2019

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF edition Table of Contents

- Prologue The Bitter Truth About the U.S. ‘Economic Recovery’

- Industrial Wasteland by Marcia Merry Baker

- Breakdown of U.S. Cities: Case Study New York City New York City: Dark Age or Renaissance? by Diane Sare

- Breakdown of U.S. Cities: Case Study Seattle Seattle Is Dying: Shut Down Dope, Inc. by David Christie

- Breakdown of U.S. Cities: Case Study San Francisco San Francisco: End the Hippies’ Disease! Time for a Cultural Renaissance by Michael Steger

- The Cost of U.S. Public Transportation Breakdown by Paul Gallagher

- Devastation in the Farm Belt,Rural Depopulation by Robert Baker and Marcia Merry Baker

- Breakdown of U.S. Public Health Infrastructure, Breakout of Disease by Dr. Debra Hanania Freeman

- Drugged-Up America by Robert Ingraham

- Ending the Culture of Death: Restoring the Soul of America by Kesha Rogers

- Epilogue A Punctum Saliens

- The Four New Laws to Save the U.S.A. Now! Not An Option: An Immediate Necessity by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (June 10, 2014)

The Bitter Truth

About the U.S.

‘Economic Recovery’

Editor-in-Chief and Founder:

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editorial Board: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. , Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert, Gerald Rose, Dennis Small, William Wertz

Co-Editors: Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Rainer Apel

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

United Nations, N.Y.C.: Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 46, Number 27, July 12, 2019

Cover This Week

CC/Daquella Manera

Disabled and homeless in Los Angeles.

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THE BITTER TRUTH ABOUT THE U.S. ‘ECONOMIC RECOVERY’

Megan Beets, Special Edition Editor

3 PROLOGUE

The Bitter Truth About the U.S. ‘Economic Recovery’

5 Industrial Wasteland

by Marcia Merry Baker

8 BREAKDOWN OF U.S. CITIES:

Case Study—NEW YORK CITY

Dark Age or Renaissance?

by Diane Sare

11 Case Study—SEATTLE

Seattle is Dying: Shut Down Dope, Inc.

by David Christie

14 Case Study—SAN FRANCISCO

End the Hippies’ Disease!

Time for a Cultural Renaissance

by Michael Steger

17 The Cost of U.S. Public Transportation Breakdown

by Paul Gallagher

21 Devastation in the Farm Belt, Rural Depopulation

by Robert Baker and Marcia Merry Baker

25 Breakdown of U.S. Public Health Infrastructure, Breakout of Disease

by Dr. Debra Hanania Freeman

29 Drugged-Up America

by Robert Ingraham

34 Ending the Culture of Death: Restoring the Soul of America

by Kesha Rogers

41 EPILOGUE

A Punctum Saliens

42 THE FOUR NEW LAWS

TO SAVE THE U.S.A. NOW!

Not an Option: An Immediate Necessity

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

June 10, 2014

CORRECTION: Concerning the caption for the photo on page 59 of EIR dated July 5, 2019, Pat Quinn was Governor of Illinois from 2009 to 2015.

The Jan. 27, 1989 Jailing of Lyndon LaRouche

Defined an Era, Which Now Must End

Watch The LaRouche Case video

Watch the LaRouche Memorial video

Sign the Petition to Exonerate LaRouche

at lpac.co/exonerate

Prologue

O wad some Power the giftie gie us,

to see oursels as ithers see us!

(O would some Power with vision teach us,

to see ourselves as others see us!)

—Robert Burns

The Bitter Truth About the

U.S. ‘Economic Recovery’

The articles following this introduction are but a shallow scratch into the surface of the most devastating physical economic breakdown ever experienced by the United States. When you read the following reports—and there are crucial areas like energy supply, water management, education, and health care that are not even touched upon here—you might first imagine that you are reading a report about some other planet in the midst of a Dark Age.

But as you read this report, ask yourself: Aren’t you experiencing precisely the effects documented below? You might then begin to consider all of the hysteria in the U.S. media about the horrible “authoritarian regime” in China, where, in reality, 800,000,000 people have been lifted out of poverty, hundreds of shining new cities have been constructed, trains are being developed which go 600 km per hour, and millions of children are playing the violin and piano, and you might look at yourself, and the conditions you have tolerated, with a new perspective. In 2017, it was established that roughly 30 million poor still remained in China, mostly living in rural and hard to reach areas. A targeted program was implemented, and China is on track to completely eliminate poverty within its borders by 2020. Consider how far China has come in the last 50 years. Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche has spoken frequently about the economic misery she encountered in China when she traveled there as a young journalist in the midst of the “Cultural Revolution” in 1971, but today, conditions are completely transformed.

Now consider the United States over the same period of time. Since 1971, conditions in the United States have gone in the exact opposite direction: U.S. life expectancy has been declining for the longest stretch since World War I; drug overdose and suicide have surpassed car accidents as a cause of death; formerly eradicated diseases are on the rise; homelessness, hidden and overt, is rampant; bridges, tunnels, and other vital infrastructure are collapsing; subway systems are decrepit and dangerous; many of our municipal water systems are over 100 years old; drought and flood plague what is left of our agricultural sector; and energy use per capita is dropping—all indicative of a dying society.

NASA

President Kennedy peering into the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule with astronaut John Glenn at Cape Canaveral in 1962.

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The terrible economic disintegration of the United States never would have happened had the American people rallied to the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche. As the United States was in the throes of the 1960s paradigm shift so violently announced by the assassination of President Kennedy, Lyndon LaRouche warned his fellow citizens that unless halted and reversed, this shift would lead to the disintegration of the nation. In the decades since, he warned again and again that the deindustrialization (“liberalization”) of the economy and accompanying rock-sex-drugs counterculture of the ’60s were laying the path to economic collapse, and to the destruction of the cognitive potential of the population. When Nixon pulled the plug on the Bretton Woods System in 1971, and shifted the world monetary system to a floating exchange rate, LaRouche prophetically announced that this policy change—bestowed upon the U.S. by the British Empire—would either lead to a new fascism, or would force the creation of a new world economic order.

NASA

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, in the first Moon landing, salutes the American flag, July 21, 1969.

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Nearly 50 years—half a century—later, LaRouche’s warnings have been borne out, as you the citizen can see all around you. The imperial system of geopolitics, which marched humanity into two world wars and has caused many times more mass death through its economic imperialism than the Hitler regime, is now collapsing under the weight of its own self-destruction.

Therefore, an urgent decision stands before the people of the United States, in particular. We must face the magnitude of the problem squarely to muster the courage to demand the solution. Following the case studies detailing the collapse of different physical sectors of the United States economy is a call for action, accompanying an article written by LaRouche, in which he lays out “Four Laws” to save the United States. He states that these laws are “Not an Option: An Immediate Necessity.”

We think you will agree with that sentiment by the time you have finished reading this report.

Note: The articles in this report were written by various authors, with varied areas of expertise, in locations around the United States. They give perspectives from all corners of the nation, and provide not merely an individual view, but taken together, a top-down picture of the real conditions which must be overcome if our nation and its people are to contribute to a vibrant and viable future for humanity.

Industrial Wasteland

by Marcia Merry Baker

rustwire.com

An abandoned blast furnace in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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June 17—Large parts of the former Great Lakes powerhouse manufacturing belt are now industrial wastelands, from western New York, through to Wisconsin, and from St. Louis eastward into the Ohio Valley and West Virginia, and the same holds for other former factory centers, such as Birmingham, Alabama. These areas once produced myriad industrial products, and at the same time, socially and culturally, they produced the skilled and productive people who drove the process. When the factories left—beginning in the 1970s, then accelerating during the 1990s globalization through today—the physical conditions of life fell apart, from homes to institutions: hospitals, churches, museums, school districts and local government functions. Add to this, the downshift culturally, the persistent war deployments and other degradations, and conditions of life are hard and sad for millions of people.

Overall, manufacturing jobs declined 35% nationally over the last four decades, from 19.5 million in 1979, down to 12.5 million today. This decline was geographically concentrated in the Great Lakes industrial belt, but affected dozens of lesser manufacturing centers across the country, including Baltimore and Birmingham. One expression of this process of de-structuring of productive concentrations is that the population itself declined dramatically in these former manufacturing cities over this same period, as people not only moved out into the suburbs, but left the metropolitan areas entirely, seeking their livelihoods elsewhere.

Look at the major cities of the Great Lakes region, in the period from before the drastic outsourcing under NAFTA (1994) and the WTO (1995), and see how the population plunged. Detroit went from 1.03 million people in 1990, down to 673,000 today. Milwaukee shrank from 630,000 in 1990, to 595,000. Cleveland went from 505,000 to 385,000. Buffalo dropped from 328,000 to 239,000. For St. Louis, the change was from 370,000 to 302,000. In fact, five of the most prominent cities of this region have lost fully half their population since 1950: Pittsburgh (-65%), St. Louis (-65%), Detroit (-64%), Cleveland (-58%), and Buffalo (-56%).

In the mid-2000s, Lyndon LaRouche launched a mobilization to reverse this decline. He intervened with a national recovery program, in the context of furthering international collaboration for world economic development through a “New Bretton Woods” fixed-exchange-rate system of financial and foreign relations for that purpose. He commissioned work to “animate economics,” as he called it, through video, mapping and other illustrations, to try to make clear to people, what principles are involved.

However, despite all efforts, the underlying industrial takedown process proceeded in the 21st century. This dynamic was intensified both by the 1999 rescinding of the Glass-Steagall banking law—which had worked for 66 years to favor banking and credit for physical economic development, not speculation—and the passage of the 2001 Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which unleashed waves of unheard-of financial gambling, to the destruction of the real economy.

CC/SA 3.0

The loss of manufacturing jobs has been devastating for entire regions of the country; from the Great Lakes, across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and up into New England. (To say nothing of other regions in the southern U.S.) Major cities in the region shown lost from 5 to over 25 percent of their population since just 2000, while three metropolitan areas lost more than four-fifths of their manufacturing jobs since 1954: Steubenville, OH, Johnstown, PA, and Augusta, ME.

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Bankruptcies Overwhelm Desperate Cities

As the revenue base of industrial cities shrank, urban government functions and responsibilities could no longer be fulfilled, and outright insolvency set in. Federal municipal “Chapter 9” bankruptcies (or the state legal equivalent, “financial distress” statutes) were declared in major locations. In July 2013, Detroit declared the largest Ch. 9 bankruptcy in history, with a debt of nearly $20 billion. Already in 2003, Pittsburgh’s finances were taken over by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (under its Chapter 47 Municipalities Financial Recovery Act Program). In Alabama, Jefferson County (Birmingham) declared bankruptcy in 2011. Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, declared bankruptcy in 2011. In California, both Stockton and San Bernardino declared bankruptcies in 2012. Cities have cut essential services like pest control and public health, and have allowed the deterioration of basic infrastructure, such as water treatment, levees, bridges, etc.

People are in unlivable situations. In several of the Great Lakes cities, 20–30% of the households are under the official poverty level. In Pittsburgh, for example, 12% of the households earn less than $10,000 a year. The crime rate is high. Cleveland’s violent crime rate of 1,557 incidents for every 100,000 people is among the highest in the nation. McKeesport, near Pittsburgh, today the fourth worst U.S. city for violent crime, was once the largest maker of pipe in the world, giving it the name, “Tube City.” Add to this the drugs plague, and these are conditions of misery.

EIRNS/Robert Baker

As these scenes from McKeesport, PA demonstrate, the loss of manufacturing jobs and subsequent population collapse over decades lead to the kind of abandonment and devastation resembling post-war zones.

EIRNS/Robert Baker

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‘Alternatives’ Were No Solutions

What were touted as economic “solutions” to the breakdown, that is, as the “alternatives” to the LaRouche Recovery plan based on the American System, have only worsened the devastation. There are examples of boondoggles of all kinds, foisted on desperate cities by Wall Street/City of London operations. The category of wonder projects includes “river walks,” conversion of former factory and mill buildings into trendy housing and entertainment venues, urban malls, and other real estate ventures. “Public-private-partnerships” for localities to obtain funds for highways and other infrastructure, have financially blown out on cities and states everywhere.

“Privatization,” the sell-off at discount rates of government physical property or government functions—trash collection, water and wastewater services—has been no “solution.”

The prominent, ambitious political names in both parties rode the waves of all the fake solutions. When he was Governor of Indiana (2013–2017), Mike Pence was gung-ho for the PPP approach to highway improvement, which was an outstanding failure. During her time representing New York in the Senate (2001–2009), Hillary Clinton claimed membership in the Senate Manufacturing Caucus, but did nothing for manufacturing, and went on, when campaigning in 2016, to advise jobless West Virginia industrial workers to just get “re-trained” for new, non-industrial work.

What has come to characterize many former manufacturing and regional economic centers, is that a mega-hospital system is now the biggest employer around. In Ohio, the Cleveland Clinic system is the largest employer in the state. In Pittsburgh, the UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) dominates. But the broad productive base in gone.

In addition to the de-industrialization, predatory banking has taken a terrible toll. In the derivatives and home mortgage-backed securities swindles of the 2000s, which led into the 2007–2008 financial blow-out, thousands of families had terrible losses.

Huge tracts of these industrial belt cities remain as no-man’s land, with derelict houses, rats and misery.

Now is a new opportunity to move top-down on real restoration of the agro-industrial economy, given the new national commitment to rev up productivite capacity to back up the Moon-Mars program, announced by the Trump Administration, and the public moralization at the 50th anniversary of arriving on the Moon. The entire infrastructure framework must be upgraded, from nuclear power, to high speed rail, to water management systems. Old cities can be made new, and entirely new cities take hold as well.

Breakdown of U.S. Cities: Case Study New York City

New York City:

Dark Age or Renaissance?

by Diane Sare

EIRNS/Diane Sare

One-third of homeless families in shelters have at least one employed family member, but still cannot afford to pay rent.

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April 28—In October 2014, during the dark days of the Obama Administration, Lyndon LaRouche created what he called his Manhattan Project, whose purpose, as expressed by one of LaRouche’s colleagues, was “expressly to resurrect the principle of Alexander Hamilton’s New York and United States—to create and empower the most productive, literate, and skilled free citizenry in the world, exerting and improving the productive powers of its labor, impeded not by ethnic background, skin color or lack of title, but only by the limitations of human creativity—which has no limitations.”

New York City, by far the largest city in the United States, was the seat of the Government of the United States of America in 1789 when George Washington was sworn in as the first president. It was home to Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s adjutant, framer of the Constitution, and later Treasury Secretary, who drafted a series of papers and policies crucial to the economic success of the young Republic.

New York became a major center of finance and trade, as it also became the first stop of millions of immigrants coming to make their homes in America after arriving at Ellis Island. Today New York is known for the New York Stock Exchange, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Philharmonic, and the United Nations, to name a few of the many institutions that are based here. New York is also the city of origin of the International Caucus of Labor Committees—Lyndon LaRouche’s international association, which he founded over 50 years ago, to address what he correctly foresaw was an impending physical economic collapse of the United States and world economies.

Manhattan, the most densely populated of the boroughs comprising New York City, is, along with the rest of the city, experiencing a catastrophic collapse in every imaginable domain: physical, cultural, and moral. This collapse can be reversed by implementing LaRouche’s Four Laws as part of a New Bretton Woods system, and one could argue that with President Trump in the White House and the Chinese leading the world to eradicate poverty by 2050, this reversal is perhaps even likely. But it will not happen if Americans, and in this case New Yorkers, sit smugly on the sidelines, as they themselves are sucked into the maelstrom of a deadly toxic sewer of delusion.

The purpose of this report is to hold up a mirror, so that we can look ourselves straight in the eye and consider how it is that we have allowed ourselves to fall into this sorry state of decay, which many call “success,” in order that we might change our thinking, and thereby our behavior, so that we can not only survive, but prosper for centuries to come, on Earth and on other planets as well.

EIRNS/Diane Sare

Crowded 168th Street New York subway station, after a fire on the track blocked train traffic.

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A Ruined City

Today the blood-sucking monster known as “Wall Street” and its City of London controllers have turned the formerly great city into a filthy rubble heap with a few fancy skyscrapers whose rents only the ultra-rich can afford. The average speed an automobile can travel in Manhattan is below 5 miles per hour. The subway trains went from a 99% on-time rate in 2007 to 78% today. (And that’s an improvement from 65% last summer!) In some parts of Brooklyn it is reported that rats are so numerous they are destroying people’s cars by gnawing through electrical wires. Bridges which have double-digit dollar tolls connect roadways with potholes than can swallow your tires. Foreigners visiting Manhattan actually giggle and look away when you talk about the infrastructure of the city.

To address all of the facets of the collapse of New York would be a project of mammoth proportions. A comprehensive plan of action will require a documentation of the painful magnitude of the collapse in numerous overlapping areas: transportation, water management, power supply, education, housing, and healthcare among them. But for the purposes of this short report, I have chosen to focus on homelessness among public school students in New York City, because if this particular crisis is not solved immediately, its effects will be with us for generations to come.

In October 2018, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Homelessness in New York Public Schools is at a Record High: 114,659 Students.” The article caught my eye, and I imagined what it must be like in a classroom where one out of ten students is homeless. Of course, it doesn’t work that way—the homeless children are not evenly distributed among the five boroughs’ 1700 public schools. It turns out that in 144 of these schools 30% of the children are homeless, and in a few schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn roughly half of the children are homeless. Try to imagine teaching a class of 27 students, where 12 of them haven’t had a bath in two weeks, and 15 haven’t had breakfast that morning, or dinner the night before.

Another study by Kathryn Hill and Zitsi Mirakhur of NYU’s Research Alliance for New York City Schools found that of “81,669 students who began kindergarten in the fall of 2012, 10,312 students—over 12 percent of the cohort—experienced homelessness at some point before their 5th grade year.” Of those who became homeless during that period, 70% were homeless for over one year, and 25% were homeless for all five years. Of these homeless children, about 58% were staying in the home of a friend or family member, and most of the rest were in shelters. Not surprisingly, fewer than 20% of the children staying in shelters were able to pass standard tests for reading or mathematics, due to inability to concentrate, and also the necessity to frequently move, resulting in missing an average of 30 days of school per year.

On top of this, there are 400,000 low-income New Yorkers, many of them children, living in 328 so-called “developments” run by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), who are suffering sub-human living conditions, finally brought to light as a result of a 2018 lawsuit brought by Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The agreement with NYCHA, signed by Berman, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson, and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, states that NYCHA is required

. . . under the supervision of a federal monitor, to fundamentally reform its operations and remedy living conditions for its residents, including lead paint hazards, mold growth, pest infestations, lack of heat, and inadequate elevator service.

In the very cold and snowy winter of 2017–2018, an astonishing 320,000 of these 400,000 residents had lacked heat or hot water for extended periods of time. NYCHA also was discovered to have been covering up findings of dangerous levels of lead in the water, which affected an unknown number of children. In June 2018, the New York Times reported that there were over 170,000 unanswered repair tickets for apartments in these complexes, and that many tickets were closed without the repairs ever having been done.

As a result of this breakdown, and because there is only 1 social worker per 1,660 homeless children, teachers and school administrators are finding themselves dealing with all kinds of situations for which they were never trained and are not prepared. School supply closets now carry items such as deodorant and toothbrushes for homeless students. In 2017, it was decided to provide free lunches for all students because those whose parents couldn’t afford to pay, were often stigmatized, and therefore ashamed to ask about the discounted lunch programs which were available.

Aside from the immediate difficulties for all students in a classroom where 30–50% of the students cannot concentrate because all their energy and concentration are consumed by survival issues, consider the situation a decade from now when hundreds of thousands of young people are growing into adults, unable to read and write, or perform basic mathematical calculations. What will become of these people? What will become of a city and a nation which is filled with young adults who are at an educational and perhaps emotional level of a four-year-old, through no fault of their own? Do you really think that such a society will survive? Which of these young people, given the proper conditions of life, might have found a cure for cancer, or become the next Mozart? Can you place a monetary value on this colossal loss of undeveloped talent?

Adding Perspective

This problem is not caused by a shortage of money. Through New York City flow enormous amounts of money, but none of this money seems to find its way into improving the physical conditions of the city. These income streams are sucked into propping up the stock market bubble, which is rapidly approaching the breaking point. What’s the difference between $50 spent to park in a lot for an hour, and $50 to pay for school lunch for a child for 28 days? A New York resident getting paid minimum wage would have to work for more than three hours, to pay for one hour of parking! One hour of minimum wage work barely covers the cost of crossing the George Washington Bridge (which is crossed by 276,000 vehicles per day).

Because of unbridled real estate and housing speculation, housing costs have soared beyond the reach of many working people. In 2017, it was reported that one-third of homeless families in New York shelters had at least one employed family member, but one salary was not enough to cover rent or a mortgage.

The lying Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, who defended NYCHA’s horrendous record as “doing the best they can,” until the fraud was exposed in the 2018 lawsuit mentioned above, has proposed “congestion pricing” and banning plastic bags and consumption of beef to deal with “climate change,” but has no meaningful proposal to alleviate the murderous poverty suffered by the people he supposedly represents.

It is this delusional quality of non-leadership which is accepted by our citizens which has to change, or we are not going to survive as a nation. People like Bill DeBlasio and AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) should be ridiculed and laughed out of office. The problem is that most of your neighbors have come to accept these conditions as a “new normal,” as opposed to intolerable, and requiring drastic action.

Breakdown of U.S. Cities: Case Study Seattle

Seattle Is Dying: Shut Down Dope, Inc.

by David Christie

The only thing I can equate it to is that we are running a concentration camp without barbed wire, up to and including the medical experiment of poisoning these people with drugs.

— Todd Wiebke,

Seattle Police Department (ret.)

June 27—This quote, from former Seattle Police Officer Todd Wiebke, is featured in a documentary produced by Seattle-based KOMO News called “Seattle is Dying.” The documentary has been viewed over 4 million times and has struck a nerve among not only residents of Seattle, but people all over the country and even from around the world. Todd Wiebke’s quote above hits on one of the core themes of the documentary—the crisis of homelessness in Seattle, and many other cities in the United States, is fueled by drug addiction. Drug addiction is of course not limited to the homeless population, and is expanding in all sectors of society, but it is symptomatic of a phenomenon expressed as an increasingly popular phrase of today: diseases of despair.

While drug addiction may be a cause of homelessness for some people, it is not the direct cause for the majority. However, all the reasons for homelessness are symptomatic of the root cause of these diseases of despair—the despair of losing a national mission, of losing a sense of progress as represented by cultural optimism defined by scientific and creative endeavor. The assassination of John F. Kennedy and the takedown of the space program is certainly one of the defining points leading to the present cultural degradation. That assassination was followed by turning our backs on a physical approach to the economy and moving towards a financialization of the economy under the policies of globalization, and the cultural revolution we experienced of the rock-sex-drugs counterculture explosion.

The takedown of the advanced manufacturing and scientific orientation of the economy of the West Coast, which had been defined by the great projects of President Franklin Roosevelt, and the aerospace sector rising to the challenge of the Apollo Project, were then followed by the growth of the information technology sector. This IT sector is part of the “everything bubble,” and is hyper focused on quickening the pace of delivery of consumer goods and advertising to surround all parts of your existence. But it is also part of the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex, which is responsible for the endless war policy of the neocons and neolibs, and is also a part of the surveillance state to enforce group think and cultural stupidity through social media, and other means. At the center of the British financial system is the international drug trade, which provides the cash flow to prop up the speculative financial bubble—all guided by the British Empire, running the policy from the top.

Edgar Allen Poe’s Mask of the Red Death

Perhaps the lackeys of the British Empire and the operatives of the modern day British East India company and its opium trade think that they are immune to the results of their policy of Dope, Inc. But just as Edgar Allen Poe wrote in The Mask of the Red Death, the plague will find them too. As our fellow human beings live amid trash piles on the West Coast, surrounded by human excrement, disease has found a petri dish to thrive. There are now apps to report and document human feces on the streets of San Francisco, since there is so much of it. Not surprisingly, in these conditions, diseases that had been nearly eradicated—such as tuberculosis and typhus—are making a resurgence. Some have even claimed that bubonic plague is appearing on the streets of Los Angeles.

flickr: David Lee, CC BY-SA 2.0

Just one of many homeless encampments in downtown Seattle, March 2018.

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Lyndon LaRouche has outlined the relationship between the economic health and the physical health of a society. He has defined the metric of “potential relative population density” to determine the carrying capacity of a society, for both culturally creative societies and those societies that turn their back on reason and embrace drugs and the latest cult beliefs, like environmentalism. When the potential population density falls below its current level, the ensuing collapse can take the form of poverty, disease, and death.

This dark age decay on the streets of the United States is certainly noticeable to those who have not become desensitized to it, but it is especially notable to foreign visitors who may not expect this on the streets of the nation considered “the leader of the free world.” According to Michael Snyder via the Economic Collapse blog, an official of the United Nations, Leilani Farha, who had previously served as the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing for four years, said that the homeless crisis in San Francisco was comparable to the conditions in the slums of Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Jakarta, and Manila.

These appalling conditions on the streets of the West Coast, occur in the middle of great “wealth” being generated in the information technology sector, especially in San Francisco and Seattle. Salaries in companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google far surpass the earnings of those working in construction or the service economy. This is one of the key factors driving up real estate prices, beyond the previously seen and now ongoing factor of financial speculation.

Seattle is now third in the nation in terms of the homeless population, coming in at 12,000, trailing behind Los Angeles and New York. The homeless population surged in 2018 in the city of Los Angeles by 16% to 26,000, with 25% of those counted for the first time, and 50% of them citing financial stress as the cause, which of course includes rising housing costs. Among homeless people interviewed by KOMO News on the streets of Seattle, 70% responded that they could only afford $500 for rent—in King County (which includes Seattle), the average rent for a one bedroom apartment is $1580. Research by real estate database company Zillow indicates that for every 5% increase in the price of rent, another 258 people go homeless in Seattle.

The Role of IT Firms in the Collapse

The information technology (IT) firms also play a role in the economic collapse that will only worsen. The FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) are often cited as one of the potential triggers of a looming stock market meltdown, and are part of the inflation of the “everything” bubble through their role in stock buybacks and other financial manipulation. But perhaps their more fundamental role in the collapse has to do with the actual type of business activities they are involved in. In general, much of the work of these IT firms is hyper-focused on consumer goods and advertisements, where developers are paid handsomely to write code for pop-up ads on your cell phone that try to sell you the shoes you bought three days ago. Or they are taking advantage of the lax rules in our present surveillance state: they are profiling every detail of your life for the purposes of marketing strategies, often directed at you personally.

Perhaps more insidiously, they are becoming an increasing part of the “military industrial intelligence complex,” which has brought us an unending series of wars, resulting in trillions of dollars of our nation’s resources wasted and, more importantly, many hundreds of thousands dead since 9/11, as well as the consolidation of a surveillance/police state that attempts to control what people think and do.

Take the case of Amazon as an example of the unsustainable nature of the growth of these companies. Amazon does not depend on its retail operation for its income, and is able to undercut just about anyone in terms of price, destroying small, medium, and large businesses along the way, as they further consolidate control over the entire retail market’s logistics and supply chain, as well as knowledge about the shopping habits of consumers. They then offset retail losses with the profits they make with Amazon Web Services (AWS), supplying cloud data management for a whole range of commercial and government entities. AWS was awarded a $600 million contract to run the cloud system of the Central Intelligence Agency, and they are also finalists along with Microsoft in vying for the multi-billion dollar contract (or more, since it is an “indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity” contract) called the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI) Contract, which will provide cloud services for the Pentagon. These profits provided by the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex to Amazon, offset their intentional losses in their retail sector, as part of their strategy to wipe out all of their competitors.

Profit or Progress?

Some call this “innovation.” Yet, while their stock prices rise, nothing has been added to the real economy— gig economy delivery drivers or Amazon trucks still deliver the (mostly imported) goods driving combustion engine vehicles driving on dilapidated roads, which reflect the overall collapse of our national infrastructure, as a reflection of the lowering of our potential relative population density. Moreover, “innovation” by these IT firms is also defined by introducing robotics and artificial intelligence to replace human labor in the economy. In a healthy economy, such automation would be an important step—freeing the labor force from manual labor, or menial number-crunching would be critical to allowing workers to be more involved in creative thinking to improve the productive power of labor through higher modes of energy flux density, such as moving to a higher platform of infrastructure after achieving a breakthrough on fusion energy, or breakthroughs that come from space exploration—and these endeavors can benefit from the currently misapplied skills of these IT professionals.

While the financial hardship of living through this bubble economy is cited as the leading cause of homelessness, a City of Seattle report reports that 13% of the homeless population cited drug addiction and alcoholism as the cause, and 50% of the homeless claim to be chronically addicted to drugs or alcohol or both. A shocking one-third of the deaths in this aptly described concentration camp are due to overdoses. How many deaths come from rising HIV rates through sharing needles, or infectious endocarditis, which requires a heart valve replacement procedure, costing somewhere near $150,000? As part of a broken criminal system, and a totally overwhelmed rehabilitation system, people are cycled in and out of jail with nowhere to go, except to the methadone clinics that are located near some of the largest homeless encampments—or maybe it is the other way around.

We now need a reversal of that “cultural revolution” of the 1960s, and a move to a new paradigm outlined by Lyndon LaRouche and his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, to end the cultural decay of drug addiction, and the economic collapse brought on by the financialization of the economy.

Central to the LaRouche “new paradigm” is his call for a “Four Powers” agreement between the United States, China, Russia, and India, as well as the call for his “Four Laws,” which would orient the economy to the frontiers of scientific and technological advancement in space and fusion research. Trump has proposed Project Artemis, which would define a new generation by their great mission to return to the Moon in five years and then move on to Mars, and would certainly be the pinnacle example of cooperation among the nations of the “Four Powers” to end the British Empire and their geopolitical manipulations.

Only through this orientation can provide truly useful employment—for those currently employed and those without work—creating a future for those who will be part of the Artemis Generation, once this financial system and its police state apparatus crumble.

Breakdown of U.S. Cities: Case Study San Francisco

San Francisco: End the Hippies’ Disease! Time for a Cultural Renaissance

by Michael Steger

June 22—Following the end of World War II, San Francisco held the greatest promise of any city in the world. California was quickly becoming the greatest agro-industrial state in the nation, and possibly the world, and this was largely based on the most extensive water and irrigation infrastructure ever developed, in some of the world’s most fertile soil—the Central Valley. This was combined with an intense focus on aerospace, auto manufacturing, and nearly a dozen top national facilities in advanced research and development in nuclear power, lasers, computers, and much more.

Moreover, California, and San Francisco especially, were to become the gateway to Asia, much for the same reason the first assembly of the United Nations took place in San Francisco in 1945. The post-war world was moving towards the great populations and development potential of China and East Asia, India, Southeast Asia, and even towards Africa.

Yet, instead, within twenty years of the end of the war, San Francisco was becoming the victim of the greatest cultural experiment ever waged, perhaps only parallel to the cultural destruction of ancient Athens by the high priests of the Persian Empire.

By the time of Plato, the Persians had twice attempted to destroy Athens militarily, and had twice failed, much like Britain’s attempts to destroy the United States during the 19th century. So rather than risk another disastrous military campaign, the high priests of Persia planned a cultural destruction of the scientific and artistic identity that had made Athens so fiercely independent, skillful, broadly educated, and thus nearly indestructible. By the time of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, Athens had succumbed to Persia’s dissemination of cultural relativism known as Sophism, where truth is regulated to opinion, and morality, justice, and the common good are subjected to the whims and interests of an oligarchical power.

In the United States in the wake of World War II, Britain’s Winston Churchill and the British pawn President Harry S Truman, like the Persian agents 2300 years earlier, opened a broad assault on the intellectual life of American culture, an assault which had actually begun by the turn of the century, but which was now unleashed through the new means of mass propaganda.

In response to Truman’s Cold War culture of white-collar conformity, where prestige was based on security clearance, and Betty Crocker suburbia, where culture was reduced to Mickey’s Mouseketeers, a reactionary youth counter-culture was created by British intelligence agents like Bertrand Russell. And so San Francisco, the city on a hill which looked to the potential of the Pacific, of Asia, and which seemed destined to become a new renaissance city the likes the world had never seen before, was now directly targeted to become a cultural wasteland.

The British-led counter-culture, with the first expressions in the pro-drug culture of the Beatniks, was soon to become dominated by the coming-of-age of the Mousketeers, who came to be known as the Hippies or Baby Boomers, through a cultural operation dominated by the Sophists’ pursuit of personal pleasure, combined with the terror of nuclear annihilation, the Kennedy and related assassinations, and the launching of the Vietnam War.

Blame Kissinger and Shultz for

Fifty Years of Economic Destruction

After 50 years of rampant fraud supported by the likes of Henry Kissinger and George Shultz,[fn_1] combined with the frenzied speculative bubbles launched successively since the end of the Cold War, we now have the ultimate Grand Finale of the 1960s cultural revolution—a revolution which accurately boasts of having created scores of pubescent millionaires and a few oligarchical billionaires—with billions left to die in poverty, disease and warfare around the world, and now increasingly in the United States.

What has now been incubated for over fifty years in the petri dishes well known to San Francisco’s Bohemian Club Grove, or the dens of Silicon Valley, or the pedophile rings of West Hollywood and Washington D.C., a process that has been metastasizing since the heyday of Haight-Ashbury’s year-long orgy in 1967 has finally come to maturity for all to see.

The West Coast cities are now the national centers for not only homelessness, drug use, human waste and disposal teams called “poop squads,” but also the revival—not only of dead-beat rock musicians and Hollywood has-beens—but of old-world diseases like typhus and even bubonic plague, which if not already here, is certainly not far behind as rodents infest the iconic Los Angeles City Hall.

But all of this is becoming rather common knowledge, so let others speak to this ongoing West Coast hippy wonderland, before we address what is the ultimate and only solution.

OpenTheBooks.com

Sites in San Francisco where human waste was reported, from 2011-2019.

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San Fran-shitsco?

In a Forbes article from April 15, 2019, Adam Andrzejewski writes:

“By many measures, San Francisco is a world-class city. It’s a tourist mecca that boasts 25 million visitors each year. It’s home to wonders of the modern world—the Golden Gate Bridge and its iconic cable cars—as well as powerful progressive politicians, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Governor Gavin Newsom, and U.S. Senator (and presidential hopeful) Kamala Harris…

“But the city itself is in trouble. Today, San Francisco hosts an estimated homeless population of 7,500 people. Affluent sections of the city have become dangerous with open-air drug use, tens of thousands of discarded needles, and, sadly, human feces.

“Since 2011, there have been at least 118,352 reported instances of human fecal matter on city streets.

“New mayor, London Breed, won election by promising to clean things up. However, conditions are the same or worse. Last year, the number of reports spiked to an all-time high at 28,084. In first quarter 2019, the pace continued with 6,676 instances of human waste in the public way…

“Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com plotted all reports of human waste since 2011 using latitude and longitude address coordinates of all cases closed by the San Francisco Department of Public Works.”

Los Bubo-les?

Dr. Drew Pinsky, a physician and radio host, had the following to say regarding Los Angeles to Fox News Radio on May 23 with Brian Kilmeade:

I live in the great state of California, the utopia that is California, which is a nightmare…

I want to give you a prediction here. There will be a major infectious disease epidemic this summer in Los Angeles…

We have tens and tens of thousands of people living in tents. Horrible conditions. Sanitation. Rats have taken over the city. We’re the only city in the country—Los Angeles—without a rodent control program. We have multiple rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses: plague, typhus. We’re gonna have louse-borne illness. If measles breaks into that population, we have tuberculosis exploding. Literally, our politicians are like Nero. It’s worse than Nero.

And then on May 31 with Fox’s Laura Ingraham, Pinsky said:

We have a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization in Los Angeles right now.

We have the three prongs of airborne disease (tuberculosis is exploding), rodent-borne (we are one of the only major cities in the country that does not have a rodent control program), and sanitation has broken down.

We had a typhus outbreak last summer; we will have a typhus outbreak this summer.

lacounty.gov

Makeshift shelters of the homeless on a sidewalk in Los Angeles.

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He then said that bubonic plague—a pandemic that killed tens of millions of people during the 14th century – is “likely” already present in Los Angeles.

This is unbelievable. I can’t believe I live in a city where—this is not the Third World, Laura, this is medieval. Third World countries are insulted if they are accused of being like this. No city on Earth tolerates this. The entire population is at risk.

The Solution: A New Renaissance

Pinsky is right, the entire population is at risk. The entire nation, but more so, the entire world is threatened by the continued tolerance of this rock-sex-drugs Hippie culture, a culture spawned from the caverns of British Intelligence in the 1950s to end scientific and industrial progress, and spread the disease of cultural pessimism for a New Dark Age of medieval rulers and slaves.

There is no difference in the cultural mindset, i.e., seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, between the hippies of Haight, or the marketing scheme of Silicon Valley’s surveillance industry, or the speculative short-term debt frenzy of Wall Street. Get pleasure—i.e., money now—by any means available, and screw the real world consequences for everyone else.

The Bush foreign policy was the same paradigm, “They will welcome us as heros!” Bush said. Instead, he and Obama spawned a medieval culture threatening a global dark age throughout Southwest Asia. The same was true for the Obama bailouts to Wall Street, where Main Street was suffocated to near death with the loss of local banking and industry, while Wall Street has continued to post $50 billion in profits—not revenue—each year.

What’s required is a new culture, a new paradigm, where the human individual is both the measure and the measured.

The view from Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, where the towering Columbus looks west towards the Orient, towards the collaboration between the great Renaissance of Europe and her political offspring, the United States of America, with the ancient civilization which has become the modern miracle of today’s China—this collaboration, this is the cornerstone of the new paradigm.

A paradigm where billions are taken out of poverty, and mankind finally grows beyond puberty into a healthy loving state of adulthood, a society oriented towards the great exploration of our universe and the fulfillment of that creative endeavor known as humanity.

[fn_1]. These are the two Americans most responsible for the destruction of the U.S. and much of the world over the last 50 years. See the Theranos case if you are unfamiliar with their roles in the great fraud of Silicon Valley. [back to text for fn_1]

The Cost of U.S. Public Transportation Breakdown

by Paul Gallagher

A “J” train leaving the Chambers Street Station in Manhattan.

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June 27—It is a well-known fact that residents of the United States use their personal motor vehicles for almost all travel, and that companies in the country use commercial trucks to ship the great majority of non-bulk freight cargo. It is often remarked that this is because Americans are “addicted” to cars and trucks for cultural reasons and because gasoline is relatively cheap; but the reason is much simpler.

All forms of public rail transportation, from subways to Amtrak inter-city lines, are very slow and unreliable as to schedule; rail freight transport is extremely slow; even air travel is so unreliably scheduled and has so many layover stops as to be slow, relative to driving, for trips up to about 300 miles. This is the result of decades of lack of investment in urban transportation, commuter rail, electric intercity rail, and airports, as well as deregulation of air travel and trucking.

While metropolitan area rail systems have simply deteriorated, leaving buses stuck in the congestion of cars and trucks, the United States has simply ignored the decades’ march of technology for electric rail, control, and signaling which have made rail travel considerably faster in most other industrial countries.

The increasingly frequent claim of “experts” that the United States’ destiny is simply to “skip over” the whole of modern rail technology and go directly to universal self-driving electric cars and trucks, is also bogus. China has built an entire high-speed rail system of nearly 13,000 miles in the decade the United States has been talking about the self-driving car future, and will probably get to at least 20,000 miles while Americans continue talking about it.

Here are the average speeds of metropolitan transportation in the United States:

• Metropolitan area rail, average 21 mph

of which, commuter rail 28 mph

of which, metro/subway (so-called “heavy rail”) rail, 15 mph

• Metropolitan area bus, average 12.2 mph

(was 13.6 mph in 2000)

• Metropolitan area auto, 31 mph

(New York, Washington, and San Francisco are under 20 mph).

In the United States, intra-urban transit (rail and bus) averages 14 mph overall. Even across all metropolitan areas defined by the Urban League as having “robust” public transit networks—and there are only 28 such areas—commuting by public transit takes an average of 1.5 to 2 times long as driving for essentially any distance.

In China, according to a Dec. 2016 study published by Springer, average metropolitan rail speed was 45 kph or 27 mph; bus average speed was 23 kph or 14 mph. Average speeds in Western Europe are higher than either. But the Chinese averages had risen from 2005–15. The U.S. averages, above, had fallen over the same decade.

LPAC/TV

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The consequence of the incapacity of public transportation described above, is that except for New York City, the vast majority of work commuting throughout the United States is by car. In total, 80% of all passenger-miles of transportation is by car; 6.5% is by bus, 12% by air, and 0.75% by rail. There are only 22,000 miles of double-tracked passenger rail lines in the United States, of which just 122 miles are electrified. The average passenger train speed overall in the country is 59 mph, including 65 mph in the Northeast Corridor. In comparison, China has 45,000 miles of double-tracked passenger rail, average speed on which is 116 kph or 73 mph.

Even for intercity travel—where, in parts of Europe and especially in China, rail effectively competes with air travel for efficiency, while being significantly less expensive—the United States average motor vehicle speed, 62 mph in 2017, was faster than average passenger train speed, 59 mph. And driving appears to be significantly less expensive, if one ignores the costs of parking and repair and maintenance, as most drivers do when comparing the transport modes.

For freight, trucks carry 75% of all freight which does not go through pipelines. Rail freight, by contrast, is just 12% of that total. Again, the sole reason for this tremendously costly and inefficient set of proportions, is speed. Taking Union Pacific as an example, the average speed for freight rail in 2018 was 23.5 mph, down from 25.5 mph in 2014. No rail freight is pulled by electric locomotives, even when traveling on the small sections of electrified track.

The average speed of truck travel with freight, outside inner cities, is 55 mph. No contest, from the non-bulk shipper’s standpoint.

Sharply Rising Household Expenditures

Congressional Budget Office figures show that public investment in transportation infrastructure has kept falling, from 2002 to 2017—by 5% in state and local funds, and by 19% at the federal level. As those government investments have fallen, the American household’s expenses for transportation have risen considerably, and now cost that household more than any other necessity except housing.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has found the share of household expenditures going to routine transportation (excluding air travel) to have risen from about 16% of household income in 1999 to 21% in 2016, a significant increase. The median household of two persons apparently now spends approximately $11,000/year on such transportation, averaging out to each such household spending $30 daily to get around.

Of this 21% total, a mere 6% of household expenditure is for public transportation. Only 28 U.S. cities have multi-modal (both bus and rail) public transportation systems. More importantly, as shown, the fastest way to get places in the United States—even within central cities—is by driving, since public transportation is so slow and uncertain. Only the time and expense of parking, or inability to afford a car, leans against driving—which is why the use of ride-hailing services and cabs in metropolitan areas is growing rapidly. With it, the amount American households spend on transportation grows further. Since 2015, steady increases in tolling, and increases in state gasoline taxes in 28 states, have accelerated this increase.

Truck driving is the most dangerous occupation in the United States—more dangerous than police, fire, construction work, etc.—as well as being the most harmful to health. So bad an occupation is it, that the American Trucking Associations (ATA) group says there is a 30,000 shortage of long-haul truckers despite their earning an average of $80–90,000 annually. Trucking employment was 1.45 million in 2018, and had not grown since 2005. Truck freight volume was 25% greater, however, due to larger, heavier trucks.

A truck-oriented paradigm of freight transportation is expensive! Heavy trucks are estimated to cause $30 billion/year in damage to roads. The costs to passenger vehicle drivers, who use the damaged and otherwise deteriorated roads, averages $600/driver/year in vehicle repairs. The costs to those drivers, of the extreme congestion of car and truck traffic around all cities and even towns, averages $800/driver/year in extra fuel consumption and lost time. So overall, there is an annual cost of $1400 per driver, due to using a fundamentally damaged and deteriorated road and bridge system. And the average of these costs for trucks themselves—losses to the companies employing truck drivers, from broken down road conditions and extreme congestion at the beginning and end of routes, is just under $2,000 per truck per year, again according to the ATA.

These financial figures do not consider the loss of life caused by motor vehicle crashes. Road fatalities were 39,000 in 2016 and rising by about 6% per year. This number is 13 road fatalities /100,000 population. In Europe there were 84,000 road fatalities in 2019, or about 9/100,000 population.

Electric Powerless

The source of these problems, even before the neglect and decay of public transportation and especially of the rail networks, was and is the complete lack of electrification of rail. Intercity passenger rail travel, on average, is no faster today than it was 80 years ago; on some passenger routes west of the Mississippi, which do not operate any more, it was faster 80 years ago than today. Intercity freight rail travel is notably slower than in the 1930s. This is disgraceful when one looks at the advances which have been made in electric-traction rail speeds in other countries over that 80 years—speeds have doubled, and in some cases tripled—not to mention the magnetic levitation rail which has begun to be introduced in China and Japan.

U.S. Census Bureau publications show that in 1938, the United States reached a peak of electrified track mileage, at 47,000 miles (today it is 4,900 total miles, of which just 122 miles, as mentioned, is intercity passenger rail). Intercity passengers 80 years ago travelled at up to 75 mph—again, on some western routes, at 100 mph or more—and the average speed was 57 mph, essentially the same as in 2018. Intracity (subway and commuter rail) passenger travel at the time was markedly faster (averaging 37 mph) than it is today (21 mph).

For rail freight, even longer ago—at the time of World War I—so-called “fast freight line service” routes comprised 35,000 miles of track, according to United States Census Bureau publications, and on them, freight speed averaged 35-37 mph. Today, as noted above, that average is 23 mph.

The process of electrification has to be repeated—starting with the existing, largely freight, lines—and must be accompanied by double tracking, in order to begin to build a high-speed intercity rail network.

China, for example, has about 13,000 miles of high-speed rail (HSR), heading toward an 18,000-mile target, which travels at 200-300 km/h (120-180 mph). But China did not build any of this HSR until 2004, well over a decade after making the first plans to do so in 1990. It did not have the industrial capacity or capability to do so; and that is the situation in the United States today, which for example does not have any company making train sets and only one which produces diesel-electric locomotives.

In China, writes Michael Molitch-Hou in an article at engineering.com, “the country began improving its railways via the ‘Speed-Up’ campaign, so that they could handle speeds that would increase from 48 km/h (30 mph) to 160 km/h (100 mph).” The trains, not the workers, were sped up—first by improvement in track and locomotives, and then, during the second half of the 1990s, by electrification of existing lines. This allowed using faster electric traction, built into the train set rather than just a locomotive. “The first HSR line was developed from the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Railway, which was kicked up to 160 km/h (99 mph) in 1994 as the first sub-HSR line using diesel trains.”

In addition to electrifying existing lines, trainsets were initially acquired from French, German, and Japanese trainset manufacturers, then developed in China through technology transfer. Existing rail lines were progressively double-tracked, using new ballastless track technology, allowing for mixed (freight and passenger) use to be separated and true high-speed passenger rail (200-300 km/h) to be developed.

If the United States is to acquire relatively fast and reliable rail transport, for freight and for passenger travel up to the distance that requires going by air, it will have to follow the same steps.

Army Corps of Engineers/Jack Sweeney

In order to accommodate rising waters, a steam work boat lifts wickets near the bear trap section of the dam at Locks and Dam 52 on the Ohio River at Brookport, Illinios, in October, 2017.

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Waterways, Locks and Ports

According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers data, nearly 80% of lock sites with commercial traffic had at least one unexpected outage in 2017, with an average outage of 144 minutes. In 1993, 71% of such locks had an unexpected outage, with an average outage of 90 minutes. During approximately the same span of time (2000 to 2016), the volume of tonnage on the U.S. waterways system dropped by 13%, to 1.7 billion tons. This lost traffic was diverted to rail and truck.

The average lock system age is 61 years; the operating expected life is 50 years. (In 2017, one lock outage essentially closed down the Ohio River to freight traffic for four months.)

The best port productivity in the United States, in Long Beach, California, is 88 container moves/hour, making it only 20th in the world, with the top 19 being in Asia or the Middle East, and showing 120-130 container moves/hour. U.S. ports’ berth productivity overall in 2014 was 50% lower than ports in the Asia-Pacific and 15% lower than ports in the European Community. This gets reflected directly in longer ship turnaround times. (This has been studied by the Journal of Commerce, which published an international study in 2016.)

Georgia Port Authority

Moving containers from trucks at the Port of Savannah.

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On the land side—where the biggest investments are needed—average truck visit times are about 90 minutes, with 20% being two hours or longer (according to the Harbor Trucking Association). In Asian and European ports, truck visit times are in the range of 75-80 minutes on average; but the real comparison is to the use of rail. While railcar visit times are in excess of 4 hours on average, a freight train loads hundreds of trucks worth of freight, making this mode of transport potentially very efficient.

Port ship turnaround in U.S. ports (roughly one day) is somewhat slower than European ports and faster than Asia ports, but the U.S. ports are handling smaller ships, 8,000 TEU and smaller, compared to 10,000 up to 18,000 TEU in North European and Asian ports.

Devastation in the Farm Belt,

Rural Depopulation

by Robert Baker and Marcia Merry Baker

gillettewy.gov

Flood waters cover a farm in Nebraska. The 2019 flooding has not only caused devastating losses of livestock and stored grains, but has also made timely spring planting of many crops impossible.

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June 17—Drive through the Midwest Farm Belt as of spring 2019, and you immediately see the effects of not building needed infrastructure. Two things stand out:

First, the vast flooding. The lack of full build-out of the water control structures (dams, levees, diversion lakes and channels) long planned for the Upper Missouri-Mississippi River Basin over the past 50 years, has made this huge agriculture region of 15 farm states subject to periodic storm disasters, as well as limiting potential irrigation, extended navigation and hydropower. Plus, the existing river navigation system serving this mid-continental breadbasket region has been closed repeatedly during the past three months, due to high water dangers. This year’s storm patterns also produced fierce tornadoes.

The sorriest part of the picture is that this heartland of the U.S. Farm Belt—one of the world’s top agriculture zones—has been repeatedly subject to massive floods: in 2011, 1993, and earlier. The devastation is huge. So far, an estimated 40 lives have been lost due to the 2019 flooding, storms, and tornadoes. One Nebraska farmer died when high water swept him off his tractor, as he tried to rescue a motorist—a stranger in trouble.

This level of destruction was not at all “necessary,” given that since the 1940s, engineering plans were worked out for both the Upper Missouri and Upper Mississippi systems, similar to the big dams, run-off channels, flood walls and other systems that were built in the Lower Mississippi after the devastating 1927 floods.

A Blow to the World’s Food Supply

The flooding and stormy weather in Missouri–Mississippi River Basins is automatically a blow to the world food supply. The U.S. accounts for over a third of all world corn output, and a quarter of world soybeans—whose 2019 harvests will be greatly reduced by late seeding or re-planting, if they are not total losses.

Nebraska State Patrol

Right: Destruction of a portion of Highway 12 due to flooding.

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According to USDA estimates, as of June 14, only 83% of U.S. corn was planted nationally, compared to the five-year average of 99% for this time of year. For soybeans, only 60% were in the ground, far below the normal 88%. Much of what is planted, is slow to emerge.

Livestock is a similar picture. The core Missouri Basin states hit by flooding—South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas—account for 27% of U.S. cattle. Over half of U.S. hogs are raised in this region. Four of the top ten egg producing states are here: Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Missouri. All this capacity is hit by lack of infrastructure, either directly or indirectly.

Second, the underlying economic landscape in the Plains and nearby states—with or without flooding, is a dramatic scene of abandoned farmsteads and boarded up rural towns. This reflects the impact on the agriculture sector of the last four decades of phase-out of national-interest economic policies such as parity-based pricing for farm commodities, regulation to prevent wild commodity speculation, infrastructure-building to provide power, modern transportation, water management and disaster defense. Instead, more and more practices of the British free trade model have been implemented, serving Wall Street and City of London interests. These include wild price swings, speculation, and lack of anti-trust action. In particular, a select few mega food cartel firms have come to exert vast control of processing, retail and international trade, and farm inputs (such as chemicals, fertilizers, and seeds). They source commodities for cheap, and make their cut, no matter what happens with trade.

U.S. Average Farm Household Income, by Source, 1960-2018

USDA, ERS (Economic Research Service), August, 2018

The average farm household income comes mostly from the off-farm jobs of family members, and has declined in total, for the past five years. The figures are inflation-adjusted, with 2017=100.

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The Independent Family Farm Model

The independent family farm model of the American System has been severely undercut. Average farm income in the past few years has been below costs of production, and even income from off-farm jobs has not been enough to make up the gap. More than half of U.S. farm households lost money farming in recent years, according to the USDA, which estimated the media farm family income was negative $1,548 in 2018. For most to be able to continue to farm, the high value of land has provided the collateral for banks to keep lending.

Total aggregate farm income for 2018 was half that of 2013. The pressure is to go bigger and bigger, to try to get margins of income, which are becoming smaller and smaller. Go-getter farmers are renting thousands of acres to try to make it. But this is no answer for the nation. If land prices blow out, a very large portion of the big operators will go out of business. Moreover, there are not enough up-and-coming young farmers to take over.

The number of farm bankruptcy declarations is surging in the Midwest. The declarations of Chapter 12 bankruptcy (the federal legal code for independent farm household bankruptcies) jumped 100 percent over the decade 2008–2018 in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. In Minnesota, more Chapter 12 bankruptcies were declared in 2018 than in the previous 10 years combined. Short of bankruptcy, thousands of farmers are turning to professional mediators to arrange a work-out of their debt. In Minnesota, more than 3,500 farmers filed for mediation in 2018 to try to save their farms.

The data in the latest U.S. Census of Agriculture, released this April (covering 2012–2017) reflects the downshift underway in the U.S. farm sector, in which mid-sized, family-scale operations are disappearing. What is being lost, is the productive context of know-how from family farm activity—animal husbandry, handling heavy equipment, crop and livestock genetics, chemicals, construction, water management, understanding weather patterns, mechanics, machining, and electrical and plumbing skills, etc.—all carried out in an industrious community, which is conducive to raising up young folk with know-how, ingenuity, and optimism. The downwards trend reflects the establishment of an increasing number of larger farms (towards the mega-sized) and smaller farms (serving niche markets and “lifestyle” purposes), and a loss of mid-sized family farms. Merely 78,865 mega farms (3.6% of all farms) produce over two-thirds of all the $390 billion in total value of annual U.S. farm production.

Approximately One-Third of U.S. Counties Lost Population Between 1980-2010

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Plains States Dying

Hundreds of formerly thriving Plains states counties have been steadily losing population. One third of all rural counties lost population in the 30-year period from 1980 to 2010, and these are concentrated in the Midwest. Institutions have been amalgamated or shut down—schools, churches, social centers.

As the number of farm families, and farm income have declined, support businesses have shut—from car repair and gas stations, to dentists and pharmacies, to stores of all kinds. Farm families remaining on the land now drive long distances for necessities and services. This same process is underway in farm areas everywhere cross country, not just in the Midwest Farm Belt, where it shows up as extreme.

The medical system for rural areas is contracting to the vanishing point. As of this March, it was estimated that 20% of rural hospitals are in the red, and on the verge of shut-down. Over the period 2013 to 2017, 64 rural hospitals closed, following on 30 shutdowns in the prior five years. The picture is that 430 out of the 2,035 rural hospitals (out of the national total of some 5,000 public hospitals) are facing shutdown. Half of Alabama’s hospitals are in this category, as are one-third of those in Arkansas, Georgia and Mississippi. The situation is similar in Alaska and Maine.

In addition, the ratios of other basic health care facilities and services—from the number of beds for elderly residential care, to the number of mammography machines, to the number of obstetric and natal clinics—are way below modern standards in hundreds of rural counties, especially in the Southern states. Moreover, even hospitals that are still open, have a bed count far below what is needed. It is now common to have “boarding” of patients in emergency rooms, on gurneys, for days, for lack of proper beds.

Thus, the day-to-day environment of dying towns, the loss of hospitals, churches, schools, cultural centers and all the rest, plus income crises, are grounds enough for personal upset, if not despair.

Making it far worse, are the delusions deliberately pushed by the propaganda wing of the British free trade system, which drives globalization of banking, commodities and industrial monopolization. A series of fake solutions to rural life and livelihood, that people are supposed to swallow, have been promoted over the past decades.

For example, farmers are told that biofuels are the salvation for corn and soybean prices, that hemp is the new way to increase income, that putting wind turbines on your land and solar panels on your roofs will give you some bucks and save the world from over-heating, etc. Many in farming or living in rural communities, know these recourses are not only no “solution”—but they are unscientific rip-offs. “But,” they ask themselves, “what else is there?”

Drugs and Suicides

Add the drug scourge to this picture, and conditions for suffering and despair are guaranteed. In fact, rates of opioid addiction and meth use, as well as alcoholism, are worse in rural communities than in urban and suburban areas. This relates to rural poverty, isolation, dangerous work, disasters, and a dead-end rural economy. There are many ugly patterns.

Robert L. Baker

Abandoned buildings in the former town of Union Level, in southern Virginia.

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For example, secluded areas on farms are targeted by meth lab operators—sometimes in pop-up facilities, or what are called “backpack” sized labs—in order to elude detection, and to originate supplies to cities nearby. The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau website even has a special “Meth Awareness” page, advising farmers: “If you suspect a meth lab on your property or in your area, do not attempt to confront the individuals yourself. Lab operators are often heavily armed, and may react violently.” The webpage cautions: “If you find any suspected meth lab waste, do not touch or get near any of the material. Even small amounts of the waste can kill or severely injure you.”

The suicide rates in geographically rural areas are some of the highest in the nation. In fact, in many years over the past three decades, suicide rates among farmers and agriculture workers exceeded homicide rates in these same social groups.

Contrast this to the growth of rural towns and family farms set in motion by deliberate Federal policies at key moments in U.S. history, under the principles laid out by the first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and followed, for example, by President Abraham Lincoln. The expansion of the railroads initiated by Lincoln, along with his agriculture policies, saw each new rural community become as self-sufficient as possible—in food output, mechanics, education, etc.—while at the same time producing for people elsewhere in the nation, and in far-off lands. Thus, producers and consumers were brought closer to each other, as Lincoln’s economist Henry Carey liked to point out (as in his 1851 The Harmony of Interests) to the mutual benefit of all. This was the American System in action, in opposition to the British imperial system, whose “free” trade globalization today is causing terrible destruction.

Breakdown of U.S. Public Health Infrastructure, Breakout of Disease

by Dr. Debra Hanania Freeman

CDC

The Oriental Rat Flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, is a primary vector for both murine typhus and bubonic plague.

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June 13—A close look at the complete breakdown of all aspects of the nation’s public health infrastructure is nothing short of alarming. And, despite what some would like to argue, the breakdown didn’t begin the day that Donald Trump became President.

Earlier this year, a state of near panic erupted when a Los Angeles city employee was diagnosed with typhus, which she says she contracted at the city’s rat-infested City Hall. Then on May 29, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced that an employee at its downtown station was being treated for typhoid fever. Soon afterward, it came out that five other LAPD employees were displaying symptoms.

These incidents focused attention on the problem, but the fact is, such cases of disease have actually been increasing in California for more than a decade.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in 2008, Los Angeles County reported 13 cases of murine typhus, carried by fleas. In 2018, that number increased to 124. In the first four months of this year, more than 190 cases have already been reported. The problem is compounded by the fact that officials don’t keep an accurate count of how many cases of murine typhus there are each year; public health officials believe that the actual number of cases is probably much higher.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why this is happening. A stroll through downtown L.A. makes it impossible to ignore the piles of uncollected trash that litter the streets. That trash attracts rats and stray cats that carry the disease, though it doesn’t make them ill. But their fleas transmit the bacteria to humans by biting the infected animals and then biting humans.

Rising Number of Unsheltered Homeless

Due to cuts in city services, uncollected trash has been a major problem in Los Angeles, and countless other cities in the U.S., for more than a decade. But the problem has been dramatically escalated by the burgeoning numbers of encampments of unsheltered homeless people living in absolute squalor. And, while estimates on the numbers of unsheltered homeless vary widely, even the most conservative estimates indicate that there were approximately 600,000 unsheltered homeless adults (as opposed to those living in shelters and temporary housing) in the U.S., with more than half of them living in California.

In his February State of the State address, California Governor Gavin Newsom said, “Our homeless crisis is increasingly becoming a public-health crisis,” citing outbreaks of hepatitis A in San Diego County, syphilis in Sonoma County, and typhus in Los Angeles County. Hepatitis A, spread primarily through feces, infected more than 1,000 people in Southern California in the past two years. Almost twice that number of cases have already been diagnosed this year among homeless people in San Francisco, where the piles of human feces littering the streets, especially in the Tenderloin district, have forced the city to employ Poop Patrols whose task it is to collect the feces and steam the streets on a nightly basis. The disease has also erupted in New Mexico, Ohio, and Kentucky, primarily among people who are homeless or use drugs.

In the state of Washington, both Seattle and Kings County recently reported epidemic-level outbreaks of shigellosis, which is spread by feces, as well as trench fever, which spreads through body lice. Less serious, but no less widespread, are skin infections which also greatly lower an individual’s resistance to other diseases.

On the East Coast, in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., although encampments are becoming more and more common, most of the homeless population is sheltered. So, while diseases like typhus and hepatitis are less of a problem than they are on the West Coast, the reported cases of tuberculosis in homeless shelters are at the highest level since the Great Depression.

cc/NeoBatfreak

Homeless camp near Laney College in Oakland, CA.

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These infections are hardly a surprise. In California, without any public bathrooms or areas where people can even wash their hands, human feces are contaminating the same areas where people eat and sleep. Elsewhere, even those fortunate enough to find beds in homeless shelters are vulnerable to such outbreaks because their weakened immune systems are worsened by stress, malnutrition, and sleep deprivation. Many also have mental illness and substance-abuse disorders, which make it even harder for them to stay healthy or get even the most minimal health care.

The proposed solutions range from massive increases in urban sanitation budgets, to new forms of sanitation like San Francisco’s Poop Patrols, to allocations for portable toilets, to rounding up the homeless and moving them elsewhere, making them somebody else’s problem. But the proposed solutions aren’t solutions at all. Simply cleaning up the garbage in so-called “typhus zones” will not solve the problem, as people who have nowhere to go and nowhere to dispose of their waste will simply make more. And more garbage means more rats, which means more fleas, which means more typhus, more hepatitis, etc.

The problem is getting worse not only in urban areas, where astronomical housing prices are fueling the crisis, but also in rural states, which are reporting rapidly increasing numbers of homeless encampments where even fewer services are available. Between 2012 and 2018, government estimates indicate that homelessness surged by 75%.

The homeless population is varied. Almost a third of Los Angeles’s 50,000 homeless are suffering from chronic mental illness. In Washington, D.C., among homeless adults with children, almost a third have reported working at least part-time. NYC estimates that 10% of the children who attend public school are homeless. In Washington, D.C., that number jumps to 45%. A recent study by the National Center on Family Homelessness at the American Institutes for Research estimates that there are more than 2.5 million children in the United States that are homeless. The public health implications are staggering.

Spread of Infectious Diseases

Furthermore, the idea that somehow the spread of these infectious diseases is contained among the homeless is itself a dangerous illusion. A case in point: the U.S. is currently grappling with the worst measles outbreak in more than 65 years. The CDC reports that as of June 6, there were 1,002 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. in the first six months this year, triple the number of cases reported in all of 2018. From January 1 to June 6, cases were confirmed in 28 states.

The patterns of incidence are necessitating many localities to take various public health emergency measures. For example, as of March, several counties in New York, including New York City, were forced to declare states of emergency and activate special orders. In the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, NY, where more than 250 people, mostly members of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious community, have gotten measles since September, a policy of mandatory vaccination was ordered (and upheld by the courts). Also, in late winter, more than 700 students and staff members at two California universities—the University of California, Los Angeles, and California State University, Los Angeles—were under quarantine. Three counties in Maryland had to restrict hospital visits by children under the age of 18, who are assumed to be unvaccinated. All this in a nation that, in the year 2000, declared measles to be totally eradicated. What has gone wrong?

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Measles: Most Highly Contagious Virus

First, it is important to understand that the measles virus is possibly the most highly contagious virus that we know. About 90 percent of people exposed to measles will become infected if they are not immune or have not been vaccinated. It is so contagious, that it is possible to contract measles simply by entering a room, hours after an infected person has been there. Adding to the high communicability, the virus is durable: It remains in the air of a room for up to 21 days. As a result, a much higher level of immunization coverage is required in order to achieve herd immunity—a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when a large percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, usually as a result of vaccination, thereby providing a measure of protection for individuals who are not immune. The level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity varies by disease but ranges from 83 to 94 percent. For measles, an outbreak can occur as soon as coverage drops below 90%; coverage of 95% is required before herd immunity is securely achieved.

Moreover, whenever measles strikes, any public health professional will tell you that it’s more than just an outbreak of a single disease, or even an indication that children aren’t receiving their measles shots. It is a sharp warning that immunization coverage in general, for all vaccine-preventable diseases, is lower than it should be. That is, when rates of routine vaccination—children receiving all their shots on schedule, as a preventive measure rather than a reaction to an outbreak—start to fall, the first sign is usually a measles outbreak. These outbreaks, when looked at from a public health standpoint, are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.

Vaccinations Way Down

At the moment, routine vaccination is at the lowest level the U. S. has seen since the introduction of the polio vaccine. More and more people are opting to not vaccinate their kids. The main fixation of anti-vaccine groups is an old discredited study linking vaccination to autism, something that President Trump lent credence to during his campaign (although the recent measles emergency has led him to have a change of heart). Another is a conspiracy theory, heavily circulated online, that both doctors and pharmaceutical companies stand to profit financially by pushing vaccines.

In fact, the opposite is true. Vaccine production is simply not profitable. In the past, federal initiatives and the allocation of federal funds were solely responsible for providing the incentive for big pharma to produce vaccines:

• Dwight D Eisenhower signed the Polio Vaccination Assistance Act in 1955, which gave $30 million in federal grants to states to cover the costs of planning and conducting polio vaccination programs, including purchasing polio vaccine

• John F Kennedy signed the Vaccination Assistance Act in 1962 (Section 317 of the Public Health Service Act), declaring “There is no longer any reason why American children should suffer from polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, or tetanus. … I am asking the American people to join in a nationwide vaccination program to stamp out these four diseases.” The measure provided financing for a three-year program to provide funds to ensure that American children be vaccinated against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, but it has been continuously reauthorized ever since.

Federal support for vaccines reached a low point while Reagan was in office and we quickly saw outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, including many deaths, especially as rates of children living in poverty and without health insurance increased. More importantly, the national supply of vaccines diminished to dangerous levels, with most pharmaceutical companies ceasing production of most common vaccines.

Following three years of measles outbreaks, in 1991, an alarmed George H.W. Bush initiated his immunization activation plan that once again served to raise immunization rates. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, he declared a state of national emergency when it was learned that vaccine supplies had diminished to record lows. He launched the Childhood Immunization Initiative in 1993, which included signing the Vaccines for Children (VFC) Act, providing free vaccines to many children.

As funding for these programs ran out, pharmaceutical companies once again ceased production. Today, Merck is the only company currently licensed to offer the measles vaccine.

USAF/Desiree N. Palacios

Boy receiving multiple vaccinations as part of Immunization Awareness Month, August 2014.

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Ironically, the failure to fund vaccination programs is extremely costly. In the case of measles, the economic cost of the highly infectious and potentially deadly virus is continuing to rise.

“It is expensive to the public health system,” Dr. Nate Smith, the director and state health officer for the Arkansas Department of Health, told Fox Business earlier this year. “The real costs, though, are not all financial, and they’re borne by the individuals and the families.”

Although there had been no cases confirmed in Arkansas, he reported that an analysis of a 2018 case led them to an estimate of the cost to the health department. The result? A staggering $47,962.

Although cases and outbreaks of measles are unique—and therefore the cost is not uniform—Smith said that a figure of $50,000 is “pretty consistent” across the U.S. (based on a report in the medical journal Vaccine). Extrapolating these figures to the 695 confirmed individual cases in 22 states, the economic cost exceeds $30 million. “And quite honestly,” Smith said, “you can vaccinate a whole lot of folks for $48,000.”

A Public Health Emergency

The bottom line? Whether we are talking about the public health emergency created by rising homelessness, the current measles outbreak and all that it implies, or even the fact that more and more health insurers are now refusing to fund cancer treatment at the nation’s premier cancer research facilities because the cost is deemed too high, the result flies in the face of President Trump’s assertion that the U.S. economy is the best it has ever been. Monetary profits may be high, but in reality, they are no measure of a healthy economy. Making America great again is an admirable goal, but to do so means a reassertion of the commitment to promote the general welfare of our population. The most workable approach to doing so is to implement the programs and policies most recently delineated in Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws for Economic Recovery and the Four Powers Agreement. Nothing short of that is going to work.

Drugged-Up America

by Robert Ingraham

EIR

The cover of Dope, Inc., commissioned by Lyndon LaRouche, which analyzes the scope and size of the international illegal drug-trafficking empire. LaRouche laid out a war strategy against these London-based death merchants that would work, a war strategy that got considerable traction in the early 1980s.

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The mass drugging of the American people is a secret hidden in plain sight. Over a span of four decades, Americans have consented to a deluge of drug usage. The responsibility for this lies at the feet of the pro-drug Wall Street establishment, the pro-drug news media, pro-drug politicians, the pro-drug psychiatric profession, and drug-saturated Hollywood. An environment has been deliberately created in which everyday drug usage is seen as acceptable, if not normal or even desirable. This is the 21st Century fulfillment of the “soma” vision of British oligarch Aldous Huxley.

Estimates are that in 2017, more than 30.5 million Americans had used an illegal drug within the last 30 days. At least 47 million Americans had used an illegal drug within the last twelve months. That is 15% of the total population. Additionally, those figures do not include either the millions who legally consume a wide variety of mind-numbing prescription drugs, or the millions of alcohol addicts.

If one were to add in the number of people who legally use opioids (such as OxyContin), anti-depressants (such as Prozac, Zoloft, or Celexa), anti-anxiety drugs (such as Xanax), and ADHD drugs (such as Ritalin or Adderall), then the total figures for “drug usage” skyrocket. The numbers are staggering.

Let us be clear: This is the deliberate mass drug enslavement of the American people. Nothing like this has existed anywhere in the world, of this scope or magnitude, since the enforced opium addiction of tens of millions of Chinese by the British monarchy in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Much attention is given, and rightly so, to the crime and deaths which result from illegal drug trafficking. Yet, much more devastating damage is being done. A minimum of 25%—or perhaps a much, much higher number—of the American people are now being stupefied by drugs. Their minds are impaired. Their cognitive reasoning is damaged. Ask yourself, would we have a society today in which tens of millions oppose nuclear power and embrace the anti-scientific fraud of global warming were it not for the widespread drugging of the population? Would we have a culture dominated by Hollywood trash and mindless video games were it not for widespread drug usage? Or, more to the point, what percentage of the deluded demonstrators demanding that Donald Trump be removed from office have consumed a mind-altering drug within the last thirty days?

Reasoned discussion, which is only possible through higher cognitive functioning, a mandatory pre-requisite for the existence of a republic, is being erased from our society.

In This Case . . . Figures Don’t Lie

The consensus among government reports is that 25 million Americans have used marijuana within the last 30 days (including 35% of high school seniors) and 41 million within the last 12 months. Current figures show that, among “regular users”—i.e. those who have used the drug within the last thirty days—there are:

• 1.5 million cocaine users,

• at least 1 million heroin users (compared with 300,000 in 2003),

• 900,000 methamphetamine users,

• 3 million Ecstasy (MDMA) users,

• 2 million users of hallucinogens, and

• perhaps as many as 4 million users of illegal opioids.

If one were to expand this to include “casual users,” i.e., those who have used marijuana within the last year, the figures would double, or in some cases triple.

There is also the following to consider.

When the LaRouche political movement published the book, Dope, Inc.: Britain’s Opium War Against the U.S. in 1978, the explosion in use of legal psychiatric drugs was still two decades into the future. Today, the “legal” drugging of Americans is beyond epidemic proportions. The first anti-anxiety drug Valium was introduced in 1963, but the real revolution came with the introduction of the powerful anti-depressant Prozac in 1988, i.e., the acceptance of the idea that psychological and emotional “well-being” could be achieved through swallowing a pill. This re-definition of mind-altering drugs as “medicine”—which today includes marijuana—has been key to the mass drugging of the population.

According to figures supplied by IMS Health, a company that provides information, services and technology for the healthcare industry, 79 million Americans are now taking some form of drug for emotional or psychological relief. That’s 25% of the entire U.S. population. This includes

• 37 million taking anti-anxiety drugs,

• 41 million taking anti-depressants,

• 11 million taking drugs for attention deficit disorder, and

• 7 million taking anti-psychotic drugs.

One in eight Americans now takes an antidepressant medication; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four. Many people have multiple prescriptions for a variety of these drugs. Additionally, in 2012, 259 million prescriptions were written for narcotic opioids (e.g., OxyContin), which is more than enough to give every American adult his or her own bottle of pills.

The powerful anti-anxiety and anti-panic drug Xanax today ranks #1 as the most prescribed psychiatric drug in America. As of 2015, doctors were writing nearly 50 million prescriptions for Xanax every year—that’s more than one Xanax prescription every second.

The drugging begins at an early age. In the age group 0-5 years, 200,000 are already on ADHD drugs, 110,000 are on anti-depressants, and 725,000 are on anti-anxiety drugs. Over one million children are on drugs by the time of their sixth birthday. An astounding 20% of high school-age boys—ages 14-17—in the United States have been diagnosed with ADHD, and 10% of high school-age girls have likewise been diagnosed.

These are powerful drugs. During the last thirty years, Dr. Peter Breggin has authored a series of books, including Toxic Psychiatry; Talking Back to Prozac; Talking Back to Ritalin; and Medication Madness. In his work, Dr. Breggin had documented a widespread deterioration of mental functioning in the users of these drugs. He has described a condition which he calls “medication spellbinding,” wherein severe mental impairment occurs without the drug user noticing it. The same could certainly be said for marijuana users.

Obama the Drug Pusher

In October 2009, Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden issued a memorandum to federal prosecutors, directing them that they should not enforce federal anti-drug laws (the Controlled Substances Act) against individuals or institutions which are in “clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” Thus, Barack Obama became the first U.S. President to accept the definition of marijuana, a Schedule I controlled substance, as a “medicine.”

This federal endorsement of marijuana was taken a step further in 2013 when Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole issued a memo to federal prosecutors in all fifty states declaring that the Obama Administration would not challenge laws legalizing marijuana in Colorado, Washington, or any other state which chose to violate federal drug laws.

In March 2015, following the legalization of marijuana in Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Colorado, Barack Obama conducted an interview with Vice News. He stated that he was “encouraged” by recent actions at the state level to give greater access to marijuana. This Presidential endorsement, combined with federal non-enforcement of the nation’s anti-drug laws has resulted in seven additional states—California, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Vermont, Michigan, and Illinois—legalizing marijuana in the past two and a half years.

Barack Obama, together with his wife Michelle and his bizarre political bedfellow Valery Jarrett, have established a headquarters in Washington, D.C. from which to organize an effort to block and destroy President Donald Trump. This unholy trio are linked in their efforts with Nazi-sympathizer George Soros, the billionaire who is now personally bankrolling the attempt to create a “color revolution” in the United States by deploying thousands of deluded foot soldiers into the streets of American cities in violent anti-Trump demonstrations.

Since 1994, George Soros has spent more than $200 million of his own money to legalize drugs in the United States. During the last twenty years, almost every state ballot initiative for drug legalization or “decriminalization” has been financed by Soros, some almost entirely by him, and Soros has not limited his efforts to marijuana legalization. He has also spoken out—and financed ballot initiatives—for the decriminalization of all “hard drugs,” including heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines.

In a December 2015 interview with the Russia-24 TV channel, Viktor Ivanov, the head of the Russian anti-drug agency FSKN, charged that Soros’ efforts for drug legalization in the United States, was developed for export to foreign countries, particularly intended to effect drug legalization in Mexico and other Latin American nations, where propaganda is being spread by Soros-controlled NGOs.

What Obama Has Wrought

Between 2009 and 2016, under Barack Obama:

• Marijuana use went up 100%.

• Methamphetamine use increased 62%.

• Heroin use increased 200%.

According to a report issued by the CDC, in 2012 the number of people using heroin for the first time was 156,000, nearly double the number of people in 2006. This increase has been driven largely by young adults aged 18-25.

On Feb. 23, 2017, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) released data showing that overdose-related deaths increased from 38,329 in 2010 to 52,404 by 2015, a 27% increase in five years. Over the same period, heroin-related deaths quadrupled, going from 3,036 in 2010 to 12,989 in 2015, all of this under the Obama regime.

Numerous studies have documented that this frightening explosion of drug usage correlates directly to states that have legalized the Obama-approved “medical” use of marijuana. A 2014 report published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, titled “The Effect of Medical Marijuana Laws on Marijuana, Alcohol, and Hard Drug Use,” documents a 27% increase for marijuana use in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Multiple Cause of Death 1999-2017 on CDC WONDER Online Database, released December 2018.

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Since the 2012 outright legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington, attempts have been made to calculate the effects of legalization on drug usage (as well as in the additional states that subsequently enacted marijuana legalization). Initial studies have shown a sharp increase in drug usage among the population. Millions of youth are now being told that marijuana is a “medicine,”—like the pills that mother takes for her “well-being”—or at the very least it is acceptable to use, now that it has been legalized. The societal and cultural barriers to drug usage are being removed.

As for prescription drug use, under Obama, the overall use of psychiatric drugs to numb and pacify the population has increased dramatically. Since 2008, there has been an 87% increase in the use of anti-depressants, a 100% increase in children under age 10 taking anti-psychotic medications, and a 40% increase in the number of girls being prescribed ADHD medications. There has been an explosion in the use of prescription opioids, accompanied by the development and marketing of new opioids. The United States makes up only 4.6% of the world’s population, but consumes 80% of its opioids.

Start From the Top

So, what is to be done?

The first step must be to recognize the paramount role of the major British and American banking institutions in the global drug trade. This role is not merely one of avaricious “money laundering.” The London and Wall Street apparatus is the command center for the intended drugging of the population, and none of the major drug cartels could function without the protection and support of Wall Street and the City of London.

In 2009, Antonio Maria Costa, then the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), identified the fact that the international banks had become “drug dependent.” He said:

In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor. Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities. . . There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.

Speaking in Washington, D.C. in 2011, Viktor Ivanov, the Director of the Russian Federal Narcotics Service, went even further:

Drug money and global drug trafficking are actually not just valuable elements of, but as donors of scarce liquidity, a vital and indispensable segment of the whole monetary system.

Ivanov went on to say that Russia and the United States must work in tandem to effect—

the drastic transformation of the international financial system. . . . To a certain extent, we are observing a revival of the logic of the Glass-Steagall Act, adopted in the U.S. in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, which separated the deposit and investment functions of banks.

However, he added, “restrictions to prevent the attraction of criminal money are required even more. In other words, liquidation of the financial bubble alone will not be enough. … The key way to liquidate global drug trafficking is to reformat the existing economy and shift to an economy that excludes criminal money” and moves instead “to an economy of development, in which decisions are based on development projects and long-term targeted credits.”

The first action which must be undertaken to combat the drug scourge is to enact into law the restoration of Franklin Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall legislation, along with accompanying actions which ruthlessly bring to an end the last two decades era of unregulated banking and financial speculation. The predatory practices of the “too-big-to-fail” banks in London and New York—the headquarters of Dope Inc.—have brought the trans-Atlantic financial system to ruin. The restoration of Glass-Steagall is essential for the creation of a Hamiltonian Credit System needed to finance a national economic recovery, but it will also have the salutary effect of destroying the financial operations and structures which control and bankroll the international drug trade.

The tens of millions of drug users in the United States are the victims of Britain’s modern Opium War against the United States. By adopting the measures which LaRouche enunciated in 1985, together with enactment of Glass-Steagall legislation as well as strict enforcement of federal drug laws, the amount of drug consumption can be drastically curtailed. The availability of drugs will be sharply reduced, and the message that has been sent out by Barack Obama for the last eight years that “Drugs are OK” will be reversed. A contrary social dynamic will be created. The question then becomes how to move forward, how to create a better culture and a better society than that which currently exists.

Even far greater challenges—and greater opportunities—could then be posed to young Americans. A true Hamiltonian economic policy will provide the means to take on stupendous projects, including a rapid return to space exploration, in partnership with other nations. An upward optimistic perspective can take hold. The potential for a profoundly positive change in culture would then become possible. Human minds begin to function again. Reason awakens. Cognition is improved.

Justice

There is no reason to incarcerate drug users. Again, they are the victims. Simply cut off their supply, and move as many of them as possible into an FDR economic recovery effort. This approach should also apply for many “lower level” individuals involved in the drug trade, if their crime is non-violent and their desire to escape the drug lifestyle is genuine. The only necessary caution is to avoid excessive leniency until the drug cartels are crushed. Forgiveness after a war is laudable; during the war it is suicidal.

For those with serious problems of addiction or severe psychological problems, rehabilitation clinics should be the first step. According to a report by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), almost 23 million Americans aged 12 and older need treatment for drug or alcohol use, but only 2.5 million have received treatment at a specialty facility.

For the controllers and the military command structure of Dope, Inc., no mercy must be permitted.

Leading bankers and financiers involved in drug money laundering or drug transactions, either directly or through connivance, should be stripped of their ill-gotten gains, prosecuted, and jailed. No one should be immune, including CEOs and others in executive positions. During their 2012 plea bargain, the top officials of HSBC openly admitted that they had knowingly laundered billions of dollars in drug money. Not one of them spent a day in jail.

All high level officials and major players in drug gangs and drug cartels should be similarly treated. This falls under the heading of “military procedures,” and it will necessitate cooperation with a variety of other nations.

Any state or local government official, elected official, or law enforcement official who defies federal law in regard to the War on Drugs, i.e., commits treason, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The issue of “states’ rights” was settled on the bloody battlefields of Gettysburg and Shiloh. The same approach might be necessary for some within the nation’s major news media.

Responsible individuals, again including top corporate officers within the pharmaceutical industry, who have wittingly participated in the mass drugging of the American people, should be indicted and prosecuted. Procedures which govern the availability of powerful psychiatric drugs must be radically overhauled.

Such ruthless action will cripple the command structures of the enemy and destroy their ability to continue to operate. At the same time, it will accomplish a great shift in the morale of the American people. It is time to resurrect the methods of Ferdinand Pecora who jailed Wall Street bankers in the 1930s. If the CEOs of major financial institutions are marched in handcuffs off to prison, together with the leaders of the major drug cartels, everyone will know that this war is deadly serious.

In his 1985 Mexico City address, Lyndon LaRouche stated, “Special attention should be concentrated on those banks, insurance enterprises, and other business institutions which are in fact elements of an international financial cartel coordinating the flow of hundreds of billions annually of revenues from the international drug traffic. Such entities should be classed as outlaws according to the ‘crimes against humanity’ doctrine elaborated at the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal.”

What LaRouche said then was true, and it remains true today.

This section was adapted from an article by Robert Ingraham, “How to Win President Trump’s War on Drugs” published in the EIR of March 3, 2017. For further historical background and deeper discussion of how to solve the drug epidemic, see the full article.

Ending the Culture of Death: Restoring the Soul of America

by Kesha Rogers

https://youtu.be/OP7l1n_8Lh4

A scene from “Just Another Day: How to Survive an Active Shooter Event on Campus” by Towson University.

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June 15—Two key turning points of bad policy following the untimely death of President Franklin Roosevelt—the murder of both President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King leading up to the 1971 destruction of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, and the near collapse of the system in 1998 leading up to the 9/11 attacks and the treasonous presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama—were a process of willfully destroying the generation then coming of age, by subjecting it to the kinds of horrors that cause people to abandon hope in the future, and escape into pleasure and death. We are now living in the aftermath of these utterly disastrous turns away from the productive vision and leadership of Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy, and a modest attempt to revive aspects of their outlook by Presidents Reagan and Clinton. Today, with the coup against President Trump crumbling, and the ability to enact LaRouche’s Four Laws during Trump’s administration growing, we have an opportunity to pick up the broken pieces of our society and reform it anew. But first we must acknowledge where we truly are, and how we got here.

Several key social indicators are examined here in detail: the shocking rise of suicides (including public mass murder suicides, often called active shooter events), the rise in overdoses by drugs (especially opioids), and the increasing escape into video games (including highly realistic murder simulators). Consider these factors against the backdrop of a collapsing economic system that has turned from physical economy to monetarism, developed in more detail elsewhere in the report.

Consider, for example, a Towson University video that seeks to train students on how to survive an active shooter situation on their campus. The video should be alarming for many reasons, as it is titled, “Just Another Day: How to Survive an Active Shooter Event on Campus.”

A Culture of Violence and Death

What we must understand is that the culture that we are living in—a culture that promotes a culture of death and violence in our society—should be far from normal and is absolutely anything other than “just another day.” One particular point in the video makes us question how such a culture of violence and disregard for human life has become so commonplace in our society. The video has a classroom scene, in which a professor is teaching his students a “concept of Keynesian economics.” He explains: “So, let’s break it down. As to do with anything in monetary policy, it’s all about winners and losers.” The video then cuts to a gunman wearing all black, carrying a duffle bag and armed with a long rifle, stepping onto the campus. The gunman starts to fire into the campus and the video describes scenarios of how the shooting might play out and what actions should be taken. The three actions to be taken in an active shooter situation are described as follows: 1. Avoid 2. Deny 3. Defend. It recommends that students and staff run and avoid the gunman, to get to safety as quickly as possible. Secondly, if you are unable to get out, then deny the gunman access by locking and barricading the door and being as quiet as possible so as not to draw attention to your presence. Finally, if the gunman makes his way in, then everyone should prepare to defend themselves, grabbing whatever they can find to take down the shooter.

A Study of 160 Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000-2013: Incidents Annually

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Now, I want you to go back to the professor’s lesson in economics: “There are winners and losers.” This is the line that is ingrained into our children’s heads as they go through life. This is what has defined our society. This is what is at the core of the violent video games that your children play for hours on end. Millions of children play popular games like Fortnite and Counter Strike, where their goal is to kill everyone so that they (or their team) are the last one standing.

It is a tragedy in our culture that has made people desensitized to violence and death. We must replace a culture of mass death that encourages mass shootings, drug overdoses, and the horrific scenes of violent video games that are in played in real life, with a culture that embraces the dignity and value of human life. The solution to ending a dark age culture of death is to replace it with a renaissance and a culture that embraces creativity, and where economics is not based on monetary value, which declares that there are winners and losers. We must replace this tragic culture with one that embraces economics as advancing the creative powers of the human mind.

When You Refused to Heed the

Warnings of Columbine

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the tragic shootings that took place at Columbine High School, when two young men wearing trench coats began shooting fellow students outside the high school, located in the Littleton, a suburb south of Denver, Colorado. The pair moved inside the school, where they gunned down many of their victims in the library. The shooters killed 13 people and wounded 21 others before turning the guns on themselves.

In the aftermath of that horrific event, Lyndon LaRouche released a report on June 11, 1999, titled “Star Wars and Littleton,”[fn_1] which included the following statements: “Unless the U.S. government, and many relevant other influentials, change their view of this problem, abandoning the useless approach they have publicized thus far, the horror will continue, gun laws or no gun laws. Unless relevant institutions get down to the serious business of addressing the actual causes for this pattern of incidents, this murderous rampage will persist…

“My function, in this report, is to define the methods which must be brought to bear, if the danger posed by this new form of terrorism is to be brought under control… If you are willing to be serious, at long last, you will now turn your attention to the scientific roots of the problem.

“Merely ending the sale of satanic video games, such as Doom… will not put this horror back in the box from whence it came. This new problem of terrorism must be attacked, by focusing on the conditions which many readers have been complicitly condoning. Face the fact, that it might be your negligent tolerance which has contributed to the popularizing of such video games and cult films, especially the spread of these among suggestible children and adolescents.

“What are the methods which have, similarly, turned so many among our children and adolescents into such ‘zombies’ as those killers? …

“To grasp the horror posed by such cases, restate the same problem as a national security topic.”

FIGURE 1

YouTube user: Exposed.Files

YouTube user: Jester814

Compare first person shooter games from 1999 (Doom, top) and 2019 (Arma 3, above). How much more realistic are the killings carried out by the children and adults playing these games today?

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Compare how much more realistic and popular first-person shooter video games have become since 1999 (Figure 1).

Columbine killers Klebold and Harris were skilled Doom players, and Harris had devoted significant time to creating his own levels, which he shared. According to a student who played Doom with both of the killers, Harris claimed he had created a Doom level modeled on their high school. While in Doom the player takes on the role of a “space marine” to fight against hordes of demons from Hell, in today’s murder simulators—which are much more realistic—the player can be on the side of the military, or of terrorists, or just in a free-for-all. First-person shooter video games lead U.S. video game sales, and combined with action games like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed, missions of adventure, robbery, plunder, and war make up about half of the video games played by children and adults in the United States. Unlike real war, which is traumatic and deadly, the fantasy war of video games lets players feel the adrenaline and excitement of crime without the consequences. Your friend dies in a shootout with a rival gang? No problem, he will respawn later. Death is made a casual experience, just like in movies, music, and the news.

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Teens and adults up through their upper 30s, who think school or work is a dead-end job, who think they have no real future because they have no savings or can’t get a job paying what they think they are worth, what do they do? They play video games to de-stress from the frustrations of life, and they smoke, drink, or take other drugs to numb the pain and decompress from their day to day. Can’t win at life? Well at least you can win in this video game.

Playing video games has even become a source of income, where advertisers will pay, and viewers will donate to watch leading players win on game-streaming services like Nintendo’s Switch. This has become so popular that video sports leagues are popping up with big cash prizes, even among farming. The Verge reports: “Competitive Farming Simulator events have quietly existed for several years, relegated primarily to agriculture-focused events, but they drew big crowds of players who wanted to watch the best hay bale stackers in the world, prompting Giants [the firm that produces Farming Simulator] CEO Christian Ammann to start looking at farming e-sports a bit more seriously.” Giants Software PR and marketing manager Martin Rabl reflected: “That’s when we realized that that’s something that we could potentially do on a bit more professional level.” People are more interested in playing a game about farming, than actually farming.[fn_2]

Dehumanizing the Image of Man

As LaRouche wrote in 1999, “For that purpose, the leading subject for discussion, as posed by the Littleton and kindred cases, is terrorism by children. Stating the problem in that way, brings the sheer, satanic horror of the matter into focus.…

“How does one corrupt innocent children into becoming psychotic-like killers? The quick answer to that question, is: dehumanize the image of man.”

This is exactly what has been done to our children and to the culture. It did not just start twenty years ago with the killing spree that unfolded in Littleton, Colorado. This dehumanization of humans and desensitization to death and violence has been the intentional aim of a geo-political, oligarchical system. This is a system that views the human species as nothing more than another animal and believes that there is no intrinsic value to human life. The British Empire and oligarchy has subjugated societies, keeping them impoverished and backwards, destroying many generations of people by inducing them to destroy themselves, through the use of illicit drugs, mass suicide, and promoting a culture of killing and death.

The culture that we find ourselves in gets right at the heart of the problem we find with the subject in the video we discussed at the beginning of the article, on the subject of winners and losers in a monetary economy. This is what many people have been conditioned to believe, that they are nothing more than a statistic, that they are only a loser, that they have no reason to live because there is no real value in their life, or that if they want to get ahead they have to quickly eliminate the next person. Then in their next class, they may be told that they are a plague on the planet and destroying the earth because they are using up too many of the precious resources, that they are a useless eater.

Figure 2

Rates for Drug-Poisoning Deaths Involving Heroin, by Selected Age Groups: U.S. 2000-2013

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As was stated in the opening of this article, the most devastating effects of the last 50 years of cultural degeneracy have been revealed through the destructive policies of the Bush–Cheney and Obama presidencies, especially under the fast and furious drug legalizing President Obama. Look at the statistics of the increase in suicides and drug overdoses during the period from 2000 to 2013 (Figure 2). Look at the result of those hideous policies on our nation, with the Opioid crisis running rampant, and drug legalization in states across the U.S. growing at rapid rates.

Big Pharma’s Dreamland

The release of the book Dreamland in 2015 by author Sam Quinones, weaves together the previous 45 year history of working class white Americans overdosing on black tar heroin and other opiates, the rise of what became known as “Big Pharma,” i.e. pill mills backed by authoritative-sounding, lavish marketing campaigns and university professors who said opioids weren’t addictive, and impoverished Mexican rancheros who realized running heroin as a delivery service was their ticket out of cutthroat poverty. While his book presents a useful picture of a portion of the story about why so many Americans are now dying of opioid overdose, it leaves out a crucial piece of the puzzle, namely, what the LaRouche organization has correctly identified as Dope, Inc.: the critical role that “too big to fail” Wall Street banks like HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and others, have played in laundering this drug money through their coffers to keep the international derivatives bubbles afloat.

FIGURE 2

Suicide Rates for Males, by Age: United States, 1999 and 2014

Deaths per 100,000 in specified group

NCHS

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Amidst the rise of opioid deaths, suicides, mass shootings, and dropping out of reality to play video games, among the formerly productive, predominantly white middle class Americans, the theme echoes in the Towson University video: in this world, there are winners and there are losers. But the so-called “winners” exist because the rest of us are pitted, each against all, as losers. This is the destruction of our humanity that Lyndon LaRouche warned about in 1999.

So, how did such a vile outlook on human life and economy arise in our society? What happened to a society that cherished its youth and the future of our nation? Let’s look at the culture that has been intentionally promoted to destroy our youth and our society.

Think about the fact that 50 years ago, the first American astronauts landed on the surface of the moon, on July 20, 1969, a little less than a decade after President Kennedy declared that our nation would commit itself to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth before the end of the decade. Think of the optimism and excitement that spread throughout the nation and the world, as those astronauts carried the plaque to the moon declaring, “we came in peace for all mankind.” Look at the fact that the space program was an inspiration for broad masses of people, something that transformed the lives of so many, via the massive scientific and technological improvements during the years of Apollo.

But what has become the state of our society in those intervening years since the Apollo program was intentionally sabotaged by the anti-science environmentalist and budget cutters, from the very onset of Kennedy’s announcement of his moon mission up to the abrupt ending of that era of the program in 1972? We have seen rapid declines in the conditions of life and the standard of living over the last 50 years, as a result of the degeneracy and destruction of optimism, as a result of the targeting against real scientific and technological advancements.

Creative Commons/Russ Allison Loar

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The Drug-Rock-Sex Counterculture

Look at the devastating effects of the “68er” generation on today’s society. How did the counterculture of drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll, a culture that promoted a no-growth society and environmentalism, become so dominant in our society? In his article entitled “The Science and Technology Needed to Colonize Mars,” LaRouche declares:

“Our postwar State Department turned our foreign policy away from the nation-building perspective we developed during the war years under President Franklin Roosevelt. We allowed the subversion of the morals of the nuclear-family household, the rock on which the development of the child’s character depends. We allowed the immoral subversion of our educational systems. We tolerated the spread of the rock-drug-sex counterculture during the past quarter century.”

When the world entered the space age, we discovered that we had always been a space-based civilization. Everyday life on Earth is permanently and incessantly connected with the activities of our solar and cosmic environment. From cosmic rays that interact with molecules in our atmosphere to produce clouds, to the Sun that warms our planet enough to support life, and the scientific reach of mankind to understand and replicate the physical laws of nature to solve problems and access to a better world, mankind has always been connected to the greater universe.

NASA

The next generations will succeed NASA’s “Project Artemis,” to return people to the Moon by 2024, with missions to colonize Mars, the outer planets, and eventually other planetary systems.

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A Return to Space Is a Return to Sanity

For this reason, the fastest way to make the biggest improvements in the condition of mankind is through human space exploration, because this generates the spin-off technologies that touch every corner of human existence. That is why the Apollo Program not only generated a financial return of $10 for every $1 invested but also permanently uplifted the potential living standards for all successive generations, by applying discoveries and inventions made during the missions to technologies and processes more broadly. Space inspires us with its enormity and beauty, and the thrill of achieving great new discoveries despite incredible adversity. That is why thousands crowded the street in New York’s Times Square to watch the landing of the Mars Curiosity Rover in 2014, and why the entire world watched as Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon in 1969. Space exploration inspires our humanity, because it is something that is uniquely human. Wolves may howl at the moon, but only human beings can land on it.

We now have the opportunity and responsibility before us to reverse the destructive policies of the last several decades, driven by war and economic ruin. We must act now to save the soul of America. What is required for such a change toward progress and growth in our society and culture? Leadership. The Apollo program would never have been made possible without the visionary leadership of President Kennedy and the great space pioneers who shared his vision, and worked tirelessly to realize it. Today we have a President, Donald Trump, who has stated his commitment to ending the ruinous policies of our nation, as established through his commitment to ending the decades of endless wars, and building peaceful relations among nations, especially recognizing the importance of cooperation with other leading nations around the world, emphatically Russia and China. We must end the economic model of geopolitics, based on winners and losers. We must adopt the win-win approach, which is at the foundation of our American system, and which China has successfully implemented, sweeping away poverty and increasing the standard of living for hundreds of millions. The commitment must be to the future.

We Are Going to the Moon and Mars!

After signing his space policy directive back in December 2017 to return American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972, Trump has escalated that initiative and called for an accelerated plan, to get Americans back on the Moon, with our next man and first woman, by 2024. This mission has been named project Artemis. In Greek mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo, and the goddess of the Moon. The current NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine, the first administrator not to have lived during the Apollo missions, has stressed the importance of ushering in a new generation of scientists and discoverers and of making breakthroughs as a new generation of explorers. He identifies this new generation as the “Artemis generation.” The Artemis generation is in complete contrast with what has been defined as the Age of Aquarius, the idea of humans seeking only to live out their sensual pleasures, in a society that seek to destroy its youth and turn them into mass killers. It is important to make emphatically clear that we will not have the optimism of the Artemis generation, making bold breakthroughs and discoveries in the exploration of space, under the stranglehold of a monetarist, anti-human, anti-science, zero-growth system.

Putting an end to the ruinous policies of the last fifty years and achieving the goal of returning Americans to the Moon for the first time since 1972, requires an outlook and dedication to space exploration not merely for the next 5 years, but for the next 50–100 years. This will only be achieved through adopting the policies and the forward-looking solutions of Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche’s outlook of “The Spiritual Imperative for Conquest of Space” is crucial for the understanding of the truly creative nature of mankind as distinguished from the beast, required for restoring the soul of America advancing the progress of all humanity.

“Human beings are absolutely distinguished from beasts by virtue of the fact, that every normal newborn infant has what is sometimes called “the divine spark of reason.” This spark, if developed, enables each of us to develop the power of creative reasoning, the quality of reasoning typified by the work of the best scientific discoverers. . . . One new, useful idea, discovered by such an individual mind, is of benefit to all mankind.”

When mankind goes out into space, when an astronaut goes out and orbits the Earth, when we go to the Moon, this isn’t just something that the astronaut is doing to go on a joy ride. He is actually doing this because the entire nation is going with him to participate in this. The entire world is benefitting from this discovery, as all of the world benefits from a great scientific discovery, such as a discovery of Einstein, or a musical discovery of a great Classical composer.

It’s time to end the culture of mass death, and bring about the age of reason. We can truly save the soul of America, with LaRouche’s “Artemis generation.”

[fn_1]. https://larouchepub.com/lar/1999/lar_littleton_2627.html [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/23/18194259/farming-simulator-league-esports-prizes-giants-software [back to text for fn_2]

Epilogue

A Punctum Saliens

The horror of what was just presented is not a bad dream—it is reality—but it is also possible to “wake up” from the delusion that things must continue in this fashion, to change direction in an instant. Rather than accepting the idea that things will only continue to get worse, we must instead imagine the United States as part of a new paradigm, 50-100 years from now. Future generations will live in a far different world: poverty has been permanently eliminated, relegated to a past era of human development; the world’s energy problems have been overcome by the mastery of fusion power, with all of its scientific and industrial benefits; international scientific and industrial stations on the surface of the Moon provide the basis for exploration of the outer solar system; billions of children are learning to sing and play in orchestras, and a renaissance of the most beautiful culture has grown to replace the degenerate entertainment culture.

Such a transformation of the United States and the world must begin now. The foolish economic notions underlying today’s tragic conditions have failed; therefore, the door is open to replace them with a real, scientific approach to physical economic progress. This is what you will find in the following pages in Lyndon LaRouche’s “Four New Laws to Save the U.S.A. Now! Not An Option: An Immediate Necessity.”

And therefore, an urgent decision stands before you, a punctum saliens.[fn_1] Human civilization is in the midst of a profound reorganization of relations among nations and peoples, a change to a new paradigm, based on fundamentally different ideas than those of the currently predominant system of geopolitical interests and finance-based economics. Will the U.S. join this emerging paradigm, and contribute to the creation of a new and just world system, thereby choosing to survive into the next decades and century? Or will we go down, clinging to the mast of the proverbial “ship” of the imperial system, characterized by the still-ongoing economic collapse and perpetual war policy which has been killing our citizens at an accelerating rate since the early 1970s?

Lyndon LaRouche has shown you the way forward. It’s time to join us, and mobilize.

[fn_1]. In a 1992 presentation, Helga Zepp-LaRouche explained the meaning of this term: “[Friedrich] Schiller used this notion in his great historical dramas, where the drama develops...in a historical setting, in which the fate of nations and peoples will be decided by the main figures, the heroes. The story develops, and for a variety of reasons—some depending on the positions of the heroes, some depending on events outside their control—things go wrong, and . . . a terrible crisis develops. Then comes a point where everything seems to be lost; the entire story concentrates in one point, and the hero gets another chance to overcome this crisis. Now it is up to him to save the nations and the people. He can do so if he’s strong, and if he has a good character; or he fails, because he has some crucial weakness or insufficient knowledge. This moment, where the decision is thrown back into the lap of the hero, is what Schiller calls the punctum saliens.” [back to text for fn_1]

The Four New Laws to Save the U.S.A. Now!

Not An Option:

An Immediate Necessity

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

June 10, 2014

Lyndon LaRouche in 2003.

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The Fact of the Matter

The economy of the United States of America, and also that of the trans-Atlantic political-economic regions of the planet, are now under the immediate, mortal danger of a general, physical-economic, chain-reaction breakdown-crisis of that region of this planet as a whole. The name for that direct breakdown-crisis throughout those indicated regions of the planet, is the presently ongoing introduction of a general “Bail-in” action under the several, or more governments of that region: the effect on those regions, will be comparable to the physical-economic collapse of the post-“World War I” general collapse of the economy of the German Weimar Republic: but, this time, hitting, first, the entirety of the nation-state economies of the trans-Atlantic region, rather than some defeated economies within Europe.

A chain-reaction collapse, to this effect, is already accelerating with an effect on the money-systems of the nations of that region. The present acceleration of a “Bail-in” policy throughout the trans-Atlantic region, as underway now, means mass-death suddenly hitting the populations of all nations within that trans-Atlantic region: whether directly, or by “overflow.”

The effects of this already prepared action by the monetarist interests of that so-designated region, unless stopped virtually now, will produce, in effect, an accelerating rate of genocide throughout that indicated portion of the planet immediately, but, also, with catastrophic “side effects” of comparable significance in the Eurasian regions.

The Available Remedies

The only location for the immediately necessary action which could prevent such an immediate genocide throughout the trans-Atlantic sector of the planet, requires the U.S. Government’s now immediate decision to institute four specific, cardinal measures: measures which must be fully consistent with the specific intent of the original U.S. Federal Constitution, as had been specified by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton while he remained in office: (1) immediate re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall law instituted by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, without modification, as to principle of action. (2) A return to a system of top-down, and thoroughly defined, National Banking.

The actually tested, successful model to be authorized is that which had been instituted, under the direction of the policies of national banking which had been actually, successfully installed under President Abraham Lincoln’s superseding authority of a currency created by the Presidency of the United States (e.g. “Greenbacks”), as conducted as a national banking-and-credit-system placed under the supervision of the Office of the Treasury Secretary of the United States.

For the present circumstances, all other banking and currency policies, are to be superseded, or, simply, discontinued, as follows. Banks qualifying for operations under this provision, shall be assessed for their proven competence to operate as under the national authority for creating and composing the elements of this essential practice, which had been assigned, as by tradition, to the original office of Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Alexander Hamilton. This means that the individual states of the United States are under national standards of practice, and, not any among the separate states of our nation.

(3) The purpose of the use of a Federal Credit-system, is to generate high-productivity trends in improvements of employment, with the accompanying intention, to increase the physical-economic productivity, and the standard of living of the persons and households of the United States. The creation of credit for the now urgently needed increase of the relative quality and quantity of productive employment, must be assured, this time, once more, as was done successfully under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, or by like standards of Federal practice used to create a general economic recovery of the nation, per capita, and for rate of net effects in productivity, and by reliance on the essential human principle, which distinguishes the human personality from the systemic characteristics of the lower forms of life: the net rate of increase of the energy-flux density of effective practice. This means intrinsically, a thoroughly scientific, rather than a merely mathematical one, and by the related increase of the effective energy-flux density per capita, and for the human population when considered as a whole. The ceaseless increase of the physical-productivity of employment, accompanied by its benefits for the general welfare, are a principle of Federal law which must be a paramount standard of achievement of the nation and the individual.

(4) “Adopt a Fusion-Driver ‘Crash Program.’” The essential distinction of man from all lower forms of life, hence, in practice, is that it presents the means for the perfection of the specifically affirmative aims and needs of human individual and social life. Therefore: the subject of man in the process of creation, as an affirmative identification of an affirmative statement of an absolute state of nature, is a permitted form of expression. Principles of nature are either only affirmation, or they could not be affirmatively stated among civilized human minds.

Given the circumstances of the United States, in particular, since the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, and his brother, Robert, the rapid increase required for even any recovery of the U.S. economy, since that time, requires nothing less than measures taken and executed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his actual term in office. The victims of the evil brought upon the United States and its population since the strange death of President Harding, under Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover (like the terrible effects of the Bush-Cheney and Barack Obama administrations, presently) require remedies comparable to those of President Franklin Roosevelt while he were in office.

This means emergency relief measures, including sensible temporary recovery measures, required to stem the tide of death left by the Coolidge-Hoover regimes: measures required to preserve the dignity of what were otherwise the unemployed, while building up the most powerful economic and warfare capabilities assembled under the President Franklin Roosevelt Presidency for as long as he remained alive in office. This meant the mustering of the power of nuclear power, then, and means thermonuclear fusion now. Without that intent and its accomplishment, the population of the United States in particular, faces, now, immediately, the most monstrous disaster in its history to date. In principle, without a Presidency suited to remove and dump the worst effects felt presently, those created presently by the Bush-Cheney and Obama Presidencies, the United States were soon finished, beginning with the mass-death of the U.S. population under the Obama Administration’s recent and now accelerated policies of practice.

There are certain policies which are most notably required, on that account, now, as follows:

Vernadsky on Man & Creation

V.I. Vernadsky’s systemic principle of human nature, is a universal principle, which is uniquely specific to the crucial factor of the existence of the human species. For example: “time” and “space” do not actually exist as a set of metrical principles of the Solar system; their admissible employment for purposes of communication is essentially a nominal presumption. Since competent science for today can be expressed only in terms of the unique characteristic of the human species’ role within the known aspects of the universe, the human principle is the only true principle known to us for practice: the notions of space and time are merely useful imageries.

Rather:

The essential characteristic of the human species, is its distinction from all other species of living processes: that, as a matter of principle, which is rooted scientifically, for all competent modern science, on the foundations of the principles set forth by Filippo Brunelleschi (the discoverer of the ontological minimum), Nicholas of Cusa (the discovery of the ontological maximum), and the positive discovery by mankind, by Johannes Kepler, of a principle coincident with the perfected Classical human singing scale adopted by Kepler, and the elementary measure of the Solar System within the still larger universe of the Galaxy, and higher orders in the universe.

Or, similarly, later, the modern physical-scientific standard implicit in the argument of Bernhard Riemann, the actual minimum (echoing the principle of Brunelleschi), of Max Planck, the actual maximum of the present maximum, that of Albert Einstein; and, the relatively latest, consequent implications of the definition of human life by Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky. These values are, each relative absolutes of measurement of man’s role within the knowledge of the universe.

This set of facts pertains to the inherent fraud of the merely mathematicians and the modernist “musical performers” since the standard of the relevant paragon for music, Johannes Brahms (prior to the degenerates, such as the merely mathematicians, such as David Hilbert and the true model for every modern Satan, such as Bertrand Russell, or Tony Blair).

The knowable measure, in principle, of the difference between man and all among the lower forms of life, is found in what has been usefully regarded as the naturally upward evolution of the human species, in contrast to all other known categories of living species. The standard of measurement of these compared relationships, is that mankind is enabled to evolve upward, and that categorically, by those voluntarily noëtic powers of the human individual will.

Except when mankind appears in a morally and physically degenerate state of behavior, such as within the cultures of the tyrants Zeus, the Roman Empire, and the British empire, presently: all actually sane cultures of mankind, have appeared, this far, in a certain fact of evolutionary progress from the quality of an inferior, to a superior species. This, when considered in terms of efficient effects, corresponds, within the domain of a living human practice of chemistry, to a form of systemic advances, even now leaps, in the chemical energy-flux density of society’s increase of the effective energy-flux-density of scientific and comparable expressions of leaps in progress of the species itself: in short, a universal physical principle of human progress.

The healthy human culture, such as that of Christianity, if they warrant this affirmation of such a devotion, for example, represents a society which is increasing the powers of its productive abilities for progress, to an ever higher level of per-capita existence. The contrary cases, the so-called “zero-growth” scourges, such as the current British empire are, systemically, a true model consistent with the tyrannies of a Zeus, or, a Roman Empire, or a British (better said) “brutish” empire, such as the types, for us in the United States, of the Bush-Cheney and Obama administrations, whose characteristic has been, concordant with that of such frankly Satanic models as that of Rome and the British empire presently, a shrinking human population of the planet, a population being degraded presently in respect to its intellectual and physical productivity, as under those U.S. Presidencies, most recently.

Chemistry: The Yardstick of History

We call it “chemistry.” Mankind’s progress, as measured rather simply as a species, is expressed typically in the rising power of the principle of human life, over the abilities of animal life generally, and relatively absolute superiority over the powers of non-living processes to achieve within mankind’s willful intervention to that intended effect.

Progress exists so only under a continuing, progressive increase of the productive and related powers of the human species. That progress defines the absolute distinction of the human species from all others presently known to us. A government of people based on a policy of “zero-population growth and per capita standard of human life” is a moral, and practical abomination.

Man is mankind’s only true measure of the history of our Solar system, and what reposes within it. That is the same thing, as the most honored meaning and endless achievement of the human species, now within nearby Solar space, heading upward to mastery over the Sun and its Solar system, the one discovered (uniquely, as a matter of fact), by Johannes Kepler.

A Fusion economy, is the presently urgent next step, and standard, for man’s gains of power within the Solar system, and, later, beyond.