The LaRouche Plan to Reopen the U.S. Economy

The World Needs 1.5 Billion
New, Productive Jobs

The following LaRouche PAC report was researched and written by Robert L. Baker, Dave Christie, Richard Freeman, Paul Gallagher, Susan Kokinda, Brian Lantz, Marcia Merry Baker, William F. Roberts, Dennis Small, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

 

The individual who contributes to making society good is worth a thousand times the individual who wanders through life scattering only individual good deeds. For, a bad society will crush the good contributed by its individual members.... Who makes society good thus preserves the goods contributed by thousands and millions of individuals.

—Lyndon LaRouche,
The Science of the Human Mind, 1984

Mankind is now living with the terrible consequences of tolerating the “bad society,” of which Lyndon LaRouche warned. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the criminal failure of the neo-liberal imperial system resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, an unprecedented disruption of economic and food supply chains, historic levels of unemployment, and uncounted millions of lives threatened with other diseases and starvation. Looming over this cost in lives and livelihoods is a $1.8 quadrillion financial bubble which cannot survive, despite the central banks’ hyperinflationary attempts to do so.

This is not a series of individual crises. This is systemic, and can only be addressed by a new system, based on fundamentally different principles than those of the current monetarist, Malthusian globalist structures. At the heart of this evil, this “bad society,” is the denial of the right of billions of people, including hundreds of millions of Americans, to contribute to the physical development and scientific advance of their economies. That is what has left so many nations defenseless in the face of the virus and ensuing economic collapse. The economic breakdown crisis we are facing today was not created by the coronavirus pandemic. It has been in plain view for 50 years of bad policies for anyone willing to think it through, which is why Lyndon LaRouche was able to forecast that this sort of pandemic would necessarily emerge at some point. And now it has.

Lyndon LaRouche challenged us to make society good. What does that look like? Are you among the 50-plus million Americans who are out of work? Need a productive job? So do 1.5 billion other people on this planet.

The world needs 1.5 billion productive jobs which currently do not exist, and could not exist under the current monetarist system. The American economy must be completely reconfigured, employing half of its labor force into real goods-producing—not “gig economy” service jobs—with a target of creating 50 million productive jobs. Those jobs would be driven by the mission of producing the food, health care, infrastructure, and capital goods to rebuild our own nation and to help transform underdeveloped nations, ensuring that they have the power to transform their economies and workforce similarly, creating 1.5 billion new productive jobs globally. The 50 million new jobs in the U.S. is only 3% of the total required worldwide. But it is actually the key to the success of the whole effort, planet-wide. Here’s why.

When Lyndon LaRouche first ran for President in 1976, his campaign theme was, “This man wants to give you a job, rebuilding the world!”

The Physical-Economic Approach

Twenty years later, addressing new potentials for that same idea, LaRouche declared,

There is no need for anybody on this planet, who is able to work, to be out of work! It’s that simple…. If the United States, or the President of the United States, and China, participate in fostering that project—sometimes called the “Silk-Road” Project, sometimes the “Land-Bridge” Project—if that project of developing development corridors, across Eurasia, into Africa, into North America, is extended, that project is enough work, to put this whole planet, into an economic revival....

So that, what we have here, is a set of projects, which are not just transportation projects, like the transcontinental railroad in the United States, which was the precedent for this idea, back in the late 1860s and 1870s. But you have development corridors, where you develop an area of 50 to 70 kilometers on either side of your rail link, your pipeline, so forth—you develop this area with industry, with mining, with all these kinds of things, which is the way you pay for a transportation link. Because of all the rich economic activity: every few kilometers of distance along this link, there’s something going on, some economic activity. People working; people building things; people doing things, to transform this planet, in great projects of infrastructure-building, which will give you the great industries, the new industries, the new agriculture, and other things we desperately need.

Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws (“The Four New Laws to Save The U.S.A. Now! Not an Option: An Immediate Necessity,” June 10, 2014) will reorganize the U.S. economy to do that. His proposal for a Four Power Summit between the United States, Russia, China, and India to organize a new international financial system, a New Bretton Woods, should be convened immediately to address the urgent pandemic, hunger and financial crises before us—that is, to replace the modern-day British Empire with a New Paradigm based on sovereignty, development and classical culture.

We must break Americans out of the polarized and controlled agenda of the mass media, which declares that there only two alternatives—defeat the virus and kill the economy, or “open” the economy even if it means losing lives of the most vulnerable. In reality, the economy was already dead, killed by the $1.8 quadrillion financial parasite (which the central banks continue to bail out at rates far, far greater than the emergency funds being allocated to people, businesses, and governments). That is not the economy that should be reopened. Nor can it be one based on a new, zero-growth “Green” financial bubble to replace the current, collapsing one, which the City of London and Wall Street are now intent on conjuring into existence.

In the following pages, we present to you a mission, and we present to you a method, informed by Lyndon LaRouche’s thinking, for accomplishing that mission.

How Did We Get Here?

In the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority was considered the eighth wonder of the world, taking one of the poorest sections of America and transforming it into a powerhouse of higher energy-flux density economic production. In the 1940s, Americans created a manufacturing and machine tool miracle which allowed allied soldiers to win the war against fascism. In the 1960s, President Kennedy challenged us to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, and we did, discovering new physical principles and revolutionizing our economy.

Two years after the Moon landing, on August 15, 1971, our economic sovereignty was stolen by the financial lords of Wall Street and the City of London, who used their monetary power to create a globalized modern-day British Empire.

For the next five decades, most Americans accommodated to that monetarist system, protesting aspects of it at times, but, basically learning how to survive within it. Americans gradually stopped producing and started hustling.

Lyndon LaRouche, instead, challenged that system. He warned that it would inevitably fail, by virtue of its profoundly evil and fatal policy of sacrificing physical economies, human productivity, and lives to speculative financial income streams and the anti-human intentions of the global elite. He developed the scientific principles needed for sovereign nations to reclaim their economies in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton’s American System, and urged peoples and nations to act before the inevitable happened.

The inevitable has happened.

The global pandemic has only removed the façade, exposing the tragic transformation of the agro-industrial base of western economies into hollowed out consumer- and entertainment-driven service economies. It has ripped the mask off the equally tragic idea that the “underdeveloped” countries could remain permanently underdeveloped, without genocidal consequences.

Fifty million Americans are unemployed or barely employed, many of them discovering painfully that their jobs have nothing to do with meeting real human needs, and are not coming back.

Throughout the world, but especially in underdeveloped nations, people are faced with the impossible choice of continuing their informal activities and likely contracting or spreading COVID-19, or locking down and subjecting themselves and their families to hunger—and in the case of hundreds of millions of people, especially in Africa, outright starvation. World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley recently warned that 821 million people worldwide are chronically hungry, another 135 million are “acutely food insecure, meaning they are on the brink of starvation.” He added that under the hammer blows of locust plagues, collapse of supply chains and the pandemic that number could double. He warned of 300,000 preventable deaths daily, and “multiple famines of biblical proportions.”

How can this be happening in a world where American farmers are euthanizing their livestock and chickens and dumping milk? How can the basic needs of survival be lacking in the face of mass unemployment and underemployment which pre-dated the pandemic?

Because this is the intention of the British Empire. It has been politely rebranded as “globalization,” but Prof. Niall Ferguson, an unabashed promoter of British imperialism, more accurately identified it as “Anglo-globalization.” The spokesmen of that Empire have been explicit, for centuries, about their preference for genocidal Malthusianism, which they are today trying to repackage as “Green environmentalism.”

They Say It Themselves

Take the case of Prince Philip of the United Kingdom, who in 1988 stated:

The more people there are, the more resources they’ll consume, the more pollution they’ll create, the more fighting they will do. We have no option. If it isn’t controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily by an increase in disease, starvation, and war.... In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.

Or Bertrand Russell before him, whom Lyndon LaRouche called the most evil man of the 20th Century, who stated in 1951:

War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect [population control], but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. [Emphasis added.]

Or go back a couple of centuries to the evil Parson Thomas Malthus, who wrote in his 1791 Essay on the Principle of Population:

We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. [Emphasis added.]

This kind of imperialism or oligarchism, as LaRouche defined it, is grounded in the idea that man is no more than a creature of his senses, an animal which has to react to the world as it is, a hedonist in search of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, and which can be manipulated and culled as needed. The idea of “herd immunity,” which argues, “let nature take its natural course, we have no power over it,” is a recurrent incarnation of this idea.

To the contrary, Lyndon LaRouche located man’s unique ability to create new and better ways of doing things, based on the discovery of new universal physical principles, as the substance of economics. LaRouche’s original and unique conception of Potential Relative Population-Density corresponds to the power of society to maintain a rising total population, with rising longevity, a rising standard of living, and with augmented access to classical culture, such that the rate of future scientific discovery and technological advance can outpace the growth of population per se. This depends on the ability to produce improved market baskets of consumer goods, production goods, and infrastructure, on a per-capita and per-square-kilometer basis.

If such capability falls, then society will predictably devolve, to the point where the Potential Relative Population-Density drops below the actual total population—as has happened globally over the past 50 years, with the disastrous consequences we are witnessing with the coronavirus pandemic today, and as LaRouche warned in studies in the 1970s and 1980s.

The solution lies in a dramatic about-face in the world’s plunging relative potential population-density, through the equally dramatic increase in the productive powers of labor, a concept at the heart of Alexander Hamilton’s American System and Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws.

LaRouche’s Physical-Economic Forecast

With his ability to forecast the future in order to change it, Lyndon LaRouche described the nature of today’s crisis and its solution in 2007:

If the United States—and this is not impossible—if the United States should extend a proposal to Russia, to China, and to India to co-sponsor the formation of a new international monetary financial order, that could be done.... We have now an incalculable crisis worldwide in progress. This is not a financial crisis.... This is a crisis to see who is going to run the world. Is it going to be a group of nations, or is it going to be the re-emergent British Empire which never really went away—which takes over from the United States and establishes its world rule through globalization?

President Donald Trump came into office with the mandate for and the intention to rebuild American infrastructure, revitalize industry, and relaunch our space program; to end perpetual wars and normalize relations with Russia and China; to put an end to the speculative looting of economies with a return to the FDR-era Glass-Steagall law. For the past three years, the British Empire and their American assets have been engaged in an attempted coup against the President to prevent any movement in the direction of those policies. Now is the time for that coup to be defeated, and those policies immediately implemented—along with the full program we present below.

The pandemic, the economic collapse, and the immediate threat to hundreds of millions of lives, now call the question on the fight between the two systems—the one based on encouraging, not millions, but billions of lives to be eliminated; the other, based on increasing the creative and productive output of those same billions and future billions.

What follows is a concept of how to unleash the people of the United States to play their indispensable role in that fight, by creating 50 million new productive jobs, by reconfiguring the American economy and workforce with directed investments in manufacturing, agriculture, space exploration, and advances in thermonuclear fusion, as part of a global crash program to create 1.5 billion new, productive jobs worldwide. These are guidelines of the needed approach, with further details to be filled in based on input from engineers, farmers, scientists, manufacturing workers, and others.