Dennis Small

The LaRouche Program for the Planet:
1.5 Billion New Productive Jobs

This is the edited transcription of Dennis Small’s presentation to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6, 2020. Mr. Small is Ibero-American Editor for Executive Intelligence Review. Subheads, and embedded links to source material, have been added.

As the title of this panel indicates, Franklin Delano Roosevelt left us—all of us—some unfinished business. So did Lyndon LaRouche.

In his famous January 6, 1941 State of the Union address, FDR spoke about the “future days” we were fighting for, in which four essential human freedoms would prevail—everywhere in the world. Here’s what he said:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

Note that FDR insisted that this mission was “attainable in our own time and generation.” It was attainable, but it has remained unfulfilled. It is FDR’s charge to the future we must now take up, not just for the United States, but for the entire planet. That is the agenda we bring before the required P-5 summit.

The Greatest Danger Since the Black Death

Mankind today is facing the greatest danger probably since the 14th Century Black Death: a possible war among nuclear-armed super-powers; a pandemic which continues its deadly march across the planet; a financial blowout that will vaporize $2 quadrillion of worthless financial paper quicker than you can count the number of zeros in quadrillion—it’s 15 zeros, by the way; a physical economic collapse that has thrown nearly half the planet’s labor force into de facto unemployment; and widespread cultural depravity and mass psychosis in broad swaths of the population in most countries—not unlike the flagellants and the hedonist fools of the 14th Century.

We are in the midst of a systemic collapse of an entire system. Institutions that people once relied on have ceased functioning. Entire populations have lost their moorings, and will not return to sanity, or safety, until a new system, with new institutions and values that work, is brought into existence—everywhere in the world. That is the intent of the LaRouche Plan for 1.5 billion new productive jobs for the world, emphatically including 50 million here in the United States.

The COVID-19 pandemic did not cause this crisis. It simply ripped the veil off what was already there, and had been created by 50 years of looting by City of London and Wall Street policies. Back in 1985, 35 years ago, in a paper titled “The Role of Economic Science in Projecting Pandemics as a Feature of Advanced Stages of Economic Breakdown,” Lyndon LaRouche warned:

The conditions for economically determined pandemics [were being created and had to be reversed]. We are most concerned with the effects on health, as the nutritional throughput per-capita falls below some relative biological minimum, and also the effect of collapse of sanitation and other relevant aspects of basic economic infrastructure upon the conditions of an undernourished population.

The Unemployment Factor

Let’s look at one, central feature of this problem—unemployment; real unemployment. Over the last 50 years of British free trade and globalization, high-skilled industrial jobs in the advanced sector have been increasingly replaced by the “gig economy,” and in the Third World, the so-called “informal sector” has taken over like a cancer. By and large, these are people who don’t actually produce anything useful—they hustle to make money, to barely survive from day to day. When the pandemic hit, the whole house of cards came crumbling down, and what people foolishly thought was “employment” (making money, as opposed to engaging in useful production) quickly became exposed as de facto unemployment.

Look at Figure 1. We estimate that today there is a 46% real unemployment rate worldwide. That amounts to 1.6 billion human beings out of a world labor force of some 3.5 billion. In Africa there is a 65% unemployment rate—and 50% of the population live in poverty. In Ibero-America it isn’t much better; 42% unemployed. In the U.S. and Europe, real unemployment today stands at about 25%. In China, however, it is only 4%. China has also reduced its poverty phenomenally, lifting 850 million people out of poverty in 40 years, and they intend to get the remaining 30 million people out by the end of this year.

It would appear that China, at least, is completing some of FDR’s unfinished business.

This massive world unemployment of 1.5 billion is the single greatest loss of wealth, of real economic value, imaginable. Why?

What Is Economics?

Let’s start with economics. What is economics? Here’s a short definition, obtained by that fine art known as “Googling”:

The proper and prudent management of the scarce resources of a society, family or individual, with the objective of satisfying its material needs.

This is a gem, because it contains at least five gross scientific errors in just 23 words: resources aren’t scarce; national finances are not the same as a family budget; satisfying so-called “material needs” is just Benthamite hedonism in fancy clothes; and on and on. This goes hand-in-hand with the typical definition of “employment,” such as that provided by Professor Oscar Cooley of Ohio Northern University:

Employment signifies the state of anyone who is doing what, under the circumstances, he most wants to do. Such a person is fully employed.

Welcome to Economics 101 in pretty much every university in the world.

Compare that to LaRouche’s definition of physical economy:

The manner in which the human species utilizes its unique characteristic of creativity, to achieve the continuous successful reproduction of that characteristic in the physical universe.

In other words, in real physical economy, human creativity, per se, is both the input and the output of your production function. So how do you measure that? How do you guide your economic decisions? LaRouche explains that his own central discovery and advance in Leibniz’s science of physical economy, is to have established the causal relationship between advances in human creativity, in both physical sciences and classical culture as well, and measurable increases in what LaRouche calls “potential relative population-density.”

In Operation Juárez, LaRouche explains:

Economics is essentially a study of the principles by means of which a people is able to produce the material preconditions for its own continued existence. It is these physical-economic issues which are fundamental; monetary matters, such as currency, credit, banking, and debt, are a subordinate issue.... Therefore, we take as our first measurement in economic science a quantity we call potential relative population-density.

If you don’t have a sufficient rate of increase of creativity and resulting scientific and technological advances, you will not meet those material preconditions, and the power of your society to develop—its potential relative population-density—will fall further and further behind its actual population.

This is what has happened over the last 50 years, since the end of FDR’s Bretton Woods system in 1971. This is what has happened because LaRouche’s clear warnings and solutions were ignored, and he was then demonized when he was unjustly jailed in 1989. This is why we have a pandemic today, and why nearly a million people have died unnecessarily—from that cause alone.

How long must this criminal insanity go on?

Not only that. Prince Philip’s “Green” policies—which have taken over much of the world, including the U.S. Democratic Party—will make all of this far worse.

By de-nuclearizing and de-carbonizing the economy, they would reduce the human population to some 1.5 billion people. By decorticating it, using drugs, depraved culture and entertainment, and radical Jacobin violence of the sort we are witnessing in many U.S. cities today, they intend to wipe out the spark of human creativity itself—which alone can pull humanity back from the brink.

A Way Out

There is, of course, a way out—are we not human?!

We must launch a world recovery of the physical economy by putting the existing financial system through bankruptcy reorganization, and issuing state-backed credit to finance the creation of 1.5 billion new, productive jobs. Three months ago, LaRouche PAC issued a 30-page pamphlet detailing how this can be done, prepared by a national team of LaRouche movement organizers from Seattle, Houston, Detroit, and Virginia. Here is a broad outline of our proposals, for further elaboration.

Because we are facing a pandemic, we start with a crash program to create a world health system, consisting of viable national capabilities in every country in the world, to stop the COVID-19 pandemic dead in its tracks. What is needed is to return the United States to the standard of 4.5 hospital beds per thousand residents which was established by the 1946 Hill-Burton law (today the U.S. has dropped to 2.8), and we must bring the underdeveloped world up to an equivalent standard (most of which have today an average of less than 1 bed per thousand). This will require over 600,000 new hospital beds in the U.S., and a good 10 million worldwide. Which will, of course, require massive construction of new hospital facilities, adequate supplies of ventilators and other equipment, expanded staffing with doctors and nurses, and so on.

This is a daunting challenge, but it can be done with a crash global project, in which the more developed nations help provide engineering brigades to join with local capabilities in poorer counties to get the job done—and train millions of workers in the process. All this, of course, while we are in the process of developing as fast as we possibly can, with international cooperation, a vaccine which will make a serious dent in this pandemic’s reproduction capabilities.

Health, Electricity, Water, and Rail

In health, we are talking about 6 million new jobs in the U.S. and 100 million globally. These are direct jobs. Health infrastructure, however, is not a stand-alone. You don’t plop a brand-new hospital in the middle of a desert, or an urban slum for that matter, without water and electricity. The electricity needs for the new hospitals alone rise to 100 gigawatts worldwide. But today over 1 billion people lack any electricity at all, so building out those requirements is going to employ another 10 million people. Nuclear energy, first fission and then fusion, has to be the area of world concentration to meet these needs, as we discussed in Panel 2 yesterday.

Fresh water is another vital aspect of infrastructure. FDR’s TVA is a model for such projects, including NAWAPA for North America, and Trans-Aqua for Africa —which alone will create some 5 million new jobs, out of the 20 million such water projects will directly create worldwide.

And then there is rail. High-speed rail and maglev rail especially, as the backbone of industrial corridors spanning the globe, as Lyndon LaRouche has long emphasized. China has built more high-speed rail lines than the rest of the world combined; they had 36,000 km as of August 2020. They intend to double that by 2035. In the U.S. we have exactly zero kilometers of high-speed rail. China has also played the central role in extending rail lines across Asia into Europe, and to Africa as well, where they are beginning this process as part of their Belt and Road Initiative.

The U.S. needs to build some 64,000 km of electrified, double-tracked rail lines; and the world rail requirement is of about 320,000 km. These must be linked by major projects such as a Bering Strait tunnel linking Alaska and Russia; a Darién Gap link to connect South America to Central and North America; the Sakhalin bridge to join Japan and Russia; a Gibraltar tunnel going from Spain to Africa; the Kra Canal in Thailand to vastly reduce shipping times and congestion in the Straits of Malacca; and so on. We estimate this will directly generate 1 million new productive jobs in the U.S., and 5 million worldwide.

Adding up just those major areas of infrastructure projects, we will be directly creating 15 million new jobs for the U.S., and 135 million for the world. But these are just the direct jobs. The total number of indirect jobs created will be vastly greater, anywhere from 4 to 10 times as many. Moreover, infrastructure projects, such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or LaRouche’s comparable World Land-Bridge, produce productivity, so the overall power of the economy and labor force will be dramatically increased, in ways defying any simple mathematical measurement.

Shift the Internal Proportions of
the Labor Force

What we can say, is that the internal proportions of the labor force will shift dramatically over the next generation towards full employment in productive activity.

Unemployment will drop to some 2%; 50% of the labor force will be engaged in goods-producing industrial activity; and an additional 5% will be in the all-important category of R&D activities. As we discussed in yesterday’s exciting Panel 2, fusion and space exploration are among the key frontiers for coming decades.

This unending quest for universal physical principles is the real scientific driver of a global recovery program. And this is probably the most salient area for potential cooperation among the United States, China, Russia, India, and other space-faring nations.

None of this can be done by one country alone. China is the decisive partner for the U.S. in many of these endeavors; for example, the construction of a grid of high-speed rail lines. But neither can a world recovery be accomplished without the United States. The 50 million new productive jobs to be created in the U.S. may only be a small fraction, 3%, of the world total of 1.5 billion; but it is the decisive fraction, both in terms of physical economy as well as politically.

The U.S. and the Chinese cannot be decoupled from each other—at least not if we want the world to survive. Working together, we can embark on finally finishing FDR’s unfinished business.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is also why the full exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, and his ideas, is the key to global recovery. Thank you very much.