Role of the West

The United States Can Transform Itself
by Helping Develop the Global South

Nov. 24—Mass migration can be slowed and stopped by building the “showcase” and basic fundamental infrastructure projects, in every portion of the developing world, featured in this report. This will produce tremendous results; even the launching of it will attract economic migrants back to their homelands, more optimistic than before about their conditions of life.

But at the same time, this process could reindustrialize the United States’ and Europe’s collapsing physical economies, should the West decide to collaborate on it with Russia and China. Already in a report published in EIR in May 2020, “The World Needs 1.5 Billion New Productive Jobs: The LaRouche Plan to Reopen the U.S. Economy,” we showed in detail that a crash development effort in the Global South, focused on power, water, and healthcare infrastructure, would create hundreds of millions of new, productive, and well-paid jobs in the developing countries, and approximately 50 million such new jobs in the United States itself. Creating modern hospital and clinic systems alone, across the developing sector, will mean 100 million productive and scientific jobs worldwide, and 5-6 million in the United States, for example.

(Consider that 100 million American workers—two-thirds of the workforce—are not productively employed, and another 10 million are unemployed or forced to work part-time.)

On the worldwide scale, the “1.5 Billion Jobs” study showed that several of the most economically transformational and wide-scale “great projects”—such as the Transaqua Plan to recharge Lake Chad, irrigate the central Sahel region, and produce hydroelectric power—would each create productive, engineering, and scientific employment in the millions.

The development surges we propose now would mean trillions of dollars of export orders for the West—and other nations—for capital goods and technologically advanced infrastructure packages for the Global South. This would concretely mean that the West would reconvert some closed factories and portions of its military-industrial-financial complex facilities, while otherwise expanding the capacity of its existing factories to manufacture machine tools, assemblies for nuclear and other power plants, large tractors and dredgers, modular hospital system components, and clean water system elements, all of which are needed by and will develop the Global South.

The United States’ Potential

A preliminary look at the United States economy shows that the U.S. does not have the present capacity to export on a considerable scale to the Global South. The accompanying graph, Figure 1, documents the U.S. manufacturing labor force: in 1979, the United States employed 19.43 million manufacturing workers. (Manufacturing workers transform nature to produce capital goods and goods for human existence.) That plunged to 11.5 million during the 2007-09 global financial meltdown, and moved up slightly to 12.9 million today. The U.S. is still 6.5 million manufacturing workers short of the 1979 level. Moreover, that 1979 level of manufacturing workers is itself crucially short of what it should be.

The United States can succeed in a top-down economic transformation, through combining this export campaign with an internal domestic economic policy focused on building the large-scale infrastructure projects it should have built.

As for its shortage of capacity, it can overcome that through building new capacity, and through reconversion/retooling. It is difficult to determine the exact number of workers involved in defense manufacturing, but it appears to be between 900,000 and 1.1 million manufacturing workers. A part of that production and associated workers can be reconverted, which means the old machine tools are removed from the plant, except for those that can be used, and new advanced machine tools designed for production of particular goods—nuclear components, tractors, etc.—are put in. Almost any plant can be retooled to produce a necessary product. As well, 66,000 manufacturing plants in America have been shut down since 1998. Some of those closed factories, if still idle and available, can be reopened and retooled.

This will take funding. On Aug 9, 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the CHIPS and Science Act, which invested $53 billion in funding primarily to build semiconductor fabrication plants in the United States. Certainly, financing methods on a larger scale can be employed on the above project. (See Credit section of report.)

Launching the Project

The U.S. has a number of inventive engineers, skilled workers, etc., who could within the right setting, with directed credit, achieve the objective.

• On March 5 of this year, the Nigerian Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Abubakar Kyari, stated Nigeria “requires 72,000 tractors to achieve food security, but has fewer than 5,000 tractors that are working.” Caterpillar, which has 62 operating plants operating in the U.S., and John Deere which has more than 60 such plants operating in the U.S., could provide a portion of that. An African organization, with a few Americans within it, Tractors for Africa, reports that, “Ghana needs over 30,000 tractors, and they currently operate less than 2,000.” The need and thus market for tractors, combines, harvesters, bulldozers, excavators and cranes is immense.

• EIR has proposed that Africa, Ibero-America, and parts of Asia need hundreds of nuclear, natural gas, hydro-electric, and “clean coal” power plants. The EIR 2020 study, “The World Needs 1.5 Billion New Productive Jobs: The LaRouche Plan to Reopen the U.S. Economy” reported, “Another ten million jobs will be created internationally just building barely reasonable levels of electric power; more than 1 million in the United States including construction workers, power engineers, and line workers.”

The same study, “1.5 Billion New Productive Jobs” called for a New World System of Public Health, and stated, “if the United States joins with the other leading technology powers in mobilizing new hospitals, equipment, staffing, and specialists across the developing nations of South America, Africa, and Asia, that process will create 6 million new productive, skilled jobs in America and well more than 100 million such jobs worldwide.” The report then explained how this will be achieved.

• The Global South and East needs machine tools: 5-axis machine tools, laser machine tools, computer numerical control lathes, and it needs master machinists to teach younger workers, students, and engineers the science of operating them. It also needs food processing machines, cannery machinery, flour mills, forges, steel blast furnaces, rolling mills, equipment for railroad locomotives and tracks, and so forth. In 2022, the last year for which figures are available, U.S. machinery and mechanical appliances exports totaled approximately $240 billion. This level could be quadrupled to at least $960 billion a year, in five years. And so on for every category of hard commodity goods, as well as infrastructure. This is a magnificent way for the United States to create expanded capacity, create several millions of new manufacturing jobs, be provoked to attain the highest scientific knowledge, and create development and tens of millions of productive jobs in the Global South.

U.S. Domestic Projects of Infrastructure

Inside the United States, under the paradigm of a new security and development architecture, the United States should pursue some of the most scientific large-scale forms of infrastructure that will transform the U.S. physical economy, embedding within it permanently much higher productivity. To mention briefly just a few:

• Nuclear NAWAPA—which would divert southward a portion of run-off from Alaska and from the Mackenzie River Basin in Canada’s Northwest, pass it through the Rocky Mountain Trench in British Columbia, into the United States, and on to Mexico. In the Nuclear NAWAPA plan, water would also be distributed eastward in the United States. All told, total water delivery would be about 120 million acre-feet per year, distributed between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, including provisions for hydro-electricity generation, and irrigation. It is estimated it could create up to 7 million jobs.

• The Schiller Institute and The LaRouche Organization have proposed a two-phase plan to build 42,000 miles of modern, electrified high-speed rail, with approximately 16,000 miles being magnetic levitation. This would connect and service more than 40 major and mid-sized cities in the United States, and incorporate a future feature to transport freight in densely populated areas by freight-capable maglev. Presently, the United States has almost no high-speed rail.

• The building of 100 new nuclear power plants throughout the United States

• A crash program to advance all lines of research on achieving sustained nuclear fusion, resulting in the production of commercial reactors.

There are dozens of other projects with the same technological thrust as these, including space travel.

The combined effect of export of high technology packages to the developing world, with the development of great infrastructure projects within the U.S., draws in and productively employs the unemployed, and the non-productively employed, shifting the United States away from a financier speculation-driven economy, to one of productively designed objectives.

Lyndon LaRouche envisioned shifting the composition of the U.S. labor force—and the labor forces of all nations—so that 50% of all workers would engage in productive employment, and half of that latter segment, or 25% of the workforce, would engage in manufacturing. Another 5% would be in Research and Development. This is represented in Figure 2. By 2045, 91.5 million American workers would be in productive work, and 45.7 million in manufacturing, almost four times the present level.

The United States joining with China and Russia to export goods and infrastructure to the Global South, enabling it to flourish, combined with continent-changing internal infrastructure projects will produce a lasting effect for generations.