EDITORIAL

Your President Needs You Now
—Not Three Weeks from Now

May 2—They mock it mercilessly, as they mock everything that is potentially good—but Tuesday’s White House infrastructure meeting between President Trump and a dozen Congressional Democrats strikes close to the root of the question of why Donald Trump is in the White House today, and also the question of the late Lyndon H. LaRouche’s legacy, and the use to be made of LaRouche’s ideas in the acute crisis of today.

As many of you probably know, the same group is to meet again in the White House in about three weeks, to hear President Trump’s proposal for how to fund a (very inadequate) ten-year, $2 trillion infrastructure package. The President said, “I’ll lead on this. I’d like to do something. It may not be typically Republican.” He dismissed the previous White House plan, based on public-private partnerships (PPPs), saying, “That bill was so stupid. It was a Gary [Cohn] bill,” referring to his previous top economic advisor, from Goldman Sachs. PPP means “you get sued,” said the President.

Of course, our role is not to take bets around the water cooler on what the President may propose, but rather to go flat out immediately to encourage and support him to propose what is urgently needed.

Now the principle of credit was not quite at the very center of LaRouche’s scientific discoveries, but it was never far from his thoughts. In a December 7, 2012 webcast, “No to the Green Policy: Revive Our Credit System,” LaRouche began by insisting again that Glass-Steagall must be restored to protect the needed, honest part of the banking system. But he went on to specify:

However, . . . Glass-Steagall is indispensable, but it does not contain a cure. It contains a preventive of gambling, and it is necessary. But here’s where the problem comes in: We’re going to be operating, not on the basis of the present system. That is, if the United States is going to survive: if the U.S. economy is not going to disintegrate entirely, what’s going to have to happen, relatively immediately, now, is the installation of a credit system as the basis of actually creating the growth of the U.S. economy. That is, an inflation-free form of growth, or hyperinflation-free form of growth, as the matter is now.

Later on he clarified:

Credit does not lie in letting money sit in a bank; it must do something. It must change its character; it must be more efficient; or it must be more enriching. It means technological progress; it means higher rates of energy-flux density, which is an essential part of this. People are more skilled; they do a job which is a more skilled job; they produce more value with the same amount of nominal labor. That’s the system. We must generate growth. We must increase the productive power of labor. We must advance technology—absolutely. We must increase the energy-flux density flowing through the entire system.

So all the myths which Republicans and Democrats alike believe in, with a kind of religious fervor, or, shall we say, Satanic passion, are wrong. The generation of credit, as real credit, occurs only by the increase of the productive powers of labor, as measured in physical terms. This means physical terms in the sense that people doing the same thing do it more efficiently, or do it at a higher technology.

This is the principle of Federal credit, and that principle precedes and absolutely governs the forms of the institutions through which that Federal credit is issued, which are accurately summarized, for U.S. history, in LaRouche PAC’s January 2019 statement, “The Way Forward,” which says:

Hamilton did it through the National Bank. Abraham Lincoln did it with his Greenback policy. Franklin Roosevelt did it through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. So why not return to the best practice of both parties in finding a principled way to fund desperately needed infrastructure?

Upgrading U.S. infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers’ current rating of “D+” to its “A” level will indeed increase the productivity of all labor—but how do we achieve the qualitative revolutions which LaRouche indicates above? One great leap will involve bringing the huge Chinese high-speed rail industry to invest in this country to begin to revolutionize ground transport. Follow that up with magnetic-levitation rail, also now being pioneered by China.

But let’s recall that LaRouche eventually rejected the term “infrastructure” entirely, in favor of the much more general concept of “economic platforms” forming the basis of an entire stage of human economic-scientific-cultural development, as for example the prehistoric maritime culture, which based itself on knowledge of the relationship between the long-cycle solar calendar and the entire celestial sphere, as Ben Deniston has reported.

This view forces us to unify (what should be) the short cycle of disaster relief from the Midwest flooding, with the middle-term cycle of disaster prevention, and the longer cycle of bringing the Belt and Road and its Eurasian Land-Bridge throughout the Western Hemisphere, from Alaska south to Tierra del Fuego, and equally West to East across the hemisphere.

The Road to the Stars

But at the same time, that concept introduces an even grander consideration—that of Solar system exploration and colonization. Now man can no longer be seen as strictly an earthbound species. We are in transition from a terrestrial “platform” to a Solar system platform. The race to land on the Moon within five years, and then to colonize the Moon and begin to explore Mars, has already forever changed our perspective even on Earth. And our apparently-earthly “infrastructure” plans undertaken today, will be penetrated and conditioned by the space Odyssey. All labor, of whatever form, will become more productive because of across-the-board scientific and technological breakthroughs spinning off from the space effort.

This was the Kennedy economic miracle: his de Gaulle-style indicative planning or industrial policy, and his infrastructure initiatives were all revolutionized by the Apollo Lunar program, as ours are being revolutionized now by our space program and the cooperative international crash space program of the immediate future.