PRESS RELEASE
Trump Begins ‘Infrastructure Week’: How Would China Do It?
June 5, 2017 (EIRNS)—President Donald Trump today began an "infrastructure week," actually a two-week period in which the President plans to make presentations in Washington and in the country about raising the level of the crumbling U.S. economic infrastructure. He began by calling for a new air traffic control system guided by satellite global positioning systems rather than ground-based radars; he proposed to achieve that by putting air traffic control into a non-profit corporation both paid for and controlled by commercial airlines, but overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration. Both the airlines and the air traffic controllers’ union support this action.
Later this week the President will speak in Cincinnati about waterways infrastructure, including locks and dams; and at the Transportation Department in Washington about rail and road infrastructure. His Administration will talk roughly about adding $200 billion in Federal infrastructure investments over 10 years. But the President will be implicitly opening up a great national mission which will require more than 10 times that investment. And by estimates from China, the world’s great builder of modern infrastructure now, it will require up to $8 trillion in investments.
The new economic system being created by China’s Belt and Road Initiative is, in fact, the dynamo that America can join up with to "get it done." And large investments can come from there as well.
Perhaps the worst infrastructure problem in the nation is the nightmare Summer threatened by the ongoing breakdown of transportation systems in the greater New York City area—though there are grim competitors elsewhere.
But the evidence of the past 20 years of China’s development and outreach is clear: If this breakdown were occurring around Beijing, the whole transport system would be transformed, with new high-speed and even mag-lev metro lines connecting out into national high-speed networks, in two years at most!
In fact, just that is being done with the bigger Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei metropolitan region in China right now, begun only late last year (see below). Why not in New York?
If Americans—whose nation was first with a trans-continental railroad, first with nuclear energy, first to go to the Moon—believe this can be done here, the United States should join up with the new economic order being created with the great infrastructure projects of the New Silk Road.
That will require a mobilization to create a national bank, a source of national credit for new infrastructure; and restoring Glass-Steagall bank separation to break Wall Street’s control of commercial bank lending. But above all it will require restoring the belief that the United States can do what is being done all along the Belt and Road Initiative.
Last Nov. 29, EIR reported:
China To Build Intercity Rail for Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei
China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced Nov. 28, 2016 that
"The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region is going to serve as a new pole of growth for the Bohaai [Yellow Sea] Rim, and the safe and effective railway system shall connect the metropolitan area,"
said Cheng Shidong, a transport official with the NDRC.
Hebei is the province which surrounds the adjacent cities of Beijing and Tianjin. The new intercity rail system will be modeled on the Tianjin-Baoding (a city in Hebei south of Beijing) and Tianjin-Beijing high-speed rail lines which have already eased traffic in Beijing and facilitated development of the region. Four other cities in Behei will be connected in the grid—Shijiazhuang, Tangshan, Qinhuangdao, and Langfang.
Gao Mingming, who is in charge of the railway network plan, said the inter-city high-speed railways will "help phase out non-essential functions in Beijing and promote industry distribution in the region." He said railway stations will be constructed in cities or counties with a population over 100,000. A railway service will also be provided between Beijing Capital International Airport and the new airport which is now under construction.
