EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY, JUNE 22, 2021

What ‘Infrastructure’ Do We Really Need, and Why Is It Never Discussed?

June 21, 2021 (EIRNS)—Economic “infrastructure” is again being widely discussed, in terms that have nothing to do with the actual economic missions necessary to preserve and improve human life.

The most important such mission in the world now is clear—the COVID pandemic found that the great majority of nations completely lack what they need to fight it: a modern system of healthcare, comprised of hospitals, clinics, highly skilled and trained medical professionals, and public health, with laboratories, epidemiology, disease surveillance, sanitation. By expert estimate this includes between 4 and 5 fully equipped hospital beds per 1,000 population, including ICU, isolation, and specialist beds for surgical and acute care, pediatric, ob/gyn, emergency, etc. But look at the nations worst hit by pandemic disease and death: India, 0.7 beds/1,000; Brazil, 2.1/1,000; Indonesia, 1.0/1,000; South Africa, 2.3/1,000; Iran, 1.6/1,000, and so on throughout the developing nations.

But over the past 18 months’ pandemic, only the Schiller Institute has proposed building modern healthcare capacity throughout the world, in every nation—beginning with its founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who called as early as in March 2020 for a summit of major powers to launch “emergency physical-economic action” against the pandemic. Her call made clear that new electric power and fresh water infrastructure development throughout developing nations were essential to the action. No other agency or official has discussed or even mentioned this obviously critical mission, even as China was able to throw up hospitals in days in Wuhan and then followed through in Africa. The nations with the greatest capabilities must join in such a life-saving imperative; the credit that must be instituted to do it will point toward a New Bretton Woods international credit system, as Zepp-LaRouche insists.

The mission and the work of the Committee on Coincidence of Opposites which she and Dr. Joycelyn Elders established, and their collaborators have built to carry it out, will be fully presented on Sunday, June 27 in the morning and afternoon panels of the Schiller Institute’s June 26-27 international online conference.

In the United States, whether human beings can continue to live in half of the North American continent is in question, as it is desertifying from drought, which has been growing over a huge area for a generation. Meteorologists generally date the onset of the current, intensifying Western drought period to the late 1990s, with peaks of intensity in 2003-04 and in 2013, and brief periods of apparent relief in 2011-12 and 2020. According to a chart from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) aired in April by a CBS News report—entitled, “Western U.S. May Be Entering Its Most Severe Drought in Modern History”—the extent of drought, and even the extent of severe drought across the country is no greater than in 2003-04, for example; but, the area of exceptional drought is unprecedented in this generation-long drought cycle. Exceptional drought now characterizes 20% of the area of the entire western half of the United States and Mexico, while various levels of water scarcity describe a full 90% of that entire area.

It was obvious to thinking engineers decades ago that unused, excess water sources exist in other parts of North America, could they only be brought to the desertifying areas with their overutilized rivers and aquifers. And that vast volumes of seawater are there to be desalinated with high-temperature power sources, especially nuclear power sources. Thus, the human populations of western North America can continue living, working and farming there; otherwise, they must surely leave, and leave desert behind.

That is infrastructure. But for decades since this intensifying drought was confirmed at the turn of the century, the ideology of calling it “unstoppable global warming” has been used to suppress all discussion of doing anything about it—as if taxing carbon dioxide will finally produce water. Engineering plans for long-distance water transfer have been so long ignored that “infrastructure experts” now don’t know they exist.

The actually Malthusian ideology of “made-made climate change” will be thoroughly taken apart by scientists, and the alternative to it presented, in the second panel of the Schiller Institute conference, on Saturday afternoon June 26.

The Saturday morning panel will deal with the danger of nuclear war from the U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China confrontations, and the murderous policy of sanctions against nations all over the world, which is part of those confrontations. Organize everyone you know to register and participate in the Schiller Institute’s online event: “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefitting the Few!”