PRESS RELEASE
LaRouche Calls for Launching of `Super-TVA':
Candidate Pushes Emergency Infrastructure Jobs
Nov. 9, 2002 (EIRNS)—This statement was released today by Lyndon LaRouche's political action committee, LaRouche in 2004.
Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche is launching a major drive, to force through an FDR-style "Super-TVA" of crucial mass-employment programs indispensable for halting the economic disaster now hitting the United States.
LaRouche explained, that the system is now plunging into a collapse. A comprehensive change in national and state economic policies, is now a matter of life or death for our economy. We must shift from the Wal-Mart to reality. Reality means infrastructure building as the leading edge of a revival of durable goods production.
LaRouche outlined an emergency program of infrastructure building in energy production and distribution, water management, and mass transit rail-network programs, chiefly on the state level, but with backing by the Federal government. These are the immediate emergency measures to halt a presently spiralling, and accelerating collapse in state economies of many of our states. These emergency actions to be begun now, are part of a larger package which LaRouche described as a "Super-TVA."
He expained: A new Federal credit-generating mechanism, even bigger than the project-oriented TVA which Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched, is the only kind of program that can deal with the disaster which confronts us now.
Every single state is bankrupt. California is facing a $24 billion deficit this year, and even if there were a so-called recovery, the 2003 deficit is projected to be over $20 billion. Texas's deficit is between $10 billion and $15 billion this year, and there are similar budget blowouts in all 50 states.
After 30 years of New Economy insanity, it's going to take a generation 30 years to rebuild the real economy to levels which existed prior to the 1971-1981 wave of destruction of much of the nation's basic economic infrastructure and industrial and farm sectors. We have already entered the worst systemic economic and financial disaster in modern history. What is required right now, is states' demand for action by the Bush Administration, to set up a "Super-TVA" Federal agency, that will fund the urgently needed emergency infrastructure-building needed to avert an already-ongoing general collapse of the national economy.
This new mechanism should not pour funds into the repayment of old state debts, but into major, urgently needed infrastructure projects—real development corridors. The existing state debts will have to be restructured, and the states will have to totally rethink how to deal with their budgets. But the Super-TVA's funding of large-scale infrastructure projects will create the productive jobs, and the expanded tax revenue base, that is required to actually solve the crisis.
This "Super-TVA" will be a tightly administered, effective Federal authority, disbursing low-interest, long-term credits into the states to launch these projects. To make this happen, we require emergency legislation, which repeals all of the deregulation laws of the past 30 years.
The election is over, it's time to focus on the reality of economic collapse. We need a new political agenda, defined by the Super-TVA. Let's get moving now.
