Vi har brug for et nationalt infrastrukturprogram, NU!
LaRouche PAC Internationale Webcast,
14. juli, 2017

Det er den 14. juli, 2017; og, som de ville sige i Frankrig, »Bonne Fête Nationale!«. Vi ved, at præsident Trump netop er kommet tilbage fra at deltage i fejringen af Bastille-dagen i Paris, Frankrig, hvor han havde et succesrigt møde med præsident Macron, iflg. rapporter. De fejrede mere end 200 års fransk-amerikansk partnerskab, der går helt tilbage til vores alliance for at besejre briterne i den Amerikanske Revolution.

Men, der er gået nøjagtig én uge siden det historiske møde mellem præsident Trump og præsident Putin fra Rusland, på sidelinjen af G20-topmødet i Hamborg, Tyskland.

(Her følger det engelske udskrift af webcastet.)

WE NEED A NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROGRAM NOW!

LaRouche PAC International Webcast

MATTHEW OGDEN:  Good evening; it’s July 14, 2017.  My name
is Matthew Ogden, and you’re joining us here for our weekly
webcast on larouchepac.com.  I’m joined in the studio by Paul
Gallagher, {EIR} Economics Editor.
It’s July 14, 2017; and as they would say in France, “Bonne
Fête Nationale!”  We know that President Trump has just returned
from attending the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris, France,
where he had a successful visit with President Macron according
to reports.  They celebrated over 200 years of French-American
partnership going all the way back to our alliance to defeat the
British in the American Revolution.
But it’s been exactly one week since the historic meeting
between President Trump and President Putin of Russia, on the
sidelines of the G-20 in Hamburg, Germany.  We have a picture
[Fig. 1] here I can put on the screen of President Putin’s and
President Trump’s meeting, as you can see here.  As was correctly
cited by Stephen Cohen in an article in The Nation yesterday,
this was a very successful summit.  The achievements included: 1)
formalizing a new direct partnership between the United States
and Russian Presidents — personal relationship; 2. negotiating a
very successful ceasefire in southern Syria, which continues to
hold to this day.  This is part of a more general policy of
coordinating anti-terrorism campaigns; 3. — according to reports
— creating a bilateral US-Russia channel to try to resolve the
ongoing civil war in Ukraine.  But, over the past week, we’ve
also seen an escalation to a real fever pitch of the so-called
“Russia-gate” campaign.  We’ve seen this very rapid escalation of
attacks against the Trump Presidency.  But as Paul Gallagher
pointed out correctly in a lead that was published yesterday on
the LaRouche PAC website, this latest series of frenzied
outbursts against President Trump over the so-called
“Russia-gate” is not due to some sort of 20-minute meeting that
one of Trump’s children had with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower
during the campaign.  But rather, it’s over the fact that
President Trump himself had a very successful 2.5-hour meeting
with President Putin of Russia last week.  This is a meeting that
Trump’s opponents never intended to allow to occur, let alone
turn out as positively and successfully as it did.  This has
been, emphatically, the issue all along in this so-called
“Russia-gate” collusion scandal; going all the way back to before
Trump’s inauguration.
I’d like to put on the screen here a tweet [Fig. 2] that
President Trump tweeted out on January 7th of this year, where he
correctly identifies exactly what the issue here is.  This is two
weeks before the inauguration.  He says, “Having a good
relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.  Only
‘stupid’ people or fools would think that it is bad.  We have
enough problems around the world without yet another one.  When I
am President, Russia will respect us far more than they do now,
and both countries will perhaps work together to solve some of
the many great and pressing problems and issues of the world.”
So, indeed, that’s what Trump has been able to succeed in
accomplishing; and he’s stuck to this, despite the environment of
Russophobia which far rivals anything that we’ve seen at least
since the Cold War, maybe going all the way back to the infamous
McCarthyism of the 1950s.  You’ve reached a point now where even
Senator Tim Kaine, the former running mate of Hillary Clinton
during the campaign, has openly accused the sitting President of
the United States of treason over the fact that Trump’s son
allegedly met with a foreign national to receive so-called
damaging information against his opponent Hillary Clinton in the
Presidential campaign.  While at the same time, Hillary Clinton
herself had actively solicited damaging, salacious misinformation
against her opponent Donald Trump from a known former agent of
British Intelligence, Christopher Steele.  So, that’s quite the
double standard, if you ask me.
But to make the point, in the face of this entire apparatus,
President Trump’s policy of cooperating with Putin and
establishing a good relationship with President Xi of China is,
indeed, a courageous one.  But as Paul Gallagher made the point
in this same lead which I cited earlier, which he titled “Trump’s
Policy of Peace with Putin and Xi Is Courageous; But His Policy
of Peace with Wall Street is not”.  Very correctly, Paul, you
said “What is not courageous is this President’s inability to
take any steps against Wall Street towards carrying out the
economic recovery policies on which he ran his campaign.  Rather,
Wall Street, led by the likes of Treasury Secretary Steve
Mnuchin, is running all over him.  President Trump is fighting
the British imperial policy and it is British Intelligence which
launched ‘Russia-gate’ against him a year ago, and has driven the
Congressional leadership into McCarthyite madness.  But neither
he, nor either party in Congress, is fighting Wall Street; that
is up to the rest of us, and it cannot be delayed or the next
looming crash will wipe us out entirely.”
So, Paul, that’s what you said in the lead of the LaRouche
PAC website yesterday, very correctly; and I think we’ll get into
that.  But this was echoed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche during
discussions we had with her just a little bit earlier today.  She
said what is clearly urgently necessary and seriously lacking in
the current Trump administration is a commitment to following
through on what she called “an industrial program for the United
States.”  She said we need to get people to focus on this.  The
Trump agenda internationally is fine, clearly; especially Trump’s
stance on Russia, China, US cooperation, which is obviously
positive she said.  And which is the source of the unprecedented
attacks against his administration by those who wish to sabotage
such a relationship.  But domestically, we need a real economic
program.  She said, “As the famous saying goes, ‘it’s the
economy, stupid!’|”  She said that we do expect that sometime
this month, the US-China economic cooperation report is expected
to be published, which was commissioned during President Trump’s
and President Xi Jinping’s summit at Mar-a-Lago a few months ago.
But, as far as can be seen up to this point, there is really
nothing yet happening in terms of Trump’s promised $1 trillion
infrastructure investment plan for the United States.  She said
this is a big weakness, along with Trump’s indefensible cowardice
in the face of Wall Street.  So, it’s our responsibility to
escalate this campaign to get this infrastructure campaign going
in the context of LaRouche’s Four Economic Laws; starting with
Glass-Steagall, which we’re going to discuss more in a minute.
We can use the reconstruction of the New York City region as a
necessary catalyst and a keystone to energize this entire
national infrastructure vision.
So, just to begin with, I’d like to play a short video which
was just posted on the LaRouche PAC website, narrated by Jason
Ross, on this subject.  The title of the video is “What New York
City Can Learn from Africa”.

JASON ROSS:  So, New York City has now officially
entered the “Summer of Hell” created by long overdue maintenance
work around Penn Station.  This work is going to reduce commuter
access to this vital hub by 20% for the half million commutes
daily.  A couple of weeks ago in New York, the derailment of an A
train left dozens injured and disrupted hundreds of thousands of
trips.  In two years, the planned shutdown of the L train will
disrupt 200,000 daily trips for a year and a half.  Today, New
York City’s subway delays are 2.5 times what they were just five
years ago.  It’s clear that transportation in America’s leading
city is at the breaking point.  This should be no surprise to
anyone who has followed the lack of infrastructure investment
over the past decades; particularly to Lyndon LaRouche, who
fought against the 1970s destruction and under investment in New
York City and the Big MAC (Municipal Assistance Corporation)
financial dictatorship that took it over.
Many of the immediately needed fixes are totally obvious to
anyone familiar with the situation.  Replace the 100-year-old
tunnels crossing the Hudson and East Rivers; upgrade the
switching equipment that dates back to Franklin Roosevelt’s
Presidency; and increase maintenance and repair, overhaul of
track and equipment.  But what’s really required is a longer-term
perspective of the next level of infrastructure; the long-term
perspective whose absence caused the crisis that we now find
ourselves in; a crisis in which New York City is merely a leading
example in the United States.  Without fighting to win a
commitment to such a long-term perspective for a new platform,
any short-term fixes — even needed ones — will just be kicking
the can down the road.
To make that long-term perspective clear, let’s look at what
we can learn from Africa and China.  With some exceptions of the
more developed nations such as Egypt and South Africa, African
infrastructure is at a pitifully under-developed level.  Consider
these figures:  The total shipment of freight by rail.  In
Africa, it’s less than 10 % of what it is in the United States,
China, or Europe.  Consider per capita energy consumption in
Africa; only 10% that of the US, only 1/3 that of China.  It’s
more clear, when we focus on the higher form of energy represented
by electrical energy.  Per capita use in Africa is only 6 % what
it is in the United States, and only 1/4 that of China.  In fact,
less than half of Africans have reliable access to electricity at
all.  A typical US refrigerator uses more than double the average
electricity use of citizens of Nigeria or Kenya.  With such an
insufficient infrastructure platform, extensive economic progress
is simply impossible.  Yet, some people — and by some people, I
mean Africa’s colonial masters, led by the British — say that
African development should be through “appropriate” technologies.
That an incremental approach to improvement should be taken; that
foot-powered pumps for water, or solar panels on a hut would be a
useful upgrade.  That is nonsense!
For example, the pathetic Power Africa plan proposed by
President Obama would hardly make a dent in the outrageously low
levels of development.

OBAMA:  It’s going to be your generation that suffers the
most.  Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that
everybody’s mentioned here in Africa, if everybody’s raising
living standards to the point where everybody’s got a car, and
everybody’s got air conditioning, and everybody’s got a big
house, the planet will boil over.”

ROSS:  Africa must leap ahead, not crawl forward; and this
can happen.  The Congo River itself could support an estimated
100,000 MW of electricity; enough for 100 million people or more,
with 40,000 MW from the planned Grand Inga Dam alone.  The
Trans-Aqua water program which would use water from the Congo and
its tributaries to refill and to provide navigation to Lake Chad
which is currently drying up; this would be larger by an order of
magnitude than any other project in the world.  The expansion of
rail lines in Africa is currently at a world-leading level today;
it’s growing.  New transportation routes across Africa will
connect the hinterlands, allowing modern development.  This will
change the situation from the current land-locked regions of the
continent.
To give one example, the freight costs for bringing in a
container of fertilizer from Singapore, to bring that into Rwanda
or Burundi, it’s more than 2.5 times the cost of bringing it to
the port city of Alexandria in Egypt; due to the terrible,
insufficient quality of overland transportation infrastructure
across the continent.  So, by creating access to efficient
transportation, regions benefit from the opportunity to bring in
equipment and supplies; to export their products and ideas; for
residents to travel. With the availability of electricity, higher
productive capabilities are unlocked.  The value of the land and
of the people increases.
Some people recognize this.  Unlike the outlook of the
trans-Atlantic world, China views Africa not simply as a source
of raw materials, as a continent that’s best kept in a state of
under-development; but as an opportunity for massive, rapid,
intense, overall economic development.  As potential partners for
economic prosperity, as new markets, new collaborators.  So,
while US or European stock in Africa is heavily oriented towards
mining and resource extraction, Chinese investment goes primarily
to infrastructure and small- and medium-sized businesses.  Back
in 2010, Chinese trade in Africa overtook that of US trade with
Africa; and it is currently more than double the US-Africa trade
level.  China is financing big projects.  The nearly
500-kilometer, 300-mile standard gauge railway in Kenya; built in
only three years.  The 750-kilometer, 500-mile Djibouti-Addis
Ababa rail line, which will be extended.  It reduces travel time
from days to hours, as it whizzes by at 100mph.
Such major investments, along with the future completion of
the Grand Inga Dam, of the Trans-Aqua water system, they’re going
to completely transform the economy of Africa and each locality
within it.  Bringing water, power, transportation access;
allowing a higher level of industry, mining, agriculture,
scientific and cultural pursuits.  Productivity will grow.
So now, return to New York City.  What has been missing in
New York City?  Maintenance?  No.  What’s been missing is a
commitment to discovering and building the next platform of
infrastructure for the region.  In the context of a national
credit system of Federal high-speed rail authority work, of
upgraded and reliable waterways, of high-tech new designs of
nuclear plants; all of these potentially built with international
cooperation.  In this context, how does New York City fit in this
broader area that it exists in?  Where will the next generation
of transportation and development hubs lie?  And upon what
technologies will they be based?  How can magnetic levitation
technology change our view of transportation?  How will
commercial fusion power, realized within a decade by a fully
funded research program, how could this change our relationship
to power, to materials, to production, to transportation?  How
will the expanded availability of water, power, and transport
open new areas of the country to development; and higher types of
development?  How will the Bering Strait connection change world
freight flows?  Will New York City even still be the nation’s
leading metropolis in a century?

So, sure.  Fix the L train; rebuild the Hudson River
tunnels.  Absolutely.  Redo the disaster known as Penn Station.
But do it all in a national and international context; a context
of a future orientation, of an economic outlook to the value of
leap-frogging to a higher infrastructure platform.  So as in the
future, our national high-speed rail authority builds a 300mph
train system, starting across the Northeast.  As transit in
cities are upgraded to allow for commutes of half an hour rather
than an hour and a half; as the World Land-Bridge connects to
North America, allowing land travel from New York to Beijing;
from North America to Asia.  As all this takes place, what
totally new projects will take place in New York City?  What will
be its future; and what will be its mission?
The mistake of the past was failing to have a future; and
that error must end.

OGDEN:  So, this is clearly the kind of national economic
vision that we need for the United States, and which needs to be
adopted by this administration.  So, I just wanted to ask Paul to
give us a sense of where the fight around this stands, and then
some of the updates in terms of Glass-Steagall, which is the
urgent first step.

PAUL GALLAGHER:  Well, first of all, you’ve already pointed
it out, but I want to point out that some political leaders here,
and most of the media, who are going crazy against since the
meeting between the Presidents of the United States and Russia.
Most of them are directly opposing peace and the potential
economic benefits that follow from the end of the last 15 years
Bush-Obama regime change wars.  As the President pointed out
yesterday, there has been what is already a long ceasefire in
southern Syria, and two other ceasefires being worked on
imminently directly coming out of that meeting that he had with
President Putin of Russia.  That means lives are being saved
there; American lives, Syrian lives, lives of others are being
saved there.  There is also an agreement that came out of similar
negotiations whereby the supply of water for the Palestinian
Authority is being tripled.  This agreement was just announced
yesterday by Jason Greenblatt, the special envoy of President
Trump to the embryonic Mideast peace or Palestinian/Israeli peace
negotiations that are going on.  More importantly, Syria and the
Middle East have become a clear location for the New Silk Road,
the increasingly vast array of infrastructure developments and
projects which include what Jason was just discussing there in
Africa.  The massive investment that China is making with some
other countries as partners in the development of new
infrastructure across Eurasia, now in Africa and into the Middle
East.  There was just a large meeting in Beijing earlier this
week of experts planning the reconstruction of Syria as soon as
the wipe-out of ISIS and the ceasefires now being put into effect
are actually in effect, the reconstruction with large-scale
investment as part of the Belt and Road, as the Chinese call it.
This New Silk Road.
So, there is tremendous potential coming out of these summit
meetings, and the readiness of the President to work with Putin,
with Xi, and the readiness on the other side of the Chinese
leadership to continually expand this tremendous investment that
they have been making in new infrastructure projects across
Eurasia into Africa through the Middle East.  Obviously that
stands ready as well to work in the United States; but that is
where we come to the roadblock that we were referencing earlier,
Matt.  That the Trump administration has been completely unable
up to now, to follow through on the economic promises that it
made to the American people in the course of winning the
Presidency.  Those promises included reinstating the
Glass-Steagall law; putting — for starters — $1 trillion in new
investments.  And everyone thought that meant public investments
into new infrastructure in the United States; including such
things as new ports, new airports, national high-speed rail
networks, connectivity for broken-down transportation systems
like that of New York.  This has not moved at all, because of
tremendous deference to Wall Street and the White House looking
to Wall Street — the worst possible place to look — Wall Street
and environs.  Private equity funds which claim to be setting up
infrastructure funds, all this sort of thing.  Looking entirely
in the wrong place for a large-scale investment in fundamentally
new infrastructure platforms in the United States.
We had a glaring example of this in regard to New York City
and the New York metropolitan area crisis just this week.  It was
announced that what I believe is the very first investment of the
Trump White House under the Transportation Infrastructure
Financing and Innovation Act — it’s called TIFIA.  For the
little bit of public funds from the Federal government that have
been going into transportation projects in the recent years,
TIFIA is a big deal in a very little pond.  The very first TIFIA
investment in transportation infrastructure under the Trump
administration was in Penn Station; and specifically the creation
of a second station across 8th Avenue from Penn Station in New
York.  To make a long story short, this development of a second
station, which is not trains, is not tunnels, is not bridges, is
not new routes, not new connectivity into high-speed rail going
into New England and going into the Northeast corridor south and
going West through New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  It’s not any of
those things; it’s a train station.  It’s only for some of these
lines, and it is merely one small part of what is really the
development of a huge shopping and office mall in this former
Post Office location directly across 8th Avenue from Penn
Station.  This is almost $600 million in this Federal investment
grant being combined with investments more or less ordered by the
various transportation agencies in the New York area, and a
significant investment by the state of New York, essentially in
order to create 850,000 square feet of new office and retail mall
space.
Now what’s going on with malls across the United States?
They’re going bankrupt.  So, what we’re creating here is an
immediate, new potential large-scale bankruptcy like the one that
just occurred with the public/private partnership for the Indiana
Toll Road; like the one that just occurred with the
public/private partnership for Route 130 in Texas, which just —
God bless it — emerged from bankruptcy for the second time under
a new private/public partnership which will soon go bankrupt for
the third time.  These projects which can’t even take tolls; not
even high tolls.  Even with those high tolls can still not meet
the rapacious demands of the private investment banks, private
equity funds, and the other Wall Street which want 10% return on
their investment annually; want all of their capital back in ten
years.  They simply cannot meet these demands, even with tolls
that drivers cannot pay.  This kind of failure is going on all
over the country of exactly this kind of large-scale investment
that we unfortunately just saw go into New York.
What is needed, clearly, is in the trillions; the $1
trillion is a low estimate of what is needed if the United States
were to stop the decline in per capita provision and use of
electricity and instead increase it again.  If it were to stop
the decline in all of the most productive forms of the use of
water, and instead increase it again by new water management,
water transfer, and even at the frontiers of technology, water
creation; that is, storm creation technologies, especially in the
West of the country.  If the United States were to stop the
decline in passenger rail and freight rail travel annually, and
instead build out an entirely new national high-speed rail
network.  If it were really to attack the problems of storm
management, or storm protection; the kind of thing which would
have prevented the ruination of the tunnels in the New York
subway and rail systems in the first place.  If they had been
able to have sea gates to stop the destruction wrought by
Hurricane Sandy, the replacement of water infrastructure
nationally with new infrastructure.  This clearly requires
trillions, and it requires trillions in a short period of time.
There is only one way that this can be attempted, and that is to
create a national credit institution which both attracts new
Federal credit and also attracts the investment of holders of
existing US Treasury debt, the investment of holders of municipal
debts, of state debts who want to put that in the way that
citizens did in the period of World War II into new war bonds;
who want to put that into a new bank created by Congress and make
a bank capable of issuing trillions of dollars in infrastructure
credit; and have it coming from sources already existing within
the Federal government at the same time, as well as the
participation of infrastructure bonding by state and municipal
agencies.  It is only through that kind of Hamiltonian national
credit issuance that, putting aside all the nonsense about
public/private partnerships or the idea that some in the Trump
administration had of an infrastructure bank which was really
more like a private/private partnership, a kind of giveaway to
organized capital in the United States in order to put it into a
bank which would reward them with tax credits equal to what they
were putting in, and then borrow and borrow and borrow on the
debt markets.  This kind of Wall Street scheme absolutely is
destructive, and results not simply in these repeated
bankruptcies, but actual destruction of infrastructure in the
country.
Clearly, that requires that Glass-Steagall be reinstated.
Why?  Take a look at the issuance of credit of China over the
last ten years.  It clearly has been driving the majority, and at
all times over that decade, a third or more of the growth in the
world.  It’s been doing that perhaps on the order of $10 trillion
or more in credit issued by the major public commercial banks in
China; what are sometimes called the policy banks, but they are
public, commercial banks.  Although the Chinese system is clearly
Helsomewhat different than ours, nonetheless commercial banking
is commercial banking; whether it’s being done by
government-backed banks or being done by commercial banks which
are entirely private.  Their publicly-backed commercial banks
have put $10 trillion or more in new credit into the development
of the Chinese economy.  Increasingly in the last two years, into
the projects that I was referencing in the beginning in other
countries along what they call the Belt and Road, the economic
Belt and the maritime Silk Road; which have now crossed into
Africa and are now crossing into the Middle East war zones to
reconstruct them.  Perhaps $400-500 billion is already invested
and committed outside China in the last two years by these major
banks.
Now, how have they done it?  Obviously during this period of
time, there have been some bubbles created in the Chinese economy
in real estate and so forth, bad debt of the same kind which
brought down the banking systems of the United States and Europe.
How have they avoided that?  First of all, the vast majority of
that new credit has gone into the most productive and most
productivity-generating investments; in particular, the platforms
of new infrastructure from nuclear power to fusion power research
to the dynamic space program and to the national high-speed rail
networks, the North-South water transfer, projects which have
changed the availability of water in the Chinese economy.  That’s
first of all.  Second of all, they have operated under a fairly
strict enforced Glass-Steagall regimen since January 1, 1995.
That has also enabled those banks to overcome the formation of
bad debt, the existence of bankruptcies, and to keep on issuing
this productive credit.  They have, despite this huge credit
issuance, stayed below 3% of the world’s banking systems’
exposure to derivatives.  Less than 3% of that exposure is in the
Chinese commercial banking system.  Their income, their revenue
has been overwhelmingly from loans, including 70% to 80% and more
of the annual revenue of all of these banks in comparison to half
or less than half of the income of the megabanks in the United
States coming from interest on loans.  That has indicated the
Glass-Steagall ordering of their banking system, and has enabled
them to keep doing this.
We have to reinstate Glass-Steagall here immediately in
order to put the commercial banking system of the United States
in a condition where it will make productive loans of that kind,
and in order to head off what is clearly now an approaching crash
on the order of, or greater than, 2008.  You have all sorts of
bankruptcies, not just public/private partnerships; all sorts of
bankruptcies rising fairly dramatically in the United States
after a tremendous issuance of credit to the banks, and by those
banks to the largest corporations and on the high interest debt
markets of other corporations, which have set them up for another
crash which is now approaching.  Just to give one example, it was
reported the day before yesterday that in Texas, which of course
brings together the central area of the shale oil and gas boom of
the last ten years and all of the companies associated with that,
along with retail chains and malls.  The rate of corporate
bankruptcies in the first six months of this year in Texas has
been an all-time record; much higher than even in 2009, the real
of the real, total collapse.  It has been about 50% higher than
the same period of time last year.  When you look at the auto
loan delinquencies rising rapidly, the credit card delinquencies
rising rapidly, the fact that the Federal government has just had
to restate its exposure to student debt in such a way that it
suddenly produced a deficit in June of nearly $100 billion in the
Federal budget in a month in which there is usually a surplus,
simply because of the losses coming from the write-off of
defaulted student debt.  This kind of a crash would not only
devastate our economy, it would also cause tremendous for the
international collaboration in development; which is really the
leading and positive feature of these summit meetings which have
occurred.
As the American people have been demanding, we have to
reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act.  Janet Yellen was asked about
this just yesterday again in her Senate testimony; and gave the
usual nonsense explanation that we should value highly the
Lehmann Brothers of the world, because because of Glass-Steagall,
she said, Lehmann Brothers failed.  Because of Glass-Steagall,
other investment banks failed.  Whereas, if we had not repealed
Glass-Steagall, they could be rescued by big commercial banks and
therefore, these Wall Street speculators could keep on doing what
they were doing.  But the question alone indicated that — the
question was from a Senator who asked her “Did we make a mistake
in repealing Glass-Steagall?” — indicates that that question is
still reverberating through Congress.  We have to get that
reinstated in order for the rest of this program which is our
objective, to work.  So, that’s what I would say about it, Matt.

OGDEN:  As you stated correctly yesterday, this is the major
weakness of the Trump administration at this point.  Even the
ability to follow through on these kinds of productive
relationships with China in terms of great projects and
infrastructure development is in jeopardy.  Not only because
you’re missing the entire mechanism to make that work in the form
of a national bank, but also because we’re flirting with disaster
as another financial crisis — potentially worse than 2008 — is
looming over the entire trans-Atlantic.

GALLAGHER: And all of the collaboration of the sort that we
just saw in Africa, if people can actually put themselves in that
situation; all of the collaboration that we saw there could be
replicated in terms of collaboration and development of, for
example, high-speed rail networks in the United States with the
Asian powers which are financing that in Africa and in other
areas of Asia.  But not if our policy is going to be one of no
national public funding, no national public credit institution.
There will be no way for those investments and that engineering
assistance to take place.

OGDEN:  It’s only now that China has actually even been able
to take off in terms of this global infrastructure program in the
way that it has wanted to.  As Bill Jones went through on this
program on Monday, despite the fact that it was all the way back
in 1991, 1994 that the Eurasian Land-Bridge idea was being
discussed in high-level circles in China with Helga Zepp-LaRouche
attending forums on this subject in Beijing in 1994.  We had two
major economic crises in the intervening period:  1997, but then
in a major way, 2008.  It’s only been since 2013 that Xi Jinping
has been able to get this program off the ground.  So, if you
look at this in the long term, you really are at a crucial
decision point for the entire globe on which this decision by the
Trump administration — are you going to follow through on this
promise you made in the campaign?  The future of a lot hinges on
that.  Frankly, with the kind of courage Trump has shown in the
face of the severity of the propaganda and attacks against him on
the Russia question, there is no excuse why he should not have
the same kind of courage in the face of Wall Street.  One
question is, as Mr. LaRouche identified it all the way back in
the transition period, what is the nefarious role that is being
played by Steve Mnuchin, for example, in undermining and
sabotaging what was clearly one of the issues on which the
American people voted in the Trump campaign; which was
Glass-Steagall and finally getting tough on Wall Street.

GALLAGHER:  You’ll remember as recently as a month or so
ago, in an interview, the President said some people want to go
back to the old Glass-Steagall system; we’re looking at that
right now.  That’s what he said.  Clearly, there is also strong
opposition from certain people in Congress who are in Wall
Street’s pocket in the Republican Party, and also from Mnuchin
and others in the administration who want to give Wall Street a
complete deregulation instead.  The President has been letting
those people have their way; and so of course, have the
Republican leadership in both Houses of Congress been kowtowing
in the extreme to the demands of Wall Street to take off
regulations, to let them again leverage up in the way that they
did right before the last crash where they got up to 30:1 and
35:1 debt leverage.  They want to have the capital requirements
lowered so they can leverage up again.  These kinds of demands
are being granted by the leadership in Congress and by the
President, when they have clearly said to the American people, we
want productivity; we want development to return; we want new
infrastructure development to return; we want to rebuild the
country.  They’re not doing it.  I would just emphasize that
those members of the House and the Senate in the order of 50 or
60 total who have put their names on Glass-Steagall legislation,
they have done so with large-scale petition drives being done by
constituency groups with which we’ve been working, which have put
them in a position to say “My constituents are demanding this;
and constituents across the country are demanding reinstating
Glass-Steagall.”  They moved from that, so it’s really up to us
to get this done and break through this combination of money and
fear and cowardice which is really letting Wall Street continue
to run this infrastructure issue.  They will absolutely destroy
what little remains of the infrastructure in the country; they
will make these breakdown crises as in New York and dam that
collapsed in California and the locks that are threatening to
collapse on our major waterways.  They will make them far worse
by their toll-looting schemes and their public/private
partnership schemes.  That’s got to be completely replaced by a
policy of Hamiltonian national credit; that’s the only thing that
will work.

OGDEN:  Exactly.  As Helga was saying when we spoke with her
earlier today, this is the strategic priority in terms of a
breakthrough on the domestic front in the United States; is
securing the kind of momentum necessary to force the
Glass-Steagall measure through, and to create the kind of
political environment in which it’s impossible to oppose
Glass-Steagall.  The kind of situation that is now hitting in New
York, we’ve now come into the official “Summer of Hell” as Jason
said in the beginning of that video; this creates the kind of
political conditions on the ground where you can really catalyze
at least a discussion of the type of infrastructure vision that
you need for the United States.  But this comes in the context of
what could potentially come out of a US-China cooperation on Silk
Road development, or the Belt and Road Initiative development.
As Jason said, you do have to really think in terms of at least
50 years into the future.  What is the kind of economic geometry
in which these current crises, these current projects fit?  And
the only form of economics which is based on that kind of
thinking, is what Hamilton came up with at the origination of the
United States:  This credit system which is fundamentally
different from the kind of monetarism which this public/private
partnership approach is based on. That’s the only kind of
philosophy which thinks in terms of 50-100-year returns in terms
of real physical wealth and real increases of productivity rather
than just accounting.

GALLAGHER:  There are people such as our friend Hal Cooper,
a very experienced and expert railroad engineer and planner, who
have exactly that kind of vision of how the now-collapsing
transit system around New York City could be transformed into
something in which the lines would not all be converging on Penn
Station and stopping there, and then going into tunnels and
gradually going back the other way — all of it at 10mph or less.
But rather, those transportation lines within the city would be
opening up and connecting directly into high-speed lines coming
out of that area, going to New York State and New England, going
west across the belt between New York and Chicago and the whole
high-speed planning area there; going down all the way to Florida
in the Northeast corridor.  That these kinds of directly flowing
connections which would make the transit system around New York
merely the major node, the biggest node in the country in a
continually connected national high-speed transportation network.
These kinds of plans do exist; they require — as I was saying
before — naturally they require a great deal of investment.
They don’t require a few hundred million dollars from here and
there and everywhere else into an office and shopping mall to
make a new train station.  They require serious, long-term, high
productivity building of the kind of transportation
infrastructure that we have nowhere in this country at this time.
That’s where Hamiltonian banking and credit comes in; and it’s
really the only thing that can make that possible.

OGDEN:  Well, thank you very much, Paul.  I know that your
last appearance on this program generated a lot of views on the
internet, and also a lot of questions.  I think a lot of the
viewers appreciated the opportunity to write in via the comments
on YouTube.

GALLAGHER:  I tried to answer some of them.

OGDEN:  You had the opportunity to answer them.  So, we
would invite people again; if you have questions for Paul, go
ahead and write them in the comments section on this YouTube
video.  Maybe we can do another follow-up video where it’s a
question and answer kind of session like that.  This is an
ongoing discussion, obviously; and we’ve got a lot of
responsibility on our shoulders to follow through on this policy
and to make this work.
So, thanks a lot, Paul, for joining us.

GALLAGHER:  Thank you.

OGDEN:  Thank you for watching; and please stay tuned to larouchepac.com.