http://www.californiadroughtupdate.org/pdf/20170525-California-Drought-(and-Flood)-Update.pdf
People don’t operate from financial incentive, they operate from the standpoint of the meaning of their lives.
Michael Steger
A Note To Readers
About 40 years ago there appeared on our planet a new species. It did not evolve from some already existing plant or animal; though it may have evolved from some deadly virus. Prior to this, Americans understood that an economy meant building things, having productive industries, discovering new scientific principles, planting crops in the ground and harvesting them, undertaking great, bold adventures like the Apollo Project to the Moon, and creating the infrastructure that would serve coming generations– generations that would have the education and training to be even more productive than their parents.
Yes, back then, Americans were known as producers. Often, as with President John Kennedy’s Apollo Project, they had a mission, one that unified the nation with a sense of purpose larger than themselves.
May 29 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Kennedy. Nothing could commemorate him more than giving the nation a great project once again. President Trump appears to be moving to do so. The President sent a high-level representative to the May 14-15 Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, created a “U.S. Belt and Road Committee” to follow through, and invited China to join in planning and building the desperately needed reconstruction of the rotting infrastructure in the United States.
Gradually, in the post-President John Kennedy decades, as the producers died off, or were just eliminated, “economists” of Wall Street (America’s financial oligarchy) discovered that a new species was replacing the soon-to-be extinct producer species. They called this new specie “consumers.” Consumers, perhaps comparable to the drones in a bee hive, produce nothing, do not participate in the physical transformation of nature that citizens of a well-organized physical economy do, and have become the hordes that now, today, populate the Walmarts and shopping centers scattered over the suburban landscape.
But, if the individual has no necessary and productive role to play in creating a future for themselves or the generations to come, then what happens to that person’s self-identity. Knowing that if they live or die matters not, that there is nothing they do that matters to anyone, then why not just die? Or, destroy their minds with drugs; or waste away that potentially creative mind in frivolous or destructive entertainments.
For the economists, and most political leaders, producers, for all they care, may as well go extinct. And it is that view, and the consequences of that view, that Donald Trump understood, and used it to gain the White House. Now, he must deliver on his promises of rebuilding the nation with a new industrial revolution, a great project of infrastructure building, a revived and expanded space exploration policy, and most importantly, eliminating the Wall Street parasites control over the U.S. financial system, with the first step being the restoration of the FDR Glass-Steagall banking law.
The ongoing attempted coup against the Presidency will fail, and the left-over rot from the 16 years of hell imposed on the nation by the Bush and Obama administrations, must, and will, be eliminated. But, especially, the small-minded Republicans in the Congress must have shoved down their throats a real return to the American System of physical economy and the Alexander Hamilton national credit system required for it. We do not need the anti-growth thinking of austerity, budget cuts and the stealing from the public called privatization. We need to grow, grow big, grow fast and join most of the rest of the world in the greatest building project in human history: The China-led One Road One Belt Initiative.
We do not need the mediocrity of small minds. As Lyndon LaRouche once said, mediocrity should be known as a mortal sin.
Contrary to the views of those who created such a weird species as consumers, when this country does great things, it is the government that leads it. An example of that was the electrification of the farms of the U.S., beginning in 1936. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in just 15 short years (during the depression and World War II), took the farm sector from just 10 percent of the farms having electricity in 1935 to 90 percent electrified by 1950.
The REA is the subject of our feature this week.
