http://www.californiadroughtupdate.org/pdf/20180111-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
The need for the U.S. to be able to create a large amount of national economic credit, rapidly, to mobilize the American economy and raise its productivity, is not simply a matter of “renewing the nation’s infrastructure,” but also one of maintaining credit for innovative manufacturing—including by small and medium-sized companies—through a large national system of commercial banks.
For 150 years, when such mobilization of national credit was done successfully—from the time of Washington to that of FDR—the method of doing it was Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s.
From: LaRouche’s Four Laws & America’s Future On The New Silk Road
A Note To Readers
Water, rain, snow, flooding, broken spillways, wrecked aqueducts– that is California today. Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico– more than $200 billion in damage and the Congress still has not passed the rebuilding bill, leaving millions of Americans in misery and death. While China now has the most aggressive research program in the world for advanced nuclear technologies, including for fusion, the U.S. continues to shut down nuclear plants and construction and cuts the fusion research budget even more.
The President’s intent to make America great by building and rebuilding our infrastructure must get moving. The battle is being sabotaged by the Republicans in the Congress and Wall Street’s parasitical speculative system. The Feature this week presents how to restructure the financial system to make possible the building of a new productive platform of infrastructure for the nation.
Others are beginning to call attention to the urgency of freeing the President from the saboteurs:
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), representing millions of people in manufacturing companies, released a strong letter to Trump Jan. 9, signed by NAM CEO Jay Timmons. “The infrastructure investments of the 1950s and 1960s brought tremendous economic benefits, built strong communities, improved productivity and competitiveness, and allowed manufacturing to grow and put people to work in solid middle-class jobs. Today, however, as more and more of our infrastructure crumbles, it is not keeping up with modern demands for safety and innovation, nor is it giving American workers the tools they need to compete with the rest of the world.”
In This Week’s Report
Southern California had ten months of virtually no precipitation and the northern part of the state was not much better. The question asked for the past weeks was “is this a new drought?” Well this week’s rain and some snow does not answer that question yet, for after all, this is California and anything can happen in the remaining two months of the “rainy season.” The first section below gives the story for this week anyway.
The Oroville Dam update features the January 5 release of the Independent Forensic Team (IFT) final report on the collapse of the Oroville Dam spillway of February, 2017. The Department of Water Resources, the report states, in my words demonstrated gross incompetence, irresponsibility, and a lack of serious foresight and planning. Of course, all that can be said of virtually the entire political leadership of the nation over the past 40 plus years. And as the saying goes, the fish rots from the head down, such rottenness at the top has percolated down through all the institutions of the nation.
Lack of precipitation in the entire Colorado River Basin, while not threatening to the entire Southwest’s water supply yet, is beginning to become alarming.
The damage from California’s five year drought continues to be counted up. Subsidence along the Friant-Kern Canal, with a five-inch drop within the past year in southern Tulare County has caused a 60 percent reduction in deliveries to districts along the lower half of the canal system.
The section “Infrastructure and Related News” includes articles on Trump’s speech to the American Farm Bureau Federation, the tax cut bill, the fight between Trump and the Republican Congress on infrastructure, China’s investments in the U.S. “rust belt,” and a report on how one-third of global GDP growth this past year occurred in China.
The Feature this week under the title of The American Credit System begins with two videos on what is an economy and what is value. It concludes with chapter 2 of the new pamphlet, “LaRouche’s Four Laws & America’s Future On The New Silk Road.”
