“We seek not merely to make government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity. We are poor indeed if this nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
A Note To Readers
California’s water problems and the building and rebuilding of the nation’s infrastructure requires a healthy population. Until the COVID-19 pandemic is under control, nothing will be done. That does not mean serious planning can wait, and the President’s demand that the Congress pass his $2 trillion infrastructure proposal must be done.
But, it is not just in the U.S. and Europe that the pandemic will be stopped. For now it is beginning to sweep through 54 African nations with their 1.2 billion population. It will be devastating, for half or more of the people there have no electricity or running water, not to speak of almost non-existent public health systems. Africa has a “tsunami of other infectious,” to quote Princeton University professor Jessica Metcalf, such as AIDS, Measles, Malaria and more. In addition to millions of already hungry people, the Horn of Africa is being swept by locust swarms which eat as much food that could feed 35,000 people a day.
Like the 1918 flu, which receded during the Summer in the northern hemisphere, but returned from the southern hemisphere in the Fall, in a more virulent form, COVID-19 may do the same. So, we begin our Feature this week with excerpts from a speech by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, she demands that a new global paradigm be our response, and it begin with a global mobilization to create and build a world health system that can defeat this pandemic and deal effectively with those to come.
There is some water and drought news in this report
We begin with the U.S. Drought Monitor and a couple of articles underline the ongoing increasing drought picture for California.
Then we look at a couple of the areas of fall-out from the COVID-19 pandemic: On the ability to fight forest fires and on agriculture.
The Feature this week:
With the worst pandemic in 100 years now sweeping the world, and much of the world economy shut down, it is not a time to forget that it has been the so-called “liberal world order” of the financialization of the western economies that not only created the conditions for the proliferation of such diseases, but also significantly dismantled the health care systems and productive industries required to defeat this new Corona virus, COVID-19.
Our feature this week focuses on the war that must be waged now. For it is a war to defend civilization and to build an economy that is not just well-prepared for such challenges, but to also eliminate the economic policies that have made this pandemic so damn deadly and threatening.
We begin with a short video from China, expressing the reality that this pandemic makes clear that we are all One Humanity. Chinese and Italian opera singers provide the beauty of that idea.
The first article below is from Helga Zepp LaRouche putting forward what must be done: “We Must Build a World Health System Now.”
That can only be done if the U.S. returns to the American System, as I have repeatedly described in these reports.
Perhaps we are on the way to doing so. President Trump is taking unprecedented action that does begin to echo the “first 100 days of FDR.” One-upping Bernie Sanders, Trump has ordered Medicare, now, to cover all costs for all COVID-19 patients. That follows on Trump’s statement last week that he is considering expanding Medicare and Medicaid to poor people. Sanders is probably saying, why didn’t I think of that?
And perhaps, like FDR who imposed his own man on the Federal Reserve and it then funded much of the infrastructure projects of the 1930s and early 1940s, are we seeing the Fed begin to do something similar? That is possible as the Fed is now buying up Municipal debt and will be funding the building of hospitals and roads.
Paul Gallagher of the Executive Intelligence Review has an article you will find below, “If Trump Controls the Fed, Can He Conceive of What Must Be Done?” In that context, the President has once again demanded $2 trillion for funding infrastructure. That the Democrats are resisting may just be one more straw on the camel’s back.
One article below, “There is no Future in Bailouts: Trump Puts Infrastructure Back on the Agenda,” takes on the insanity of the almost $500 billion of the $2.2 trillion CARES bill that will be given directly to the Federal Reserve from the U.S. government, to be used to bailout the Wall Street parasites.
“There is no future in bailouts: Trump puts infrastructure back on the agenda,” summarizes the problem of the “liberal system,” and presents the alternative.
