www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20201029-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf?_t=1604094292
“While President Trump has spent almost his entire term promoting a massive multi-trillion dollar program for building and rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, the U.S. Congress has refused to even consider such a policy. Yet, even with that the president has been able to allocate billions for necessary projects of urgent repairs to key structures and other projects. Both what he has proposed and what he has already done should be enough to say that he is “the Best ‘Democrat’ Since JFK.’”
A Note To Readers
With only five days to the most important election since that of 1860, which brought Abraham Lincoln into the presidency, the re-election of Donald Trump is as critical for the nation’s future as was the election of Lincoln.
Now some may object, but perhaps this issue of my report can, if not convince you of that necessity, but at least get you thinking about why I have said what I said.
Toward that end two sections of this report are focused on what Trump has done and can do in a second term. First under the title of “Infrastructure– Trump,” the following is stated:
While President Trump has spent almost his entire term promoting a massive multi-trillion dollar program for building and rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, the U.S. Congress has refused to even consider such a policy. Yet, even with that the president has been able to allocate billions for necessary projects of urgent repairs to key structures and other projects. Both what he has proposed and what he has already done should be enough to say that he is “the Best ‘Democrat’ Since JFK.”
Look at the Artemis program. For the first time since Apollo, Americans are going back to the Moon to colonize and industrialize it, using it as the jumping off point for a voyage to Mars. How much will be discovered in the process? Fusion power, the promised, unlimited energy resource of the future, which the Artemis program is advancing for propulsion in space in particular, and which will give us the capability to green all of Earth’s deserts, is just part of the future this program builds for future generations. Obama and Biden killed manned space exploration. We became dependent on Russia for even going to the International Space Station. Obama once remarked that quite simply, we “don’t need no fancy fusion energy.”
Consider the New Lock at the Soo Locks in Michigan, enabling ships to reliably travel between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes. Approximately 80 million tons of commercial commodities pass through the Soo Locks annually. The second phase of the billion-dollar Soo Locks expansion is now scheduled to start in the Spring of 2021. A 2015 Department of Homeland Security study on impacts of an unexpected Soo Locks closure showed that the deteriorating Soo Locks are a nationally critical infrastructure. On the verge of breakdown, the Great Lakes Navigation System is a critical node essential to U.S. manufacturing and National Security.
The Trump Administration awarded $3.8 billion in BUILD grants and $3.4 billion in Infrastructure for Re-building America (INFRA) grants to communities across the country. Of that, they have awarded $2.9 billion to the so-called “fly-over states” and $960 million to Opportunity Zones. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is now investing $371 million to build and improve critical electric infrastructure across 11 states. Alterations to the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) aim to reduce approval time for highways alone by 70%.
Even more than such projects, look at Project Warp Speed, the crash project that the President has mobilized to develop vaccines and antivirals to defeat COVID-19. Even Dr. Robert Wachter, the chair of Medicine at UC San Francisco and a furious critic of the Trump Administration’s pandemic response, had an honest if very reluctant response recorded in the October 24 Washington Post and other media: “Going from where we were in January and February—where we are going to be hit by this tsunami—to very likely having a vaccine, or more than one vaccine, that is proven safe and effective within a year, is staggeringly impressive, and would only have happened with strong and effective federal action.” Wachter called the vaccine mobilization “nearly flawless,” and which he told the Washington Post he found the words difficult to say.
But the greatest threat to the United States and the world is not Russia, or China. It is the toleration over the past half-century of a logic of economic, social, and political thinking that is now culminating, as it fractures, into an all-out effort to prevent any possible change. The central political pillar of this effort? The coup against Trump.
The second section is titled, “Exploring the Universe,” and presents, once again, the Trump NASA mission Artemis, which will land the first woman and the next man on the Moon in 2024, as the first stage of establishing a permanent colony on the Moon and to pave the way for a manned mission to Mars. Comparing that optimistic and frontier exploration intent to the Obama-Biden actions of shutting down the manned space program and even the ability for the U.S. to land its astronauts on the International Space Station for nine years, we already know what a Biden policy would be, as has been enunciated by several Democratic members of Congress– to cut the funding for the Artemis mission and shut it down.
To create a world that the future will be proud of us for having won, requires a long-term economic vision. It requires far-reaching aspirations for scientific discovery and space exploration. And it requires a defeat of the anti-human intelligence nexus found in Russiagate.
The need for a radical shift in economics and statecraft is urgent. Think of the enormous frauds perpetrated on Wall Street and in the City of London, where money is created out of thin air in a process that loots the physical economy. Think of the millions of people who have already died from famine this year, and the tens of millions more whose lives hang in the balance. And that is considering only the present! What of the tens or hundreds of millions of people who died unnecessarily, or were never born, over the past several decades during which a great opportunity for progress was squandered and prevented?
In any case, after the election result is clear, it is the moment to really start tackling all the issues from the pandemic, the famine, the threatening financial crash, the urgent need to build a world health system, to really start to develop the developing countries in earnest, and all the issues which are absolutely crying out for a summit approach, for a change in paradigm have to be put very much upfront on the agenda.
As President Trump continues his “energizer bunny” appearances at multiple rallies each day, summoning the optimistic spirit of the American people to take on the crucial issues of the day, “Sleepy Joe” occasionally ventures out of his basement hideaway to stoke fears of a coming “Dark Winter”, stumbling through speeches given to small gatherings of socially-distanced parked cars, while counting on censorship to protect him from evidence of his role in promoting wars, pushing economic policies resulting in deindustrialization and loss of productive jobs, and involvement in his son’s corrupt business ventures. There is too much at stake for anyone to succumb to pessimism.
A Trump victory, to clear out this imperial nest in the U.S., clears the way for great power collaboration for the advancement of all nations. On the critical matter of preventing nuclear war, Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday issued an arms control statement, with new negotiating proposals to accommodate U.S. and Russian considerations on pulling back nuclear missiles, and increasing verification, to draw back from the brink. President Trump has personally expressed concern about this for decades.
This week’s Feature is titled, “The Alaska-to-Alberta Railway; The Year We Walk through the Door to the World Land-Bridge, or the Lost Chance of 2020?,” and presents the perspective of a World Land-Bridge linking the United States and Russia across the Bering Strait crossed an important threshold towards realization on September 29, 2020, when President Donald Trump issued a Presidential Border Crossing permit for the Alaska-Alberta Railway Development Corporation (A2A Rail) to lay track across the border between Alaska and Canada. This is a crucial step for the construction of a rail line that can change the world.
Also in this week’s report:
Drought is upon us once again, not just in California but the entire Southwest of the U.S. The U.S. Drought Monitor gives the story for California and subsequent articles discuss the rest of the Southwest and the direction toward more drought and fires throughout the region.
The lengthy section on “Infrastructure” includes, as mentioned above, a section on Trump’s policy. In addition, water infrastructure is discussed along with some real and looming infrastructure disasters.
The section on agriculture includes the report of China purchasing 23 billion in U.S. agricultural goods and a statement by U.S. farmers on the necessity of acting to alleviate the starvation now ongoing in Africa.
Next on “Energy” is an eye-opening report on how China is building or has completed building 777 electrical power generating plants all over the world.
The final section before the Feature, is discussed above, under the title of “Exploring the Universe.”
