“The movie, ‘When We Were Apollo,’ manages to capture, almost physically, the change in human personality induced by a mission orientation to conquer the unknown and unexplored, shared entirely by 450,000 people, as the result of the challenge by the President of the United States, and the crash scientific effort—with management techniques being innovated as the project moved along.”
From the review of the movie featured in this week’s report
Every four years the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) produces an Infrastructure Report Card– a comprehensive assessment of the nation’s 16 major infrastructure categories. Highlighting the failure over more than two generations now to build and repair the nation’s infrastructure, the 2017 report by ASCE graded the nations performance at D+.
“The 2017 grades range from a B for Rail to a D- for Transit, illustrating the clear impact of investment – or lack thereof – on the grades. Three categories – Parks, Solid Waste, and Transit – received a decline in grade this year, while seven – Hazardous Waste, Inland Waterways, Levees, Ports, Rail, Schools, and Wastewater – saw slight improvements. Six categories’ grades remain unchanged from 2013 – Aviation, Bridges, Dams, Drinking Water, Energy, and Roads.” https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/
Just to bring the current infrastructure up to a passable mark, the ASCE has determined, requires about $3.5 trillion. That estimate, according to the Chinese, the nation now engaged in building the most massive infrastructure project in human history– the Belt and Road Initiative– is too low. Their estimate is about $7.0 trillion for U.S. infrastructure.
The ASCE estimate does not even consider the necessity of moving to a new platform of productivity through investments in the frontier infrastructure required for the future in areas such as fusion, maglev rail, space exploration and more.
I began with this in order to emphasize two aspects of this week’s report: One, without completely restructuring the financial system to eliminate the dominance of Wall Street and London’s stranglehold on the economy– now having brought us to the brink of a new collapse– nothing will be done to create the real physical infrastructure and production required for today and the future.
Secondly, this past week has seen a declaration of war by those same parasites to reorganize the western financial system as a top-down bankers dictatorship, virtually outlawing productive investment in favor of more bailouts and speculation, and hiding that behind a fantasy of directing all capital into “green technologies and investments.” Which, by the way, should give us a little insight into why the Extinction Rebellion and other ecofascist phenomenon are all funded by billionaires.
There is a way to solve this problem and that is presented as part of the Feature this week.
Also In This Week’s Report
We begin with a weather report: The Southwest will be hot this Labor Day weekend.
We are now in the most intense two or three months of the California fire season, and still we have been lucky. Perhaps the Gods of Fire are on vacation, for the number of fires and acreage burned this year remains a small fraction of that we have experienced in recent years. An article on why points to the reasons for that.
“When A Mud-puddle Is Considered A Body of Water, Something Has to Give,” reports on the court decision declaring illegal the Obama administration’s 2015 rule that maintained that “rivers used for drinking, recreation and fishing can only be clean if pollution from creeks and other bodies of water feeding into them — including ditches, wetlands and ‘ephemeral’ streams that are created by rainfalls — is regulated….” This policy has resulted in farmers being fined by the EPA for building a small pond on their land for their livestock.
Then under the title, “Some Truth About the Amazon in the Midst of Hysterics,” we contrast actual real, factual reports to those who are having “Amazon grief-counseling sessions.”
A review of the movie ‘When We Were Apollo’ provides a very nice message about “Mission and a Culture of Creativity.”
Ben Deniston for LaRouche PAC then presents why we must “Quadruple Global Electricity Consumption By 2045.”
Finally, the Feature: Helicopter Money, a Banker’s Dictatorship, a Little (or a Lot) of Insanity, and an Alternative to It All.
