As the disaster of Harvey in Houston lingers on, the largest Atlantic hurricane in modern history, the category- five Irma, is blasting through the Caribbean, expected to hit Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico by the time you are reading this, and reaching Florida soon thereafter. A competent infrastructure plan had been proposed for Texas during the Kennedy Administration which would have eliminated the worst of the horrors of the past week — had it been implemented. In the case of these Caribbean islands, where the existing infrastructure is decrepit or non-existent, the capacity to survive Irma is in doubt.

Across the U.S., the 16 years under Bush and Obama saw trillions of tax dollars thrown into bailing out gambling casinos on Wall Street, while trillions more were spent destroying countries in the Middle East, turning them over to terrorist gangs, driving millions out of their homes as refugees across the region and into Europe. Today, the Korean Peninsula, according to left-over neocons from the Bush and Obama era, must be the next target of their failed military adventures — even while virtually every sane human being is warning that the results would be catastrophic for the entire human race.

And yet, most of the world is now beginning to learn first-hand how China lifted 700 million people out of poverty in thirty short years, as the New Silk Road is bringing infrastructure, industry, health facilities, and hope, to the nations and populations subjected to colonial and post colonial looting and warfare for the past several centuries under Western domination.

Organizers in the LaRouche movement in the US are reporting that Americans are increasingly recognizing the "new paradigm" (as Helga Zepp-LaRouche calls it) emerging out of the China-Russia cooperation, creating new global institutions like the BRICS, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These new institutions are reaching out to Africa, Ibero-America, and Asia — and even to the dying economies of Europe — through new financial institutions (e.g., the AIIB and the BRICS New Development Bank) offering credit for physical development, without the political and economic "conditionalities" of the IMF which kept nations subservient to British and American imperial dictates.

But these Americans often fail to understand why the US is not undergoing a similar development process. They have been induced to believe in the monetarist myth that freedom means the freedom of British and Wall Street bankers to run the economy, and the world, as they wish. As the New York City subway system collapses, why do we not do what the Chinese would do, and build an entirely new system with state-of-the-art technology, rather than patheically trying to patch up the hundred-year-old monstrosity? As Houston drowns, why not do what the Chinese did to save thousands of lives every year, building the biggest dam and hydroelectric system in the world at the Three Gorges? The same company which built the Three Gorges is now preparing to save Central Africa through the Transaqua project, moving water from the Congo to the shrinking Lake Chad. Why didn't the US build the NAWAPA project, and the Houston water-control program, and other such Great Projects, as Kennedy had proposed along with his space program?

To know the answer to that question, we must "break things open" in the US, Lyndon LaRouche said today. "We must do it — don't talk about issues, talk about the facts. This must be done for mankind — it's not anything smaller than that. And now is the time — victory will be in reach."

The only thing standing in the way is the British Empire — meaning the London and Wall Street institutions which have been allowed to maintain "the independence of the Federal Reserve" and the "free market" take-down of Glass-Steagall and related regulations on the banking system. These were the policies implemented by FDR, which allowed him to direct the nation's credit to the most massive infrastructure development the world had ever seen, or would see again until today's One Belt One Road coming from China. Now, the US economy has collapsed, and the Wall Street banks are bankrupt, desperately trying to bail out their gambling debts by looting not only the developing nations, but the American economy and the American people.

The response of the vast majority of the American people to the disaster in Houston was to put aside the media-created "issues," issues created to the purpose of making people small, creating artificial conflicts over petty or irrelevant concerns, while their world is collapsing into economic decay and permanent warfare. But after Harvey, thousands of people went to Houston, offering their support to save people in distress, Republican or Democrat, White or Black or Brown, even risking their own lives.

Trump was elected because he was committed to ending the economic decay, and the permanent "regime change" war policies. His effort to build a working relationship with Russia, and to join with China in the New Silk Road, provides the promise of the US becoming part of that new paradigm. The British and their assets in the US are desperate to stop him from implementing that plan, which would mean the end of Empire.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche today pointed to the inspiration felt by all Americans who see the selfless actions of the thousands who are acting to help those suffering in Houston. If we are to give Americans the strength to act against the Empire, to free the nation and the world of the dictates of the City of London and Wall Street, she said, we must do everything possible to elevate people to the level of the sublime, as Schiller understood that term — to find in themselves that goodness which is more precious than life itself, that which locates the capacity of each person to act for the betterment of mankind as a whole. Nothing less than that can succeed, and yet, as Lyndon LaRouche said, if we act in that way, victory will be in reach.