A pipeline shuts down in Alaska. Equipment failures disrupt air travel in Los Angeles. Electricity runs short at a spy agency in Maryland.

None of these recent events resulted from a natural disaster or terrorist attack, but they may as well have, some homeland security experts say. They worry that too little attention is paid to how fast the country's basic operating systems are deteriorating.

The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation "D" for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.

There have been four outstanding aspects of the way in which deregulation has virtually destroyed the U.S.A.'s economic stability today: 1.) The Nixon use of a flight into the disease of "Friedmanism" as a prelude to the wrecking of the world monetary-financial system through the breakup of the Bretton Woods system; 2.) The massive deregulation conducted under the 1977-1981 Carter Administration; 3.) The post-October 1987 lunatic binge ("financial derivatives") of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan; and, 4.) The sheer economic-financial lunacy of the Bush-Cheney Administration. These are not the only important factors, but they have been the most crucial among the blunders of U.S. policy over the 1968-2006 interval to date.

The underlying common feature of these and related, ruinous measures can be summed up in one word: "deregulation." The single most ruinous feature of the entire period 1968-2006 to date, has been the interweaving of the collapse of basic economic infrastructure with an increasingly wild emphasis on "free trade."

Under any continuation of those trend-features of that 1968-2006 interval, the U.S. is doomed to not merely a new world depression, in the sense "depression" was understood in the Europe and Americas of the 1930s, but the more calamitous form of a general breakdown-crisis of the present world economic-financial system. However, there are alternatives. The pivotal issue is the need to put the U.S. banking system, the Federal Reserve System, into bankruptcy, under U.S. Federal Government receivership. Much of the paper involved, including current mortgage values, financial derivatives obligations generally, and so on must be savagely discounted, or simply discarded as financial derivatives must be. However, this means that the U.S. Federal Government must intervene to keep the doors of the banks open, and their functional role in maintaining the current level of physical economic support of levels of employment, production, and essential services, while also serving as a conduit of long-term Federal credit at rates of 2% simple-interest, or lower, needed to stabilize impaired banking institutions and also stimulate growth of employment and output to national and regional levels above break-even.

The presently indispensable turn to such kinds of measures must be matched by a reinstitution of the kinds of Federal regulation which came out of the 1933-1945 interval of recovery from the deep Coolidge-Hoover depression of the national economy.

That is not "socialism," contrary to the reckless babbling of some. Indeed, solid economic conservatives of the 1950s would have called this a change back to a "fair trade" policy, as an escape from the syphilis-like effects of recent decades' whorish dalliance with a street-walker's sort of "free trade" policy

LaRouche's economic plans for a "high technology" economy are brilliantly conceived and carefully researched. They have genuine merit. But there's one little hitch: To carry them out would require an authoritarian transformation of the U.S. government and the development of a Fascist type corporative state (which the West German branch of LaRouche's organization has already advocated in its program, "Der Rechsstaat"). If U.S. economic clout continues to weaken at home and abroad, it is quite possible that significant forces in U.S. industry will become attracted to LaRouche's economic thinking. Certainly he is the only American economist today who is seriously exploring the Fascist alternative for American business. As such, he will inevitably receive a respectful hearing (even if he fails to make any converts) from some conservative business circles, in spite of his kooky "cover." [From earlier] (Already, in seeking conservative business support for his 1980 presidential campaign he is speaking with a new soberness.)