LAROUCHE PAC SPECIAL REPORT
NAWAPA XXI: A Great Project
To Restore the American System
jReleased with a cover date of March 2012, the LaRouche PAC Special Report is written, as stated in the Abstract, "as a proposal for action, to be immediately undertaken by elected officials of government," "as a handbook for patriots who seek to re-establish the United States as a leader in science, technology, and industry," and "for those who seek to restore a vigorous use of the powers which have been rightly bestowed upon our institutions of government in order to act in the interests of the nation."
The report presents a detailed plan to:
- Employ millions in productive labor and restore U.S. manufacturing.
- Re-establish water, food, and power security for North America, establish a continental system of drought and flood control, and develop new infrastructure corridors involving most of the continent.
- Restore the U.S. system of public credit.
- Demonstrate man's ability to improve on nature."
It is dedicated to President John F. Kennedy, who, had he not been assassinated, would have proceeded to develop the great North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) program, as proposed by the Parsons Engineering Co. in the mid-1960s (see the LPAC video "NAWAPA 1964").
Topics covered in the report, but not included here are:
- A "History of NAWAPA;
- Section I: NAWAPA XXI System Requirements"; and
- "Section II: Water and Agriculture."
In "Section III: How NAWAPA XXI Will Restore the U.S. System of Public Credit," we include Parts 1 and 4,
- "Hamilton's National Banking System of Public Credit"
- "Roosevelt's Credit Funds"
The Appendices are not included here.
The principal author of the report is Michael Kirsch of the LaRouche Basement Team.
EIR presents significant excerpts from the report, and strongly encourages readers to view the complete text online.
Introduction
Today, the United States is a shadow of what it was before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The lingering promise of visionary leadership in U.S. government was finally shattered with the assassination of Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy five years later. The sudden transition from technological optimism, to the belief in halting scientific progress and resource development, and the worship of market speculation and deregulation, created the predictable outcome of rusting factories, degrading infrastructure, and a lack of future-orientation within our citizens.
The loss of manufacturing and skilled labor capacity in the last decades, accelerating with each passing year, has pushed us into a dangerous dependence on a collapsing global free-trade economy. Our infrastructure grid is decrepit on all levels. Those with skill in productive trades are at or past retirement, without adequate replacement by a younger generation raised in a post-industrial, service economy. Food security is non-existent, as historically low commodity reserves, combined with aging infrastructure, have left us vulnerable to catastrophic storms, floods, and drought, such as those which devastated the food belt in 2011.
On top of the present lack of productive capacity, the cultural shift in outlook has spawned a religious fervor of self-induced cutting, in the name of "fiscal responsibility," which threatens to remove any remaining logistical and productive capacity needed for rebuilding our economy.
This has not been accidental. The London- and Wall Street-centered monetary empire has targeted the United States for destruction, a strategic intention most nakedly displayed in the character of the last two Presidential administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
All of these wounds are self-inflicted, and our role as errand boy for a system outside of our own sovereign interests, arises from a national amnesia of the legacy we betray.
What is needed now is an army of patriots to unite around a plan that is:
- sound and capable of mobilizing the quickly evaporating skills and capabilities of our once great economy,
- reminiscent of our great acts of national pride and cultural progress, and
- will serve to restore the public credit of the United States as a source for productive investment.
With a master plan of this kind to change the direction of the nation, a patriotic movement can be formed, even at this late date, which can create the rallying point for the election of a qualified President.
The plan enclosed, called NAWAPA XXI, meets these criteria. NAWAPA XXI is based on the original 1964 North American Water and Power Alliance proposal for continental water management,[1] but has been updated and expanded to specifically address today's economic needs, including the necessary re-establishment of the U.S. public credit system.
The plan, however, whose impact and need is fully demonstrated in the following pages, is not merely an engineering project capable of restoring economic progress; it implies and requires an understanding of economics as a physical science.
It requires a recognition that the cause of the current crisis has not been an error in the financial markets, but an error of the paradigm of monetary value. Monetary value has replaced the value of technological progress which comes from mankind's mastery and regulation of nature. Practically speaking, the latter outlook translates into new resource and power development systems, with constant increases in manufacturing and industry to service the growth of those capabilities, while the former outlook promotes cannibalization of existing infrastructure, making monetary profits to continue consumption, without creating the productivity to regenerate the wealth consumed.
The history of evolution of life on Earth, as demonstrated by LaRouche PAC's Research Team,[2] has never shown a tendency toward balance. The biosphere as a whole has evolved through successively higher stages through transformations akin to technological revolutions, in which the influence of living matter over the surface of the planet has steadily increased. This is seen, for example, in the creation of an oxygen atmosphere by free-living photosynthesizing bacteria, the subsequent development of multicellular organisms requiring a greater throughput of matter and energy, and the eventual colonization of the land, vastly increasing the biomass of the planet and fundamentally altering such global processes as the hydrological cycle.
Each new system which had been waiting in the wings, with a point of incidence much earlier in the process, takes over as the predominant system for as long as it maintains the baseline requirement for survival.
Human evolution is unique in this process, as human society contains within itself the option to willfully self-develop. Where social organization and scientific progress have been united, mankind's development has succeeded, with the history of the United States serving as an example of this forward progress of successive evolutionary phases of an economy.
Water-wheel technology, launched for iron production and other manufactures, established the sovereignty of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Inland waterway development, with regulation of our rivers during the Washington Administration, followed by New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio canals in the James Monroe and John Quincy Adams administrations, opened new resources for industry and consumption, and opened the Midwest for habitation. The continued promotion of canals and initiation of railroads alongside them, by Adams, secured our leadership in iron production and other manufactures. A new power of mankind was beginning, akin to the stages represented in the nested conical growth function of the stages of the biosphere. Lincoln's promotion of domestic manufactures, and push to colonize the West, then secured the scope of the United States as we know it today.
Franklin Roosevelt's development program of the Tennessee, Columbia, and Colorado River Basin developments expanded and secured what the transcontinental railroads began, now harnessing the resources of rivers, securing the fertility and productivity of our soils, protecting our citizens from flood and drought, electrifying the 90% of our farms without power, and using breakthroughs in chemistry to skyrocket our food production. Our national productivity increased qualitatively, opening the way for a new level of sustained consumption and production. New chemical fuel sources launched the colonization of the atmosphere by man, and the further penetration into space. Discoveries in chemistry increased food production, while discoveries in the nuclear field held promises only typified by serving as an unbridled power source.
Albeit with long periods of inactivity in this forward moving process, often amounting to a whole generation of stasis or stagnation, the trend has been one of successfully transmitting and making the discoveries needed to continue mankind's development. John F. Kennedy was in a line of American Presidents who picked up this development thread, pushing the boundaries of mankind's scientific capabilities, continuing Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace and nuclear power start-ups, and doing his utmost to push forward the basin development policy of Roosevelt, calling for nothing less than a nationwide TVA. Had John Kennedy lived, there is little doubt that NAWAPA, as proposed in 1964, would have been completed, which, combined with his nuclear rocket program to follow the Moon landing, would have created the necessary higher system in mankind's forward evolution (Figure 1).[3] Since the turn away from the policies which JFK represented in his time, the United States has contradicted this trend of continued transmission and application of discoveries with each subsequent generation, creating an unprecedented gap of two generations. A policy of decreasing productivity, coupled with the consequent fixed and decreasing consumption of resources, puts us directly in the category of evolutionary systems destined for extinction.
By adopting the contents of this report as an imperative for the United States and its neighbors, it is not too late to turn the tide of backwardness in which our nation is now drowning, and transmit the knowledge and operation of a productive economy from an older generation, soon to pass, to a new generation.
We live on borrowed time. Act now.
[1] See "History of NAWAPA" section of this report (http://larouchepac.com/nawapaxxi).
[2] See larouchepac.com/evolution.
[3] See "History of NAWAPA" section of this report.
