Dossiers NAWAPA XXI Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente Emergency Resolution NAWAPA XXI: Applying a System of Public Credit 10 May 2012 The Committee for the Republic of Canada has initiated a nationwide mobilization to win support for the following emergency resolution. [You may sign the Resolution electronically at the bottom of this page.] In 2007-2008, the governments of the trans-Atlantic region missed the opportunity to attack and eliminate the speculation-based financial system. The financial bubble created over decades had finally burst, but proposals to protect the real economy from the collapse of fictitious asset values were ignored or blocked. The failure to implement available solutions in the self-interest of nations led to a continuous series of financial bailouts by European governments and by the Bush and Obama administrations in the United States. In Canada there were officially no bank bailouts but only so-called “liquidity support” for the banks [1]. Bank bailouts and continuous support around the world for a “universal banking” speculation-based system forced federal governments to initiate and carry out severe austerity measures on behalf of these banks. Hospitals, schools, police forces, and other forms of vital social infrastructure have continued to disintegrate, and millions of families have lost their livelihoods, including long-term employment in productive jobs, life’s savings, and homes. In the United States, as a consequence of the continued bailout policy of 2007-2012, the last vestiges of the machine-tool sector, heavy industry, and other potential infrastructure building capacities have almost entirely disappeared. Canada is also facing a dire situation: an overvalued housing market has driven consumer debt to an all time high of 153% of average household income. Ontario’s industrial belt is facing high unemployment while manufacturing is collapsing across the country. Advanced sector industries are in serious difficulty with the near shutdown of our nuclear industry and budget slashing in Canadian aerospace. Highly qualified workers are now retiring and our young generations cannot find work as they are largely unskilled and wholly unprepared for the future. A continental plan of action must be implemented which can also make up for decades of lack of investment in infrastructure and industry, utilizing the skill and technological capacities which still exist before they finally vanish, and address the immediate crisis threatening the existence of both the Canadian and American economies with the imminent blowout of the Euro-zone, by instigating emergency measures creating adequate financial barriers and banking regulation. Such a plan is immediately available, as presented in the Committee for the Republic of Canada Special Report NAWAPA XXI [2] (North American Water and Power Alliance XXI), which proposes: a) reviving the separation between commercial banking and the securities business by enacting legislation modeled on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1933 Glass-Steagall Act; to be immediately followed by, b) establishing a System of Public Credit in Canada, the United States and Mexico by means of the construction and requisite methods of funding of NAWAPA XXI. The NAWAPA XXI plan consists of the following: A water and power proposal employing a vast number of industries involved in material and machine production which are vital for Canada and the United States to develop and salvage, as well as new infrastructure routes stretching most of the continent, providing millions of Canadians and Americans long-term employment, and training a new generation of highly skilled workers; its construction will provide the basis to industrialize northern Canada and Alaska for the first time, while reviving Canada’s golden horseshoe economy and the once proud rust belt states economies of our southern neighbour. The utilization of 11% of the runoff of Alaska, Yukon, and British Columbia, as a permanent source of water to double food production in the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico, and turn would-be flood waters in one area into the means of fighting drought in another, to bring water to the dry Canadian Prairie provinces, to create a network of barge canals stretching from Vancouver to the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway, the deep-water port at Churchill, as well as James Bay and Labrador opening a vast resource potential for Canada’s development. This project would massively increase the economic activity of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico for a generation. Mexico has already initiated water projects that would connect with NAWAPA XXI, while previous generations of political leaders in Canada, such as Prime Minister Lester Pearson, [3] viewed the opportunity to move some of our abundant water resources down South as “one of the most important developments in our history … as important as exporting wheat, or oil or anything else.” NAWAPA XXI would provide a model for cooperation between sovereign nation states that would benefit all parties involved. In the System of Public Credit, existing or newly created Public Debt by the government is funded according to the timetable required for industrial and infrastructural growth, through the means of a reorganized Bank of Canada serving as a credit lending institution for internal improvements and industry. In this system, the anticipated future value of Public Debt associated with the infrastructural and industrial projects circulate as currency in the present. This system has been used in past American infrastructure and industrial mobilizations to build the United States and combat financial oppression, and was established by Alexander Hamilton in his success in turning monetary debts into circulating credit through the use of the Constitutional Powers of Congress and the Bank of the United States, and later applied in Nicholas Biddle’s directing of the second Bank of the United States under President John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln’s Greenback-based national banking system, and Franklin Roosevelt’s use of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Under the proposed plan, the government’s coordination of the vast economic activity and provincial and federal revenues which NAWAPA XXI’s construction will create, will generate enough activity to make feasible sufficient credit emissions through a new credit lending institution to revive our economy as well as actualize any valid debts after Glass-Steagall and an associated banking re-organization. Therefore be it resolved, that I hereby endorse the NAWAPA XXI plan, and that a copy of this Resolution shall be forwarded to Members of Parliament and to the Prime Minister of Canada. For more d’information : writeto@committeerepubliccanada.ca or call at (514)-461-1557 (514)461-7209 [1] David MacDonald: "The Big Banks’ Big Secret"— Estimating government support by Canadian banks during the financial crisis. April 2012. Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. (www.policyalternatives.ca) [2] NAWAPA XXI Report [3] Canadian Broadcasting Corporation “Free Time Broadcast” No. 4 on October 15, 1965 at 8:00 P.M., cited in correspondence of U.S. Senator Frank E. Moss.