July 27, 2010 -- So you agree we need to create jobs. By what means? We could build a casino. Jobs would be created, and money would come in. But wait, is that really what we want?

Let's think of our economy from the standpoint of 2050. What will be the conditions of life which we will have handed to that generation of youth, in such areas as energy and water availability, food production, or cultural optimism?

The immediate construction of the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), an “on-the-shelf” project designed in the 1960's, would create jobs immediately in the present, while also providing a vast increase in water supply and energy production for the future. Additionally, this project would enhance soil quality, open up canal routes across the continent, and cleanse polluted areas, like the Great Lakes.

The project essentially redirects runoff from the mountains of Alaska and Canada, through the Great American Desert, using a system of aquifers, pumps, dams, and canals. This will provide that desert region with water and the potential to increase plant life, allowing a physical transformation of the region, as green plants, using chlorophyll, have the power of transforming the sun's energy into carbohydrate-rich life forms, and also to moderate the climate, with trees converting 10% of solar radiation into biomass, and grasses 1 to 2%.

Those who push things like casinos, are still living in a world dominated by money. This approach to economics is what has created the collapse, and that world is already dead. We need a higher approach, what economist Lyndon LaRouche calls physical economy.

A project of this scale will demonstrate what it takes to create, and what the results are, of a physical transformation of a given environment, comparable to what we will be necessary to make Mars habitable.

Let's think big! Merely attempting to make ends meet is not enough, the entire physical economy has been destroyed under several decades of monetarism and globalization. We must increase our productive powers, in order to address a diminishing resource base, a collapsed infrastructure system, and a growing population. Building NAWAPA will allow us to survive in the present, but it will also allow us to improve the future, and make our time here on the planet worthwhile.

My campaign will have more on this project in the near future.

--Rachel Brown