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The Case for a New WPA
Why many are calling for a modern incarnation of the Depression-era program.
The image catches your breath. The look etched on the mother's face reveals more about the hard lives of migrant workers during the 1930s than any history book. The photo, by Dorothea Lange, is one of the most famous shots in American history and an iconic representation of the Great Depression. Lange captured it while participating in the Farm Security Administration's photography project, a division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
One of the most powerful images of the Great Depression, "Migrant Mother" depicts 32 year-old Florence Thompson, a pea picker, with her children in Nipomo, Calif..
Photo by Dorothea Lange, courtesy of Library of Congress.
In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt took office with the promise of
government action to relieve destitution, unemployment had reached
nearly 25 percent. As part of that commitment, his administration
created the WPA, a permanent jobs program that put 8.5 million Americans
to work between 1935 and 1943. The WPA was a massive public undertaking
that changed the face of a growing nation. In addition to providing
jobs to millions, it brought the nation's transportation system into the
20th century and brought art to people of all classes, leaving the U.S.
with a rich legacy of oral history and artistic masterpieces.
Many organizations are calling for a modern incarnation of the WPA both to assist the nation's 6.5 million long-term unemployed and to advance national priorities, from transitioning to clean energy to modernizing infrastructure to supporting the arts. A new WPA could help support:
Jobs
In 1938 the WPA was the largest employer in the nation. For every job it created, two jobs in the private sector were created indirectly. Today, with unemployment seemingly stuck above nine percent and concerns that young workers will never fully recover from slow-starting careers, a new WPA, like its predecessor, could be the answer. The WPA was an important strategy for lowering unemployment and reducing the human suffering of economic recession. Government can hire people that the private sector typically does not: the long-term unemployed, young people without work experience, people from chronically underemployed populations, older workers nearing retirement, and workers with criminal backgrounds. Job experience and training can help these workers move into new industries for the long term.
Green Infrastructure
A new WPA could also help modernize an American infrastructure in desperate need of overhaul. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. a grade of "D" in categories ranging from drinking water to transit to hazardous waste management, and estimates that $1.6 trillion in investment is needed over five years to bring dams, bridges, roads, sewers and other public projects up to par.
The first WPA played a huge role in modernizing the United States' 19th century infrastructure. Workers built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, and 125,000 public buildings. The WPA built parks, zoos, public pools, golf courses, and even ski hills, many of which are still in use.
This incarnation of the WPA should focus on creating green jobs to decrease U.S. reliance on fossil fuels. WPA workers could perform overdue energy assessments on public buildings and help boost their energy efficiency; build improved and expanded transit systems; or overhaul sewer systems to stop disastrous overflows and protect fresh water sources.
The Arts
The WPA also brought art to the public through Federal Project Number One, which included the Federal Art, Theater, Music, and Writers' Projects. During the life of the WPA, musicians performed 225,000 concerts for 150 million people, many of whom had never seen a concert. They also produced nearly 475,000 works of art, which still decorate post offices, courthouses, and other public buildings.
The Farm Security Administration's (FSA) photography project documented the life of the rural poor through photos. The motto of the program was "introducing America to Americans." The project produced more than 160,000 photos, many of which are iconic today, and captured the struggles of thousands of Americans.
The FSA was not the only project determined to "introduce America" to her citizens. The Writers' Project original goal was to produce accessible, detailed guides to every state in the union so that people could learn about their country. But one of the project's most enduring and important was the Slave Narrative Collection. Between 1936 and 1938, writers conducted more than 2,000 interviews with former slaves in seventeen states. The interviews gave ex-slaves the opportunity to describe what they had lived through and are an important part of the nation's collective memory.
A modern day Writer's Project could bring music, art, and theater back to cash-strapped public schools. It could also hire journalists and writers who have been laid off from the shrinking newspaper and publishing industries to collect oral histories from survivors of World War II and the Civil Rights Era.
True Majority is advocating for a new WPA, while Campaign for America's Future and many other organizations are pushing the Local Jobs Act for America, a bill designed to save local jobs and services, authored by California Rep. George Miller. Notably, the Local Jobs Act lacks WPA-style funding for artists. You can show your support for a modern WPA by signing their petitions, and by calling on Rep. Miller to add funding for the arts to the Local Jobs Act.
It is difficult to quantify the priceless legacy of WPA projects; the highest honor that could be paid to the visionaries of the past would be to repeat their efforts. Maybe the time has come to "introduce America to Americans" all over again.
Interested?- The Food of a Younger Land
Author Mark Kurlansky unearths a Depression-era project to document the country's food traditions. - Protecting Workers, Not Corporations
By actually regulating businesses and standing up for workers' rights, the new Department of Labor is part of a "quiet revolution" in government. - Climate Hero, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
With unemployment near 10 percent and the economy struggling to recover, how do you convince Americans to get involved in solving the climate crisis?
Kate McCormack wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Kate is a freelance writer currently living and working in Zacatecas, Mexico. She volunteers with a transnational workers' rights law center where she participates in outreach to migrant workers about their labor rights in the United States.
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61 Comments so far
Show AllOne form of art which should receive immediate funding is to employ laid off builders in making guillotines as inter-active sculptures for public places.
with or without the heads in the basket?................
I'd love to see one of those planted right in the middle of Wall St. and another one in the halls of Congress.
so many heads, so little time
30 years of decriminalizing corporate crime (euphemistacally called deregulation) will make it hard to convict corporate criminals and their agents in Congress.
Restoring and updating New Deal era regulations is the first step that the Obama Regime refuses to take.
Constructing guillotines may be putting the cart before the horse.
As an unemployed carpenter with some blacksmithing skills I do believe that such a thing could be done. In fact with modern hydraulics and a control panel we could make some solid improvements to the old model. The Aristocracy has innovated, so why shouldn't we?
I knew FDR, FDR was a friend of mine. Obama, you're no FDR.
Is there ANYTHING Obama has in common with FDR other than cigarette smoking?
Many of the unemployed are home-builders caught in the Clinton/Bush derived housing bubble pop. Create a WPA that builds alternative energy devices: windmills, solar power plants (photovoltaic, and solar thermal), mass transit (both trains and competitors), low-building-usage products (insulations, etc), ocean wave energy and OTEC (HUGE untapped sources of energy), biodeisal products, and CO2 sequestration such as biochar methods (I know a lot of greenies hate this, but I love it), and a truly hi-tec power distribution system. Oh, yeah, maybe some nuclear (sorry). Result: energy independence (let the Middle East figure its own sh*t out), fossil fuels independence (let the oil companies drown in their product instead of the Gulf), and climate change remediation (your grandchildren will love you for it).
Had Obama expanded Medicare eligibility to 55-64 years olds rather than creating the corporate welfare program known as Obamacare, the cost to taxpayers and patients would be far less than Obamacare, and millions of baby boomers would be retiring from their family-wage jobs, thereby opening millions of family-wage jobs for young Americans, without having to create and fund a WPA.
Obamacare is resulting in many boomers postponing or cancelling retirement, further reducing job opportunities for young Americans. Its hard to believe so many young Americans support Obama when you consider that he walks over them every chance gets.
There was a problem in America. Many people could not afford health care insurance. The problem was easily solved, however. People who cannot afford health care insurance are now required to purchase health care insurance. Problem solved.
Just because America needs a new Works Progress Administration to pull us out of our Bush depression is no reason to think that Pres. Obama will step up to the plate and provide it... Pres. Obama is more corporate than Bush, more imperialistic than Bush and more of a tyrant than Bush. Pres. Obama has turned his back on labor unions and progressives since taking power. He talks the talk, but he doesn't walk the walk.
We need to stop pouring American taxpayers dollars into the twin ratholes of Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to jack up the income tax rates on large corporations and the top two percent. We need to end the outsourcing of American jobs to overseas locations.
My question is what the pay level would be in this new WPA?
Would it become a way to push down wages in unionized trades? the repubs would insist on that, I would think, and the corporate Dems would have cover to do a little union weakening.
during the fdr years the wages were paid at prevailing wage levels.... for the most part people could only work 30 hours a week -
and harry hopkins hired over 3 mil workers in under 6 weeks and it had a 3-5% overhead......
meaning 97% went straight to wages or materials - not harry hopkins paycheck or to some corrupt corporation....
while the katrina cleanup was bid out for 175 an hour and subbed out on down the line multiple times until the person who actually did the work was paid around 12 per hr - that's about a 90% overhead...
Ain't Corporate Capitalism grand?
A lot of it got "subbed out" so badly, commissions in advance, that even that ten or twelve per hour, wasn't there when it came time to turn a shovel.
They actually had to start over with less for reconstruction, because the "entrepreneurs" were already in Latin America, getting Daquiris on the beach, with their "faith based" FEMA funds.
You are SO right. Naomi Klein was dead on the money. That whole operation was designed to fail. The ghost of Salvadore Allende' is wandering the 5th Ward.
It is surreal just to read something like this at this point in U.S. history.
Already a full-blown fascist state and on an ever-accelerating glide path to totalitarianism, the U.S. is suddenly going to about-face and create a program that strengthens worker security?
Really?
If this Rep. Miller actually does draft a bill of some kind, O'Bonzo and the House "leadership" will declare jobs for the unemployed "off the table" and negotiate with the most regressive of the duopoly's representatives to insert tax cuts and subsidies for the oligarchy.
By the time the new and improved bill is deemed acceptable to precisely 60 multi-millionaire senators and then enacted, it will use public funds to pay private companies to create "local jobs" -- assuming your locale happens to be in China.
These workers will all produce the same piece of art for export to the U.S.: Telescreens, mandatory for every home.
Yeah that sounds about right, though I would say we've been in the grip of Inverted Totalitarianism for some time.
If you really want to know what time it is in America, check out the "Crash Course" on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0WuQ5-t3xM
The whole situation was caused by the conflict between a basic law of Capitalism: Continuous year-on-year exponential growth must occur in order to sustain the debt-credit system that underlies every facet of the economy; and the reality that there are limits to growth. Our collective failure to anticipate and plan for the certainty that exponential growth in: energy consumption, population, debt, and environmental destruction/exploitation could not continue indefinitely potentially threatens our very survival (War) and guarantees that billions of people around the world will suffer a drastic and sudden contraction of standard of living.
I could go on and on, but I hate excessively long posts; just watch Crash Course and consider Kurt Vonnegut's parting advice, "join a gang."
There is no one else to help.
Swapping Nafta created Chinese factories for the WPA sounds like a good Idea to Slick Willie and the Bush Gang. If they approve it, Obama will make hand stands.
If we are that far down the Depression Road, it's time to haul Bubba before Congress and explain his signing the bill to create Nafta and let him tell us why some 30 million people are unemployed and let why countries have donated to his cause and why he is now worth more than 100 million dollars
So we're pinning NAFTA on Bill Clinton? This seems a bit unfair.
If memory serves, pretty much the whole Democratic Party was plumping for NAFTA. Remember how Al Gore made Ross Perot look like an ass because he dared to criticize free trade? It could be argued that Clinton was simply representing his party.
Besides, the economy was booming under Clinton, with higher income at all levels. We were even paying off the deficit. Apparently, Clinton knew how to make this free trade thing work--a fact which bugs progressives no end.
Never Trust a Democrat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz3567ydYe0
Yes, the Democratic Party is responsible for zealously promoting and passing NAFTA.
The DNC made sure that Clinton got the 92 nomination rather than Jerry Brown.
The DNC made sure that John Kerry got the 04 nomination rather than Howard Dean.
Do we see a pattern here?
If only America put the same amount of urgency , money and manpower into all of what was mentioned in this article, how all our lives could be changed.
But it doesn't pay as well as war , and were not angry enough, at someone , or a group of someones, and there is no 9/11 attack that killed 3000 Americans on television at one time. Though as horrific and serious as that was, we are all used to hearing about death every day, except the 600000 innocent men women and children that have died in Iraq. And the 30000 Americans that die every year on our highways by accident. In other, were the 3000 people lives we lost 9/11 more precious than the 600000 lives we took in Iraq? And at a cost of 2 trillion dollars and 6000 troops lives.
Are playing God , eye for eye, or more, because we refuse to control our Neanderthal emotions, use intellect, common sense or the law to find terrorists.
No , we have people dieing slow quiet deaths of poverty, wage stagnation, foreclosures, job losses, unemployment benefit cuts, 30 percent price increase of food and smaller packaging in the last 4 years, almost triple the gas prices since 2001,
and our national debt from 4 trillion to 14 trillion ,12 trillion by Bush/Chenny.
We should have been building alternative energy products and jobs in an industry that would have given great jobs to Americans and security, and kept our money in the USA instead of sending it to the middle east over the last thirty years.
Thats our money over there, and now we go to war to get control of it.
Washington has the best law makers and leaders the rich oil company's could buy.
I dont blame the oil company's at all, its just business to them , but our elected officials for the last 40 years, thirty years of republican white house control, and Bush senior 12 years , and jr 8 years , 20 years of oil men controlling the white house.
Well ,could Americans be any more stupid.
Ya , we could, they sent us credit cards in the mail starting in the 80, and then wages started to decline as Reagan tour apart unions.
And we used the credit cards , cause we weren't making enough money to buy goods we wanted.
Well ,could Americans be any more stupid.
Ya , we could, we let our politicians create tax incentives for corporations to move our jobs to cheap labor country's.
Well ,could Americans be any more stupid.
Ya, 9/11 , we did not believe what we saw on television, a controlled demolition.
So we allowed these aholes to put us into trillion dollar wars.
Well ,could Americans be any more stupid.
Ya, we let them invoke the patriot act.
Well ,could Americans be any more stupid.
We stood by and cheered torture, as if they could never use it on us.
Well ,could Americans be any more stupid.
Ya, we dont have enough courage to march on Washington like brave Americans did to end the Vietnam wars.
Well ,could Americans be any more stupid.
Ya, people and company's willingly joined the secret fusion center spy network of warrant less surveillance.And are now proud to be 1 in 20 rat fink bastard spys for the government.
Well ,could Americans be any more stupid.
Nope , that about sums it up for me , I am using the constitution for toilet paper now. And its all gone.
If we had a democracy this idea of re enacting the W.P.A. would be passed by Congress. If we want to use our common sense to find the terrorists, we'd start the search in Washington D.C. We may indeed have the courage to march on Washington to end the wars--but we are not stupid--those marches won't work. Congress doesn't give a f___ for what the people want. They care what their paymasters want.
Bornfreemen says, "Washington has the best law makers and leaders the rich oil companies can buy." Yes!! That is true and that is where we need to start. We need to kick those corporate courtesans out of Congress. Under our current two party system only a Democrat or a Republican can be elected. We need to make a vote of NO CONFIDENCE by refusing to vote for either a D or an R. The bums will still get elected (under our phoney no choice method), but by lowering the vote total to the corrupt, new candidates can be encouraged to step forward and run next time. Anything would be an improvement over what we have now. Don't vote for the corporate lackeys in office now.
Bushie said the Constitution was just a piece of paper but it is not!! We need to fight to enforce it, not use it for T.P.
If we had a democracy we wouldn't be in a depression and there would be no need for a WPA.
I feel your anguish and dispair, my tears fall beside yours my friend. I agree with everything you wrote, every single word.
The state of our beloved country falls on the stupidity of us all and allowing our elected officials to get away with what they have done, the terrible things that they have done.
I believe Americans are the greatest, the bravest, the strongest, the smartest and the proudest people on earth. There is not one thing we cant do if we all work together.
You and I know what it is going to take to get out of this mess.
To lay down and dispair, to give up hope, is not the answer.
Get up and fight, do as your heart knows what is right. Are you ready?
Someone is trying very hard to push this idea . . .
let's just get the old jobs back --
overturn trade agreements . . .
"According to all myth, the female - not the male -- gives life"
I'm guessing that the difference between the WPA and modern jobs programs is that the WPA was federally directed. People built sidewalks and dams because the state or local government decided that the state/city needed them.
What we the citizens need for a green infrastructure is green product development. We may or may not need green research, which in this corrupt age funds lots of rich or powerful people in reality, as opposed to handing out the money on merit. However, what scares the bejeezus out of Exxon is that someone will come along with something that makes petroleum production unprofitable. The worst possible thing that the government could do, in Exxon's opinion, is to develop such a product for mass marketing. This would cut Exxon's throat.
Oddly enough, you will not hear one politician talking about green product development. You know, the key to creating thousands and millions of good jobs so that America can lord it over everybody else?
BTW, if your goal is to murder Exxon, and BP, and maybe Massey Coal, remember that the murder of a corporation-person might be a felony, because corporations are now persons according to the activist courts. On the flip side, if a corporation murders you, how are they going to put the corp. in jail?
Great IDEA!
The government can put the unemployed to work cleaning up Wall Street. That should take at least until the economy picks up a bit. Hurcules used a river to clean out the Augean Stables; however in the case of Wall Street, flame throwers would probably be more effective. Then there is the Federal Reserve, the big banks and Congress. Over the years this country has contributed more than its share of garbage to the environment and it's about time we did something responsible.
Lovely idea, but it's a matter of whether pigs can fly:this is pure lefty nostalgia.I'd like to join the International Brigades and fight the fascists in Spain, too.
YES!YES! YES! A teacher gave me a WPA book for the state of California. It's wonderful and filled with history and everything that you didn't even imagine that you might want to know! ! Really, it does , especially interesteing is the past history, and finding that at one point in California's history, everything was written in both English and Spanish, just like now.
To read about the conservation , and people of the past, well they all are past now, but it's a great history book and well written with great photographs.
It is so worth it for the government to write about each state's history. It did affect private business too and so many peole benefited from it then, and now too.
It really is an actual book of that time: California, A Guide to the Golden State: The Federal Writer's Project sponsored by Mabel R. Gillis, State Librarian, and published by Hastings House Publishers in New York. copyright 1939. I love this book!
I love the preface too! " This book moreover, has been written to be read, not only by those to whom California is still an unseen and fabulous land of sunshine and oranges, but also by those who will look at these pages for something new and little known, about the everyday California in which they live and work."..... yes it is kind of amusing about the oranges, I think Disneyland plowed those under, but it really is funny and factual and needed look at what we were, and what we can be again. This a book for everyone!
It's not just writers and photographers but builders too; peopple using conservation and using what they had. So many of the parks in California's big cities and small cities have wonderful stoneworks for parks and walls and walkways along city streets. Lovely huge and round boulders and stones used from the local area. Plus, some of the art in the libraries too. I've seen wonderful murals in Detroit's libraries and Bakersfield and Los Angeles and this wonderful art is all over America...wonderful historical murals too
DO IT AGAIN! We need an update and more employed people; everything from infastructure to parks to writings to art. This really leaves a tangible legacy for everyone!
It is very clear that they were a lot GREENER too.
It really makes you go, 'Oh, this is what America is supposed to be." We definitely need some of this.
We are being engineered into accepting much lower living standards. There will be no WPA. The key is to take the elites with us. We will have to accept financial pain in order to bring them down with us. Do not purchase new items and do not borrow or purchase from national corporations. Become active in the SLOW movement at the local level.
HA ,HA, HA , HA, HA, HAR DE HAR HAR , HO , HO, LAUGH DIDE
LAUGH....MR. JOURNALIST.
Lets talk about FDR.............SOME MORE.......LOVE UR
HISTORY LESSONS...
Things are going to continue to get worse, much, much worse.
Just what do you believe is going to happen??
It is going to get really bad.....chaos.....depression.....
the rest of your prescious middle class is going tooo.
It is going, going, gone Mr. Journalist !!!
Do you believe in elections ????? Ha Ha Ha...........
We're so screwed and so are you Mr. Journalist !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Our mission, as set forth by the Congress is a critical one: to preserve price stability, to foster maximum sustainable growth in output and employment, and to promote a stable and efficient financial system that serves all Americans well and fairly." - Ben Bernanke
And he is still head of the Federal Reserve? If he was competent, we wouldn't be having a conversation about the WPA!
Whats that about head s?
Kate McCormack offers a logical approach. Resurrecting FDR's WPA would go a long way of renewing hope for millions of Amerikkkans.
Unfortunately, it will never come about. In the 1930s we still had a democratic government and a president who understood the needs of workers. In the 21st century we have a fascist government and president who cares little for workers. If a given policy doesn't favor corporations it never comes to fruition.
Besides W. Bush and Obama have given any money that could have been used for a WPA type of recovery to the crooks who looted the treasury to begin with. There just isn't any money left; the country is bankrupt.
Because many workers in the 30s supported socialism and communism, FDR and progressives in congress were able to get the New Deal enacted. The right wingers figured the New Deal was better than a commie takeover.
The US working class today has been so brainwashed to reject socialism that anybody running left of the Democrats gets less than 1% of the vote. The Democrats therefore feel free to keep moving further to the right. Until a significant number of Americans start voting for socialist candidates, neither Obama or any other Democrat will see the need to restore any New Deal program.
Of course WPA can work again. But the reinstitution of glass-steagal will be needed to crush the privatised "money power" of the global bankster syndicate, to get the necessary funding,AND to acknowledge the phony indebtedness to these financier parasites. All the new deal laws will need to be re-instated.And, since the privatised "money power " is in the hands of a "globalised" financier class, and is more powerful than any one nation, to crush them will require one final task from the four remaining, truly powerful, nation-states left standing as sovereigns, before they disband into more humane,managible sizes. The U.S., Russia, China, and India must form a grand strategic alliance to adopt a global glass-steagal reform,leading into a fixed-exchange rate,"public utility" CREDIT system, to displace the defeated financier/speculative monetary system; AND a multinationally co-ordinated WPA system to restore/rebuild/improve the world for the people, INSTEAD of for the greedy benefit of the imperial owner/rulers.This is the only hope for the world. Russia, China, & India are on board.It is we in the U.S. who are dragging our feet on this global reconstruction project, and it won't work without us. Not enough "critical mass", not enough power, WITHOUT our co-operation. No other combination will succeed.
Under these conditions; yes, WPA can work again.
Great article Kate! This is something I have been telling my friends for a number of years now. The WPA of the 30s did many wonderful projects in this nation, building structures and parks that have lasted to this day. I have camped in many of those parks across the United States, and most of those facilities are still well-made and beautiful. The WPA put people to work and provided money to their families. It gave many destitute people new skills that they then put to use in helping build this country.
In the past several weeks, our local area has experienced several water main breaks. The rate of these breaks seems to be increasing as the too-old pipes crack and leak. The local water commission said recently they have created a committee to study a long-term solution to this problem. Why they didn't do that years before is beyond me. But meanwhile, our county continues to spend tons of money on unneeded road and government building construction projects.
So, yes, we could put many millions of people to work in this country rebuilding our decaying infrastructure, including replacing aged water pipes, fixing bridges, updating our sewage disposal, cleaning our rivers and bays, and building our green energy infrastructure. Greensburg, Kansas should be a model for all towns and cities in the US.
How much money could this country save if we were not sending so much to the oil countries? How much better would we all be health-wise without so many oil-based products in our lives? The new WPA could create a huge solar farm in the southwest that could generate enough electric power for the whole world. That's right - the whole world! All it would take is a 100 square mile solar farm, a way to store the electricity overnight, and a way to send that electricity around the world. According to a show on Planet Earth, a solar farm that is 100 square miles will generate enough electricity for the whole world. We could end up exporting electricity to the world instead of importing oil. (See http://americanenergyindependence.com/solarenergy.aspx). What better use of our new WPA could there be? We can solve the electricity storage problem; after all, we've solved big problems before in this country.
The new WPA would provide jobs to people as mentioned in the article. Every year you worked in the WPA could guarantee you a free year at a college in the US. A certain percentage of your relatively small income from working could be sent directly to your family, as was done with the old WPA.
I strongly believe a new WPA is a win-win situation for the millions that are out of work, for the rest of the country, and for the generations to come.
The thing whats coming into my mind is what Bill clinton used to say : ITS THE ECONOMY STUPIED!
well...... letst think about this for a moment
this seams so logic, good economie , more jobs we all have some money in our pocket.. we are all going to better of and we want some of the wealth..
but no fellows, ITS NOT THE ECONOMIE STUPIED!
ITS WHAT THEY DO WHITH OUR MONEY WHEN WE HAVE A GOOD ECONOMIE GOING !
think about it some corporations are getting ungodly rich ... and than the money gets scooped away under our noses by the fact that we the people bailing them out and we the people are left again with the crumbs and another deppression
nothing new, are we getting the picture yet?
but I do think that there is a enormous feeling in this country that this capitalistic americen system is NEVER wrong , just the people who are living init are wrong we keep blaming each other HOWEVER THIS A HUGE DISTRACTION , meanwhile the system is rigged beyong the peoples imagination
we have been highjacked for a verry long time
The Infrastructure part might have a chance.
The arts? Not in this country at this time.
Can you imagine the stink?
Or the creationist art?
Many of the laborers the WPA employed lived in conditions not far removed from Concentration Camps.
Drafty, unheated, overcrowded barracks to sleep in surrounded by barbed wire fences with National Guard watch towers, bad food with survival level nutrition, back breaking labor, minimal pay (if they got paid at all. Many workers wound up owing money as their food and lodging was subtracted from their pay), severe restrictions on travel, normal human sexual relations between workers and local townsfolk were forbidden, frequent abuse of workers by the employer, and in not a few cases after continued mistreatment by management, protest, strikes and riots were put down with ruthless brutality by police and Army forces.
During the Depression many unemployed were seen as a potential threat to the US Government. In fact, many were US military veterans who had participated in the 'Bonus Army March' on Washington, led by General Smedley Butler. The unemployed, and especially any who were unionized, were seen as a hotbed of potential Communist sympathizers and agitators. (As an interesting historical note, General Butler was approached by several powerful Corporations to head a coup aimed at toppling the democratically elected Government at the time, with the aim of making Butler a Fascist head of state beholden to the Corporate interests who had approached him. He wisely refused and turned States evidence of the plot. The Corporate conspirators were never punished, or even arrested. Just like today, they were well connected.)
Read Howard Zinn for more details on just how bad the WPA treated it's workers.
Given today's increasingly totalitarian behavior of Government and Corporations, do you *really* think this is a good idea? The Corporations would *LOVE* to have an almost unlimited pool of virtual slave labor, drawn from the nearly 27% (unofficial) unemployed desperate for *any* job.
Non Serviam - I will not serve.
There was another choice, rather than submitting to the cruel authority of the Government or starving. A nascent Socialist movement was underway at the time, and many workers and the impoverished saw it as a chance to get out from under the crushing debt load imposed on them by Capitalism at the time.
The US Government saw what was brewing, and feared a Communist take-over like the relatively recent one in Russia. Because of that fear, a witch-hunt was created that exists to this day, persecuting those who actually give a damn about their fellow human beings. The nascent Socialist movement of the day was snuffed out with ruthless efficiency as a threat to the rising Corporate Elite and moneyed classes. To this day, speaking of compassion, egalitarian treatment of all, equal rights for all, justice for all, and similar 'socialist' concepts is met with derision and hostility from the addicts of the economic nightmare called the 'American Dream(tm)'.
It is past time to break up the Mega-states and Corporations. But they will not allow this to happen without much pain and suffering for all.
Non Serviam - I will not serve.
My Great-grandfather had a small dairy farm; during the depression, it was pretty much a subsistence operation. When the WPA came to DuPage County, my grandfather worked on a road project. He had a team (of horses) and a box wagon, so he got $5.00 a day hauling gravel. Without that tiny amount of money, there's no way of knowing whether my cousins, brothers, and I would be here. We still have the original homestead(2.5 acres out of the original 160); I drive on that road almost every day. When I see WPA plaques on bridges and buildings, I feel proud of what so many people did, no matter how small their contribution. Now, the roads, bridges, and many buildings are parts of our crumbling infrastructure. A new WPA/CCC would be the best thing that could happen for millions of people - urban and rural. A high speed internet effort reminiscent of the Rural Electrification Project would set us on the road to pass South Korea(!) in terms of internet availability. In the current political environment, though, a nationwide effort to provide equitable programs and projects would fall victim to the likes of Michelle Bachman, Mich McConnell, and the right-wing press.
The Federal Theater and Arts projects were the fine hotbeds of working class leftism. In those days, when people still remembered the slagan "Bread, and Roses too!" (decent wages and culture too), the working class still was still culturally literate - both folk art, music and crafts, as well as classic art, theater and symphonic music.
But today, one could travel througout the Applacians and not find a single working class household where someone plays the fiddle or mandolin - or knows how to make quilts or afghans.
"Today, with unemployment seemingly stuck above nine percent and..."
True unemployment is above 20%, near depression level, and we all know it. When is the god damned government ever going to stop lying to us? I've given up on government of any kind. I pay what it chooses to confiscate and spend on war and otherwise try to stay off its radar. Lies lies lies and more lies -- it is how they operate. When or if the government ever tells the truth I simply will not believe them. If the government tells me the sky is blue I will check for myself before I'll believe it.
Every time someone mentions the idea of the govt's creating jobs, some right-winger pipes up with their current mantra: "government jobs don't create wealth." That's because they don't recognize commonwealth as wealth. What they mean is it doesn't further enrich the already rich. If they could be sure that any wealth created by government jobs would shortly be privatized, they would fall all over themselves promoting it.
The WPA built a park in my hometown that is the best thing that city has going for it even 75 years later. I'm tempted to suggest that the public sector is better at creating jobs doing things that should be done than the private sector is -- until I think about things like cruise missiles and supermax prisons.
"cruise missles and supermax prisons" pretty much sums up the USA of today.
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