Levees Not War

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As Long as They’re Calling You a Socialist, Go All the Way

What does “Labor Day” mean to the 15+ million unemployed?

Below is our Happy Labor Day card to President Obama in advance of his address to the nation Thursday, Sept. 8, about proposals for alleviating the nation’s chronic unemployment crisis. The jobless rate is stuck at 9.1 percent, but it’s really over 16% counting the under-employed who find only part-time work or those who have given up looking. The unemployment rate is near 17% for African Americans and 18% among Americans under 24.

Barack Obama has been in office for 2 1/2 years. Republicans in Congress have blocked every effort to revive the economy, and anything that has passed they insist has failed (though they secretly like the stimulus). They figure more jobless = fewer votes for Obama and Democrats. Thus far, Obama has sought to “find common ground” with a party that blocks him at every turn. No matter what he proposes on Thursday, they will say America cannot afford it, that government is the problem, not the solution, and that only reducing “job-killing” regulations and taxes will kick-start job growth. Eight years of George W. Bush disproved that theory. Obama and Democrats—and we ordinary citizens who want the stalemate to end—must affirm that government can and must help create jobs because no one else will. U.S. corporations, enjoying record profits, are sitting on some $2 trillion in capital, reluctant to hire because of depressed consumer demand. Rational behavior.

We believe that in addition to a big, bold, WPA-style jobs program described below, the government should also extend federal unemployment benefits and the temporary payroll tax cut for employees beyond the end of 2011. Also, the highway trust fund should be reauthorized before it ends Sept. 30: that could prevent furloughs of current workers and create up to 120,000 jobs a year through 2014. See other proposals here and here. Some say the U.S. cannot “afford” government action. We say the U.S.—and the world—cannot afford our inaction.

The letter to the president follows after the jump.

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Uplifted by the happy oyster video (below), we’re off to Hyde Park, New York, on Saturday 6/19 (taking a train, naturally!) for the seventh annual Roosevelt Reading Festival at the FDR Presidential Library—free and open to the public. The keynote address will be given by Alan Brinkley, New Deal scholar and Columbia University professor, and author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Oxford University Press, 2009). Along with Brinkley, one of the main attractions for us will be Neil M. Maher, author of Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the Environmental Movement (Oxford, 2008). We hope to meet with Dr. Maher and geek out on the CCC—one of the most popular New Deal programs, that FDR designed himself and signed into law in March 1933, his first month in office.

Authors will read from and discuss their books on the New Deal’s “alphabet soup” of agencies, FDR and Churchill, the G. I. Bill, Marian Anderson’s great Lincoln Memorial concert (arranged by Eleanor Roosevelt), a new biography of FDR’s political adviser Louis Howe, the quest for civil rights in the Roosevelt era and the flight of refugee Jews from the Nazi Germany, and much more.

Participating in the Reading Festival will be FDR’s grandson David B. Roosevelt. The program notes that “Mr. Roosevelt authored a concept paper (based upon the Civilian Conservation Corps) for the Clinton Administration which eventually became the National Civilian Community Corps department of AmeriCorps. As a consequence David B. Roosevelt was appointed to serve on the national board for the National Civilian Community Corps.”

Click here for the Reading Festival’s full agenda and author list.

Click here to read about Nick Taylor’s American-Made, a fine history of the WPA.

Click here or the photo above to hear Ben Selvin and the Crooners play “Happy Days Are Here Again” (1930).

Bloomberg reports recovery from worst recession since 1930s is “broadening and becoming more entrenched”

Some good news on the employment front: The U.S. Labor Department reported Friday that while the unemployment rate held at 9.7 percent, the national economy added 162,000 jobs in March. This figure includes the government’s hiring of 48,000 temporary workers for the Census, and private employers’ adding 123,000 jobs, the most since May 2007. Republicans and conservative “news outlets” are pushing the line that all the increase is due only to the temporary hiring of Census workers, but in fact the trend has been growing for several months—March’s is the third gain in the past five months—as shown in the graphic above and as detailed here by Bloomberg News.

This is all good but it’s not good enough. Too many millions are still unemployed and underemployed. We supported and still support the stimulus (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) of 2009 but we want at least another stimulus bill that big with more job-creation. We have also advocated a Civilian Conservation Corps–like jobs program to restore the coast of southern Louisiana and other fragile, flood-prone environments (Sacramento and environs, for example, could also use some help). America’s infrastructure is in serious disrepair—the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the U.S.A. a D grade and estimates a five-year investment of $.2.2 trillion is needed to get the nation back in shape. There’s some jobs waiting to be filled. What we need is political will, incessant pressure on Congress and the White House. You know how to get it done: Roll up sleeves, pick up phone . . .

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

While others have gone quickly online with some very affectionate and stirring tributes to Senator Kennedy, we wanted to take a little time to reflect on his life and work (plus, we’ve been busy fine-tuning our newly redesigned web site). As usual, we look at things in relation to New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Gulf Coast. It may be only accidental that the great senator’s death falls within days of the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, but there’s an important connection people should know about, and surely some credit goes to the Louisiana woman he married, Victoria Reggie Kennedy.

It was Senator Kennedy who proposed a Gulf Coast Rebuilding Plan soon after the storm. This comprehensive rebuilding plan was said at the time to have been modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority; as usual, Senator Kennedy thought large, seeing the scope of the effort the crisis called for. (Note that here, once again, he found a cosponsor for a bipartisan bill in Republican senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.)

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“All work undertaken should be useful—not just for a day, or a year, but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the Nation.”

—Franklin D. Roosevelt, second state of the union address (1935)

“You can start out from Baton Rouge in any direction and pass through town after town which has water facilities or sewer facilities or roads or streets or sidewalks or better public buildings, which it would had not have had but for the Works Progress Administration.”

—WPA administrator Harry L. Hopkins, dedication of addition to Tiger Stadium, LSU, Nov. 28, 1936 (in Taylor, American-Made)

Levees Not War has been recommending a Civilian Conservation Corps for Louisiana coastal restoration for some time now, and here is more encouragement in that direction.

From his first days in office, Franklin Roosevelt worked to establish relief programs to ease the pain of 25% unemployment nationwide, with some 15 million men, or 60 million Americans, having no income whatsoever. But it was not until his third year in office that Roosevelt launched the Works Progress Administration, the famous jobs and public works program that is one of the hallmarks of the New Deal. Other public assistance and jobs programs had come before—FDR’s beloved CCC was created in his first month—but the WPA took relief to a whole new level: practical, rewarding, enduring.

Yesterday we went to the 92nd Street Y–Tribeca to hear Nick Taylor speak about his book American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (2008). Mr. Taylor began research for the book in 2001, and its publication could hardly be more timely: lucky for the book’s sales and for American readers. American-Made is an engaging account of the Roosevelt administration’s Works Progress Administration (1935–1943), the nationwide jobs and public works program that put 8.5 million Americans back to work (enrollment peaked at about 3.3 million in 1938) in building roads and bridges, tunnels and airports, producing plays and painting murals, serving millions of hot lunches, sewing clothes and repairing toys, and many more useful and entertaining works.

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On this Thanksgiving Day we are grateful for family and friends and our work that sustains us—as well as for life’s simple pleasures (like crawfish and pecan pies) and the opportunities we’re given to make the world a better place.

We are also especially thankful that the American people voted in large numbers and so enthusiastically for an excellent new president (-elect) who is already restoring hope and confidence in our people—and around the world. May God guide him with wisdom and keep him safe and in good health always. (We pray the same for all our public officials.)

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