14 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • JULY 2020
POINT OF VIEW
NEW DEAL 2.0
COVID-19 ECONOMIC CURE
BY KARL GROSSMAN
Investigative reporter and professor
of journalism
From the U.S. Heartland to its largest
urban area has come the call to recreate
the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
of the New Deal to address the massive
unemployment nationwide caused by
the COVID-19 pandemic and to resolve
important environmental needs.
Jon M. Hunter, publisher of the Madison
Daily Leader in South Dakota, wrote
that the nation should respond the
same way as when the country entered
the Great Depression, when President
Franklin D. Roosevelt created the CCC in
1933. A decade later, more than 3 million
participants in “Roosevelt’s Tree Army”
had planted more than 3 billion trees,
built hundreds of parks and wildlife refuges,
and completed thousands of miles
of trails and roads, Hunter recalled.
“We’re facing an intersection of high
unemployment and environmental
needs,” Hunter wrote, noting that environmental
needs are different, but the
solutions may be similar. “Here’s a bonus:
Many young people are passionate
about saving the environment … There
is important work to be done and we
have young, enthusiastic people to do it.”
Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the
National Wildlife Federation, noted that
nearly 7.7 million American workers
younger than 30 are now unemployed.
“There’s one fix that will put millions
of young Americans directly to work:
a 21st-century version of the Civilian
Conservation Corps,” he wrote in The
New York Times.
The New Deal also established the
Works Progress Administration
(WPA), which built roads and public
buildings, many of which can be seen
today on Long Island and in New York
City.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has emphasized
that we must “supercharge the
reopening” of the U.S. economy through
“major infrastructure projects.” Meanwhile,
U.S. Sen. Kristen Gillibrand
(D-NY) with U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet
(D-Colo.) have introduced legislation
to create a U.S. Health Force based on
the CCC and WPA models. It “would
recruit, train and employ thousands of
Americans in order to provide public
health capacity” to focus on COVID-19
and “prepare for future public health
care needs, and build skills for new
workers to enter the public health and
health care workforce,” they said.
“In the face of this unprecedented crisis,
Congress must harness American
patriotism, resilience and ingenuity by
establishing a Health Force,” Gillibrand
said.
New Deal programs were central to
getting America out of the Depression.
We need the same kind of innovative
job-creating programs today.
“Congress must harness American ... ingenuity by
establishing a Health Force,” says Kristen Gillibrand
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