A New Deal For '08

Everyone's heard of it, and some people can still explain pretty much what it was. But most people consider "The New Deal" a historical phenomenon, like the Vietnam War or the Bolshevik Revolution.

They're not wrong. It was historical: In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt began a series of programs that he promised the American people to help ease the burdens of the Great Depression. Scheduled to last until 1938, these initiatives fell under the umbrella term "The New Deal." It technically ended at the outbreak of World War II, when the war suddenly created a great many jobs and gave the economy an enormous boost.

But Howard Zinn, a leftist historian and social critic, asks in this week's issue of The Nation, why aren't any of the presidential hopefuls invoking this most relevant, historic program in their campaigns?

The parallels between the 1930s and today, Zinn writes, are many, and contemporary America would benefit enormously from a program like Roosevelt's New Deal. It's an idea, Zinn writes, whose "time has come."

What if, Zinn, suggests, a presidential candidate gave a speech along these lines:

"Our nation is in crisis, just as it was when Roosevelt took office. At that time, people desperately needed help, they needed jobs, decent housing, protection in old age. They needed to know that the government was for them and not just for the wealthy classes. This is what the American people need today.

"I will do what the New Deal did, to make up for the failure of the market system. It put millions of people to work through the Works Progress Administration, at all kinds of jobs, from building schools, hospitals, playgrounds, to repairing streets and bridges, to writing symphonies and painting murals and putting on plays. We can do that today for workers displaced by closed factories, for professionals downsized by a failed economy, for families needing two or three incomes to survive, for writers and musicians and other artists who struggle for security.

"The New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps at its peak employed 500,000 young people. They lived in camps, planted millions of trees, reclaimed millions of acres of land, built 97,000 miles of fire roads, protected natural habitats, restocked fish and gave emergency help to people threatened by floods.

"We can do that today, by bringing our soldiers home from war and from the military bases we have in 130 countries. We will recruit young people not to fight but to clean up our lakes and rivers, build homes for people in need, make our cities beautiful, be ready to help with disasters like Katrina. The military is having a hard time recruiting young men and women for war, and with good reason. We will have no such problem enlisting the young to build rather than destroy.

"We can learn from the Social Security program and the GI Bill of Rights, which were efficient government programs, doing for older people and for veterans what private enterprise could not do. We can go beyond the New Deal, extending the principle of social security to health security with a totally free government-run health system. We can extend the GI Bill of Rights to a Civilian Bill of Rights, offering free higher education for all.

"We will have trillions of dollars to pay for these programs if we do two things: if we concentrate our taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, not only their incomes but their accumulated wealth, and if we downsize our gigantic military machine, declaring ourselves a peaceful nation."

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