Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
In the fall of 2015, when John Delaney was my Congressman in Maryland’s terribly gerrymandered 6th Congressional District, he gamely travelled to the far Western reaches of this improbable district, near the West Virginia border, to meet with residents: those with problems – and proposals.
I had a proposal, in writing, on the need for a new Civilian Conservation Corps, justified by the pressing employment and social needs or our Appalachian region , that is Allegany and Garrett Counties, the part of Maryland which is included in the Federal Appalachian Regional Commission’s (ARC’s) mandate.” Here is my posting about it at the Daily Kos : www.dailykos.com/…
I’ve been in a lot of meetings with public officials, including governors and Secretaries of the Interior, over my half-century in political life, but Delaney’s stony face over my CCC proposal was one of the most straightforward thumbs-down I’ve been “privileged” to receive. Yes, his commercials always touted his blue collar roots, his dad being a union man, yet his own life trajectory was that of the Democratic Party transitioning from blue collar New Deal to white collar Wall Street millionaires.
I should also mention in the context of the CCC and the Appalachian Regional Commission, that President Biden appointed Senator Joe Manchin’s (another “Dem” millionaire) wife, Gayle, to be co-chair of the ARC. apnews.com/…
Now, in August of 2021, amidst a rapidly shifting political landscape, I’ve spent about a week or more doing my due-diligence on the many CCC proposals sweeping the Democratic side of Congress. I’ve taken some strong hints from allies to do some writing on it, but as you will see from my two commentaries, I’ve got some distance from the those facts on the ground, so I’ll spare you all the bills and all the details, and try to introduce some alternative perspectives to bring to bear if the proposals ever are enacted, there being a gauntlet of troubles to be run, getting tougher and tougher now with the withdrawal fiasco in Afghanistan.
I initially put my comments down online to respond to a serious pitch for the CCC from William Lawrence, who has strong former ties to the Sunrise Movement. Here’s the link to his interesting column: www.the-trouble.com/…
To give you a clear sense of his angle of vision on the new CCC proposals, here’s the heart of the message:
“This brings us back to the Civilian Climate Corps. The CCC’s function is to take the strongest stand possible on the side of direct public employment, and create the political conditions for more democratic guidance of future climate policy. In contrast to Biden’s paltry offer of a $10 billion CCC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey have proposed a heftier $132 billion version, which is backed by Sunrise and others. AOC and Markey’s CCC would employ 1.5 million people over the next 5 years to support the expansion of renewable energy and build healthier neighborhoods. The program aims to have workers serve in their home communities when desired. All would receive at least $15 per hour and have the option to form a union.
The significance of the CCC is its potential to turn neoliberal subjects into Green New Dealers for life. Imagine 1.5 million young people connecting with their communities and their environment through a shared experience of dignified public employment. Imagine these 1.5 million getting a taste of actually building sustainability and resilience in their hometowns. Imagine friends and neighbors envying CCC workers for the opportunity to work and serve, and wanting it for themselves. In this world, climate change is more than something to fear or ignore; it’s an invitation to act together for the common good.
None of this is given, which is why above all, we should imagine the CCC as an organizing opportunity. The difficult truth—made certain the moment Joe Biden overcame Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary—is that whatever can be won this year will be too small and restrained to fully match the climate emergency. Thus, the task in 2021 is to win as much as possible now, and win in a way that shifts the political and social terrain towards more hard-to-reach victories in the near future.”
Here is my first take, written about a week ago:
gracchibros response:
“William Lawrence: I like it! Thank you. I’ve been pushing for a CCC and a Green New Deal for at least a decade, writing as “bill of rights” and posting at the Daily Kos, and learning to duck there in good time as a Sanders’ supporter.
I think the nature of American society in 2021 makes any kind of group living or barracks situation for a new CCC much more difficult than the original, which was exclusively composed of financially struggling young white men, mostly from urban areas; at least part of the unspoken purpose of the first CCC was to head off the explosive combination of aimless young men and the tidal wave of Great Depression unemployment.
Today, race, gender, age, sexual orientation will make the group living challenging to say the least, although optimists point to contemporary college dorms of various arrangements as a model.
Who should the new CCC program target, if anyone, or should it be left open to anyone who applies…and what will be the hiring criteria? Should there be clearly stated national goals of how the workers will be put to use…tree planting, environmental remediation of many types or closely tied to climate…(these are in most bills, with a strong dose of Green New Deal Resolution attention to frontline communities getting a percentage of the hires, based on poverty, pollution impacts, race…tribal lands); nearly all the bills stress interaction with existing unions and their training programs: rehabbing housing for energy efficiency will get a chunk of the Biden billions…and that could be a general training program for well known energy skills, or for the deeper projects…leading to electricians, plumbers, carpenters, masons…with the AFL-CIO either in lock step or in repeat of its early rocky road with the CCC in 1933-1934 – until the genius of FDR’s appointments bridged and calmed the waters.
Uniforms? Green pants and “blue collar” shirts? Logo? Yes I chuckle, but it’s important…it was recognition for the 1930’s workers…
And night classes? Computer literacy? Just plain literacy? American history classes?
Who will be the leaders, supervisors? Former social workers or drill sergeants (we have women drill sergeants now, don’t we?)…for the greater range of recruits today I suspect good leaders will have a touch of both…
Ah yes, almost forgot…we have hundreds of thousands, probably low millions, of people coming out of prison, and out of drug rehab. Will they be able to apply or be given any priority in hiring? I think it is probably better to integrate them with the general applicants rather than separate programs which might only serve to further stigmatize them. (in part I reconsidered in my second comment, below). This is a theme, which legislatively might prove very useful, as the urban problems once thought of belonging to exclusively black and brown urban “ghettos,” now belong to red state rural America as well. The Baltimore-Western Maryland embrace in a downward spiral analogy holds pretty well.”
My second response to William Lawrence went up two days ago, August 18, 2021, and was first written as an internal discussion with about a dozen Green New Deal/CCC supporters, responding to a Emailed link to Lawrence’s essay.
“Some further reflections after a medium depth dive into all the competing versions of a new CCC (or CCCC) on the policy table, some in the legislative hopper:
Greetings to everyone:
Some of you know me and some of you don’t, but I didn’t want to ignore Paul’s (that’s Paul Baicich of Our Revolution in Howard County, MD) and William Lawrence’s good work on promoting the CCC, so I thought I’d better respond on why I haven’t written about it recently. Those who know me know I’ve been invested in a new CCC and a Green New Deal for almost a decade – I’ve lost track.
However, now the situation has changed, everyone and their uncle being for some version, and there are many, now in bills and insider tracks. I’ve done my due diligence but you are not going to get the full Monty, just some observations;
By the way, I’ve participated in no policy discussions on this at all; despite my track record, I’m a political exile. Indian caste problem, apparently.
And keep in mind, as I’ve tried to show in my last two postings and mailings: the US no longer knows how to plan, if it ever did other than wartime, and the fiasco in Afghanistan was the proof of that. It’s not hard to see how the Right turns the disaster into a generalization that if you can’t plan an evacuation in one little country, how the hell can you redesign a whole economy’s energy regime (and more of course).
Alright, that out of the way, the other brake on me going full bore right now are the political dynamics both inside the Democratic Party and the Right’s reaction to it – Beltway Dynamics as we’ve seen them since the Obama days.
Unfortunately I can easily see the good left of AOC et al (the Progressive caucus , The Squad) blocking anything including the infrastructure bill itself, from passage if the center-right dems won’t go for any or even a scaled back broader policy which would probably have a CCC of some sort in it. And the Right and Center would be happy to pin the gridlocked failure entirely on the Progressive caucus. We can game plan this forever but this is a real possibility. As are other outcomes.
Now tending to all the different versions themselves:
The general thrust of bills is not to duplicate the structure of the original CCC: no companies of between 170-200 workers at a given site, housed there or not…that’s because the existing predecessors – the Youth Cons. Corps Act of 1970; the Nat. & Community Service Act of 1990, the Public Lands Corps Act of 1993 (containing the Indian Youth Service Corps in sec 210) and the Urban youth Corps under the Nat. and Comm. Service Trust Act of 1993 are, shouted by acclamation, going to be the template under the rationale: “why invent the wheel when all the spokes are already there.”
Editor’s Note: the picture below the title is from: “How the CCC looked in Lurey, VA, April, 1933; NYTimes/Getty Archives at History.com “6 Projects the CCC Accomplished,” 5/28/2020.”
Well, here’s why:
I’m not a fan of the old spokes, having gotten a flavor of the AmeriCorps in my family first hand, and watching a single AmeriCorps employee work on a “farm to table” project in Frostburg, MD, but more importantly asking: if all this has been out there since the 1970’s and 1990’s…what impact has it had other than making some upper middle class “do gooders” feel better (getting a little cynical here) and a country on the downslope salving its conscience with invisible programs that have not dented the Right or its center brothers and sisters in their Neoliberal World views?
The existing programs could be seen as containing, muzzling and disappearing idealism into very safe channels. This older public/national service is so fragmented and decentralized that I don’t see it working towards the ends of the authors Paul has sent out to us. (William Lawrence’s hopeful view).
You can say the original was not ideological either, but it had some basic solidarity which broadcast a good message, intended or not: uniforms, barracks, a small dose of military discipline and visibility in rural regions when most of its workers were poor and urban. It was work and hope and stronger bodies and spirits, on display in hard to miss work crews and down time “dances”…it spoke of the simple New Deal message: help is here and more on the way. From your elected government. Restoring the human beings as well as building infrastructure and repairing Nature.
Now, only in Senator Casey’s bill (S.2414) do I see any policy daring: he alone of all the authors seems to recognize Deaths of Despair starting young and at least the hundreds of thousands of citizens who have finished their legal sentences but sadly Casey puts them under the euphemism of “Justice Involved Youth” – if those who wanted to go into, or have come out of drug treatment programs are going to get further help via jobs perhaps we could create a “Sargent Peppers” branch…ok, seriously I guess the decision has been made everywhere in every bill to not create – Casey’s one excepted – either a category or separate program (with its own uniform, barracks and greater internal discipline – like former military Drill Sergeants, men and women, lending a hand but not a stick if you get me, it shouldn’t be as militarized as the original…yet a clear structure with discipline would help sell it to conservatives )…
For some CCC enrollees, it might still be very valuable to have them live in tents, then be trained to build decent but not too upscale “quarters” and have the union afl-cio trades people in carpentry plumbing electricians…metal workers help them build…and creating the apprenticeship structure right there…I’m sure I’ll drown in this…but there might be some pride in this route, quite different than “bury them among the educated underemployed and idealists) – kind of a “Dirty Dozen” builds pride approach…and oh yes, in the spirit of the missions and tasks outlined in the bills, all this possible apprenticing via the Unions would add the solar, thermal, insulating training to build proper solar orientation in new bldgs (with good architectural input, simple, sturdy, solar ) or “restored retrofits,” which surely towns like Cumberland and Frostburg MD could use…architectural competitions where the challenge is to be modern on energy sources and insulation without driving the costs through the roof…and wouldn’t such structures have many good uses for a country that can’t build affordable housing to scale…and is facing never ending natural disasters induced by global warming?
But it looks like instead those with prison/drug tainted resumes (as far as the private sector views them) they’ll be made, to the extent hired, to “disappear” among the less needy applicants. Wise or not I don’t know.
And last, Casey’s bill takes another leap no one else has: I’ve written about it long ago and the original CCC dodged it entirely: he will bust the legal and/or political barriers to having public employees doing publicly paid work on private lands/farms as long as Ag or Interior sanction the work as being largely in the public interest. Bravo and a bridge to all the red state “producers” who have been taught by Rush and Company to “hate our guts.”
We damn well better, though, have auditors as thorough, as good as Harold L. Ikes (en.wikipedia.org/…) and FDR’s very trusted Harry Hopkins to keep an eye on those projects with an eye to cronyism and corruption.
As for all the other bills and details, pretty unremarkable – and potentially submerged. If you want the numbers and co-sponsors I’ve got a start on them…
One last thought: a national design contest for the uniforms, which should be “uniform,” one for work, one for parade and ceremony…across the country with as much effort as goes into outfitting our Olympic Teams’ uniforms. Put a big $$$ and fame out for the design.”
And then one last idea expanded, creating a separate branch of the CCC to fight fires but also be almost EMT’s and first flood/hurricane/natural disasters responders: shall we say 20,000-30,000 as our nation slides downhill?
Here is my note to a good green family member:
“We could use a force of 25,000-30,000 young, fit, men and women firefighters on national call, but it will be CA and Western focused…yet you might as well train them to be the 82nd Airborne for FEMA for hurricanes and floods too… the original CCC did some of that, sans extensive training…and some would have to be trained to jump in real dicey situations where we can’t get a crew in fast enough by ground…There would be six months of serious training (the minimum I think) and its got to cover basic EMS medicine, water rescue, boats….the basic skills for emergency frontline workers…I think the public would go for this…and maybe, no they should be paid, after the first year, or even completion of training, at a higher rate than the other CCCers…The firefighter bill is by Ron Wyden, S-487 and Joe Neguse in the house, HR 1162, and neither are lightweights…This should be a new stand alone CCC with the mission I described above…and maybe this would be the place for all those perceived “tough guys” coming out of jail…they might like it and feel redeemed in the cause and the risk taking, because it can be dangerous work…Happy to answer any other questions on the competing bills…I think it is senseless to go deeper just now because of the dynamics I described and the “mergers” if we ever get to that point, will be done out of sight…and for me, like I never worked on this stuff ten years ago.”
I would be remiss in my thinking, and reporting, having lived in rural Western Maryland for six years now, if I didn’t reflect, at least briefly, on how all of the above might look to the Religious Right: conservative Catholic, fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants who have, on and off, but mostly on, been half or more the grassroots power part of the Republican Right’s national coalition along with old line entrepreneurs and the major business lobbying groups — and angry small business owners who don’t want any of the old New Deal or Green New one.
Thinking specifically of William Lawrence’s vision of what the CCC might become, we forget to recall that the Religious Right has been busy for most of the last half of the American Century, and all of the 21st, building parallel institutions to those of the “secular,” liberal state: pre-schools, home schools, bible schools of all grades and colleges, universities and law schools. How do they respond to something which was once very popular in the 1930’s, still shows good polling numbers today…certainly the more Lawrence stresses the ideological dimensions of the new CCC inside Green New Dealish proposals, however watered down, it’s bound to provoke the Right who sees the march of secular liberalism under every reform…
My closing note here is driven by my recent reading of Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America ( 2015), and especially, Frances Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, (2017); and remembering her vivid 9th chapter, “The Fundamentalist Uprising in the South,” which describes her visits to Lynchburg, Va.
So to the traditional “how will this play in Peoria,” add “how will it play in Lynchburg, VA?”
Best to you all as we watch a nation in a downward spiral…can we pull it out of the dive?
gracchibros
Frostburg, MD
gracchibros 