I lifted the following quote from a post on Jersey Perspective, which I found linking from Shelley’s, as usual, on-target take on what should never have happened. (And I linked to Shelley, from Jeneane, whose blog I still check just about every day now for three years).
The problem of what to do with and for the hundreds of thousands of people – maybe millions – who have been left homeless and jobless by Katrina is perhaps the most significant facing the government in the storm’s aftermath. Instead of bringing in some immense developer to reconstruct the city, why not create a modern-day Works Progress Administration to oversee a civilian-led rebuilding of New Orleans? Thousands and thousands of refugees from the city could be hired to do the construction of homes and buildings, giving them not only money, but a sense of ownership and pride in the rebuilding effort. Many of the city’s residents were jobless or at least desperately poor to begin with. I can’t think of a better idea both for rebuilding the city of New Orleans, and also lending a hand to the people of that city who were already down, and have been knocked out by Katrina.
Ah yes, the Works Project Administration, which
… was a “make work” program that provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression. WPA projects primarily employed blue-collar workers in construction projects across the nation, but also employed white-collar workers and artists on smaller-scale projects, and even ran a circus.
According to author Nick Taylor, “The WPA built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 buildings, and seven hundred miles of airport runways… It presented 225,000 concerts to audiences totalling 150 million, and produced almost 475,000 works of art. Even today, almost sixty years after it ceased to exist, there is no part of America that does not bear some mark of the WPA.”
Yup, Jersey Sam’s grandpa, who remembers the WPA, has come up the best long-term solution for helping the shattered Gulf coast get rebuilt while giving its people a way to survive back in their home territory.
What’s that you say? Halliburton already got the contract? Well, isn’t that just the Republican way of getting things done!! They certainly wouldn’t want to resurrect the WPA; that was put in place by a popular Democratic president FDR, and

businessmen and bankers were turning more and more against Roosevelt’s New Deal program. They feared his experiments, were appalled because he had taken the Nation off the gold standard and allowed deficits in the budget, and disliked the concessions to labor. Roosevelt responded with a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthy, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.
In 1936 he was re-elected by a top-heavy margin….
Not only do we need another WPA. We need a entirely brand New Deal.