The young people of the South Bronx today are faced with a miserable and hopeless future, ultimately the result of 50 years of benign neglect, planned shrinkage, and indifference of those who have shaped New York City’s financial and related policies. A report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, revealed in December 2022 that the Bronx had the highest poverty rate in the state at around 24%. The South Bronx itself has over 40% of its children living in poverty. The report further adds that among 16-to-24-year-olds in New York City, 18% of them are unemployed, with unemployment among young men hovering at 24%. This is merely a picture, not a whole overview of the problem, however, since the figures provided most likely underestimate the true unemployment, along with “underemployment” rates in the form of unproductive service and retail jobs.
A similar situation confronted the United States in the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, where all had seemed to be lost for Americans who lost their homes, life savings, and the ability to provide for themselves and their families basic necessities. By the time Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, at least a third of the working population was unemployed. Roosevelt, within only 100 days of his administration, realized the need to revive and transform the gutted physical economy of the United States through rigorous, extensive programs such as the Glass-Steagall Act, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and more. One of these programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).
Operating in camps, supervised by military personnel and professional workers, over 3 million young people between the ages of 18-25 were recruited to learn the basics of productive labor, and what it meant to work in a disciplined, cooperative work environment. Many of them had been illiterate, impoverished, demoralized, and troubled youth. By the end of their training, they would come out intelligent, skilled, and productive workers, with many of their future employers praising their work ethic. By the end of the CCC’s tenure in 1941, over 4 million acres of trees were thinned, a billion fish stocked, and more than 30,000 wildlife shelters were built. Along with this, over 7,000 canals and diversion ditches were dug, along with thousands of roads, bridges, buildings, and other infrastructure being built. A task for which the CCC became primarily known was reforestation. This was a significant task in the midst of the Dust Bowl, where droughts in combination with bad farming practices eroded much of the land in parts of the Midwest, creating homelessness and environmental degradation. Franklin Roosevelt’s “tree army” as it was called—consisting both of CCC and WPA workers—helped to plant more than 3.5 billion trees across the United States. The Great Plains Shelterbelt, as envisioned by Roosevelt, provided for a solid wall of trees running several miles wide from the Canadian border all the way to Texas, shielding farmers from severe winds and dust storms which resulted in soil erosion and drought. After their training, many of the CCC workers would go on to fight the war against fascism, while some stayed at home to build the “arsenal of democracy.” By the end of the war, the United States would emerge as the most powerful economy in the world.
Unfortunately, the CCC was never revived after the Second World War, but it still remains a viable model for the South Bronx and other parts of the city. A program for today, however, wouldn’t involve simply teaching people “practical” skills, but would instead be a mobilization to completely revamp New York City and other parts of the United States, through construction of massive infrastructure, and discovery in technologies of the future. This would be done, through a new and revitalized “Space CCC” for the 21st Century.
Looking at the needs for the United States as a whole, from the standpoint of physical economy as identified by U.S. statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche, the economy is stagnating in energy, transportation, urban infrastructure, and healthcare. This indicates the need for hundreds of small and large-scale nuclear power plants to be built across the country, a 42,000-mile high-speed rail network connecting major cities and other areas, the construction of new hospitals, schools, sewer systems, and levees on the collapsing U.S. waterways system. Abandoned military bases, vacant manufacturing facilities, shopping centers and unused land can be converted into campuses, where food and care will be provided.
Space CCC enrollees will not only work in urban settings. Following the old CCC model of FDR, many enrollees will be put to work throughout the nation’s forests, fields, and state parks, areas which are foreign to urban youth, but which will provide an invaluable educational experience and sense of the world. This will especially be crucial for the, unfortunately, large amounts of inner city youth plagued by an environment of drug addiction.
Students of the Space CCC program, in the following years of their training, will become highly-skilled engineers, scientists and tradesmen. This will, of course, necessitate an intensive educational component to the program.
During the first Summer that the CCC was in operation in 1933, Roosevelt, in discussion with the program’s director, Robert Fechner, had realized the importance of adding an educational component to the program. Soon after, President Roosevelt employed a director of education to oversee the education curriculum of the CCC program, with every camp being assigned its own advisor to help enrollees choose a vocation once their training was completed. This especially helped with the problem of illiteracy rampant among the enrollees. A reported 110,000 young illiterate men were taught to read and write, during night and weekend, thanks to the now enlightened and revised structure of the CCC.
I would take this worthy precedent one step further. While many enrollees will be given intensive on-the-job training, a clear educational curriculum will be provided in order to ensure a grounding in basic elementary subjects, along with the ability to read and write. In order to construct many of these projects, the Space CCC will be trained in vocational skills, producing skilled machinists, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. An enrollee, who’s 16, will spend 2-3 years mastering their trade. By the time they’re 22, they will become a skilled engineer contributing to the modernization of their communities and neighborhoods. A cultural program, based on classical principles of art, music and poetry, reflected in the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, and other such luminaries, will be added to the curriculum in order to inspire and increase the creative capabilities of each student’s mind and heart. In a truly productive economy, based on advanced technological discoveries and principles, there is no difference between science and art.
Beyond transforming and modernizing the U.S. economy, participants in the Space CCC will be given the mission of exploring new exciting frontiers in space, and contributing to the leading thrust of a new, revitalized space program.
Go back to the Apollo Program under President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. During that time, over 400,000 were employed directly and indirectly on the Apollo Project. We had devoted 4.4% of the national budget to space, and we benefited enormously from that investment, earning approximately $10 back from every $1 spent. That’s not simply a monetary figure, but a representation of the scientific technologies that were developed and later inputted into the physical economy to make it more advanced and productive. A mere 0.48% of the national budget is devoted to NASA today.
As a member of the U.S. Congress, representing New York’s District 15, I will fully commit to making the South Bronx a model for a new, advanced productive labor-force, composed of the now neglected youth of the city. The United States is now on the precipice of an unprecedented financial meltdown, as is reflected in the now $34 trillion national debt and the soaring interest payments arising from such debt. As was revealed in the 2008 financial crisis, the economy is essentially dead, surviving on the reckless creation of liquidity into an over indebted system at the cost of neglecting the physical capabilities of the economy. A revived U.S. workforce, not based on the so-called “service economy,” but on real productivity, will put the United States on the right track, as FDR did for the nation to bring it out of a depression.
Operating in camps, supervised by military personnel and professional workers, over 3 million young people between the ages of 18-25 were recruited to learn the basics of productive labor, and what it meant to work in a disciplined, cooperative work environment. Many of them had been illiterate, impoverished, demoralized, and troubled youth. By the end of their training, they would come out intelligent, skilled, and productive workers, with many of their future employers praising their work ethic, giving them the nickname “CCC boys.” By the end of the CCC’s tenure in 1941, over 4 million acres of trees were thinned, a billion fish stocked, and more than 30,000 wildlife shelters were built. Along with this, over 7,000 canals and diversion ditches were dug, including thousands of roads, bridges, buildings, and other infrastructure. After their training, many of the young workers would go on to fight the war against fascism, while some stayed at home to build the “arsenal of democracy.” By the end of the war, the United States would emerge as the most powerful economy in the world.
Unfortunately, the CCC was never revived after the Second World War, but it still remains a viable model for the South Bronx and other parts of the city now. A program for today, however, wouldn’t involve simply teaching people “practical” skills, but would instead be a mobilization to completely revamp New York City and other parts of the United States, through construction of massive infrastructure, and discovery in new technologies of the future. This would be done, through a new and revitalized “Space CCC” for the 21st Century.
Looking at the needs for the United States as a whole, from the standpoint of physical economy as identified by U.S. statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche, the economy is stagnating in energy, transportation, urban infrastructure, and healthcare. This indicates the need for hundreds of small and large-scale nuclear power plants to be built across the country, a 42,000-mile high-speed rail network replacing dilapidated rail connecting major cities and other areas, the construction of new hospitals, schools, sewer systems, and levees on the collapsing U.S. waterways system.
In order to provide for youth who enlist in the program, abandoned military bases, vacant manufacturing facilities, shopping centers and unused land will be converted into campuses which will house, feed and care for them. A project to revamp the U.S. economy, of course, must include an intensive educational program which will feature retired machinists, union members, military personnel, and other remnants of the old productive U.S. economy as teachers for uneducated youth. Graduates of the Space CCC program, in the following years of their training, will become highly-skilled engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs. A cultural program, based on classical principles of art, music and poetry, reflected in the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, and other such great minds, will be added to the curriculum in order to inspire and increase the creative capabilities of each student’s mind. In a truly productive economy, based on advanced technological discoveries and physical principles, there is no difference between science and art.
Beyond transforming and modernizing the U.S. economy, participants in the Space CCC will be given the mission of exploring new and exciting frontiers in space.
Go back to the Apollo Program under President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. During that time, over 400,000 people—representing 35% of the workforce—were employed directly on the Apollo Project. We had devoted 4.4% of the national budget to space, and we benefited enormously from that investment, earning approximately $10 back from every $1 spent. That’s not simply a monetary figure, but a representation of the scientific technologies that were developed and later inputted into the physical economy to make it more advanced and productive. A mere 0.48% of the national budget is devoted to NASA today.
As a member of Congress, representing New York’s District 15, I will fully commit to making the South Bronx the model for a new, advanced productive labor-force, composed of the now neglected youth of the city.
The United States is now on the precipice of an unprecedented financial meltdown, as is reflected in the now $34 trillion national debt and the soaring interest payments arising from such debt. As was revealed in the 2008 financial crisis, the economy is essentially dead, surviving on the reckless creation of liquidity into an over indebted system at the cost of neglecting the physical capabilities of the economy. A revived U.S. workforce, not based on the so-called “service economy,” but on real productivity, will put the United States on the right track, as FDR did for the nation to bring it out of a depression.
