March 31, 2008 (LPAC)--On this date 75 years ago, less than four weeks after his first inauguration, which was the result of his brawl against the financial oligarchy and victory in the 1932 Democratic Primary, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Emergency Conservation Work Act creating the Civilian Conservation Corps, among the first of his productive public works programs which mobilized the unemployed to rebuild elements of the collapsed economy.

The CCC, as it became famously known, employed six million men and boys in infrastructure construction until ceasing to operate with the beginning of World War II. Reversing the desolate hunger and unemployment of the Depression, the average recruit among these six million gained 11 pounds within the first three months of strenuous CCC work. The first CCC enrollees were at work within 10 days, just 37 days after FDR took office.

The CCC as "Roosevelt's Tree Army", which planted 3 billion trees from 1933-41, was crucial in the fight to overcome the Dust Bowl, where reforestation was necessary to break the wind, hold water in the soil, and keep the soil in place. It increased the national productivity of agriculture by creating good drainage for 85 million acres, built 97,000 miles of local roads, and even built new general aviation airports.

With today's current collapse of the nations infrastructure, agriculture, and productive capabilities generally, this could not only be accomplished today, but must, if the nation is to survive. Lyndon LaRouche, in his 2005-07 mobilization to save the U.S. auto/machine-tool industrial capacity with the Economic Recovery Act (ERA), outlined an associated revival of the CCC. While auto capacity would be retooled under LaRouche's ERA in order to generate the bill of materials for new high-speed transport, power, water control, and other critical modern infrastructure, a "new CCC" role in recruiting urban and rural unemployed young people into building these infrastructure projects would be necessary. Since the time of the proposal of that initial legislation, the crisis in both the physical and financial aspects of the US economy has hit a terminal phase, to which LaRouche proposed a three step solution, like FDR’s proposals in his time. This proposal is the only policy that ensures the future survival of not only the United States, but of economies globally.