President Biden’s idea of creating a new CCC — not a Civilian Conservation Corps from the New Deal but a Civilian Climate Corps — and funding it to the tune of $10 billion in his $2.65 trillion American Jobs Plan is a far-seeing and reassuring move. We’ve waited for four crazy and, perhaps, fateful years for the federal government to take the climate crisis seriously again. The new CCC is a major early step in trying to prepare America to stave off the potential “doom” of extreme weather conditions that come with climate change. One of its principal tasks will be to ready rural America and its public lands for the drastic changes ahead. And rural states like ours will benefit greatly.
The Jobs Plan will be funded in part by raising taxes on the enormously wealthy, the so called 1%, the oligarchic upper crust. And those at the exalted heights of America’s financial hierarchy will surely gripe and groan that taxes are anti-democratic and amount to confiscation and redistribution of wealth from the hard working well-to-do down to the lazy and shiftless poor. This, of course, is the party line of an American breed of fascism, a political theory that, as Heather Cox Richardson writes in her profoundly insightful book, “How the South Won the Civil War,” is based on the notion that “some people are better than others, and that those natural leaders must keep followers in line by stifling all opposition.” That view is at the very core of Jim Crow racism and American conservatism as it’s evolved since the Civil War. It’s what Richardson calls the ideology of the Confederacy.
But taxing everyone proportionately, including the super-rich, for infrastructure repair and development is not a “commie plot.” It’s a public good. No one would be able make a dime, much less amass a fortune, without roads and highways, an education system, the electric grid, bridges, dams, public lands, water works, high-speed internet access and countless other refinements provided to all of us by the government we elect to serve us, not neglect us, or throw us to the wolves.
It seems absurd to have to point out such an obvious reality. But that’s how dismal the state of American self-awareness has become after the catastrophe of four years of Trumpism. A progressive income crisis tax, where the well-to-do are taxed at a higher rate than those who are unlucky enough to toil for a lesser income but are still taxed, is not wealth redistribution. It’s a fair-play form of public financing of public needs that any society requires to sustain itself.
As New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, a lead sponsor of the new CCC, put it last week, “In times of crisis, Americans have always embraced service to their nation.” He sees the Civilian Climate Corps as mobilizing “the next generation of conservation and resilience workers” to revive foundations “for a thriving outdoor industry and long-term economic prosperity” in rural America, and “make vital contributions to restore the health of American landscapes and improve the resilience to climate impacts like more extreme wildfires and floods.”
New Mexico alone has 97 dams that have been allowed to deteriorate over the years because of lack of public funding. The Associated Press reports that “New Mexico leads the nation with the highest percentage — nearly 50% — of its high-hazard dams being in bad shape.” Many “have inadequate spillways that would be incapable of withstanding a historic storm,” a characteristic of extreme climate change weather events, such as the flooding that occurred around the state in the 2006 monsoon season. Workers in a New Mexico CCC should be able to help stabilize some of those dams.
And they might also be enlisted to lead the way in de-polluting our heavily littered and poisoned state. State trust lands, for instance, in various checkerboards around the state, are often used as illegal dumps, endangering water run-off with debris and hazardous waste.
New Mexico is also still plagued by hazardous waste from the military-industrial complex at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base. Perhaps the magnitude of cleaning up such dangerous and poisoned places is beyond the scope of a Civilian Climate Corps, but it could help to speed up that major task if an anti-pollution tone was set by a CCC here cleaning up local septic system pollution, underground gas station leaks, pollution from fracking and other drilling, and legacy landfills.
New Mexico and the whole country needs this kind of help. No one is safe from the stingy greed of the rich. Not only do the oligarchs object to paying taxes, they want to rely on the American taxpayer to clean up their hazardous waste, an insidious kind of private welfare for the high and mighty which they hide behind a vociferous, anti-science denial of pollution’s harm.
No society could survive an historic, long-term heat induced drought if its underground water supply has been polluted by industry, the military, landfills, random surface dumping and by decrepit or faulty tax-deprived infrastructure. The new CCC could go a long way in helping us survive and endure the climate crisis by contributing to the creation of a social atmosphere of environmental responsibility led by diligent and ecologically responsible young people in communities across America.
Our thanks go out to Senator Heinrich for leading support for this indispensable idea from the past and working to turn it into one way to ensure our survival in the days ahead.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Thank you, VB.