It's Time for a New "New Deal":http://tinyurl.com/a76rk :

...The Administration's ineptitude, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it, was "a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good."
The government's failure was the result not of "simple incompetence" in the Administration but "of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify the role of government in American life," LA Times columnist Robert Scheer argued. And as the Financial Times observed, "For the past quarter-century in Washington...US politics has been dominated by the conviction that what was wrong with America would be solved by getting government off the people's backs"--an attitude that contributed to the criminal inaction on the part of the federal government.
Indeed, you could see what the dog-eat-dog, antigovernment philosophy of the far right has reaped in the bloated bodies and raw sewage in New Orleans's flooded streets....
... Here's one answer: Let's seize this moment by launching a twenty-first-century New Deal--with programs modeled after the Works Progress Administration, updated for these times. Why?
A modernized version of the WPA would help our nation to rebuild New Orleans and Mississippi's Gulf Coast, and repair the racial and class divides that we saw in such dramatic relief these past few days. It would rebuild and improve our nation's public infrastructure and (hopefully) alter the terms of our political discourse in the years ahead.
After all, Roosevelt's New Deal was so much more than simply a vehicle for providing economic relief to citizens in need. It gave Americans a sense of solidarity, a new social contract, as well as the chance to go to work. It also helped bring the country's infrastructure into the twentieth century....
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