I remember the CCC, WPA, NRA and other initialed Rooseveltian measures to combat the Great Depression (inherited by unregulated expansion by previous administrations).  Mr. Roosevelt had not quite four terms to try to carry out measures to get Americans back to work. Ironically it was entry into WWII which completely erased unemployment and put America on the way to world leadership because of its unusual productivity.  The time was right.

In Nazi Germany the time was right for a leader to UNIFY the disparate parts of still medieval Germany. Hitler put millions to work creating the Autobahn, the national series of highways that unified the country and, as I remember riding on one of them just after Germany surrendered, it was quite a highway.  One memory, out of the ordinary, was traveling at night in a jeep filled with soldiers hearing a thump, stopping and getting out to see that a rabbit had tried to cross the roadway at a place and time it usually did before that highway was constructed - as its ancestors probably did back at the dawn of time.

Mr. Hitler probably only did the right thing for his time in getting people back to work.  Building an infrastructure was the right thing to really unify a people whose loyalties were not to the German Reich but to their own provincial principalities.  The highway system is just a symbol of a good and proper way to put people to work, to give them a national purpose and, militarism aside, a way for soldiers to get from here to there in a hurry.

As Bob Herbert pointed out this morning in the NY Times, there are numerous people out of work and a great number of people whose homes have been lost to foreclosure.  Mr. Obama has been traveling the world to sell America but his plans to put Americans back to work have not inspired Congress to rebuild the highways and other infrastructure needs that are crying out for attention.  Our highways need workers to rebuild and extend them.  I would suggest that a public railway system be resurrected and bus routes be enlarged in order to get people from here to there.  The airplane has replaced the trucks as the main means of transporting goods and people.  The Panama Canal is being widened because shipping has undergone changes which mean larger, longer and wider ships to move goods from here to there. Driving big cars emitting pollution must come to an end.

The autobahn is a good example of what such "Works Projects" can create to provide jobs and building up America again.  Those Works Projects are needed federally rather than on a state level.  America needs to get working again.