AP-Vets-Jobs Program
Obama to push for veterans jobs programs
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Emulating the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, the president Friday will unveil a new jobs program for the nation's veterans, designed to rebuild roads, levees and trails on public lands.
To make the announcement, President Obama will travel across the Potomac to a fire station in Arlington, Virginia, that was one of the first to respond to the Pentagon on Nine-Eleven.
The effort is geared to those veterans who served after the attacks, a group experiencing an unemployment rate of 5 percent more than non-veterans.
The "Veterans Jobs Corps" would spend a billion dollars and put some 20-thousand veterans to work. The president will also ask for 4 billion dollars more for his COPS program and another billion for firefighter grants. How this will play with a tightfisted Congress remains to be seen.