This Hoover History's For You
This is a comment I wrote, which I have transfered here to make into a blog post. It is a response to a recent editorial piece. It is also response to all the short and inane comments that appeared under the post. ___________ McClintock's minions proved during the campaign that the people who would vote for him did NOT want to hear or read anything that was without insults, condescension, and character assassination.
They wanted short and nasty buzz phrases, and they got it.
McClintock has proven he thinks he's the smartest one in the room because he had his minions use character assassination and swiftboating to obtain an election result. Hence, since that was his winning formula, he will continue to do it. Meanwhile, the minions (and I'll continue to use that phrase until they pick one username here on this site, and stick with it ) and the blog minders continue to wheedle and beg that everybody else "be polite" when they counter McClintock's minions with things like FACTS.
McClintock managed to use quite a bit of self control here by only referring to Ted Kaczynski, the crazy Unabomber, who lived in the remote Montana wilderness and sent 16 bombs out to schools and airlines while "protesting" development.
Thanks for the Doolittle memories !
McClintock's piece has the same old phrase about Hoover and the Great Depression we have heard (and will hear) time and time again. This is because not that many people who were alive during the time frame of Hoover's presidency are still around to be able to remember just exactly what was going on. So McClintock is free to make up whatever interpretation he thinks will make the best sound byte.
Herbert Hoover, a REPUBLICAN, (1874- 1974) had an extraordinary earlier political life, and if he had not been elected to that one term of Presidency, he may have gone down in the history books with much less of a lousy reputation. Born in Iowa to Quaker parents, he was an orphan by age 9. After living with relatives, he entered Stanford University, in a time when STANFORD HAD FREE TUITION.
You see the difference. Free college tuition ?! McClintock supports putting a huge private university in Placer County, the mother branch of which, in Philladelphia, charges more in tuition and fees than many people earn in a year. But I digress.
Hoover got his degree in geology and became a mining engineer. He worked in Australia and China. During the beginning of the first World War, Hoover did outstanding volunteer work with moving and feeding refugees from London, England. President Wilson appointed Hoover head of the US Food Administration in 1917 to encourage Americans to limit consumption of scarce foodstuffs, to avoid rationing. After the war ended, Hoover headed the American Relief Administration to send food to starving Europeans.
Hoover, in response to criticism about feeding Russians: "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed !"
Imagine Americans sending butter, and not bombs, somewhere now. Or rice instead of rockets. Herbert Hoover was probably responsible for Russia being one of our allies during World War II instead of siding with the Axis.
After that, Hoover became secretary of Commerce under President Harding. As Sec of Commerce, Hoover sought to get government and business cooperating and not fighting each other. He promoted international trade. He had an "Own Your Own Home" campaign to promote single family home ownership and long term mortgages.
At this point, you can see why McClintock likes to diss on Hoover. McClintock is a "Free Market" Darwinist in that he has consistently been against any sort of government regulation of the Savings and Loan and Banking industries as they pillage, rip off, and foreclose on the average homeowner. McClintock has taken huge amounts of donations from these very banking and financial interests, located in Southern CA, out of the district. McClintock, by default, is therefore for letting the "free market" continue to let things collapse and die off, so we have more scavenge-salvage crisis investors scooping up the foreclosed properties, more bankruptcies, more homeless people, and more renters.
A nomadic existence is beneficial for Republican voting patterns these days.
Where Hoover Screwed Up: When the Levees Broke.... Before Our Time
If only Hoover hadn't let racism go against his better instincts as a problem solver. During the time of Hoover's term at Commerce, the United States suffered a great flood on the Mississippi River, flooding millions of acres and leaving thousands of human beings homeless. Alas, in the relief efforts, Hoover was put in charge by Calvin Coolige, and there was not equality in how all Americans were treated. This is when he made his bargain with the devil, as he promised African Americans if they did not publicize what happened after the flood, if and when Hoover was elected President, he would treat them better later. He didn't. In 1932, there was a reckoning.
Hoover was elected President in 1928, during a fairly prosperous time, and then the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 occured.
I had one parent alive during this period and the other one born not too far before the election, both remembered it, and I have it on first person witness knowledge that the beginnings of the Great Depression was wretched, especially if you did not live in a city. But "Hoover" did not cause a Great Depression all by himself.
How is this different that the current situation?
We already were experiencing a financial meltdown under the Bush administration. In spite of the mass amnesia going on in the current Republican Party, there was a smaller stock market flop soon after Bush was first elected in 2000, and the market never really recovered no matter how much Foreign War Stimulation Bush tried to revive it with. Hence the housing bubble as the nation's banks decided to play "shuffle the invisible assets." The Bush administration had already seen indications that there was going to be a MASSIVE financial international meltdown, and had sent Sec Treasurer Paulson to Congress to beg for money to try to stave it off in the autumn of 2008. T-A-R-P, or Troubled Asset Relief Program, it was called.
On Sept 24, 2008, President Bush went on television during prime time and told the nation that Congress had to pass the TARP thing.
Both Presidential candidates acted like Congress should indeed get off its butt and pass some sort of money giveaway, if only to make Bush go away and make it more likely that Bush's replacement was not going to be from Bush's party.
This was not done out of altruism, but they want a Democratic President Obama to fail as they perceive Hoover did, so the next President will be Republican. Please don't try to revise history and pretend that the Republican Party was against the TARP bailout thing.
What has happened since then, to turn the remnant neocon wing of the Republican Party so against any sort of bailout, stimulous spending, or government unemployment and medical care largesse, is that the Republican Party has been turned OUT of office and is no longer dictating where the next round of the stimulus money goes.
It's really that simple.
Congress is trying to spend the money on domestic projects instead of having it disappear into some foreign ether. So is the President.
This has infuriated the Republicans enough to even stage protests that their tax money *might* be spent on.... gasp.... those.... African American type of people. Or Hispanic Americans. Chinese. Japanese. Anybody downstream.
Some things never change.
Herbert Hoover was fumbling around in a world that was rapidly changing due to the rise of modern manufacturing technology, petroleum mining, transportation by automobile, and the increase in global trade and also the potential for global warfare. He thought he could just engineer the problem of a lack of "volunteers" like anything else, and it should go away quickly. But there was NOTHING like the social safety net that we have today, nor the communications network of television and internet. The percentage of population living in rural areas as subsistance farmers was much greater, when their crops failed, they migrated to cities when they couldn't find jobs, and lived in shanties called Hoovervilles. Today, we have the power to distribute food to those who need it, and we will not let people starve or go without shelter to the extent it was done before. Hoover tried cutting taxes on the TOP INCOME EARNERS, which helped increase the national deficit. Then he tried increasing taxes. He tried making tariffs on imported goods, which led to other countries retaliating in a trade war. Whatever he did, it would not be enough because he was the wrong person at the wrong time. A quarter of the country was unemployed.
McClintock imagines himself the right person at this wrong time, but fails, because his solution is always the same "feel good" but nonfunctional invitation to tax-cut chaos. McClintock, for example, previously has deliberately done two things to cause financial chaos in CA. First, he created an "issue" to abolish a tax on automobiles, using a state campaign account that was financed by Southern CA casino tribes, and pushed through that tax cut, helping to create a deficit. Secondly, he helped create the myth that if the CA legislature did energy market deregulation, it would lead to cheaper consumer electrical prices, the result was ENRON ripping off the state, price spikes, and rolling blackouts, and McClintock expecting to be elected to governor after he successfully got Gov. Gray Davis recalled. McClintock lost that election.
Republican philosophy depends partially on the concept of if a person has bad things happen to them, they must have screwed up to deserve it, and therefore Republicans are entitled to lecture other misfortunates on their failures. Republicans forget that they cannot do this to more than about 10% of the population before there is an awakening. They alternate this with a giddy appeal to the people who don't want to live in civilization with taxes.
Hoover suffered another Public Relations disaster when he sent the United States Army to remove an encampment of World War I veterans and their families seeking govt. bonuses from occupying Washington, DC, in June of 1932. That and the political backlash from Mississippi flood, made him a one- term President. That was a historical awakening.
The electorate at the time knew that if they re elected Hoover, the government money that the Federal government was eventually going to have to spend on its own people, was not going to be spread around in a way that they thought they needed it.
Incredibly, after WW II, President Truman put Hoover back to work at what Hoover was good at doing- he went to Europe, looked at the post war situation, and began the work of providing food aid again to starving Europeans. Hoover started a school lunch program for German schoolchildren which fed 3.5 Million children.
We know how McClintock votes on any sort of government program that might benefit children. Or Veterans. No. No. No. No. Try to imagine McClintock looking at a starving child who needs lunch. Think about how he'd vote.
Really, when you think of "Hoover," think "German school lunch program" and "Europeans make the finest engineered cars and high speed rail lines in the world" and understand why McClintock is always calling Hoover a failure.
When you use enough clichés, really, people start to see that they are not the same thing as having the ability to effect government policy in a way that actually benefits the residents of the district that one is supposed to be "representing."
"If you tax productivity," McClintock says, (and this is not a good phrase, but it's a direct quote) "you get less productivity." Well, that's the biggest bunch of cattle pooky malarkey in the above piece, but I don't have time to write an entire book. One does not tax "productivity." Yee gadzooks. One taxes wages, income, or purchases, or real estate. If I have a small business that can provide a good or service that people might want, if they HAVE THE MONEY, they may partake. If they don't have the money, they either don't partake or use credit. There is no credit. Many people have no money. The government is trying to give people cash in exchange for work, so they can spend.
Is this REALLY new age rocket science ?
The United States government can take taxes and spend them on ANYTHING that it wants to, to create spending on ANY sort of endeavor. And that spending creates demand for the product. McClintock knows this. McClintock's shame should be that he insists that the district's federal tax collections should be given away to other districts because he despises his district's constituents so much.
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I see that you have some passion for this subject and feel the need to express your feelings, but I was wondering if you could perhaps inform us of where you learned your writing skills and, if possible, those that were in charge of these facilities at the time you studied there. I would greatly appreciate this information as I have some children currently in school and this knowledge would be of great assistance in evaluating local schools and/or universities. Thank you.
Public schools. East coast.
At the time I learned to read those schools were experimenting with the phonetic method of teaching, where the alphabet is taught first and then the sounds the letters make were taught, then we were taught to sound out the short syllables and words.
I can remember doing that.
The teachers give you the secret code as to what the shapes mean on the page, and then you get to decipher it at home. We had books, magazines and newspapers to practice on.
I learned much later that this was not how other children were taught, they were taught by reading by the "see- and - say" method, where they learn to read by the shape of the word. And by trying to guess what the word meant by its placement in a sentence with other words that might be known.
This is also called by other names, such as teaching reading by use of "whole language."
Well, by the time one is reading for several years in phonics, then when they start to get faster by practice, their brains do start to process the words and phrases by shapes. By thinking of it that way, then I was able to comprehend that maybe some people who naturally learned to read this way (or survived being taught by "see- and - say" ) thought that everybody should learn to read the same way. But of course, I favored the method I had been taught to use, phonetic reading, as it seemed to be easy for me.
I was really, really surprised to learn that there actually was (and still is ) a big public debate in some circles on which is "better." I am trying to remember when I first found this out. Maybe 35 years ago ?
I have a few phrases for the entire system of goobledegoop scholaria that is insisting all students can learn to read English, a language of very strange and inconsistent spelling and pronunciation, by using only the technique of "whole language," but I will self censor myself because this is a public blog.
I do not know, now, if I were a child, what sort of learning experience I would be having, as they do everything by keyboarding now, and I had much more difficulty than the average person with learning to type. I barely, barely got through a single course of it in high school and remembered agonizing over having to type papers. (this was before computers, highlighting, and the "delete" key. Some sadistic instructors forbid the use of typing paper that was erasable, because the ink could smear. I would use it anyway, then treat the paper with art fixative, so the finished ink would not smudge. Too much white out otherwise. ) We also had foreign language instruction in elementary school. We also did a lot of sentence diagramming.
Today, I see teenagers happily obsessing over using their thumbs to type texting on micro-miniature sized little keyboards 3 times as fast as I can go on a big keyboard, and I just am praying that this is not going to become the obligatory method for Adult World. Please. No.
I know better than to insist that one theory of language instruction is better than another, as people do have completely different styles of learning, and there will be variations on the scale of each category, the readers who are best at reading each letter or syllable, vs. the readers who are reading more in the style of looking at a pictograph. And some children (and adults ) just don't like to read, or they like to read casually for entertainment, but not write, no matter how they were taught, or what sort of atmosphere they have at home and at school.
In the public elementary school system I attended, there was overcrowding, so we had our beginning classes (K, 1, 2 ) in other buildings not connected to the school campus at all. In the junior high (grades 7 - 9 ) school I attended in another state, there was also overcrowding, so instead of renting buildings or using a lot of pre-fab modular box buildings, they ran double shifts in the same school, having one shift go very early in the day, and the other shift later, and using a schedule of shortened class times. By high school there was finally a building large enough to hold all the students at one time, then by state university, once again, extremely crowded classes, and really big freshman classes.
I think where I learned to persevere the most was at a community college as an adult, (modular box buildings, again ) where I had absolutely outstanding math and science teachers, who were obviously really enjoying cracking the "secret code" for us older people. Oddly enough, this is also where I ran into the one bad instructor in my life, in an English course, who kept giving everyone D's, D minuses, and E's. I was writing circles around some of the other students, not to boast at all, but it was not casual writing as I am doing here, but on a stricter level where you go back and edit for clarity and for grammar and spelling, and then one might have to read it out loud, so it needed to not ramble. And I was getting bad marks and nasty comments. I conferred with my fellow students, which ranged in age from teens to late middle aged, and all of them were doing college level work, ( we traded papers after they had been savaged by her red pen, so they could see it wasn't "just them" ) and a lot of us went to the registrar's office and just dropped the course before the deadline, so the school could get the message that they had a problem with this one teacher. None of us could figure out just what it was she wanted, but she was obviously in her first, and hopefully, last "teaching" assignment that consisted of berating how the topics she assigned were being treated. Fortunately that was not my last semester, or I would have been aggravated at the waste of time.
CanyonRat, thank you for a superb blog detailing Hoovers trials and triumphs. It was my pleasure to read it.
I cannot stress the importance of FREE education enough. It's amazing all that have benefited from it in one form or another and would yet deny it to the next generation.
"Republican philosophy depends partially on the concept of if a person has bad things happen to them, they must have screwed up to deserve it, and therefore Republicans are entitled to lecture other misfortunates on their failures."
The true nature of Capitalism is based in desire and envy. One would think that's bad enough without adding hate to the equation.
McClintock won this last election by fanning the gossip and innuendo, half truths and out right lies about Charlie Brown. The Repubs are easily hoodwinked. He played on the fears of the illinformed. If he offered any solutions at all I don't see them. He redirected stimulus monies to districts where he has a support base guaranteeing him a political seat somewhere.
Those that voted for him are not the ones who got him elected.
ChuxxR - what do you mean by FREE education? It sounds wonderful. Does it mean that nobody has to pay anything or you can study whatever you want? Like the library? Oh, I forgot, taxes pay for that, that's why the selection is so poor.
momof11, by free education I mean college tuition. Public education has been robbed of elements necessary to one being a well rounded person. Music, art , and most importantly recess have bee usurped by bean counting educators. Students must pay dearly for extracurricular activities and the old generation feels that once they have a kid out of school they shouldn't have to pay although someone paid for them and their children's schooling. Public education trumps all other needs. health care is important but not as much as education.
I am still confused. Do you mean college tuition paid by the state, with money taken from taxpayers? Wouldn't that create the same problems we have in state-controlled, taxpayer-funded elementary, middle and high school? Just like state-controlled, taxpayer-funded health care would most likely resemble Medicare and VA healthcare. Personally, I would rather keep my tax money and educate my kids as I prefer. I have two kids in high school that passed the Cahsee in Sophomore year but are not allowed to take the GE exam until age 18. Why? It would be great to see some real freedom in education, so we could join the 21st century and get away from the 18th century blackboard/textbook model. Just my opinion.
Your right. trouble is many folks can't be teachers because of time constraints or unfamiliarity with subject matter. The poor would suffer the most and even though it has issues public education is a must for socially responsible nations. Without it some kids would no get much of an education if any at all. We all pay for it as it was paid for us. Many people send their children to private religious type schools. Some give superior education and some indoctrinate the childen in bizaare religious experiences. We need public schools to keep it real.
I thought that 14 was the age to be permitted to attend college.
The current blackboard/textbbok model is disheartening. No child left behind never took into account that children learn things differently. A one size fits all approach is well backwards but necessary.
Yeah, guess you're right, good thing we have the most expensive babysitting service ever invented so that we can avoid any religious indoctrination of innocent children.
Oh, I wouldn't be so down on them. Kids actually get an education sooner or later. I don't object to Catholic school or any religious school that provides such an excellent education. What I object to is the fear mongering that takes place in some religious academies. My point is that public school with it's strengths and weaknesses provides a necessary curriculum that benefits all people of this nation.
You know that saying: "It takes a village to raise a child" That's what I mean when I say all citizens should contribute towards the goal of educating all the children.
http://www.justpeace.org/village.htm