Scott Walker is no Herbert Hoover

History is a series of interlocking stories with numerous actors driving even more numerous causes. The agency of actors then creates effects which in turn give us the facts of history. Those events lead to new stories, driving new actions from the changing situation; and hopefully, sometimes, maybe, new motivations in the causation of events. When it comes to the governor of Wisconsin though, we see history repeating as farce in exactly the way Marx meant it.

Much has been written comparing the financial meltdown of 2008 to the Great Depression and stock market crash of 1929, but the comparison here will make you weep for humanity. Wisconsin has always had a populist mentality, our first constitution considered a ban on commercial banking in the state. The Republican Party was founded here with the radical idea that free labor was preferable to that of the slave. The Progressive movement was very strong in Wisconsin, first in the GOP then it's own party, pioneering railroad and other business regulation among many other positive changes. The Wisconsin Idea was something of a revolution in bringing the knowledge, wisdom, and expertise of the state university to government. Wisconsin was a leader in the burgeoning environmental movement, passing protective statutes before the federal government, and while Gaylord Nelson (founder of Earth Day) was a Democrat he was joined in the environmental protection and cleanup effort by many Republicans in state government.

So it is no surprise that many Wisconsinites have a strong affiliation with the Republican Party and the good it has done in the past. However, then is not now and today's GOP has no interest in good governance or responsibility to anything other than how much cash they can pile into private hands from the public purse. Cheeseheads got a sneak preview of modern Republican graft and incompetence when Scott McCallum made a mockery of the governor's office during his brief tenure after Tommy Thompson left to join the Bush Administration. But that did not seem to alert anyone to the dangerous nature of the modern "conservative" wrecking crew nor taint the name of Scott with servile irresponsibility.

Swept into office on the coattails of tea party fervor and possibly voter fraud, college dropout Scott Walker has been the biggest embarrassment to Wisconsin since McCarthy. While there is an entire blog devoted to cataloging his every crime and many bloggers keeping track of his every move both in Wisconsin and nationally, so far no one has noticed the historical parallel between the "troubled" Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation and Herbert Hoover's vehicle of fighting the depression, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." However simplistic this opening line of The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley may seem, it is one of the first ideas a budding historian must internalize because it is true. Remembering this maxim is also the first rule in comparing one historical event to another. So the creation of the RFC is different from the creation of WEDC, the circumstances around them are different, the actors involved are obviously different, and importantly the ideologies driving their creation are radically different. In the first place, Herbert Hoover started his administration by predicting the end of poverty in America. Scott Walker began his by declaring teachers and their unions to be public enemy number one. Hoover was a brilliant mining engineer whose talent and accomplishments made him a very wealthy man on his own merits before entering politics. Walker's only talent seems to be swindling people and parasitically living off of public largesse. Hoover's failure to stem the depression flowed from his inherent optimism that people could work together to solve problems without coercion, whatever else can be said. Walker thrives on confrontation and destroying his enemies. Finally, Hoover would have been remembered as an outstanding President in non-crisis period of American life while Walker would be equally divisive and destructive of anything he touched no matter the larger circumstances.

It is actually ironic that the so-called tea party movement began as a populist reaction to government bailing out powerful and well-connected financial firms. WEDC was not designed to bail out irresponsible businessmen the way TARP was, but loan taxpayer money to private businesses in order to "create jobs" in Wisconsin. Therefore it was an intervention in the "free market" to "pick winners," something that is supposed to be anathema to conservatives. Not only does this expansion of government (pattern?) into the economy ignore the basic tenets of economics but it just happens to be a giant pile of "pay to play" corruption that so-called conservatives are also supposed to abhor. So, as Scott Walker toured the state (on TV ads at least) during his campaign in 2010 with his little brown paper bag he promised that he had big, bold ideas to bring 250,000 jobs to Wisconsin and WEDC was part and parcel that idea. And as usual, Capper at Cognitive Dissidence put it best:

Not only did Walker and WEDC fail miserably to perform as promised, but the agency has been plagued with corruption and ineptitude. Audit after audit showed that the agency lost track of tens of millions of dollars, didn't follow its own rules regarding giving loans and spent money on things like iTunes and Badger football tickets.

In the most recent audit, it was learned that Walker's top aides were leaning heavily on WEDC to give a construction company a $4.3 million loan. The loan ended up being $500,000 but the company created no jobs, went under and never repaid the loan.

It was further revealed that Walker was aware of the progress on securing the loan. You see, Walker had a personal interest in this loan going through since the company owner had given Walker's campaign a $10,000 campaign donation.

Walker went into damage control mode and called for his agency to stop all loans, basically admitting to the failure and corruption of WEDC, which he oversaw.

Days later, it was revealed that Walker had tried to slip into his budget a rule that WEDC would be exempt from FOIA requests.

Which brings us to the last point. Capper also linked to a Capitol Times article that in turn cited a study by a good government watchdog group that showed how these quasi-public entities charged with handing out taxpayer loans to private business both do not work and are rife with corruption. Other states have finally "learned their lesson" and are getting rid of these things but Wisconsin is 20 years behind the rest of the country it seems so they are doing it now. When Herbert Hoover and the Republicans of 86 years ago confronted the depression they had very little information to work with on how to fight the horrific cycle of a collapsing economy. FDR did not have all the answers either but he was unafraid to try things that went against the orthodoxy of the day. Hoover was trapped in that orthodoxy and the things that had worked in the past did not work on the Great Depression. Today we do know what causes horrific bubble-bursting crises, and we know how to fight them. Scott Walker may not be a brilliant engineer but he had to know that simply shoveling money out the door and hoping jobs would some how be created without any of that money going to stimulate demand would not work. Meaning that it was a completely cynical way of hacking open the state to reward the people he really works for.

So it is easy to state that Scott Walker is a worse leader than Herbert Hoover. Let's not make that mistake again.

When Journalists Blow It.

I mostly, really like NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. His reporting is solid, he really cares about human rights and well-being, and generally his politics align with my own. But today he wrote a column called When Liberals Blew It that dives into a very difficult subject and threatens to reopen some (still unhealed) wounds in the America outside of fascism.

"Causation is difficult to tease from correlation."

Well, he's right about that. Causation is what scholars such as historians primarily concern themselves with. Journalists report facts in a timely, objective fashion and columnists try to give some context and meaning to events, but it takes a lot of time and research to get to the bottom of causation. When your life and livelihood are dedicated to following along with the tide of events you simply do not have the time to really understand the lines of causation. I am sure a serious commentator like Kristof tries very hard to fill in the blank spaces by researching scholarly work when he is able. I will return to this issue after presenting some of the information in his column.

'Blowing it' refers to the backlash faced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report, on a subject he was actually a recognized scholarly expert in, in March, 1965 as part of the Johnson administration's Great Society program. Yes, it is always remembered as the statement on the breakdown of the African-American family but it was part of a real effort by the federal government to improve people's lives. Remember that? A time when government actually tried to address social problems? I know it sounds hard to believe in our age of rampant corruption and distrust, but it really did happen. The report is remembered as a moralizing, racist denunciation of the African-American community, blaming their poverty on absent fathers.

I want to make this less than a book-length post so I will stay away from Moynihan's actual findings. But here's the bait and switch, Kristof titled the column "When Liberals Blew It" but his first line is that fifty years ago "Democrats made a historic mistake." Democrat does not equal liberal, it doesn't now, it didn't then. As the fascist right is always pointing out, the Democratic party (in the south) had fewer votes for the Civil Rights Act than the GOP. The Southern Democrats supported segregation and Jim Crow, etc. There are liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats and so on. The political parties in America are coalitions, not uniform ideological robots. This is especially true in the Democratic party, as any history textbook will tell you. The New Deal coalition that kept reform going for a generation after FDR's death was made up of northern workers, African-Americans, conservative southerners, and academics to name a few. They did not all get along.

The second problem is that Kristof only cites one critic that could be called a liberal, Floyd McKissick, who Kristof says was a prominent civil rights activist. I know this is only a column for the NEW YORK TIMES and not some piddly academic journal where you have to cite all evidence, but come on there had to be one more point of view you could cite. It is not convincing to say "Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist" and leave it hang. This sounds a little like the twitterati of today who read an inflammatory headline and jump into action.

Then thirdly, Kristof writes:

The taboo on careful research on family structure and poverty was broken by William Julius Wilson, an eminent black sociologist. He has praised Moynihan’s report as “a prophetic document,” for evidence is now overwhelming that family structure matters a great deal for low-income children of any color.

 This statement caught my eye as a little fishy. Especially after reading through some of the comments that Kristof completely misrepresented Wilson's scholarship. And sure enough, if you click on Moynihan's name you are treated to the man's obituary in the Times, which states:

Though savaged by many liberal academics at the time, it is now generally regarded as "an important and prophetic document," in the words of Prof. William Julius Wilson of Harvard.

Kristof does link to a primary source for Prof. Wilson's quotation, but falls short on the context. His exact words were:

"Moynihan’s study of the relationship between poverty and family structure, famously known as the Moynihan Report, is, as I noted in a recent article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, an important and prophetic document.  It is important because it continues to be a reference for studies on the black family and the plight of low-skilled black males.  It was prophetic because Moynihan’s predictions about the fragmentation of the African American Family and its connection to inner-city poverty were largely borne out, and since 1990, social scientists and civil rights leaders have echoed his concerns about black make[sic] joblessness and the need for social policies that would address their skills deficits and change behavioral responses that emanate from severe employment constraints." (emphasis mine)

This is lazy journalism bias of the kind (Senator) Al Franken took to task in his book
Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them along with the getting there first bias that it seems Kristof was trying to accomplish. The lazy bias is "why look at the original source or do your own analysis when you can simply look at what someone else wrote yesterday." Or in the case of the Moynihan quotation, twelve years ago.

So, to Mr. Kristof, I appreciate what you were trying to do with this column but there are some real mistakes. In future columns maybe we can actually get to the substance of the Moynihan report, what we have done about poverty, why this was not actually the reason or spot that Liberals blew it and so on.