Depression coming? Herbert Hoover, Green Lakes, Chittenango Falls & the CCC and more...

Historians read history books to give them a feel for the past and to give them a way to understand what happened, why it happened, if it was good or bad, and if we can learn from it.  This winter, during this unbelievable spell of cold, I have been reading and reading on the years leading up to the Great Depression….how we tried to solve it…and what could have prevented it.

Armed with this information …13 books later… I have decided that the conclusion I can draw from this past history is that if a Republican is elected President in the next two elections we will begin the cycle of the Great Depression again.  We are already starting because of today's Congress. 

                                                                                                                                               

What became most striking to me this week was the cutting of food programs for the poor while paying subsidies to the wantonness of large agricultural farm corporations and subsidiaries...including Monsanto. Especially dsiscouraging in the face of proven paid lobbying done by the corporations they benefit!

How sad to think of it happening again.

The depression was also fueled by the great dust bowls that ruined much of our farmland and sent poor farmers in vast number into  foreclosures of their poverty… basically the addition of Mother Nature’s wrath.  (Global Warming?) 

Everyone should read up on this lamentable and preventable dark period of our American history.  If you do you will see that during this time large wealthy corporations, wealthy companies, and wealthy people flourish.  You will also find that the head of the  U S Treasury for a good part of this period was Andrew Mellon…yes that rich Andrew Mellon.  (Sort of like a Koch brother as Treasury Secretary tody!) The wealthy remained wealthy, the middle class disappeared and the poor class embodied a vast hopeless swath of America.  

When we elected Herbert Hoover he swore hw could change it all by asking Americans to voluntarily help the sick, hungry and jobless.  He said that we did not need handout programs in the government.   It did not work.  The nation’s leaders (Congress) said that the problem was lazy people who needed to find jobs…. of course, of which there were few.  I part the trouble was because companies were inventing ways to mechanize workers jobs and force them out of industry, enabling them to make more …profits.  (Now we send the jobs overseas)

When things became totally desperate we did something…we made FDR President and he started work programs. Yes work programs.  The complaint then was that the government was giving them “leaf raking jobs”.  It was providing jobs.  These programs included among them the WPA, CCC, and a new National Guard force… it employed millions in government subsidized labor programs.  Programs that enabled us to build up our infrastructure, parks, community projects, repair schools, playgrounds, highways…and all of this done with these  supposed “lazy people” who didn’t want to work.

Today we in CNY have a wonderful array of parks done by some of these programs ...including Green Lakes Park, Robert Treman State Park, Montezuma, Trails in Brookfield, Gilbert Lake, Chittenango Falls Park, Selkirk Shores Park, Buttermilk Falls State Park and many, many more….

Time to wake up America…learn history…don’t rely on FOX News and TV and Radio Commentators who choose to stir the pot so that their “sponsors” and stations pay them more.  Get out and enjoy what these supposed laborers did for us!  Remember but for the grace of God you have a job...this could all change in a heartbeat... 

Here is a video I did of Green Lakes State Park once called Green Pond!