Friday, January 30, 2009

Franklin Delano Roosevelt *30 January 1882

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Monument. District of Columbia.
Every country’s leader would like to promise peace and prosperity. gwbjr, aka chimpy, did so and brought the opposite, he brought war and depression. He created war, so as, to be ‘a war president’. Chimpy was a typical, delusional Republican. The greatest bugbear, the greatest villain in the history of the country, perhaps the world, for them, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Then, after twelve years of unchecked, unregulated ‘free market’* economics, that the Republicans stood for and by, delved this nation into the Great Depression. Roosevelt understood, that, there was a great impetus to really do something. Then, when world fascism and militarism forged an axis of aggression and evil, the United States was attacked by imperial Japan.

Now, many years later (1984 Dallas Republican convention, if memory serves) Ronnie Reagan forgave Hitler and blamed Roosevelt for the war. The hatred for Roosevelt has never subsided, on the part of rabid, Republican partisans. Chimpy after the 2004 election was determined to dismantle Social Security. That one programme, which perhaps, is the one, great, enduring legacy, that, Roosevelt, and the New Deal, accomplished, and is remembered, by the nation is Social Security.

Roosevelt was elected four times to the presidency, to the great alarum of the Republicans. He won honestly and greatly. America was in a condition, everyone, recognised as not prosperous. War was begun by the world’s, imperialist, anti-democrat fascists that over ran Poland, and attacked the
United States.

The words of FDR at the beginning of his presidential mandate, concerning the first great crisis:

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. ― First Inaugural Address (4 March 1933)
The initial words of FDR, concerning the second great crisis:
Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.
Now, Roosevelt was in the habit of using the more polite term ‘economic royalist’ for fascist, and these economic royalists, supply siders, welfare capitalists, those who privatise profit, and want to wrest government, to do their will, are with us still. Roosevelt is the sort of man these Republicans hate. Here are some of the other words, which, raises the rancor, and inflames the ire of these people:
No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. ― on the National Industrial Recovery Act (16 June 1933)
***
Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. ― Speech to the Democratic National Convention (27 June 1936)
***
Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing. ― Simple Truths message to Congress (29 April1938)
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We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization. ― Greeting to the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, Washington, D.C. (9 January 1940)
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But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.
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Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.
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Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
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I am a Christian and a Democrat, that's all.
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I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments.
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If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do is join a union.
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It is one of the characteristics of a free and democratic nation that it have free and independent labor unions.
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It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.
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More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars - yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.
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One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment... If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.
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The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.
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There is nothing I love as much as a good fight.
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Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.
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War is a contagion.
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I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
There has been some controversies about the Roosevelt Memorial Park. What I have not read, or heard about, is the popularity of the statue group above. People are taking, especially, their small hounds, and photographing them next to Fala. Mister Fala of the White House was Roosevelt’s war time companion. Earlier, I wrote of man and dog; this continues the thought: Whosoever loveth me loveth my hound. Conversely, those who hateth me hateth my hound.
These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks — but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him — at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or 20 million dollars — his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since! I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself — such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog. — (23 September 1944)
Fala was a scottish terrier. The Roosevelts had a succession of scotties. In the film, Wizard of Oz (1939), Dorothy had a, similar highland terrier, a cairn terrier. The Wicked Witch said, “I’ll get you my pretty ... and your little dog too!”. Yes, the venom people have for you, will, also, be given your dog.
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*Now, the reaganistas and the busheviks were against regulation of industries and commerce. Something, that the Constitution mandates, which has never been changed in the wording of the Constitution:
Article I. Section 8. The Congress shall have power ... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes ...

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