Posts Tagged ‘Roosevelt’

Democrat Hero FDR Was In Fact A Wicked Man Who Is Burning In Hell With The Blood Of Hundreds Of Thousands Of Innocent Holocaust Jews On His Hands

April 12, 2013

I had my view of Franklin Delano Roosevelt radically changed by my reading of the Burton Folsom Jr. book, New Deal Or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.  I challenge anyone who adores FDR to read that thoroughly documented work.  Another book to read is Amity Schlaes’ The Forgotten Man.  You end up being incredibly angry and deeply saddened at the same time as a foolish American people wickedly kept returning to the policies of a wicked man who trapped America into the misery of a terrible depression that lasted fully seven years longer than it should have.

We also find that he may have – at least if you believe in a just and righteous God – kept America trapped in a bloody world war that resulted in the deaths of over 400,000 Americans.

If you believe in God – as I do – I think it is a valid assertion that God would have given America swift victory had we tried to help God’s people the Jews instead of what we did under a despicable and callous FDR.

We know that FDR was a racist bigot who detested black people and allowed labor unions to exclude blacks from work that they desperately needed to survive the darkest days of America.

The question as to why black people have in recent years chosen to celebrate and support the party that put their ancestors in the chains of slavery, fought a vicious Civil War to keep them in those chains, invented the Ku Klux Klan as the terrorist arm of the Democrat Party to keep blacks who had been freed by Republicans in subjugation, resegregated blacks under the tyranny of “the father of the modern progressive movement” also known as the racist white supremacist Woodrow Wilson, was still so racist in 1924 that the Democratic National Convention of that year was called “Klanbake,” allowed black men to go untreated with syphilis so researchers could study the progression of the disease (the Tuskegee Experiment) throughout the entire FDR presidency, was largely THE party of racist discrimination through the 1950s, and then only passed the Civil Rights laws with the overwhelming supporting votes of Republicans, is a mystery that I will not attempt to explain.  I have no idea why black people as a culture allowed Democrats who had subjected them to one form of plantation allowed Democrats to bait and switch them into a different form of plantation (the welfare plantation of institutional generational dependency).

I will only point out that after reading about the incredible harm a wicked and cynical president did to the American economy out of bitter partisan ideology, I believed that FDR is burning in hell today.

Now, having read this piece by an expert on the Holocaust, I am certain of it (this piece was originally filed under the LA Times title, “FDR’s troubling view of Jews”):

What FDR said about Jews in private
His personal sentiments about Jews may help explain America’s tepid response to the Holocaust.
By Rafael Medoff
April 7, 2013

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called “the best way to settle the Jewish question.”

Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman) “to spread the Jews thin all over the world.” The diary entry adds: “The president said he had tried this out in [Meriwether] County, Georgia [where Roosevelt lived in the 1920s] and at Hyde Park on the basis of adding four or five Jewish families at each place. He claimed that the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.”

Roosevelt’s “best way” remark is condescending and distasteful, and coming from anyone else it would probably be regarded as anti-Semitism. But more than that, FDR’s support for “spreading the Jews thin” may hold the key to understanding a subject that has been at the center of controversy for decades: the American government’s tepid response to the Holocaust.

Here’s the paradox. The U.S. immigration system severely limited the number of German Jews admitted during the Nazi years to about 26,000 annually — but even that quota was less than 25% filled during most of the Hitler era, because the Roosevelt administration piled on so many extra requirements for would-be immigrants. For example, starting in 1941, merely leaving behind a close relative in Europe would be enough to disqualify an applicant — on the absurd assumption that the Nazis could threaten the relative and thereby force the immigrant into spying for Hitler.

Why did the administration actively seek to discourage and disqualify Jewish refugees from coming to the United States? Why didn’t the president quietly tell his State Department (which administered the immigration system) to fill the quotas for Germany and Axis-occupied countries to the legal limit? That alone could have saved 190,000 lives. It would not have required a fight with Congress or the anti-immigration forces; it would have involved minimal political risk to the president.

Every president’s policy decisions are shaped by a variety of factors, some political, some personal. In Roosevelt’s case, a pattern of private remarks about Jews, some of which I recently discovered at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem and from other sources, may be significant.

In 1923, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at the college and helped institute a quota to limit the number admitted. In 1938, he privately suggested that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were therefore to blame for provoking anti-Semitism there. In 1941, he remarked at a Cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon. In 1943, he told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions “should be definitely limited” so as to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.”

There is evidence of other troubling private remarks by FDR too, including dismissing pleas for Jewish refugees as “Jewish wailing” and “sob stuff”; expressing (to a senator ) his pride that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins”; and characterizing a tax maneuver by a Jewish newspaper publisher as “a dirty Jewish trick.” But the most common theme in Roosevelt’s private statements about Jews has to do with his perception that they were “overcrowding” many professions and exercising undue influence.

This attitude dovetails with what is known about FDR’s views regarding immigrants in general and Asian immigrants in particular.

In one 1920 interview, he complained about immigrants “crowding” into the cities and said “the remedy for this should be the distribution of aliens in various parts of the country.” In a series of articles for the Macon (Ga.) Daily Telegraph and for Asia magazine in the 1920s, he warned against granting citizenship to “non-assimilable immigrants” and opposed Japanese immigration on the grounds that “mingling Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.” He recommended that future immigration should be limited to those who had “blood of the right sort.”

FDR’s decision to imprison thousands of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II was consistent with his perception of Asians as having innate racial characteristics that made them untrustworthy. Likewise, he apparently viewed with disdain what he seemed to regard as the innate characteristics of Jews. Admitting significant numbers of Jewish or Asian immigrants did not fit comfortably in FDR’s vision of America.

Other U.S. presidents have made their share of unfriendly remarks about Jews. A diary kept by Harry Truman included statements such as “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish.” Richard Nixon’s denunciations of Jews as “very aggressive and obnoxious” were belatedly revealed in tapes of Oval Office conversations.

But the revelation of Franklin Roosevelt’s sentiments will probably shock many people. After all, he led America in the war against Hitler. Moreover, Roosevelt’s public persona is anchored in his image as a liberal humanitarian, his claim to care about “the forgotten man,” the downtrodden, the mistreated. But none of that can change the record of his response to the Holocaust.

The observance of Holocaust Memorial Day begins Sunday night. It is the annual occasion to reflect on the Nazi genocide and the world’s response to it. In the case of the United States, it is sobering to consider that partly because of Roosevelt’s private prejudices, innocent people who could have been saved were instead abandoned.

Rafael Medoff is the founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington. His latest book is “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith.”Medoff will speak Sunday at the Holocaust Memorial Day service at the Alpert Jewish Community Center in Long Beach.

I’m sorry.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was different from Adolf Hitler HOW, exactly?  Certainly not in their vile racism or their contempt for Jews.

FDR has the documented blood of an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM of 190,000 Jews on his hands.  And given that he should have done far, far more than the “absolute minimum” to help desperate people who were condemned to miserable deaths because he wouldn’t lift a finger to help them, that number of Jews whose blood FDR has on his hands soars much the way Obama’s debt has soared.

FDR wanted to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.”  The rat bastard son of a bitch actually AGREED WITH HITLER!!!

That’s one of the reasons every single American should be nauseated by this image that celebrated both the wicked Obama and his wicked predecessor in massive socialism and rabid anti-Semitism:

Obama-FDR-New-New-Deal

At the heart of the Democrat Party is a profound hatred for God, for the Judeo-Christian worldview and for the people – both Jew and Christian alike – who follow the Word of God.

At last year’s Democrat Party National Convention, they removed “God” AND Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  The Democrat Party then illegally put them back in not because they didn’t despise God and a Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, but because of the political embarrassment they had caused themselves by being too honest with their hatred of the God of the Bible.

This is God damn America.  And we’re going to reap the same godless disaster this time around that we faced the last time.  Only this time – given the fact that this nation is more depraved than ever before – we are going to lose and lose big and lose everything.

And then Democrats will lead America into the worship of the Antichrist and the acceptance of the mark of the beast.  Because that is the hellish abyss they have been pushing America toward for decades.

Why FDR Would Have Denounced The Modern Democrat Party As Un-American

February 25, 2011

Democrats and the Democrat Party they form have become truly despicable.

I can cite former Democrats such as Dennis Prager who has frequently called himself “a Kennedy liberal.”  He has pointed out, “I didn’t leave the Democrat Party; the Democrat Party left me.”

I can cite Ronald Reagan himself as such a man:

Reagan began his political career as a liberal Democrat, admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and active supporter of New Deal policies, but in the early 1950s he shifted to the right and, while remaining a Democrat, endorsed the presidential candidacies of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 as well as Richard Nixon in 1960.[54] His many GE speeches—which he wrote himself—were non-partisan but carried a conservative, pro-business message; he was influenced by Lemuel Boulware, a senior GE executive. Boulware, known for his tough stance against unions and his innovative strategies to win over workers, championed the core tenets of modern American conservatism: free markets, anticommunism, lower taxes, and limited government.[55] Eventually, the ratings for Reagan’s show fell off and GE dropped Reagan in 1962.[56]  That year Reagan formally switched to the Republican Party, stating, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”[57]

One of the things that undoubtedly resulted in these two brilliant political thinkers’ sense of abandonment was the fact that they clearly HAD BEEN abandoned by the Democrat Party as it continued to “evolve” (liberals love that word, worshiping it in place of a God who stays the same) into a degenerate spiral.  And it was that profound abandonment of key Democrat liberal views – the abandonment of classical liberalism into something that can only be described today as a hybrid of Marxism and fascism – that then led these men to question their entire political presuppositions that had resulted in their being Democrats in the first place.

Yes, I know, liberals always confidently assure us that Nazism and fascism are right wing.  But how, exactly?  If they say militarism, then how was it that the Soviet Union had the largest and most powerful military machine in the world?  If they say racism, then – apart from their own bigotry – how do they escape their own racism?  If you want to talk about anti-Semitism of the Nazis, it turns out that Democrats are actually far more anti-Semitic than Republicans.  And, again, the genocide of the leftwing Soviet Union dwarfs even that of the Nazis.

So, what exactly is it that makes Nazism “right wing”?  Well, maybe the left would say that the Nazis were “Christian” and left wing ideologies are secular.  But that is hardly true, either.  I document in a previous article (“Hitler Wasn’t ‘Right Wing’, Wasn’t ‘Christian’; And Nazism Was Applied Darwinism“) that Nazism and Christianity had virtually nothing to do with one another, and that in fact Hitler was an acknowledged atheist.

I did not know at the writing of that article that in fact Hitler actually wanted to kidnap Pope Pius XII, and that the SS officer placed in charge of the operation understood that Hitler would have murdered him following his capture.  I don’t see how that doesn’t do anything more than strengthen my case that Hitler was hardly a “Catholic.”

When it comes to Nazi ideology and Nazi policies (not the least of which was the sort of abortion and Darwinian eugenics that liberal progressive and modern-day Democrat Icon Margaret Sanger engaged in), Nazism was far more in line with liberal progressivism than anything remotely conservative.  A couple quick statements by Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of Hillary Clinton:

In Pivot of Civilization, Sanger referred to immigrants and poor folks as “human weeds,” “reckless breeders,” “spawning  … human beings who never should have been born.”

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she said, “if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” (Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon)

In her “Plan for Peace,” Sanger outlined her strategy for eradication of those she deemed “feebleminded.” Among the steps included in her evil scheme were immigration restrictions; compulsory sterilization; segregation to a lifetime of farm work; etc. (Birth Control Review, April 1932, p. 107)

And I also show in a comment to that article that Nazism was far, FAR more in line with Democrat Party liberalism than it ever could be Republican Party conservatism when it came to big government and big government policies.

Jonah Goldberg points out that Nazism was in fact “far right.”  But only in the sense that the Nazi Party, i.e. the National Socialist German Workers Party, was the far right of the extreme left.

A good article I recently found on the subject of socialism and fascism is available here.  Basically, the latter is simply a particular species of the former.

American conservatism calls for a strong military defense, yes.  But as we shall see, so also did FDR.  And in every other aspect, consistent conservatism calls for limited and small national government.  Which was the diametric opposite of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi project, which controlled every sphere of life the same way the Democrat Party tried to do during the last two years when they had power.

If you think for so much as an instant that Adolf Hitler wanted less centralized power for himself and more control in the hands of the states/districts and the individual people – as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and conservatives constantly talk about – you simply couldn’t be any more ignorant.

That said, just what are the two fundamental issues I claim in my title that FDR would have denounced in the Democrat Party of today?

They are military power and the willingness to use it (i.e., the heart of any foreign policy) and government or public employee unions (i.e., the heart of Democrat’s domestic agenda).

These are no small matters: the former is central to any rational foreign policy and the latter has become central to Democrat domestic policy.

I describe FDR’s fundamental opposition to government unions and the reasons he was opposed to them here.  And I provide FDR’s very own words and his very own reasoning.  Suffice it to say that as pro-union as FDR was, he was profoundly opposed to government/public sector employees having the very sort of collective bargaining rights that Democrats today routinely demand for the public sector unions which constitute the bulk of union power today, and which massively contributes almost exclusively to the Democrat Party machine.  FDR realized that these employees were employees not of some unfair private company, but of the American people.  He also recognized that the government becomes a monopoly unto itself, and that government unions striking 1) exploited that monopoly power in an unfair and un-American way, and 2) was a defacto attack against the American people.

Please read the article above for more.

That leaves the other issue, the foreign policy issue of military power and the willingness to use it to deal with threats to the nation.

A speech by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could have been given today to expose the American liberal views of Democrats basically since Lyndon Baines Johnson refused to seek re-election after liberals turned on him.  It certainly powerfully applies to the Democrat positions in the war on terror – that Obama once refused to even acknowledge – of today.  Churchill began:

I have but a short time to deal with this enormous subject and I beg you therefore to weigh my words with the attention and thought which I have given to them.

As we go to and fro in this peaceful country with its decent, orderly people going about their business under free institutions and with so much tolerance and fair play in their laws and customs, it is startling and fearful to realize that we are no longer safe in our island home.

For nearly a thousand years England has not seen the campfires of an invader. The stormy sea and our royal navy have been our sure defense. Not only have we preserved our life and freedom through the centuries, but gradually we have come to be the heart and center of an empire which surrounds the globe.

It is indeed with a pang of stabbing pain that we see all this in mortal danger. A thousand years has served to form a state; an hour may lay it in dust.

What shall we do? Many people think that the best way to escape war is to dwell upon its horrors and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation. They flaunt the grisly photograph before their eyes. They fill their ears with tales of carnage. They dilate upon the ineptitude of generals and admirals. They denounce the crime as insensate folly of human strife. Now, all this teaching ought to be very useful in preventing us from attacking or invading any other country, if anyone outside a madhouse wished to do so, but how would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves that is the question we have to ask.

Would the invaders consent to hear Lord Beaverbrook’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Mr. Lloyd George? Would they agree to meet that famous South African, General Smuts, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it. I have borne responsibility for the safety of this country in grievous times. I gravely doubt it.

But even if they did, I am not so sure we should convince them, and persuade them to go back quietly home. They might say, it seems to me, “you are rich; we are poor. You seem well fed; we are hungry. You have been victorious; we have been defeated. You have valuable colonies; we have none. You have your navy; where is ours? You have had the past; let us have the future.” Above all, I fear they would say, “you are weak and we are strong.”

Churchill gave that speech back in 1934.  Just imagine how much unparalleled human suffering would never have happened if only the weak and appeasing policies of the leftist bleeding hearts had not triumphed!  The left wrongly claim to stand for peace and compassion and every good thing.  But the exact opposite is true, as they have in fact murdered millions and millions of innocent human beings with their naive and morally stupid policies.  And to whatever extent liberals have good intentions, the road to hell is paved with liberal intentions.

Think back to Obama’s positions as a candidate in which he demonized Bush’s war in Iraq and his surge strategy.  Think of Obama’s incredibly naive and incredibly failed policy of talking to Iran without preconditions.

I could go on all day about Democrats taking on the views that Churchill condemned; that our enemies really aren’t that evil and how we can talk to them and reach some kind of accord short of fighting them.  It is as naive and morally idiotic today as it was in the era of Churchill and – yes – Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I did not realize this until I watched a program I viewed on the Military History Channel called “Decisions That Shook the World.”  But FDR rapidly became what we would today call a neo-conservative.

In the late 1930s, FDR began to watch with growing horror as the Nazis began to take over Europe.  In secret letters to Winston Churchill, he offered his moral support to the Allies.  FDR knew that if the people – who did NOT want to become entangled in what they saw as a European war – were to find out about these letters, they would turn against him in outrage.  The American people in the 1930s and early 1940s were crystal clear that they did not want to become involved in another world war in Europe.  As it was, at the very time that the American people were the most worried about FDR secretly getting involved in the war behind their backs, FDR was in fact secretly corresponding with Churchill to do that very thing.  FDR also – again secretly – ordered his military commanders to devise a secret military plan with Great Britain for when FDR was able to involve America in the war against Hitler in Europe.

Now, today, it would be very easy to condemn FDR as duplicitous.  And he WAS incredibly duplicitous.  FDR was a man – we find out in the words of the historians who narrated the “Decisions” program – who had no problem saying and doing things in private that he very much did not want to be known in public.  As an example, FDR, in direct defiance of the United States Supreme Court – directed his Attorney General to wiretap suspected spies.  That was literally an impeachable offense.  FDR was breaking the law to deal with what he saw as a growing threat against America.

Rep. Wendell Wilkie, the Republican candidate for president in the 1940 election – warned the American people, “If you elect FDR, he will get you into a war you don’t want.”  And FDR, deceitfully, in a speech, said, “That charge is contrary to every fact, every purpose of the past eight years.”  It was, as history documents, a complete lie.

Another lie FDR told the people came on the eve of the 1940 election.  FDR told mothers, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”  And it is hard to imagine a more dishonest promise, given that he was at the moment he said those words doing everything he knew how to get America into the war in Europe.

One of the points the historians made clear is that, “If all of Roosevelt’s acts were publicly known, he likely would have been impeached.”  He most certainly would NOT have been re-elected in 1940.

FDR was reelected on the promise that he would not do what in fact he was determined to do.

In 1940, the “anti-war” candidate was the Republican, Wendell Wilkie.  He had the virtue of being honest, but likely on the wrong side of history (we can’t know for sure what would have happened had the United States not become involved in World War II, but it doesn’t look pretty).  Democrat FDR may have had the virtue of being right, but he was certainly profoundly dishonest.

Now, I could write how FDR was quite constant with other modern liberal presidents who say one thing and do the exact opposite (I’m speaking directly about Barack Obama, the examples of which are now already legion).  But that isn’t my project here.  My project is to point out that, when it came to being prepared for war and then fighting that war, FDR was fundamentally in opposition to the modern Democrat Party agenda.

That briefly stated, it was the Republican Party which ultimately came to realize that FDR was correct in his views of the military and the need to vigorously defend American national security.  And it was the Democrats who came to turn on FDR’s realization and abandon his views.

They didn’t do so all at once, or right away.  As much as modern liberals tried to attack Ronald Reagan as putting the world on the brink of nuclear war in his Cold War stand against the powerful Soviet Union, one President John F. Kennedy was every bit the cold warrior that Reagan ever was.  And, again, any liberal who doubts this is simply a fundamentally ignorant human being.  That said, it was during the Kennedy presidency that JFK cynically – and by executive fiat rather than any vote by Congress – allowed the government unions that came to own the Democrat Party lock, stock and barrel to collectively bargain as a means to help the Democrat Party.  And the moral collapse of the Democrat Party was incredibly precipitous after that.

At this point in time, anyone who doubts that radical Islam is easily capable of not only destabilizing the world, but plunging it into economic depression and global war is delusional.  The mere prospect of a collapse of the Libyan government alone could spell enormous problems in the likely event of a civil war in that country.  Oil prices could literally more than double, which would simply obliterate any potential global economic recovery.  If Iran is able to obtain the bomb – which is most assuredly will if it hasn’t already – we will see a rise in Islamic fundamentalism, jihadism and terrorism such that the world has never seen as the Iranian regime rightly sees itself as impervious to any meaningful international action against it.  If that isn’t bad enough, we would also see a nuclear arms race quickly escalate in the craziest region in the history of the planet as Sunni Muslim regimes tried to protect themselves against the Shiite Iranian threat.

For what it’s worth, even as mainstream liberals celebrate and rejoice in the overthrow of one Arab leader after another, it is IRAN which is most benefitting from the chaos.  From the New York Times:

MANAMA, Bahrain — The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran’s position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said.

I have been warning and warning about this.  But the world listens to Obama, not me.

But in light of Obama’s policy of appeasement, of asking for meetings of minds with no preconditions, allow me to rephrase Churchill’s words to suit our modern-day situation:

Would the invaders consent to hear Barack Obama’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Hillary Clinton? Would they agree to meet that famous African, Kofi Annan, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it.

Allow me to share with you the consensus view of liberalism today at one of its elite headquarters of Columbia University:

Columbia University is holding a series of public hearings on whether or not to allow ROTC back on campus now that DADT has been repealed. A wounded Iraq veteran who recently enrolled at Columbia took to the microphone and asked fellow students to support ROTC. He was booed, jeered, and called a racist.

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.

“Racist!” some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.

The former soldier responded to the jeers with this awesome statement:

“It doesn’t matter how you feel about the war. It doesn’t matter how you feel about fighting,” said Maschek. “There are bad men out there plotting to kill you.”

The despicable so-called “Americans” in the audience only laughed and jeered more.

Anthony Maschek was a staff sergeant with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. He was shot 11 times and spent two years recovering at Walter Reed. He’s an American hero and those thugs at Columbia are a disgrace. This is no different than those pieces of crap who spit on veterans coming back from Vietnam. It’s disgusting that in 2011 our veterans should have to be heckled by cowards.

Read more: http://www.thehotjoints.com/2011/02/21/wounded-veteran-booed-and-jeered-at-columbia-university/#ixzz1Evn0A8qL

FDR would have turned his back on this Democrat Party as a bunch of contemptible and despicable traitors to the United States of America.  He would have looked at the government unions that today are the sine qua non – the “that without which” – of the Democrat Party machine.  And he would have been disgusted that the entire Democrat Party rests today upon an inherently un-American foundation.  Then this president who risked so much to keep America and the world safe from tyranny would have looked upon the modern Democrat Party and its repeated denunciation of those who would fight America’s most terrifying enemies even as those enemies grew stronger and stronger while we have grown weaker and weaker, and he would have vomited in contempt for the party that he had such a profound role in shaping.

By the very standards of the figures that you cite as your greatest heroes, I denounce you as the pathetic, vile, un-American fools that you truly are, Democrats.

I would say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but I doubt that you are capable of that virtue in this house-of-card world that you are building now.  And the problem with houses of cards is not merely that they fall; it is also that they tend to burn furiously when a match is struck.

And when the Antichrist warned of by the Scriptures for more than 2,600 years comes (as described in the Books of Daniel and Revelation), it will be Democrats, the quintessential fools, who welcome him with cheers and adoration.

Why Government Unions Are Proof That Democrats Have Become An Inherently Un-American Threat

February 22, 2011

FDR never wanted to see public sector unions.  FDR wrote:

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.”

[Well, that hasn’t really come to pass now, has it?  FDR continues]:

“Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that ‘under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.'”

Why did FDR say that?

Read this article from The Wall Street Journal and understand the inherent threat of public unions.  And then open your eyes:

It’s now official: In 2009 the number of unionized workers who work for the government surpassed those in the private economy for the first time. This milestone explains a lot about modern American politics, in particular the paradox that union clout with Democrats has increased even as fewer workers belong to unions overall.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported recently that 51.4% of America’s 15.4 million union members, or about 7.91 million workers, were employed by the government in 2009. As recently as 1980, there were more than twice as many private as public union members. But private union membership has continued to decline, even as unions have organized more public employees. The nearby chart shows the historical trend.

[1unions]

Overall unionism keeps declining, however, with the loss of 771,000 union jobs amid last year’s recession. Only one in eight workers (12.3%) now belongs to a union, with private union employment hitting a record low of 7.2% of all jobs, down from 7.6% in 2008. Only one in 13 U.S. workers in the private economy pays union dues. In government, by contrast, the union employee share rose to 37.4% from 36.8% the year before.

In private industries, union workers are subject to the vagaries of the marketplace and economic growth. Thus in 2009 10.1% of private union jobs were eliminated, which was more than twice the 4.4% rate of overall private job losses. On the other hand, government unions offer what is close to lifetime job security and benefits, subject only to gross dereliction of duty. Once a city or state’s workers are organized by a union, the jobs almost never go away.

This means government is the main playing field of modern unionism, which explains why the AFL-CIO and SEIU have become advocates for higher taxes and government expansion in cities, states and Washington. Unions once saw their main task as negotiating a bigger share of an individual firm’s profits. Now the movement’s main goal is securing a larger share of the overall private economy’s wealth, which means pitting government employees against middle-class taxpayers.

And as union membership has grown in government, so has union clout in pushing politicians (especially but not solely Democrats) for higher wages and benefits. This is why labor chiefs Andy Stern (SEIU) and Rich Trumka (AFL-CIO) could order Democrats to exempt unions from ObamaCare’s tax increase on high-cost health insurance plans. To the extent Democrats have become the party of government, they have become ever more beholden to public unions.

The problem for democracy is that this creates a self-reinforcing cycle of higher spending and taxes. The unions help elect politicians, who repay the unions with more pay and benefits and dues-paying members, who in turn help to re-elect those politicians.

The political scientists Fred Siegel and Dan DiSalvo recently wrote in the Weekly Standard about the 2006 example of former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine shouting to a rally of 10,000 public workers that “We will fight for a fair contract.” Mr. Corzine was supposed to be on the other side of the bargaining table representing taxpayers, not labor.

From time to time, usually requiring a fiscal crisis, middle-class taxpayers in the private economy will revolt enough to check this vicious political cycle. (See Scott Brown.) But sooner or later, the unions regain their political advantage because taxpayers have other concerns while unions have the most to gain or lose.

This is why most Democrats once opposed public-sector unionism. Such 20th-century liberal heroes as New York Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia and Franklin Roosevelt believed fervently in industrial unions. But they believed public employees had a special social obligation and could too easily exploit their monopoly position. How right they were.

As we can see from the desperate economic and fiscal woes of California, New Jersey, New York and other states with dominant public unions, this has become a major problem for the U.S. economy and small-d democratic governance. It may be the single biggest problem. The agenda for American political reform needs to include the breaking of public unionism’s power to capture an ever-larger share of private income.

The public sector unions and their power over the people was recognized to be an un-American and an inherent danger even by advocates of unions such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  We have only to look at Wisconsin and at what fascistic Democrats such as Community Organizer in Chief Barack Obama are doing in that state and others to see how right past Democrats like FDR were.

The things about economics and the economy that FDR believed in were wrong.  They were proven wrong in history.  That’s why the industrial unions that he adored have nearly vanished; they simply create too many impediments to a strong economy – particularly in today’s competition with countries like China that do not have “a union problem.”  And so Americans in our free market system decided long ago that it was better to have an actual job than it was to belong to a union and wonder why they had no jobs.

Modern Democrats, in desperation, turned to the very thing that they saw as an inherent un-American threat in the past.  They have to be hypocrites and liars because they have abandoned the very nature of their previous beliefs about the nature of the economy in a democracy.  Now public unions – once rightly an anathema – have become the foundation of their strength.  Big Union money constitutes more than TEN TIMES any Republican special interest money; and it obviously comes overwhelmingly from the public sector unions that FDR warned us about.

And in doing so, the Democrat Party has become an un-American and inherent threat themselves.

Jesus’ words in Luke 22:25 sum up Democrats and unions so well today: “Jesus said to them, ‘The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors.'”  Because liberals and unions literally take our money from our children and then tell us they’re doing it for our own good.  And the Democrats who take and take and take from us while calling themselves our “benefactors” today is hardly anything new.  And hardly anything Jesus approved of.

Liberal Unions Are Profoundly UnAmerican. Just Ask FDR.

February 18, 2011

Public sector unions love putting themselves first and the people they are supposed to serve dead last.

And yes, I DO mean “dead” last.  Unions have an interesting history of violence and murder.

Here’s the latest example of public sector unions acting like swine:

The state’s largest teachers union Wednesday night called on all 98,000 of its members to attend rallies in Madison on Thursday and Friday, which led school districts — including Madison — to cancel classes for Thursday.

“This is not about protecting our pay and our benefits,” Wisconsin Education Association Council President Mary Bell said at a press conference on the Capitol Square. “It is about protecting our right to collectively bargain.”

In an interview, Bell said her message stopped short of endorsing the kind of coordinated action that closed Madison schools Wednesday. She asked teachers who “could” come to the rally to come.

And, of course, it’s not about their bennies and their perks.  Because these dear government teachers would walk neck deep in snow uphill both ways to teach your darling children.  It’s about a sacred principle.

Yeah, right.  Just how stupid are we supposed to be?

Those wonderful public school teachers.  They don’t care if the children they’ve been misteaching for thirty years can’t read.  What’s important is their swollen pensions that are bankrupting America one city, one county, one state and one country at a time.

If they actually give a fig about the children they constantly claim they give the slightest damn about, maybe they could, oh I don’t know, TEACH THEM.

But I’m afraid that the right to collective bargaining is far more important than your little dears, good people of Wisconsin.

Among the rioting government-sector union emloyees are prison guards.  Newly elected Republican Governor Scott Walker was forced to call in the National Guard because these dedicated prison guards cared so much about the sacred right to collective bargaining for even MORE cushy government benefits that DOUBLE workers in the private sector that they abandoned their posts and put the people at risk of inmates escaping.  And, of course, being dishonest demonizers right down to the pits of their tiny shriveled little cockroach souls, the left accused Governor Walker of creating a Nazi police state for calling in the Guard.  Because, apparently, keeping murderers and rapists from escaping prison is a “Nazi” thing to do.  And letting murderers and rapists go is the virtuous thing to do, according to this despicable mindset.

Public unions and the Democrats who support them are profoundly unAmerican.

But don’t believe me.  Just ask former Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

February 10, 2010
Even FDR Was Wary of Public Employee Unions
Marc Comtois

This article by Rich Lowry and this piece in the Wall Street Journal both alluded to Franklin Roosevelt’s wariness towards public employee unions. I was surprised. So I dug around and found one source that supports this claim. In a letter to a public employee union, Roosevelt explains that, yes, they do have a right to organize, but there are some restrictions:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

Well, that hasn’t really come to pass now, has it?

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that “under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”

Interesting that he viewed strikes by Federal employees in such a way.

Public unions bargain and organize against the American people, and against their country.   Who employs them?  Who do they “collectively bargain” against?  The people, and the well-being of the people.  They seek to undermine the efforts of the government to serve the people, and instead of serving the people advance their own interests ahead of the people’s.  They make a mockery of John F. Kennedy’s famous words, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

And public school unions are even worse; because not only do they bargain against the American people and against their country as they strive to screw taxpayers for still more totally unsustainable benefits while doing a truly suck job at their jobs, but they stab our children right in their minds.

New York Snow Cleanup: Unions Once Again Prove They Are Un-American

December 30, 2010

This is just another shocking addendum to my previous article, “Labor Unions: A Century Of Genuine Evil.”

In New York City, people are dead and unknown tens of thousands suffered because union workers were in a snit over reductions in the workforce.

Sanitation Department’s slow snow cleanup was a budget protest
By SALLY GOLDENBERG, LARRY CELONA and JOSH MARGOLIN
Posted: 2:34 AM, December 30, 2010

These garbage men really stink.

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in combating a fierce, fast-moving blizzard like the one that barreled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.

The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.

In the last two years, the agency’s workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors — down from 6,300 — because of the city’s budget crisis. And, effective tomorrow, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.

[Snip]

Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said only: “We would hope this is not the case.”

But multiple Sanitation Department sources told The Post yesterday that angry plow drivers have only been clearing streets assigned to them even if that means they have to drive through snowed-in roads with their plows raised.

And they are keeping their plow blades unusually high, making it necessary for them to have to run extra passes, adding time and extra pay.

One mechanic said some drivers are purposely smashing plows and salt spreaders to further stall the cleanup effort.

“That is a disgrace. I had to walk three miles because the buses can’t move,” said salesman Yuri Vesslin, 38, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

The article fails to mention that at least two people are DEAD because of this disgrace.  They were murdered by union greed.  It also fails to mention that in addition to the workers who showed up deliberately sabotaging the cleanup effort, more than 10% of the union employees simply called in sick.

As I point out, it is anything but the first time labor unions have demonstrated that they were despicable, un-American, or murderers.  It isn’t even the first time that top union leaders TODAY have participated in the murder of American citizens.

Now, when I point out the fact that labor unions are fundamentally un-American, I’m not making anything up.

From my aforementioned article about labor unions being genuinely evil:

Let’s also point out that while labor unions were being violent racists in America, they were in the process of being the source of the greatest evil in human history in Europe.  It was the labor unions that formed the core of Lenin’s violent communist movement.  The Marxists started out in 1898 by forming the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.  Just as labor unions formed the core of Hitler’s National Socialist German WORKERS Party.

From a 1935 German magazine:

A Socialist Workers’ Government has achieved a workers revolution in Germany without resorting to, though in some respects it approximates, CommunismAdolf Hitler has done it by wiping out all class privileges and class distinction, but the economics foundation of property rights and private capital has been left almost intact – for the present time.”

“The Third Reich, under Hitler, has wiped out corporate trade-unionism by forcing all workers to join one great government union, the National Socialist Union of Employers and Workers…”

While American labor unions were basking in the light of FDR’s pork barrel political favoritism and doing everything they could to keep poor blacks down, their European counterparts were at work preparing to set the world on fire.

So far, I can’t say I’d be proud to be a member of a labor union.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka recently appeared before an audience of fellow socialist travelers and said:

“…we need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations which have distorted our economy and hijacked our government. That’s a long-term job, but one we should start now.

I Hate the Media points out the scary parallels to the ugly history of the past:

“Re-establish”? Wouldn’t that imply that there had once been popular control over private corporations?

Richard. Mr. Trumka. Sir. Pardon our impertinence, but we believe that what you’re talking about here is National Socialism.

As in Adolf Trumka.

Meanwhile, while AFL-CIO head Trumka was flirting with National Socialism, recently retired SEIU president Andy Stern was kissing up to socialism’s more famous sister, communism, saying:

“Workers of the world unite – it’s not just a slogan anymore.  It’s the way we’re gonna have to do our work.”

Whose slogan was that “workers of the world unite” thing, Andy Stern?

The political slogan Workers of the world, unite!, is one of the most famous rallying cries of communism, found in The Communist Manifesto (1848), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A variation (“Workers of all lands, unite”) is also inscribed on Marx’s tombstone.

Ah, yes, the vile, vindictive, vicious and vehemently anti-American Marxists.  And labor unions, which are nothing more than the Communist Party in America today.

Labor unions were spawned by evil and continue to have a history of evil.

But don’t ask me about the particular evil of public unions; ask a former hero of the Democrat Party (which proves that Democrats are far more despicable today than they even were before), Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

February 10, 2010
Even FDR Was Wary of Public Employee Unions
Marc Comtois

This article by Rich Lowry and this piece in the Wall Street Journal both alluded to Franklin Roosevelt’s wariness towards public employee unions. I was surprised. So I dug around and found one source that supports this claim. In a letter to a public employee union, Roosevelt explains that, yes, they do have a right to organize, but there are some restrictions:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

Well, that hasn’t really come to pass now, has it?

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that “under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”

Interesting that he viewed strikes by Federal employees in such a way.

Not just “Federal employees.”  “All government employees.”  Public-sector unions in general.

Labor unions are un-American in every way, as are the Democrat-passed laws that make it impossible for private businesses to resist their impossible demands that are now breaking the back of our economy and our society; and public labor unions are even more so.

FDR’s argument was that public-sector labor unions would entail government workers literally organizing AGAINST AMERICA and AGAINST AMERICANS.

And in that one thing, FDR was entirely right.

Meanwhile, such flagrantly un-American organizations own the Democrat Party, and own President Barack Obama.

SEIU boss Any Stern, “Mister Marxist” himself, was the number one visitor at the White House.  And Mister Marxist bragged that “we spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama — $60.7 million, to be exact — and we’re proud of it.”  You know, when he wasn’t saying stuff like, “We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”

And, of course, letting American citizens suffer and even die while unions refused to do the jobs they were hired to do was most certainly “the persuasion of power.”

And the very same public sector unions that FDR condemned as profoundly anti-American blatantly OWN Barack Obama, who once famously said:

“Your agenda has been my agenda in the United States Senate.  Before debating health care, I talked to Andy Stern and SEIU members.”

“We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”

For the record, SEIU is the very sort of public labor union FDR never wanted to see.  It was a giant step downward into the death-spiral of the American eagle-as-Dodo-bird.

Obama swore that he was a loyal minion of the union agenda.  He also swore he was a loyal minion of the despicable anti-American treason organization aka ACORN.

And just what is that agenda that Obama shares with unions?  How about – in addition to “the persuasion of power” – passing on $3 TRILLION in unfunded pension liabilities onto the American people???

If you’re for public union workers literally allowing you to freeze to death as a means of forcing local governments to continue to impose the union agenda – which includes destroying American families to pad their pensions – then by all means, just keep voting for Obama and the Democrat Party.

But I hope you don’t mind if people who know the truth call you out for what you are: as un-American as Marxist pie (which taste just like a shit sandwich, for what it’s worth).

Even Liberals Realizing Obama Has Been Total Bust At Creating Jobs

October 8, 2009

This article is in many ways typical New York Times.  It comes from a distinctly liberal perspective, and views solutions to the problems that America faces through a liberal prism.

The big difference in this case is that it really takes a critical look at a Democrat.  It slams Barack Obama as being basically disinterested and uninvolved in – and even uncomprehending of – the biggest crisis facing the country.

Does Obama Get It?

By BOB HERBERT
Published: October 5, 2009

The big question on the domestic front right now is whether President Obama understands the gravity of the employment crisis facing the country.  Does he get it?
The signals coming out of the White House have not been encouraging.

The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high finance who never saw this economic collapse coming are now telling us with their usual breezy arrogance that the Great Recession is probably over.  Their focus, of course, is on data, abstractions like the gross domestic product, not the continued suffering of living, breathing human beings struggling with the nightmare of joblessness.

Even Mr. Obama, in an interview with The Times, gave short shrift to the idea of an additional economic stimulus package, telling John Harwood a few weeks ago that the economy had likely turned a corner. “As you know,” the president said, “jobs tend to be a lagging indicator; they come last.”

The view of most American families is somewhat less blasé. Faced with the relentless monthly costs of housing, transportation, food, clothing, education and so forth, they have precious little time to wait for this lagging indicator to come creeping across the finish line.

Americans need jobs now, and if the economy on its own is incapable of putting people back to work — which appears to be the case — then the government needs to step in with aggressive job-creation efforts.

Nearly one in four American families has suffered a job loss over the past year, according to a survey released by the Economic Policy Institute. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans is officially unemployed, and the real-world jobless rate is worse.

We’re running on a treadmill that is carrying us backward. Something approaching 10 million new jobs would have to be created just to get back to where we were when the recession began in December 2007. There is nothing currently in the works to jump-start job creation on that scale.

A massive long-term campaign to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure — which would put large numbers of people to work establishing the essential industrial platform for a truly 21st-century American economy — has not seriously been considered. Large-scale public-works programs that would reach deep into the inner cities and out to hard-pressed suburban and rural areas have been dismissed as the residue of an ancient, unsophisticated era.

We seem to be waiting for some mythical rebound to come rolling in, magically equipped with robust job creation, a long-term bull market and paradise regained for consumers.

It ain’t happening.

While the data mavens were talking about green shoots in September, employers in the real world were letting another 263,000 of their workers go, bringing the jobless rate to 9.8 percent, the highest in more than a quarter of a century. It would have been higher still but 571,000 people dropped out of the labor market. They’re jobless but not counted as unemployed. The number of people officially unemployed — 15.1 million — is, as The Wall Street Journal noted, greater than the population of 46 of the 50 states.

The Obama administration seems hamstrung by the unemployment crisis. No big ideas have emerged. No dramatically creative initiatives. While devoting enormous amounts of energy to health care, and trying now to decide what to do about Afghanistan, the president has not even conveyed the sense of urgency that the crisis in employment warrants.

If that does not change, these staggering levels of joblessness have the potential to cripple not just the well-being of millions of American families, but any real prospects for sustained economic recovery and the political prospects of the president as well. An unemployed electorate is an unhappy electorate.

The survey for the Economic Policy Institute was conducted in September by Hart Research Associates. Respondents said that they had more faith in President Obama’s ability to handle the economy than Congressional Republicans. The tally was 43 percent to 32 percent. But when asked who had been helped most by government stimulus efforts, substantial majorities said “large banks” and “Wall Street investment companies.”

When asked how “average working people” or “you and your family” had benefited, very small percentages, in a range of 10 percent to 13 percent, said they had fared well.

The word now, in the wake of last week’s demoralizing jobless numbers, is that the administration is looking more closely at its job creation options. Whether anything dramatic emerges remains to be seen.

The master in this area, of course, was Franklin Roosevelt. His first Inaugural Address was famous for the phrase: “The only thing we have to fear. …” But he also said in that speech: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” And he said the country should treat that task “as we would treat the emergency of a war.”

Now that’s the sense of urgency we need.

More Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on October 6, 2009, on page A31 of the New York edition.

Not to dive into the genetic fallacy, as so many liberals so often do, but it is nevertheless significant that the Economic Policy Institute is a distinctly liberal think tank.  And Hart Research Associates aint exactly Rasmussen.  So while I don’t know that they aren’t right in their survey about Obama vs. Congressional Republicans, I would point out: 1) that I wouldn’t regard it as gospel; and 2) don’t forget that as LOW as Bush got in the polls, he STILL outperformed the Democrat-controlled Congress throughout his entire presidency.

In fact, Bush had more than DOUBLE the ratings of the Democrat Congress:

Bush’s job approval rating fell to 24 percent from last month’s record low for a Zogby poll of 29 percent. A paltry 11 percent gave Congress a positive grade, tying last month’s record low.

So in terms of net differences, Bush actually fared quite a bit better when pitted against a Democrat Congress than Obama is faring when pitted against Congressional Republicans.  And I would submit that the public thinks a lot more highly of Republican ideas than this smoke-and-mirror statistic would otherwise indicate.  Just sayin’.

I made that point just to demonstrate the statistical sleight of hand going on.

Now, Bob Herbert is a big government, rah-rah FDR guy, who sees the big public projects of the WPA as the model for our country’s salvation.

For what it’s worth, I – and Congressional Republicans – agree(d) that that would have been FAR better than Obama’s $3.27 trillion pork-laden employment bust known as the stimulus.

A New York Times story points out why Republicans opposed the porkulus so fiercely:

But the committee’s ranking Republican, Jerry Lewis of California, asserted that the program would do far too little to finance road construction, flood control projects and other works for the public good.

“Facts are stubborn things,” Lewis said, describing the package as a recipe for bloated government programs that would saddle taxpayers with a debt burden “well, well into the future.”

And now even the New York Times is essentially acknowledging that the Republicans were right and Obama was wrong.

I would also point out that the Hoover Dam is named the Hoover Dam because Herbert Hoover was doing public works projects before FDR.  And Herbert Hoover was the guy that every Democrat loves to blame for the Great Depression.

And while we’re on the subject of what happened in the 1930s, I might as well point out that things didn’t go so good under the leadership of FDR.

In fact, FDR’s Treasury Secretary had this to say as he looked back over the decade:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” — Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

A look at the graph of unemployment should help you understand what Henry Morganthau understood:

It shouldn’t surprise you when you take the time to learn about what FDR attempted that he actually prolonged the Great Depression by seven years.

Having mentioned the massive yet mysteriously ignored failure of FDR to solve unemployment or get the economy going, allow me to return to Obama’s current failure.

Still another liberal publication, Time Magazine, ran an article back in July entitled, “Obama’s Stimulus Plan: Failing by Its Own Measure.”  It begins:

Back in early January, when Barack Obama was still President-elect, two of his chief economic advisers — leading proponents of a stimulus bill — predicted that the passage of a large economic-aid package would boost the economy and keep the unemployment rate below 8%. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Last month, the jobless rate in the U.S. hit 9.5%, the highest level it has reached since 1983.

And of course, it’s currently 9.8% – and almost certain to keep rising.

Now contrast what the Obama team predicted – a ceiling no higher than 8% unemployment – and then see what the administration is trying to pass off now:

Vice President Joe Biden delivered a rousing review of the government’s economic stimulus plan in a conversation with the nation’s governors. “In my wildest dreams, I never thought it would work this well,” he said. “Thank you, thank you.”

I mean, is this a statement that when team Obama said that they believed their stimulus plan would keep unemployment under 8% that they were being fundamentally dishonest with the American people?  And that 9.8% unemployment is better than their wildest dreams?

And don’t just say Vice President Joe Biden is an idiot and dismiss him.  He IS an idiot, of course.  But he is the official spokesidiot of the Obama Administration.

Having affirmed that significant public works-style projects would have been a massive improvement over the failed Obama stimulus, allow me to briefly point out a few other things that would have helped the nation restore confidence in the U.S. economy and the jobs that would have gone with it.

For one thing, tax breaks would have helped, but we didn’t get them.

Contrary to Democrat fluffery, there really weren’t “tax breaks” in the stimulus.  Rather, the people who got the “breaks” didn’t actually pay federal income taxes.  The “tax breaks” were really welfare breaks.  Lowering taxes stimulates more investment and more productivity by allowing investors to keep more of what they earn, rather than incentivizing them to shelter their money, which raising taxes invariably does.  Transferring money from the pockets of tax payers and giving it to those who didn’t pay federal income taxes – even if you euphemistically call it a “tax break” – simply doesn’t accomplish that goal.

Another thing that would have helped was targeting stimulus toward the businesses that actually do most of the hiring.

Small businesses which employ 20 or fewer workers are responsible for 50% of the jobs in this country.  And businesses defined as “small businesses” are responsible for nearly 3/4ths of the total jobs in the USA.

And what did small businesses get from the stimulus? Butkus.  The porn-loving National Endowment for the Arts actually got more stimulus funds than all the small businesses in the country combined.

If Democrats wanted to create jobs, they might have considered giving the money to businesses that actually created jobs, rather than to their politically connected liberal special interest groups.  Again, just sayin’.

It also would have helped if the stimulus had been something that actually helped more than it hurt.  The Congressional Budget Office, hardly a conservative bastion, reported that the stimulus bill would lead to a lower GDP 5 to 10 years out than if Congress had done absolutely NOTHING.  The enormous government spending will ultimately crowd out private investment which would have had a much higher chance of increasing GDP than the spending in the stimulus bill.

Is Sarah Palin A Right-Wing Warmonger On A Holy Task From God?

September 12, 2008

I was rather amazed at the headlines about Sarah Palin coming from the Associated Press following her ABC interview with Charles Gibson:

In addition to it’s “God and war” bit, another AP story had the title, “Palin leaves open option of war with Russia.”

Somehow, when I watched the interview, I didn’t hear her threatened to bomb Russia.  In fact, she took nearly the identical position that Barack Obama has embraced: that Georgia should become a member of NATO – which would mean that other NATO countries would be obligated to come to her aid should she be attacked. (more…)