I'm an FDR Democrat and damn proud of it!

:hi: fellow DUer. Glad I caught your post. Love the post, by the way.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library: http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/
FDR Museum: http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/museum.html



You're in good company, friend!

But the policies of FDR wouldn't work today. Just too many conservatives Southerners and Westerners to deal with

We need him back, or at least his ideological heir. When folks say Dems are weak on national security, I have to chuckle. If a Dem hadn't been prez during WWII, we might all be speaking German. He had his faults (trying to pack the SCOTUS was way overreaching) but knew how to kick ass and take names. And Eleanor wasn't too shabby either.

I believe Bill and Hillary could have come close...

I call myself an FDR/Kennedy liberal democrat. :bounce: My grandfather adored FDR. Whenever he talked about FDR he had sparkles in his eyes. :cry:







( http://www.tvakids.com/whatistva/history_fdr.htm )

Even their dog kicked ass!

this is the true degradation of western civilization - the primacy of the public interest and the understanding that government, business and social structures all exist solely to serve the people, and that all government actions flow from this principle has been replaced with the notion that we are all little automata whose prime directive is to satisfy their perceived self-interest via personal gain.

We were once capable of thinking as a people, which included (more or less, modulo sectors of socially institutionalized discrimination) all and didn't consider boundaries of ethnic origin, race, or gender - FDR's achievement was to create a transnational America where the America promise framed by the words "all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was made concretely accessible to all, at least to a far greater extent than it had been previously, when we were an insular, inward-looking nation.

This creation of a significantly unified 'people' of the United States is what let us prevail in WWII and what allowed the generation of postwar affluence. Being forgetful, we have in the last 60 years squandered that, and to a significant extent been deliberately seduced by the usual suspects among the profiteering holders of capital into again becoming navel-orbiters. I often say that I doubt we would today be capable of national projects such as a space program or, more pertinently now, a reorientation of energy use and economic activity away from self-indulgence and masturbatory overproduction of unneeded goods and corresponding squandering of resources and environmental demolition and toward conservation and purposeful consumption and production.

Human beings want to have concrete purpose, and exert themselves to attain it. We become dysfunctional when we do not. We are currently in the state of being stoned on the heroin of being able to luxuriate in wealth which is in the process of running out. We need to get clean fast, before fascist capitalists supporting liberal economics and conservative social structures succeed in completing structures which will make our successful action far more difficult, and before our phsyical environment is so despoiled that we will be effectively living in a wasteland.

It is possible to have a unified people who think as a people and engage in democratic discourse to forge quality consensus on national direction without being bamboozled by liars pursuing self-interest and without becoming a fascist threat, and it is not about conditioning to become Connected and join a groupmind, but about individuals who consciously choose via rational processes to cooperate together for their common good. This is the American gift and comes from the expansiveness and humanism of the Enlightenment on which the nation is based, it is encapsulated in the USS Arizona memorial, where the center is low and the sides rise up to jointly meet challenges and threats, and it is what FDR gave us. We need to head there again and neutralize those who would obstruct us, whether due to greed or incompetence. There are better and worse ways of living, not all social organizations are equally valid, and it is time for us to reacquaint ourselves with that truth and choose correctly. Our lives depend on it.

Where FDR, Kennedy, Carter came from. That's what we need to get back to I believe. Show people that and what we've done in the past. FDR really did care about people and he showed that (see for example the TVA Act) and people trusted him in that concern and voted for him four times. The only president in history who had that happen and he was a liberal democrat. And a very rich liberal democrat but he cared about people. And yes Elanor was great too. She's a personal role model of mine. :loveya:

and look at what Republicans have done, since leaving office...
That shows you who the real servants of the people are!...

That is how I became a Dem. rather than a middle of the roader. It took a democrat to straighten out what the repubs had screwed up and stolen while they were leading the nation and lying to us the whole time.

when it comes to domestic issues, that is. :kick:

We need to get back to these basic freedoms and truths. Great post!

TC

All you would have to do to solve this current, undeclared Depression is to get a book, make a list of every single New Deal program--from the National Recovery Administration to the Home Owners' Loan Corp., from the CCC and WPA to help for farmers, from new regulations that gave workers rights for the first time, to banking regulations that protected savings, from union and minimum wage protections, to regulations against "insider" stock speculation, taxes on excess profits and penalties against war profiteering, etc., etc.--and reimplement every single one of them. They solved it the first time, they can solve it again. Corporate criminality and corruption, poverty and want, do not change. The only thing that changed was the corporate lobbyists of "D"LC, Inc. giving us NAFTA, GATT and outsourcing, which FDR, Truman and all the rest would never have done in a million years.

We already have internment camps.

but their aren't enough Republicans in them...yet...

btw Grover Norquist is a traitor...

I believe that he gave away Eastern Europe to the Russians. I think that he LIHOP'ed the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. I think that he illegally interned US citizens during WW2.

I don't think I put him too much farther up the scale than *

Although, he did in all likelihood save our country from self destruction during the depression recovery and dustbowl years.

But I wasn't implying that I thought FDR was okay in any way if that was what you meant.

Otherwise, I don't know what you meant by "feel free to add your alternative"

till her dying day. Bless her soul.
emdee

Looking Back (And Ahead) With Edwards
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/03/24/LI2005032402294.html

with my comment on another post at DU
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x194986

So much for Christian charity, huh ?

He stood in line and gave away government cheese for part of a day...
Whens the last time they had to decide wether it was best to pay the Electric or water, because you only had enough money to pay for one but not the other...
The American dream...LOL

spiteful. Many of them probably took GI Bill benefits etc and now that the r's policies since Reagan are creating 'Generation Debt', they begrudge someone else getting help.

I was that mad already...

Don't you read the national review?!
:sarcasm:

and quickly retreated into Keynesian Demand-side economics, which relies upon 'marginal propensity to consume'. This lead to pump-priming and the enhanced money in the hands of the poor, as opposed to just the wealthiest vacuuming it all up and putting it under a mattress (!) kept things rolling. Along with real estate amortization (low downpayments and low monthly payments) meant that previous 50% downpayments being eliminated...lead to more cash on hand monthly for the LITTLE GUY. His consumption drove the economic recovery from the Great Depression.

Also, the National Review...isn't that William F. Buckly's publication ? More Knights of Malta, aristocratic B.S. vehicles.

they can't see beyond the dollar sign...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley,_Jr.

If protecting the Knights of Malta's aristocratic 'agenda', which the Freemason FDR was dead set against with his New Deal, then Buckley will protect those aristocrats to the bitter end.

Their Will Be Done
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1983/07/willbedone.html

Most all of the early, and probably the current, leadership cadre of the CIA were/are Knights of Malta. Nowadays even FBI spys like Robert Hanssen are Opus Dei, KOM wannabees. If you want to infiltrate the CIA/FBI/DHS etc, I guess being a KOM bootlicker to aristocrats is the way to go.

Says something about national security for the little guys, though, doesn't it ?

I have an excerpt from this speech if you want to hear it from the horse's mouth.

MP3 download -- Right click and "Save as"

Four Freedoms - From 6 Jan 1941 State of the Union (2 Mbyte - 4:35)

"Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country."

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group,”

some quotes by FDR

“The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have little.” Franklin D. Roosvelt

“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country”

“Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth”

“Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races”

“We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all of mankind”

(my favorite) “A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.”

“Books may be burned and cities sacked, but truth like the yearning for freedom, lives in the hearts of humble men and women”

“When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”

DARED to blaspheme The Man. Its one of her many proudest moments. (Slapping a bigot across the face for telling a racist joke in front of her Justice Department brother-in-law was another. My mom rocks.)

I am a ZombyWoof Democrat. I don't look up to the likes of FDR.

Supreme Court packing. Internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent.

Not allowing anti-lynching laws to pass and other obstacles for real civil rights advancement.

And the elephant in the room: Despite its bold experimenta nature, it was World War II, not the New Deal, that effectively ended the Depression.

Feh on FDR. He was a largely a myth, as are most of the esteemed presidents of either party.

JAPANESE-AMERICAN INTERNMENT

CHAPTER 6 - INTERNMENT CAMPS FOR AMERICANS


High-ranking officials of the United States military believed Japan might invade the West Coast. While such concerns may seem unrealistic today, military strategists were still reeling from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The most popular song of the day was Remember Pearl Harbor:


Let's REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR -
As we go to meet the foe -
Let's REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR -
As we did the Alamo.
Concerned that Japanese-Americans were more loyal to Japan than to the United States, American military leaders convinced FDR to sign Executive Order 9066. The order authorized the "appropriate Military Commander" to determine whether anyone posed a military risk to the country and, if so, authorized the military to exclude those persons from affected geographic areas.

http://www.lawbuzz.com/tyranny/snow_falling/internment_camps.htm

Chapter 2
To Undo a Mistake is Always Harder
Than Not to Create One Originally
Eleanor Roosevelt

This essay is a draft of an article that had been written for Collier's Magazine by Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt visited the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona in 1943 in response to charges that the Japanese American evacuees there were being "coddled" (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). The manuscript, courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (Hyde Park, New York), was published in a revised form October 10, 1943. It is reproduced here from the original draft with only minor editorial changes.

We are at war with Japan, and yet we have American citizens, born and brought up in this country whose parents are Japanese. This is the essential problem. A good deal has already been written about it. One phase, however, I do not think as yet has been adequately stressed. To really cover it, we must get the background straight first.

In this nation of over one hundred and thirty million, we have 127,500 Japanese or Japanese Americans. Those who have lived for a long time in the Midwest or in the east and who have had their records checked by the FBI, have been allowed to go on about their business, whatever it may be, unmolested. The recent order removing aliens from strategic areas, of course, affects those who were not citizens, just as it affects other citizens, however.

112,000 Japanese of the total 127,500 lived on the West Coast. Originally they were much needed on ranches, and on large truck and fruit farms, but as they came in greater numbers, people began to discover that they were not only convenient workers, they were competitors in the labor field, and the people of California began to be afraid of their own importation, so the Exclusion Act was passed in 1917. No people of the Oriental race could become citizens of the United States, and no quota was given to the Oriental nations in the Pacific. They were marked as different from other races and they were not treated on an equal basis. This happened because in one part of our country they were feared as competitors, and the rest of our country knew them so little and cared so little about them that they did not even think about the principle that we in this country believe in — that of equal rights for all human beings.

http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anthropology74/ce2.htm

Astonishingly, Senate Resolution 39 makes no mention of the f-word, which denotes the mechanism that allows a minority of legislators to block votes. The resolution duly notes that at least 4,742 people, mostly African Americans, were lynched in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968; that nearly 200 anti-lynching bills, backed by seven presidents, were introduced in Congress during the first half of the 20th century; that the House of Representatives did pass three strong anti-lynching measures, but that the Senate never did, thus failing its "minimum and most basic of federal responsibilities" to those who were "deprived of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States." As Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat who sponsored the resolution, said, the Senate was "uniquely culpable" for Washington's failure to protect U.S. citizens from a type of domestic terrorism often orchestrated by local authorities.

http://www.thatliberalmedia.com/archives/004621.html

More than 4,749 Americans, most of whom were black, were lynched — killed without lawful trial, generally by hanging — between 1880 and 1960, according to figures compiled by Tuskegee University that the proposed resolution cites.

Several 20th-century presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, urged the Senate to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Although the House of Representatives passed anti-lynching measures three times between 1922 and 1940, all of them failed in the Senate.

At a news conference Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol, Landrieu said a formal apology was important. "There are still Americans who refuse to believe that this happened, that it happened on the scale that it did," she said.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1231249/posts


Roosevelt explained his reluctance to support anti-lynching legislation in a conversation with Walter White of the NAACP. "I did not choose the tools with which I must work. Had I been permitted to choose then I would have selected quite different ones. But I've got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk." However, he did move Blacks into important advisory roles, brought them as delegates to the Democratic National Convention for the first time, abolished the two-thirds rule that gave the South veto power over presidential nominations, added a civil rights plank for the first time ever to the 1940 party platform, and included Blacks in the draft with the same rights and pay scales as whites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Delano_Roosevelt

With the Republicans powerless in Congress, the conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court was the only obstacle to Roosevelt's programs. During 1935 the Court ruled that the National Recovery Act and some other pieces of New Deal legislation were unconstitutional. Roosevelt's response was to propose enlarging the Court so that he could appoint more sympathetic judges. This "court packing" plan was the first Roosevelt scheme to run into serious political opposition, since it seemed to upset the separation of powers which is one of the cornerstones of the American constitutional structure. Eventually Roosevelt was forced to abandon the plan, but the Court also drew back from confrontation with the administration by finding the Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act to be constitutional. Deaths and retirements on the Supreme Court soon allowed Roosevelt to make his own appointments to the bench. Between 1937 and 1941 he appointed eight justices to the court, including liberals such as Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, reducing the possibility of further clashes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Delano_Roosevelt

amen

During the first hundred days of his administration, Roosevelt used his enormous prestige and the sense of impending disaster to force a series of bills through Congress, establishing and funding various new government agencies. These included the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which granted funds to the states for unemployment relief; the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to hire 250,000 young men to work on rural local projects; and the first Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). The AAA tried to force higher prices for commodities by encouraging paying farmers to take land out of crops and cutting herds (and by ordering the slaughtering of pigs.) In 1936, the U.S. Supreme Court found the AAA to be unconstitutional.

Roosevelt's series of radio speeches known as Fireside Chats presented his proposals to the American public. The informal chats not only reassured listeners but--unlike formal speeches--made it seem the President was in the room at fireside explaining the actions he was taking.

Following these emergency measures in 1933 came the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which imposed an unprecedented amount of state regulation on industry, including fair practice codes and a guaranteed role for unions, in exchange for the suspension of anti-trust laws and huge amounts of money through the PWA to stimulate to the economy. Roosevelt worked with Senator George Norris to create the largest government-owned industrial enterprise in American history, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and power stations, controlled floods, and improved agriculture in poverty-stricken Tennessee.The repeal of prohibition also provided stimulus to the economy, while bringing in new tax revenues and keeping a major campaign promise.


Second New Deal 1935-1936
After the 1934 Congressional elections, which gave Roosevelt large majorities in both houses, there was a fresh surge of New Deal legislation. These measures included the WPA which set up a national relief agency that employed two million unemployed family heads. The Social Security Act (SSA), established Social Security and promised economic security for the elderly, the poor and the sick. Senator Robert Wagner wrote the Wagner Act, officially the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which established the federal rights of workers to organize unions, to engage in collective bargaining and to take part in strikes. While the First New Deal of 1933 had broad support from most sectors, the Second New Deal challenged the business community. Conservative Democrats, led by Al Smith, fought back with the American Liberty League, but it failed to mobilize much grass roots support. By contrast the labor unions, energized by the Wagner Act, signed up millions of new members and became a major backer of Roosevelt's reelection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Delano_Roosevelt

A friend of mine from NOLA, Anita Spell. She's an attorney and President of the local NAACP chapter...
Not bad for a redheaded caucasion from New Orleans...

FDR, Fala and Ruthie Bie at Hill Top Cottage in Hyde Park, N.Y. 1940. The better of two extant photos of FDR in a wheel chair-Photo by Margaret Suckley , from FDR Library 73113:61