The Republican Party: The Party of White Supremacy - Page 7 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

Political issues and parties in the USA and Canada.

Moderator: PoFo North America Mods

Forum rules: No one line posts please.
#15183610
ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, well *this* part is no longer a 'personal perspective' -- it's just plain bullshit.


As I said, I consider my use of "only" a mistake.

In addition, what I said did nothing to deny or undermine their contributions to winning a war pivotal to the survival of humanity.

I fail to see my words are bullshit.
#15183616
ckaihatsu wrote:
You don't want to deal with the actual *history* around FDR's presidency, but here's some more of it



It hadn't been that long since the army was used against striking workers, and protesters.

The reality was the Union movement had stalled before the Depression, and was in trouble for the same reason everybody else was in trouble.

FDR passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933, which provided for collective bargaining, and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act).

He saved the Unions...

I overlook most of your excesses, but there are limits.
#15183645
The cherry on top of all this will be when in the next presidential election Republicans will loose Florida :roll: Not super likely but now fully possible. And don't forget Texas, Texas might be the second cherry.
#15183648
ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, well *this* part is no longer a 'personal perspective' -- it's just plain bullshit.



Patrickov wrote:
I never see FDR's presidency easy, especially as he took up the job during both the Great Depression and the rise of Totalitarianism elsewhere in the world.

Both FDR and Winston Churchill were regarded as great only because they fought and won a great war (not totally to their credit, I have to say), and they are still held in high regard today because the nations they saved have not gone awry like the Soviet Union did. In particular, I see Chiang Kai-Shek be an extremely unlucky guy compared with FDR / Churchill, as well as Charles de Gaulle and Joseph Stalin.



---


ckaihatsu wrote:



It was a war against an enemy of unspeakable evil. Hitler's Germany was extending totalitarianism, racism, militarism, and overt aggressive warfare beyond what an already cynical world had experienced. And yet, did the governments conducting this war-England, the United States, the Soviet Union-represent something significantly different, so that their victory would be a blow to imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the world?

Would the behavior of the United States during the war-in military action abroad, in treatment of minorities at home-be in keeping with a "people's war"? Would the country's wartime policies respect the rights of ordinary people everywhere to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? And would postwar America, in its policies at home and overseas, exemplify the values for which the war was supposed to have been fought?

These questions deserve thought. At the time of World War II, the atmosphere was too dense with war fervor to permit them to be aired.

For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs. It had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had "opened" Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.

While demanding an Open Door in China, it had insisted (with the Monroe Doctrine and many military interventions) on a Closed Door in Latin America-that is, closed to everyone but the United States. It had engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the "independent" state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal. It sent five thousand marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution, and kept a force there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops there for nineteen years. Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times. By 1924 the finances of half of the twenty Latin American states were being directed to some extent by the United States. By 1935, over half of U.S. steel and cotton exports were being sold in Latin America.

Just before World War I ended, in 1918, an American force of seven thousand landed at Vladivostok as part of an Allied intervention in Russia, and remained until early 1920. Five thousand more troops were landed at Archangel, another Russian port, also as part of an Allied expeditionary force, and stayed for almost a year. The State Department told Congress: "All these operations were to offset effects of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia."

In short, if the entrance of the United States into World War II was (as so many Americans believed at the time, observing the Nazi invasions) to defend the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of other countries, the nation's record cast doubt on its ability to uphold that principle.

What seemed clear at the time was that the United States was a democracy with certain liberties, while Germany was a dictatorship persecuting its Jewish minority, imprisoning dissidents, whatever their religion, while proclaiming the supremacy of the Nordic "race." However, blacks, looking at anti-Semitism in Germany, might not see their own situation in the U.S. as much different. And the United States had done little about Hitler's policies of persecution. Indeed, it had joined England and France in appeasing Hitler throughout the thirties. Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, were hesitant to criticize publicly Hitler's anti-Semitic policies; when a resolution was introduced in the Senate in January 1934 asking the Senate and the President to express "surprise and pain" at what the Germans were doing to the Jews, and to ask restoration of Jewish rights, the State Department "caused this resolution to be buried in committee," according to Arnold Offner (American Appeasement).

When Mussolini's Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the U.S. declared an embargo on munitions but let American businesses send oil to Italy in huge quantities, which was essential to Italy's carrying on the war. When a Fascist rebellion took place in Spain in 1936 against the elected socialist-liberal government, the Roosevelt administration sponsored a neutrality act that had the effect of shutting off help to the Spanish government while Hitler and Mussolini gave critical aid to Franco.

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon ... eswar.html



---


Patrickov wrote:
As I said, I consider my use of "only" a mistake.

In addition, what I said did nothing to deny or undermine their contributions to winning a war pivotal to the survival of humanity.

I fail to see my words are bullshit.



Your historical assessment is bullshit because the Allies *knew in advance* of atrocities against Jews in Europe, and yet did nothing. The Allies allowed Japan to plunder China, and Mussolini and Franco to do *their* totalitarianism.

ITT sold armaments to *both* sides during WWII, and FDR's New Deal tanked in 1937 because it was *insufficient*, as Keynes noted.



Auschwitz bombing debate

The issue of why the Allies did not act on early reports of atrocities in the Auschwitz concentration camp by destroying it or its railways by air during World War II has been a subject of controversy since the late 1970s. Brought to public attention by a 1978 article from historian David Wyman, it has been descried by Michael Berenbaum as "a moral question emblematic of the Allied response to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust",[1] and whether or not the Allies had the requisite knowledge and the technical capability to act continues to be explored by historians. The U.S. government followed the military's strong advice to always keep the defeat of Germany the paramount objective, and refused to tolerate outside civilian advice regarding alternative military operations. No major American Jewish organizations recommended bombing.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate



---



ITT Inc., formerly ITT Corporation,[3] is an American worldwide manufacturing company based in Stamford, Connecticut. The company produces specialty components for the aerospace, transportation, energy and industrial markets. ITT's three businesses include Industrial Process, Motion Technologies, and Connect and Control Technologies.[4]

ITT has approximately 10,000 employees in more than 35 countries and serves customers in well over 100 countries. The company's long-standing brands include Goulds Pumps, Cannon connectors, KONI shock absorbers and Enidine energy absorption components.[5]



German subsidiaries in the Nazi period

On August 3, 1933, Hitler received,[clarification needed] in one of the first meetings with US businessmen, Sosthenes Behn, then the CEO of ITT, and his German representative, Henry Mann.[11][13][14]

In his book Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Antony C. Sutton claims that ITT subsidiaries made cash payments to SS leader Heinrich Himmler. ITT, through its subsidiary C. Lorenz AG, owned 25% of Focke-Wulf, the German aircraft manufacturer, builder of some of the most successful Luftwaffe fighter aircraft. In the 1960s, ITT Corporation won $27 million in compensation for damage inflicted on its share of the Focke-Wulf plant by Allied bombing during World War II.[11] In addition, Sutton's book uncovers that ITT owned shares of Signalbau AG, Dr. Erich F. Huth (Signalbau Huth), which produced for the German Wehrmacht radar equipment and transceivers in Berlin, Hanover (later Telefunken factory) and other places. While ITT - Focke-Wulf planes were bombing Allied ships, and ITT lines were passing information to German submarines, ITT direction finders were saving other ships from torpedoes.[15]

In 1943 ITT became the largest shareholder of Focke-Wulf Flugzeugbau GmbH for the remainder of the war with 29%. This was due to Kaffee HAG's share falling to 27% after the death in May of Kaffee HAG chief, Dr Ludwig Roselius. OMGUS documents reveal that the role of the HAG conglomerate could not be determined during WWII.[16]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Inc.# ... azi_period



---



Keynes did not think that The New Deal under Roosevelt ended the Great Depression: "It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiments which would prove my case — except in war conditions."[102]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal# ... d_recovery
#15183649
ckaihatsu wrote:
You don't want to deal with the actual *history* around FDR's presidency, but here's some more of it:


The thirties and forties showed more clearly than before the dilemma of working people in the United States. The system responded to workers' rebellions by finding new forms of control-internal control by their own organizations as well as outside control by law and force. But along with the new controls came new concessions. These concessions didn't solve basic problems; for many people they solved nothing. But they helped enough people to create an atmosphere of progress and improvement, to restore some faith in the system.

The minimum wage of 1938, which established the forty-hour week and outlawed child labor, left many people out of its provisions and set very low minimum wages (twenty-five cents an hour the first year). But it was enough to dull the edge of resentment. Housing was built for only a small percentage of the people who needed it. "A modest, even parsimonious, beginning," Paul Conkin says (F.D.R. and the Origins of the Welfare State), but the sight of federally subsidized housing projects, playgrounds, vermin-free apartments, replacing dilapidated tenements, was refreshing. The TVA suggested exciting possibilities for regional planning to give jobs, improve areas, and provide cheap power, with local instead of national control. The Social Security Act gave retirement benefits and unemployment insurance, and matched state funds for mothers and dependent children-but it excluded farmers, domestic workers, and old people, and offered no health insurance. As Conkin says: "The meager benefits of Social Security were insignificant in comparison to the building of security for large, established businesses."



When the New Deal was over, capitalism remained intact. The rich still controlled the nation's wealth, as well as its laws, courts, police, newspapers, churches, colleges. Enough help had been given to enough people to make Roosevelt a hero to millions, but the same system that had brought depression and crisis-the system of waste, of inequality, of concern for profit over human need- remained.

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon ... hel15.html



late wrote:
It hadn't been that long since the army was used against striking workers, and protesters.



Correct. I included an excerpt from history on how FDR treated striking workers in the '30s, and you've already had an opportunity to comment on it. Now you're merely recounting it *empirically*. Here it is again:


ckaihatsu wrote:



Roosevelt liked the idea of the CIO campaigning for him in elections, but he was not prepared to upset capitalists who also supported him. This was shown dramatically late in 1937, when Lewis undertook the biggest organising drive yet—in the steel industry. The CIO appointed 433 full time and part time organisers, working from 35 regional offices. In the aftermath of the GM strike many steel companies recognised the steel organising committee as a union, without much participation by the new union members. But the big firms refused to do so, and in late May the organising committee called a strike involving 75,000 workers. The companies responded with all the ferocity they had shown in the 1919 steel strike. They attacked the picket lines with ‘company thugs, deputies, police and the National Guard… There were 18 strikers slaughtered, scores wounded, hundreds arrested’.231 The organising committee had not prepared workers for such an onslaught because it had put its faith in Democratic Party governors and mayors showing sympathy to the organising drive. It ‘told workers that all the “New Deal” public officials were “labour’s friends”, and that the strikers should “welcome” the National Guards, state troopers and police sent to “keep order”.’ 232 The workers were thoroughly demoralised when these ‘friends’ attacked them with clubs and bullets. In Pennsylvania the first Democratic governor for 44 years declared martial law in the steel town of Johnstown. State troopers reopened the factory, restricting the number of pickets to six, and herded ever-greater numbers of scabs into the plant. In Youngstown, Ohio, where there was also a Democratic governor, deputies shot two pickets dead. In Chicago police sent in by the Democratic mayor killed ten strikers. When CIO leaders looked to Roosevelt for help he declared, ‘A plague on both your houses’.233 The biggest organising drive was broken just as the economy began to plunge downwards into renewed slump.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 516



---


late wrote:
The reality was the Union movement had stalled before the Depression, and was in trouble for the same reason everybody else was in trouble.



This is entirely too *dismissive*, since labor unions reached the *height* of their power in the '40s, during the war.


late wrote:
FDR passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933, which provided for collective bargaining, and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act).

He saved the Unions...

I overlook most of your excesses, but there are limits.



Tough talk from a tough guy.

You're putting the cart before the horse -- labor unions don't *need* government approval, rather FDR's administration had to *chase after* unions because of their militancy, as formalized in the founding of the CIO:



In its statement of purpose, the CIO said it had formed to encourage the AFL to organize workers in mass production industries along industrial union lines.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_ ... anizations
#15183666
ckaihatsu wrote:
Your historical assessment is bullshit because the Allies *knew in advance* of atrocities against Jews in Europe, and yet did nothing. The Allies allowed Japan to plunder China, and Mussolini and Franco to do *their* totalitarianism.

ITT sold armaments to *both* sides during WWII, and FDR's New Deal tanked in 1937 because it was *insufficient*, as Keynes noted.



Patrickov wrote:
@ckaihatsu

Ah, pro-socialism bullshit. I forgot your agenda. Sorry.



Touchy-touchy -- !

Here's a tip -- don't take it so personally. Anytime you care to address the *history*, there it is.
#15183722
ckaihatsu wrote:

This is entirely too *dismissive*, since labor unions reached the *height* of their power in the '40s, during the war.





Thanks for making my point. This was war, and if FDR had wanted to, he could have crushed them.

Nothing will keep you from clinging to your idiotic fantasy.
#15183731
late wrote:
Thanks for making my point. This was war, and if FDR had wanted to, he could have crushed them.



No, labor was *definitely* outside of FDR's control:



Despite the overwhelming atmosphere of patriotism and total dedication to winning the war, despite the no-strike pledges of the AFL and CIO, many of the nation's workers, frustrated by the freezing of wages while business profits rocketed skyward, went on strike. During the war, there were fourteen thousand strikes, involving 6,770,000 workers, more than in any comparable period in American history. In 1944 alone, a million workers were on strike, in the mines, in the steel mills, in the auto and transportation equipment industries.

When the war ended, the strikes continued in record numbers- 3 million on strike in the first half of 1946. According to Jeremy Brecher (Strike!), if not for the disciplinary hand of the unions there might have been "a general confrontation between the workers of a great many industries, and the government, supporting the employers."



https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon ... eswar.html



---


late wrote:
Nothing will keep you from clinging to your idiotic fantasy.



What's my 'idiotic fantasy', exactly -- ?
#15183760
ckaihatsu wrote:

What's my 'idiotic fantasy', exactly -- ?




Good question.

The Modern World is a cooperative effort, although it often doesn't look that way. You want to force a bottom up perspective on it, but the history is quite different.

In the first century of an economy that goes capitalist, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Our Civil War makes for a dandy example.

To be successful, you need to have the players at the table. That means government and business needs to cooperate with workers and knowledge institutions.

"The federal government in 1935 guaranteed unions the right to organize and bargain collectively, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established a mechanism for putting a floor under wages and a ceiling on hours that continues to this day. It provided, in 1935, financial aid to the aged, infirm, and unemployed when they could no longer provide for themselves. Beginning in 1933, it helped rural and agricultural America with price supports and development programs when these sectors could barely survive. Finally, by embracing an activist fiscal policy after 1937, the government assumed responsibility for smoothing out the rough spots in the American economy."
https://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/impact-and-legacy

They didn't even mention the Wagner Act.

"On this day in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the National Labor Relations Act, which established guidelines for ties between business and labor, including collective bargaining rights for labor unions. It guarantees basic rights of private-sector employees to organize into trade unions, to engage in collective bargaining for better terms and conditions at work, and to take collective action, including going out on strike if warranted.

The legislation is also known as the Wagner Act, after Sen. Robert F. Wagner (D-N.Y.), a principal architect of the measure. In the decade after its passage, opponents of the Wagner Act introduced several hundred bills to amend or repeal the law. All of them failed or were vetoed by Roosevelt until the passage of the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947 by a Republican-controlled Congress."
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/05/fdr-signs-national-labor-relations-act-july-5-1935-693625

You can nitpick all you want, but safeguarding collective bargaining and making laws that protected workers was a huge improvement.

If you haven't read the history you can't know the massive opposition FDR faced.
#15183762
late wrote:
You can nitpick all you want, but safeguarding collective bargaining and making laws that protected workers was a huge improvement.



My position is that FDR *had* to do those kinds of reforms, because Hoover *didn't*.

Here's a quick sketch of what social conditions were like at the time:



There were millions of tons of food around, but it was not profitable to transport it, to sell it. Warehouses were full of clothing, but people could not afford it. There were lots of houses, but they stayed empty because people couldn't pay the rent, had been evicted, and now lived in shacks in quickly formed "Hoovervilles" built on garbage dumps.

Brief glimpses of reality in the newspapers could have been multiplied by the millions: A New York Times story in early 1932:

After vainly trying to get a stay of dispossession until January 15 from his apartment at 46 Hancock Street in Brooklyn, yesterday, Peter J. Cornell, 48 years old, a former roofing contractor out of work and penniless, fell dead in the arms of his wife.

A doctor gave the cause of his death as heart disease, and the police said it had at least partly been caused by the bitter disappointment of a long day's fruitless attempt to prevent himself and his family being put out on the street... .

Cornell owed $5 in rent in arrears and $39 for January which his landlord required in advance. Failure to produce the money resulted in a dispossess order being served on the family yesterday and to take effect at the end of the week.

After vainly seeking assistance elsewhere, he was told during the day by the Home Relief Bureau that it would have no funds with which to help him until January 15.

A dispatch from Wisconsin to The Nation, in late 1932:

Throughout the middle west the tension between the farmers and authorities has been growing ... as a result of tax and foreclosure sales. In many cases evictions have been prevented only by mass action on the part of the farmers. However, until the Cichon homestead near Elkhorn, Wisconsin, was besieged on December 6 by a host of deputy sheriffs armed with machine-guns, rifles, shotguns, and tear-gas bombs, there had been no actual violence. Max Cichon's property was auctioned off at a foreclosure sale last August, but he refused to allow either the buyer or the authorities to approach his home. He held off unwelcome visitors with a shotgun. The sheriff called upon Cichon to submit peacefully. When he refused to do so, the sheriff ordered deputies to lay down a barrage of machine-gun and rifle fire . . . Cichon is now in jail in Elkhorn, and his wife and two children, who were with him in the house, are being cared for in the county hospital. Cichon is not a trouble-maker. He enjoys the confidence of his neighbors, who only recently elected him justice of the peace of the town of Sugar Creek. That a man of his standing and disposition should go to such lengths in defying the authorities is a clear warning that we may expect further trouble in the agricultural districts unless the farmers are soon helped.

A tenement dweller on 113th Street in East Harlem wrote to Congressman Fiorello La Guardia in Washington:

You know my condition is bad. I used to get pension from the government and they stopped. It is now nearly seven months I am out of work. I hope you will try to do something for me.. .. I have four children who are in need of clothes and food.. .. My daughter who is eight is very ill and not recovering. My rent is due two months and I am afraid of being put out.



https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon ... hel15.html
#15183769
ckaihatsu wrote:
My position is that FDR *had* to do those kinds of reforms, because Hoover *didn't*.



You keep trying to bring coal to Newcastle.

While ignoring the obvious, which I just pointed out, that politics is a give an take process. It didn't have to be that way, this was something new.
#15183772
late wrote:
You keep trying to bring coal to Newcastle.

While ignoring the obvious, which I just pointed out, that politics is a give an take process. It didn't have to be that way, this was something new.



I guess my concern here is that you seem to be detaching 'politics' from the *material world* -- there were certain conditions on the ground then, in the Great Depression, that the U.S. government couldn't simply *ignore* anymore, and which FDR was *obligated* to address, though he also used a heavy hand against the interests of organized labor.



In the first six months of Roosevelt’s New Deal more than 15 strikers were killed, 200 injured and hundreds arrested.226



[In] late May [1937] the organising committee called a strike involving 75,000 workers. The companies responded with all the ferocity they had shown in the 1919 steel strike. They attacked the picket lines with ‘company thugs, deputies, police and the National Guard… There were 18 strikers slaughtered, scores wounded, hundreds arrested’.231 The organising committee had not prepared workers for such an onslaught because it had put its faith in Democratic Party governors and mayors showing sympathy to the organising drive. It ‘told workers that all the “New Deal” public officials were “labour’s friends”, and that the strikers should “welcome” the National Guards, state troopers and police sent to “keep order”.’ 232 The workers were thoroughly demoralised when these ‘friends’ attacked them with clubs and bullets. In Pennsylvania the first Democratic governor for 44 years declared martial law in the steel town of Johnstown. State troopers reopened the factory, restricting the number of pickets to six, and herded ever-greater numbers of scabs into the plant. In Youngstown, Ohio, where there was also a Democratic governor, deputies shot two pickets dead. In Chicago police sent in by the Democratic mayor killed ten strikers. When CIO leaders looked to Roosevelt for help he declared, ‘A plague on both your houses’.233 The biggest organising drive was broken just as the economy began to plunge downwards into renewed slump.



Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 514, 516



---


Components of Social Production

Spoiler: show
Image
#15183831
ckaihatsu wrote:
No, actually, you haven't



If you knew, and understood the history, you would know I have.

What FDR did was a huge improvement, and applying contemporary standards, as you are doing, violates historiography.

It's been Procrustean...
#15183846
late wrote:
If you knew, and understood the history, you would know I have.



Okay, please provide a link to the post in which you addressed labor militancy in U.S. history.

(You can right-click on the eight-digit post number in the upper-right corner of any post, and select 'Copy link address'.)


late wrote:
What FDR did was a huge improvement, and applying contemporary standards, as you are doing, violates historiography.

It's been Procrustean...



No, I'm *not* applying any special standards -- organized labor had certain demands at the time, which are in the excerpts I provided, and those demands were particular to that time in history.

I'm sorry you don't agree with my assessment of FDR, but I think he was just playing catch-up to the circumstances of the time, at best, which was better than what Hoover did, which was an even *more* heavy-handed treatment, unfortunately.
  • 1
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9

EU is not prepared on nuclear war, but Russia,[…]

It is implausible that the IDF could not or would[…]

Moving on to the next misuse of language that sho[…]

There is no reason to have a state at all unless w[…]