Monday, February 17, 2014

Pelajaran dari Kelud

http://nasional.kompas.com/read/2014/02/16/0916135/Pelajaran.dari.Kelud

Ahmad Arif


SURYA / AHMAD ZAIMUL HAQWarga dan tim SAR mengamati abu vulkanik yang meninggi keluar dari Gunung Kelud yang terlihat dari jarak lima kilometer di Desa Penataran, Kecamatan Nglegok, Kabupaten Blitar, Jumat (14/2/2014). Menurut Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG), Gunung Kelud yang meletus pada Kamis lalu sekitar pukul 22.30 WIB bersamaan keluarnya tremor tersebut, mengalami 442 kali gempa vulkanik dangkal. SURYA/AHMAD ZAIMUL HAQ

KOMPAS - “Kalau Kelud meletus lagi, semoga saat itu saya tidak lagi menjadi Kepala PVMBG,” kata Surono di kawah Kelud, Jawa Timur, 4 November 2011. “Saya tidak bisa membayangkan bagaimana letusan Kelud ke depan.”

Ucapan Surono itu kembali melintasi pedalaman kepala begitu Kelud kembali menggeliat sejak beberapa hari terakhir. Pagi itu gerimis, kami menuruni tangga menuju bekas danau kawah Kelud yang telah menghilang. Surono lalu berdiri di kaki kubah lava yang masih menguarkan bau belerang. Saya melihat rautnya gelisah. “Peta KRB (Kawasan Rawan Bencana) Kelud harus sudah diubah,” katanya.

Saat itulah dia kemudian menyampaikan rasa jeri pada letusan Kelud di masa mendatang. Ketika Kelud akhirnya meletus pada Kamis (13/2/2014) malam lalu, Surono memang telah berhenti sebagai Kepala Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG). Namun, dia ternyata tidak bisa lepas dari Kelud karena pada Jumat (14/2/2014) pagi, Surono justru dilantik menjadi Kepala Badan Geologi Kementerian yang membawahi PVMBG.

Kelud memang spesial bagi Surono. Gunung ini ibarat kawah candradimuka, yang menggodok kepakarannya soal gunung api. Kelud mengantarkan Surono meraih gelar master dan doktor dari Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, Perancis, karena penelitiannya tentang instrumen akustik untuk memantau kondisi Kelud saat gunung itu meletus pada tahun 1990.

Berubah

Selama ratusan tahun, Kelud dikenal memiliki letusan freatik (phreatic) karena keberadaan danau kawahnya. Letusan ini dipicu oleh masuknya air danau ke kantong magma yang bersuhu sekitar 1.000 derajat.

Persentuhan air danau dan magma ini kemudian memicu munculnya uap panas yang segera menjebol sumbat, melontarkan debu, bebatuan, bom gunung api, hingga air. Paduan material padat dan air danau ini menciptakan lahar letusan yang secara historis menimbulkan korban dan kerusakan besar di sepanjang Sungai Brantas, dan sungai lain yang berhulu di Kelud.

Teks Sanskerta, berjudul ”Goentoer Pabanjoepinda” yang ditulis pada tahun 1334 dan dikutip oleh geolog dari Museum Geologi Bandung, Indyo Pratomo dalam disertasinya, Etude de l’éruption de 1990 du volcan Kelud (1992), menggambarkan karakter letusan Kelud di masa lalu itu, ”.... Bumi mengguncang, uap panas dimuntahkan dari gunung api dan banyak abu jatuh, gemuruh guntur, petir besar-besar..., muntahan lahar segera tiba kemudian....”

Selama lebih dari 1.000 tahun, upaya mengatasi letusan Kelud lebih terfokus pada muntahan lahar ini. Bahkan, istilah lahar, yang kemudian dipakai dalam term vulkanologi secara global, berasal dari fenomena Kelud ini.



KOMPAS IMAGES / FIKRIA HIDAYATBocah mandi di sudetan yang mengalir menuju Waduk Siman di Kecamatan Kepung, Kediri, Jawa Timur, Kamis (3/11/2011). Sudetan dan waduk diperkirakan telah ada sejak zaman Mpu Sindok (kerajaan Mataram Kuno era Jawa Timur). Di sekitar waduk ditemukan sejumlah prasasti, salah satunya Prasasti Harinjing yang berisi pembuatan sudetan, mitigasi bencana gunung berapi sejak 894 Masehi. KOMPAS IMAGES/FIKRIA HIDAYAT

Upaya pertama dan tertua yang tercatat dalam sejarah untuk mengatasi lahar Kelud adalah pembangunan sudetan dari Sungai Konto ke Sungai Harinjing atau sekarang dikenal sebagai Sungai Serinjing di Desa Siman, Kecamatan Kepung, Kediri. (lihat Kelud Revolusi Gunung Api, laporan khusus Ekspedisi Cincin Api Kompas, 21 Januari 2012) .

Prasasti Harinjing atau juga disebut Sukabumi yang ditemukan di sekitar Desa Siman mencatat upaya itu. Prasasti dengan angka tahun 921 Masehi ini diperkirakan dibuat pada era pemerintahan Tulodong, memuat informasi tentang pembangunan bendungan (mula dawuhan) dan saluran sungai (dharmma kali) yang keduanya dibangun tahun 804 Masehi. Kanal buatan ini saat ini dikenal sebagai Sungai Harinjing, sekarang bernama Sungai Serinjing.

Boomgaard dalam A World of Water: Rain, Rivers, and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories (2007) menyebutkan, bendungan dan saluran sungai itu kemungkinan terhubung dengan sebuah candi. Menurutnya, rencana besar penyaluran air tersebut sebagai salah satu strategi besar mengendalikan air dan mengurangi dampak bencana.

Pada era Belanda, upaya untuk mengendalikan letusan Kelud dilakukan dengan merekayasa danau kawahnya. Saat Kelud meletus pada 1919, volume air danau kawah saat itu mencapai 40 juta meter kubik. Jarak luncur lahar letusan saat itu mencapai 37,5 kilometer dan jumlah korban tewas mencapai 5.110 jiwa.

Dengan berpatokan bahwa ancaman Kelud membesar seiring dengan besarnya volume air kawah, Belanda berupaya membuat saluran air guna mengurangi volume danau itu.

Kusumadinata (1979) mencatat, pada 11 Juli 1907, Belanda berupaya membuat saluran air di lereng barat Kelud. Dampaknya, tinggi muka air kawah turun 7,4 meter dan isi air berkurang 4,3 juta meter kubik. Pada tahun 1919, penggalian terowongan dilanjutkan. Air dari terowongan rencananya akan dialirkan ke arah Kali Bladak atau sering disebut Kali Badak.

Namun, pekerjaan terhenti karena terowongan ini runtuh. Pembuatan terowongan dimulai lagi pada 1923 dengan menggali 7 terowongan pembuangan utama dan beberapa saluran sekunder. Pembangunan ini sukses mengurangi volume air danau dari 40 juta meter kubik menjadi hanya 1,8 juta meter kubik.

Seluruh terowongan itu rusak dan tersumbat saat Kelud meletus tahun 1951. Garis tengah danau yang semula 500 meter menjadi 700 meter, volume air danau pun bertambah menjadi 23,1 juta meter kubik. Pada tahun 1953, pekerjaan perbaikan terowongan kembali dimulai dan selesai pada tahun 1955. Tahun 1966 dibangun terowongan Ampera sepanjang 20 meter. Dengan terowongan Ampera, volume air danau menjadi 4,3 juta meter kubik.

Namun, pada akhir 2007, raut Kelud berubah total. Danau kawah Kelud yang jadi ciri khas gunung ini dan diperkirakan telah berusia 2.400 tahun itu menghilang. Kelud pun sudah tidak bisa disebut ’kelud’—PVMBG menyebutnya Kelut. Tidak ada lagi danau kawah yang menyapu saat letusan.

Nama Kelud—dalam bahasa Jawa sapu—dilekatkan ke gunung api ini karena saat meletus menyemburkan lahar letusan, lalu menyapu desa-desa di lerengnya.

Perubahan karakter, bahkan identitas gunung ini, telah membuka masalah baru. Sebelumnya, PVMBG menggunakan perubahan suhu dan warna air danau Kelud untuk memantau aktivitas gunung ini, karena gunung ini juga irit mengirim gempa saat krisis. “Kami harus memikirkan cara lain untuk memantau Kelud karena danaunya sudah diganti kubah lava,” kata Surono kala itu.

Hujan batu

Kubah batu yang menyumbat kawah Kelud inilah yang menakutkan Surono saat menemani perjalanan tim Ekspedisi Cincin Api Kompas dua tahun silam. “Sulit membayangkan jika kubah lava ini terlontar seketika saat Kelud meletus karena energi letusan Kelud yang sangat eksplosif,” katanya. Skenario terburuk bisa saja terjadi jika aliran magma tak kuat menjebol sumbat lava, lalu menjebol titik lemah lain di lereng Kelud, di dekat permukiman.

Untung saja skenario terburuk itu tak terjadi. Daya eksplosif Kelud berhasil membongkar kubah batu dan meontarkannya menjadi hujan batu kerikil, hingga abu yang memenuhi hampir seluruh Pulau Jawa.

Selain itu, Keputusan Kepala PVMBG  Hendrasto untuk mengosongkan kawasan dalam radius 10 km dari kawah Kelud sebelum Kelud meletus layak diacungi jempol. Keputusan itu tentu tak gampang dibuat mengingat pada 2007, PVMBG pernah mengevakuasi warga di sekitar Kelud hingga berbulan-bulan, namun gunung ini kemudian tak meletus eksplosif  sehingga banyak pihak yang mencibir keputusan itu. Surono pernah merasakan pahitnya cibiran saat dia mengevakuasi warga, termasuk seluruh stafnya dari Pos Pemantauan Kelud pada 2007.

Nyaris saja! Selain perubahan karakter Kelud yang berubah tak gampang terbaca, alat-alat pemantauan gunung api Indonesia sebenarnya masih sangat minim. Saya pun teringat dengan pengakuan Surono dalam beberapa kali perjumpaan. Dari 127 gunung api, baru separuhnya yang dipantau intensif. Surono mengibaratkan proses pemantauan gunung api di Indonesia seperti menaruh anak kecil di pinggir kolam. ”Kalau kita lengah, pasti masuk kolam. Kalau selamat, bisa dibilang karena kebetulan,” katanya  Surono.

Letusan Kelud kali ini sekali lagi mengajarkan pentingnya menyadari posisi Nusantara yang dilingkari Cincin Api, yang menuntut kita untuk terus bersiaga. Apalagi, karakter dan sifat gunung juga bisa berubah. Gunung api adalah organisme Bumi yang hidup. Mereka lahir, tumbuh, tertidur, mati, lalu terbangun, dan meletus.

Gunung api terus berevolusi. Begitu pula seharusnya kita yang hidup di sekelilingnya...


Simak kembali catatan Ekspedisi Kompas Cincin Api “Kelud Revolusi Gunung Api” di edisi khusus epaper.kompas.com danwww.cincinapi.com.

Friday, February 14, 2014

Mengenal Gunung Kelud

http://rovicky.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/mengenal-gunung-kelud/
by Rovicky

Gunung yang satu ini sering juga disebut dengan Gunung Kelud ataupun Gunung Kelut. Gunung ini secara administratif terletak di perbatasan Kabupaten Kediri, Kabupaten Blitar dan Kabupaten Malang. Puncaknya berada pada ketinggian 1717 (meter dpal) . Puncak kawah gunung ini, terletak di Kecamatan Ngancar, Kabupaten Kediri.
:( “Wah betul Pakdhe, jelasin yang rinci ya. Kalau kita ngga kenal kita ngga bisa tahu perilakunya sehingga kita akan mampu menghindari “keinjek kaki waktu dia menjoget”, ya ?” :P .
:D “Ngga usah rinci Thole, mengko malah lupa”.
Mengenali perilaku gunung api mirip mengenali binatang peliharaan kita (pet). Oleh sebab itu jaman dahulu ada penunggu atau pawang. Seperti adanya mBah Maridjan di Gunung Merapi itu. Tapi aku tidak tahu siapa penunggu Gunung Kelud ini. Wah ternyata kata Si Ambu namanya mBah Ronggo.

Berkas:Kelut.jpg

Letusan Gunung Kelud


Gunung ini tercatat sebagai gunung yang sangat aktif. Menurut penelitianSmithsonianselama seratus tahun terakhir ini sudah tercatat letusan hampir 40 kali.

letusan-kelud.jpg


Letusan terbesar dalam catatan sejarah sejak seribu tahun lalu terjadi pada tahun 1586 dimana waktu itu terjadi hampir semua karakter erupsi [ Central vent eruption, Crater lake eruption, Explosive eruption, Fatalities, Damage (land, property, etc.) dan Mudflow(s) (lahars)]. Menurut buku Data Dasar Gunung Api di Indonesia jumlah korban diperkirakan mencapai 10 000 orang. Bayangkan saja pada tahun itu tentunya jumlahpenduduk masih sangat sedikit, tapi mampu menelan jumlah korban sangat banyak. Letusan tahun 1856 itu diperkirakan memiliki kekuatan Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI): 5. Kira-kira setara letusan Pinnatubo tahun 1991.
Sebagai bayangan kekuatan letusan :
  • Tambora, Indonesia 1815: VEI=7, 92,000 meninggal
  • Santorini, Greece 1628 B.C.: VEI=6, unknown meninggal
  • Krakatau, Indonesia 1883: VEI=6, 36,400 meninggal
  • Santa Maria, Guatemala 1902: VEI=6, 6,000 meninggal
  • Mount St. Helens, USA 1980: VEI=5, 57 meninggal
  • Vesuvius, Italy 79: VEI=5, 3,360 meninggal
  • Pinatubo, Philippines 1991: VEI=5, 932 meninggal (lihat gambar)

Letusan krakatau yang VEI=6 itu setara dengan 150-175 megatons of TNT, atau ekivalen dengan 7,500-8,750 bom atom Hiroshima (satu bom Hiroshima kira-kira termal energinya 20 kilotons).
:( “Pakdhe jadi sakjane kalau semua bom atom di dunia ini meletus bareng-bareng dunia tetep aman ya dhe ?”
:D “Hush, kalau bom atom ada radiasinya yang mematikan. Bukan hanya getaran dan panasnya saja.”
Kalau melihat trend letusan Gunung Kelud dalam grafik diatas, sepertinya rata-rata hanya 3 untuk 500 tahun terakhir ini (lihat gambar). Namun karena keunikannya, maka ahli-ahli Volkanologi tidak mampu menebak letusan ini seperti menebak letusan Gunung Merapi tahun lalu.

Keunikan Gunung Kelud.


kelud.jpg

Salah satu keunikan gunung api ini adalah adanya danau kawah. Konon dalamnya lebih dari 600 meteran dan mampu menyimpan air sampai 40 juta m3. Bayangkan kalau air sebanyak ini dipakai untuk menggelontor pasir-pasir lepas disekitarnya. Mempertimbangkan bahayanya kalau sampai 40 juta m3 air tersebut terbawa oleh letusan dahsyat, maka pada tahun 1907 pemerintah Belanda membuat sistem trowongan dan berhasil mengurangi air danau kawah sebanyak 4,3 juta m3. Pada tahun 1923, menyusul runtuhnya dinding trowongan , maka dibuatkan lagi 7 trowongan yang berhasil mengurangi jumlah air sampai menjadi 1,8 juta m3. Klicksaja gambar profil gunung diatas


:D “Keunikan gunung ini seperti melihat keunikan individu. Manusia memiliki kesamaan karakter untuk setiap bangsa. Misal orang Jawa itu kalem, Orang Batak itu keras. Namun selalu saja masing-masing ada yang tidak memiliki sifat general ini”
:( “Lah hiya Pakdhe aja criwis ngga anteng kayak wong Jowo”


:D “Gunung-gunung api di Jawa mirip jenisnya strato-volkano, atau gunung yang berlapis-lapis dan berbentuk kerucut. Tetapi akan sangat berbeda dengan gunung api di Hawai yang magmanya sangat encer, dan relatif mendatar. Dapat dilihat juga antara Gunung Merapi dengan Gunung Kelud berbeda, kan ?. Seperti orang Jawa ada yang mancung dan ada yang pesek kayak kamu, Thole” :P .
:( “Halllah Pakdhe. Oooh, makanya masing-masing gunung biasanya punya pawang ya Pakdhe?”

Pawang Gunung Kelud bernama Mbah Ronggo

Kediri (ANTARA News)- Juru kunci Gunung Kelud, Mbah Ronggo, tampaknya ingin mengikuti jejak Mbah Maridjan, juru kunci Gunung Merapi. Mbah Ronggo yang aslinya bernama Parjito hingga kini masih enggan mengungsi dari rumahnya di Dusun Margomulyo, Desa Sugihwaras, Kec Ngancar, Kab Kadiri, Jatim, sekalipun sudah “dirayu” oleh Kapolres Kediri, AKBP Eky Hari Festianto. “Kami sudah meminta Mbah Ronggo untuk segera mengungsi ke tempat yang sudah disediakan,” kata Kapolres Kediri usai menemui Mbah Ronggo di rumahnya, Kamis (18/10).

http://www.volcano.si.edu/volcanoes/region06/java/kelut/06klt01f.png

Karena adanya danau air ini, maka pengamatan pada kedalaman magma sangat sulit. Salah dua gejala yang diamati adalah kenaikan suhu kawah, dan mnunculnya gelembung. Yang kedua dapat juga menggunakan alat perekam getaran gempa volkanik, untuk menuntun dimana kira-kira puncak aliran lava saat ini. Karena kesulitan inilah, maka Pak Surono kepala PVMBG (pusat vulkanologi dan mitigasi bencana geologi) yang bertanggung jawab soal kegunung apian ini tidak mudah untuk menentukan kapan saat yang tepat untuk menghindarkan diri.

Peta Daerah Rawan Bencana.


kelutkrb3d.jpg

Dari websitenya PVMBG (pusat vulkanologi dan mitigasi bencana geologi) dapat diketahui daerah bahaya yang sudah pernah dipetakan sebelumnya. Dengan menggunakan Google Earth maka peta rawan ini dapat di-tampal (overlay), sehingga dapat dilihat bagaimana kira-kira dampak terhadap penduduk sekitarnya.
Menurut peta rawan bencana ini, arah pergerakan lahar dari Gunung Kelud ini diperkirakan ke arah barat. Yang agak menghawatirkan adalah daerah sepanjang warna biru (rawan aliran lahar) ini merupakan daerah yang padat penduduknya. Dengan Google earth akan mudah diketahui bahwa hampir sepanjang warna biru ini merupakan pemukiman penduduk.
Menurut, Pak Miko, seorang kawan di IAGI menuliskan bahwa Wilayah G. Kelud dibagi atas beberapa daerah yaitu Daerah Terlarang ( radius 5 km dari kawah dengan luas 91 km2 ) dengan ancaman hujan bom dan rempah-rempah batuan, awan panas, lahar letusan dan lahar hujan. Data tahun 1972 menunjukkan hunian 50 orang. Kemudian Daerah Bahaya I ( radius 10 km dari kawah dengan luas 223 km2 ) dengan ancaman hujan bom dan rempah-rempah batuan. Daerah ini dihuni oleh 136.500 orang ( data tahun 1972 ). Selanjutnya Daerah Bahaya II yang ancamannya lahar sekunder. Daerah ini meliputi bantaran sungai-sungai lahar yang luasnya 56 km2 dan dihuni oleh 178.000 orang.

kelutkrbcrop.jpg

Mempertimbangkan besarnya jumlah penduduk yang menempati Daerah Bahaya I (136.500 orang , data tahun 1972 !!! ), maka bisa dibayangkan betapa sulitnya PVMBG dalam mengambil keputusan tentang status G. Kelud. Taruhannya sungguh berat , di satu sisi menyangkut begitu banyaknya keselamatan jiwa manusia dan di sisi lain menyangkut juga biaya evakuasi yang miliaran rupiah ( kalau 100.000 orang saja yang diungsikan dan perlu biaya Rp 10.000 / hari maka diperlukan dana minimal Rp 1 milyar/ hari !!! ) . Kita tentunya yakin bahwa apa yang telah diputuskan oleh para pakar di PVMBG pastilah merupakan keputusan terbaik karena didasarkan pada kaidah-kaidah ilmiah yang cukup akurat . Walaupun demikian, sebagai umat beragama, kita tentunya percaya bahwa apapun keputusan kita, Tuhan jualah yang akhirnya menentukan.

Perhatikan bulan purnama nanti.
Kalau melihat adanya hubungan antara bulan dengan aktifitas volkanisme seperti yang pernah ditulis sebelumny a tentang Efek bulan terhadap pasang-surut, gempa dan gunung api, maka perlu diperhatikan pada waktu bulan purnama (yang paling dekat tanggal 27-28 Oktober) dan pada waktu bulan mati setelahnya. Tentunya ini bukan sebuah ramalan looh ya. Hanya untuk berjaga-jaga saja. Karena mengingat biaya mengungsi juga tidak sedikit. Jadi yang paling tepat seperti yang dilakukan PVMBG yaitu pengamatan dimana (kedalaman) magma itu berada, serta teramati dari suhu kawah yang meningkat tajam yang menunjukkan bawah magma sudah mendekati danau kawah.
Salam WASPADA !

Being gay IS in your genes, say scientists in controversial new DNA study

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2559021/Being-gay-DNA-researchers-claim-controversial-new-study.html
FIONA MACRAE SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT IN CHICAGO

WHAT MAKES A HOMOSEXUAL?

Other studies suggests that conditions in the womb also influence sexual orientation.
For instance, the more older male siblings a man has, the greater chance he will be gay.
Scientists say the phenomenon cannot be explained by the youngest boy being babied and mollycoddled or other differences in the way they are brought up.
It is thought that carrying a male baby in the womb triggers an immune response in the mother, creating antibodies that attack part of the unborn child's brain linked to sexual orientation.
This response gets stronger the more boys a woman carries, raising the odds of homosexuality.
Exposure to hormones in the womb is also likely to be important and some argue that upbringing plays a role in sexuality.

The confirmation of the existence of a ¿gay gene¿ or genes will strengthen arguments that homosexuality is a matter of biology, rather than choice.

Being gay could be in the DNA.
Scientists have found two stretches of DNA linked to homosexuality in men.
The confirmation of the existence of a ‘gay gene’ or genes will strengthen arguments that homosexuality is a matter of biology, rather than choice.
However, it also raises the prospect of a genetic test that could be used by insurance companies to discriminate against clients or by pregnant women to abort gay babies.
In the study, Chicago University researchers analysed the DNA of more than 400 pairs of gay brothers, recruited at Gay Pride festivals at marches over several years.
This revealed flagged up two pieces of DNA that seem to be linked to homosexuality.
It is not known which of the many genes they contain are key or how they affect the development of sexual orientation.
However, the result, revealed at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s prestigious annual conference, backs up a contentious 1993 study.
That research, the first to find evidence of a ‘gay gene’, created a storm of controversy, which was further fuelled when other scientists failed to find a genetic link.
Dr Michael Bailey from Northwestern University in Illinois, who contributed to the latest study, said it is the biggest of its kind.
He added: ‘Sexual orientation has nothing to do with choice. Our findings suggest there may be genes at play – we found evidence for two sets that affect whether a man is gay or straight.
‘Although this could one day lead to a pre-natal test for male sexual orientation, it would not be very accurate, as there are other factors that can influence the outcome.’
Despite this, he would not would not object to a prenatal test being developed.
He said: ‘Clearly parents should not be allowed to torture or kill babies. But they can currently choose to terminate a pregnancy early on, so they should be allowed to have as much information on the future child as possible.’
Chicago University researchers analysed the DNA of more than 400 pairs of gay brothers recruited at Gay Pride festivals at marches over several years.

Qazi Rhaman, a King’s College London psychologist, said that genes are thought account for up to 40 per cent of a person’s sexual orientation is governed by genes, and that it is likely that many genes are involved.
This would make developing a genetic test incredibly difficult.
He said: ‘There is no real risk of anyone finding a 'genetic test' for sexual orientation based on these or any of the scientific findings about the genetics of sexuality from the past 20 years.
‘The reason is that there is no gay gene.  You are not going to be able to develop a test to find them all.’
Dr Rhaman, who has written a book about sexual orientation, added that all psychological traits involve genetics and people should not be afraid about link homosexuality to genes.
Richard Lane, of gay rights organisation, Stonewall, said that while studies into the origins of homosexuality have yet to produce convincing evidence, they do to point to a biological root.
He said: ‘The thing that’s consistent across all of them is that they all point to sexual orientation being something fundamental to a person rather than the lifestyle choice some opponents of equality repeatedly suggest.’
Other studies suggests that conditions in the womb also influence sexual orientation.
For instance, the more older male siblings a man has, the greater chance he will be gay.
Scientists say the phenomenon cannot be explained by the youngest boy being babied and mollycoddled or other differences in the way they are brought up.
It is thought that carrying a male baby in the womb triggers an immune response in the mother, creating antibodies that attack part of the unborn child's brain linked to sexual orientation.
This response gets stronger the more boys a woman carries, raising the odds of homosexuality.
Exposure to hormones in the womb is also likely to be important and some argue that upbringing plays a role in sexuality.

Saturday, February 01, 2014

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: 1933-1944 ~ 32nd U.S. President

http://mauialmanac.com/2008/08/31/us-presidents-franklin-delano-roosevelt/
By the Maui Curmudgeon

FDR, 32nd US president

The offspring of the fabulously wealthy patrician families Delano and Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt seems to have been molded for his time and the position of presidency from the very start. A graduate of Groton, FDR was strongly influenced by its president, Reverend Endicott Peabody, who called FDR to a life of social responsibility through public service.
He graduated from Columbia Law School, but law bored him, and in 1910 FDR gained a state senate seat in New York in the party of his father (not his great cousin Teddy), the Democratic Party, which, beginning with Grover Cleveland, had made its way through education and hard work to realize the values embodied in the likes of Abraham Lincoln were the ones who had to guide the country for it to thrive, values which the Republican party, beginning with Warren G. Harding, rebuked.
In 1913, when Woodrow Wilson came to power, he appointed FDR as undersecretary of the Navy, a position FDR loved and kept for 8 years (a position Teddy held under McKinley initially). In 1920, Roosevelt joined the James Cox ticket as vice-presidential candidate, but they were drubbed by Harding. The loss didn’t hurt FDR a bit.
But polio did. He contracted the disease in 1921 and never really walked again. It took years to learn what he could do, but by 1928 he successfully ran for governor of New York, and in 1932, for president. He is the only person to win four elections as president, something which the 22nd amendment to the Constitution now prevents. The amendment was one of his legacies infact. The republicans were tired of losing elections to the same guy.
THE BAD
By 1937, the Supreme Court – most of which was appointed by Republicans – ruled unconstitutional much of FDR’s reform policies. FDR thought that, since he had huge Democratic majorities in Congress, he could change the rules and “pack” the Supreme Court with judges more sympathetic to his causes, but the attempt to add six seats to the Court failed miserably. In this case, historical hearts and minds are with FDR – he correctly decided that his programs – saving lives and rebuilding a nation – were in the short term more important than literal readings of the law.
Executive Order 9066: It was a presidential act which interred more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans at the start of World War II, depriving them of liberty, property – everything the Constitution stood for. This is the one black mark on his presidency which FDR cannot escape.
THE GOODBy now, the first 100 days of his first term have become legend, and rightfully so. The National Industrial Recovery Act, the Public Works Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Rural Electrification Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – the list is exhausting, and all part of the “New Deal,” passed in three months. It literally reinvented America, and saved American capitalism from what historian Mark Leff says was “a sure and hard demise.”
People adored him. Finally, citizens felt that someone in the White House cared. When one of the new programs worked out, it wasn’t the civil servants or Congress who got the credit. “FDR saved my life.” “FDR got me my job.” He was the face of hope and reform.
In 1939, FDR was looking forward to retirement. The country, though not fully recovered, was well on its way and FDR had other accomplishments to pursue. But Germany invaded Poland, World War II broke out. The impending catastrophe wiped out any opposition to the traditional two-terms which the country, since George Washington, had held. In fact, much like the country felt of Washington – if he weren’t the new country’s president, who could be? – many American’s felt of FDR. In these uncertain and dangerous times, who could continue to lead us? Only FDR.
Before America entered the war in 1941, FDR suggested a “United Nations,” playing off his mentor Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations. This was to bear fruit shortly after FDR’s death.
The Wordl War II stimulated the U.S. economy as no program had before – national production increased 75% from 1939 to 1943, a rise never equaled before or since. FDR’s genius was now able to focus his revitalizing economy toward a military victory.
In 1944, shortly before his death, FDR proposed an American Bill of Economic Rights, but he died too soon to push its passage.
INTERESTING BITS
In 1905, he married his cousin Eleanor, a brilliant, engaging, sincere and hopeful woman who I think, along with John Adam’s wife Abigail, would have made a smashing president. They had six children, four in the first five years of marriage, which wore Eleanor out. Imagine her surprise then, when in 1918 she discovered love letters from FDR to Lucy Mercer, her own secretary. They had been having an affair. Eleanor wanted out. FDR realized that thIS would mean the death of his political life. Also, if he lost his wife, FDR’s mother, who still held most of the family’s purse strings, would cut him off financially. They struck a deal. The affair would end. They would no longer sleep together. And he would never direct her life again. Eleanor became independent, and the country benefitted enormously because of it.
Nonetheless, FDR began seeing Mercer again after he won the presidency. She was with him when he had his massive stroke and died. It was only then that Eleanor discovered he had violated his promise.
Tens of millions of American’s never knew FDR couldn’t walk. The press had an unwritten rule: you never photographed or filmed “the man” while he was moving.
Until he felt he could trust his generals (he never trusted Douglas MacArthur), FDR kept a close watch on the military during the war. He created the Joint Chiefs of Staff precisely because of thIS. He was the one who pushed General Doolittle raid Tokyo in the early days of the war. And he appointed Eisenhower to command the European invasion.
Murray-Blessing Rank: 2nd
My Score: 80% (would be higher but interning Japanese is a horrible thing)
Interesting Reading:
FDR
FDR by Jean Edward Smith
FDR SCANDAL PAGE

ADULTERY

FDR & Lucy Mercer Rutherford: Lucy was Eleanor's social secretary in the period before 1918. In September, 1918, Eleanor discovered a packet of love letters from Lucy to FDR. Eleanor later admitted, "the bottom dropped out of my own particular world & I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time." FDR and Eleanor immediately stopped living as man-and-wife. Lucy was dismissed but came back during FDR's later years.

FDR & Marguerite 'Missy' LeHand, his "other wife." FDR's son Elliot wrote in his book about his father, "everyone in the close knit inner circle of father's friends accepted it as a matter of course. I remember being only mildly stirred to see him with Missy on his lap as he sat in his wicker chair in the main stateroom holding her in his sun-browned arms...He made no attempt to conceal his feelings about Missy." FDR left Missy half of his 3 million dollar estate. Note: before FDR got polio, he was widely known as a womanizer and playboy.

FDR & his floozy cousin Margaret Suckley. As early as 1920 she was missidentified as his wife in a newspaper photograph of them at a ball game. Eleanor who was sitting behind them was cropped out of the picture. FDR built a secret lovenest on his estate for their trysts. For details of their affair see MARGARET SUCKLEY CLOSEST COMPANION, by Geoffrey Ward, 1995.
FDR blackmailed Princess Martha of Norway, mother of three small children, into having sex with him in return for war aid to her husband Crown Prince Olav and Norway during 1941.

Eleanor & Lorena Hickok lesbian affair- Hickok was an unattractive 5' 8" 200 pound reporter who moved into the White House to be near Eleanor. Some of the content of their letters to each other: "Hick longed to kiss the soft spot at a corner of Eleanor's mouth; Eleanor yearned to hold Hick close; Hick despaired at being away from Eleanor; Eleanor wished she could lie down beside Hick and take her in her arms." (Goodwin p.222) On March 7, 1933, Eleanor wrote to Hickok: "Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it." Enough?

Eleanor and the much younger Joseph Lash- in a very funny scene, military intelligence on FDR's orders bugged Eleanor's room in the Chicago Blackstone Hotel in March 1943 where she was having sex with Joe and sent the recordings to FDR for his listening pleasure. This led to a row between ER and FDR because she was told about the bugging afterwards by the hotel. FDR also read Joe's intercepted love letters to ER. Eleanor also had a long affair with Earl Miller, FDR's bodyguard.


FDR's DISREGARD FOR LAW

  • FDR was born January 30, 1882.
  • FDR was a mediocre and unpopular student at Groton and Harvard.
  • FDR became a failed lawyer (without a degree) in 1907, which explains his morals.
  • 1910-1913 - NY State Senator. He told Rosenman in 1928 about his time as Senator: "I remember they used to call us socialists and radicals in those days."
  • 1913-1920 - Assistant Secretary of Navy (he later bragged that during WWI he had "thrown money around like water"). FDR played the most sordid sort of ward politics with Navy contracts.
  • VP candidate in 1920.
  • THE BUTCHER OF HAITI - In July 1915 FDR, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, personally led US Marines into Haiti to overturn the only independent black republic besides Abyssinia. By all accounts, FDR administered Haiti brutally and cruelly with no regard for lives. Even in 1920 after gross atrocities were reported in the media, FDR claimed responsibility but when that caused an uproar, he denied responsibility. In the campaign of 1920 President Harding said this: "Practically all we know is that thousands of native Haitians have been killed by American Marines, and that many of our own gallant men have sacrificed their lives at the behest of an Executive department in order to establish laws drafted by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy...I will not empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by US Marines."
  • SELF-CONFESSED FELON - 1 February 1920 before an audience of 1500 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, FDR said, "Two months after the war was declared, I saw that the Navy was still unprepared and I spent $40,000 for guns before Congress gave me or anyone permission to spend the money." This action had been opposed by the President. FDR further boasted that he had "committed enough illegal acts" to be impeached and jailed for "999 years." (Cook, pp 265-266)
  • PERJURER 1921 - A Senate subcommittee concluded that FDR had committed perjury before a Naval Court of Inquiry about his investigation of a homosexual corruption ring at the Newport, RI, Naval Station. FDR, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had approved the use of decoys to entrap homosexuals (young sailors were instructed in and ordered by FDR's men to perform homosexual acts and the details truly are unprintable). When it became an issue he had lied about it to the Court. He had signed an order for investigators to go "to the limit" but he denied under oath that he had read what he had signed and swore he had no idea what was in the order. On June 11, 1919, FDR had personally taken charge of every aspect of the case, the most extensive systematic persecution of homosexual men in American history. When the facts emerged FDR denied he knew anything about it and if he had known about it he said he would have stopped it. FDR's testimony under oath at the May 1920 Navy Board of Inquiry was the height of arrogance. How did he suppose evidence for sodomy could be obtained, he was asked. FDR:"As a lawyer, I had no idea. That is not within the average lawyer's education." Did you realize as a lawyer or a man of intelligence that the investigation of such matters, very often has led to improper actions? FDR:"I never had such an idea. Never entered my head..." How did you think evidence of these things could be obtained? FDR:"I didn't think. If I had thought I would have supposed they had someone under the bed or looking over the transom." (Cook pp 267-271 and Ward pp 488-490) The Senate subcommittee also found "Roosevelt's actions displayed an utter lack of moral perspective." (Ward pp 571-572) FDR, who had always reacted to stress with illness, was so stressed that his immune system misfunctioned and he immediately contracted polio on the publication of the Senate report.
  • FDR contracted polio in 1921. Keeping this disability from the public has been called a "splendid deception." However, objectively the voters were deprived of important information about a candidate for the highest office. In May 1944 after he suffered a heart attack, doctors told FDR that if he wanted to avert death that he could not work more than 4 hour days. After this prescription, FDR decided to run for his 4th term. In 1944 he spent 200 days away from the White House in rest or travel undertaken for his health. From FDR's perspective this was simply a self-serving deception, a fraud on the people. It damaged the country. He was utterly unfit for his high office long before the election. The lives of millions depended on the judgment of a man whose mind was warped by arteriosclerosis and the strong medication digitalis. It was a sordid deception. FDR also had cancer.
  • Until he became President, FDR always struggled financially. He never made more than $25,000 a year as a lawyer, which he had to give up in early 1923 because of his polio, and he flopped in the stock market. His only business was his Warm Springs, GA, resort, bought with his mother's money, which he ran as a quack health spa. As a condition of running for governor in 1928 he had a Democrat kingmaker named Raskob pay off his $250,000 debt.
  • 1928 FDR became Governor of New York by means of massive vote fraud in Buffalo. The seeds of the Great Depression were first sown in New York State when FDR was governor.
  • 1932 FDR turned himself into a corkscrew at the Democratic Convention to get the nomination.

  • New Deal - Toward a Soviet America

    Hammer and Sickle
    A Red New Deal with a Soviet seal
    Endorsed by a Moscow hand,
    The strange result of an alien cult
    In a liberty loving land.
    "The tone and tendency of liberalism...is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs (and freedom) of the people under the pretext of progress." --Disraeli, "Speech in London"
  • 1933 FDR became the 32nd President of the United States. He had sent William Bullitt to the USSR even during the campaign to arrange its recognition while Stalin was killing 10 million Ukrainians. FDR imposed central planning through New Deal, a.k.a. Raw Deal, regulations and programs. His close advisor Douglas said "The present pseudo-planned economy leads relentlessly into the complete autocracy and tyranny of the Collectivist State." FDR broke every campaign promise he had made and the New Deal was exactly the opposite of what he had promised. FDR had promised "I propose to you that the government, big and little, be made solvent and that the example be set by the President of the United States and his cabinet...Stop the deficits! Stop the deficits!" FDR made a flat promise to "reduce the cost of government operations 25 percent" and called for a sound gold currency (!). Instead, Franklin Deficit Roosevelt engaged in an orgy of spending and implemented the first twelve planks of the Socialist Party platform, which in substance was the New Deal. In his first year he proposed spending 10 billion on 3 billion of revenues; from 1933 to 1936 government expenditures went up more than 83 percent. He closed all banks with no intention or thought of ever re-opening them (banks are not needed in Marxist economics). After two years the New Deal was such a failure through waste, mismanagement and outright graft that FDR had to introduce a "New New Deal." The ND has been called 'a study in economic confusion.' FDR undermined the Constitution with blank-check appropriations which allowed him to control spending and blank-check legislation which allowed him to set up agencies to pass laws and regulations."There is in Chicago and in a very large part of the country, more suffering than there was in 1933 when the President came into office. It is a common sight to see children salvaging food from garbage cans." Grace Abbott to the DNC. Labor leader John L. Lewis told the NAACP in 1940 that "Mr. Roosevelt made depression and unemployment a chronic fact in American life." Herbert Hoover, 1928 Democrat Presidential Nominee Alfred E. Smith, and the 1924 Democrat Presidential Nominee John Davis all called the New Deal communistic. Admitting the failure of the New Deal, FDR said in October of 1937, "I'm sick and tired of being told by the cabinet, by Henry and everybody else what's the matter with the country and nobody suggests what I should do." Gottfried Haberler, Professor of Economics at Harvard and President of the American Economic Association and the world's leading authority on depressions, called the failure of the New Deal a policy disaster "unparalleled in other countries." Winston Churchill said in 1937: "The Washington administration has waged so ruthless a war on private enterprise that the US...is actually...leading the world back into the trough of depression." The New Deal was repudiated by the voters in 1938 and the Republicans took effective control of Congress. FDR made the depression worse and prolonged it, including the FDR recessions of 1937 and 1939. When he was elected there were 11,586,000 unemployed and in 1939 - seven years later- there were still 11,369,000 unemployed. In 1932 there were 16,620,000 on relief and in 1939 - after seven years - there were 19,648,000 on relief. The war eventually ended it. FDR supporter Merle Thorpe wrote in 1935, "We have given legislative status, either in whole or in part, to eight of the ten points of the Communist Manifesto of 1848; and, as some point out, done (sic) a better job of implementation than Russia." Colonel Sactuary's pamphlet Is the New Deal Communist? made a 35 point comparison of it to Marx's 1848 program.
    Every choice made in the New Deal, whether it was one that moved recovery or not, was a choice unerringly true to the essential design of totalitarian government -
    1. To extend the power of executive government, to rule by decrees and rules and regulations of its own making; between 1933 and 1943 FDR issued 3,556 Executive orders
    2. To strengthen its hold on the economic life of the nation;
    3. To extend power over the individual - the domestication of individuality;
    4. To degrade the parliamentary principle;
    5. To impair the independent Constitutional judicial power;
    6. To weaken all other powers - private enterprise and finance, state and local government.
    7. It is almost amusing that FDR built a cult of personality just as Hitler and Stalin did - it is necessary in a tyranny because in rule by men, loyalty is not to law or country but to a person. Power then depends on such a cult.
    I'M SO TIRED OF IT ALL
    I'm so tired - Oh so tired - of the whole New Deal;
    Of the juggler's smile; the barker's spiel.
    Tired of taxes on my ham and eggs;
    Tired of payoffs to political yeggs.
    I'm tired of farmer's goose-stepping to laws;
    Of millions of itching job-holder's paws;
    Of Fireside Talks over commandeered mikes;
    Of passing more laws to stimulate strikes.
    I'm tired of the hourly-increasing debt;
    I'm tired of promises still to be met;
    Of eating and sleeping by Government plan;
    Of calmly forgetting the Forgotten Man.
    I'm tired of every new brain-trust thought;
    Of the ship of state - now a pleasure yacht.
    I'm tired of cheating the courts by stealth;
    And terribly tired of sharing my wealth.
    I'm tired and bored with the whole New Deal;
    With its juggler's smile and barker's spiel.

    SOME NEW DEAL FIGURES :)

    U.S. Population (1935)...120,000,000
    46,000,000 Eligible for Old Age Pension
    30,000,000 Children prohibited from working
    30,000,000 Government employees
    13,999,998 Unemployed
    ---------------------
    119,999,998

    Left to produce U.S. wealth = 2
    Just you and me - and I'm all worn out!
  • 1935 Supreme Court unanimously ruled FDR's National Recovery Administration (NRA -a.k.a. Nuts Running America), the centerpiece of the New Deal, unconstitutional (Schechter v US). The NRA was a total assault on free enterprise. Industry was to be straight jacketed into government-mandated cartels given the authority to set prices, determine production levels, and regulate the workplace. This was something akin to Mussolini's fascist corporativism; and expanded executive power at the expense of the Congress and the courts. Democrat Senator Carter Glass denounced the NRA as "the utterly dangerous effort of the federal government at Washington to transplant Hitlerism to every corner of this nation."
  • 1936 Supreme Court ruled FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) unconstitutional (US v Butler). This was the program that plowed crops under and senselessly slaughtered millions of animals at a cost of $700,000,000 over two years. By cutting corn production the US had to import 30 million bushels from abroad. The Supreme Court ruled the AAA was "a central government exercising uncontrolled police power in every state of the union."The most profound writing on the New Deal is Garet Garrett's The Revolution Was
    The definitive analysis of the New Deal and one of the greatest speeches of all time is "The Facts in the Case" by Al Smith given January 25, 1936, to the American Liberty League. You can get a free Acrobat Reader at www.adobe.com

  • 1935 When the Supreme Court was deciding whether gold repayment clauses in government bonds could be unilaterally voided, FDR prepared to defy them if they voted against him. He prepared a fireside chat to announce that he would not comply and when the Court reluctantly found 5-4 in his favor, FDR confided to an aide "The nation will never know what a great treat it missed in not hearing the marvelous radio address."
  • When asked to do something about silver, FDR said, "All right. I experimented with gold and that was a flop. Why shouldn't I experiment a little with silver?" FDR had confiscated all US gold at $20.67 an ounce and then raised the price to $35.
  • 1937 with both the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act pending before the Supreme Court, FDR proposed in Congress that he pack the Supreme Court by "re-organizing" it by allowing him to appoint six new justices.
  • 1938 Congress defeated FDR's dictator bill.
  • 1938-1939 FDR stated a policy that the Soviet Union could build destroyers in the United States.
  • 1940 - For the election, FDR repeatedly promised to keep the country out of war and then did everything in his power to involve the country in war. No national leader in history has ever so brazenly lied to his people about such an important national issue: war or peace, life or death.
  • March 1941 - FDR rammed the Lend-Lease Act, a.k.a. Lenin-Lease, thru Congress. Both selling munitions to belligerents and convoying them were acts of war and contrary to international law. FDR publicly represented this as a peace measure. Previously he had said, "Convoys mean shooting and shooting means war." Roosevelt impressed on his aides about Russia, "we can let them have almost everything they want."
  • 14 August 1941 - During the Atlantic conference, FDR entered into an illegal and unconstitutional agreement with Churchill that America would go to war if Japan attacked British territory in the Far East. FDR said: "I may never declare war; I may make war. If I were to ask Congress to declare war they might argue about it for three months." This was an impeachable offense. The best discussion of it is in And I Was There by Admiral Layton, NY, 1985, Chapter 11. Churchill immediately after gave a radio address saying that he and FDR had "jointly pledged their countries to the final destruction of Nazi tyranny" and the Atlantic Charter itself refers to that destruction. In mid-October the US asked for and received permission to build airfields on Dutch and British Far East colonies.
  • 8 Oct 1941 - FDR ordered US vessels to shoot German vessels on sight. FDR lied to Congress about the USS Greer and Kearny incidents, in an attempt to get them to declare war against Germany. He lost all credibility. FDR also sent troops to occupy Greenland, Iceland and the Canary Islands without authority and illegally using conscripts. (See Charles Beard's President Roosevelt and The Coming of War 1941)
  • Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said FDR had a second-class intellect. The British Ambassador Lord Halifax called FDR's decision making like "a disorderly day's rabbit shooting." Secretary of War Stimson said FDR governed by a "topsy turvy, upside-down system of poor administration...The President is the poorest administrator I have ever worked under..." Harold Smith, Director of the Budget 1939-1946, said Roosevelt was "a very erratic administrator." FDR made a point of not reading books and not consulting experts. FDR was full of tall tales about himself, for example that he had been a combatant in WWI when he had actually avoided service. Even FDR's friends called him mentally light, mendacious, lacking wit, unreliable, petty, vengeful and manipulative. His nicknames were Chief Disorganizer and Chief Manipulator. Walter Lippmann wrote of FDR "his mind is not very clear, his purposes are not simple, and his methods are not direct." Stimson said that "His mind does not follow easily a consecutive train of thought..." British Foreign Secretary Eden called the Roosevelt administration "a mad house." Lord Halifax said FDR's ideas were "pretty inchoate" and Eden called them "feckless"(feeble). FDR was the first President unable to write his own speeches. FDR's Secretary of Labor said he had a "streak of vanity and insincerity." His Secretary of Interior Ickes called him "an inactive and uninspiring President." Churchill said that FDR had no ideas at all. Lord Moran wrote that FDR had used his shrewdness to cover his ignorance, but at Yalta his shrewdness was gone and there was nothing left.
  • FDR used the IRS to investigate his enemies, e.g. Father Coughlin, Rep. Hamilton Fish, publisher Moe Annenberg of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Charles Lindbergh. He also stopped investigations of his friends like Lyndon B. Johnson who had committed tax fraud.
  • FDR requested the FBI files of his political opponents, e.g. Senator Nye. As he was happily discussing with his circle the sex lives of his enemies, J. Edgar Hoover was tapping Eleanor's phone! For a general discussion by presidential historians of FDR's abuse of the FBI see PBS NewsHour: -- July 5, 1996.FDR's youngest son John said, "Hell, my father just about invented bugging. Had them spread all over, and thought nothing of it." The No. 3 man at the FBI confirmed that to Congress in 1974.
  • FDR abused the Secret Service, having them investigate the source of an unfavorable story in the Wall Street Journal.
  • FDR used the prestige of the Presidency to enrich his dysfunctional sons through their many shady business deals. He not only phoned financiers but met with them. Jimmy made $100,000 selling insurance to government contractors in 1939, $25,000 more than his father. Elliot made $1,175,000 from 1933-1941 on the strength of his White House connections. In 1939 Elliot got his father to personally strong-arm A & P Tea Company to loan Elliot $200,000 secured by shares of a shakey Texas radio station. In 1942 the President gave $4,000 back in return for the stock, saying that it was worthless. It was worth $1 million. A & P took the $196,000 loss off their tax returns, so the US Treasury and public took the hit. FDR was also guilty of nepotism, hiring Jimmy as his secretary in 1937. Elliot became a brigadier-general in months. Eleanor made at least $3 million from 1933-1945 in lecture and writing fees, which is not bad for someone who had no earning power before she entered the White House. She also got a $10,000 fur coat from Canadian fur breeders, a gold bracelet from Emperor Haile Selassie and a gold crown from the Sultan of Morocco. When FDR had destroyed a Tammany Hall politician, he had said "What of a public official who allows a member of his family to obtain favors or benefits through his political connections?" FDR often requested and got original die sheets (back to 1896) and imperferate first sheets of stamps from the Post Office at cost, knowing that they were worth $20,000 each to collectors. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars on these stamps. In the sons' defense, their parents' example suggested that life was a scramble to satisfy personal needs and appetites. (Flynn Bk 3, ch 2, 'The White House Goes into Business')
  • FDR used the very worst elements of the mob to funnel New Deal money into big cities in order to bring the political machines to their knees and ultimately control them through the mafia. In NYC he used Jimmy Hines associate of the notorious Dutch Schutz; in Chicago it was Al Capone's man Ed Kelly; it was Frank Hague in New Jersey and this pattern was repeated across the country. FDR was mobbed up. (Flynn, Bk 2, ch 8, pt 1)
  • TAXES - Roosevelt & the Congress raised the effective federal tax rate by 700% between 1932 & 1939. --- John H. Makin & Norman J. Ornstein 1994 _Debt & Taxes_ pg 95."The 1942 act sharply changed tax policy in the US. The income tax base more than doubled in size, as the number of tax payers increased from 13M to 28M, while 50M were paying the victory tax. In 1943, yet another new tax bill introduced Americans to tax with-holding for the 1st time. By the end of the war, millions of new tax payers had been drawn into the tax net, & individual & corporate income taxes accounted for 3/4 of the nation¹s federal tax burden -- up from less than 40% before the war. Before the war, ~7% of the public paid some income taxes; at the height of the war, 64% of the population did so. 4M Americans were income tax payers in 1939; the number rose to 43M by 1945. Income taxes had by 1945 become almost as inevitable as death for Americans..." --- John H. Makin & Norman J. Ornstein 1994 _Debt & Taxes_ pg 101. Lenin wrote that "Taxation with its offspring inflation, is the vital weapon to displace the system of free enterprise."
    FDR's alter ego, Harry Hopkins, was famous for the quote "We will tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect." Hopkins also said, "This country does not know what real heavy taxation is."

ROOSEVELT - SOVIET AGENT,
COMMUNIST STOOGE Hammer and Sickle

THE CENTRAL FACT OF THE 20TH CENTURY IS THAT FDR AT YALTA DELIVERED 725 MILLION HUMAN BEINGS INTO COMMUNIST SLAVERY

To do so, FDR trashed the four freedoms, the Atlantic Charter, his promises and commitments to small democracies, his oath of office, the moral standing of the United States, and he created a perpetual cold war that bankrupted US. To understand the treason at Yalta, is to understand Roosevelt. All of his actions were bent in the same direction - dead left. He unceasingly promoted Communism at home and abroad to the full extent and possibility of his office. FDR was a hard-core Marxist as proved by his speeches - in his first inaugural he proposed 3 planks of the Communist Manifesto. In his first inaugural address, he proposed national land redistribution! Karl Marx explained his plan to destroy all constitutional government: "The surest way to overturn the social order is to debauch the currency." FDR carried that out with a vengeance by taking the US off the gold standard and confiscating all gold.
Through 3 declarations of National emergency - March 1933, September 9, 1939, and May 27, 1941, FDR usurped as much dictatorial power as Hitler had on paper. The first was codified in HR 1491, No. 1 and gave FDR the same powers as in war.

SOME QUOTES ABOUT AND BY STALIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

Stalin is my "brother" - FDR after Tehran

  • FDR gave a speech in Troy, NY, 3 March 1912, in which he laid out his philosophy - he placed the "liberty of the community" over "the liberty of the individual." He said competition was bad but cooperation was good. The speech was a concerted assault on the idea of private property. "...why can we not...predict that the state will compel every farmer to till his land or raise beef or horses?" He also claimed that the state could force "idle" men to labor. He imposed no limits on the power of the state. His definition "by liberty we mean happiness and prosperity" is not liberty at all but could as well mean slavery. He pointed to the Germans as proving that we "had passed beyond the limits of the individual." In his first inaugural speech, he said, "rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed" and threatened Congress and asked for dictatorial powers.
  • Charles Beard, the doyen of American socialists and creator of the ideas for FDR's NRA and AAA: "FDR accepts the inexorable collectivism of the American economy...national planning in industry, business, agriculture and government." "Individual economic activities and individual property rights will be altered and changed." FDR was bringing us to a 'collectivist democracy' and "worker's republic."
  • Earl Browder, a regular Bolshevik and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA, went wild with delight and excitement over FDR's speeches. "If the New Deal could be established, it should be possible to proceed from this, step by step, without violent overturning, to socialism." Earl, who was also a Russian spymaster, ran his base of operations from the White House and hired and fired administration officials at all levels. FDR pardoned him from a 5 year prison sentence in 1942.
  • George Bernard Shaw said FDR "is a communist but does not know it." Of course he did know it, but it would have been political suicide to express it.
  • H.G. Wells wrote "The exciting thing about him, as about Stalin, is that he, too, has more of the appearance of having modern objectives, however incompletely apprehended, than anyone else in the world." Also that FDR was feeling his way toward state capitalism and Washington and Moscow were 'the twin centers of reconstruction effort.' After reading Well's autobiography in which he called for a 'greater effort' for Communism, FDR wrote him "your direction and mine are not so far apart."
  • FDR said it was time for US "to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occassionally, nations are saved from revolution...Wait until next year, I am going to be really radical." "National thinking, national PLANNING and national action are the three great essentials...'socialism' has probably done more to prevent Communism and rioting and revolution than anything else in the last 4 or 5 years." National planning necessarily requires coercion - it is the recipe for tyranny. FDR liked to call himself the Kerensky of the American revolution.
  • "The Russian newspapers during the last election (1932) published the photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt over the caption 'the first communistic President of the United States'." -- Senator Thomas D. Schall
  • Stalin called FDR in Dec 1933, "a decided and courageous leader." In 1934 he praised FDR's "initiative, courage and determination".
  • Although FDR liked to pretend that Teddy Roosevelt and his family supported him, in 1935 in Philadelphia, Teddy, jr. leveled this blast at FDR: "You have been faithless. You have usurped the function of Congress, hampered freedom of the press...You have urged Congress to pass laws that you knew were unconstitutional...You have broken your sacred oath taken on the Bible."
  • August 13, 1938, The House Un-American Affairs received testimony from John Frey, president of an AFL union, about 280 Communist Party members in the CIO and that communists had infiltrated the government in almost every bureau through the United Office and Professional Workers Union. FDR , who was very angry, met with Chairman Dies and told him "Well, there is no one interested in Communism, no one at all. I've heard it all my life. There is no menace here in Communism...there is nothing wrong with the Communists in this country. Several of my best friends are Communist." The bitterest attack FDR ever made publicly against a public official was against Dies for his investigation of Communist influences in union sit-down strikes. FDR refused cooperation with the Dies committee and tried to kill it by blocking funds to it in 1940. Dies claimed there were 3,000 communists working in government.
  • "Submission, not freedom is to be the future badge of the United States...the overturn of institutions, including the Constitution, is the avowed goal of his (FDR's) immediate advisors. -- Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, in Portland, OR, Sept. 1934
  • Father Coughlin said in 1936 that the New Deal had its feet of clay mired "one in the Red mud of Soviet communism and the other in the stinking cesspool of pagan plutocracy." Also "the efforts are made for low, practical purposes to confuse a Christian program of social justice with a Godless program of communism."
  • "Now to bring about government by oligarchy masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our national government. The individual sovereignty of our states must first be destroyed, except in mere minor matters of legislation. -- FDR March 2, 1930
  • When his Chief of Security Berle brought him information from the Communist courier Whittaker Chambers that there were 2 Soviet spy rings at the highest levels of his administration, naming names like Hiss, White and Silvermaster, FDR told him to "go jump in a lake." The report was suppressed for years. The KGB archives list 221 agents in the most sensitive sections of the Roosevelt administration in April 1941. There were probably a like number of Soviet military GRU agents.
  • The week before the 1944 election, Izvestia wrote "to announce joyfully that Mr. Roosevelt's return was secure" and predicted an American Reichstag fire.
  • In 1946 FDR's son Elliot wrote a book titled As He Saw It which was meant to be the memoir that his father never wrote. It quoted many important private conversations and opinions of FDR. The real inside story scandalized the keepers of FDR's myth, who said that it put the words of the communist newspaper The Daily Worker into his father's mouth. The truth hurts.
FDR and Eleanor's political views were shaped by a political leech named Louis Howe who attached himself in 1912 and was always very secretive about his political beliefs. Similarly, FDR has often been called 'non-ideological' because he could not admit his ideology. Howe saw in FDR an ambitious, ruthless young man with no moral compass or ideas. Over years of conversations, and speech writing and agenda planning, and especially during the onset of FDR's polio when Howe lived with them and they depended on him, Howe shaped both FDR and Eleanor. He was their brain. They were his disciples. He taught them an ideology. They became ideologues. In a Cosmopolitan article in April 1934, Howe wrote quoting his protege FDR "that the time has arrived to build a new kind of government founded on the doctrine of the good neighbor and not the cruel doctrine of 'rugged individualism.' " In other words, FDR stood for the obliteration of individualism at the hands of a ruthless, all powerful state.
In early 1939, FDR tried to become a card-carrying communist. He applied for membership in the front League of American Writers but Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA, returned his application saying, "Don't get mixed up in this. There is going to be a lot of controversy about it." That was the understatement of the decade. Recall that FDR's choice, when he was aware that he was dying, for vice-president was Henry "The people's revolution is on the march" Wallace, a communist; that FDR had supported the communists in the Spanish Civil War and had tried to get the neutrality act repealed for them, that FDR sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviets at Yalta; that FDR made Karl Marx's primary goal, redistribution of income, his primary goal; that he was against loyalty oaths; that remarkably there was not a single prosecution of any Soviet spy during his Presidency; that when 12 communists were arrested by the FBI in Detroit in 1940 that he removed the FBI's power to make arrests; that he vetoed a bill to deport communist aliens in 1940; that he several times blocked the extradition of communists; that he constantly sent "greetings" to various Red organizations and took every opportunity in public to praise Stalin's regime.
When he returned to the United States from Yalta, FDR told his Cabinet that he had found in Stalin "something else in his being besides this revolutionist, Bolshevik thing." FDR said it might have something to do with Stalin's early training for the priesthood in the Russian Orthodox Church. "I think that something entered into his nature of the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave," Roosevelt declared. On Sept 30, 1941 FDR told reporters that there was freedom of religion in the USSR, right after 2 million Christians had been butchered and the churches were still burning: religious control was "essentially what is the rule in this country; only we don't put it quite the same way." "I may say that I got along fine with Marshall Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people - very well indeed." --FDR after Teheran Conference.
(audio)

FDR lived by the maxim "the ends justify the means" and endlessly preached class warfare - profit was evil, investors were parasites and businessmen were scoundrels. FDR stocked his government with communists. For example the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, had so many communists that it was jokingly said that OSS stood for "Oh, So Socialist and Office of Soviet Stooges." Joe Kennedy complained to FDR that he was surrounded by "Jews and communists." FDR made sure that the atom bomb project was crawling with communists. When the FBI started tracking communist leaks from the project, they were ordered to stop investigating. Earl Browder praised FDR to the Executive Committee of the Communist Party, USA, in September 1934 and they officially threw their support behind him. Prior to that time, they had refrained because they knew the value of communist opposition - the public would support what communists attacked. However, by 1934 that ploy had worn thin so they had no reason not to openly support FDR. The Communist international conference in Moscow in 1935 ordered support for FDR. In the Fall of 1936 Moscow ordered support for FDR in the election. The communist-controlled unions were FDR's main constituency and power base. In 1936 a communist union put up 1/2 million dollars for his campaign and an unlimited number of labor campaign workers. It is a statistical fact that FDR could not have won his last two terms without the Red vote. Therefore, FDR was a wholly-owned subsidiary of those communist unions (not all unions were controlled by communists, but many were through Stalin's agent Joseph Zack). FDR spent millions on propaganda for Stalin like the nonsense book and movie Mission to Moscow which had these fine lines: "Stalin's brown eye is exceedingly kind and gentle. A child would like to sit in his lap and a dog would sidle up to him." Your tax dollars at work. The House Un-American Affairs Committee in 1940 released the names of 563 communists in his administration. Both Republican candidates for President Landon and Dewey accused FDR of being a communist, as did Hearst who called FDR's administration "more communistic than the Communists."
  • FDR defined Freedom of Religion as Stalin did.
  • FDR defined Freedom of Speech as Stalin did, i.e. he used the Marxist formulation 'Freedom of Information' in his speeches.
  • FDR pressed a bill to eliminate the right to bear arms, the guarantee of all others.
  • FDR told Churchill that "an unwritten Constitution is better than a written one." When reminded there was the Constitution, FDR said after his 1936 inauguration "Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it - flexible enough (to do what he wanted)." He admiringly told Churchill that Stalin didn't have to worry about Congresses and Parliaments, "he's the whole works." In a letter to a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, FDR wrote- " I hope your committee will not permit doubt as to Constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation." FDR did not believe in Constitutional checks and balances - he tried to destroy and was prepared to defy the Supreme Court and Congress. He did not believe in advise and consent or the rule of law - he waged war and made treaties without Congressional approval. He did not believe in representative democracy and often said that since Congress did not reflect the will of the people they should be ignored.
  • Probably the best exposition of FDR's procedures regarding the rule of law vs the rule of men was said by his top deputy, KGB agent Harry Hopkins, to his aides - "I want to assure you that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have here a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal."
  • FDR defined democracy just as Joseph Stalin did - as the mere act of voting. (Of course he believed it was good to lie to the people to influence their votes. He also engaged in vote fraud - he won the 1928 NY Governor's race solely with massive vote fraud in Buffalo.) In a famous speech FDR said "The truth of the matter was that the public neither knew or understood what was involved...In other words, public opinion would be easy to manipulate." So much for the public will.
Roosevelt showed the liberal's willingness to side with Communist infiltration and treason, to glamorize the brutality of Communist governments. Liberalism and Communism are both infected with the same materialistic secular virus and have such philosophical affinity that usually they can not be distinguished. Their identical world-view creates a "strong affinity between the Communists and New Dealers; between the progressive and totalitarian visions of the maximalist state." (Professor Herman)

INCOMPETENT WAR LEADER

Churchill came away from the Atlantic Conference on August 14, 1941, observing the "astonishing depth of Roosevelt's intense desire for war." Before we entered the war, FDR sent a delegation to the Vatican to get the Pope to endorse Godless communism - he refused. With lend-lease, a.k.a. Lenin-lease, before Pearl Harbor FDR pressed his aides to allocate and speed shipments to the Soviet Union in the strongest possible way. FDR exerted frenetic personal devotion to the cause of lend-lease to the communists, distinctly favoring Russia over Britain (and US) and if you read page 549 volume 3 of The Secret Diaries of Harold Ickes, Ickes makes it clear that in a choice between England and Russia FDR would have abandoned England: "if the (public) attitude had been one of angry suspicion or even resentment, we would have been confronted with the alternative of abandoning Great Britain or accepting communism..." On August 1, 1941 FDR said about planes for Russia, "we must get 'em, even if it necessary to take from our own troops." Ickes said "we ought to come pretty close to stripping ourselves in view of Russian aid." The US sent 150 P-40's (the newest) when we were woefully short. In 1944 Churchill publicly complained about Britain being treated worse than the Soviet Union (in 1943 we sent 5,000 planes to Russia; overall we sent 20,000 planes and 400,000 trucks - twice as many as they had had before the war, 9 million pairs of boots, complete factories as part of $11 billion in aid that was never expected to be paid back). FDR's oil embargo of Japan forcing them South to take oil-rich Dutch Indonesia, is incomprehensible unless you realize FDR did it to relieve Japanese military threats to the Soviet Union.

WHY DID FDR WANT WAR?

  1. Not for moral reasons - Stalin was worse than Hitler.
  2. Not to defend European democracies - they were flattened years before.
  3. Not to defend America - we were totally safe.
  4. Not to defend Britain - FDR was anti-British and didn't want to get into the war until long after they were safe, had won the air Battle of Britain and Operation Sea Lion, the proposed German invasion, had been canceled.
  5. FDR became deranged, hysterical and white-hot for war in May 1941 when the Luftwaffe was transferred to the EASTERN Front! FDR was so distraught that he not only totally lost control of his emotions but also control of his body functions- he was bedridden for a month. FDR declared a national emergency and put the country on a war footing. In May, he ordered a 25,000 man Expeditionary Force to be ready to fight anywhere on June 22 - the date he knew Russia was to be invaded! FDR said: "My own thought is that perhaps there is one word that we could use for this war. The word SURVIVAL. The Survival War." The only country fighting for survival was the Soviet Union. Only FDR wanted it to survive.
Lenin Lease, unconditional surrender, 2nd front, and Yalta all point to Russia. But by his actions in May 1941 when he knew Russia was to be attacked, Franklin Roosevelt bared to the world the fact that he was Stalin's agent.

MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR COMMUNISM

I Want You to Save Communism 

If you think that FDR's lying to get us into the war was in our interests or a good thing because of the result, the unleashing of Communism on a mighty scale, (it's hard to see how we could have been worse off, especially considering that Japan was third-rate and Germany had lost the Battle of Britain and in N. Africa and was losing in Russia already) consider this: if lying for the peoples' good is permitted and FDR had the right to do it, to whom is the right denied? It is a total repudiation of our democratic institutions and Constitutional form of government. It is personal and arbitrary government - the principle of totalitarianism. FDR broke all commitments that he had made - not to go to war, the 4 freedoms, the Atlantic Charter and limitlessly misrepresented his foreign policies and his commitments at Yalta both publicly and privately. A problem for mythmakers is that if Pearl Harbor was a surprise to FDR, then he was a victim, not a maker of history; he did not lead the nation into war for reasons of world morality but was forced into it or drawn into it or compelled to take up arms against his will, by circumstances beyond his control. If Pearl Harbor was not a surprise, FDR was a traitor.
Leftists like FDR believed that they were creating a new world order and that the Soviet motherland was its center. FDR, who defined himself as an internationalist, envisioned using the UN with himself and Stalin as co-leaders to bring New Deal Hitlerism to every corner of the world. On September 3, 1943 FDR had a conversation with his friend Cardinal Spellman which is reported in The Cardinal Spellman Story by Robert Gannon pp 222-24. FDR explained how he would divide up the world after the war--
Stalin would certainly receive Finland, the Baltic states, the eastern half of Poland and Bessarabia (Romania)...Britain and Russia get Europe and Africa. But as Britain has predominating colonial interests, it might be assumed that Russia will predominate in Europe...The European people, which includes France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway and of course our wartime enemies Germany and Italy, will simply have to endure the Russian domination in the hope that in ten or twenty years they will be able to live with the Russians.
He also told Spellman that the population of Eastern Poland "wanted to become Russian...I look upon the Russians as our strongest ally in the years to come...Stalin is a great leader." After Yalta FDR told Averill Harriman that he didn't care if the countries bordering on Russia became Communized.
  • On March 7, 1942, FDR ordered every agency to give priority shipments to the USSR "without regard to the effect of these shipments on any other part of the war program."
  • On April 3, 1942 FDR wrote Churchill: "Your people and mine demand the establishment of a second front to draw off pressure on the Russians...Even if full success is not attained, the big objective will be." Big objective? What was that if not saving communism? Hopkins, speaking for FDR, told the British that on the second front "depended the preservation of all that democracy held dear." Hopkins stressed to Churchill "that the disposition of the United States was to take great risks to relieve the Russian front." FDR assured Molotov that he was prepared to sacrifice 120,000 British men for a second front. Churchill wanted to attack the soft-underbelly of Europe for strategic reasons as explained by the US Commander in Italy, General Clark: "The weakening of the campaign in Italy in order to invade Southern France, instead of pushing on into the Balkans, was one of the outstanding mistakes of the war...Stalin knew what he wanted...and the thing he wanted most was to keep us out of the Balkans." These comments apply equally to OVERLORD, the invasion at Normandy - it kept us out of central and Eastern Europe, allowing Stalin a free hand there. Marshall gave this reason to the Brits for Normandy: it would be "more satisfying to the Russians." Churchill pointed out that the Normandy invasion was the only possibility to lose the war.
  • Oct 7, 1942 FDR wrote Churchill: "I think there is nothing more important than that Stalin feel that we mean to support him without qualification and at great sacrifice."
  • FDR unilaterally gave Stalin 1/3 of the captured Italian fleet without consulting Churchill. At Yalta he suggested giving large parts of the US and British merchant marine to the Russians.
  • FDR wrote Churchill about India that "the best solution would be reform, from the bottom, somewhat on the Soviet line."
  • At the Teheran conference, France was to be made a third-rate power, Germany was to be divided in to 6 or more states and stripped of all industry and technology, mines flooded, so-called pastoralization - a plan to turn Germany into a gigantic Buchanwald. Most of this plan was implemented. e.g. slave labor and 767 factories were shipped to Russia. The leaking of this drastic plan, written by communist agent Harry White, was used as a club to prevent Germany from surrendering to GB and US. FDR expressed his hope for Germany's future this way: "We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people, not just Nazis. You either have to castrate them or you have to treat them...so they can't go on reproducing people who want to continue...as in the past." (Freidel, p 550) Poland was given to the Soviets. FDR later told a Hyde Park visitor that he was sick and tired of the Poles and other Eastern Europeans clamoring about their boundaries and sovereignties.
  • Yalta - gave Stalin's enslavement of 725 million people moral legitimacy (not counting 193 million Soviets). He lay in Stalin's lap the existence of little nations and the lives of little peoples he had sworn to defend. FDR didn't demur at a single request or suggestion from Stalin. Just for signing the agreement, he was given Sakhalen Island, the Kurile Islands, Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, parts of China and 3,000 tanks, 75,000 motor vehicles and 5,000 planes for his Far East Army who were incapable of taking China without US aid. Stalin demanded and got 20 million Germans for slave labor for an indefinite period. As Hopkins said "The Russians have given us so much at this conference that I don't think we should let them down." FDR told Stalin that he would make Britain give up Hong Kong.
  • Yalta - FDR's ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley, called FDR's secret agreement a "blueprint for the Communist conquest of China."
  • When Churchill prevented the communists from taking Greece on Christmas 1944, FDR was extremely angry and demanded that a commission be formed to rule Greece, headed by a Russian.
  • When the US took Italy in 1943, a US ship brought communist leader Togliatti from the SU and the allies gave almost all mete'rial and political favors to the communists in Italy and Yugoslavia. Italian Premier De Gasperi called it "the Roosevelt climate."
  • April 11, 1945, The 9th Army under General Simpson was 24 hours from Berlin with no resistance in front and they were ordered not to cross the Elbe. Simpson wrote that he had six or seven divisions, two Army corps, in very good shape, with railroads bringing in supplies and hundreds of 10-ton truck companies, and two bridges across the river. He claimed there was no doubt that he could have taken Berlin easily 2 weeks before the Russians did. But FDR had given Berlin to Stalin at Yalta and so Eisenhower sent a unilateral telegram to Stalin, violating the chain of command and ignoring the combined chiefs, that Stalin could have Berlin. (full discussion in Nisbet pp 83-90) Patton was stopped outside Prague and had to watch Germans killing civilians a few days before the Russians got there. FDR had agreed to immediately withdraw US and British troops from all of Germany after the surrender.
  • In 1990 Harry Hopkins was exposed as the top KGB top agent during the war. (Inside the KGB Chris Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky pp 287-288) In 1995 Hopkins was identified by the NSA in VENONA intercepts (KGB and GRU messages from DC to Moscow) as "Agent 19." Originally in 1937-39 Hopkins was a GRU agent recruited by Akhmerov but was turned over to the KGB in August 1939. FDR's KGB cover name was "KAPITAN." (Source "Venona Source 19 and the Trident Conference of 1943" by Eduard Mark in IQ and National Security vol 13 (1998) no. 2) See if you can detect a pattern in the Roosevelt administration - KGB agent Alger Hiss was No. 2 at the State Department, KGB agent Harry Dexter White was No. 2 at Treasury, and Harry Hopkins was No 2 in the country. What is the significance of the fact that FDR's alter ego, his top advisor, Deputy President, Acting President, the man who controlled FDR completely, the President in all but name was a KGB agent? Harry called the American people "his enemy." He told FDR "the American people are too damn dumb to ever sense what we are doing to them."
  • FDR's insistence on unconditional surrender for Germany and Japan cost hundreds of thousands of lives. FDR thought of it at Casablanca in January 1943. He said: "Of course, it's just the thing for the Russians. They couldn't want anything better. 'Unconditional surrender', Uncle Joe might have thought it up himself."
  • On Dec 30, 1944, FDR ordered the elimination of barriers to any Communists in the Armed Forces and expressly condoned "divided loyalty" -U.S.S.R. and U.S.- for American personnel.
  • Mass Murderer - At Yalta, FDR agreed to round up 2 million Russian nationals in Germany, Italy and France to be forcibly deported to Russia for execution (See OPERATION KEELHAUL by Julius Epstein, 1973; THE SECRET BETRAYAL by N. Tolstoy, 1978; THE LAST SECRET by N. Bethall, 1974). Among other things, this was a violation by the US of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.</>
  • At the Teheran Conference, Stalin made a toast that 50,000 Nazis should be summarily put in front of a firing squad. Churchill was shocked, "I will not be a party to any butchery in cold blood." FDR then said, "Shall we say 49,500?" Churchill left the room in protest.
At every turn FDR bungled the war from Lenin Lease, to the treason at Pearl Harbor, the gross strategic mistake of the second front, the senseless invasion of the Philippines, not taking the fruits of victory, handing the fruits of victory to Stalin, and giving atomic secrets to the Russians. In a word, FDR was a disaster. America, the greatest power on earth, lost the war and it was won by the brutal Soviet Union which had been flat on its back and inches from extinction. FDR achieved the worst possible result - Karl Marx did indeed win the war.

CONCLUSION

Roosevelt - Anti-Semitic Racist

FDR had some other personal flaws besides being a Stalinist - he was an anti-semite and a racist. Here is his thinking about blacks from his discussion of the Caribbean Islands during the bases for destroyers swap in the summer of 1940 -
I told Winston, listen Winston, those places are nothing but a headache to you – you know that. They cost the British Treasury five million pounds – nearly 25 million dollars - every year. They are nothing but a headache. If you think I want your headaches, you are mistaken. I don’t. Furthermore those places are inhabited by some 8 million dark-skinned gentlemen and I don’t want them coming to the United States and adding to the problem we already have with our 13 million black men. I tell you, Winston, it’s just a headache and you can keep it. - Ward pp. 526-527
FDR deliberately hurt Jews by restricting their immigration to nearly zero and opposing opening refugee camps in N. Africa (Wyman p 117). In June 1939, FDR refused to save 900 Jews aboard the ship St. Louis. FDR repeatedly endorsed the Holocaust - he suppressed news about it (Treasury Report) and would not permit bombing of deportation railways or crematoria at the camps even when it could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives (Wyman p 295). FDR delayed the freeing of prison camps in the Netherlands as long as possible so the Jews would die. Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews, Treasury Department, January 13, 1944, said FDR was "guilty not only of gross procrastination and willful failure to act, but even of willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler." Just one fact of many that are in the report - "By the act of 1924, we are permitted to admit approximately 150,000 immigrants each year. During the last fiscal year only 23,725 came as immigrants. Of these only 4,705 were Jews fleeing Nazi persecution."
For more on this gruesome FDR horror see Abandonment of the Jews by David Wyman, 1984; and PBS's The American Experience | America and the Holocaust.
When NY Governor Lehman opposed FDR's court-packing scheme, FDR said to reporters: "What else could you expect from a Jew?" He also told King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia in February 1945 that the only offer he might give him was the six million Jews in the US. Finally, although FDR was a warmonger, he bungled the build-up to the war. His failed diplomacy set the foundation for the cold war. Stalin in the White House would have done nothing different than Roosevelt did. FDR's actions can only have one explanation - he was Stalin's agent.
Roosevelt
Apologists say that FDR wanted a personal relationship with Stalin. Preposterous! Why would FDR beg Stalin for that which he could have forced him to do? FDR wanted a relationship with Stalin, if he did, for the same reason that he implemented the Communist Manifesto, for the same reason he put Earl Browder, Chairman of Communist Party, in the White House, for the same reason as Lenin-Lease, for the same reason that he wanted war to save Russia and for the same reason he committed treason at Yalta - Franklin Roosevelt was a Communist.
Here are some ideas for the FDR Memorial by J. GELT:
How about a group of statues that form a human pyramid with the ones on top looking looking somewhat pleased while the ones in the successive lower stacks appear increasingly distressed by their crushing burden. I mean shouldn't his greatest achievement, social security, be memorialized also?
Or perhaps we could also section off an area with chain link fence with razor wire on the top and hire Asian- Americans to sit in the area as a tribute to the humanitarianism he showed some of our citizens during the war?
Or perhaps the statue of him in his wheelchair could be enhanced by placing a copy of the Bill of Rights under the tread of his tires?

Hammer and Sickle

COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

Here are the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto which should be engraved on every statue of FDR, every school named after him, and every book about FDR:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. (FERA acquired 25 million dollars of land by mid-1935; the Resettlement Administration later bought many millions of Acres; FDR called for national land redistribution in his 1st inaugural)
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. ("...the duty rests upon the government to restrict such incomes by very high taxes." FDR, PPA 1935:274; 1935 Wealth Tax Act; FDR imposed a 90 percent rate on corporations and issued a decree that no one could make more than $25,000 after taxes - overridden by Congress.)
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. (1935 Wealth Tax Act with its confiscatory inheritance taxes)
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. (cf. 117,000 Americans of Japanese descent 1941 which the ACLU calls "the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history." FDR wanted to put ethnic Germans in concentration camps too, but there were too many.)
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. (Banking Act of 1935, gold confiscation by Proclamation 2039 in March 1933 and formalized in the 1934 Gold Reserve Act, etc.)
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. (Federal Communications Act of 1934, Railroad Coordination Act, ICC, FTC; FDR put private air mail carriers out of business and had the Army deliver mail in '34)
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. (TVA (FDR proposed 7 other TVA-like projects), Rural Electrification; the NRA was business and industrial planning; on 8/14/41 the House rejected FDR's Property Seizure Bill passed by the Senate which would have given him dictatorial power over all business and industry as well as confiscated all private arms; Resettlement Administration)
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. (CCC, CWA, PWA, WPA, etc)
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. (Subsistence Homestead Division, Rural Rehabilitation Division of FERA, and the Resettlement Administration)
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. (NRA)

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT FOR FDR

  1. ABUSE OF POWER Usurped the power of Congress to wage war and make treaties. Attacked the Supreme Court. In 1942 he stated that if Congress did not repeal a provision that it had duly passed that he would on his own authority repeal it.
  2. TREASON--PEARL HARBOR Provoked and facilitated the attack. Details on my Pearl Harbor Homepage - Mother of All Conspiracies.
  3. TREASON--YALTA FDR sold out numerous countries at Teheran and Yalta against US interests and used US resources thru Lenin-Lease to enable Stalin to take Berlin and Prague and various countries, the most significant of which was China. The sacrifice of China to Communism was so destructive of US security interests that we still suffer from it today and for the foreseeable future.
  4. TREASON--ATOMIC SECRETS TO SOVIETS FDR gave at least 1,465 pounds of uranium (about 4 times as much fissionable U-235 as the US kept for itself), 417 tons of cadmium, 437 tons of cobalt, 12 tons of thorium, and 1100 ounces of heavy water as well as all the designs for the atom bomb and reactor to create plutonium. Without this assistance it would have taken the Soviet Union 10 years and all of their economic resources to make a bomb. See the shocking story in From Major Jordon's Diaries and The US House of Representatives, Eighty-first Congress, Second Session, Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings Regarding Shipment of Atomic Material to the Soviet Union During World War II (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1950).
  5. CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Roosevelt threw 725 million human beings to the slave drivers of Communism.

ASSASSINATIONS

On Christmas Day 1942 Frenchman Bonnier de la Chapelle, a paid U.S. agent under the control of the State Department's Robert Murphy, assassinated our ally the French leader Darlan. After seeing how that went down FDR cabled Churchill with a copy to Eisenhower on New Year's Day 1943 stating that if Free French leader Charles De Gaulle did not "play ball" that they would have to assassinate him. Eisenhower was horrified and told aide Harry Butcher that if directly ordered to do it that he would set the assassination in motion and then resign from the Army. Churchill also was shocked by the idea and managed to nix it.
FDR ordered the assassination of Chiang kai Shek because he was not knuckling under to Mao and the Communists fast enough for FDR. In December 1943, FDR's military representative in China, General Joseph Stilwell told a subordinate, Col. Frank Dorn, that FDR was "fed up with Chiang and his tantrums, and said so. In fact, he told me in that Olympian manner of his, 'if you can't get along with Chiang, and can't replace him, get rid of him once and for all. You know what I mean, put in someone you can manage.'" Col. Dorn prepared a plan for an airplane mishap, in which there would be engine problems and, in the process of bailing out of the plane, Chiang and his wife would be given faulty parachutes. Fortunately Chinese security was too good and foiled the plot.(Freidel, p 561)
On August 12, 1944, Ensign Joe P. Kennedy, Jr. volunteered for a highly risky mission officially called "Operation Aphrodite" (also known as "Project Anvil") to pilot a PB4Y-1, the Navy version of the B-24, loaded with 21,470 pounds of explosives – a flying bomb -- across the English channel towards the German V-2 rocket sites on the other side. His orders were to aim his plane at the sites and bail out before the plane was exploded by radio from an accompanying plane. Immediately after take-off from Winfarthing-Fersfield airfield a mysterious radio signal on the secret military frequency came up from the ground for a few seconds and detonated the plane killing Kennedy and the other officer on the plane, Lt. Wilford J. Willy. Joe Kennedy, Sr. always believed that FDR had arranged the death of his son to hurt him - really the only possible explanation. We have the anomolous case of a US President murdering the brother of a future US President. In 1974, after Truman's death, Merle Miller published a 1961 interview with Truman done on tape in front of three witnesses in his best seller entitled Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman. Truman, according to Miller, was in Boston in 1944 in the Ritz-Carlton hitting up Joseph Kennedy for campaign funds for FDR's run for fourth term, and "Old man Kennedy started throwing rocks at Roosevelt, saying he'd caused the war and so on. And then he said, 'Harry, what the hell are you doing campaigning for that crippled son of a bitch that killed my son Joe?'"

REFERENCES

Cook - Eleanor Roosevelt, vol 1, 1992, Blanche Cook, NY:Viking.
Flynn - The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn, NY, 1948, has many of the facts on this page.
Freidel - FDR A Rendezvous with Destiny, Frank Freidel, 1990.
From Major Jordan's Diaries by George Racey Jordan, Harcourt, Brace 1952. It gives a complete listing of Lend Lease to SU.
Goodwin - No Ordinary Time, 1994, Doris Kearns Goodwin. Pathetically bad book by the well-known plagerist.
Morgan - FDR A Biography, 1985, Ted Morgan.
Nisbet - Roosevelt and Stalin, Robert Nisbet, DC:Regnery, 1988, covers FDR's betrayals at Teheran and Yalta.
Roosevelt's Road to Russia by George Crocker, Chicago 1959, is an excellent book also online.
The Yalta Betrayal by Felix Wittmer, 1953. The single best resource on FDR. WWW.rooseveltmyth.com has the book online as well.
Ward - First Class Temperament, 1989, Geoffrey Ward.
Wyman - Abandonment of the Jews, 1984, David Wyman.