The worst American president

In my view the worst American president was Franklin D. Roosevelt. His crimes:

1) In his first act in office, he closed all the banks to stabilize the financial system. Only the largest banks were allowed to reopen. This had the immediate effect of concentrating control of finance capital.

2) He continued Hoover's policies of subsidizing railroads, banks, and mortgage corporations with public money.

3) He cut tens of millions from pensions for veterans of World War I and vetoed a bill to allow them to collect their promised bonuses immediately.

4) He was allied politically with a number of disreputable figures, the most notorious among them including Klansman Senator Theodore Bilbo, Nazi sympathizer Joseph P. Kennedy, appointed by Roosevelt to head the SEC and as ambassador to the UK, and former Klansmen Hugo Black and Harry Truman, who became Supreme Court Justice and vice president under Roosevelt. Charles Coughlin and Huey Long were also his allies before turning against him. Douglas MacArthur became a powerful war chief under Roosevelt and was given a free hand for massacres in the Philippines. In foreign policy, his allies included Laval, Petain, Franco, and Chiang Kai-shek, in addition to Churchill and of course Joseph Stalin.

5) He provided for compulsory arbitration for labor disputes, essentially empowering a board of bureaucrats to outlaw strikes. He worked closely with conservative union leaders such as Daniel Tobin and Walter Reuther to persecute union militants and break strikes.

6) 2 major pieces of social legislation signed by Roosevelt, the Social Security Act and the GI Bill, provided benefits to whites only.

7) He introduced payroll taxes, paid only by the working class and the most regressive form of all taxation.

8) He took an active role in breaking the dockworkers' strike in San Francisco, the auto workers' strike in Toledo, and the teamsters' strike in Minneapolis by deploying military force against them and arresting their leaders. He signed the Smith Act outlawing communism (a violation of the 1st Amendment) and sent 18 teamsters and antiwar activists to prison under it.

9) He censored the federal mail to prevent radical views from being heard.

10) He took steps to prevent private American aid from being used to help the anti-fascist forces in Spain.

11) He attempted to create a pliant Supreme Court by "packing" it with his allies. He was prevented only by his death from serving an unprecedented four terms in office. By these lights alone, the modern imperial presidency began with Roosevelt.

12) He put the economy on a permanent war footing which exists to this day and created the first peacetime draft in history.

13) He created the FBI, reorganizing the Bureau of Intelligence, increasing its powers, and putting in charge another ally, the notorious J. Edgar Hoover. He used the FBI to spy on members of Congress.

14) He created the OSS, precursor to the CIA.

15) He approved research on nuclear weapons.

16) He conducted WWII with the aim of securing American colonies in the Pacific and the control of the U.S.'s puppet Chiang Kai-shek in China. He helped British, French, and Dutch empires regain control of their former colonies. He provided only inadequate and shoddy equipment for defense of the Soviet Union and charged exorbitant prices for this material in both monetary and diplomatic terms. He ordered attacks on civilian targets in Germany and Japan, including the firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden (in collaboration with the Churchill regime) as well as the attack on Tokyo which was the deadliest bombing raid in history.

17) He refused to bomb supply routes leading to German death camps, thereby disrupting the progress of Germany's Final Solution. He maintained strict quotas on Jewish immigration that prevented an estimated 3 million Jews from escaping death in the Holocaust.

18) He maintained racial segregation of the military and refused to push for an anti-lynching law for fear of alienating his segregationist allies.

19) He officially encouraged the rise of price-fixing cartels as part of his economic program.

20) He signed an executive order confining hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans and some Italian-Americans in what he himself termed "concentration camps."

To me, whatever good he did is far outweighed by this truly awesome monument to evil.