Volstead Act Totalitarianism, II-24

SEC. 24. In the case of the violation of any injunction, temporary or permanent, granted pursuant to the provisions of this title, the court or in vacation a judge thereof, may summarily try and punish the defendant. The proceedings for punishment for contempt shall be commenced by filing with the clerk of the court from which such injunction issued information under oath setting out the alleged facts constituting the violation, whereupon the court or judge shall forthwith cause a warrant to issue under which the defendant shall be arrested. The trial may be had upon affidavits, or either party may demand the production and oral examination of the witnesses. Any person found guilty of contempt under the provisions of this section shall be punished by a fine of not less than $500 nor more than $1,000, or by imprisonment of not less than thirty days nor more than twelve months, or by both fine and imprisonment. * * * 

This federal criminal statute under the 18th Amendment served to erode if not nullify the right to trial by jury in the text of Article III Section 2 of the Constitution and 6th Amendment of the Bill of Rights: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed..."  To add injury to contempt for the Declaration of Independence those fines in gold would today range from $51,296 to $102,592. For what? The preceding section makes clear there is nothing cruel or unusual about this as punishment for storing a case of beer in a rented room! (link) Here's how this benefited families: 


Recall that even the Declaration of Independence listed depriving us of Trial by Jury among the litany of usurpations and abuses for which Americans took up arms. 

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 29coversmall.png

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

Three dollars on Amazon Kindle

Brazilian blog…


Tagged: 18th Amendment, altruism, collapse, Constitution, libertarian, political clout, prohibition, pseudoscience, repeal, spoiler votes, superstition, totalitarianism, Volstead Act, war,


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1987 Crash: Naming Names

Image
What happened after a Republican fanatic was reelected, 1986. Reagan Speech : There've been some real champions in the battle to get this legislation through Congress: Senators Bob Dole , Robert Byrd, and Strom Thurmond ; Congressmen Bob Michel, Jim Wright , Benjamin Gilman, Charles Rangel, and Jerry Lewis. I'd like to single out Senator Paula Hawkins in particular. She took this battle to the public and has been a driving force behind the effort to rid our society of drug abuse. Like Nancy, she made her commitment to fighting drugs long before it was the popular thing to do. This kind of honest, hard-working leadership is what makes all the difference. And now, Paula, if you and your colleagues will join Nancy and me, we will get on with the signing of that bill, making it the law of the land.  Here are the names given "it," "the" law of the land.  Signed by President . 10/27/1986: Became Public Law No: 99-570. TITLE(S): (italics indicate a title for ...
Read more

Connecting Prohibition, Crash, War dots

Image
Typical drug manufactures chart, 1930 No American schoolbook mentioned the Opium Wars until Brian Inglis published The Opium War in 1976, the election year the Libertarian Party ran its second slate of candidates demanding repeal of drug prohibition laws. The audiobook version is now available.( link )  Brian's other drug book, the Forbidden Game, gives further insights into how prohibitionism developed as a cudgel with which pharma cartels wielded government laws as marketing tools and double-edged weapons once the colonial harnessing of addiction was out of the bag.( link ) The link between the dragooning of political States into marketing tools and weapons of economic warfare is not the sort of thing those political states extoll with pride. Enormous effort goes into disguising the fact made plain by Adam Smith in 1775 that wars prohibiting production and trade necessarily wreck national economies, just as purging the violence of law from trade relations gives rise to the Wealt...
Read more

Prohibition laws, the 1987 Crash and Recession

Image
Bush notices the difference between his prohibitionism and freedom of production and trade Ronald Reagan published an autobiography in 2007 bragging about how he and Nancy had seen to it that only people willing to pee into a Drug Czar sample cup could hold jobs in the federal bureaucracy. All others would be fired.  Onto this bandwagon hopped a Texas congressman with ambitious plans to spread enforcement tentacles around the entire planet, invade other countries, choose foreign politicians and assassinate or jail any who balked.  A year after Reagan's biography revealed--bragged about--what had gone on in the hustings, Texas President George W Bush blinked at teevee cameras as the economy crashed around him.  Bush was absolutely baffled that "the market" Reagan, Bush Daddy and he himself had coerced at gunpoint with prohibitionist zeal and faith-based asset-forfeiture highway robbery, had "stopped working." Let's look at the record.  The following materi...
Read more