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

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

Behind the Scenes in 1929

Image
  Off with their heads! Qing prohibitionism On the 17th of January, 1929 , the League Of Nations' coryphaeus of opium prohibitionism met in Geneva to deliberate on the initiation of deadly force in furtherance of prohibitions outlawing production and trade. On September 2, this Opium Advisory Committee recommended that the League organize gangs to kill, imprison and confiscate throughout the entire planet, as the Republicans had done in the USA. As of March 2, 1929, beer and wine made one liable to five years in jail and a fine of about 14 pounds of gold.( link ) Stock markets shriveled and interest rates climbed steeply.  All that remained was for Europe to withdraw investments from the USA, as England had done when China, in December of 1836, invited the East India Company opium dealers to leave.  Germany--the world's premier heroin producer even before the First World War--stood threatened by the Christian fascism of compulsory abstinence. Japan was the only Asian cou...
Read more

Causes of 1980s Recessions, Crash

Image
  The blue line is unemployment, grey bars recessions. We now examine 1980-1990.  On 19 February 1980, the Commission on Narcotic Drugs decided to ask all governments to implement to the fullest extent possible sweeping countermeasures against drugs declared illegal, and recommended crackdowns: 3 (XXVIII) ... on financial assets and transactions related to illicit traffic … and subsidized equipment and technical assistance to prohibitionist countries.( link ) The muckraking journalists on 60 Minutes--who stirred national panic after a TMI reactor malfunction injured no one--promptly fanned hysteria against Bolivian plant drugs neither habit-forming nor addictive.( link ) The recession in 1980--like the Great Depression caused in part by League of Nations prohibitionism--is thus clearly discernible in the first quarter of 1980.  Inflation went to 13%, then 15% and the San Francisco Fed presented an unconvincing theory reminiscent of Herbert Hoover's "explanation" of the...
Read more