Ambushing Germany, February 1931

 

A most important event in February 1931 was Hitler’s visit with his personal banker at Merck Finck & Co (link) August von Finck(link) on the third, to raise 13 billion Reichsmarks ($3billion, that much in $20 gold coins weighed 307,328 kilos) for the National Socialist party campaign. Why?

Over in Geneva, League of Nations cartel experts had been meeting since 1920, all the while demanding Germany make regular payments in restitution for damage done to “Allied” (U.S. not included) nations AND ban a bunch of drugs. Versailles Treaty Article 23 read the same as League of Nations Charter Article 23, which repeated the 1912 Hague Convention demands that Germany produce less morphine and cocaine. By the first week of 1929, these prohibitionist demands had jelled into U.S.-backed plans to cause every country in the world to enter into a combination to limit production to whatever governments said was the right amount. Of course they would have to divide that market fairly… That advisory resolution was accepted by the League in the first week of September 1929, the week the US stock market changed from increasing to decreasing. 1931, like 1930, was a Deep Depression year in the USA, Britain, Canada, France, The Netherlands–everywhere that had in the past bought and sold drugs without compulsion. Germans understood this new wave of hysteria as another Hague Opium Convention attack on German markets and sovereignty, and could make an educated guess as to where it was headed. Already profits were down in ALL mom ‘n Pop drugstores throughout Germany, according to the NY Times.

The Blacklist. One A.E. Sirks, a Rotterdam police chief credited with shrill Reefer Madness and Cocaine Fiends articles in 1930 was now demanding a “black list” identifying corporations insufficiently zealous toward prohibitionism.(link) That same February 2, the NY Times bristled with articles about Bank of United States financial troubles, suspicious and frozen accounts, reports naming judges, politicians and dead racketeers. The bank examiners’ 1000-page report named names like Hearst, Smith, Zigfeld, Morrow, Tumulty, the Soviet Amtorg Corporation–with Judge Manton alone endorsing some $200,000 in BUS notes in this searching investigation of that big bank’s failure. No paper then or now mentions the interception of half a ton of morphine in NY at the time of the BUS failure. The League of Nations Blacklist idea was not mentioned in any newspapers. The 03FEB NY Times reported a flurry of narcotics raids in Chinatown, and the 11FEB1931 edition reported yet another law against smuggling “narcotics.” But the flurry was over because the 24 public and 2 private League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee meetings begun January 9th, ended February 2nd, with its report handed over to the Council of the League of Nations in Geneva, scheduled to convene 16-30MAR1931. President Herbert Hoover had January 21st asked Congress for an appropriation of $35,000 to cover American participation expenses in Geneva. Plans had clearly been made.

On 19FEB1931 the Chicago Tribune reported President Hoover had signed a bill to provide for deportation of aliens convicted and sentenced for violation of narcotic laws. The following day Hoover’s message to the World Conference on Narcotic Education read: I deeply sympathize with organizations working to bring about international agreements for limiting the manufacture of narcotic drugs and to energize the police power of the several states of the Union to destroy illicit traffic in narcotics. This associated convicted foreigners with undefined “narcotic” drugs in the collective mind of the Great Unwashed. Then again, foreigners had for over a decade so associated the USA with standardized puritanical bigotry as to goad U.S. Ambassador Walter Edge in Paris into leaping to America’s cultural defense that February. Still, deep trouble was brewing. Civil war raged in Peru and 40,000 jobless demonstrators protested in Germany, several dying. Turkey reacted to pressure by instituting “drastic measures” there to prevent dope exports to the U.S.–measures that coincided with a national currency crisis. This lull would end in March. *-*-*

Good Reading: Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises by Charles P. Kindleberger(link) The original struck me as so exploitatively overpriced that I instead invested in a translation–to incidentally help me with my blog in Portuguese.(link) Already I am convinced my first impression was wrong. Of the dozens of writers explaining away the Crash and Depression, only Peter Temin, Tobias Straumann and Herbert Hoover convinced me they understood correctly… but were consciously lying–by omission or outright. Kindleberger, on the other hand, has in early chapters avoided the usual arm-waving or socialist sermonizing to which one quickly becomes inured in this field. Rather than sidestep taboo subjects, Kindleberger searches everywhere for odd and poorly-understood panics, crashes, depressions, recessions and calamities–many of which were entirely new to me. His approach is skeptical; he contrasts bad explanations so that the weakesses in one call into relief the problems with another.

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, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style 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)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the instructions accessible to and understandable by people accustomed to thinking in Portuguese. This costs one dollar ($1) and you can read it on a cellphone with the Kindle app.(link)

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, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style 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)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the instructions accessible to and understandable by people accustomed to thinking in Portuguese. This costs one dollar ($1) and you can read it on a cellphone with the Kindle app.(link)

 

Ambushing Germany, January 1931

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Besides enforcing felony beer, the Hoover Admin. also funded exportation of drug laws worldwide

Did you know that in February 1931 President Herbert Hoover pardoned a prohibition law violator? That same month he signed a bill to deport “drug violators” and later an Executive Order making it difficult for women to become citizens by marriage? Do you believe that making beer an asset-forfeiture felony and paying the League of Nations to extend Harrison Act bans worldwide had nothing to do with the 1929 Crash, 1930-33 banking panics and great Depression? Brace yourself. Here you will see newspaper headlines anyone can look up at a library–yet omitted from subsidized & paywalled academia. Blow-by-blow, every move in the game up to the final ambush of Germany by countries that were NOT America’s Allies in WW1 will unfold before thine eyes.

January 1931: Al Capone’s buddy Frank Nitti was already doing time for tax evasion when the outfit’s treasurer, Jack Guzik got 5 years and the Hoover Administratin was looking at Big Al. Children too young to file tax returns or be sentenced to chain gangs were running liquor stills. On January 9, the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee assembled in Geneva, Switzerland, to plan the expansion of the Hague Opium Convention of 1912 and Geneva additional drugs Convention of 1925 into an all-pervasive steamroller to flatten Germany’s drug industry–the industry that enabled Germany to pay war reparations installments to the Allies (which never did include the USA). The League committee also labored to export hemp prohibition laws into the Americas. The USA wanted only repayment of money loaned out during WW1--and prohibition of everything that moved. U.S. papers paid ignored the Geneva meeting, but did report on movements of tax dodger Terry Druggan.(link) When Druggan and Lake were first charged, back in 1928, there was heavy liquidation in the stock market.(link) In fact, when this entire business of illegal income becoming liable to taxes first surfaced in May of 1927, foreign stock markets broke and never recovered.(link)

This global prohibitionism mania began in 1905, when China begged the U.S.–then “pacifying” Filipinos–to stop the world from shipping drugs to China, whose laws had demanded death (1839), then forfeiture, fines and prison (1844)–otherwise China would boycott U.S. goods. Beer, wine, etc, were banned in the U.S. 15 years later, under penalty of fines and forfeiture, in a logical progression of international cooperation.(link) Pink-cheeked Crusaders in Chicago on January 18 demanded nationalization of the liquor industry under a planned economy–precisely the plan suggested by China a year earlier in Geneva–with a planetary monopoly on drugs centered in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Federal Reserve Board changed the subject and digressed about the 981 bank suspensions involving deposits of 515 million dollars, in the first eleven months of 1930. Autonomous spending had fallen by some $4 billion, a phenomenon liable to generate serious multiplier effects. But the desperate banking and economic situation was evidently lost on the Prohibition Bureau, which, like Comstock before it, banned such publications as recipes on how to ferment grape juice. On January 20th, Chicago Tribune news from Kentucky included two facts: 1) people were starving, and 2) 90% of all criminal cases there were for prohibition violations. The following day, President Hoover announced to Congress an appropriation $35,000 in gold coins to fund U.S. participation in the next Conference on The Limitation of The Manufacture of Narcotic Drugs in Geneva (after the current planning conference in progress). Those 1750 $20 gold double eagles weighed over 58 kilos of gold, today worth over $5 million. At the time, however, those $35000 were but 0.04% of the annual cost of prohibition enforcement once loss of government revenue was added in–this according to Prohibition Commissioner Doran. January quickly got interesting as financially-weakened Germany–anxious over competitors using the League and Versailles Treaty against her–was cowed into signing an extradition treaty with the U.S. making persons suspected of “offenses” against laws for the suppression of traffic in “narcotics” liable to be hauled into the dock as criminal defendants in Dry America.

*-*-*

Good Reading: Public Papers of the Presidents, Herbert Hoover.(link) When I was researching data for Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929, I sent off for the entire collection of Herbert Hoover Presidential Papers. These volumes covered 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932-33 in a stack close to a foot thick. I bought the lot of them for $27 from the Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa back about 1993, before the PDF versions appeared on the web. The Proclamations and Executive Orders are separate, and calculatedly so. By separating the EO replicating Woodrow Wilson’s prewar announcement of income tax enforcement and exposure of corporate tax returns to public scrutiny, Hoover managed to conceal his December 1932 Executive order exposing corporate tax returns to public scrutiny. On 20JAN1933, however, Hoover let on to the press that the Democratic majority in Congress had not struck down that particular Executive Order. And as of that day the collapse of the entire U.S. Banking system began, culminating in the Banking Moratorium Holiday and confiscation of all gold as economy measures on 04MAR1933. All of this is in my explanation of the Crash and Depression.

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, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style 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)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the instructions accessible to and understandable by people accustomed to thinking in Portuguese. This costs one dollar ($1) and you can read it on a cellphone with the Kindle app.(link)

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, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style 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)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the instructions accessible to and understandable by people accustomed to thinking in Portuguese. This costs one dollar ($1) and you can read it on a cellphone with the Kindle app.(link)

Spot an error? Comment!

Prohibition, crises and War in the 1930s

 

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 Wealth of Nations.(link) As Smith cannily observed "We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen."

So ingrained by conditioning is blindness to the prima facie obviousness that banning trade brings Panics, Crashes, Depressions and War that the very suggestion that Prohibitions on commerce--be it of liquor, drugs or books--elicits an almost instinctive skeptical reaction worthy of the attention of the son of a deputy opium inspector second-class. Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was in fact just such a son and in 1930 wrote a book the publication and sale of which was soon banned throughout the British Empire.(link) This blog mostly unfolds a tale of the whys and wherefores of this censorship. You and I are examining the facts it conditions people to ignore by methods proven to sell liquor and cigarettes.(link)

The chart above claims that German production of morphine fell in 1930 to a level lower than the previous five years of rapid population growth. Nobody mentions that American prohibition laws urged ahead by Chinese trade boycotts as of 1905, had expanded internationally via the Hague until war exploded in morphine-exporting Europe. The Versailles surrender treaty operated by the League of Nations took over drug cartel prohibitionism--in its Article 23--and also demanded Germany pay war reparations to the European victors. German morphine found its way to the USA as a replacement for alcohol, but those clandestine exports were hampered by the establishment of the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs on 15DEC1920, the day before liquor was banned by U.S. law. The subsequent  Jones-Miller Act of 26MAY1922 creating Federal Narcotics Control Board soon played a role in wrecking the German economy.(link) Government schools elide these laws and focus instead on French incursions into Germany's Ruhr region and the horrors of hyperinflation.(link) 

America's War On Beer and Gin led to enforcement of the Prohibition Amendment via the Income Tax Amendment. This method leaked over into so-called "narcotics" as of 16MAY1927, and all German industrial output fell sharply, as the 1927 morphine bar shows on the League of Nations chart above. That same politician, Wesley Livsey Jones, wrote a law making even beer offenses a felony in March 1929, one month after the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee meeting in Geneva spent two weeks in lively discussions of ways to enforce prohibitions on the "illicit" traffic in what it called "dangerous drugs." 

The word CRASH described the U.S. financial situation in Time Magazine in its 21APR1929 edition.(link) But the word CRASH soon returned to journalistic vernacular, for the Opium Advisory Committee turned its report and recommendations over to the League of Nations which met on 02SEP1929. These came complete with Chinese recommendations that drug manufactures be limited by government fiat and that China be given a world monopoly on producing opiates. Three days earlier, talks on war reparations payments at the Hague were concluded. Check any interactive chart and you can see that stock prices changed from rising to falling on 03SEP1929. There are lots more of these examples. 

Good reading: The Forbidden Game: A Social History of Drugs, Kindle Edition, by Brian Inglis. This brilliant Irishman assembled a fluent and readable history of the way prohibitionism extended its reach throughout all global trade and production. (link) It may sound like a joke, but when I was in college and extra history classes on Southeast Asia, the Opium Wars that wrecked the Qing at a cost of deaths equal to the entire US population never happened. To find out about them you have to search out Brian Inglis and William Darymple's The Anarchy, The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire. 

UTEXAS at Austin also kept the existence of the Libertarian party a trade secret. One of my History profs went so far as to use "The Vegetarian party" as an example of things that have no clout. When it became mathematically clear that the LP was swinging election results to make the more totalitarian looter candidates lose to slightly less totalitarian opposition, and that the Travis County Libertarian Party could no longer be safely ignored by its ku-klux and communist opposition, things changed. Instead of republicans discarding prohibition and Comstockist girl-bullying planks, they began infiltrating a fifth column into the LP. After accidentally electing Trump, thanks to Dem dereliction, the GOP went all out to replace libertarians with T-party and Trumpanzee muppets. The Trojan Horse got the Don elected a second time, but enough is enough. Welcome to Third Party Watch(link) If you would rather have the libertarian party back instead of a Hitlerjudeng/SA replica, visit and learn what is being done in the way of reclaiming our former leveraged, law-changing spoiler vote clout.

Interesting Reading: Ghosts of Panama, A Strongman out of Control, a Murdered Marine, and the Special Agents Caught in the Middle of an Invasion, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll.(link) No it's not great literature, but the story unfolds day-by-day throughout the U.S. invasion of a once-friendly nation, naming names and dates. The officiousness is the same as led to book-burning Comstockism in 1873, through the brutalization of the Philippine Islands and Dominican Republic by abstemious and patronizing Christian Nationalism. Key to all these episodes since 1920 is the license to invade contained in the League of Nations Charter and Treaty of Versailles article 23: "entrust the League with the general supervision over agreements with regard to the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs." In July 1986 U.S. newspapers labeled "Panama's Noriega" as tied to "the drug trade." From then till the close of 1989 the fix was in. Ghosts of Panama provides insights into how U.S. agents believe anything the government kleptocracy tells them to believe. 

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, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style 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)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the instructions accessible to and understandable by people accustomed to thinking in Portuguese. This costs one dollar ($1) and you can read it on a cellphone with the Kindle app.(link)

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, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style 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)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the instructions accessible to and understandable by people accustomed to thinking in Portuguese. This costs one dollar ($1) and you can read it on a cellphone with the Kindle app.(link)

Spot an error? Comment!