Sandbagging Germany, April 1931

 

The Hoover Administration in 1931 needed to elect candidates and coerce Germany–this while robbing and jailing voters over beer, interstate weekending and foreign drugs–all in one juggling act. A typical cartoon sandbags readers by pretending dry Republican “progressives” (who just cost the GOP control of the House) would change policy (link). The prime directive was to ignore the wet Liberal Party. Here are some portentous events of April 1931.

March papers closed with articles on the huge fortunes amassed by the Kaiser (living it up in Holland) and frau Bertha Krupp von Bolen and Halbach, still the boss lady of the Krupp steel and weapons conglomerate, worth 283,000,000 marks.(link) Germany was investing in some brand new warships as well. Americans were meanwhile shocked to learn that illegal liquor had a budget of 5 billion dollars tax-free, while courts and jails were filling up with bootlegging tax dodgers indicted back in 1928.(link)

The doper extradition treaty the U.S. foisted on Germany back in July of 1930 was ratified, proclaimed and now made drug “violators” anywhere in Germany liable to be frogmarched into U.S. courts as of 22APR1931. To the world’s largest manufacturer of drugs, heavily invested in U.S. corporations and in part managed by America’s Alien Property Custodian, this was no laughing matter. There had been a huge bust at Atlantic Highlands in 1929, with encrypted radio station, observatory, docks, roads all located between a submarine overhauling facility and Atlantic City. Codebreakers had been working on collected messages and claimed to have in hand codes for landing–not liquor–but way more valuable drugs. (link)

Coincidentally, New York papers announced 17 boxes containing about 400 pounds each of narcotics worth $3 million wholesale were nabbed on the Hamburg-American pier off the Milwaukee. As in the case of the Alesia— caught unloading morphine as the Bank of United States failed 5 months earlier–details came in a slow trickle. From different NYT articles, readers pieced together the story of a U.S. Hamburg-American liner loaded with 3200 pounds of morphine, 500 pounds of heroin and as much again of opium. Yet the numbers changed every day with a typical overnight discrepancy of 3500 pounds, and only the vaguest hint that the dope was packed in woolen goods and originated “in the north of Germany.”

This embarrassment occurred as the League Opium Advisory Committee was unpacking for its 17th Session, with American and Chinese money piling into its coffers for a strict neo-prohibitionist antidope convention to begin the first week of May. NORDWOLLE was a North German corporation–on a scale with Anheuser-Busch, Argo or Hershey–located in the company town of Delmenhorst some 12 miles from the Bremen rail line leading to the nearby port of Hamburg where the dope evidently was loaded for transport. All mention of that drug shipment vanished from the press. But Nordwolle would soon be in headlines, indebted to the Danat bank, with both teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. *-*-*

Relevant Reading: International Narcotics Control, by L.E.S. Eisenlohr, Geneva, July 1934. Like other official books skirting the topic, this one is long on the “social evil” angle and short on the economic effects of government intervention, confiscations, violent enforcement, deadly reprisal counterforce and the stacks of dead civilians, uniformed cops and plain-clothes agents out to make a crime of trade and production. Everything religious fanatics and rent-seekers eager to benefit from prohibition laws wanted politicians to believe is in there.

Restoring the Libertarian Party is the topic at Third Party Watch.(link) Rather than delete cruel and unusual planks from their platform to compete, God's Own Prohibitionists first packed the courts with Christian National Socialists, then enlisted a fifth column of zealots to infiltrate and corrupt the Libertarian Party. Our formerly leveraged, law-changing sppoiler vote share now looks like this: 

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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)