German, U.S. Spoiler parties, May 1931

 

Herbert Hoover was inaugurated 2 days after beer was made a felony–while the League of Nations unfolded a worldwide war on drugs. Small wonder that the resulting Great Depression triggered a search for replacement parties here, there and everywhere…

Germany had troubles too. Losing the 1914 war against the Hague opium conventions had burdened the nation with war reparations to the Allies and loan debts to the (NOT an Ally) U.S. By 1930, League plans to throttle German pharma–Germany’s largest industry–had intensified. The U.S. now financially backed these international prohibitionists and packed the Geneva committee with her own delegates. Naturally, the search was on for new politicians. Adolf Hitler’s name began appearing in the news.(link)

The League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee spent nearly all of May 1931 working on the new Drug Convention they’d planned throughout 1930. German participants kept their government dutifully apprised of plans amounting--in the committee’s own words--to a planned economy.(link) Participants, nearly all from producing nations, lobbied for bans on non-toxic and non-addictive drugs to cripple potential competition for their own products and to muddy up the waters with mission creep. South American coca and African khat--both of them stimulants and the exact opposite of narcotics--were scheduled for banning by corporate experts who argued that their own codeine was not addictive. After all, hadn’t Herbert Hoover himself argued that laissez-faire liberalism meant dog-eat-dog? Besides, the League Covenant and Treaty of Versailles, in their respective article 23, entrusted the League of Nations “with the general supervision over agreements with regard to the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs.” “Other” all of a sudden meant cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, cigarettes, cacti–whatever you could get the League to say was dangerous. “Supervision over agreements” still meant the initiation of deadly force.

Armed with that ambiguity, America’s anti-dog-eat-dog President had Secretary of State Henry Stimson instruct cash-laden American envoys to the convention that “the draft convention proposes to extend certain of the provisions of the convention to other drugs not covered by the Geneva Convention.”(link) If this juggernaut came to be, Germany’s drug-producing competitors could use it to throttle her sales while bleeding the nation into bankruptcy with reparations demands under the Versailles treaty. Since the fix was already in for the antidope convention, national survival required getting rid of the reparations levies. Stories about German demands for a moratorium hit the papers as soon as the drug cartel delegates took their seats.(link) Alert readers will notice the Hitler story a few inches lower in the same column.

Germany stood threatened with confiscation, extradition, income tax liability in the U.S., crippling of primary industries and renewed expropriations as in 1923. The Bank of United States and Al Capone stories in every paper served notice that Americans gleefully used tax laws to prosecute their own to death for dope shipments. The shipment of opiates industrially packaged into “woolens from Northern Germany” just intercepted in New York made those liabilities all the more ominous. Hyperinflation had failed in 1923. Germany needed a political party that was truculent, xenophobic and eager for revenge; Adolf Hitler was the handiest counterthreat to rattle back with. An alternative threat would be to form a customs union with Austria, thereby eliminating local customs barriers.(link) The possibility was aired May 10, and a panicky run on Austria’s Kreditanstalt bank took hold immediately, for reasons completely unclear.

WHAT WAS CLEAR was the perfect correlation between religious fanatics, Comstockist book-burning, bans on contraceptives and desperate missions to outlaw Evolution, beer, wine, drugs, movies and Sunday baseball at all costs–and not just in Pennsylvania.

Tennessee’s Monkey Law had tried and convicted a schoolteacher for heresy in 1927--and the appeals court let it stand in 1931. Quaker President Herbert Clark Hoover thanked the Southern Baptist Convention on Law Enforcement for its role in building a new race via deadly force on May 16. Communists--multiplying geometrically since the 1929 Crash--tended to side with whomever zealots singled out for prosecution. Spanish socialists were keenly alert to the opposition; anti-religious sentiment there pulled no punches. As if to rebuke Pres. Hoover, Christian National Socialists won a sensational victory in the federal state elections at Oldenburg. U.S. papers even tried tried equivocation–announcing on May 18 that Adolf Hitler’s NATIONALIST party scored notably in Danzig Free State elections.(link) There were battle lines being drawn…

Good reading: HERETIC, Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, by Catherine Nixey.(link) Yes this is the same spellbinding wordsmith who crafted The Darkening Age. And yes, it is also available with audio interpretation by that best of all voice actresses Lalla Ward. This ought to be must reading for anyone with pretentions at writing ability. I personally feel crushed by her every page. Nowhere is there an awkward moment–and bear in mind that the source material comes from the most awkward languages and dialects. “Apocryphal stories” pops up in Milton Friedman lectures, but Nixey leads down the path to genuine apocrypha--stories that, like Beatles albums or Erskine Caldwell novels--simply had to be put to the torch for your own protection from inconvenient facts of reality.

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)

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: 

Visit Third Party Watch and help find solutions.

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, 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)