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)

 

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)

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