“Those who contended that during my administration our economic system was one of laissez faire have little knowledge of the extent of government regulation. The economic philosophy of laissez faire, or ‘dog eat dog,’ had died in the United States forty years before, when Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Commission and Sherman Anti-Trust Acts.” Herbert Hoover, 1952
Hoover was not an admirer of Karl Marx, whose Manifesto proclaimed: 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. But he did admire and donate money to the campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, whose Progressive party platform read: We favor the ratification of the pending amendment to the Constitution giving the Government power to levy an income tax. In those days there was still no clear and meaningful definition of the word “government.” At the time the Communist Manifesto was published, Frederic Bastiat described it as a fiction “through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
Hoover also admired and supported Woodrow Wilson, who bragged: “We have sought to equalize taxation by means of an equitable income tax.” Wilson went a step further and ordered “Pursuant to the provisions of Section 2 of the Tariff Act of October 3, 1913, said section providing for income tax, and which contains in paragraph G, sub-paragraph (d) the following provision, “When the assessment shall be made, as provided in this section, the returns, together with any corrections thereof which may have been made by the Commissioner, shall be filed in the office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue and shall constitute public records and be open to inspection as such…” This Wilson did as he signed the Convention and Final Protocol for the Suppression of the Abuse of Opium and Other Drugs.
Another famous altruist on the international scene, the Austrian Franz Ferdinand, remarked on a visit to Australia that he did not like America, where “the almighty dollar reigns supreme through the land. No one can escape its spell.” Suddenly, Austrian Christian Socialist Franz Ferdinand was shot, the opium protocol was forgotten, Russia banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Wilson signed an income tax law, and the stock market shut down completely for four months, while the festering Balkan wars in Europe gradually escalated into World War I (Opium War III).
Were all of these events somehow related?
Learn how republican Herbert Hoover used the IRS to swat beer, and crushed the U.S. economy instead. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929, is live at Amazon Kindle for the price of a pint.
Stay tuned for insights into political economy. If you ever need a politically economical translator or interpreter, look for Hankphillips.com
Ser fiador de um governo eleito por votos secretos, dos quais o eleitor não pode conferir a contagem, é correto? Quem gasta dinheiro que não possui é de confiança? E se gastar, é legítimo usar ameaças e coação para fazer com que o cidadão inocente pague essa despesa–com juros?
XIV
Com base em princípios gerais do direito e da razão, todo compromisso feito por sulista varonil desde a guerra da secessão, de obedecer as leis do Congresso, defender a União, e coisas afins, é nulo. São inválidos esses compromissos não apenas por terem sido extorquidos por poder militar e ameaça de confisco, ou por estarem também em contravenção aos direitos naturais de todo homem de fazer o que bem entender no que toca o apoio ao governo, como também por não ser compromissados com ninguém. Foram simbolicamente feitos com “os Estados Unidos”, mas por necessidade não foram feitos com ninguém, pois nos princípios gerais do direito e da razão, não existiam “Estados Unidos” com os quais se pudesse fazer tais compromissos. Vale dizer, não existia associação ou organização visível, autêntica, reconhecida e legítima conhecida como “os Estados Unidos”, ou como “o povo dos Estados Unidos”, com o qual pudesse ser feito o compromisso. Se alguém disser que existia tal corporação, que diga quais os indivíduos que o compunham, e como e quando se incorporaram. Foram membros os senhores A, B ou C? E se membros, aonde estão as suas assinaturas? Onde está a prova dessa associação? Cadê o assentamento? Em que lugar a prova visível e autêntica? Não há. Portanto, no direito e na razão, inexistia a tal entidade.
Nos princípios gerais do direito e da razão, toda pessoa jurídica, associação ou corporação organizada de homens, de existência legítima e possuidora de direitos legítimos como tal, deve ser composta por indivíduos conhecidos, capazes de constatar, mediante prova legítima e razoável, a sua participação. Mas nada disso se pode provar em relação à pessoa jurídica ou corporação que se denomina de “o povo dos Estados Unidos”. Nenhum dentre eles, em todos os estados do Norte, é capaz de provar por evidência legítima que seja, conforme o exigido para constatar a associação a qualquer outra pessoa jurídica, que ele próprio, ou algum conhecido seu, seja membro de corporação ou associação denominada “os Estados Unidos”, ou “o povo dos Estados Unidos”, ou, por conseguinte, que exista tal entidade. Não sendo, pois, possível provar que existe tal pessoa jurídica, é claro que não se pode provar que os compromissos dos sulistas foram feitos com tal pessoa jurídica. Quando muito, poder-se-ia dizer que foram feitos os compromissos para com um bando secreto de assaltantes e assassinos, que se denominam por “os Estados Unidos”, e que extorquiram esses juramentos. Mas isso certamente não basta para provar que tais compromissos seriam de obrigatoriedade alguma.
Na Amazon: A Lei Seca e o Crash. Todo brasileiro entende rapidinho o mecanismo desta crise financeira de 1929. Com isso dá para entender as de 1893, 1907, 1971, 1987-92, 2008 e os Flash Crashes de 2010 e 2015.
Para melhorar o seu inglês, nada como a minha polêmica tradução de Monteiro Lobato: America’s Black President 2228. Na Amazon (link)
How the American Liberal Party changed national prohibition policy in 1932 and secured repeal of the 18th Amendment by December of 1933.
Recall that one of the Liberal Party organizers was Nicholas Murray Butler—also a friend of wet Democratic nominee and former New York governor Al Smith. Butler, an ancient Republican activist and University President, was roundly booed when at the 1928 Republican National Convention he suggested a plank to repeal the Prohibition Amendment. Instead, that platform read: “PROHIBITION… The Republican Party pledges itself and its nominees to the observance and vigorous enforcement of this provision of the Constitution.” The Democratic Party plank was much the same: “Speaking for the national Democracy, this convention pledges the party and its nominees to an honest effort to enforce the eighteenth amendment and all other provisions of the federal Constitution and all laws enacted pursuant thereto.” So, besides economic collapse under the weight of prohibition and tax laws, what political change occurred?
During the 1932 election campaign, Butler broadcast radio talks on how prohibition had created a four-billion-dollar tax-free industry–the size of the 1929 federal budget. Income tax revenue in 1932 fell to 36% of what it had been in 1927, and the Liberal Party published its own planks. Beginning with the observation that the major parties “are now virtually merged into one immense Prohibition Party, which is subject to sectarian control through the dictation of shallow and malignant men,” and to “extirpate all those organizations that are holding liberty in bondage, and to disperse all those political groups of the churches which are endeavoring to enact their religious and moral tenets into the laws of the land.” Echoing Jefferson, they “unfalteringly declare our hostility and opposition to every form of religious interference in the laws of this Government.” Nor did these classical Liberals hesitate to demand “the dissolution of the Ku Klux Klan, because that society, suppressing the social and political rights of Jews, Catholics, and Negroes, is a foul vulture that is eating the heart out of the body politic.” The Liberals repudiated “any alliance between Church and State,” then closed in for the kill: “PROHIBITION: We demand the immediate repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.”
The Prohibition Partyreaction was shrill: “We unequivocally oppose the repeal or weakening of the Eighteenth Amendment or of the laws enacted thereunder, and insist upon the strengthening of those laws. …can and will coordinate all the powers of government, Federal, State and local, strictly to enforce, by adequate and unescapable punishment of all violators, this wise and beneficent law. ” The Republican Party, having heard it’s masters’ voice, recited: “We do not favor a submission limited to the issue of retention or repeal, for the American nation never in its history has gone backward, and in this case the progress which has been thus far made must be preserved, while the evils must be eliminated.”
Faced with the horns of dilemma, the Democratic party seen its chance and took it: “We advocate the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment,” and went on to demand the immediate legalization of beer. This, of course, ruined whatever chance the Liberal Party might have had to “win” by making its urbane and educated candidates and spokesmen into grafting looter politicians. But that was not the victory they were after.
To the Liberal Party the important thing was “the freedom of life, and the exercises of those innocent pastimes which give life its chief happiness.” They did not want socialism, nor a welfare state. After rejecting “social cancer” of welfare handouts, the platform observed that those “who get on the dole system will never get off it.” Nor did the Liberal Party advocate unemployment relief “from the politicians at Washington.” The platform called for restoring state power by dispensing with the 17th Amendment and restoring election of senators to the State Legislatures, the way it was done before the looter prohibitionist frenzy replaced freedom with the 16th, 17th and 18th Amendments. The party favored liberalization of divorce laws, and that prostitution laws not burn the deportable brand of “moral turpitude” onto individuals. It called for letting folks watch pugilism movies with Jack Johnson walloping the daylights out of The Great White Hope. South America was to be freed from U.S. colonial meddling, Russia would be recognized if it ever acquired a legitimate government, and a way should be found to reduce regulations to do away with the “riots, destruction, and murder” that accompanied taxicab strikes in those dark days before Uber and Lyft.
The Liberal Party was okay with kids who wanted to work getting jobs, and wanted federal bureaus stripped of much of their coercive power. Listening to the radio on Sunday would be kept safe and legal, veterans bonuses would be paid at maturity and schools should teach mathematics, physics, and chemistry, history and literature. The Liberal Party was also the first to come out for an earlier Inauguration Day—a year before Hoover’s lame-duck depression winter closed every bank in the nation. By Executive Order, the President allowed state authorities to examine the federal income tax returns of corporations—especially the ones that had benefited enormously from prohibition laws. The Liberal Party was the prime mover behind the political repeal of prohibition. Naturally conservative fanatics dedicated to taking happiness away from others revile its memory–indeed try to blank it out entirely–for it broke the death-grip of a religious dictatorship in time to rescue individual rights from extinction.
Like any other party, some of its ideas were unoriginal, others less than brilliant, but the Liberal Party was designed to restore basic freedoms by ridding These States of rule by the sort of Christian fanaticsthat destroyed the U.S. economy. Those same fanatics also fostered the emergence of a similar regime in Germany, a dictatorship of Positive Christianity—only with death-camp National Socialism instead of saloon padlockings and dry killers.
Next: But, wasn’t Herbert Hoover a laissez-faire capitalist?
This has been a presentation of Brazilian Translated, translating financial and political information since 1990.
For more on how Republican prohibitionism crushed the U.S. economy and brought on the Great Depression, why not download Prohibition and The Crash–cause and Effect in 1929? The book is live on Amazon Kindle and you can read it on a cellphone for the cost of a craft pint at a pub.
The Liberal Party, planned in 1929, organized early in 1930 when its candidate against a Republican prohibitionist netted nearly 300,000 votes. The Liberal Party platform, published 1931–promised explicitly to do away with the Prohibition Amendment, all blue laws, and the Ku-Klux Klan.
The third communist experiment–after the Plymouth and Paris disasters–begun in 1917 when the Czar’s Christian Empire was overthrown, was barely thirteen in 1930. But it had successfully rid the Central Powers of an adversary–thereby bringing the United States into World War I lest Federal Reserve member banks have to write off the loans they’d made to drug-exporting European Allies. Liberal Party organizers openly rejected communism in an era when one of the Bryan brothers of Populist Party and prohibitionist fame graced the Klanbake-cowed, dry Democratic ticket of 1924. Members of the Progressive party, so named the better to push the “progressive” income tax plank from the Communist Manifesto into the Constitution, were opportunistically silent on prohibition even after morphing into the Socialist and Socialist Labor parties next election season. Sure enough, the Republican Party, dominated by the Methodist White Terror backed by ku-klux turncoats, defeated “Whiskey Al” Smith and elected Herbert Hoover, the evangelically dry Germanic Quaker, on the Anti-Saloon-League-approved prohibition-enforcement platform.
This capitulation to the forces of superstition by “both major” parties left Liberal Party organizers no choice but to go it alone after the stock market so eloquently foretold the nation’s economic future in 1929—seven months into Hoover’s enforcement of the Five and Ten law making beer a major felony. After discussion of the “strangling grip” with which the “ecclesiastical union” of the “narrow and fanatical of mind” was throttling the nation’s freedom and economy, Liberal Party organizers rejected the prohibition laws passed by “entrenched politicians of the two old parties…”
The situation, in other words, was not all that different from 1971, with Richard Nixon bombing overseas with conscripts and running Operation Intercept into a year-long recession complete with wage and price controls. In fact, 1931 was also much like the current prohibition-related asset-forfeiture depression begun under a bomb-dropping Republican administration in 2007. These States are now repealing their marijuana prohibition laws—despite federal scolding—the way they legalized beer from 1922 through 1933. Then, as now, Political Action Committees grabbed all the headlines, and every effort was made to keep the existence of the Liberal Party a secret, just as Nixon’s campaign subsidy law has kept the media from mentioning the Libertarian Party these past 45 years.
The strategy was already wearily familiar in 1931. The Anti Saloon League and Women’s Christian Temperance Union were in all of the churchly periodicals, while the dripping-wet Chicago Tribune never tired of running column-inches about the American Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), the New Crusade, or Pauline Sabin’s White Ribboners, a.k.a. the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform.
Things are no different today. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and NORML are media bait among their single-issue faithful, but panhandling PACs struggle to blank out the Libertarian Party–without which they would have no chance whatsoever of changing the laws. One major difference is that folks in the thirties were fed up and courageous. They returned fire against the agents of the “two old parties” and were not into limp-wristed socialism.
The new party idea hadn’t been new since before the Civil War. In November of 1922 there was already talk of organizing a “wet” party to call for relegalizing beer and liquor. Discussion was resumed in 1927, when the Supreme Court ended the loophole whereby the Fifth Amendment protected bootleggers from having to declare illegal income. Bootlegging, previously untaxed, became a major tax liability.
“Liberalism” in Wisconsin made the news in 1929, when the state legislature began chafing under prohibition, alcohol poisoning, blue laws, and movie censorship. But things got serious in a hurry when Samuel Hardin Church, president of the Carnegie Institute, threw his weight behind formation of a liberal-minded party to repeal prohibition early in 1930 at a meeting of the AAPA, the party changed election outcomes by draining off wet “spoiler” votes that November.
Entrenched looter parties reacted as you’d expect–by lying. Their party newspapers were quick to comment on the Anti-Saloon League, AAPA or WCTU meetings and conventions, but kept a deafening silence about small, competing parties. This was odd because the Prohibition party – America’s oldest third party and third-oldest party – had been in existence since Reconstruction, and had forced adoption of the Prohibition amendment by using that platform plank to drain off a small percentage of votes. No new policies ever came from the Democratic or Republican platforms. But Republican newspapers pretended in 1931 that there was no Prohibition party, save for cryptic mention of a hypothetical wet party as a possibility long–after the Liberal Party had upset election applecarts.
By May of 1932, Pres. Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University was backing the Liberal Party in radio broadcasts all over the country. Conservatives, who had pointed to the prohibition law as the major reason for America’s prosperity in the roaring 20s, now stood surrounded by a crumbling economy and rising unemployment, with “We Want Beer!” marches breaking out everywhere. Tycoons like John Raskob and Pierre DuPont threatened to shift their financing to the repeal party as women voters came out en masse for repeal. Unlike saloons, speakeasies did not discriminate against women, who developed a taste for tippling and wanted their husbands and boyfriends released from prison. But fanaticism was still powerful, and there was a very real chance the Republicans could win if the Liberal Party were to drain wet votes away from the Democratic party.
Democrats saw the writing on the wall and smoothly changed their platform. Even Herbert Hoover realized by convention time that any candidate who was openly for prohibition would most certainly be defeated. The battle over the prohibition plank in the 1932 Republican Party resembled the fight over the Ku Klux Klan plank during the 1924 Democratic convention. None of this would’ve happened if the Liberal party had not published its platform demanding the repeal of the 18th amendment and the Volstead act, just as the Prohibition amendment and Volstead act themselves would never have passed were it not for the constant political pressure exerted by the Prohibition Party and its allies. The collapse of banking and financial industries disproved the myth that dry totalitarianism was good for the economy. Statistical information emerged showing quite clearly that the Prohibition amendment itself – together with the income tax – had been the major cause of the Great Depression.
Continued…
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)
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.
The Interwar Period. Similarities between American and German Conservatives in the 1920s..
The United States never joined “The Allies” but entered World War I as an “Associated Power,” never at war with Turkey and intent on collecting the money it had loaned those Allies before the Soviet revolution. Other belligerents demanded reparations of Germany, for the war had cost nearly 385 billion gold dollars.
Henry Ford and many Germans published vituperative attacks on all things Jewish. Ford was the only American praised in Hitler’s Mein Kampf–which disparagingly used the word “liberal” 31 times and “Jewish” 267 times. As civil libertarians reacted in horror to armed ethical cleansing under national prohibition, America’s prohibitionist religious conservatives increasingly began pronouncing “liberal” and “Jewish” in much the same menacing tones used by German religious conservatives, albeit reversing the frequency of their use of the individual words.
The ACLU defendeda schoolteacher named Stokes for bringing the theory of evolution into the classroom and American True Christian™ hostility became as overt toward “liberals” as Christian German scorn for “jewishness.” Germans were horrified by the thought that Jews did not believe in life after death, and their party platform explicitly endorsed altruism and “positive Christianity.” American majorities were appalled at the idea that liberals entertained doubts about the virgin birth, the recent creation of the heavens and earth, and the wisdom of sending men with guns to tell people what to eat drink and smoke–or else! New and Old World conservatives were equally convinced that altruism, sacrifice and duty were the bedrock of all ethical principles. German-descended Herbert Hoover spoke of “building a new race” in his 1929 inaugural speech, and Adolph Hitler’s first official speech as Chancellor of the Reich, four years later, mentioned the “German Volk” in practically every paragraph.
Typical of National Socialist “big tent” exhortations was this one by Gregor Strasser:
“Finally, we require of the servants of the Christian denominations that they do not weaken the God-given instinct of national self-determination and that, in the spirit of original Christianity, they shall not allow religious differences to become a political danger to the Christian people.”
A complaint of low farm earnings by Himmler and Fedor in Volkischer Beobachter went:
“2. In our competition with foreign agriculture, which produces under more favorable conditions, which is not sufficiently curbed by our tariff policy, which is hostile to agriculture.”
Both quotes are by NSDAP–National Socialist Workers Party of Germany contemporary spokesmen and this latter remark sounded a lot like Herbert Hoover’s call for a special session of Congress to fiddle with agricultural tariff schedules. There was still a sort of “gentlemen’s agreement” in effect to say almost nothing at all in public about international “narcotics” control negotiations, or such pertinent clauses in the Surrender documents as:
Part I, Article 23 (…) (c) will entrust the League with the general supervision over the execution of agreements with regard to the traffic in women and children, and the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs;
Another much-overlooked international treaty clause read as follows:
PART VIII. REPARATION. ANNEX VI. 1. Germany accords to the Reparation Commission an option to require as part of reparation the delivery by Germany of such quantities and kinds of dyestuffs and chemical drugs as the Commission may designate, not exceeding 50% of the total stock of each and every kind of dyestuff and chemical drug in Germany or under German control at the date of the coming into force of the present Treaty.
After President Warren Harding’s Alien Property Custodian and numerous chums and buddies became embroiled in skirting the edges of narcotics laws, the Democratic Party included in its platform a plank expressing concern over the sudden influx of addictive dope.
NARCOTICS: Recognizing in narcotic addiction, especially the spreading of heroin addiction among the youth, a grave peril to America and to the human race, we pledge ourselves vigorously to take against it all legitimate and proper measures for education, for control and for suppression at home and abroad.”
Like Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson before him, Herbert Hoover was far more concerned about international narcotics than domestic beer, but had sworn before Congress to crush both underfoot. The League of Nations had been bullied into finishing the work of the Hague Conventions, banning all drugs of which American Christianity disapproved, regardless of whether they were habit-forming or not. German industry had been very busy selling such drugs in order to pay its reparations, and Herbert Hoover used American influence to shut down those industries while at the same time protecting Germany from international debt obligations–through such dodges as the ill-conceived “Moratorium on Brains.”
In point of fact, most of Europe’s drug-producing nations experienced their interwar economic peaks shortly after the 1925 Geneva Narcotics Convention, then transitioned into depressions as that treaty became law long before U.S. markets gave any indication of coming troubles. National Socialist victory celebrations in 1927 occurred against a backdrop of declining securities prices all over Europe. The 1928 and 1929 stock market crashes in the United States coincided with federal grand jury conspiracy investigations involving huge American sugar and yeast corporations and investment banks funding distilling and drug smuggling operations. Enormous narcotics shipments were confiscated and even Germany–world cornucopia of heroin–was forced to quietly pass an anti-narcotic “poisons” law as Wall Street shuddered. Strapped foreigners sold off their American securities while wealthy American bootleggers liquidated theirs to avoid seizure through asset forfeiture. The resulting market crash foretold the coming Great Depression.
As the depression worsened, a meeting was held on February 4, 1930 in New York City to create a national political organization to be called the Liberal Party. Its purpose was to repeal teetotalitarianism as embodied in the Volstead Act and Eighteenth Amendment, and to overthrow the Methodist White Terror’s religious dictatorship.
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.
Liberal as a political modifier has drastically changed meaning in the United States. To the rest of the world, the word means the same as it always has. To communists, socialists, anarchists and fascists, the label has always expressed “selfish” free-market tendencies bordering on laissez-faire. To everyone else the label stood for “individualist” free-market tendencies bordering on laissez-faire. Everything changed in November 1918, then changed again in November, 1932.
Germany’s National Socialist Workers Party, or NSDAP had, of course, despised “liberals” even before it became fashionable Stateside. Germany’s chemical industry had treated salicylic acid with a chemical reagent to produce Aspirin, which became a huge economic success. A similar success was obtained by subjecting ordinary morphine to the same process, and the patent was granted for Heroin™. Like aspirin, heroin was a powdered product, easily absorbed and readily marketable to the medical industry… and to people addicted to opium.
Opium itself had led to wars. Chinese import restrictions on opium grown in India in 1837 resulted in liquidation by British investors of bonds and other securities issued in the United States. By 1840 Chinese restrictions had blossomed into full-blown prohibition and the British Navy was sent to bombard the Celestial Empire into repealing its prohibition laws–as the United States sank into a deep depression. The process was repeated in 1857, this time with French participation in hopes of exporting drugs produced in what we now call Vietnam. The Chinese were horrified by these things, and similar hostilities broke out first with the Boxer Rebellion, and finally in 1911 with the Chinese Republican revolution, at a time when “Republican” was still roughly synonymous with socialist, anarchist and communist throughout most of Europe.
It so happens that much of the world’s high-quality opium was at that time grown in the Balkans — the group of countries between Italy and Turkey, south of the Austro-Hungarian empire which, like Germany, produced chemicals and pharmaceutical products. As soon as China’s renewed prohibition took effect, India, Turkey and that entire region went into a deep economic depression, riddled with wars and skirmishes, which gradually escalated into what we now call World War I.
You would hardly expect modern history books to call it Opium War III, but that is what it was. The Theodore Roosevelt and Taft administrations had labored for years to help China restore its prohibition of opiate imports, just they sought to exclude liquor from Indian reservations in the U.S.. The Woodrow Wilson Administration backed fanatical prohibitionist William Jennings Bryan in his efforts in furtherance of a multinational treaty to curb the production and sale of opium and its derivative chemicals–and of relatively harmless enjoyable drugs.
The upshot of all this was the Final Protocol of the Third International Opium Conference, 1914, signed at the Hague June 25, 1914. Germany had been pressured against her will to sign the document, but it was an open secret that she had no intention of ratifying or enforcing it, for that would mean giving up a lucrative enterprise. A way would have to be found to derail these efforts before a sufficient number of signatures were placed on the Opium Protocol. Three days later, a Bosnian youth shot an Archduke. The pretext was thus supplied, and war preparations replaced opium protocols in newspaper stories worldwide.
Germany and its allies lostthe war, had to hand over large amounts of “chemical drugs” as set forth in the surrender documents, and were forced by treaty to pay reparations for damages occasioned by the hostilities. Every schoolchild is taught that German conservatives resented this, and imagined Germany would have won had she not been stabbed in the back by liberal and Jewish entities. No schoolchild hears anything about the Opium Protocol signed three days before the Archduke’s assassination, but they are given to understand that Woodrow Wilson was a low-tariff liberal like any other Democrat at the time.
Germany’s Weimar Republic was also liberal in the sense that it did not protect Germany’s huge chemical and drug industries from competition and treaty enforcement. Political contributions found their way into the hands of belligerent Christian conservatives likely to frighten and intimidate Germany’s former enemies, and these worthies began churning out venomous propaganda demonizing “liberal” and “Jewish” financial interests.
Next… Similarities between American and German Conservatives in the 1920s.
Se corretas até esse ponto, as observações de Spooner seriam relevantes à chegada de estrangeiros ao país, uma das coisas que a Declaração de Jefferson procurava facilitar em 1776–só que não no papel de algozes contratados.
XIII
Com base em princípios gerais do direito e da razão, os compromissos que fazem os estrangeiros ao chegarem aqui e se “naturalizarem” (conforme é chamado), não têm valia. São assumidos para com ninguém; pois inexiste associação visível e autêntica ao qual pudessem se associar; ou com o qual pudessem eles, enquanto indivíduos, prestar boa fé. Desde que nunca foi formada, mediante contrato visível, lavrado, autêntico e voluntário, uma associação tal qual “o povo dos Estados Unidos”, inexiste, com base em princípios gerais do direito e da razão, tal associação. E todo compromisso supostamente feito para com tal associação ou organização é feito com o vento. Não se pode afirmar terem sido assumidos com qualquer pessoa, ou corporação de pessoas enquanto indivíduos, pois não há pessoa ou corporação de pessoas capaz de apresentar prova alguma de que os compromissos foram feitos para com eles enquanto indivíduos, e nem tampouco para qualquer associação da qual sejam membros. Dizer que existe um entendimento tácito de uma parte da população varonil do país, de se denominarem “o povo dos Estados Unidos”, a agir em conjunto para sujeitar ao seu domínio os demais cidadãos dos Estados Unidos, mantendo-se pessoalmente incógnitos por praticar à socapa o que fazem, é prova insuficiente, com base nos princípios gerais do direito e da razão, da existência de associação ou organização tal qual “o povo dos Estados Unidos”; ou, por conseguinte, provar que os compromissos dos estrangeiros são feitos para com tal associação.
Liliana Ayalde is probably still a complete unknown to Brazilian voters baffled by media showdowns between their twice-elected president and the lynch mob of televangelist politicians that assembled screaming for her impeachment following her reelection.
Indeed, the same sort of thing happened in Paraguay after that same American official had served as US ambassador there, shortly after her expulsion from Bolivia. From Paraguay, Ms. Ayalde went to the Caribbean to work for USAID, an American agency concerned primarily with sending prohibitionists with guns to exacerbate the frightening levels of “drug-fueled” crime and associated violence. These are things that never existed in the Caribbean before fanatical American Christians began shooting up the place. In January of 1931, Puerto Rico was demanding an end to American prohibition. The Supreme Court there refused to prosecute rum smugglers, and Republican President Herbert Hoover elected to personally travel to the island to bully justices into enforcing that alien law causing alcohol-fueled crime to skyrocket as the island economy collapsed. This, under the First Amendment, is the “free exercise” of religious intolerance and the violence of law.
The recent 800% increase in Caribbean homicide rates accompanying stepped-up U.S.-imposed prohibition enforcement and civil asset forfeiture is as completely surprising to our representative for CICAD, GAFISUD, OPDAT, MERLDAT, INL, FinCEN and GMPL mentors as their attendant financial panics and depressions are to government agencies and their gun-toting agents. Nevertheless, she was promptly named US ambassador to Brazil as financial collapse and Occupy Wall Street protesters dominated the headlines in These States.
By truly amazing coincidence, unconvincing nationwide protests followed her arrival in Brazil, as Brazil’s President, other politicians and many industrialists discovered, to their horror, that the NSA had been tapping their telephones, and that many were suddenly under indictment on charges filed by local Federal Police. Brazilian evangelical politicians who support all United States efforts to have prohibitionist enlightenment raise drug prices for the childish-minded inhabitants of the banana republics were delighted to change the subject.
Where headlines once blared news of their own private airfields and helicopter-loads of cocaine, impeachment proceedings against the second-term president and boodling politicos and contractors from all 32 subsidized parties became the hot news items. That the prez is herself a former activist against the US-backed dictatorship and not at all popular among religious right-wing extremists is another one of those baffling coincidences so endemic to asset-forfeiture politics in the Western Hemisphere.
So,Mr. Newton Silva’s cartoon translates pretty directly from the Brazilian situation back to the American situation, as it stood before that particular prohibition-enforcement crisis was exported to the rest of the world. Grateful thanks.
Trabalhei como professor de inglês, e durante esse tempo todo o que mais me atiçava a curiosidade era querer descobrir por que as pessoas não conseguiam repetir com a pronúncia correta. Americano nato repete São Paulo como Sam Palo e acha bonito. Brasileiro da gema comete essa mesma categoria de erro sem se tocar. Nenhum dos dois percebe que está repetindo errado o que acaba de ouvir. Mas as crianças conseguem distinguir e discriminar as sutilezas. O mecanismo surpreende.
A revelação veio num artigo da Profª Janet Werker na Universidade de British Columbia no Canadá. Ela descobriu que todos nós somos ouvintes universais quando bebês mas adquirimos uma surdez seletiva aos 8 meses de idade. Esta surdez favorece os idiomas que ouvimos no cotidiano e desestimula ou exclui os sons alheios aos idiomas com os quais interagimos nessa etapa do crescimento. Assim, cada um se torna ouvinte nativo e teima em favorecer a sua língua materna.
Seu artigo mais importante, intitulado “Becoming a Native Listener“, apareceu na revista American Scientist, Volume 77, em 1989.
Quem tem mais de oito meses de idade perdeu a chance de tomar o caminho fácil e vai ter que treinar com uma certa intensidade durante pelo menos um ano.
Nunca antes na história da humanidade isso foi tão fácil quanto hoje, graças à física quântica e os transístores que resultaram da sua aplicação.
Basta vc aplicar um pouco de disciplina, pois o processo de discriminação que, quando bebê, levaria uns 3 meses, agora requer um ano de prática. Faça assim:
1. Compre um tocador de mp3 que funciona com pilha AAA, de preferência que tenha encaixe USB embutido. Procure headsets confortáveis, mais do que um, para trocar de vez em quando.
2. Baixe livros falados do Gutenberg.org e coloque no player.
3. Repita cada palavra de cada conto, concentrando na pronúncia perfeita. A pronúncia é o importante, compreensão vem depois, como em qualquer bebê.
Os mp3players que eu gosto são esse e esse outro da RCA. Qualquer modelo parecido permite que você pare a gravação para depois retomar – até mesmo quando trocar a bateria. É importante poder trocar a bateria.
Compre baterias recarregáveis para uso caseiro e descartáveis para viajar e como reserva. Com isso vc não só aprende inglês, como pode dominar várias matérias relevantes. Para quem já domina o básico, Audible.com oferece assinaturas de livros falados.
Mais tarde você aprenderá a converter vídeos do Youtube em mp3 e a cortar trechos e mudar o volume com softwares de áudio. Mas esse treinamento, ouvir e repetir, você deverá fazer com toda caminhada e nas refeições em vez de assistir televisão. Repare que todo esse processo é por áudio, sem leitura visual. Depois de dominar a pronúncia, fica mais fácil desapegar do sotaque e resistir a tentação de aplicar as regras idiomáticas erradas no ato de leitura de texto. O mundo inteiro se transforma numa sala de aula, mas com nítidas distinções entre os idiomas.
Se essa dica lhe for de alguma utilidade, por favor faça a obra de caridade de ensinar esse truque aos locutores “bilíngues” que gravam os anúncios de vôos e de saídas de ônibus nos aeroportos e nas rodoviárias. Pesquisa patrocinada pelo www.tradutoramericano.com
Uma das leis que Spooner mais criticava durante a ocupação militar dos latifúndios algodoeiros sulistas foi a que nomeava cobradores de impostos. Tamanha era a desconfiança federal neste ofício que os cargos vinham ouriçados de compromissos, com multas e penas de prisão se o cobrador embolsasse o dinheiro arrecadado em vez de entregá-lo aos mandantes federais.
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E é justamente por isso que os compromissos de todos os demais pretensos agentes deste bando secreto de assaltantes e assassinos são, sob os princípios básicos do direito e da razão, igualmente destituídos de qualquer obrigatoriedade. São compromissos para com ninguém, feitos apenas com o vento.
Os compromissos dos fiscais e agentes fazendários do bando são, nos princípios gerais do direito e da razão, de nenhuma valia. Fosse qualquer desses fiscais embolsar o dinheiro que arrecada, recusando-se a entregá-lo, os membros deste bando não teriam como dizer a ele: Arrecadaste esse dinheiro enquanto agente nosso, para as nossas finalidades; juraste entregá-lo a nós, ou a pessoa por nós designada. Nos traíste, e violaste a nossa fé.
Bastaria, como resposta, dizer-lhes:
Nunca vos conheci. Nunca se apresentaram a mim individualmente. Jamais fiz compromisso com vocês enquanto indivíduos. Podem ou não ser membros daquele bando secreto que designa agentes para assaltar e assassinar; porém cujo precavimento é tal que nem se identificam sequer aos seus agentes, nem àqueles aos quais seus agentes são incumbidos de assaltar. Se é que são membros daquele bando secreto, que designa agentes para praticar assassinatos e assaltos em seu benefício, não dispõem de prova de que alguma vez me encarregaram de praticar assaltos em seu benefício. Nunca os conheci individualmente, e portanto nunca prometi entregar-lhes a verba proveniente dos meus assaltos. Pratiquei os assaltos por conta própria e para o meu benefício. Se me julgaram tolo a ponto de permitir que se mantivessem às ocultas, utilizando a mim como instrumento seu para a rapina de terceiros; ou que assumiria todo o risco pessoal desses assaltos, pagando a vocês o saque, foram muito parvos. Conforme assumi todo o risco dos assaltos, cabem a mim todos os lucros.
Sumam!Pois além de pilantras, são otários. Se é que fiz compromisso algum, o tenho com outros e não vocês. Mas na verdade, não fiz com ninguém, apenas com o vento. Veio de encontro aos meus propósitos à época. Possibilitou que me apossasse do dinheiro que queria, e com o qual agora pretendo ficar. Se esperavam que o entregasse a vocês, dependeram apenas da honra que dizem prevalecer entre os ladrões. Entendem agora quão débil essa suposição. Estou confiante de que terão o juízo de não repetir esse erro. Se é que me cabe algum dever nesta questão, seria de devolver o dinheiro àqueles que dele desfalquei; e não de entregá-lo a pilantras como vocês.
States forty years before, when Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Commission and Sherman Anti-Trust Acts.” Herbert Hoover, 1952
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