http://www.illuminati-news.com/who-sunk-the-titanic.htm
http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2008/07/roman-catholic-church-cocaine.html
http://www.illuminati-news.com/marijuana-conspiracy.htm
http://www.despatch.cth.com.au/Misc/Graham3.htm
http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/mj004.htm
http://www.whale.to/b/morgan.html
Alcohol and Petroleum
“In 1859, near the peak of domestic industrial hemp production, another event occurred that would soon change both the politics and economics of U.S. industry: the drilling of the first oil well. Three years later, a federal tax was levied on alcohol to help pay for the Civil War. Though the target of the tax was purportedly beverage alcohol, it made fuel and industrial uses of alcohol prohibitively expensive—a condition which persisted, despite the repeal of the tax in 1906, through alcohol Prohibition from 1920 to 1933. The result was exceptionally fast growth in the use of petroleum feedstocks in first fuel and then plastics. Petroleum-derived textiles diminished the market for domestic hemp even further.”
– March 2008 Reason Foundation Study on Hemp, Illegally Green: Environmental Costs of Hemp Prohibition. Policy Study 367, by Skaidra Smith-Heisters
It is interesting to note that the reason biofuels aren’t as common today as they should be has to do with a combination of events that began in the 1859. At the time of the Civil War the government placed a tax on liquor to help pay for the war. Because ethanol, which is made from plants, contains alcohol, it too was taxed. At the same time the first petroleum wells were being drilled. A common petroleum fuel of the day, kerosene, was free from alcohol, and couldn’t get people drunk. So it escaped this alcohol taxation, and its popularity increased, even though it smelled horrible, and was not a clean-burning fuel like hemp oil or ethanol.
The alcohol tax was finally eliminated in 1906, but by this time petroleum fuels had taken over the market, and the electric light bulb was replacing the use of kerosene lamps. When ethanol use began to increase for motors, the government just happened to impose Prohibition on alcohol with the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was passed on December 18, 1917, ratified on January 16, 1919, and was set into law on January 16, 1920, once again killing the ethanol/biofuel industry. The enforcement of this law led to a whole underground culture in which a crime element flourished as they made loads of money by providing booze to those who wanted it. This, of course, was not what some people had expected. When prohibition became law, some municipalities thought it would be the end of most crime, and some sold their jails.
For several decades those in the temperance movement had been manipulating the government into passing laws against alcohol. This was only a continuation of various movements to outlaw alcohol based on the belief that alcohol was against God’s will. Throughout American history such laws were backed by strict religious groups, such as the Puritans, Amish, Quakers, Shakers, Calvinists, and Baptists, and, after they were established in the 1800s, the Mormons.
In 1784 a prominent doctor in Pennsylvania named Benjamin Rush gave the opinion that excessive alcohol consumption lead to physical and psychological ruin. His opinion was in response to the problems alcohol consumption was causing in society, and especially among those in poverty or who were committing crimes. Using his opinion, in 1789 a group of Connecticut farmers formed a group in support of reducing the use of alcohol.
Another doctor, this one named Billy J. Clark, started a small group in New York in 1808 to support their own struggles with alcohol. Other abstinence or temperance groups formed in various parts of the country, with some being based on mutual support to help the local community members, and others being based on religious beliefs, and some a mix of the two. Those that were stringently religious in nature became the most aggressive, preaching against alcohol with religious zeal and using terminology that related alcohol with ungodliness.
A scowling Presbyterian minister by the name of Lyman Beecher became well known for preaching against the use of alcohol from his pulpit in New England. After Beecher graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1797, he became a pastor in East Hampton, Long Island, where he spoke out against alcohol use and labeled the Jeffersonian Democracy political movement as ungodly. In 1810, Beecher moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, where he preached Calvinism, a strict and conservative religion that was opposed to alcohol consumption. In 1813, he helped to organize the Connecticut Society for the Reformation of Morals, which worked to rid the society of gambling, prostitution, alcohol sales, and drunkenness. Upon moving to Boston, where he was minister of the Hanover Church, Beecher preached against the spread of Unitarianism. In 1825 he helped found the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, which was backed by a flourishing network of conservative churches with the goal of ridding society of everything they considered to be immoral, and especially alcohol consumption, gambling, and prostitution. Apparently Beecher wasn’t against all fun things. He was the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and 12 other children. The first 8 were from his first marriage. After being widowed, he married again and had four more children. After that wife died, he married a third time. Upon moving to Ohio in 1832, he became pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati. Also in Ohio, Beecher was a founder of the Lane Theological Seminary, which was involved in turning out ministers who would move west to spread Protestantism. Beecher’s ministers carried his religious booklet, “A Plea for the West.” It was at the Lane Theological Seminary in 1834 that debates were held to discuss the issue of slavery. After 18 nights of discussions, some joined the abolitionist movement. However, Beecher was against abolitionism and refused to allow Black students into his seminary. He was also against Catholicism. A talk he gave against Catholicism in Boston in 1834 lead to the burning of the convent of the Catholic Ursuline Sisters. Back in Ohio, Beecher was accused of heresy for his evangelistic tactics. After being exonerated by the Presbyterian Church, he spent his last years with his family in Brooklyn, New York, where he died in 1850.
While Beecher had used the pulpit and network of churches in New England to organize temperance groups throughout New England, there were plenty of other preachers and societies at the forefront of the temperance movement, both in New England, and in other states.
In 1934, the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance changed its name to the American Temperance Society and continued its moral righteousness crusade, complete with pamphlets and public gatherings, to rid the country of alcohol consumption. In the following decade the membership of the American Temperance Society grew to hundreds of thousands throughout the states. Throughout the 1800s, a number of other anti-alcohol groups had formed. Among them were the Anti-Saloon League, the Sons of Temperance, and the Independent Order of Good Templars.
The temperance movement in Britain had also been organized since about the 1830s. The Band of Hope was founded there in 1847. The temperance movement also spread to other countries, including to Australia and New Zealand. Basically, wherever the religious fervor of radical Christianity spread, and wherever they organized to profess their shame and guilt and their so-called high moral standards onto others, so too did the temperance movement. Apparently people were really into having scornful preachers preach hellfire and brimstone, and paid to attend the meetings. As today, in the 1800s, preachers projecting the right level of shame and damnation to guilt-ridden churchgoers could make a good living at it.
Among the rumors the temperance movement spread in the U.S. was that those who drank too much could be engulfed in flames, a result of spontaneous combustion. Another rumor was that alcoholics could set themselves on fire when they lit a cigarette or pipe. Another was that alcohol turned blood into water, which filled the lungs and caused people to drown. Still another was that many types of alcoholic drinks were made of fermented insects, which gave the alcohol its color and smell.
The temperance movement in the state of Maine was lead by Neal S. Dow, who was elected mayor of Portland in April 1851. The product of a Quaker home, Dow founded the Maine Temperance Society in 1827. After failing in earlier attempts, Dow was successful in getting the Maine legislature to pass a bill against the sale of alcohol in 1851, and got the governor, John Hubbard, to sign it into law on June 2nd. The law stated that alcohol was illegal to manufacture and sell in the state of Maine, with the exceptions being that it could be used for “medicinal, mechanical, or manufacturing purposes.” By 1855, twelve other states had passed alcohol Prohibition laws. Dow became known as “The Napoleon of Temperance.” Two months after the bill was signed into law, Dow was the lead speaker at the National Temperance Convention. He had lost his reelection bid for mayor. With the backing of the Republican Party, he won the mayor’s seat again by a slim margin in 1855. It was during his second stint as mayor that the Portland Rum Riots broke out on June 2, 1855. This happened after it was revealed that Dow had authorized the purchase of alcohol that was to be used for “medicinal or mechanical” purposes. Although he claimed that the alcohol was for distribution to doctors and pharmacists, a protest occurred outside of the building where the alcohol was being stored. As night set in, fights broke out and Dow called for the militia, which fired on the crowd, killing a man named John Robbins, and injuring several other protestors. Dow was tried and acquitted of improperly acquiring alcohol. Maine repealed its Prohibition law in 1856. In the 1860s, Dow co-founded the National Temperance Society and Publishing House.
The laws of course didn’t stop the sale or consumption of alcohol in any of the “dry” states. Personal distilleries became common, as did trips to purchase alcohol from bordering states. Homemade “bathtub gin,” became popular, and also lead to many people becoming poisoned, and some dieing. Making wine at home was as easy as could be. The Catholic Church was allowed to keep using it in their ceremonies, which gave winemakers an excuse to label their wine as “sacramental” or “communion” wine, even though it was meant for consumption by anyone who wanted it. Despite the laws, some saloons never stopped selling the stuff.
The anti-alcohol movement gained steam as the National Prohibition Party was formed in 1869, and the Anti-Saloon League was founded in 1893. In 1880, Neal S. Dow was the National Prohibition Party candidate for president. He came in fourth.
In the later1800s, the temperance movement was largely driven by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as well as by self-serving ministers who preached against alcohol.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Movement was founded in 1880. It was said to have been organized to protect women from abusive husbands, to improve the state of the poor, and to eliminate public drunkenness and alcohol-fueled violence. But it became much more than that. Many religious fanatics became members, and used their association to preach their moral concepts to anyone who would listen, and to many of those who didn’t want to. The organization went on to form the Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, with the goal of getting schools to teach against alcohol consumption, which they did by lobbying for legislation in every state of the union.
Industrialist John D. Rockefeller took such an interest in the temperance movement to outlaw alcohol that he donated an estimated $25 million to the cause. But, it wasn’t so much that Rockefeller wanted to stop people from getting drunk. Even though he liked people to think otherwise, it was known that Rockefeller was a drinker. Instead, he wanted to eliminate alcohol from the market for other reasons.
In 1870, Rockefeller had founded Standard Oil Company, which was a petroleum fuel producer based in Cleveland, Ohio. Much of what they produced was kerosene, which was used in lamps. The product line of Standard Oil quickly expanded. In 1872 the combustion engine was invented, and it ran on ethanol (plant alcohol). It could also be run on petroleum gasoline.
In 1880 it was Rockefeller’s money that got Kansas to add a Prohibition Amendment to its constitution.
In 1892 the diesel engine was invented, and it ran on plant oils. It could also be run on petroleum oil. While kerosene lamps became less popular with the invention and use of the electric light bulb, Standard Oil saw the demand for engine fuel increase as the use of motorized vehicles became popular.
Using his political connections, Rockefeller manipulated the markets to create a monopoly in oil refineries. This was another reason why Rockefeller wanted alcohol out of the picture. His interest in getting alcohol off the market was about eliminating the ethanol as a competition as an engine fuel. Through his Standard Oil Company, and then through investments in other industries, Rockefeller became the richest person in the world. Sometime between 1910 and 1920, it is estimated that he became the world’s first billionaire.
Rockefeller was a supporter of the legendary temperance advocate named Carrie A. Nation, a large woman who was known to carry a hatchet into saloons and destroy the bar and the alcohol stock.
Born Carry Moore, Nation was a product of a troubled family with a history of mental illness ruled over by a mother who is said to have experienced phases where she thought she was Queen Victoria. Because of her mother’s mental issues, Carry was often tended to by the family slaves and lacked a formal education. On November 21, 1867 she married Dr. Charles Gloyd, but separated even before their daughter, Charlein, was born. Gloyd, who was an alcoholic, died in 1869.
In 1877, Carry married a lawyer and minister named David A. Nation who was 19 years her senior. After her marriage, Carry began using the name Carrie A. Nation. After a cotton farm they had purchased in Texas failed, the Nation’s moved to Medicine Lodge, Kansas. In their new town, her husband became a preacher as Carrie ran a hotel. It was also where Carrie founded a branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
After organizing her branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the group began holding protests outside of local saloons. As the group got more creative with their protests, they learned that they got more attention from newspapers. Eventually Nation began bringing an organ with her to serenade saloon patrons with leering gospel lyrics meant to shame drinkers into sobriety and the doorway of her husband’s church.
On June 5, 1990, Nation had what she considered to be a message from God to, “Take something in your hands, and throw at these places in Kiowa and smash them.” She interpreted this as meaning that she needed to damage the saloons in the town of Kiowa. At first she and her followers brought rocks with them to shatter the bottles of booze in the saloons the raided. Being arrested for her protests didn’t stop her. At a half-joking suggestion of her minister husband, Nation began carrying a hatchet and used it to shatter the bottles in the saloons while her followers stood by singing church hymns.
To raise funds, Nation went on speaking tours, sold souvenir hatchets and publicity photos, and published a pamphlet called The Smasher’s Mail, and a newspaper named The Hatchet.
After raiding saloons in downtown Kansas City, in April 1901 Nation was fined $500 and banned from entering the city. Her husband also divorced her.
After collapsing while giving a speech in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, Nation died on June 9, 1911 and was buried in Belton, Missouri. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union paid for her headstone, which reads, “Faithful to the cause of Prohibition, she hath done what she could.”
Those behind the temperance movement pressured school systems and textbook publishers to include anti-alcohol messages in their lessons. By the late 1800s anti-alcohol lessons were required in schools around the country using text approved by the Scientific Temperance Instruction movement. In the early 1900s they stepped up their efforts to outlaw alcohol throughout the country. While some of the claims they made about what alcohol could do to a person’s health were based on truth, the temperance activists greatly distorted the facts.
“The liquor traffic is the most fiendish, corrupt and hell-soaked institution that ever crawled out of the slime of the eternal pit. It is the open sore of this land.”
– Reverend Mark A. Matthews, Seattle, 1909
Michigan passed a law on May 1, 1918, that outlawed alcohol. They later changed their state law to make the fourth liquor offense punishable with a life sentence. In 1929 the dangerous person they slammed with this charge was 48-year-old, whiskey-drinking, moonshine-selling mother of ten, Etta May Miller. This put both parents of those ten children in prison because Etta’s husband Alvin was also in prison for violating the Prohibition laws. On Etta’s appeal the arresting officer confessed that the police planted the liquor found in the Miller home.
“Our only regret is that the woman was not sentenced to life imprisonment before her ten children were born. When one has violated the Constitution four times, he or she should be segregated from society to prevent the production of subnormal offspring.”
– The General Secretary of the Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, on the conviction of Etta May Miller
The temperance leaders were known to be anti-immigration, anti-European, anti-Black, anti-Mexican, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic. And they were influential in getting laws passed that agreed with their so-called high morals. They did this by pressuring voters and candidates, sending massive letters and telegraphs to Congress with falsified signatures, and publishing and handing out literature. They dressed children in white and used them to help hold public protests against alcohol at the places where it was sold. They testified at Congressional subcommittee hearings, which entered their words into the Congressional Record. They took copies of this and distributed it as factual information when they knew they were not truthful in their testimony. Their actions were key in passage of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Benefiting most from Prohibition was the petroleum industry, because if alcohol became illegal, so too would ethanol. The Mafia, “organized crime” organizations, and those who otherwise worked against the laws, also benefited as they took control of the underground market to supply alcohol to anyone who wanted it.
While the U.S. Pharmacopoeia omitted alcohol as a medicine in 1916, alcohol was still a part of many prescription drugs, and this too provided reason to manufacture alcohol, which then ended up in the underground market.
Companies permitted to create alcohol for industrial purposes, such as for use in paints and cosmetics, also got in on the game by making alcohol for the underground market. The Prohibition Bureau required industrial alcohol to be uningestable, thus much of the industrial alcohol had been mixed with poisons or made to taste horrible so that people wouldn’t drink it. Some people did drink the poisoned alcohol and suffered the consequences, including some who died.
Many people learned to make alcohol after it became unavailable for sale, and this caused the deaths of some who created and/or drank lethal concoctions. Some companies sold personal distilleries, which weren’t illegal.
“The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.”
– Albert Einstein, 1921
Private but illegal clubs called speakeasies opened where visitors could get drunk, and perhaps gamble as well as get laid. Boats took people out to ships anchored off the coasts where the people could gamble, dance, and drink. The ships also functioned as safe havens for those smuggling alcohol in from Europe and Canada. Other smugglers used “fast crab” boats to bring the smuggled goods to shore, or left them just off shore marked by buoys for the onshore contact to gather later. In other words, people continued to drink alcohol.
Al Capone was on the rise in Chicago, and alcohol Prohibition got him there. His clubs served alcohol, provided jazz entertainment, and became havens for gambling and prostitution. As his wealth grew, so did the government’s focus on him. But he knew he had them under his control. After the famous 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which resulted in the death of six men, Capone’s empire spread throughout the Midwest. This is because the target of the attack, George “Bug” Moran, left the region. During the depression, Capone’s organization ran soup kitchens that did more for Chicago’s poor than the government. The back rooms also functioned as parlors for Capone’s various business interests. He knew that thousands of hungry poor people would not put up with police raiding kitchens giving out free food. He also had his hands in the pockets of various city officials.
Hoover directed Andrew Mellon to get Capone. As U.S. Treasury Secretary, Mellon was over both the Prohibition Unit and the Internal Revenue Service. Using the now legendary Prohibition Agent, Eliot Ness, and his mythically flawless (but realistically corrupt) team of “Untouchables,” the Prohibition Unit worked to close down Capone’s alcohol stills and breweries. Using U.S. Attorney E.Q. Johnson, the IRS got a warrant to seize Capone’s financial records.
The government was finally able to arrest Capone after finding his records to be both incomplete and inconsistent. He was charged with 22 counts of tax evasion, and thousands of violations of the Volstead Act. In 1931, Capone was convicted of tax evasion. He was fined $500,000 and given a severe sentence of 11 years. After his appeals failed, his sentence began in 1932.
While the very public conviction of Capone brought people to fear the IRS, the public also viewed the government’s frame-up job of Capone to be somewhat ludicrous. The Hoover administration was not well liked. His handling of a protest held by tens of thousands of World War I veterans in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 1932 further damaged his reputation. A U.S. military Calvary, led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, was ordered to shoot at the protestors. Several protestors were killed.
The Capone trial also further damaged the reputation of Andrew Mellon. Already unpopular because of his handling of events (including Prohibition) that led to the Stock Market Crash, he left is position as Secretary of the Treasury on February 12, 1932. As I detail in other parts of this book, Mellon was a key figure in the destruction of the hemp industry. During the Roosevelt administration, Mellon was investigated for tax fraud.
After Eliot Ness moved to Cleveland, Ohio, he became the Director of Public Safety in 1935, which put him in charge of both the police and fire departments. Ness worked to modernize the departments while cleaning up the city’s corruption and crime. He also kept busy working to break down Cleveland’s established mob network. From 1935 to 1938 the police department was working to figure out who was leaving dismembered torsos in various parts of the city. The serial murders remain unsolved and are the topic of the 2001 book, “Torso.” During this period, Ness, the former and legendary Prohibition Agent, was known for his public displays of drunken behavior. The Great Lakes Brewing Company named a beer after him. The Brewpub bar has never repaired the bullet holes Ness shot into the bar. His personal life was unraveling and he divorced his wife in 1938. After leaving his job in 1941, in 1942 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked to break up prostitution rings largely supported by military personnel. Moving back to Cleveland to work for a safe company, Ness failed in a run for mayor in 1947. At age 54, Ness died in 1957 of a heart attack.
While suffering from syphilis, Capone was released early from prison and was treated in a Baltimore hospital. He spent his last years in Palm Island, Florida, where he died of a heart attack on January 25, 1947.
On the East coast, the prohibition laws helped the Kennedy family to become richer. Joe Kennedy, who was already rich from banking, various business investments, and stock and commodity trading, apparently sold bootlegged and smuggled imported liquor during Prohibition. Some say he didn’t. But, he sure had accumulated a large stash of liquor during Prohibition, which he sold after Prohibition ended. In addition to his dabbling in the stock market, during which he practiced what we is now illegal and what we now call “insider trading,” he invested money in Chicago real estate, including in the country’s largest office building, the Merchandise Mart; in a Florida racetrack; in Hollywood studios; and the Pantages Theatre chain. His involvement with actress Gloria Swanson is legendary. He also helped Franklin Roosevelt win the election. When Roosevelt was asked why he appointed a crook like Joe Kennedy to head and straighten out the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Roosevelt is said to have replied, “Takes one to catch one.” When Prohibition ended, Kennedy’s company, Sumerset Importers, had signed deals to become the exclusive American importers of Gordon’s Gin and Dewar’s Scotch. Kennedy was known for saying outlandish things about Jews. Those comments and his lack of support for Britain during WWII dashed his hopes of becoming the U.S. President. He was an early supporter of Joe McCarthy, who once dated Joe’s daughter, Patricia. Robert Kennedy once served as a senior staff member on McCarthy’s investigations subcommittee. In 1957, Fortune magazine estimated Kennedy’s wealth to be in the range of $200 to $400 million, which meant he was among the richest people in the world. His fortune, and his political, business, and underworld contacts helped get his son, John, elected to the White House. Joe wanted his first son, Joe Jr., to become president, and he was grooming him for the position. But Joe Jr. was killed carrying out a bombing mission in 1944.
From its beginning to its end, Prohibition was a national disaster. Like many laws, it made the poor people poorer, and rich people richer. While the people were suffering from the nation’s ailing economy, the government was spending hundreds of millions on enforcing the Prohibition laws. The costs included building jails. They included hiring, and training officers, who often became corrupt by the easy money to be made in making and selling liquor, or protecting those who did. Many police officers, politicians, and government workers got involved in smuggling and bootlegging ventures. Unfortunately, people, including many police officers, died as a result of the laws against alcohol. Local governments lost out on tax revenue that would otherwise have been flowing in if alcohol had remained legal. Prohibition was an enormous waste of money and lives.
“People of wealth, business men, and professional men and their families, and, perhaps, the higher paid working men and their families, are drinking in large numbers in quite frank disregard of the declared policy of the National Prohibition Act.”
– Commission of Enquiry in their report, 1931. The eleven-member Commission included the president of Radcliff, Ada Comstock, and had been appointed by the Hoover administration to study the Prohibition laws. Hoover worked to hold this information until after his election so that it would not interfere with his support from the “dry voters.”
Shades of the end of Prohibition came early. On May 4, 1923, the governor of New York, Al Smith, repealed the New York Enforcement Act. If the federal government wanted the bootleggers busted in New York, they would have to do it themselves, but that task was also considered to be too expensive for the feds. Having the state of New York fail to enforce the Prohibition law was seen as a major step toward failure of Prohibition.
“Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it, or even diminish it.”
– Mark Twain, in a letter to the Alta Californian newspaper, May 28, 1867
“There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.”
– Texas Senator Marris Shepard, who co-authored the Prohibition Amendment
By the time alcohol Prohibition was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment on December 5, 1933, the petroleum industry had gained a stronghold on supplying fuel for planes, trains, trucks, tractors, ships, and automobiles. Ethanol and plant-based fuels were not being invested in. Fossil fuels and the billionaires who ran the companies that supplied them ruled the market. This set the stage for the massive fossil fuel pollution and subsequent problems the world is experiencing today.
The dependence on petroleum turned the U.S. away from being an agrarian (largely a farming and rural) country and into being an industrial country.
Plant fuels remain easy to produce. But the government keeps its laws preventing the best fuel plant, hemp, from being farmed on U.S. soil.
Those who would be able to grow hemp would be able to experience the great benefit from it – if industrial hemp farming were legal.
It should be clear to anyone knowing the facts about hemp that it must be included in any serious discussion about getting society off fossil fuels. This is some sample text. You are using FCKeditor.
Copyright © 2009 by John McCabe
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