Buy gold and silver. Stash with cash in coffee cans. Bury same in your backyard.
Such was the advice people from the old country gave their American-born offspring as the Great Depression metastasized.
There’s a bad moon on the rise. The moonhowlers are back from the dead and ready to party. Smoot and Hawley ride the Kondratieff Wave once again.
SMITING SMOOT AND KEEL-HAULING HAWLEY. The infamous duo sponsored the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff.
“Not since Herbert Hoover has a US president been so down on free trade, and Hoover was the man who signed off on Smoot and Hawley’s bill,” wrote London Guardian correspondent Dominic Rushe last Sunday.
“Hawley, an Oregon congressman and a professor of history and economics, became a stock figure in the textbooks of his successors thanks to his partnership with the lean, patrician figure of Senator Reed Smoot,” Rushe noted.
“Before he was shackled to Hawley for eternity, Smoot was more famous for his Mormonism and his abhorrence of bawdy books, a disgust that inspired the immortal headline ‘Smoot Smites Smut’ after he attacked the importation of Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover, Robbie Burn’s more risqué poems and their like as ‘worse than opium Š I would rather have a child of mine use opium than read these books.’
“But it was imports of another kind that secured Smoot and Hawley’s place in infamy,” Rushe noted.
Economists and we of lesser intellectual and moral gravitas have been debating the impact ever since. Many assert that the Great Depression was made worse and elongated thanks to Smoot-Hawley.
The law arguably kept the US economy in the doldrums until WW2 pulled us out.
Now comes Tsar Donald Vladimirovitch Trump with patrician protectionism promising instant replay.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Twice.
A dozen years ago, I wrote about Nikolai Kondratieff (1892-1938), a Russian who identified world economic cycles of roughly 75 years.
“We are now at the edge of the fabled Kondratieff Wave which forecasts a cyclical tsunami, a major economic contraction followed by a flood of widespread destruction,” I wrote on 29 May 2005.
Presidents Bush the Lesser and Obama stuck stopgap fingers in the dyke but the continuing sideways slide helped install the Orange Tsar into his very white White House.
Our big banks remain the biggest casinos in the world, funded with low-interest money that they loan back to the government at a profit, with any losses insured by taxpayers.
The wave looms. Bury your coffee cans deep.
IMMORTALITY. Smoot and Hawley have their immortality, I’ll take another.
“Thank you for (last week’s) editorial on wonder! You articulated exactly my thoughts over the years. I cut out the sentence about mystery, surprise and fear and put it on my refrigerator! Thought you’d like to know you really touched my soul!”
So wrote a Sparks reader named Karen.
I’ll proudly hang with the refrigerator magnets rather than the smutty strumpetry of Smoot and Hawley.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Barbano is a 48-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com. E-mail <barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us> Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988.
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