Wisdom for today from legal decisions of the Dirty Thirties

Americans and Canadians are going through hard times. The slowdown of business and other activity caused by the Wuhan flu pandemic sent our economies into a tailspin, from which we have not yet recovered, no matter what President Brandon and Prime Minister McBlackface tell you. Not only have we not recovered, but we are teetering on the brink of recession. 

More people are working than was the case two years ago, but more people are not working, too. Some folks, having discovered that our liberal governments will pay them not to work, have simply dropped out of the work force. Thus the same liberal governments are now telling us we need to import hundreds of thousands of third-world migrants to meet "staffing challenges".

Bidenflation has pushed prices up to the point where a lot "working poor" can barely afford to drive to work. The federal governments of both countries desperately need more revenue to cover the deficits they incur by shovelling money out to the special interest groups they rely on to keep them in power. But they are afraid to raise taxes, so the liberal cry today is "Make the rich pay their share...and more!"

And there is civil unrest, notably in Canada where Mr Socks invoked the Emergencies Act (aka Police State Act, aka Son of War Measures Act) to quash last winter's Freedom Convoy by, among other draconian measures, freezing dissenters' bank accounts without notice! That'll teach them to cling to their "unacceptable views"!

The United States went through a similar bad patch during the Great Recession of the 1930s. The Presidents of those days were mile aheads of both Demented Joe and the Emperor of Canuckistan in arrogating to their governments unprecedented powers of taxation and repression of dissent. 

Walt wonders if M Trudeau's handlers studied President Herbert Hoover's response to the 1932 march on Washington of the Bonus Army -- 1000s of war veterans demanding the bonuses which they had been promised at the end of WWI, which had never been paid. This is how it went down.

On 28 July 1932, Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the "Bonus Expeditionary Force" removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shot at the protestors. Two veterans were wounded and later died. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the U.S. Army to clear the marchers' campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.

Such heavy-handed tactics became the norm under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used whatever means he could to force Americans -- particularly rich Americans and their businesses, large and small -- to submit to his New Deal. Those who dissented had the G-men sicced on them. After all, Roosevelt declaimed, this is an emergency!

One business which FDR's Treasury Dept. tried to coerce was a firm owned by three Jewish brothers who butchered chickens. They balked at Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act, which allowed the President to regulate certain industries by distributing authority to develop codes of conduct among business groups and boards in those industries -- i.e.to control private businesses. The Schecters fought the feds all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in their favour. (A.L.A. Schecter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935)) 

In an opinion authored by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the unanimous Court exercised a check on the Legislative and Executive branches of government, declaring the Act and actions of the President an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority. 

SCOTUS ruled that the President cannot be allowed to have unbridled control to make whatever laws he believes to be necessary to achieve a certain goal. Justice Hughes wrote: "Extraordinary conditions may call for extraordinary remedies. But the argument necessarily stops short of an attempt to justify action which lies outside the sphere of constitutional authority. Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional powers." 

Here's another piece of wisdom from a famous judge, which may give some comfort to President Trump as he fights to avoid a too-public audit of his tax returns. In Helvering v. Gregory, 293 U.S. 465 (1935).69 F.2d 809 (2d Cir. 1934), Judge Billings Learned Hand, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, ruled that: "Anyone may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.... To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant."

The emphasis is mine. For some 65 years, beginning with the Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren too long (1953-1969), the Supreme Court was dominated by judicial activists intent on rewriting the laws of the USA, including the Constitution itself, to bring about "social justice" and equality of result, as opposed to the equality of opportunity which was the aim of the founding fathers. That is still the mindset of the Supreme Court of Canada.

However, the times they are a-changin'. Ordinary people, real people on both sides of the World's Longest Open Border are waking up to the fact that the liberal democratic state of Roosevelt-Johnson-Clinton-Biden and King-Pearson-Trudeau (Senior and Junior) is not their friend, but their enemy. Walt says: be like the Schecter brothers -- fight back! You can fight and beat city hall!

The peaceful protest the liberals don't want you to know about

Ed. here. It's been hot here. Walt has been sleeping it off asleep in the shade of the old apple tree, and I hesitated to rouse him from his torpor, but this space must be filled, so I locked him in the shed until he produced... this....

I am a country boy at heart. I grew up in a farming community, and after decades of wandering am now settled in a region which still has many working farms. The mayor of the city and county of Fort Mudge seems determined to see all the farmland paved over, but hey, that's progress... right?! I don't know where they think our food will come from, but I do know I'm not the first to say that.

I have great sympathy, then, for the 1000s of Dutch farmers who for the last couple of weeks have been mounting a peacful protest -- really, not being sarcastic -- at the plans of the oh-so-green Dutch government to fight the climate change "crisis" by reducing the country's agricultural output by a third. This will mean slaughtering large numbers of dairy cattle, since, besides milk, they produce enormous quantities of methane, nitrous oxide, ammonia and other greenhouse gases.

So,  inspired perhaps by this spring's Freedom Convoy in Canada, the good boers of Holland are clogging up the roads and highways with their tractors, and occasionally dumping the contents of their manure spreaders in front of public buildings.

"How dairy you!" Geddit? Right back at ya, Greta Thunberg, the patron saint of eco-alarmism, whose apocalyptic rantings and warped ideology have caused the Netherlands parliament to adopt a Green New Deal even more destructive and insane than those being inflicted on North Americans by Crazy Joe and Blackie McBlackface.

You probably haven't heard or read much about the Dutch farmers' protests, because the lickspittle media doesn't like to give any publicity to any pushback agsinst the ideologies of the liberal elites. I'm talking about the kind of sentiment encapsulated in a recent statement by Just In Trudeau's acolyte, Chrystia Freeland, that the spike in gas prices is good because it makes us focus on the need to switch to electric vehicles!

In "These farmers are fighting for us all", posted on Spiked Online yesterday, Brendan O'Neill wrote that although the Dutch farmers' protest had received some coverage outside of the Netherlands, the reports are running "below the fold" (as editors say), because "This is a people’s revolt against eco-tyranny, against the modern elite’s determination to slash 'harmful' emissions with little regard for the consequences such action will have for working people and poor people. 

"To the formers of elite consensus opinion, for whom environmentalism is tantamount to a religion, the sight of pesky little people rebelling against green diktats is too much to bear. So they either demonize these dissenters, as is happening in the Netherlands, or they ignore them in the hope they will go away, as is happening outside the Netherlands."

The slogan pictured, translated, reads: Out farmers, our future. Walt sez, three cheers and a tiger for the good boers of the Netherlands. Honk honk!

Freedom Rallies against leftist misrule break out in... wait for it...

Seems it's not only in Canuckistan that people are fed up with leftist governments that promise the sun, moon and stars but deliver only inflation, shortages, homelessness and ever-increasing government control of every aspect of the lives of struggling citizens. 

Walt's focus today shifts to the island state of Sri Lanka. Thanks to a decades-old religious connection, I have several friends (and two agents) there, from whom I'm getting disturbing reports of protests over the nation's severe economic crisis.

Just like Canada's "leader" Just In Trudeau did, when confronted by the truckers' Freedom Convoy, Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa recently declared a state of emergency as angry citizens demand that something be done about rising prices, shortages of essentials and rolling power cuts. 

When mostly peaceful protests turned violent, the government implemented a countrywide curfew, and placed a block on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp. (Does any of this sound familiar to readers in Canada? It should!)  The chairthingy of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission said the measure was carried out on instruction from the Defence Ministry and aimed to "maintain calm" (read: silence dissent).

In the central city of Kandy (home to the Temple of the Tooth), police used tear gas to disperse university students and other young protesters, including our Agent 35. Inspector Buruva of the local constabulary said about 750 people were gassed, but none were arrested. So that's all right, then.

In Colombo, the capital city, around two dozen opposition leaders protested at police barricades near Independence Square, some shouting "Gota(baya) go home!" They say the roots of the crisis, the worst in several decades, lie in economic mismanagement by successive governments that amassed huge budget shortfalls and a current account deficit. Notice the sign that reads "How much debt are we really in?" That would be a good (if rather polite) question for President Brandon!

The crisis was accelerated by deep tax cuts President Rajapaksa promised during the 2019 election campaign, which were enacted months before the Covid pandemic, which wiped out parts of Sri Lanka’s economy. 

Opposition leader Eran Wickramaratne called the curfew and other restrictions "unacceptable" Others stood in small groups outside their homes or gathered in the street, some holding handwritten anti-government banners or waving the national flag.

A student at the University of Colombo told Reuters, "This government, we do not want them anymore. They have had years and years to show us that they could do change but there is nothing. The situation has just gotten worse by the day. We really need a change, we are stripped of our basic rights...people are fed up!"

How much longer can the anger of fed-up citizens of the AABC countries (America, Australia, Britain and Canada) be contained? How high does the price of gas have to go... how much do taxes have to be increased to pay for the "reparations" and the redistribution of wealth... how bad do things have to get before the sheeple of the Anglosphere do likewise? 

If CNN had existed in 1941

Any comment would be superfluous. Thanks and a big salute to Agent 35. Noli illegitimi te carborundum!