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Smoot, smut and stash
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 1-31-2017 Sparks Tribune / Expansions in blue

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. I heard it from my mother and I'm passing it along to you.

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.

The two Republicans started out with piece of agricultural protectionist legislation but by the time it hit President Hoover's desk, it was festooned with penalties for thousands of other products. Henry Ford hisself almost convinced Hoover not to sign it but he did so to his everlasting ignominy.

"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, a Mormon apostle known as the 'sugar senator' for his protectionist stance towards Utah’s sugar beet industry," 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 Burns' more risqué poems and their like as 'worse than opium … 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.

Just as Saint Ronald Reagan scores eternal conservative cred for many initiatives started by the still-scapegoated Jimmy Carter, President Hoover started programs that President Franklin Roosevelt continued.

Alas and alack, Hoover was hamstrung by his secretary of the treasury, Andrew W. Mellon, who felt that government had no place tinkering with the economy.

Legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith called Mellon "a passionate advocate of inaction."

Six decades later, two-time Pulitzer Prize winners Donald Barlett and James Steele noted that the economic speeches of Andrew Mellon and Ronald Reagan were the same.

"The reality of Reagan, not the Republicans' legend, assigns all blame for the early-1980s recession to Jimmy Carter and all credit for the subsequent recovery to the sainted Ronald Reagan," Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in the Jan. 27 New York Times.

"In fact, that whole cycle had almost nothing to do with Reagan policies," he added.

He's not far off. The triple-dip recession was caused by the tight-money policies of Carter Federal Reserve boss Paul Volcker. He succeeded in finally breaking the back of inflation rooted in the deficit spending for the Vietnam War, but he broke the American economy as well. Reagan did more harm than good in his first year. The economy began to recover only when Volcker opened the monetary flood gates in early mid-1981.

"What Reagan did do, however, was blow up the budget deficit with military spending and tax cuts," Krugman continued.

"This drove up interest rates which drew in foreign capital. The inflow of capital, in turn, led to stronger dollar which made the US manufacturing uncompetitive. The trade deficit soared — and the long-term decline in the share of manufacturing in overall employment accelerated sharply. Notably, it was under Reagan that talk of 'deindustrialization' and the use of the term 'Rust Belt' first became widespread.

"It's also worth pointing out that the Reagan-era manufacturing decline took place despite a significant amount of protectionism, especially a quota on Japanese car exports to America that ended up costing consumers more than $30 billion in today's prices," Krugman noted.

"The biggest losers, as with health care, will be white working-class voters who were foolish enough to believe that Donald Trump was on their side," Krugman predicted.

Economists and we of lesser intellectual and moral gravitas have long debated the impact of Smoot-Hawley protectionism. 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 finally 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 stated 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 Sparks Tribune since 1988.

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