As a time-traveler, Li Xiaofeng naturally knows how devastating the Great Depression was to the United States. In 1932, the value of stocks listed on the Main Board of the United States was only 11% of what it was before the economic crisis of 1929, and investors lost more than $74 billion (three times the cost of World War I). More than 5,000 U.S. banks have collapsed, and 86,000 businesses have announced closures. GDP fell from $104 billion to $41 billion. 273,000 families have been evicted from their rental homes, and the average weekly wage for those who are employed is only $16.21. At that time, it was calculated that a family had to earn $2,000 to meet the most basic survival needs (a little more than 53 weeks a year).

To give an example, the value of the record industry in the United States has shrunk sharply from $50 million in 1929 to just $250,000. Because of the Great Depression, the vast majority of Americans could not afford to spend much entertainment. The famous de-Yi dance queen Sally. When Rand was later asked by a reporter why he chose this profession, he replied: "I don't take off my pants, how can I make money to make a living?" ”

However, the social mentality in the United States at that time was really quite interesting, that is, it was generally believed that poverty was shameful, but the social reality was that the vast majority of Americans were poor. According to the statistical results of that year, 1% of the population in the United States owns 59% of the social wealth.

At that time, the general state of life of ordinary families in the United States was to pretend that they were still living well (because poverty was looked down upon, and the rich considered original sin and depravity). Most American families hide their true living conditions from their neighbors. The young lawyer who may have come to work on time every day is no longer a lawyer, but is door-to-door selling cheap ties, magazines and other daily necessities in a remote neighborhood. It's also possible to change out of your clothes and beg in a neighboring city, or simply become one of the millions of unemployed.

The young husband's ration for each meal was probably 5 cents for a cup of coffee. Ask for another complimentary cup of hot water. Then mix the free ketchup on the counter in the hot water. Coffee is served with tomato soup and a full meal of water.

For example, the men's razor never buys a new blade, but repeatedly sharpens the old blade and continues to use it, and the family only uses a 25-watt light bulb to save electricity, while the children collect used drink bottles for money, or help their mother go to the bakery to buy a special sale of bread that is about to spoil a few days ago.

Of course, the breadwinner of the family will do everything possible to find a job. Millions of people waited in line at the entrance of the employment agency, just like the people who bought train tickets for the Spring Festival in later generations. In order to try to get as early as possible to get valuable job opportunities. Some of them even walked 900 miles (1.6 kilometers) to find work. At a recruiting agency on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, 5,000 people compete for 300 jobs. Even forced to be in a hurry, the Americans did not hesitate to use crooked tricks, someone set fire to the forests of Washington state, so that he could be hired to help put out the fire!

Remember the famous US-Soviet trading company? In that year, the company received more than 350 applications a day from Americans who wanted to settle in the Soviet Union. The most memorable thing is that when the U.S.-Soviet trading company put up an advertisement to recruit 6,000 skilled workers, more than 100,000 people came to apply.

The economically prosperous state of New York attracts countless job seekers, even in the state itself, which has 1 million unemployed people. Migrant workers join the ranks of the 7,000 "boys" in Manhattan (5 cents for a shoeshine session) or simply smuggle coal (10 percent of the city's coal is smuggled in by unemployed miners in Pennsylvania), but the vast majority of outsiders simply queue up in New York City's 82 relief teams.

At that time, if there were 10 cents. You can stay overnight in a cheap hotel that smells of sweat and disinfectant water. But if you don't have any money, you can only walk into Central Park with the newspaper you picked up. Or at the entrance to the subway, or by the municipal incinerator to heat up. The temperature of the incinerator attracts thousands of men to spend winter nights here, but they have to sleep on the garbage heap.

It's not just the city people who are unlucky, but the peasants are also having a hard time. According to the parlance at the time, the prices of agricultural products had never been so low. 1 bushel (about 36 liters) of wheat costs less than 25 cents, 1 bushel of corn 7 cents, 1 bushel of oats 10 cents, 1 pound of cotton or wool 5 cents, 1 pound of sugar 3 cents, 1 pound of pork or beef 2.5 cents, 200 boxes of apples (must be flawless and flawless) 40 cents.

Poor American farmers toiled for a year, and their harvests often outweighed. Because a wagon of oats can't buy a pair of $4 shoes, it might be okay to swap for a wagon of wheat. Let's put it this way, when a farmer takes into account all the bank loans and taxes, he loses $1.5 per acre of wheat. The farming industry is also miserable, with ranchers paying $1.1 to send a sheep to the slaughterhouse and selling the meat for less than $1.

As for the workers who are extremely lucky to find work, their life is not optimistic at all. According to surveys, the majority of female workers at the time were paid less than 25 cents an hour, a quarter of them less than 10 cents. As for the average male worker, the weekly wage is about $5. In the sweatshop in Brooklyn, New York, 15-year-old child laborers are paid only $2.78 a week, note that these children work 50 hours a week, and that's the wages of boys, and even less for girls, at $2.39 a week.

Such a miserable scene was unbearable for some of the high-ranking bigwigs, and one senator condemned: "Unscrupulous employers have cut wages to the level of China!" ”

But how did the big capitalists answer, Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, said: "What? Let me pay my salary, I never thought to base it on the needs of the workers, I based it on efficiency. Personally, I have fulfilled my social welfare responsibilities by going to church. ”

The nationwide famine broke out, and according to data collected by Li Xiaofeng through the U.S.-Soviet Trading Company, the rate of child malnutrition in the United States at that time exceeded 90 percent, and most poor children were suffering from drowsiness, lethargy, laziness, and mental retardation.

At that time, a teacher suggested that a little girl go home and eat something before coming to class, how did the child respond? "I can't eat it," she said. It's time for my sister to eat today. "It's still a child. Adults are even worse. Destitute parents starved for more than ten days without eating until their legs trembled and fainted, just to save a little food for their children. There was even a saying in society at that time: "Workers have no right to have children!" ”

Here's what Hoover said: "No one is starving, and these homeless people are eating better than they used to be." In New York, a homeless man eats ten meals a day! ”

Well, soon the president was slapped in the face, and Fortune magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Atlantic, the New York Times reported cases of famine and death from starvation. A considerable part of them were recorded as testimony by the U.S. Congress. The New York City Welfare Commission, for example, reported 29 people dying of starvation and 110 people dying of "malnutrition," most of them children.

At the same time, what is the state of the rich in the United States? The financial magnates are laving the praises of the Great Depression: "The Great Depression made people more polite in business and more reasonable at home." Especially for those women who are ill-conceived, the uninformed wives who used to be indifferent to their husbands and do not do housework have now become docile and cautious. ”

And what to say: "Transitional prosperity will corrupt people's moral character!" ”

Morgan, a well-known financial tycoon, said, "If you destroy the leisure class, then you destroy civilization." The idle class refers to the family that hires a servant, and there are now about 25 million or 30 million such families in the country! ”

Obviously, the famous financial tycoon is still living in a dream, as the census at the time showed. There are fewer than two million servants in the whole of America. Where did his twenty or thirty million idle class hire servants?

If a guy like Morgan is just a mouthpiece, what's even more terrifying is that they're liars, bastards, and miscellaneous. Why? Because the fortune tricks that these financial predators were best at playing back then were basically financial scams. For example, the famous Samuel. Insar. At its peak, he served as a director of 85 companies, chairman of the board of directors of 65 companies, general manager of 11 companies, and had assets of more than $3 billion.

By 1932, the trick could no longer be played, and in June of that year he was in debt of $60 million, and had to flee to Europe in a hurry. In order to hide his secret, he arranged a press conference in Paris, but he slipped through the back door and fled to Rome and then to Athens (Greece did not have an extradition agreement with the United States at the time). In November, after the United States and Greece reached an extradition agreement, he fled to Turkey disguised as a woman.

Of course, in the end, this person was arrested and returned to the United States, and it seems that justice has been proclaimed? If you believe it, you're wrong! In the end, he was acquitted of all charges. Humorist Will. Rogers scoffed: "The holding company is when the police investigate you, you give the incriminating evidence to your companions, and then you can get out safely." These slick and sophisticated businessmen do a lot of these things, and their practices are within the limits of the law, but so close to breaking the law. ”

As Will said, in the United States at that time, this was all too common. Wiggin shorted his own bank (Chase) stock and then lied to the department to defraud the gains. Charles of National City Bank (later Citibank). Mitchell forced his staff to continue to buy shares in the National City Bank with installment loans, at pre-crisis prices ($200 per share, but only $40 per share in 1932). At the same time, he sold the bonds to his family at a loss and bought them back to avoid federal income taxes (Morgan did the same, which he did not pay a penny of income tax from 1929 to 1931).

Even more ridiculous is yet to come, Chicago Tribune publisher Robert Brown. Colonel McCormick, the flag-bearer of these financial predators, repeatedly urged his readers to pay taxes day after day in his newspaper at length stressing how important it is to pay taxes and how only taxpayers are entitled to national welfare. However, he himself used various means to evade taxes, and only paid a measly $1,500 a year in taxes.

Of course, these people are all small CASES, remember the Coolidge era of the Minister of State Andrew . Mellon? The famous god of wealth in the Coolidge era was not a good bird either.

As Treasury secretary, he has repeatedly urged U.S. citizens who are unwilling to meet their tax obligations to abide by the law or use forceful tactics to pounce on them. But for himself, he has a completely different set of standards. He asked the Commissioner of the U.S. Department of Taxation to prepare a memo for him. 12 tax evasion methods are described in detail. And he himself used these methods one by one to evade taxes.

Afterward. The trick was exposed, and the act of the fortune god caused a public uproar, but what did Mellon's admirers answer, they strongly condemned public opinion, arguing that Mellon should not be blamed for tax evasion, because "it would provide ammunition to the activists who are making trouble".

President Hoover was not alone in the family of Mellon, whose adviser on European issues, the famous "Swedish Match King" Kruger, was even more exaggerated than Mellon, after the suicide of the goods on March 12, 1932. It was only then that it was discovered that this guy was a habitual thief, guilty of fraud, fraud and forgery of Italian national debt. And he also stole $300 million from investors who trusted him.

There are many, many others like them, such as the banker Joseph. Harriman, such as Saul, executive vice president of Bank of America. Singh, President of U.S. Federal Gas & Electric, Howard. Hopson.

We look back at Hoover's "bailout," when Congress authorized the Recovery Finance Corporation $300 million in unemployment benefits in 1932. Only one-tenth of that money goes to the states to save endangered businesses. The remaining 90% was taken by the banks held by the scammers.

The reason why I want to talk so much is that in addition to letting the comrades understand the actual situation in the United States at that time, what is more important is that this crisis was taken advantage of by a person with ulterior motives, and this person is Li Xiaofeng.

Li Xiaofeng has done two things in this crisis. The first is to short US stocks with white gloves (of course, after the crisis broke out and "infected" the world, a certain immortal also concocted the same method) and sheared the wool fiercely. Until 1932. He made more than two billion dollars in net money from financial agencies in the United States. If you count his earnings in Europe, he and his friends have earned more than five billion under the entire economic crisis.

With money, things will be easier to do later. The second thing an immortal did was to use these precious self to do some facts. For example, the development and expansion of the North Industries Group, such as giving credit loans to the Soviet government to support its industrialization, such as purchasing large quantities of cheap agricultural and animal husbandry products.

In those years, the Northern Trading Company purchased more than $500 million in agricultural products, which were so large that they had to build a large storage base in northern Finland, which will be of great use in the future.

I won't go into details, but what needs to be said in detail is that in this income, a certain immortal has specially set aside a special budget of about 300 million US dollars. These funds were used to develop a special organization, or religion, in the United States, which was called the Christian Salvation Society. Nominally, this religion promotes the concept of universal salvation, but in fact this religion sells dog meat under the guise of universal fraternity, and in essence, it exports extremist ideas.

And the target of its output is those who have been hit hard by the Great Depression, such as the poor Relief Expeditionary Force and their families, such as the poor who are struggling on the death line. The Christian Salvation Society was more generous than the U.S. government at the time, when Congress was still arguing over hundreds of thousands of dollars, when Hoover was still making a big fuss about the fact that there was no famine, and when the capitalists were acting more and more ugly. The Christian Salvation Church has generously helped tens of thousands of victims, especially children, and the Christian Salvation Society is even more generous, adopting orphans is nothing, and providing at least one meal a day for a considerable number of children free of charge.

Anyway, from 1932 onwards, the Christian Salvation Society was pouring a lot of money, and the $300 million was exhausted by 1941. So much so that from 1941 onwards, a certain immortal had to subsidize the organization from a considerable part of his own profits in North Industries to maintain its operation.

In 1930, the Salvation Church was a small church with no more than 30,000 members. But by 1941, it had a million religious people, and even more among the general public. In the most industrially developed states in the United States, the church already had considerable influence.

As mentioned earlier, this church preaches extremist ideas, but what kind of extremist ideas are there? That is to punish evil in vicariousness. To put it in layman's terms, it is to punish those sinners in God's place. So what are the wicked in the teachings of the Christian Salvation Society? Naturally, you can't run away if you are rich. Moreover, the church is very tolerant of the concept of blood feud, believing that revenge is a natural thing to do, and it is completely irreproachable to do so.

Anyway, in the past ten years, the orphans or street children who were adopted by the church have been completely brainwashed, and the ******** is to promote the theme of the church and take revenge. Remember the one in front of you who was pierced through the calf with a bayonet. Kim and Joseph. Ángelino? They are furious and want to come back for revenge! (To be continued.) )

PS: My aunt passed away, and I want to go to mourn, and the update may not be very punctual in the past two days, forgive me.

Bow and thank you to the Red Guards, Dudusnow, the 1st Guards Tank Brigade and Comrade Juventus!