PROLOGUE FOR SURVIVAL

We are succumbing to an array of physical illnesses and mental declines on a planet that will soon be uninhabitable. This reign of destruction has been brought about by individuals and corporations that seek gain at the expense of our health.

This must be stopped. Doing so, however, will be challenging because they have captured both federal and state governments, the media, finance, and institutions of higher education. In the absence of effective international governance, corporations now have nearly unfettered access to the natural resources of this world.

There is one sure way to turn matters around quickly. It involves use of the domestic violence clause in the Constitution of the United States. That clause in Article IV, Section 4, has the power to wrest control from the corporate elite. It contains the authority to reconfigure all U.S. institutions, public and private, for the benefit of the people and to assure our survival.

Article IV, Section 4, is often referred to as the guarantee provision because it contains a number of protections for the people that are sacrosanct and, thus, guaranteed above all else by the federal government. Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA), during the Lincoln administration, referred to Article IV, Section 4, as the “sleeping giant in the Constitution.” It is time to awaken that sleeping giant.

The domestic violence clause quite simply says that on application of the state legislatures, the United States shall protect the people against “domestic violence.” It takes no stretch of the imagination to understand that the harms we have done to each other are domestic violence in accordance with Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution.

When fully informed about the harms done to us by the corporate elite, the state legislatures will stand with us. They will help to build a world in which we live to love and protect each other. And that will be the way forward to full health and survival.

To hasten compliance with the transition, it will be necessary as well to have grand juries investigate actions taken by the deeply entrenched interests. Without being held to account criminally, they will continue treating us as serfs in service to their plundering of the Earth.

Let’s begin.

You Are Here

The days of consistent and normal weather patterns are over. Extinctions of insects and animal species are well under way. Our planet is hurtling toward omnicide—a global anthropogenic ecological catastrophe. And even though we brought it on, we have not yet owned up to that reality. We tend to deny it is happening, or we put it out of mind.

And the dominant public philosophy is still prosperity through freedom and individual liberty. My response is not that freedom and liberty must end, but the undertaking of duties needs to prevail in the present perilous circumstances. Key sources of those duties are in the Constitution of the United States. Hopefully, their recognition will begin to move us toward philosophies based on love and caring for one another and actions that will assure survival.

The Domestic Violence Clause

That foremost obligation to duty in our present emergency is found in Article IV, Section 4, of the United States Constitution. It is called the “domestic violence” clause.^[1]

The Goal of This Piece

This essay identifies actions that need to be undertaken pursuant to the domestic violence clause. Because matters are so dire and time is so short, obligations to use criminal laws, both state and federal, will also be discussed. The domestic violence clause has the power and the authority to help us overcome this emergency. Criminal prosecutions will break the logjams. If these actions are taken, a safe and a sane future can be assured for the generations that follow.

Back to Where We Are Physically and Mentally

Proving that an emergency exists has been made easy in this third decade of the 21^st century. It has become clear to all that climate changes are wreaking havoc: The oceans are dying, as are insects and animals upon which the web of life depends; diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s proliferate; and half of all Americans are suffering from one or more chronic illnesses.

And the toxins we have poured into our environment are creating, in the words of eminent microbiologist René Dubos, “distortions of mental and emotional attributes” that will lead to “development of a form of life that will retain little of true humanness.”

Dubos’s insightful essay, “The Limits of Adaptability,” until recently, could be found and downloaded off the internet. Surprisingly, that is no longer possible. To read his essay, you may have to obtain Garrett De Bell, Ed., The Environmental Handbook (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), p. 27.

If the harms are not soon stopped, one of every two children will likely be born with autism or a significant diminution of cognitive functioning. With that in mind, here is the domestic violence clause in Article IV, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution. Its time has come.

The Words

The full text of Article IV, Section 4, is as follows:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

Now Simplified and Ready to Be Used

Excluding extraneous words and substituting “the people” for “each of them,” in accordance with the 1868 Supreme Court case of Texas v. White, we have the following simplified directive:

On application of the [state] legislature[s], the United States shall protect the people against domestic violence.

Fear of Challenging the Benefactors

Well, you may ask, if the domestic violence clause is so important, how come I have never heard of it before? There are several answers to that question. First and foremost is fear. The political parties, our corporations, governmental agencies, churches, nonprofit organizations, magazines, newspapers, radio and television networks, and institutions of higher education do not wish to challenge the dominant underpinnings of corporate hegemony. This array of institutions takes undue comfort in continuous funding, fees for advertising, the benefits of nonprofit status, and grants for research.

Dr. Philippe Grandjean’s book, Only One Chance: How Environmental Pollution Impairs Brain Development—and How to Protect the Brains of the Next Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), should be the focus of them all. But, as he says, at page 155, children’s developing brains are continuously being harmed in the interest of assuring freedom to oppose governmental controls over the marketplace.

Distrust and Fear of Ideas That Are Different

As parents, we recoil from the fact that the consciousness of our children is being impaired. Families with members in the military are unlikely to process that their service was detrimental and wasteful. And wanting desperately to live in a better world, people shun the idea that some of our greatest leaders were murdered by Americans within the structures of power.

In addition, searching for truths now involves the fear of being called a conspiracy theorist.

Questioning the use of vaccines, GMOs, microwave ovens, fluoride in the drinking water, and mercury in dental amalgams can bring shame in being called a conspiracy theorist. An array of trolls and bots are ready to relentlessly shut down efforts at stating ideas that are contrary to accepted notions.

In this time of crisis, however, one must push past such discomforts and disruptions. Survival is at stake.

Difficulties in Processing Complex Thought

To properly assess reality, one needs to determine facts and then put those facts into a context which allows for understanding the world around us. The process is arduous. Competing assumptions should be kept in mind during the search. Independence of mind is crucial. And even after coming to conclusions, one must be open to new understandings that would require a rethinking of all or parts of our world views.

But it is clear that we are an impaired citizenry. Significant chemical and toxic exposures began in the late 1940s. Those exposures diminished our collective mental capacities. By 1986, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that students at all levels were more deficient than students used to be in higher order thinking skills, abstract reasoning, and problem solving.

The steep educational declines were not caused by changes in educational policy, quality of the schools, the number of minority students, television viewing, student use of alcohol and drugs, or the growing percentage of single-parent households. See the 1987 report by the Congressional Budget Office titled “Educational Achievement: Explanation and Implications of Recent Trends.”^[2]

In a front-page article of the Wall Street Journal on September 28, 1987, titled “A Shallow Labor Pool Spurs Business to Act to Bolster Education,” reporter Janice Simpson noted that a significant number of employees entering the work force were functionally illiterate. They might be able to read, she said, but performance would likely plummet when the assigned tasks moved beyond simpler levels.

To that reporting, I add an observation: Businesses did not act to bolster education. Those were the times when employers were shipping jobs overseas. U.S. workers, harmed by environmental exposures, were cast aside without any thought given to dealing with the harms done to them.

Historian Barbara Tuchman perfectly summed up our present collective condition of mind in her 1987 article, “A Nation in Decline.” She decried America’s deteriorating ethics, poor performance, poor thinking, and lawlessness.

Her next statement was prescient.

[It] does seem that the knowledge of a difference between right and wrong is absent from our society, as if it had floated away on a shadowy night after the last World War.

The inability to think clearly has been a significant factor in the failure of people to come to grips with use of the domestic violence clause.

Hidden in the Back and Rarely Discussed

Another reason why you might not have heard of the domestic violence clause is that it is buried in the back of the Constitution and rarely discussed. Yes, the words were always there, but only recently have we known the thinking of the framers and how crucial the domestic violence clause was to the entire Constitutional Convention in 1787.

The subject of “domestic violence” came up in the first hour of the first day of discussions. The members then voted to keep their deliberations from the public. Later, they decided that all their deliberations were to be kept secret until after the last of them died. The only comprehensive note taker was James Madison, who was the last to die in the year 1839. The first printing of Madison’s notes came in 1920 and it was not until 1937 that there was scholarly acknowledgment of their accuracy. Then Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.

Thereafter, the world’s attention was on war. It was not until 1966 that Ohio University Press published his notes in an affordable and widely distributed edition titled Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison. With that publication, historians went from trying to cull meaning from the dry bones of the words in the Constitution, as historian Adrienne Koch said, to a true understanding of what the framers had actually been thinking. (See the last paragraph of Adrienne Koch’s Introduction to Notes of the Debates…)

But It Was the Fulcrum for the Entire Convention

What was so important about the domestic violence concept that mere mention of it on that first day caused the framers to meet in strict secrecy for the next several months?

Here’s what happened. Edmund Randolph of the Virginia delegation, according to Madison’s notes, rose to address the Convention. He apologized that he was not a man of “longer standing in life and political experience.” His colleagues, he said, “imposed this task upon him,” the task of opening “the great subject of their mission.”

Their mission, he said, was to face “the crisis and the necessity of preventing the fulfillment of the prophesies of the U.S. downfall.” Crisis? Downfall? What had happened in the ten years since independence?

The government of our nation under the Articles of Confederation, said Randolph, was powerless to protect the people from threats of harm both internal and external. Internal harms were rebellions. The last one had occurred the year before. It was Shays’ Rebellion in the State of Massachusetts.

The delegates called the internal threat “domestic violence.” The external threat was called “invasion.” They had been sent to Philadelphia by the states to amend the Articles of Confederation. It was soon apparent to them that, for purposes of survival, they had to go well beyond their instructions. They were obligated to scrap the Articles of Confederation and create a new federal government, one that was powerful enough to deal with the crises that threatened survival, threats of invasion and of domestic violence.

As between the two threats, the internal threat was far more on their minds. Few delegates disagreed with Alexander Hamilton, who said “men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.” Domestic dangers were, therefore, considered “more alarming than the arms and arts of foreign nations.”

So, the domestic violence clause was, in fact, the fulcrum for the entire Constitution. Then, toward the end of their deliberations, on August 30, 1787, an important motion was made. The motion was to strike out the words “domestic violence” and insert instead the term “insurrections.” The motion was defeated. The framers did not know the form that internal violence might take in the centuries ahead, so they stayed with the generic phrase, “domestic violence.”

They created our federal government and empowered it to protect us from dire matters of domestic violence by bringing us back to safety.

Hamilton’s description of us as ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious stays with me, as does the vision of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln said: “All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up amongst us. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

Uses for the Clause in the Past

What use was made of it in the past that most closely fits our current circumstances? When racial tensions erupted in the 1960s, cities like Newark, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Cleveland were scenes of looting, burning, and killing. The federal government moved in, under the authority of the domestic violence clause, with troops and tanks and imposed—by force—curfews and martial law.

President Rutherford B. Hayes, in 1877, issued a “Manifesto Against Domestic Violence” to break up a railroad strike that portended violence in the State of Maryland. And Professor Jay S. Bybee discussed a wide array of actual and proposed incursions into the states by the federal government under a number of constitutional and statutory provisions, including the domestic violence clause. The strike in Maryland and all of the incidents that Professor Bybee mentioned pale by comparison to our current existential threat.

Professor Bybee, who had taught constitutional law and is now a United States Circuit Court Judge, urged the limiting of federal authority. He defended the rights of states to be free of federal interference with vehemence.^[3] 

But in his conclusion of “Insuring Domestic Tranquility: Lopez, Federalization of Crime, and the Forgotten Role of the Domestic Violence Clause,” he pinpoints exactly where true federal responsibility exists. It exists for dealing with harms that are beyond the resources of the states to handle.

When that occurs, Bybee said in the last paragraphs, it becomes the duty of the federal government under the domestic violence clause to insure a cessation of those harms in order to bring about “domestic tranquility.” And I hasten to add that his reference to “domestic tranquility” obviously includes ensuring our survival.

There is no state or group of states in this nation that has anywhere near the resources necessary to deal with the current crisis of domestic violence facing the people.

Original Intent of the Framers

Ensuring our safety and survival by using the domestic violence clause is a duty entirely consistent with the original intent of the framers. We have made our world toxic. They specifically used the generic term violence, which at that time and at this moment is consistent with harm as a result of toxicity. In the words of Gordon K. Durnil, we are experiencing an “insidious invasion of our bodies by harmful unsolicited chemicals,” which ought to be considered “the most flagrant violation of our individual rights.”^[4]

Here’s a sampling for usage of the term “violence” from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Chaucer, in The Pardoner’s Tale, circa 1380, described a poison capable of causing death in a shorter time than it takes to walk a mile. “This poison is so strong and violent.”

From Cyclopaedia, published by Ephraim Chambers in 1758: “Sublimate, Corrosive Sublimate is then a violent poison which corrodes and destroys the Parts of the Body with much Violence.”

A 1780 reference designated “Newgate Cal. v. 232” is quoted as follows: “In the morning she perceived a violent smell of Sulphur.”

By Fletcher around 1619: “They have done violence unto her Tomb, Not granting rest unto her in the grave.”

In 1945, we thoughtlessly decided we could “live better through chemistry.” Since then, we have assaulted ourselves massively with toxic exposures. The assault must be stopped. The victims need to be healed. Our planet must be made safe again.

Outreach

The first step to be taken is outreach to U.S. families that are struggling with such things as cancer, asthma, allergies, learning disorders, attention deficits, autism, early onset of puberty, diabetes, suicide, birth defects that are far less rare than they used to be, Alzheimer’s Disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, lupus, and a host of other burgeoning autoimmune diseases.

Reach out as well to schools and parent groups in cities where education is in decline and won’t come back, no matter how much money per pupil is spent.

Reach out to mayors and councils and civic organizations in cities where violence won’t go away and where disorder has replaced civility.

Tell them all that their plight is not a matter of bad luck, bad genes, or God’s will. The diseases, disorders, and disabilities they suffer from need not have happened. Tell them how they are victims of a chemical age that was carelessly imposed upon this country seventy-five years ago.

The Spiritual Aspect of Living to Protect Each Other

Our federal government since 1945 catered to business and corporate interests. Caring for us was a distant second. But now the domestic violence clause demands that the United States protect us. And I read the word protect to mean care about, be considerate of, and yes, even to cherish and to love us. That message from spiritual antiquity was always considered quaint and optional. Abiding by that message is now a requirement for survival. We either learn to order our affairs such that we love and protect each other or we do not survive.

There is no freedom in living to satisfy desires because they multiply. And in that cruel mathematics comes, not happiness, but isolation and death of the spirit. In the end, to paraphrase Dostoyevsky’s Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, there is not a carriage fine enough to take one to a meal sumptuous enough and back, at the end, to a house great enough.

The vast majority of people are capable of loving their neighbors and attending to duties.

They’ve waited their turn to shape this world. Their turn has come and just in time.

Changes to Be Made

Using love and responsibility as the yardsticks by which to measure appropriate federal activities under the domestic violence clause, we can do so many things surely and quickly. We can stop the exposures that are causing us to be ill and incapable. Through massive training and reorganizing, our medical and insurance systems can be transformed from reactive to pro-active and preventive endeavors. Our food supply can again be made safe and nutritious.

Cleanups of hazardous wastes can be completed. Educational deficits will be made whole by a full-out campaign to restore children and adults to complete functioning. Safe alternative energy sources can be a reality in three years, the time it took the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb. The current fleet of polluting engines can be taken off the road in the same time and replaced by engines that already exist which do not pollute and sicken us.

Using Wartime Powers

The domestic violence clause contains wartime powers to meet the domestic threat. As in a time of war, business and financial interests will need to conform to efforts that will assure survival. There is a time and place to allow complete freedom in the marketplace. The middle of a public health crisis—where survival is in doubt—is not one of those occasions.

Shouldering the massive job ahead can be the beginning of the finest era this planet has ever experienced. Earth’s history has been dominated by war. War is no longer affordable. Continued reliance upon the United Nations is no longer acceptable. Saddled by its Security Council, it has not been able to bring about peace—not an hour of it since its inception. Using the legal concept of impossibility, signatory nations should be encouraged to withdraw so that a true international body can bring peace—finally. The applicability of the law of impossibility as it relates to the United Nations is the focus of my novel titled Impasse. 

Expected Cries of the Opposition

You can expect the usual outcries against curtailment of liberties and against big government. But at this point what else can be done?

Some critics will say that there is no “scientific proof” that chemical exposures have caused declines in health, behavior, and educability. But what else could have taken us down so quickly and so thoroughly?

They will say we can’t afford the cost. But haven’t we, the people, already paid too dearly?

The People Are to Define Domestic Violence and What Is to Be Done

Only you can bring all of this about. The domestic violence clause is yours to use or not. The Supreme Court has long held that you, not the lawyers and the courts of this land, are to determine what is and what is not a condition of domestic violence. And you, not the lawyers and the courts, are to determine what measures must be taken to assure survival. See the often-cited Supreme Court opinion written by Justice Felix Frankfurter, Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549, 556 (1946). The case holds that the guarantees found in Article IV, Section 4, are for the people to decide upon and to use as they deem necessary.

So, in the face of this existential threat, we citizens must step up and begin the process required by our Constitution in Article IV, Section 4.

Addressing the State Legislatures

Recall that the domestic violence clause says that on application of the state legislatures, the United States shall protect the people against domestic violence. What follows are a few concepts that need to be communicated to state legislators.

Controlling Corporations

The first hurdle is to have them understand that both they and the federal government have long been captured by the interests that now must be faced and put under the strictest controls.

In addition, they should know that the framers were right about the need to limit use of corporations. We were wrong to have given them rights that should only be exercised by people. And as Justice Louis Brandeis predicted, the corporations, “Frankenstein monsters” he called them, have stolen our health and our freedoms. Please read his exquisitely researched dissent in Liggett v. Lee, 288 U.S. 517 (1933).

The harms done by them have been legion. For example, corporate control over health care at the turn of the last century made allopathic medicine dominant. Pharmaceutical drugs, surgery, the use of radiation, and other invasive techniques were deemed rational and acceptable as basic methodology. Treatments by using nutritional regimens, herbal remedies, homeopathy, spinal alignment, meridian energy enhancement, and the like—even though they had centuries of proven value—were driven from public accessibility.

As rates of diseases skyrocketed after 1970, corporate control made sure that allopathic medicine continued to be favored, even though its treatments were more toxic and often of limited value. A great many cancer patients suffered surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation only to find that their quality of life had been drastically altered with little or no change in life expectancy.

Many people wished to try alternative methods. But corporate control would not allow allopathic doctors to consider those methods and still retain their medical licenses. The corporate-dominated insurance companies did not pay for safer and less expensive treatments, even though controlling costs and reducing harms were obviously appropriate.

And while those alternative methods were actually working to alleviate suffering and disease, corporations in control of pharmaceutical medicine carried out public campaigns to denigrate alternative practitioners as “quacks.” Attorneys general in the various states would get court orders putting them out of business for allegedly committing fraud. Investigators refused to hear about the successes of treatments given by alternative practitioners.

State governments weighed in heavily on the side of “official” medicine. It was not uncommon for state medical authorities to obtain court orders requiring children to undergo lethal doses of chemotherapy and radiation rather than allow parents to take those children to places where more benign and effective forms of treatment were available.

When scores of safe and inexpensive cancer cures are being sidelined, how is that not akin to murder?

Why was there no accountability for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s knowingly false assertion that laetrile was not helpful in stopping the growth of cancers?

Please watch the movie Second Opinion.

A clear example of capture of governments by industry is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allowing fluoride to be added to drinking water for a preventive health care purpose, even though doing so is contrary to the Safe Drinking Water Standards. Section 1412 (b)(11) says that “No national primary drinking water regulation may require the addition of any substance for preventive health care purposes unrelated to contamination of drinking water.”

Nevertheless, the EPA allows fluoridation of drinking water to reduce tooth decay, saying that “such use” is “an ideal environmental solution to a long-standing problem. By recovering by-product fluosilicic acid from fertilizer manufacturing, water and air pollution are minimized, and water utilities have a low-cost source of fluoride available to them.” See Christopher Bryson, The Fluoride Deception (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), pp. 150-151.

Christopher Bryson called that “loony logic.” Dr. William Hirzy, an EPA scientist, agreed, saying “If this stuff gets out into the air, it’s a pollutant; if it gets into the river, it’s a pollutant; if it gets into the lake, it’s a pollutant; but if it goes right straight into your drinking water system, it’s not a pollutant. That’s amazing!” See The Fluoride Deception, p. 225.

And Dr. Hirzy was not alone in his assessment that EPA was wrong. In 1997, the union of EPA professionals, including scientists, lawyers, and engineers voted unanimously in support of the following resolution:

Our members review of evidence over the last eleven years, including animal and human epidemiology studies, indicate a causal link between fluoride/ fluoridation and cancer, genetic damage, neurological impairment, and bone pathology. Of particular concern are recent epidemiology studies linking fluoride exposures to lower I.Q. in children. As professionals who are charged with assessing the safety of drinking water, we conclude that the health and welfare of the public are not served by the addition of this substance to the public water supply.^[5]

The EPA policy that allows industrial waste fluoride to be put into public water systems is a significant source of harm to the public, but it saves industry nearly a half-billion dollars a year (in today’s dollars] by not having to dispose of it as a hazardous waste.

Contrary to EPA’s position which overlooks the harms and requires us to be unwilling recipients of industrial poisons, we are, in fact, acutely sensitive to the fluoridation of our water supplies, especially during childhood. EPA researchers recently reported that fluoride is the toxic element that has the “greatest increase in impacting cognitive ability” in children—13 times the impact of exposure to lead.

Why are such harms done to our children for the benefit of corporate profits not being considered as a vast array of assaults and poisonings?

In the 1940s, pollution-free electric delivery trucks, buses, and trolleys traversed our cities.

And then they were gone, replaced by vehicles and trains that produced choking smoke.

In his book, Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), Edwin Black excoriates the corporations for their greed and then goes on to say that “the policymakers who let it happen—they [too] got away with murder.” (See page 260.)

Black’s assertion is interesting. The destruction unleashed by dependence upon fossil fuels has been colossal. Shouldn’t the legislators be asked to accept at least some portion of the guilt involved with allowing non-polluting systems to be replaced en masse by internal combustion engines? Asking that question can bring about much needed soul searching in state legislatures.

Another example clarifies this inquiry into failures of governance. The Dupont Corporation created the dangerous chemical perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). Used in non-stick cookware and various water repellant products, it has now contaminated “all of us,” says Robert Bilott in his book, Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle Against Dupont (New York: Atria Books, 2019).

Neither the federal nor the state governments did anything to stop the harms. And we, the people, said attorney Bilott, served “as human sponges to soak up and store their toxins in our bloodstreams like millions of free, unpermitted, walking landfills; and that ubiquitous blood contamination, a ticking time bomb placed in our bodies without our consent or knowledge,” is our current reality. (See Exposure p. 369.)

We Were Left Unrepresented

Putting those circumstances of poisonings into the context of a discussion with legislators, they need to understand that the Constitution gave us a republican form of government at the federal level. It was created to be a central government that represents the interests of the people. So significant was the concept of a republican form of government, that one of the guarantees found in Article IV, Section 4, is that the states are also to give us a republican form of government, meaning one that serves the interests of the people at the state level.

But, as Bilott and Black point out, both levels of government were so careless about the health of the people that it is fair to say we were not represented at all regarding PFOA chemicals and harms done by internal combustion engines. That stark reality needs to be made clear to the legislators. The people were totally unrepresented.

In so many matters, the people have been unrepresented. In terms of governance, this is the bottom; we have hit bottom.

Regulatory systems are lax. The resulting harms done are continuing and are rarely considered to be crimes, even though they so often are intentional inflictions of harms for the purpose of sustaining corporate profits.

Colonialism, Imperialism and War

By 1914, European colonizers controlled some 84% of global natural resources. Africa is a case in point.

After the Second World War, the United States, on behalf of our corporations, brazenly laid claim to all the resources of this world. Frank Roberts, a British charge d’ affaires in Moscow, said it best in 1946. We shunned the high road of allowing countries to decide for themselves what types of political and economic systems they favored.

A Time to Bring an End to War

Being in a global, public health crisis, it is all the more important that we finally realize we cannot afford more war. The nine hundred military bases around the world must be closed. State legislators need to be apprised of how and why peace keeps eluding us. The story of military dominance by the United States is ugly but must be told to them if there is ever to be a reduction of expenditures for war.

Any choice that might be considered inconsistent with U.S. control of resources around the world would be met with force. So it began. And that exercise of empire continues to this day.

Instances of where we used unconscionable force number in the thousands. Here is one example. After the brutal colonization of the Congo by King Leopold of Belgium ended, the elegant and scholarly Patrice Lumumba became its first elected prime minister. Soon thereafter, it was feared that he might want more control over the resources of his nation for the benefit of its people. The United States government then participated in his removal from office and in his murder. The Republic of Congo has been in disarray ever since, but U.S. corporations have continuing access to its resources.

Few, if any, state legislators are likely to know that we created today’s Iran by destroying its democratic secular government. Mohammed Mossadegh, a non-cleric and a lawyer, became Prime Minister of Iran in 1952. When his government began the process of nationalizing Iran’s petroleum industry, the United States created a coup that drove him from office.

In like manner, when the democratically elected government of Guatemala decided to impose obligations on real estate owned by the United Fruit Company, the United States violently overthrew that government.

And when Chile elected a socialist president, that democratic government was destroyed by the United States and replaced with a dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet. The idea that Chile would nationalize its copper mines was unacceptable to corporate interests in the United States.

U.S. foreign policy since 1945—it should be understood by the state legislators—is best described as an organized crime enterprise.

Please read Douglas Valentine’s book The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2016). See also the Michael Steven Smith and Heidi Boghosian interview published by CovertAction Magazine: Inside the Organized Crime Syndicate known as the CIA: an Interview with Douglas Valentine.

And please watch Philippe Diaz’s movie The End of Poverty? It confirms the fact that the United States is the latest—and by far the most destructive—in a long line of empires.

I have identified just a few examples of abuse of power by the U.S. empire. There are many hundreds of authors who have meticulously documented thousands of such instances. It is time to find their works in bookstores and online. Their efforts at getting truths out for discussion have been exemplary and heroic.

War As It Relates to the States

Too often, state legislators cling to the belief that the United States is a light unto the nations and is respected everywhere. As a result, the states have been used in a most dreadful manner. They have allowed themselves to be maneuvered into giving up their young people to fight wars that have been exclusively for the benefit of an empire that corporations built.

For example, it was the responsibility of state legislators to proclaim loudly, before allowing their young men and women to go to war in Iraq, that there were no weapons of mass destruction there. The state legislators needed to display the courage of professional boxer Muhammad Ali. Ali famously refused military induction to fight in the Viet Nam War, saying

No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.

Not only must the state legislators be as forthright as Muhammad Ali, they must be wise enough to see through the chicanery and the misdeeds of those who favor war above all else. How the Korean War was made into an inevitability must be studied and posted for every state legislator to see and remember.

The Need for State Offices of Foreign Affairs Analysis

With the Korean War in mind, I would urge every state In the Union to have its own Office of Foreign Affairs Analysis. Federally created U.S. foreign policy is totally at variance with reality. The need for peace in the world at this time is paramount. No longer should the states give up their children for wars without a proper analysis of the corporate motives involved.

The Korean War as the Epitome of Folly

On August 10, 1945, President Truman received a message from Japanese Emperor Hirohito offering to end the war. Koreans had undergone 35 years of Japanese occupation. All they needed to do was watch the occupying Japanese soldiers lay down their arms as their emperor would soon direct.

That evening, inexplicably, President Truman gave an unusual order to army officers at the Pentagon. They were asked to draw a line on a map of Korea that would divide the nation in half. They chose the 38^th parallel, a line that had no basis whatsoever in Korean history. North of that line, Japanese troops were to surrender to the approaching Soviet forces. South of that line, Japanese troops were to surrender to U.S. forces. See David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 785-786.

Korea was thus foolishly divided along the 38^th parallel. War became inevitable when the division was tolerated long enough for northerners and southerners to begin considering different political and economic philosophies. But allowing Koreans to decide for themselves what type of political and economic systems they favored was out of the question. We recognized South Korea as a separate nation. War followed. Young people of every state in the Union were sent to Korea. They wreaked havoc on that nation. Some 40,000 Americans died and more than 100,000 were wounded, all for the purpose of protecting corporate control of resources around the world.

Can a better argument be made for an Office of Foreign Affairs Analysis in every state of the Union? Can what happened in Korea be deemed anything other than a betrayal? Is not every death in the service of corporate world hegemony a betrayal and a crime?

The Use of Criminal Actions

And because it is so crucial to end the drive to wars, criminal laws need to be used against those who would push us into unnecessary military actions.

The best example of being pushed into war are the anthrax attacks that took place shortly after September 11, 2001. Among the people who were sent letters with anthrax poison were Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy. Both had raised objections to the recently proposed USA Patriot Act. Both were in positions to block its passage.

Dr. Francis Boyle, who drafted the U.S. implementation legislation for the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, said that the anthrax in those letters was super weapons grade because it had been reduced to nanosized particles. And such particles, he said, could only have been made in a U.S. biological weapons laboratory run either by the Department of Defense or the Central Intelligence Agency.

The first reaction of state legislators is likely to be “That’s not our job. The federal government takes care of that.” But the federal government did not do its job. In fact, the federal government did not investigate the matter at all and is allowing a cover-up. Meanwhile the USA Patriot Act was passed. The United States went on to take the young men and women of our states and involve them in unnecessary wars and conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere.

So, the matter must be investigated at the state level, and state legislators need to consider the use of criminal laws to deal with those who transgressed by using fraud and murder to affect U.S. foreign policy. The federal government refuses to do so. That failure to act cannot be a final answer to criminality which amounts to treason.

Egregious in One Is Egregious in All

The anthrax matter brings up a crucial concept: If super weapons grade anthrax from a United States biological weapons laboratory was used by Americans against Americans, what could be more egregious? And because that grotesque event actually occurred, the question to ask is what other egregious harms have been or are being committed against the people?

Asking that question is similar to judges telling jurors that they can infer, if they wish, that a witness who has lied in their presence is capable of lying in other matters. That allowable inference is called false in one is false in all. Expanded to present circumstances, we should be able to consider that if one commits an egregious act, would it not be appropriate to assume that person or that entity is capable of committing other egregious acts? Egregious in one is egregious in all is an appropriate investigative presumption to be made under current circumstances.

With that in mind, shouldn’t state legislators begin to assess another observation of Dr. Boyle?

He is of the opinion that the coronavirus disease now being experienced in the world originated as a genetically engineered offensive biological warfare weapon that came out of a Wuhan, China, laboratory in which there had been participation by Americans. If such is the case, it was created in violation of law to affect public health in the United States and elsewhere.

Again, our federal government is not actively investigating that assertion. The state legislators, on behalf of the people, must do so. If proven, this is criminality of the highest order. It is treason.

What Exactly Is Treason?

The crime of treason is set forth in Article III, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution. It is the “levying [of] war” against us. Contrary to popular opinion, we do not have to be at war for the crime of treason to occur. See United States v. Aaron Burr, Circuit Court, D Virginia, 25 F Cas. 49 (1807).

Chief Justice John Marshall was the trial judge in the case against Aaron Burr. Marshall instructed the jury on what’s required to find someone guilty of treason. Treasonous conduct, he told them, is levying war, which means any use of force to subvert the government, compel a change in the administration of government, or to compel repeal or adoption of law.

In brief, treason is the use of force to interfere with governance. For example, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required that slaves be returned to their owners wherever they were found. On occasion, well-meaning people used physical force in an effort to interfere with the return of slaves. That use of force to interfere with the Fugitive Slave Act was deemed to be treason. Juries in the North often found the defendants not guilty of treason by one technicality or another.

Examination of Egregious Crimes and Acts of Treason

The attempted murder of two American senators to pave the way for the USA Patriot Act was treason. If the coronavirus was created illegally with the help of Americans to affect health policy in the United States, it too was treason. So, using the concept of egregious in one is egregious in all, what other matters need to be carefully assessed and possibly presented to county, state, and federal grand juries as matters of treason or criminality based upon existing state and federal laws?

Is it treason or is it against other criminal laws to purposefully keep safe and inexpensive treatments from the people in order to maintain sales of pharmaceutical drugs and invasive medical procedures?

What about those who do harm by the manufacture and sale of products known to be toxic?

What crimes were committed by petroleum companies that disseminated false information concerning global warming in order to maintain sales of petroleum?

What crimes are being committed by allowing the addition of fluoride from industrial waste products to the drinking water, contrary to law and for the purpose of saving industry the cost of disposal of a hazardous waste?

Is it treason or is it against other criminal laws to allow industries and insurers to put the financial burdens resulting from toxicity upon those of us who are suffering illnesses and disabilities from a world that corporations have made toxic?

Is it treason or is it against other criminal laws to be putting 5G networks in place, allowing weather modification by the use of toxic and dangerous geoengineering techniques, or permitting dangerous vaccine use to proliferate?

Were the events of September 11, 2001, adequately investigated regarding possible treason and other crimes?

Do It for the Children

In the final analysis of rights, duties, and responsibilities, the right to continued healthful existence on a habitable planet belongs to the people. By using the domestic violence clause and an array of criminal prosecutions, survival is possible. The “Frankenstein monsters” can be put under necessary controls. All required changes can be brought about quickly. But it is now up to us. Above all comes the obligation to put an end to the wide array of betrayals. Please have courage, and do it for the children because, as Dostoyevsky’s Father Zosima said, “They are sinless and in our care.”

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[1] My book, written in 1996, on the subject is If You Can Keep It: A Constitutional Roadmap to Environmental Security. Here’s a review http://domesticviolenceclause.org/review-3/ , a website http://domesticviolenceclause.org  and a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Michael-Diamond-The-Domestic-Violence-Clause-121684831191471/  The website and the Facebook items contain observations that go back decades.

[2] See also “Study Casts Doubt on Reforms as Key to Improved Student Performance,” Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.) August 24, 1987, p. 9.

[3] Note: Bybee, was signatory to the 2003 “Torture Memos.”

[4] See Gordon K. Durnil, The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 184.

[5] See “Highlights in North American Litigation During the Twentieth Century on Artificial Fluoridation of Public Water Supplies,” by John Remington Graham and Pierre-Jean Morin, 14 Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law, 195, 242-243 (2018).

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About the Author

About the Author