As an attorney who worked within the NJDEP, Michael Diamond believed that the law could prevent corporate destruction of Earth’s air, soils, waters, and food. He left the DEP with a sure understanding about the gross deficiencies in our environmental laws and regulations. He then spent years examining the Constitution of the United States for better perspectives on how to truly bring about environmental security. This article is his most recent testament to the brilliance of the framers of our Constitution. They set forth a path we are to follow that will ensure our survival. This piece takes us down that path.
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 and well-being.
Their pursuit of gain at our expense 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 control international affairs for the purpose of having unfettered access to natural resources and cheap labor around the 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 American 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, during the Lincoln administration, referred to Article IV, Section 4 as the “sleeping giant in the Constitution.” It’s time to awaken that sleeping giant.
The domestic violence clause quite simply says that on application of the state legislators, the United States shall protect the people against “domestic violence.” It takes no stretch of the imagination to understand that the harms we’ve done to each other are domestic violence in accordance with Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States.
When fully informed about the harms done to us by the corporate elite, the state legislators 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.
My hopes and my prayers are with us.
As a child, I lived through normal and regular patterns of weather. The wildlife around me in the 1940s was relatively abundant. Those days of consistent weather patterns and ample wildlife are over. 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’s happening, or we put that reality out of mind. I find it anomalous that the dominant public philosophy is still prosperity through freedom and personal liberty. My response is not that freedom and liberty must end, but the undertaking of duties needs to prevail in the present circumstances of peril. You’ll find the key source of those duties in the Constitution of the United States. Hopefully, its recognition will begin to move us all toward philosophies based on love and caring for one another and actions that will assure survival.
That foremost obligation to duty in our present emergency is found in Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution. It’s the “domestic violence” clause. My book, written in 1996, on the subject is If You Can Keep It: A Constitutional Roadmap to Environmental Security. Here’s a review , a website and a Facebook page. The website and the Facebook pages are not as interactive as they ought to be. They do, however, contain writings and observations that go back some fifteen to twenty years.
This essay sets forth actions that need to be undertaken pursuant to the domestic violence clause. Because matters are so dire and time is so short, concomitant 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. Careful use of criminal laws will break the log-jams. I pray that this writing will result in actions taken to assure a safe and sane future for the generations to follow.
Proving that a present emergency exists has been made easy in this second decade of the 21st century. It’s 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. Half of all Americans are suffering from one or more chronic diseases. And the toxins we have poured into our environment are, in words of the eminent microbiologist, René Dubos, creating “distortions of mental and emotional attributes” that will lead to “development of a form of life that will retain little of true humanness.” Dubos’ insightful essay, The Limits of Adaptability, until recently, could be found and downloaded off the internet. Surprisingly, that’s no longer possible. To read his essay, you may have to obtain The Environmental Handbook, published in 1970 by Ballantine Books, and turn to page 27.
So, we now have a clear understanding that we’re headed toward omnicide. And we can envision the likelihood that if the harms are not soon stopped every other child 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. It’s time has come.
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.
Excluding extraneous words and substituting “the people” for “each of them,” in accordance with the 1868 Supreme Court case of Texas v. White (1868), we have the following simplified directive:
On application of the [state] legislature[s], the United States shall protect the people against domestic violence.
Well, you may ask, if the domestic violence clause is so important, how come I've 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 understandings which support corporate hegemony. This array of institutions take undue comfort in continuous funding, fees for advertising, the benefits of nonprofit status, and grants for research.
Part of the proof concerning the fact that our major institutions operate out of that fear includes filing cabinet drawers filled with pleas to all of them, asking them to consider use of the domestic violence clause. Years of such requests have been met mostly with silence.
Of all the above organizations, fear of taking on crucial truths by institutions of higher education has been, for me, the most startling. University Departments led by tenured professors with relevant advanced degrees should be leading the fight for our survival by showing us how to take up responsibilities under the domestic violence clause.
I will never forget an encounter I had with one professor about ten years ago. He had publicly held young people up to ridicule for their not knowing answers to the simplest questions. I told him that young people are being inundated with toxic exposures that are affecting both memory and educability. It’s not their fault, I said, and asked him to look at the domestic violence clause as the method by which to stop those exposures. He then asked me this question: “Do you have any organization behind you?” When I told him no, the conversation ended. He never called back, and he continued-on publicly holding young people up to ridicule for being so obviously uninformed.
On occasion, I think of that encounter when I come across Dr. Philippe Grandjean’s book (The title says it all.) Only One Chance: How Environmental Pollution Impairs Brain Development—and How to Protect the Brains of the Next Generation (Oxford University Press, 2013). Dr. Grandjean, at page 155, bemoans the fact that children’s developing brains are allowed to be harmed in the interest of assuring that individuals will have the freedom to oppose governmental controls over the marketplace. Children continue to be harmed developmentally, and their educability suffers. The ridicule of them on late-night television shows continues. Dr. Grandjean’s book is rarely talked about.
The very idea that we are near an end point in our public health and that continued habitability of our planet is in question is frightening. As never before, we need open dialogue and earnest searches for answers about our current condition of Constitutional domestic violence and what must be done to implement solutions. But fear of exploring ideas that are different is getting in the way. People end up digging themselves deeper into their cocoons of safe assumptions.
I remember describing an array of harms that toxic exposures, beginning in the womb, are bringing to youngsters. The man to whom I was talking had an advanced degree in a field related to medicine. I was shocked at his adamant response. “You can’t possibly be right,” he said. “You’re talking about my children.” I answered, but he did not hear me. He remained safe and secure in the comfort of that adamant denial.
On another occasion, I said to the wife of a man in the military that we can no longer afford war; all resources have to be used to deal with our current condition of Constitutional domestic violence. Nothing else I said after that was processed by her. She left, and I imagined her thinking of all the sacrifices her family members had made over the years in the military services.
After meeting with attorney William Pepper, I recounted our conversation with a man who is a forensic accountant and a teacher of economics and accounting at a major university. William Pepper had studied the autopsy report of Robert F. Kennedy and concluded that his client, Sirhan Sirhan, could not possibly have been guilty of Kennedy’s murder. Sirhan had been standing in front of Kennedy. The shots that killed Kennedy had come from the rear. Standing in front of the accountant, I reenacted the events as set forth by Bill Pepper. The man to whom I was speaking simply sat down and said “No way. No way.” Sadly, nothing I said after that convinced him to assess the evidence, even though he had all the investigative training required to do so.
And one of the biggest hurdles in searching for truths is the fear of being called a conspiracy theorist. If a person takes a position contrary to officially accepted ideas, she runs the risk of being ridiculed by the powerful interests. Thus, questioning the use of vaccines, GMOs, microwave ovens, fluoride in the drinking water, and mercury in dental amalgams can bring on the charge of being 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.
Believing in truth above all and the need to express truths in these time of crisis, one needs to push past discomfort and disruptions. I pray that more of us attain the courage to do so.
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 needs to be open to new understandings that would require a rethinking of all or parts of our world views.
But it’s 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. See also Study Casts Doubt on Reforms as Key to Improved Student Performance, Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.) Aug. 24, 1987, page9.
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 Simson 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 the simpler levels. To that reporting, I wish to add a sad truth. Businesses did not act to bolster education. Those were the times when employers were shipping jobs overseas. American 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.”
I have no doubt that 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.
Another reason why you might not have heard of the domestic violence clause is that it's buried in the back, among the miscellaneous provisions of Article IV, after Articles I, II, and III created the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches of government. Not only is it in the back, but it's sandwiched between paragraphs that talk about how territories can become new states and how the Constitution can be amended.
How can something be buried in the back? Weren't the words always there to be seen? Yes, 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.
After the subject of “domestic violence” came up in the first hour of the first day of discussions, the members voted to keep their deliberations from the public. Later, they decided that all their meetings 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. It wasn't until 1937 that there was scholarly acknowledgment of their accuracy. 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…)
You may ask, 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 American 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 merely 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, invasion or domestic violence, 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 that’s critical for us more than two hundred and thirty years later. 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 a federal government that was empowered and obligated to protect us from domestic violence, the harm they felt we were likely to do to one another.
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."
What is the essence then of the domestic violence clause in the Constitution? It's the emergency provision to be used decisively in dire matters to bring the people to safety.
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.
And we are in far greater an emergency now than occurred in Newark, Los Angeles, Detroit, and the other cities. Our emergency is existential. We are watching a looming omnicide. Most of us are now ill with diseases and disabilities. And we are slipping toward, as Dubos predicted, lives that will be devoid of human consciousness.
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 circumstances. Here is his article.
Professor Bybee, who had taught constitutional law and is now a United States Circuit Court Judge, urged the limiting of federal authority throughout the article. He defended the rights of states to be free of federal interference with vehemence. 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 responsibility 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 and bring about “domestic tranquility.” And I hasten to add that his reference to “domestic tranquility” obviously includes ensuring our survival.
There is no state in this nation that has anywhere near the resources necessary to deal with the current crisis of domestic violence facing the people. Nor is there any group of states that have those required resources.
And ensuring our safety and survival by using the domestic violence clause is a duty entirely consistent with the original intent of the framers. We are struggling with the consequences of a world we’ve made toxic. They specifically used the generic term violence, which was at that time and is at this moment consistent with toxicity and harm. The word “violence,” when uttered on the first morning of the Constitutional Convention, echoes exactly what our plight is today. 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. See The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist, (Indiana University Press, 1995) at page 184.
Here’s a relevant 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 follow: “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.”
Well, we have lost our way and are losing our Earth because we committed continuing acts of violence upon ourselves. 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.
The first step to be taken is outreach to American 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 the 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.
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 shall 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.
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 will stop the exposures that are causing us to be both ill and incapable. Through massive training and reorganizing, our medical and insurance systems will be transformed from reactive to pro-active and preventative endeavors. Our food supply will again be made safe and nutritious. Cleanups of hazardous wastes will 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.
The domestic violence clause contains wartime powers that are to be used 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 a place for allowing 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, as Winston Churchill said, our finest hour. It can also 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. Here is a brief essay on that point. And the applicability of the law of impossibility as it relates to the United Nations is the focus of my novel titled Impasse.
You can expect an outcry against the proposed use of the domestic violence clause. Un-American, some will say. None of our liberties should ever be curtailed. My response is that we have sorely abused our liberties. That abuse has been constant and unrelenting. We chose a foolish path that has led to us to illness. Now, there is no other course than to order our affairs—both public and private—in a manner such as to bring about health and life.
Others will rail against big government. My response is that we got ourselves into this mess because we didn't have enough government. We did not have a government of, by, and for the people. Now, we are deep into this emergency. Now, government must do what the people acting alone cannot possibly accomplish to get us through to health and sanity.
Some critics will say that there is no "scientific proof" that chemical exposures have caused declines in health, behavior, and educability. The argument will be that the "scientific method" can only accept proof of causality when all other possible causes are studied and eliminated. And I ask, where were these scientists when we poured millions of chemicals into the world? Because of the complexities of chemistry, the toxins have, in fact, long interacted with one another to create an infinite number of combinations of poisons. And that infinite number of poisons have interacted within the complexities of human biology, which includes the fact that it’s not the dose that makes the poison, as previously thought; it’s the timing that makes the poison. A miniscule amount of a toxin during a child’s developmental phase, for example, can cripple that child’s health for the rest of her life.
In this tragic mess, use of the phrase "scientific method" is an absurdity. The time to have raised that pristine laboratory concept was in the middle of the last century, before our public health was undermined.
Another outcry against use of the domestic violence clause will be that we can't afford the cost. I say we can no longer afford the cost of rampant illnesses, the slide toward the destruction of human consciousness, and a planet that will likely soon be no longer habitable.
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, at page 556. 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 our existential threat, we citizens must step up and begin the process required by our Constitution in Article IV, Section 4. Indeed, the requirement to do so is Inherent in our citizenship which demands allegiance to the Constitution.
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 ideas that need to be communicated to those state legislators.
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 woefully wrong to have given them rights that should only be exercised by citizens. And as Justice Louis Brandeis predicted, the corporations, “Frankenstein monsters” he called them, have stolen our health and our freedoms. Please read his prescient 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 necessary.
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.” Part of my law practice included trying to protect the alternative practitioners who were curing people of significant illnesses with gentle regimens that included homeopathy and nutrition. Attorney generals in the various states would get court orders putting them out of business for allegedly committing fraud. Investigators would not even want to hear about the successes of treatments given by alternative practitioners.
Sadly, state governments weighed in heavily on the side of “official” medicine. At one health freedom conference, I met a woman who, holding back tears, described how she wanted to take her son to Europe for him to receive a relatively benign form of treatment for his cancer. When the medical authorities in her state found out, they obtained a court order giving them temporary custody. The young man was then forced to receive the usual doses of radiation and chemotherapy. He died shortly thereafter.
One of my clients, Richard Breitbarth, predicted his own murder. He had developed a cure for cancer that significantly stepped up the lymphatic system. He sent his herbal discovery around to selected doctors. They were reporting back to him that his remedy was curing cancers. That’s when he told me “The big boys won’t like that. I’ll be in line to be killed.” Richard was shot to death in his driveway at about 8:35 a.m. on November 12, 1996, having just returned from grocery shopping. His killer or killers then probably drove a few short blocks during the high traffic time to a major New Jersey highway that was minutes from a major federal highway. Police told me it was obviously a professional killing.
I learned that there were scores of safe and inexpensive cancer cures being sidelined. How is that not murder? How is that different from the gunning down of an honest researcher in his driveway?
Is there no accountability for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s false assertion that laetrile was not helpful in stopping the growth of cancers? Please watch the movie Second Opinion. Here’s a short review.
A crystal clear example of capture of government by industry is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allowing fluoride to be added to the drinking water for a preventive health care purpose, even though doing so is contrary to the Safe Drinking Water Standards as set forth in Section 1412 (b)(11). That section says “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, in contravention of the Safe Drinking Water Act Standards, for reducing tooth decay (a preventive health care purpose). And it does so because “[S]uch 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 The Fluoride Deception, by Christopher Bryson, at pages 150 – 151.
Christopher Bryson interviewed Dr. William Hirzy, an EPA scientist, about what Bryson called the “loony logic of such dumping of industrial silicofluorides.” Hirzy agreed, responding: “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 page 225 of The Fluoride Deception.
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 this 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.” See Highlights in North American Litigation During the Twentieth Century on Artificial Fluoridation of Public Water Supplies, by John Remington and Pierre-Jean Morin, Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law, Vol. 14:2, p. 195 at pages 242 – 243.
The EPA policy which allows industrial waste fluoride to be dumped into public water systems harms the public and saves industry some $300 million a year [$485 million in today’s dollars] by not having to dispose of it as a hazardous waste. (See the paragraph titled Money, Money, Money…)
Well, contrary to EPA’s position which overlooks the harms and requires us to be unwilling subjects for the sopping up industrial poisons, we are, in fact, acutely sensitive to the fluoridation of our water supplies, especially during our most vulnerable in utero times. Here’s the way noted health writer, John MacArthur, expresses that acute sensitivity in his book, Pregnancy and Fluoride Do Not Mix.
Should we just continue allowing those who have, in effect, made serfs of us for the benefit of corporate profits?
I grew up in Newark, New Jersey and remember seeing, in the 1940s, pollution-free electric delivery trucks, busses, and trolleys. 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 (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.)
Edwin Black’s assertion is interesting. The destruction unleased by total dependence upon fossil fuels has been colossal. Shouldn’t the legislators be asked at least to accept 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 the 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. 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 page 369 of Exposure.)
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 mandated to give us a “republican form of government,” meaning a form of governance for the benefit of and in 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’s 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 thrown overboard and left to drown. In terms of governance, this is the bottom. We have hit bottom.
Regulatory systems are lax. The resulting harms done to us are continuing and are rarely considered to be criminal in nature, even though they so often are intentional inflictions of harm for the purpose of allowing and sustaining corporate profits.
How long should such a situation be allowed to continue, especially in this time of existential crisis? This question has great significance insofar as issues of war and peace are concerned. Being in a crisis, we can no longer afford war. The nine hundred military bases around the world must be closed. Legislators need to be apprised of how and why peace keeps eluding us so that, finally, military expenditures can be brought under control. The story of military dominance in the United States is ugly but needs to be told to them if there is ever to be change.
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 type of political and economic systems they favored. Any choice that might be considered inconsistent with American control of resources around the world would be met with force. So it began. And that exercise of empire exists 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 his murder. The Republic of Congo has been in disarray ever since, but American 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 studied law in Paris and received a doctorate in law from the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. He became the 35th 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. The consequences have been grievous for the people of Iran ever since.
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.
American 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. Here’s a brief book review.
And please watch Philippe Diaz’s movie The End of Poverty? It confirms my research on this issue over several decades. The United States is the last—and by far the most destructive—in a long line of empires.
I’ve identified just a few examples of abuse of power by the American empire. There are hundreds of authors who have meticulously documented thousands of such instances. The authors are, just to name a few, Peter Phillips who wrote Giants: The Global Power Elite; Stephen Kinzer who wrote Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq; Chalmers Johnson who wrote The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic; John Prados who wrote Safe for Democracy: the Secret Wars of the CIA; and Paul L. Williams who wrote Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia.
Why is this discussion of the United States as a military empire so crucial for state legislators? Because they’ve not been told that the foreign policy of the United States is based on domination and military force. In fact, those 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 up for every state legislator to see and remember.
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 American 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 corporate motives involved.
Here’s a description of the inane activities that brought us the Korean War and sadly divided that nation to this very day. The war in Europe against Germany ended in victory on May 8, 1945. The Soviet Union, having suffered more than 27,000,000 casualties, agreed to enter the war against Japan, but they needed ninety days to gather themselves for such an effort. As promised, they declared war against Japan on August 8, 1945 and began moving troops eastward shortly thereafter. Most significantly, the Soviet Union did that without having made any prior claims to the Korean peninsula.
The United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and the second on Nagasaki on August 9. The Japanese Foreign Ministry offered to surrender on August 10. The message of Emperor Hirohito’s agreement to surrender was relayed to the United States on that same day, August 10, 1945.
On August 10, Soviet troops had not yet reached Korea in any great numbers, and there were few American troops in that country at that time. The Koreans had undergone thirty-five 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.
But during the evening of August 10, 1945, an unusual order was given to two army officers at the Pentagon. They were asked to draw a line on a map of Korea that would divide the nation in a way that would facilitate the surrender of Japanese troops. They chose the 38th parallel, a line that had no basis in Korean history. North of that line, Japanese troops were to surrender to Soviet forces. South of that line, Japanese troops were to surrender to American forces. See David McCullough’s book Truman, at pages 785 – 786.
Korea was thus foolishly divided along the 38th 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? When will the madness stop?
And because it’s so crucial to end the drive to wars, criminal laws need 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 submitted 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 were 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 participating in a lengthy cover-up. Meanwhile the Patriot Act was passed. The United States went on to take the young men and women of our states and involve them in wars and conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere.
So, the matter must be investigated at the state level as a circumstance of domestic violence under Article IV, Section 4. Further, state legislators need to consider using the criminal laws to deal with those who transgressed through fraud and murder to affect American foreign policy. The federal government refuses to do so. That failure to act must not be a final answer to criminality that amounts to treason.
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?
In asking that question, I refer you to a permissible inference supported by law. It’s commonly referred to as false in one is false in all. Judges tell jurors that they can if they wish infer that a witness who has lied in their presence is capable of lying in other matters. Expanded to present circumstances, if the federal government permits egregious conduct in one instance, isn’t it appropriate to consider that it might allow or commit egregious acts in other matters? Egregious in one is egregious in all is the appropriate presumption to be made under current circumstances.
With that in mind, should not the state legislators begin to assess another observation of Dr. Boyle? Boyle is of the opinion that the coronavirus disease that’s being experienced in the world now is from 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 and possibly for the purpose of affecting public health in the United States among other places.
Again, our federal government is not actively investigating that assertain. The state legislators, on behalf of the people, must do so. If proven, this is criminality of the highest order. It’s treason.
The crime of treason is set forth in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Very simply, 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 be prosecuted. See United States v. Aaron Burr, Circuit Court, D Virginia, 25 F Cas. 49 (1807). http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/burr/marshallopinion.html Chief Justice John Marshall was the trial judge in the case charging Aaron Burr with treason. Marshall instructed the jury on exactly what’s required to find someone guilty of treason. Treasonous conduct, he told them, is levying war which includes any use of force to subvert the government, any use of force to compel a change in the administration of government, or any use of force to compel repeal or adoption of law. Use of force is the first key item. Interference with governance or laws is the second requirement.
One clear example of treason during peacetime involved the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It required that slaves be returned to their owners even if they had made their way to free states. Very often, 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 treason. More often than not, juries in the North found the defendants not guilty of treason by one technicality or another, but that offense is very much real and necessary for our time.
And keep in mind that use of the misprision of treason statute will make it relatively easy to successfully prosecute those who are guilty of treasonous activities. The misprision of treason statute makes it a crime for those who have knowledge of treasons not to come forward voluntarily and give testimony.
The attempted murder of two American senators to pave the way for the Patriot Act was obviously 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?
Is it treason or is it against other criminal laws to harm people by the manufacturing of toxic products such as PFOA and then refuse to stop the manufacturing and distribution of those products?
Is it treason or is it against other criminal laws for petroleum companies to have knowingly disseminated false information concerning global warming in order to maintain sales of petroleum?
Is it treason or is it against other criminal laws to allow the adding of fluoride from industrial waste products to drinking water, contrary to the Safe Drinking Water Act, for the stated 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 despite the fact that it will be causing harm to people for little or any benefit to us?
Is it treason or is it against other criminal laws if energy weapons are now being misused to control weather and bring about harm to populations?
Is it treason or is it against other criminal laws if the program known as geoengineering, including the spraying of toxins, is now occurring?
And was it treason or was it against other criminal laws if, like the anthrax attacks, the murders that occurred in New York City and at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 were committed by Americans against Americans?
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’s 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.”
