Our Founding Felons: A crime is a crime whether the criminal thinks so or not

A felony is a serious crime, usually punishable by imprisonment for over a year. Actions committed by people two hundred years ago are sometimes excused as being commonly accepted at that time. While slavery is a serious felony today, at the time of the U.S. Revolution (1776), slave owners were prominent members of society. Owning slaves made them more powerful because slaveholding brought wealth.

Looking a actions as criminal only if the criminals themselves thought their actions were wrong would cede all the moral arguments to the criminals. Criminal organizations today have elaborate codes of honor, like the omerta of the Sicilian crime families, which create an entirely different moral system. For the crime families, the worst crime is informing for the police. For them, robbery, murder, and extortion are simply the means of conducting business.

We must look upon the actions of our founding fathers today as crimes if we find that other people at that time considered them as crimes, but the founding fathers ignored the opinions of others. Majority agreement does not make a law just, it only gives criminals justification for their actions.

Among the crimes that may have been committed by the founders—Washington, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson—were the following:

1. Enslavement
2. Rape
3. Genocide

Washington and Jefferson both owned slaves. Slavery was a customary practice in Virginia at that time, but what is customary may also be criminal. Abolition movements began as early as 1760 among the colonists. The Quakers began liberating their own slaves in the late 17th century. By 1774, they had succeeded in abolishing slavery within the movement.

Quakers wrote books and pamphlets decrying the ills of slavery. Some of them also made speeches on the subject. It was not possible for an American during the revolutionary period not to realize that many people opposed slavery.

The First Great Awakening, a revitalization of Christian churches in the 1730s and 1740s, decried slavery. Pennsylvania became the first state to pass anti-slavery legislation in 1760. Massachusetts adopted a constitution that declared all men equal. Thereafter, a number of law suits claimed that slavery was illegal in Massachusetts.

Washington and Jefferson both knew that slavery was being outlawed in several states, yet they did not free their own slaves. Neither man freed a slave during his lifetime, though Washington freed most of his slaves in his will. Jefferson freed only a few slaves in his will.

Both Washington and Jefferson had slave mistresses. Such a union is tantamount to rape, since the woman has no choice but to submit to her owner.

Andrew Jackson could have been prosecuted for the crime of genocide if that crime had been defined when Jackson ordered the four civilized nations to leave their land in the South and walk to new homes in Oklahoma. This act today would be called ethnic cleansing and is considered a form of genocide. Four thousand native Americans died along the Trail of Tears.

Long before he became president, Andrew Jackson led a merciless war of extermination against the escaped slaves who lived with the Seminoles in Florida. He began his career by leading a force of American soldiers and Native American allies against Negro Fort, a stronghold for escaped slaves in Northern Florida. He led a flotilla up the Suwannee River and provoked Spanish soldiers to fire on his forces. Jackson was thus able to claim that the Spanish had initiated the war.

Jackson used the superior marksmanship of his gunners to explode the powder magazine at Negro Fort. The resultant explosion killed all but 30 of the 3000 people within the fort. Many women and children were among the dead. Jackson justified his actions by saying he acted to “chastise a lawless foe, who, combined with a band of Negro brigands, have for some time past been carrying on a cruel and unprovoked war against the citizens of the United States.”

Andrew Jackson was the most perfidious and violent of the Founding Fathers.

Maryland v. King: New Technology Confuses Supreme Court

DNA testing is decades old. Police have developed techniques for using it to identify suspects. The suspect in Maryland v. King was caught because he was arrested for brandishing a shotgun. The police collected a sample of his DNA on a cotton swab they touched to the inside of his cheek. The sample matched DNA collected in the investigation of a brutal rape. King was convicted of that crime.

 To most people, perhaps a vast majority, this seems reasonable, even a cause for celebration. The police solved an old crime. A victim got whatever justice she could from the capture and punishment of her assailant. The public breathed a sigh of relief that a dangerous criminal is now in prison instead of on the streets, looking for his next victim.

 The Supreme Court is not most people, however. They are priests in the strange cult of Constitution worship. They compare every trial outcome to a piece of paper that is incomprehensible to most people. No one can predict what they will decide once they have performed the necessary rituals over the scrap of holy paper.

Justice Antonin Scalia is the high priest of Constitution worship. In this case, Scalia writes that the police should not be able to perform the simple act of touching the inside of a suspect's cheek with a cotton swab. The Constitution forbids it, he says. He has made similar statements in the past. The Framers of the Constitution, a small group of men who wore knickers, silk stockings, and powdered wigs, wouldn't permit it.

 This seems most strange to me. Even the existence of DNA was unknown until about 160 years after the Constitution was written. Scalia and his brethren have no way of knowing what the men of those long-ago days would have thought about today's police procedures. The whole court considers what the Framers thought, or rather might have thought, to be very important.

 The Supreme Court is very good at splitting hairs. In this case, the crucial detail is not whether the police collected the DNA sample, but when. The police should not have collected the sample at the time of arrest, Scalia writes. They should have waited until after the suspect was sitting in a jail cell. He thinks there is a distinction there.

Pragmatism should be applied here. The result in this case would be exactly the same, no matter when the DNA was collected. The result is good. Justice was done.

The Court is also very good at imagining impossible scenarios that are prohibited by the law. The Maryland law permits DNA to be collected only from people arrested for serious, violent crimes. Scalia predicts this will be used to trace minor traffic violators, even though the law specifically forbids this. He writes that this decision will be used to build a national database of DNA that includes everyone who has ever been arrested, rightly or wrongly. With this statement, Scalia is bragging that not only can he red the minds of long-dead framers, he can also foretell the future.

No one, not even a Supreme Court Justice, can foretell the future with any accuracy, any more than he can read the minds of long-dead men.

A New Bill of Rights for We The People (conclusion)

IV. No person, or set of people, are entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community, but in consideration of public services; which, not being descendible, neither ought the offices of magistrate, legislator, or judge be hereditary. Associations of people, such as corporations, may not receive exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges for longer than 30 years.

This amendment is partly drawn from the Virginia Declaration of Rights with an addition that attempts to rectify some of the problems we have experienced with corporations. Corporations have no set life span and therefore can receive benefits, such as patents, copyrights, or trade mark protection far longer than any human. When corporations benefit from such privileges for decades, they do so at the expense of humans who may wish to use them as well. This amendment recognizes that artists and inventors have always used the work of others as inspiration for their own works and that current laws prevent them from doing so.

V. No set of people, such as a corporation or a labor union, may contribute money or any other fungible item whatever to a political campaign for the offices of magistrate, legislator, or judge. Campaigns for public office must be limited to 30 days and must be funded by the political district in which the election is held. All qualified applicants for these positions will receive identical support.

American elections are frequently auctions where groups of monied interests attempt to capture political offices. The politicians who win these offices proceed to return money to their backers in the form of favors and votes. This practice is perfectly legal but resembles in all respects a system of corruption where bribery is the norm and objective analysis is unknown.

Sometimes wealthy politicians buy elections using their own money. This results in legislative bodies filled with people who have little in common with those whose interests they are supposed to represent. The best way to take money out of politics is to make it illegal to spend money on political campaigns and use public funding. The elections can cost less by limiting the amount of time campaigning is permitted.

Speech is only free when we all have an equal opportunity to speak. Speech magnified by the electronic media using cash is not equal with speech delivered on a street corner by a person standing on a crate. Free speech is important in a tyranny, but only if one has the means to eommunicate it. In 1776 the means was a printing press or a broadside. Today we need to protect free speech and also provide the means to make it heard. So public financing of elections is essential for a democracy.

VI. Habeas Corpus. The right of habeas corpus is absolute for all prisoners held by the U.S. Government and cannot be abridged by action of the government except during a war declared by a two-thirds majority of the House of Representatives and signed by the President.

The courts and the executive have , in recent years, limited the right of habeas corpus, which gives a person the right to be charged with a crime or else be released from prison. The government has done this by creating a conflict without an actual declaration of war. The declaration of war is a check on the power of government, which otherwise can act as if it at war indefinitely, suspending rights and ignoring the established conventions of war.

The Geneva conventions of war require prisoners of war to be treated humanely and also repatriated at the end of the war. Blurring the line that divides war from peace effectively repudiates the Geneva conventions. Democratic president Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnamese War by getting the congress to authorize his actions without a formal declaration of war. Ronald Reagan used government assets to overthrow the government of Nicaragua without even admitting to congress what he was doing. George W. Bush used his presidential power to declare an essentially endless war.

This amendment will help the U.S. take a step back toward the family of nations.

VII. Adopt the International Human Rights Conventions as constitutional law.

The story of Europe since the end of World War II is a continuous success story for peace over war. This region, which had witnessed over 100 years of continual aggressive warfare between nations, took a different direction by common agreement. At the outset, the U.S. also promised to take this new direction.

Germany turned from one of the most aggressive countries in the world into one of the most pacifist. England gave up its colonial holdings and changed its empire into a commonwealth. France struggled to regain control of its overseas colonies but gave up Vietnam after Dien Bien Phu (1954). The French people in 1962 voted overwhelmingly (91%) to end the occupation of Algeria.

Great Britain relinquished its overseas empire comparatively quickly after the war. India won its independence from Britain in 1947 without military resistence. Most of the rest of the Empire was integrated into the Commonwealth of Nations.

The United States and the Soviet Union, alone among the Colonial Powers, continued to resist independence movements. The United States continued enforcing its will on foreign nations through military actions in Vietnam, Central America, and Iraq. These military actions resembled colonial wars in their disregard for the Geneva Conventions concerning aggressive war, treatment for prisoners, and the use of torture.

The U.S. held trials of German war leaders at Nuremburg and executed several of the most culpable for war crimes, primarily planning and carrying out wars of aggression against other countries and mistreatment, murder, and torture of prisoners of war. After the war, the U.S. joined with other nations to create the United Nations and revise the Geneva Conventions.

The U.S. abandoned its leadership of the global humanitarian movement as a result of its wars against Vietnam, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In addition to its military interventions, publicly admitted, it has intervened secretly in Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Tibet, Indonesia, and others. These interventions may have been justified as reactions to events in those countries, yet the U.S. elected to use military force instead of diplomacy to respond to these problems.

The United Nations was formed as an alternative to military action. The international treaties agreed to—and those not yet agreed to—by the U.S. are intended to foster universal human rights. If these treaties are integrated into the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. becomes a guarantor of universal human rights. The problem of whether the U.S. can use the Alien Tort Statute to protect human rights abroad becomes moot: The U.S. will have other, more direct means to foster human rights.

The U.S. must repudiate war as an instrument of policy and join the rest of the industrialized nations in fostering peace.

McQuiggin v. Perkins: Good news for prisoners seeking to prove their innocence

In the recently decided case of McQuiggin v. Perkins, the conservatives on the Supreme Court continue their struggle against the most powerless people in our society, those who have been convicted of a crime. Justice Scalia, in his written dissent, once again claims special knowledge of the U. S. Constitution, which, he tells the court, does not permit the Supreme Court to make changes to laws, only to opinions of other judges. The part where the Constitution forbids the Supreme Court from modifying laws, according to Scalia, states “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States...”. That seems to be a straightforward statement, but it has been interpreted differently by different jurists.

Chief Justice John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison (1801), decided that the Judiciary Act of 1801 was unconstitutional and voided the entire bill. The Act was passed by the Congress, but the Supreme Court nullified it. This is undoubtedly legislating, by deciding which laws may be implemented and which may not. So the Supreme Court has been legislating from the very beginning of the republic.

The framers did not intend for judges and legislators to become quasi theologists using the Constitution as holy writ. Today, the text of the Constitution is held in such reverence by some Supreme Court Justices that they relate almost every case directly to the Constitution, whether or not the Constitution has any relevance to the case. Scalia has assumed the mantle of soothsayer, since he interprets the Constitution and expects others to be guided by his interpretation. When he says that Judges are forbidden by the Constitution to legislate, he splits some very fine hairs about what constitutes legislation and what doesn't.

Scalia also continues his crusade against what he considers a blasphemous decision, Brown v. Allen (1953). In Brown, the Court decided that a writ of habeas corpus could be granted not just on procedural grounds, but also on substantive grounds. Scalia refers to this decision as a Faustian bargain, in other words, a deal with the devil. He goes on to complain that Brown has caused the courts to be inundated with requests from prisoners. Scalia has said that there is no such thing as substantive due process.

Whether substantive process exists and whether appeals should be granted on substantive grounds depends very much on your politics. Conservatives argue that the Constitution only guarantees you a statutory trial, but does not guarantee a fair trial. You got your trial, your lawyer bungled his job, and now you're sitting in a jail cell for 20 years. If you try to assert your innocence in court, Scalia writes, you are contributing to a flood of “stale, frivolous, and repetitious petitions”.

Looking at substantive grounds for a retrial, however, as the majority of the Court ruled in this case, gives an innocent person a chance to prove his innocence in court. Justice Ginsburg, in writing the opinion of the court, writes that a provable claim of innocence justifies the extension of the one-year limitation prescribed by law. The substantive finding of actual innocence, she says, outweighs the letter of the law, which would require the innocent as well as the guilty to be punished for failing to meet a deadline.

This finding drives Scalia mad. He says the law must be observed. In this uncompromising stance he is acting like the clerk who won't let you buy a pack of cigarettes after closing time. The store is closed, the chance for justice has vanished. Scalia and the clerk make the same excuse. “It's not my fault,” says the clerk. “Rules are rules.” But Scalia and the Supreme Court are not clerks at a seven-eleven. They are the highest jurists in the land, the last court of appeal. Scalia's opinion attests to his belief that innocent people should suffer to reduce the workload of the courts.

In his dissent, Scalia uses a metaphor that reveals just how removed he is from reality. You can't just add something to a law passed by the legislature, he says. “any more than one would add another gear to a Swiss watch on the theory that the watchmaker surely would have included it if he had thought of it. In both cases, the intricate craftsmanship tells us that the designer arranged things just as he wanted them.”

The problem with this metaphor is that the watchmaker of a Swiss watch is making an instrument that is guaranteed to work indefinitely. The watchmaker assures the buyer that all of his skill has gone into the making of this watch. A legislative body assures no such thing. The legislature presents the public with a law that is very often a compromise between two diametrically opposed schools of thought. Laws are frequently badly written, containing loopholes that skillful lawyers can use to negate their purpose. Sometimes laws fail in practice because the legislature designs the law to do something that cannot be done, such as lower taxes and balance the budget at the same time. Comparing congress to a Swiss watchmaker is like comparing God (who is infallible) to the committees that design how traffic flows in our big cities.

We all may wish that our Constitution and laws could be perfect, but most of us understand that they are not.

Peer Reviewed Articles are the Gold Standard of Scientific Discovery

The following comment appeared in an article on global warming on the NewsBusters site, a conservative blog.

“The concept of "peer review" has been debunked even more than CAGW has. Those in the know now refer to it as "pal review."”

This comment is categorically false.

The NewsBusters article cited many climate skeptics giving interpretations of data they had collected. Criticizing peer reviewed articles is best performed by writing peer reviewed articles. But if you can't do that, at least don't criticize the entire scientific community and the ways they have discovered to transmit their findings that have build the extraordinary technologies we now possess.





Every scientist on the planet uses peer review as the gold standard of scientific proof. Energy companies do, too. Energy companies rely on the scientific expertise of their multitude of paid scientists  to find fossil fuel deposits, extract the contents, and create products from them. Without scientists, there would be no energy companies. Energy company scientists make decisions based on peer reviewed papers and repeatable experiments. The energy companies have complete faith in the scientists they employ.

But when other scientists (who are not paid by the energy companies) publish papers which the energy companies find detrimental to their interests, the energy companies (or front organizations they fund) attack those other scientists as conspirators and their peer reviewed articles as frauds. If the articles agree with energy company policies, the energy companies believe them. If the energy companies don't like the results of the articles, the companies attack the scientists who write them and, with them, the whole scientific world.

Climate change deniers can't have it both ways. They can't claim that peer reviews work for every other kind of science but have somehow inexplicably failed for climate science. If the climate change deniers have proof that can stand up to professional scrutiny, they should publish it in peer reviewed journals. But there is no such proof and there have been no such publications.

Peer reviewed articles are published so that anyone can refute their findings with new studies or with new interpretations of the same data. The energy companies have been unable to refute the findings of climatologists, although they have plenty of money to do so and have certainly tried.

The opinions listed in the NewsBusters article are not refutations of peer reviewed articles. They are ad hominem attacks on professional scientists. Such attacks could not be published in scientific journals, which demand proof, not innuendo or baseless rhetoric.

Global warming is real and it is harming us every day.

A New Bill of Rights for We the People

The current Bill of Rights concerned individual rights to be protected from the government. These rights were important at the time, when a war had recently been fought against the British monarchy. The American Revolution was a clash between those who believed that one class of people, the nobility, was superior to all others, and others who believed that there should be no perpetuated classses. This was the original meaning of the Declaration of Independence, when it declared that all men are created equal.

Authoritarian governments, like the English monarchy, recognized no rights among the people, only obligations. The people had the obligation to respect the sovereign, pay their taxes, and fight for him, if necessary. The American colonists objected to this view of their rights. Many of the colonies had been opposed to the English monarchy and nobility. They objected to the King's attempt to reclaim his full rights, especially the right to tax. The original Bill of Rights addressed the abuses of the monarchy.

Events that led to the American Revolution were imposition of taxes on Americans, who were not represented in the English parliament; reorganization or abolition of American governing bodies; quartering English soldiers in America for the purpose of maintaining a standing army, which could defend or control the colonists; and seizure of arms intended for militias.

Such were the events that still troubled the minds of the Framers of the Constitution in 1789. Such were the evils that the Bill of Rights was intended to combat. But these evils were shortly diminished or rendered harmless. Militias were replaced by a standing army. Representation was provided by a Congress elected every two years. The federal government has never reorganized a state government, except after a civil war. The standing army was never quartered on the populace. The amendments that refer to those ills are no longer relevant.

New ills have taken their place. First among these new ills is inequality between the wealthy and the poor, an inequality of opportunity and an inequality of power. The ills associated with industrialization are rampant: unemployment, dislocation, exploitation of labor, hunger. Corporations, monopolies, and cartels prey upon the people and control the government, the press, and the courts. New rights need to be guaranteed to counter these modern ills.

The starting point for the People's Bill of Rights is the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted by the Fifth Virginia Convention in June, 1776. This declaration of rights was echoed in the Declaration of Independence adopted at Philadelphia in the following month. The Virginia Declaration also influenced James Madison when he drew up the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

People's Bill of Rights

I. All people are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

This is the first article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, here referred to as Mason's Declaration, except that the word “people” has been substituted for the word “men” in the first line. It was appropriated into the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson, with some important changes. Jefferson's Declaration states that man is endowed by his creator. Mason's Declaration requires no such divine entity. Jefferson's rights are inalienable; Mason's are inherent, and he describes precisely what Jefferson refers to as inalienable, that is, that the people cannot deprive their posterity of these rights by any compact. Jefferson mentions three inalienable rights, namely life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Mason defines these rights more succinctly as the enjoyment of life and liberty, and pusuing and obtaining happiness. Mason also adds to these the means of acquiring and possessing property, and the ability to pursue safety.

Dropping this article from the U.S. Bill of Rights has the effect of removing the guarantee of equality. Mason also makes clear that the government is us, not an entity that was created by us and then took on a life of its own. Mason makes the people themselves those who cannot deprive their posterity of these inherent rights. This distinction erases the artificial opposition of the government to the people.

This article also answers the question whether corporations are people: No, they are not. A corporation is an artificial association of people that does not exist in nature and therefore has no inherent natural rights. Corporations, like governments, are creations of the people and responsible to them.

II. All power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.

This article describes the kind of government this is, namely a democracy, since all power is vested in and derived from the people. It also describes the relationship of the government to the people, namely that the government is their creation and its functionaries are servants of the people. In a monarchy, such as Great Britain at that time, all power arises from the monarch, who is responsible only to himself. The people in a monarchy become the servants of the monarch, who can make laws and raise taxes as he sees fit, without their consent. The people have the right to petition the monarch, but cannot force him to alter his course. Any attempt to argue with the monarch is considered treason and can be severely punished. This is why there is no freedom of speech or of the press in a monarchy.

The framers of the Constitution were republicans, that is, they designed a republican form of government. In this sort of government, the people elect representatives who make all their decisions for them. The people become the servants of their representatives, who have all the power. The people hold elections, but the same people tend to return to power again and again, becoming a de facto ruling class, who are out of touch with the people they are supposed to represent.

III. Government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation or community; of all the various modes and forms of government that is best, which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety and is most effectually secured against the danger of maladministration; and that, whenever any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.

This article reinforces the supremacy of the people over their government while it describes the attributes of a true democracy. Mason makes clear he does not necessarily favor a republican form of government unless a republic is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety and is most effectually secured against maladministration. The framers designed a republic that was inflexible and incapable of providing for the happiness of the people. Instead, the current Constitution guarantees the happiness of it rulers and gives them the power to threaten the safety of all. The waging of endless war, as some of our representatives favor, does not lead to the safety of the people; rather, it leads to an erosion of the civil liberties inadequately guaranteed under it. Civil liberties are seriously violated when the government can throw people in prison and hold them indefinitely without a trial, as is currently the case under our Constitution.

Moore, OK: Where Taxes Are Low And Children Die In Tornadoes

By Holly and Allan Masri

In 1999, Moore, Oklahoma, was hit by a tornado that killed 36 people and registered the highest wind speeds ever recorded. Then yesterday, another massive tornado struck, killing twenty-four people, including nine children. At least seven of those children died at school.

Between 1999 and yesterday, the citizens and government of that town had 14 years to make their schools safe for their children.  You would think that the 36 deaths in 1999 might have been a wake-up call, that the survivors would say, "We must be better prepared, next time.  We must make sure our children, at least, have a shelter to go to".    But yesterday, children at both of the schools had no better shelter than hallways and closets.

Where were the underground shelters?  Where did the tax money go, the money that could have built shelters for those children?  Turns out, the wealthy people have it... because Oklahoma eliminated inheritance tax, and made sure that the wealthy people pay no more income tax than poor people.

Keith Mitchell, executive director of communication at Lawtown Public Schools, located 80 miles southwest of Moore, Oklahoma, told the New York Daily News that there are no specific guidelines from the state that mandate a certain type of storm construction like a fallout shelter.

 "It was left up to the school district to determine what structures to have," he said.

Since money obviously wasn't spent on the schools, who was responsible for that decision?  Here's one person:  U.S. Rep. Tom Cole, who lives in Moore.

According to Wikipedia, Rep. Cole's voting record "during his nine years in the House marks [him] as a solid conservative with occasional libertarian sympathies. Cole has consistently voted against positions supported by lobbies for senior citizens, labor unions, and teachers' unions."  

Cole said Tuesday on MSNBC TV that the school was the most secure and structurally strong building in the area.

"And so people did the right thing," he said, "but if you're in front of an F4 or an F5 there is no good thing to do if you're above ground.  It's just so tragic."

"Tragic" doesn't begin to cover it.  But WHY were people above ground, Mr. Cole?  Why were there no adequate shelters at Plaza Towers Elementary, or at Briarwood?  Why did seven children drown in a basement?

Undoubtedly Rep. Cole and the wealthy people he works for are enjoying the blood money they saved because they refused to make safe refuges for the children of Moore. Perhaps they are even toasting each other with expensive champagne right now, congratulating each other on how little they pay to the government.  And all the dead, and wounded, of Moore?  Expendable.  (Big sigh)..."It's just so tragic."

Every day we hear from the Tea Party and their ilk that government spends too much, collects too much in taxes, and wastes our money.  But Mr. Cole, what better use for money could there be, than to keep our children alive?  A little tax money spent on underground shelters in Moore would not be wasted.