When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the people of 50 united states to reaffirm and declare forever unbreakable the political bands that connect their states with one another and with the Federal Government located in the District of Columbia, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind require that they should explain why the limitations to their sovereignty, as outlined in the American Constitution and as established by decisions of the Supreme Court, make sense also as a desirable political condition for other states throughout the world interested in joining our union.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, Property, the pursuit of Happiness, and Citizenship in a democratic state of their choosing. To secure such rights, Governments should be instituted among men with limited sovereign powers in order to prevent politicians from assuming dictatorial powers. Until the present century, independent national states required unlimited sovereignty to form national armies capable of defending states from attacks by enemy states. In the 50 united states of America, state armies are both unnecessary and illegal. In independent national sates throughout the world, national armies have become less and less necessary because the American Federal Government has assumed the responsibility of protecting foreign states from interstate wars. It backs up this responsibility at a cost of nearly 700 billion dollars a year by maintaining more than two and a half million personnel in its armed forces, military bases throughout the world, and a naval fleet present in every ocean. By joining the 50 united states as newly admitted states, national armies, which sometimes are used to repress the democratic rights of their people, will become obsolete. The Federal Government of the 50 united states has assumed the duties of a world government partly to prevent laws and policies of national states from impeding the freedom of multinational corporations to conduct business world-wide unrestricted by national boundaries. As national states apply for admission to the American union to the Congress in Washington and are accepted by the Congress, the transition of the United States of America to the United States of the World would become gradually a reality. This extensive new world union would make more and more secure and more general the movement throughout the world of labor and capital wherever opportunities for employment draw them. The American Constitution states clearly that the Congress of the elected representatives of the 50 states possesses the power to admit new states. Since the United States began in 1783 with the acceptance of the Constitution by 13 states, 37 new states have been admitted. The Federal Government’s role as a national government would not change as long as some states in the world choose to retain their unlimited sovereignty. The people of newly admitted states would be citizens, as stated in the Fourteenth Amendment to the American Constitution, both of the national union and of the state where they choose to establish residence. However, as the world role of the Federal Government increases with more and more new states, its national role would decrease. This is happening already for, since the end of the Second World War, the Federal Government’s world responsibilities have rendered it less and less able to concentrate on purely national goals. The limitations on sovereignty that apply to the present 50 states would also apply to new states although these limitations would tend to decrease as the number of new states increases. Who does not see that dictatorial governments scattered all over the world, ruled by politicians with rapacious designs on their own national wealth and indifferent to real democracy and to glaring world problems, must go? Limitations to national sovereignty are the necessary conditions for the establishment of genuine democracy and for the establishment of a world government capable of dealing with world problems. In the future, the central world government will guarantee unlimited democracy to states in exchange for their acceptance of limited sovereignty and all states will be guaranteed also full democratic representation in the government of the world government.
The Federal Government in Washington has never possessed any national territory because it has been located since 1783 in the District of Columbia separated by its borders from the neighboring states of Virginia and Maryland. It has never operated with full sovereignty as have other national states since the American Constitution grants it sovereign power only in selected and limited areas. All powers not specifically granted to the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the Federal Government are reserved as areas for the exercise of state sovereignty. In fact, most Americans before the American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, regarded the Federal Government as an agency to protect them from foreign states, to assure interstate commerce and to sort out their interstate differences and conflicts. Most regarded secession from the union as a sovereign right until the victory of the northern army over the secessionist south ended the right. The defeated general of the southern army, Robert E. Lee, publicly recognized that the war ended the right of secession but he insisted that the loss of this right meant that it was the duty of the Federal Government to use its newly-won power to assure the existence of state sovereignty. In reality, since the end of the Civil War and especially since the end of the Second World War, the Federal Government has abused and extended its powers to the detriment of state sovereignty. It has also been guilty of unjustified acts of covert and open violence against various national states mainly to secure freedom for multinational corporations to pursue world-wide economic dominance. However, the usurpation of power by the Federal Government at the expense of state sovereignty has never been accompanied by the establishment of dictatorial rule in state governments. In fact, the Federal Government by law must allow the existence in the states of only democratic governments. The US government is ordered by the Constitution in Article IV section 4 to “ guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government…” Some of the present states of the union have been functioning democracies continuously since 1783 and all 50 states are now solid democracies. We the people of the 50 united states have patiently endured painful limitations to our sovereignty imposed on us by the government in Washington, but these limitations are generally those that a world union of states would need. Both we the present states and any new states cannot wage wars, cannot set up state tariffs against free trade, cannot deny residence and citizenship and the right to work and to vote to anyone, cannot enact laws against the exercise of any religion, cannot deprive any citizen of life,liberty or property without due process of law, cannot deprive any citizen of equal protection of the laws, cannot deprive any citizen of free public education and so forth. Thus, by something like a ruse of history, most acts of the Federal Government and the Federal Courts limiting state sovereignty have in reality created a firm basis in law for a world union of states by voiding state laws that might promote tyrannical powers. Moreover, the citizens of new states in the union would enjoy voting for representatives not only to their state legislature but also to the congressional legislature in Washington. In addition, they would elect a governor for their state and a federal president for Washington. We appeal to our brother states throughout the world to join our union of democratic states so that their own democratic liberties can be secured by the Federal Government’s powers and so that by their presence in the union the Federal Government can assume as exclusively as possible the role of a world government which humanity needs to fulfill the good destiny that its Creator has designed for it.
More than eight hundred years ago middle-class merchants in Europe escaped from feudal oppression by establishing themselves in towns and by guarantying their new free, independent way of life with written laws. Entrepreneurs from this class made technological advances in the means of production over a long period of time that radicalized social and political relations. Eventually this new middle class of merchants and lawyers created national states, first as limited monarchies and then as democracies, to protect by laws and constitutions the property and riches of the few from the working class. American foreign policy since the Second World War has continued to seek this governmental protection of the rich at the world rather than just at the national level. All revolutions are destructive but it is still possible to create a positive result of the middle-class revolution of the past if we carry its momentum further by creating a new world order that protects by law not just the worldwide freedom of the rich but the worldwide freedom of everyone. We must make an orderly transition by adding states to the American union whose people will send representatives to the Congress in Washington and guarantee by the power of law both the interstate inviolability of multinational corporations and the inviolable right of labor to free interstate movement and free interstate citizenship.
We the people of the present 50 united states have national patriotic sentiments like those of people of other nations. History has taught us however that a union of states free of tyrants and corrupt politicians with a central government willing to fight anywhere in the world for the survival of freedom, as President Kennedy declared, is more important than nationalistic sentiment. Two hundred and thirty-six years ago, in 1775, the state of Massachusetts on its own put an army in its fields to fight for its independence from Britain. Independent eight years later because of help from other colonies and France, John Adams of Massachusetts refused national sovereignty for his state and instead opted for limited sovereignty and interstate union. Adams, the second President of the United States, called the men who opposed his magnanimous vision of America’s future “piddling” people. No doubt people from some states, both those already united as well as those fully sovereign, will reject the vision of this our declaration of dependence. Foreign states will assert that they have no need of world union with the 50 American states and other states because they already enjoy as sovereign states a form of world union under the protection of America. We consider their view piddling. People in American states, which already contain citizens of every race and religion from every nation of the globe speaking most world languages as well as English, will perhaps fear the end of the white race as a majority in America. We consider their view piddling. The world must get rid of all racism, all religious bigotry, all fanaticism, all national borders, all terrorism, all ignorance, all intolerance, all poverty, all tyrants, all corrupt politicians, all injustice or else we will all become “piddling” people and we will never have somewhere a strong central world government uniting us all under a constitution that will allow us to live magnanimously in free democratic states and to once again make our world green.
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