Americans Need Article 6 for Their Own Liberation

The government has really pulled a trick on you. The government has really, really pulled a trick on on the American people via this concept of American exceptionalism, whereby Americans very ignorantly and against their best interests themselves have a kind of dismissive attitude towards international law. And because of this American exceptionalist attitude, they think that their government and their laws and their constitution and what have you are basically like divine decree, supreme. The supreme law on earth for human beings is their constitution and their legal system. And what they don't understand among many things, one of the things that they don't understand is that, no, your national federal system is below international law.

It is subordinate to international law. It's supposed to be, and that's actually in your best interest. Because I think that most Americans are aware of of wrong things, let's say, wrong things that happen in The United States. Just like what brother Ali was talking about, the extrajudicial killings, the mass incarceration, and so forth. Most Americans are aware of all of those things.

But what they're not aware of is that these violations are literally violations. They are crimes in international law. In other words, there can actually be accountability. These aren't just, oh, it's a shame. Oh, it's disgraceful.

Oh, it's too bad. Oh, it's very sad. No. These are crimes, and you're supposed to have recourse. I mean, you had over 1,200 extrajudicial killings by the police in 2023.

We don't have the full numbers yet for 2024, but I wouldn't expect it's gone down. Those are usually targeted against members of the global majority who live in The United States, which is what they call minorities, and and it's systematic. And a case could definitely be made that this constitutes ethnic cleansing. It constitutes an ethnic cleansing program against so called minorities in America because you have both the extrajudicial killings, you have systemic harassment of so called minorities, you have increased and intensified so called policing in so called minority communities, which minority communities in The United States will express to you themselves that it feels more like an occupation, that they're under occupation by the police, and they have reason to say that. They have reason to feel that way.

And what they need to understand is this is not just, oh, it's too bad. Oh, I wish it wasn't that way. No. This is a crime in international law, and you're supposed to have recourse to that. I mean, all know that The United States, from from the very foundation, was rooted in the dispossession and the suffering of the indigenous people.

No one talks about that. No one really talks about that because for obvious reasons, it's it's incredibly awkward to talk about the Native Americans in The United States. There there isn't a treaty that they haven't violated against the native people, and that's not just in the past. That's not just history. Today, you have projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, desecrates lands that those people consider holy.

Okay. Like I said, that's not just a shame. It's not just sad. It's not just unfair. It's a crime.

It violates article 26 of the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people. They can be held accountable for that. Not to mention on the so called reservations, you have persistent neglect of health care, persistent neglect of education, and basic services for native communities, for native American communities. This is a direct breach of the universal declaration of human rights. This isn't even a difficult case to make.

You have uranium pollution on Navajo lands, not to mention other environmental disasters, constitutes you can make the argument, it constitutes environmental racism because you don't do it in other places. So this violates both the Stockholm declaration on the human environment and basic principles of justice, and as I say, the universal declaration of human rights. You have you have speaking of environmental crisis, you still remember just a a couple of years back, the Flint water crisis, which until now isn't completely resolved, and you had the chemical spill that was caused by the Ohio train derailment. These these are not just, again, disasters where everyone can say, oh, what a shame that that happened. These are crimes.

In Flint, contamination isn't an accident. It's the result of systemic neglect that violates the fundamental right to clean water, which is recognized by the United Nations in resolution 64 subsection two ninety two. You understand? These are crimes being committed against you by your own government, but they don't want you to even think about that because they want you to have this exceptionalist mentality where you think international law isn't supposed to apply to you. But they don't want you to think that it applies to you because they're violating it against you.

Mean, not to mention about Flint. You've got toxic water being dumped in marginalized communities all the time. This is a breach of the, what's it called, Basal Convention on Hazardous Waste Disposal. This is a crime. It's callous disregard for the lives of people who lack political and economic power in The United States.

That's why the law exists so that you can have recourse. And like what brother Ali was talking about with with homelessness and the process by which people become homeless in one of the so called wealthiest nations on earth where workers are denied fair wages, are crushed, and everyone just shrugs their shoulders as if a company has the right to crush a union. Well, union busting violates the International Labor Organization convention number 87. It's against the law. It's against international law to do that.

You don't have the right to do that. There you have a guarantee in international law for the right for workers to organize. Not to mention wage stagnation, systemic poverty. Now everyone in The United States just feels like, well, that's just capitalism. You know, some rise, some fall.

Everybody's gotta struggle on their own. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, rugged individualism, so on. No. That's a breach of article 11 of the international covenant on economic and social and cultural rights. This is a violation of the law of international law, which exists precisely for people like you who have the law violated against you throughout your whole life.

But they don't want you to think that you have any recourse to that. As brother Ali was talking about with the homelessness, how can this be such a pervasive issue? This is a betrayal of humanity. And, again, most relevantly relevant to our discussion, it's a crime. Not to mention, we've talked about it before, the, mass surveillance, privacy violations, data collection, spying on citizens, collecting their data without their approval, without their consent, without a warrant, without cause, that's a violation of article 17 of the international covenant on civil and political rights.

Yes. It's against the law. They don't have a right to do that. Just because they say they have a right to do it and their federal government says they have a right to do it and they put something on paper within their country that says they have a right to do it, it doesn't mean they do. They don't have a right to do it.

The covenant that I mentioned on civil and political rights, that guarantees protection against arbitrary interference with your privacy. That includes your data, with extrajudicial killings, which they report as police brutality or or or police shooting or whatever. But if it was done anywhere else in the world, they would call it what it is, an extrajudicial killing by the security forces. Everybody knows the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so on, countless others that are etched in the collective memory as symbols of a of a of a system that we know is systemically targeting so called minorities. Well, extrajudicial killings violate the right to life about as explicitly as it can be violated.

And that right to life is enshrined in article six of the international covenant on civil and political rights, not to mention the universal declaration of human rights and the prohibition of torture as well, which is in article seven of the covenant on civil and political rights and even protests in The United States, peaceful protests. That's a fundamental right under article 21 of the covenant on civil and political rights, and those are met with violence and suppression in America. We know it. The the the judicial system, just like he said, the judicial system and the prison system, the private prison system that that that enslaves inmates potentially for life if they have a life sentence and they have to work for free for for the profit of private enterprise, Well, that's slavery. There's not another word for it.

You force people to work. Mass incarceration, this this this systemic I mean, you can't you can't deny it if you look at the numbers. You can't deny that this is a systemic targeting of a particular population or particular populations. Well, that's a violation of what's called the Nelson Mandela rules for the humane treatment of prisoners. It goes on and on how much your government is actually violating your rights under international law, and that's exactly why they never want to think about international law.

I think most Americans aren't even aware of the fact that systemic racism, discrimination, and inequality are against international law. There's a law for that. Article 26 of the, again, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination. These are all laws being broken against you. These are all crimes being committed against you.

But they want you to just shrug your shoulders, you know, lower your head, and say, well, that's just society. That's just how it is. It's a dog eat dog world. Sometimes things are tough. Oh, well, what to do?

Well, I'll tell you what to do. You're supposed to be able to have recourse to international law, but you can't. You don't have recourse to international law. Why? Because the one who's violating your rights in your country dominates and controls and manipulates and abuses the one international institution that is charged with the mandate for the enforcement of international law.

They've made themselves above the law. They have impunity against you. They have impunity against you the same way that they have impunity against people in Congo, the same way that they have impunity against the people of Gaza, the same way that they have impunity against the people in Pakistan or in Yemen or in Somalia or in Iraq or in Afghanistan, they have that same impunity when it's regarding your rights. And they violate your rights with the same disregard that they violate the rights of people around the world. They don't look at you any different.

They'll treat you exactly the same way. And if they could, they would have drone strikes against you in Chicago. They'd have drone strikes against you in Detroit. They'd have drone strikes against you in South Central Los Angeles if they could. And I wouldn't be surprised if you see that within the next four years.

Not to mention you've got the the immigrants and refugees. That was a big issue in the in the recent election. Now, under they they they had they made it an an issue in 2020, but nothing changed over the last four years. Nothing changed. You still got immigrants and refugees who are detained in inhumane conditions.

You still got families separated. You still got children in cages on along the border. Well, that's a violation of the convention against torture and article 10 of the international covenant on the on civil and political rights. You don't know what your rights are because you think that your rights are whatever they tell you they are. And, of course, they're not gonna tell you what your rights are because they're the ones who wanna violate them.

You know? So so it doesn't make any sense for an American to not support this even though there will be consequences. Yes. Like brother Ali said, there will be consequences. But let me tell you, the consequences will actually be positive for you because just like what he said, he alluded to it, which is that once America gets expelled from the United Nations and the United Nations is able to penalize and to punish, correctively punish, rehabilitatively punish America for the crimes that they've committed, for the violations that that they've committed around the world and domestically, then, for example, economic sanctions can be imposed, and that's the most obvious measure that would be taken.

Economic sanctions would be imposed upon The United States by all of their major trading partners and by all of the members of the United Nations, which is everybody. Well, the American economy is 25% of of the American economy is dependent upon international trade, so that's gonna hit you very hard. The American economy has the engine of the American economy has been historically, traditionally, the military industrial complex, which is driven by war, conflict, carnage, death, killing, destruction all around the world. That's what has driven the economy of The United States. And what has enabled them to do that has been their impunity.

I've talked about it many times. It's not their power. It's not their economic power. It's not their political power. It's not their military power.

What has enabled them to do that, what has enabled them to sow conflict and strife all around the world has been their impunity to do so that they have secured for themselves by their control of the United Nations. So your military industrial complex, how what's the logistics of how that works? Well, how that works is that they take your tax money and they give it to Raytheon. They take your tax money and they give it to Boeing. They take your tax money and they give it to General Dynamics.

They give your your tax money to Lockheed Martin instead of, for example, using your tax money money for schools, instead of using your tax money for health care, instead of using your tax money for child care, of using your tax money for better infrastructure, for roads and for bridges and for making sure that your buildings don't fall on your own head. That's where your tax dollars are supposed to go, but because they've built an economic system based upon the ability to sow conflict all around the world, you don't even see where your tax dollars go. It goes you know, and most of it goes into waste when it goes to the military industrial complex, when it goes to those defense contractors. They're not making anything better than than countries around the world. There's weapons that America doesn't even have that they've got in North Korea.

There's weapons that even Iran has that that The United States doesn't have, hypersonic missiles and so forth. So you're spending all of this money, and you're not getting anything out of it. So if they're not able because they lose their impunity once they're expelled from the United Nations, they lose their impunity. They suffer economic sanctions. Yes.

But because they have lost their impunity and they're not able to drive their economy through sowing war and conflict around the world, then it it's no longer profitable to do that, and they're no longer free to do that. So like brother Ali said, you're gonna have to find another way. Your country, America, is gonna have to find another way to manage their economy, and they're gonna have to find something else to do with their tax dollars, and they might find creative ways to actually use that money to help people, to actually do what you're supposed to do with the tax dollars, which is give it back to the people through services, through goods and services, through programs, and so forth, affordable housing. Can solve your homeless problem. We all know that.

You can solve the homeless problem. You can solve even addiction, childcare issues. So many things can that can be solved. Even that even that that that CEO of the health care company, well, he didn't have to die. Didn't have to get shot because someone was disgruntled because of the the the the evil of that system.

Because that system exists because your country doesn't help you with your health. Because your country doesn't provide health care. That's why that system even exists. That's why that evil health care system, so called, that evil health care private system private company, that's why it exists because your government uses your tax dollars for bombs instead of for doctors, instead of for health care. That's why that that's why they're able to make a profit off of your sickness and your death because they don't provide for you.

Well, you could be be in a position now to demand that they provide for you because they don't have anything else to do with the money because Boeing can't use it, Raytheon can't use it, Lockheed Martin can't use it, General Dynamics can't use it because they're not allowed to create conflicts and war around the world anymore. Because when they try to do that, they'll be punished by the United Nations through economic sanctions by the rest of the world. So it's in your interest to support article six. It's absolutely in your interest. There's not a way that you're gonna be able to change the sick and twisted and destructive model for the management of your economy, which is the military industrial complex, you're not gonna be able to change that as long as America dominates the United Nations because it's driven by their impunity to sow violence and conflict around the world.

So if you remove that impunity from them, you have a chance for creating a better economic model a healthier economic model, a more humane economic model, and actually get some benefit from your tax dollars. Thank you.