Making Law and Money

THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION identifies only three crimes as federal felonies: treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. Treason is defined as an armed insurrection against the government, a military uprising. We interpret treason now somewhat more loosely, to denote any activity deemed to be deliberately harmful to the united States, traitorous behavior intended to either harm or destroy the country. Piracy refers of course to apprehending vessels on the high seas or the great lakes. Counterfeiting,the printing and distrbution of invalid currency, has always been difficult to detect, especially since the advent of paper currency, "greenbacks", during the time of the Civil War. It is now estimated that a substantial part of United States currency currently in circulation is counterfeit. Sheepishly I recall touring the Bureau of Printing and Engraving building in Washington D.C..We were all given a sheet of one dollar bills in two rows of eight, sixteen dollars, all attatched to each other, as souvenirs of our visit. One must presume that most people framed them or kept them as keepsakes. I became more creative, by sheer necessity. Short on beer money, boggged down by the rigors of graduate school but feeling a bit stressed and needing a break from dissertation writing, I,well,took a pair of scissors scissors and carefully, very carefully cut my sheet into sixteen equally proportioned rectangles, and bought two or three six packs of Budweiser. (In those days, beer, like everything else, was cheaper.) It must have worked. I got back on track dissertation wise, wrote a passable description of the intellectuall relationship between Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr, and got the docorate. When I defended it in front of my doctoral commitee, and wisely omitted mention of the boost I had ill gotten by cutting up money for "beer for study", not that they would have cared. I recall being relieved at the time that the liquor store clerk failed to detect any sign of my finanicial perfidy. I still am. I never wonder whether any of my fabricated one dollar bills remainin in circulation; the average life span of a one dollar bill is...what, eighteen months? And, no, I am not proud of this. My question was and remains: Was I guilty of counterfeiting? I am disclined to actually want to know the answer, but can rather readily surmise what it is. Piracy is a crime which the United States committed only a few short days ago; the now famous or infamous hijacking of the oil tanker ship off the coast of poor Venezuela. Poor Venezuela, languishing under the suppression of a brutal dictator, and besieged by the ongoing threat of American naval power, courtesy Trump, and, to a lesser extent, the defunctand always unforecable Monroe Doctrine This one's on Trump, alone. We may also thank Don the Con for our most recent manifestation of treason, but also must give credit to his insurrectionist mob of January 6, 2021. And make no mistake; this was treason, of the highly organized pre planned kind. No, it was not technically a "military" insurrection, but an insurrection it was,and with nearly all the assailants of the Capitol building on that infamous day,was more than sufficiently "militarized" to be so labeled. In other words, close enough. Since 1787 more than forty thousand more crimes have been identified by Congress by legislated statutory law as federal crimes, and the number keeps growing. The purest two acts of treason we Americans ever commited were the Revolution against British rule, and the Civil War. Donald Trump and his MAGA mob are currently in third place, but hey, who's counting? And, after all, as they say, its still early.