I am in the debt collection business. About a year ago, I came across a guy who liked to file these pleadings filled with jargon jammed together in a sort of pseudolegal word salad. I pushed along, got my judgment, he went to jail shortly thereafter on an unrelated matter, and I closed my file. I didn’t give him a whole lot of thought; the world has a lot of crazy people, and in my business, I see more than my fair share. But, then, last week, I got more pseudolegal word salad from a different person, and started to investigate.
What I’ve been seeing is apparently called “Redemption” among its practitioners. The “tell” that you’re in this particular rabbit hole is bizarre, completely out of context references to UCC-1 financing statements. If you try to follow explanations of what this is about from proponents, you’ll just get a headache. Mercifully, a guy named Mark Pitcavage distilled the theory – at least what they were saying about 10 years ago. Pitcavage is apparently a historian of sorts with respect to militia and other right wing extremist groups.
The basic idea, so far as there is coherence to it, relies on the dissolution of the Union following Southern secession; creation of a sort of government corporation which, via the 14th Amendment, created ‘citizens’ as a sort of involuntary asset. The Federal Government secretly went bankrupt in 1933 and then pledged the labor of all citizens by depositing their birth certificates with the Department of Commerce.
Fortunately, this servitude (and many other debts!) can be resisted by filing a UCC financing statement as to one’s person and all of one’s possessions. This has something to do with — and honestly, I lose the thread here — the notion that every person is sort of bifurcated into a strawman and a real person. The strawman is the thing that’s enslaved collateral pledged to government servitude. The ‘real person’ is independent of that obligation. By filing the UCC financing statement against the strawman and all of the person’s present and future possessions, the real person becomes a creditor with a security interest in the strawman and possessions. The filing turns you from “U.S. Citizen” to an “American Sovereign of the Republic of the United States.”
Apparently the UCC filing is supposed to create a superior security interest to and probably nullifies debts alleged by your ordinary creditors and even claims by the U.S. Government such as taxes and traffic tickets. Oh, and in any case, currency issued by the U.S. Government isn’t “real money” which matters . . . somehow. Again, I lose the thread, but it has something to do with silver and gold. (And, to give you a glimpse of my rich mental life, this prompted a vision of the snowman from Rudolph as a militia member singing “Silver & Gold.”)
Poking around, I see that this is a matter of at least passing discussion among Ron Paul supporters. Some in that discussion thread were posting links to why this was a load of bunk and, rationally, asking for examples of where this has worked. Ever. Some were responding by dismissing any contradictory source as unreliable. And others were promoting the idea, obviously trying to sell some kind of “system.”
The practical upshot of this seems to be that practitioners will spend money on “redemption systems.” The more nefarious ones will file various kinds of bogus paperwork, liens and IRS notices of various kinds, that harasses government officials and creditors. And the more or less innocent dupes will walk into a shitstorm when they try to talk about this stuff in court.
It highlights an important feature of the law. In a lot of ways, the law is a fiction of consensus. Let’s suppose for a moment that these folks are “right” about what the law “really” is, in some Platonic sense. Being “right” doesn’t matter at all if judges, lawyers, lawmakers, law enforcement officers, and most of your fellow citizens don’t believe you are right. Without that consensus, the law is just words and papers unless and until a sufficient number of people, more or less voluntarily, agree to conform their actions to the words on that paper.
Anyway, with higher levels of economic stress and greater levels of anti-government activity, it will be interesting to see if I encounter more of these kinds of “Redemption” filings.
Does this fit in with the one world govt and zionist control and all that crazy stuff from the 70’s? My otherwise normal thinking aunt and my somewhat idiot uncle bought into this stuff and were convinced the Rockefellers were running the world. I dread to think what they would have made of Obama. How is it that these feeble minded militia and republicant types are so easily led down these paths of inanity? Most seem like normal, nice people of average intelligence, and then, in a blink of an eye–or perhaps the actualization of the implanted chip–they turn into these jargon spewing robotic creatures. Is it the jargon that gets them–sounds smart but is rather meaningless-like all that education jargon or the new business/marketing/human resources jargon–onboarding, repurposed, take away—?
It is so easy to manipulate the average person. Just a little slick talk, some religion, allusions to past wrongs–real or imagined-based on race, culture, or class, and a well funded sponsor to provide communication and media coverage. Hey, sounds like fox news sponsorship and promotion of tea baggers :)
I haven’t seen this kind of “reasoning” yet in pleadings.
I do kind of look over my shoulder when I leave the grounds near
the CourtHouse to make certain that the debtor/spouse hasn’t followed
me and isn’t heading to where he/she hid his gun in the shrubbery
near the CourtHouse.
Goofy. Well, there’s all kinds of weird out there. At the end of the day, if you don’t pay your debts, or you don’t pay your taxes, you might well go to jail.
My favorite conspiracy nuttiness is the 9/11 Truthers. So many believe that government is inept- except that it could plan the attacks flawlessly and make it look like someone else did it. Well, which is it? Is govt inept or omnipotent?
Reminds me of the death penalty proponents who are otherwise anti-government because they believe government can’t do anything correctly.
There are a fair number of these fruitcakes that are currently incarcerated; they send me an amazing number of requests for documents related to a system they don’t accept. The good news is that I require payment in advance (or a judicial order) before sending them pages and pages of stuff; they are rarely heard from again.
“by depositing their birth certificates with the Department of Commerce.”
That in itself would be quite a feat, especially for a bankrupt government. I wonder what the Department of Commerce was supposed to do with them.
Oh, and not to be all nitpicky – but it was Yukon Cornelius who sang “Silver and Gold.” And then licked his pickaxe – one of the weirder moments of the show.
Doug, LOVE the point about law and “fiction of consensus”.
Steph, Yukon Cornelius licked his pickaxe every time it went into the ground or cliff so he could taste if he had hit gold. Made PERFECT sense. :)
1) I agree with Jason’s assessment of Yukon Cornelius’ actions.
2) Doug was right, Steph.
Burl Ives
IIRC, Burl Ives sang most of the songs in that show.
I love reading about conspiracy theories, and this one is just FULL of a few really special ones I hadn’t heard before. Great… now I’m going to get sucked into wikipedia and questionable conspiracy websites, aren’t I?
Wow, I could have sworn Yukon sang it, not that the snowman sang it about him. I knew he why he was licking the pickaxe – I just thought it looked odd.
Wikipedia says that Yukon Cornelius was really looking for peppermint, which why he kept licking his pickaxe. From the 60s to 1998, that little scene was cut out, but it does kinds ring a bell.
Sigh. I am such a geek.
Learn something knew every day. I’ve seen that Rudolph special about a million times and had no idea about the peppermint thing.