MINNEAPOLIS — One of the first inklings Sheriff Richard Stanek had that something was wrong came with a call from the mortgage company handling his refinancing.Read the rest here.
“It must be a mistake,” he said, when the loan officer told him that someone had placed liens totaling more than $25 million on his house and on other properties he owned.
But as Sheriff Stanek soon learned, the liens, legal claims on property to secure the payment of a debt, were just the earliest salvos in a war of paper, waged by a couple who had lost their home to foreclosure in 2009 — a tactic that, with the spread of an anti-government ideology known as the “sovereign citizen” movement, is being employed more frequently as a way to retaliate against perceived injustices.
The best way to deal with this is to criminalize the intentional filing of false leans or other claims. These nut jobs can whine all they want to about the false government from behind bars.
@John: "The best way to deal with this is to criminalize the intentional filing of false leans or other claims."
ReplyDeleteIn English common law, that has always been a criminal offense. It is called "Barratry":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barratry_%28common_law%29
This law, like many others, simply does not get taken seriously and enforced as it should be.
Aside from that, my more serious complaint about the whole "Sovereign Citizen" movement, is that is actually presumes that the U.S.A. is still a country of laws, and that there still exist legal and political means of redress against the plutocracy.
Chris Hedges has a fine piece on the Bradley Manning verdict, which explains the nature of the "gangster state" quite clearly:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bradley_manning_and_the_gangster_state_20130821/
I know you will disagree with Hedges, and with me, on this. I say that, despite their flaws, Manning and Snowden are heroes. If Bradley Manning is a criminal for what he did, then so was Claus von Stauffenberg. Both men violated their military oaths to end official criminality. In fact, Stauffenberg (who tried to kill his own head of state) is arguably a worse "criminal" in that respect than either Manning or Snowden.
The point of that digression, is to say that the United States government no longer possesses any moral legitimacy whatsoever, and that the "Sovereign Citizen" or "Constitutionalist" movement refuses to face that fact.
Finally, may God forgive me for my inability to muster any sympathy whatsoever for Sheriff Richard Stanek. I seriously doubt that you get to be a senior law enforcement officer in the U.S. today, without committing many official crimes under color of law.