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Tavistock – The Best Kept Secret in America

Larry Ziman — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 15:15:34 +0000

TAVISTOCK – THE BEST KEPT SECRET IN AMERICA

TAVISTOCK INSTITUTE

30 Tabernacle Street, London EC2A 4DD.–

Formed in 1947, the Tavistock Institute is an independent not-for-profit organization which seeks to combine research in the social sciences with professional practice. Problems of institution-building and organizational design and change are being tackled in all sectors – government, industry and commerce, health and welfare, education, etc. – nationally and internationally, and clients range from multinationals to small community groups. A growth area has been the use of a developmental approach to evaluation of new and experimental programs, particularly in health, education and community development. This has also produced new training events alongside the regular program of group relations conferences. The Institute owns and edits the monthly journal Human Relations (published by Plenum Press) which is now in its 48th year, and has recently launched (in conjunction with Sage Publications) a new journal Evaluation.

Three elements combine to make the Institute unusual, if not unique: it has the independence of being entirely self-financing, with no subsidies from the government or other sources; the action research orientation places it between, but not in, the worlds of academia and consultancy; and its range of disciplines include anthropology, economics, organizational behavior, political science, psychoanalysis, psychology and sociology.

The ideology of American foundations was created by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. In 1921, the Duke of Bedford, Marquess of Tavistock, the 11th Duke, gave a building to the Institute to study the effect of shellshock on British soldiers who survived World War I. Its purpose was to establish the “breaking point” of men under stress, under the direction of the British Army Bureau of Psychological Warfare, commanded by Sir John Rawlings-Reese.

Tavistock Institute is headquartered in London. Its prophet, Sigmond Freud, settled in Maresfield Gardens when he moved to England. He was given a mansion by Princess Bonaparte. Tavistock’s pioneer work in behavioral science along Freudian lines of “controlling” humans established it as the world center of foundation ideology. Its network now extends from the University of Sussex to the U.S. through the Stanford Research Institute, Esalen, MIT, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center of Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown, where State Dept. personal are trained, US Air Force Intelligence, and the Rand and Mitre corporations. The personnel of the corporations are required to undergo indoctrination at one or more of these Tavistock controlled institutions. A network of secret groups, the Mont Pelerin Society, Trilateral Commission, Ditchley Foundation, and the Club of Rome is conduit for instructions to the Tavistock network.

[Editor, Tim Aho's note: See Watch Unto Prayer report on The Heritage Foundation founded by Paul Weyrich with funding from Joseph Coors, who also founded and financed respectively the Moral Majority and Council for National Policy.]

Tavistock Institute developed the mass brain-washing techniques which were first used experimentally on American prisoners of war in Korea. Its experiments in crowd control methods have been widely used on the American public, a surreptitious but nevertheless outrageous assault on human freedom by modifying individual behavior through topical psychology. A German refugee, Kurt Lewin, became director of Tavistock in 1932. He came to the U.S. in 1933 as a “refugee”, the first of many infiltrators, and set up the Harvard Psychology Clinic, which originated the propaganda campaign to turn the American public against Germany and involve us in World War II.

In 1938, Roosevelt executed a secret agreement with Churchill which in effect ceded U.S. sovereignty to England, because it agreed to let Special Operations Executive control U.S. policies. To implement this agreement, Roosevelt sent General Donovan to London for indoctrination before setting up OSS (now the CIA) under the aegis of SOE-SIS. The entire OSS program, as well as the CIA has always worked on guidelines set up by the Tavistock Institute.

[Editor, Tim Aho: See Watch Unto Prayer report on The John Birch Society & Council for National Policy for information regarding CIA operations on the Christian Right.]

Tavistock Institute originated the mass civilian bombing raids carried out by Roosevelt and Churchill purely as a clinical experiment in mass terror, keeping records of the results as they watched the “guinea pigs” reacting under “controlled laboratory conditions”. All Tavistock and American foundation techniques have a single goal to break down the psychological strength of the individual and render him helpless to oppose the dictators of the World Order. Any technique which helps to break down the family unit, and family inculcated principles of religion, honor, patriotism and sexual behavior, is used by the Tavistock scientists as weapons of crowd control.

The methods of Freudian psychotherapy induce permanent mental illness in those who undergo this treatment by destabilizing their character. The victim is then advised to “establish new rituals of personal interaction”, that is, to indulge in brief sexual encounters which actually set the participants adrift with no stable personal relationships in their lives, destroying their ability to establish or maintain a family. Tavistock Institute has developed such power in the U.S. that no one achieves prominence in any field unless he has been trained in behavioral science at Tavistock or one of its subsidiaries.

Henry Kissinger, whose meteoric rise to power is otherwise inexplicable, was a German refugee and student of Sir John Rawlings-Reese at SHAEF. Dr. Peter Bourne, a Tavistock Institute psychologist, picked Jimmy Carter for President of the U.S. solely because Carter had undergone an intensive brainwashing program administered by Admiral Hyman Rickover at Annapolis. The “experiment” in compulsory racial integration in the U.S. was organized by Ronald Lippert, of the OSS and the American Jewish Congress, and director of child training at the Commission on Community Relations. The program was designed to break down the individual’s sense of personal knowledge in his identity, his racial heritage. Through the Stanford Research Institute, Tavistock controls the National Education Association. The Institute of Social Research at the National Training Lab brain washes the leading executives of business and government.

Such is the power of Tavistock that our entire space program was scrapped for nine years so that the Soviets could catch up. The hiatus was demanded in an article written by Dr. Anatol Rapport, and was promptly granted by the government, to the complete mystification of everyone connected with NASA. Another prominent Tavistock operation is the Wharton School of Finance, at the University of Pennsylvania. A single common denominator identifies the common Tavistock strategy the use of drugs. The infamous MK Ultra program of the CIA, in which unsuspecting CIA officials were given LSD, and their reaction studied like “guinea pigs”, resulted in several deaths.

The U.S. Government had to pay millions in damages to the families of the victims, but the culprits were never indicted. The program originated when Sandoz AG, a Swiss drug firm, owned by S.G. Warburg Co. of London, developed Lysergic Acid [LSD]. Roosevelt’s advisor, James Paul Warburg, son of Paul Warburg who wrote the Federal Reserve Act, and nephew of Max Warburg who had financed Hitler, set up the Institute for Policy Studies to promote the drug. The result was the LSD “counter-culture” of the 1960s, the “student revolution”, which was financed by $25 million from the CIA.

One part of MK Ultra was the Human Ecology Fund; the CIA also paid Dr. Herbert Kelman of Harvard to carry out further experiments on mind control. In the 1950s, the CIA financed extensive LSD experiments in Canada. Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, president of the Canadian Psychological Association, and director of Royal Victorian Hospital, Montreal, received large payments from the CIA to give 53 patients large doses of LSD and record their reactions; the patients were drugged into weeks of sleep and then given electric shock treatments.

One victim, the wife of a member of the Canadian Parliament, is now suing the U.S. companies who provided the drug for the CIA. All the records of the CIA’s drug testing program were ordered destroyed by the head of MK Ultra. Because all efforts of the Tavistock Institute are directed toward producing cyclical collapse, the effect of the CIA programs are tragically apparent. R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., writing in the Washington Post August 20, 1984, cites the “squalid consequences of the 60s radicals in SDS” as resulting in “the growing rate of illegitimacy, petty lawlessness, drug addiction, welfare, VD, and mental illness”.

This is the legacy of the Warburgs and the CIA. Their principal agency, the Institute for Policy Studies, was funded by James Paul Warburg; its co-founder was Marcus Raskin, protege of McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation. Bundy had Raskin appointed to the post of President Kennedy’s personal representative on the National Security Council, and in 1963 funded Students for Democratic Society, through which the CIA operated the drug culture.

Today the Tavistock Institute operates a $6 Billion a year network of Foundations in the U.S., all of it funded by U.S. taxpayers’ money. Ten major institutions are under its direct control, with 400 subsidiaries, and 3000 other study groups and think tanks which originate many types of programs to increase the control of the World Order over the American people. The Stanford Research Institute, adjoining the Hoover Institution, is a $150 million a year operation with 3300 employees. It carries on program surveillance for Bechtel, Kaiser, and 400 other companies, and extensive intelligence operations for the CIA. It is the largest institution on the West Coast promoting mind control and the behavioral sciences.

One of the key agencies as a conduit for secret instructions from Tavistock is the Ditchley Foundation, founded in 1957. The American branch of the Ditchley Foundation is run by Cyrus Vance, former Secretary of State, and director of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Winston Lord, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[Editor, Tim Aho's note: The wife of Winston Lord (CFR, Bilderberg, Skull & Bones), Bette Bao Lord (CFR, Bilderberg), is Chairman of the Board of Freedom House whose manipulation of the Christian Right via the Religious Persecution issue is documented in our report Freedom House: A CFR Front.]

One of the principal but little known operations of the Rockefeller Foundation has been its techniques for controlling world agriculture. Its director, Kenneth Wernimont, set up Rockefeller controlled agricultural programs throughout Mexico and Latin America. The independent farmer is a great threat to the World Order, because he produces for himself, and because his produce can be converted into capital, which gives him independence. In Soviet Russia, the Bolsheviks believed they had attained total control over the people; they were dismayed to find their plans threatened by the stubborn independence of the small farmers, the Kulaks.

Stalin ordered the OGPU to seize all food and animals of the Kulaks, and to starve them out. The Chicago American, February 25, 1935 carried a front page headline, SIX MILLION PERISH IN SOVIET FAMINE; Peasants’ Crops Seized, They and their Animals Starve. To draw attention from this atrocity, it was later alleged that the Germans, not the Soviets, had killed six million people, the number taken from the Chicago American headline by a Chicago publicist.

The Communist Party, the Party of the Peasants and Workers, exterminated the peasants and enslaved the workers. Many totalitarian regimes have found the small farmer to be their biggest stumbling block. The French Reign of Terror was directed, not against the aristocrats, many of whom were sympathetic to it, but against the small farmers who refused to turn over their grain to the revolutionary tribunals in exchange for the worthless assignats. In the United States, the foundations are presently engaged in the same type of war of extermination against the American farmer.

The traditional formula of land plus labor for the farmer has been altered due to the farmer’s need for purchasing power, to buy industrial goods needed in his farming operations. Because of this need for capital, the farmer is especially vulnerable to the World Order’s manipulation of interest rates, which is bankrupting him. Just as in the Soviet Union, in the early 1930s, when Stalin ordered the Kulaks to give up their small plots of land to live and work on the collective farms, the American small farmer faces the same type of extermination, being forced to give up his small plot of land to become a hired hand for the big agricultural trusts. The Brookings Institution and other foundations originated the monetary programs implemented by the Federal Reserve System to destroy the American farmer, a replay of the Soviet tragedy in Russia, with one proviso that the farmer will be allowed to survive if he becomes a slave worker of the giant trusts.

Once the citizen becomes aware of the true role of the foundations, he can understand the high interest rates, high taxes, the destruction of the family, the degradation of the churches into forums for revolution, the subversion of the universities into CIA cesspools of drug addiction, and the halls of government into sewers of international espionage and intrigue. The American citizen can now understand why every agent of the federal government is against him; the alphabet agencies, the FBI, IRS, CIA and BATF must make war on the citizen in order to carry out the programs of the foundations.

The foundations are in direct violation of their charters, which commit them to do “charitable” work, because they make no grants which are not part of a political goal. The charge has been made, and never denied, that the Heritage-AEI network has at least two KGB moles on its staff. The employment of professional intelligence operatives as “charitable” workers, as was done in the Red Cross Mission to Russia in 1917, exposes the sinister political economic and social goals which the World Order requires the foundations to achieve through their ” bequests “.

Not only is this tax fraud, because the foundations are granted tax exemption solely to do charitable work, but it is criminal syndicalism, conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States of America, Constitutional Law 213, Corpus Juris Secundum 16. For the first time, the close interlocking of the foundation “syndicate” has been revealed by the names of its principle incorporators Daniel Coit Gilman, who incorporated the Peabody Fund and the John Slater Fund, and became an incorporator of the General Education Board (now the Rockefeller Foundation); Gilman, who also incorporated the Russell Trust in 1856, later became an incorporator of the Carnegie Institution with Andrew Dickson White (Russell Trust) and Frederic A. Delano. Delano also was an original incorporator of the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Daniel Coit Gilman incorporated the Russell Sage Foundation with Cleveland H. Dodge of the National City Bank. These foundations incorporators have been closely linked with the Federal Reserve System, the War Industries Board of World War I, the OSS of World War II and the CIA. They have also been closely linked with the American International Corporation, which was formed to instigate the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Delano, an uncle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was on the original Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in 1914. His brother-in-law founded the influential Washington law firm of Covington and Burling. The Delanos and other ruling families of the World Order trace their lineage directly back to William of Orange and the regime which granted the charter of the Bank of England.

Tavistock Institutions In The United States
Flow Laboratories Gets contracts from the National Institutes of Health.
Merle Thomas Corporation Gets contracts from the U.S. Navy, analyzes data from satellites.
Walden Research Does work in the field of pollution control.

Planning Research Corporation, Arthur D. Little, G.E. “TEMPO”, Operations Research Inc. Part of approximately 350 firms who conduct research and conduct surveys, make recommendations to government. They are part of what President Eisenhower called “a possible danger to public policy that could itself become captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Brookings Institution Dedicates its work to what it calls a “national agenda.” Wrote President Hoover’s program, President Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, the Kennedy Administration’s “New Frontiers” program (deviation from it may have cost John F. Kennedy his life), and President Johnson’s “Great Society.” Brookings has been telling the United States Government how to conduct its affairs for the past 70 years and is still doing so.

Hudson Institute This institution has done more to shape the way Americans react to political and social events, think, vote and generally conduct themselves than perhaps any except the BIG FIVE. Hudson specializes in defense policy research and relations with the USSR. Most of its military work is classified as SECRET. (One idea during the Vietnam War was to build a moat around Saigon.) Hudson may be properly classified as one of the Committee of 300’s BRAINWASHING establishments. One of its largest clients is the U.S. Department of Defense which includes matters of civil defense, national security, military policy and arms control.

[Editor, Tim Aho: This is the same Hudson Institute which gave us GOALS 2000 and authored the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act, which became the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. This law required the creation of a federal commission to monitor religion chaired by a presidentially-appointed Ambassador-at-Large on International Religious Freedom under the mandates of the United Nations' covenants and authority of the International Criminal Court.]

National Training Laboratories One of the key institutions established for this purpose in the United States was the National Training Laboratories (NTL). Founded in 1947 by members of the Tavistock network in the United States and located originally on an estate in Bethel, Maine, NTL had as its explicit purpose the brainwashing of leaders of the government, educational institutions, and corporate bureaucracies in the Tavistock method, and then using these “leaders” to either themselves run Tavistock group sessions in their organizations or to hire other similarly trained group leaders to do the job. The “nuts and bolts” of the NTL operation revolves around the particular form of Tavistock degenerate psychology known as “group dynamics,” developed by German Tavistock operative Kurt Lewin, who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and whose students founded NTL.

In a Lewinite brainwashing group, a number of individuals from varying backgrounds and personalities, are manipulated by a “group leader” to form a “consensus” of opinion, achieving a new “group identity.” The key to the process is the creation of a controlled environment, in which stress is introduced (sometimes called dissonance) to crack an individual’s belief structure. Using the peer pressure of other group members, the individual is “cracked,” and a new personality emerges with new values. The degrading experience causes the person to deny that any change has taken place. In that way, an individual is brainwashed without the victim knowing what has taken place.

This method is the same, with some minor modification, used in all so-called “sensitivity groups” or “T-groups,” or in the more extreme rock-drug-sex counterculture form, “touchy-feely groups,” such as the kind popularized from the 1960s onward by the Esalen Institute, which was set up with the help of NTL.

From the mid-1950s onward, NTL put the majority of the nation’s corporate leaderships through such brainwashing programs, while running similar programs for the State Department, the Navy, the Department of Education, and other sections of the federal bureaucracy. There is no firm estimate of the number of Americans who have been put through this process in last 40 years at either NTL, or as it is now known the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences, which is based in Rosslyn, Virginia, or its West Coast base of operations, the Western Training Laboratories in Group Development, or in various satellite institutions. The most reliable estimate is in the several millions.

One of the groups that went through the NTL mill in the 1950s was the leadership of the National Education Association, the largest organization of teachers in the United States. Thus, the NEA’s outlook has been “shaped” by Tavistock, through the NTL. In 1964, the NTL Institute became a direct part of the NEA, with the NTL setting up “group sessions” for all its affiliates. With funding from the Department of Education, the NTL Institute drafted the programs for the training of the nation’s primary and secondary school teachers, and has a hand as well in developing the content of educational “reforms,” including OBE.

Also known as the International Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences. This institute is a brainwashing center in artificial stress training whereby participants suddenly find themselves immersed in defending themselves against vicious accusations. NTL takes in the National Education Association, the largest teacher group in the United States. While officially decrying “racism”, it is interesting to note that NTL, working with NEA, produced a paper proposing education vouchers which would separate the hard-to-teach children from the brighter ones, and funding would be allocated according to the number of difficult children who would be separated from those who progressed at a normal rate. The proposal was not taken up.

University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Finance & Commerce Founded by Eric Trist One of the “brain trusts” of Tavistock, Wharton has become one of the more important Tavistock in so far as “Behavioral Research” is concerned. Wharton attracts clients such as the U.S. Department of Labor which teaches how to produce “cooked” statistics at the Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates Incorporated. This method was very much in demand as we came to the close of 1991 with millions more out of work than was reflected in USDL statistics. Wharton’s ECONOMETRIC MODELING is used by every major Committee of 300 company in the United States, Western Europe, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the World Bank. Institute for Social Research Among its clients are The Ford Foundation, U.S.Department of Defense, U.S.Postal Service and the U.S. Department of Justice. Among its studies are “The Human Meaning Of Social Change”, “Youth in Transition” and “How Americans View Their Mental Health”.

Institute For The Future This is not a typical Tavistock institution in that it is funded by the Ford Foundation, yet it draws its long-range forecasting from the mother of all think tanks. Institute for the Future projects what it believes to be changes that will be taking place in time frames of fifty years. So called “DELPHI PANELS” decide what is normal and what is not, and prepare position papers to “steer” government in the right direction to head off such groups as “people creating civil disorder.” (This could be patriotic groups demanding abolition of graduated taxes, or demanding that their right to bear arms is not infringed.) This institute recommends action such as liberalizing abortion laws, drug usage and that cars entering an urban area pay tolls, teaching birth control in public schools, requiring registration of firearms, making use of drugs a non-criminal offense, legalizing homosexuality, paying students for scholastic achievements, making zoning controls a preserve of the state, offering bonuses for family planning and last, but most frightening, a Pol Pot Cambodia-style proposal that new communities be established in rural areas, (concentration camp compounds). As can be observed, many of their goals have already been more than fully realized.

INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES (IPS)

One of the “Big Three”, IPS has shaped and reshaped United States policies, foreign and domestic, since it was founded by James P. Warburg and the Rothschild entities in the United States. Its networks in America include the League for Industrial Democracy. Lead players in the League for Industrial Democracy have included Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Irwin Suall of the ADL, Eugene Rostow, Arms control negotiator, Lane Kirkland, Labor Leader, and Albert Shanker. IPS was incorporated in 1963 by Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnett, both highly trained Tavistock Institute graduates. The objectives of IPS came from an agenda laid down for it by the Tavistock Institute, one of the most notable being to create the “New Left” as a grass roots movement in the U.S. Its been said that Barnett and Raskin controlled such diverse elements as the Black Panthers, Daniel Ellsberg, National Security Council staff member Halprin, The Weathermen Underground, the Venceramos and the campaign staff of candidate George McGovern. No scheme was too big for IFS and its controllers to take on and manage.

Through its many powerful lobbing groups on Capitol Hill, IPS relentlessly used its “Big Stick” to beat Congress. IPS has a network of lobbyists, all supposedly operating independently but in actual fact acting cohesively, so that Congressmen are pummeled from all sides by seemingly different and varied lobbyists, In this way, IPS was, and is still, able to successfully sway individual Representatives and Senators to vote for “the trend, the way things are going.” By using key pointmen on Capitol Hill, IPS was able to break into the very infrastructure of our legislative system and the way it works.

IPS became, and remains to this day, one of the most prestigious “think tanks” controlling foreign policy decisions, which we, the people, foolishly believe are those of our law makers. By sponsoring militant activism at home and with links to revolutionaries abroad, by engineering such victories as “The Pentagon Papers,” besieging the corporate structure, bridging the credibility gap between underground movements and acceptable political activism, by penetrating religious organizations and using them to sow discord in America, such as radical racial policies under the guise of religion, using establishment media to spread IPS ideas, and then supporting them, IPS has lived up to the role which it was founded to play.

[Editor, Tim Aho: See Watch Unto Prayer report on Freedom House: "Grants (for the IPS) came from the Samuel Rubin Foundation and the Stern Family Fund. Samuel Rubin was himself a member of the elite Comintern of the Communist Party, founded by none other than Lenin himself. Billionaire Armand Hammer assisted Rubin in making the fortunes which helped launch IPS. Philip Stern, an IPS trustee, was the president of Stern Fund. The executive director of the Stern Fund, David R. Hunter, was previously an official of The National Council and the World Council Of Churches. (Dr. James W. Wardner, Unholy Alliances, p.125)]

STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Jesse Hobson, the first president of Stanford Research Institute, in a 1952 speech made it clear what lines the institute was to follow. Stanford can be described as one of the “jewels” in Tavistock’s Crown in its rule over the United States. Founded in 1946 immediately after the close of WWII, it was presided over by Charles A. Anderson, with emphasis on mind control research and “future sciences.” Included under the Stanford umbrella was Charles F. Kettering Foundation which developed the “Changing Images of Man” upon which the Aquarian Conspiracy rests.

Some of Stanford’s major clients and contracts were at first centered around the defense establishment but, as Stanford grew, so, did the diversity of its services:

Applications of Behavioral Sciences to Research Management Office of Science and Technology
SRI Business Intelligence Program
U.S. Department of Defense Directorate of Defense Research and Engineering
U.S. Department of Defense Office of Aerospace Research

Among corporations seeking Stanford’s services were Wells Fargo Bank, Bechtel Corporation, Hewlett Packard, Bank of America, McDonnell Douglas Corporation, Blyth, Eastman Dillon and TRW Company. One of Stanford’s more secret projects was extensive work on chemical and bacteriological warfare (CAB) weapons.

Stanford Research is plugged into at least 200 smaller “think tanks” doing research into every facet of life in America. This is ARPA networking and represents the emergence of probably the most far reaching effort to control the environment of every individual in the country. At present Stanford’s computers are linked with 2500 “sister” research consoles which include the CIA, Bell Telephone Laboratories, U.S. Army Intelligence, The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), Rand, MIT, Harvard and UCLA. Stanford plays a key role in that it is the “library”, cataloging all ARPA documentation.

“Other agencies”…..one can use one’s imagination here, are allowed to search through SRI’s “library” for key words, phrases, look through sources and update their own master files with those of Stanford Research Center. The Pentagon uses SRI’s master files extensively, and there is little doubt that other U.S. Government agencies do the same. Pentagon “command and control” problems are worked out by Stanford.

While ostensibly these apply only to weapons and soldiers, there is absolutely no guarantee that the same research could not , and will not be turned to civilian applications. Stanford is known to be willing to do anything for anyone.

[Editor, Tim Aho: See Watch Unto Prayer report Lambert Dolphin & the Great Sphinx, which documents the connections of SRI's Lambert Dolphin with the Edgar Cayce Foundation and The Discernment Ministries.]

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT),
ALFRED P. SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

This major institute is not generally recognized as being a part of Tavistock U.S.A. Most people look upon it as being a purely American institution, but that is far from the truth. MIT- Alfred Sloan can be roughly divided into the following groups:

Contemporary Technology Industrial Relations NASA-ERC Computer Research Laboratories Office of Naval Research Group, Psychology Systems Dynamics

Some of MIT’s clients are:

American Management Association
Committee for Economic Development
GTE
Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA)
NASA
National Academy of Sciences
National Council of Churches
Sylvania
TRW
U.S. Army
U.S. Department of State
U.S. Navy
U.S. Treasury
Volkswagen Company

RAND RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION

Without a doubt, RAND is THE think tank most beholden to Tavistock Institute and certainly the RIIA’s most prestigious vehicle for control of United States policies at every level. Specific RAND policies that became operative include our ICBM program, prime analyses for U.S. foreign policy making, instigator of space programs, U.S. nuclear policies, corporate analyses, hundreds of projects for the military, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in relation to the use of mind altering drugs like peyote, LSD (the covert MK-ULTRA operation which lasted for 20 years).

[Editor, Tim Aho's note: The founder of the Rand Corporation, Herman Kahn, also founded the Hudson Institute in 1961. In Educating for the New World Order, B.K. Eakman tells of a training manual for "change agents" developed for the U.S. government by Rand Corporation: ". . . a how-to manual with a 1971 U.S. Office of Education contract number on it entitled 'Training for Change Agents'; seven volumes of 'change agent studies' commissioned by the U.S. Office of Education to the Rand Corporation in 1973-74; scores of other papers submitted by behaviorist researchers who had obtained grants from the U.S. Office of Education for the purpose of exploring ways to 'freeze' and 'unfreeze' values, 'to implement change,' and to turn potentially hostile groups and committees into acquiescent, rubber-stamp bodies by means of such strategies as the 'Delphi Technique.'" (p. 118)]

Some of RAND’s clients include:

American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T)
Chase Manhattan Bank
International Business Machines (IBM)
National Science Foundation
Republican Party
TRW
U.S. Air Force
U.S. Department of Health
U.S. Department of Energy

There are literally THOUSANDS of highly important companies, government institutions and organizations that make use of RANDS’s services. To list them all would be impossible. Among RAND’s specialities is a study group that predicts the timing and the direction of a thermonuclear war, plus working out the many scenarios based upon its findings. RAND was once accused of being commissioned by the USSR to work out terms of surrender of the United States Government, an accusation that went all the way to the United States Senate, where it was taken up by Senator Symington and subsequently fell victim to scorn poured out by the establishment press. BRAINWASHING remains the primary function of RAND.

These institutions are among those that fund The UNIFORM LAW FOUNDATION, whose function is to ensure that the Uniform Commercial Code remains the instrument for conducting business in the United States.

Admiralty Outline

Larry Ziman — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:32:53 +0000

ADMIRALTY OUTLINE

Jurisdiction
Substantive Law of Admiralty

Article III, Sec. 2 – Constitution allows for admiralty jurisdiction without defining what is a case of what is admiralty

Jurisdictional quest is trying to define what the framers of the Constitution meant by “admiralty”

Admiralty court sits without a jury in the federal jurisdiction

28 U.S.C. 1333: admiralty/maritime jurisdiction which is counterpart to §9 of Judiciary Act of 1789 (which never defined the meaning of admiralty)

Authoritative Sources of Maritime: Congressional legislation and General Maritime law

Certain amount of state law is applied in admiralty cases

A. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Constitution and the Judiciary Act of 1789 left the courts with the task of working out answers to 3 questions:

The scope and limits of the federal admiralty jurisdiction
The scope and limits of the concurrent jurisdiction of common law courts over admiralty and maritime cases; and
The sources, nature and ultimately the content of the substantive law applicable in admiralty and maritime cases

First admiralty law question faced by US courts was the meaning of the constitutional and statutory phrase “admiralty and maritime”

Admiral – commander of the sea

Admiralty – court hearing disputes arising from naval and marine matters

Maritime – of or pertaining to the sea

Historically, admiralty was used in referring to courts and to technicalities of jurisdiction and procedure and maritime was used for substantive matters litigated and the substantive law applied in those courts

DeLovio v. Boit (1815) – whether a contract of marine insurance was within the jurisdiction

Libelant brought action upon a policy of insurance that insured a vessel against losses at sea
Issue: what is admiralty jurisdiction?
All cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction to the courts of the US comprehends all maritime contracts, torts, and injured
Policies of insurance are within the admiralty and maritime jurisdiction
Admiralty contract jurisdiction does not depend on locality but extends all over contracts which relate to the navigation, business, or commerce of the sea
Language of the Constitution warrants the most liberal interpretation and refers to that maritime jurisdiction which commercial convenience, public policy, and national rights have contributed to establish

Infra corpus comitatus: within the body of a county

The Thomas Jefferson (1825)

Justice Story passed up a chance to further expand American Admiralty Jurisdiction
In England, the admiralty judges had never claimed jurisdiction upriver further than the ebb and flow of the tide
Libel claims wages earned on a voyage on the Missouri River
Issue: Is there admiralty/maritime jurisdiction?
Admiralty jurisdiction is found in cases where the service was substantially performed, or to be performed, upon the sea, or upon waters within the ebb and flow of the tide
This voyage was several hundred miles above the ebb and flow of the tide and therefore, the wages cannot be considered as earned in maritime employment

The Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh (1851) opens the lakes and the waters connecting them to the general jurisdiction of the district courts in admiralty

Collision on Lake Ontario
Schooner Cuba claims that the Genesse ran foul of her and damaged her so seriously that as a result she sank with her cargo on board
Proceeding was in rem and in admiralty under Great Lakes Act of 1845 which extending the jurisdiction to the district courts to certain cases upon the lakes and navigable waters connecting the same
Question of jurisdiction and constitutionality of the Great Lakes Act because it was narrower than the Constitution contemplated
Law contains no regulation of commerce and it is evident from the title that Congress did not intend to exercise their power to regulate commerce
Goes against Thomas Jefferson with ebb and flow of tide
Court rejected tidal limit
There is clearly nothing in the ebb and flow of the tide that makes the waters peculiarly suitable for admiralty jurisdiction, nor anything in the absence of a tide that renders it unfit
There is commerce on the water and there need not be tide in the lake

NOTES: the constitutional grant of admiralty jurisdiction was not limited by tidelands rule

Admiralty jurisdiction is now extended to the lakes and navigable rivers of the US

The Eagle – (1868)

Eagle, tug, towing a brig and barge, grounded the brig on a shoal in Detroit River causing the barge to collide with the grounded brig
Owners of brig filed suit against tug and barge
Issue: Did the District Court have subject matter jurisdiction?
The §9 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 regards the district courts as having conferred upon then a general jurisdiction in admiralty on lakes and the waters connecting them
Great Lakes Act is no longer in effect

When a matter is “in admiralty” as per Article III, §2, Cl. 3 then:

Congress has the power to provide substantive law governing the resolution of the dispute. If Congress has not done so, the courts must fashion a dispositive “federal admiralty common law”. Courts will accord deference to, but are not bound by, the general maritime law of nations. If there is no federal statute and no need for a uniform national law, the courts may apply the law of the state with the most significant relationship to the controversy under the maritime but local doctrine
Case may be heard in federal court without regard to diversity of citizenship or amount in controversy, but litigant will not have a jury. Most admiralty cases may also be brought in state court under “savings to suitors” clause with trial by jury if allowed. If admiralty claim arises under federal statute, or if it arises under maritime common law but the requirements of diversity are satisfied, the claim may be heard in federal court as a law claim, with the right to trial by jury. Regardless of the court in which an admiralty matter is brought, the substantive law which governs is federal admiralty law, unless the “maritime but local” doctrine applies

B. ADMIRALTY JURISDICTION IN CONTRACT CASES

In admiralty law, the nature and subject matter of the contract, not the place of making or performance, govern
Contracts to furnish repairs or stevedoring services for a vessel are maritime, but contracts to procure such services are not
Marine insurance contract is in admiralty, but a contract to obtain marine insurance is not
Contract to insure, supply, load or unload, tow, pilot or dock, a vessel is in admiralty
Contracts to build or sell vessels are not in admiralty, but contracts to lease vessels are

Insurance Co. v. Dunham (1870): admiralty jurisdiction extends over maritime insurance policies

North Pacific Steamship Co. v. Hall Brothers Marine Railway and Shipbuilding Co. (1919)

Ship in need of repairs kept being taken in and out of the water

Issue: Whether there is admiralty jurisdiction
Shipbuilding filed in personam against Steamship to recover balance due for certain work and labor done, services rendered, and materials furnished
Just because the ship was dry docked does not take away from admiralty
The contract for materials furnished and work performed in repairing her under the circumstances was a maritime contract
“Any person furnishing repairs, supplies, or other necessaries, including the use of dry dock or marine railway, to a vessel, whether foreign or domestic” upon the order of a proper person shall have a maritime lien upon the vessel

General Rule: to be a maritime contract, the subject matter of the contract must be directly and intimately related to the operation of a vessel and navigation
Contracts that are not directly related to maritime matters and ship navigation afford no justification for the application of the uniform admiralty law and are best left for decision under state law contract principles
An agreement involving the construction or drilling operations on a fixed platform on outer continental shelf is not a maritime contract
An agreement to transport men and supplies to and from an offshore drilling rig is within admiralty jurisdiction

Shipbuilding v. Ship repair

One cannot have a maritime lien against a vessel until the vessel is built

Sale of vessels

Contracts to sell a vessel are non-maritime

Products liability contracts claims

Claims for breach of warranty involving ship construction are non-maritime

Kossick v. United Fruit Co. (1961)

Petitioner was employed as chief steward on vessel of United Fruit and suffered thyroid ailment
Employer wanted petitioner to go to US Public Heath Service Hospital, but respondent wished to be treated by a private physician
Ended up going to Public health and received improper treatment and sued respondent for $250,000 for bodily injury
Issue: What is the interplay b/t state and maritime law?
Contract for employment was a maritime contract
What was the subject matter of the contract? Seaman giving up a right guaranteed him by the maritime law whether he was right in his criticism in the hospitals or not and the contract sprang from the maritime contract of employment
This alleged oral contract sprang from a maritime relationship
This is a maritime contract b/c it concerns seaman, which concern vessels, concerns the assertions of the rights under the maritime maintenance and cure

Exxon Corp. v. Central Gulf Lines, Inc. (1991)

Unpaid bill for fuels acquired for the vessel Hooper which is owned by Central Gulf chartered by Waterman
Waterman and Exxon negotiated a marine fuel requirements contract – they would fuel them at ports where Exxon was located and when the vessels were at non-Exxon ports, they would arrange for local suppliers to which Exxon would pay and Waterman would pay Exxon
Exxon was Waterman’s agent in getting fuel from Arabian Marine in Saudi Arabia
Arabian Marine billed Exxon, Exxon billed Watrman and Waterman filed Chapter 11 never paying the bill in full
Central Gulf agreed to assume personal liability for the unpaid bill if a court were to hold Hooper liable in rem for that cost
Issue: Whether admiralty jurisdiction extends to claims arising from agency contracts
Minturn v. Maynard – an agent who advanced funds for repairs and supplies necessary for a vessel could not bring a claim in admiralty against the vessel’s owners – should this be overruled?
Holding: Minturn is overruled there is no per se exception of agency contracts for admiralty jurisdiction
The true criterion in determining whether a contract falls within admiralty is the nature and subject matter of the K, as whether it was a maritime contract, having reference to maritime service or maritime transactions
Courts should look to the subject matter of the agency contract and determine whether the services performed under the contract are maritime in nature
When the nature and subject matter of 2 transactions are the same as they relate to maritime commerce, if admiralty jurisdiction extends to one, it must extend to the other

North Pacific v. Hall Brothers Marine Railway & Shipbuilding Co. (1919)

If subject matter of contract is maritime, there is admiralty jurisdiction here
Boat wasn’t afloat
Contract to certain amount of work would be done by pulling the vessel up on the land so they could get to the bottom of the ship – almost rebuilt vessel
A contract to repair a vessel is a maritime contract (getting vessel back into commerce so it can serve maritime needs)
Is this a contract for repair? Contract was peculiarly worded
It becomes a vessel when it is launched and is in condition as was intended
Contract to build a vessel and contract going to build a vessel are not maritime contracts until the vessel was far enough along to function as intended
Putting too much emphasis on the fact that part of the repairs would be done on land
Court said locality of the contract was the rule under the Old English law which was thrown off and we substitute subject matter of the contract, the contract’s nature is maritime

Mixed Contract is not within admiralty jurisdiction unless it is wholly maritime
If the primary purpose is maritime, the contract is treated as wholly maritime, despite its nonmaritime elements

Lease/Purchase agreement where they agreed that after a certain time either party could exercise the purchase agreement

It is only the per se agency contract where the court has to look at the contract to see nature and subject matter of contract

C. THE NAVIGABLE WATERS ISSUE

LeBlanc v. Cleveland (1999)

LeBlanc and Ossen suffered personal injuries when their kayak was struck by a recreational vehicle on the Hudson River operated by Cleveland and owned by Grant
LeBlanc and Ossen sued Grant and Cleveland invoking federal admiralty jurisdiction
A waterway at the situs in issue is navigable for jurisdictional purposes if it is presently used, or is presently capable of being used, as an interstate highway for commercial trade or travel in the customary modes of travel on water
Interstate commerce requirement – waters must be able to be used in foreign commerce
Hudson River is navigable but this accident took place where there was no outlet to the ocean or to another state because dams that had been built and there are waterfalls
Before the dams were built, this river was fully navigable
Daniel Ball calls for ordinary condition as highways of commerce
Test to use is present capability of use as a highway of commerce but with artificial obstructions there is no capability of use

D. THE VESSEL ISSUE

The term vessel is defined in 1 U.S.C. §3 : the word “vessel” includes every description of watercraft or other artificial contrivance used, or capable of being used, as a means of transportation on water

Admiralty jurisdiction is basically defined by waters

Ferry Boat – first question: Do the vessels operate in admiralty waters? If you required activity itself to be interstate commerce, this wouldn’t fit but the Mississippi River is the largest navigable water in the US so it will always have admiralty jurisdiction
Highly intrastate activity on Mississippi River will be in admiralty

What is the test and why do you have to ask it?
Are employees on River Boat Casinos in admiralty jurisdiction under the Jones Act? Has to be a crew member on a vessel to be a Jones Act seaman
Vessel status – if they contribute to the mission of the vessel and are more than transitly connected with vessel
Code defines various terms that will be applied
1 U.S.C. §3 - the word “vessel” includes every description of watercraft or other artificial contrivance used, or capable of being used, as a means of transportation on water
Vessel never required its own motor power
any seaman who contributes to the function of the vessel will have a Jones Act liability case

The Robert W. Parsons (1903)

Contract for repair of canal boat
Just because horses pulled a boat, doesn’t take it out of admiralty jurisdiction
What definition do they give us for future cases? Purpose for which the craft was constructed and the business in which it is engaged - TWO PART TEST
The movement function here is not merely incidental to its primary function

Determination of vessel – Two part test

PURPOSE for which craft was constructed and
BUSINESS in which it is engaged

Manuel v. P.A.W. Drillings (1998)

Clearest provisions on what is a vessel and what is not a vessel

E. THE EXCLUSIVE JURISDICTION OF THE FEDERAL ADMIRALTY COURTS AND THE CONCURRENT JURISDICTION OF “COMMON LAW” COURTS

Article III, §2 – admiralty/maritime jurisdiction

1789 Judiciary Act – §9 had admiralty jurisdiction to the Federal Courts – today 28 U.S.C. §1333:

Original: the federal district courts shall have exclusive original cognizance of all civil causes of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction savings to suitors, in all cases, the right of a common law remedy where the common law is competent to give it

Present: The district courts shall have original jurisdiction, exclusive of the Courts of the states, of any civil case of admiralty or maritime jurisdiction, saving to suitors in all cases all other remedies to which they are otherwise entitled

What is saving the suitors clause about? Federal District Court have exclusive jurisdiction over admiralty matters but those courts can do something called common law remedy where they can give it

The Moses Taylor (1866)

P contracted with owner of steamship as steerage passenger
When he arrived in San Fran. He brought suit for bad food and bad conditions.
California statute allowed for P to bring ship in rem
If the action fell within the savings clause, then the state court could have heard the action but since they held that it didn’t fall under savings clause (common law remedy)
In admiralty actions you can go against the personal owner of the vessel in personam but you can also go against the vessel itself as the Δ in the action and treat the vessel as the Δ and if you are successful on the merits, have the vessel seized and sold to satisfy the judgment in your favor

Look at federal admiralty courts, you didn’t get a jury
Remedy available in common court was a common remedy in 1789
Broken down into in personam and in rem – in personam is not as radical
In personam could be brought in state court of common law in 1789; in rem admiralty action could not, it had to be brought in a state admiralty court in 1789
Common law could not entertain on an in rem action
Saving the suitors clause is in personam actions, concurrent jurisdictions and in rem is federal admiralty

Hard core admiralty jurisdiction is maritime commerce

In rem action exclusive to admiralty
The state legislature passes statute authorizing courts to take jurisdiction over maritime in rem jurisdiction. If case goes on, then he is to sell the vessel out from under owner. Defect is not that state courts couldn’t create in rem action, they are talking about state courts – the legislature has authorized the state courts to get the in rem action and they CANNOT do this

Rounds v. Clover Foundry & Machine Co. (1915)

Lien placed on vessel for supplies used

State court ordered vessel sold and goes to appeal
Was this an in rem or in personam action?
It was in personam b/c they sued the owners themselves and not the ship and therefore the state court has jurisdiction
Does fall under saving suitors clause b/c it was in personam action

In rem: Federal Jurisdiction

In personam: Concurrent jurisdiction – admiralty/law – Exception - if Congress makes a certain type of case even though in personam if in the statute it provides for exclusive admiralty jurisdiction

Thornsteinsson v. M/V Drangur (1990)

Seamen asserted claims for wages against a ship that had been seized in Iceland and sold in foreclosure to the Δ
Icelandic jurisdiction in the in rem foreclosure proceeding was based on constructive possession of the vessel via the vessel’s paper
Δ raises defenses of laches and execution sale as clearing all liens
Court held that actual, not constructive, seizure is needed in order to put claimants on notice as to the execution sale
Laches defense involved analysis of actual notice to the seamen
Factors emphasized:
- Whether seamen’s employer knew of seamen’s claims when suit was filed in Ireland, and if so;
- Whether the employer had an obligation to inform either the Icelandic court or the vessel purchaser at the auction and
- Whether the purchaser was prejudiced by enforcement of the claims

Madruga v. Superior Court (1954) – Admiralty Jurisdiction over partial actions

Supreme Court ruled that under the “Savings to Suitors” clause of 28 USCA §1333, Federal and State courts have concurrent jurisdiction to order the partition of ships in a proceeding in personam and there is no federal admiralty rule barring judicial partition of a vessel unless the ownership interests are dead locked
Court held not in rem action
Wanted to partition the vessel
Not going against vessel so it is not in rem
Partition suit between co-owners of vessel is not in maritime – this was held in certain jurisdictions

F. THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF THE FEDERAL ADMIRALTY COURT AND SOME FUNDAMENTAL FEATURES OF ITS PROCEDURE

Two sides of Federal Court

Sitting in admiralty
Sitting in law

1. The two sides of federal court

Romero v. International Terminal Operating Co. (1959)

Seaman who lost his leg on Spanish ship. Injured at port in New York and struck by cable
Sued on law side in Federal District Court, even though it is hard core admiralty case
Sues under Jones Act (negligence action of seaman against employer), unseaworthiness and maintenance and cure
Saving the suitors: go to federal admiralty, federal law (if diverse) or state
Federal law – Jones Act (federal question) provides jury trial in federal trial
Problem is with unseaworthiness and M&C – not provided by federal statute, they arise under general maritime law
Only way to do it is under the savings to suitors clause – Problem is that under this clause when you bring general maritime claims at law there has to be diversity and there is no diversity
Can he come in under federal question with general maritime claims?
Federal question jurisdiction (1875) came after Judiciary Act (1789)
Maritime granted in 1789, Federal question granted in 1875
Did Congress intend the federal question jurisdiction to include general maritime law? NO, you had admiralty jurisdiction in 1789
Rule: GML clams (unseaworthiness/M&C) CANNOT be brought at federal law exercising 28 U.S.C. §1331 federal question jurisdiction; they must be brought under 28 U.S.C. §1331 diversity jurisdiction
A maritime common law claim does not fall within the courts “federal question” jurisdiction

Romero bars removal as a federal question under section 1441(b)

If the seaman is an American citizen or resident, or in a blue water seaman’s case if the vessel is an American flag vessel or is owned by American citizens or a shipowner whose “base of operations” is in the US, American maritime law should apply and the court should take jurisdiction

Other maritime cases commenced in state court ordinarily may be removed to the law “side” of federal court, if the requisites for diversity jurisdiction are present or if there is federal question jurisdiction
However, a maritime common law claim does not fall within the courts federal question jurisdiction under 28 USC §1331 although it arises under the Constitution

2. Admiralty Procedure Before 1966

Originally admiralty, equity and law were different classes, each having their own procedural rules
1938 – combined law and equity into one class, and admiralty into one class
No jury in admiralty
Jury available at law

3. Admiralty Procedure since 1966

1966 – combine admiralty rules into FRCP
After 1966 – imperfect merger with admiralty
Some rules might not apply
There are 8 – 9 supplemental rules for cases of admiralty – procedure within rem, etc. which they couldn’t merge with FRCP
These rules shall not be interpreted as providing a jury in admiralty

Merger made it easier for judges and lawyers
Wanted all cases to be treated the same, procedure wise
Big Problem – jury trial in hybrid case that has elements of admiralty and civil elements

Advisory Committee Notes – FRCP Rule 9(h)

Since they merged admiralty with common law, you are going to get more cases with admiralty component and law component

Under savings the suitors clause you will get more admiralty and law
Problem with what to do with cases; at one time try admiralty before judge and law before jury (7^th amendment right)
When they merged they didn’t want two fact finders
Provide cases may be tried together through supplemental jurisdiction
9(h) – if you have 2 grounds for being in federal district court, one admiralty and one law then you will go in at law unless you designate your claim as one in admiralty or maritime jurisdiction
Counterclaim relies on diversity – what do you do with this when a case has come in under admiralty – HYBRID
Not getting a jury in admiralty is traditional, not constitutional – but it would harm your basis for your denying jury in admiralty

4. The Right to Jury Trial in Hybrid Cases

Sphere Drake Insurance PLC v. Shree Corp. (1999)

Case concerning insurance claim on lost gems
Underwriters want declaratory judgment – admiralty claim
Shree brought compulsory counterclaim and wanted jury trial
Issue: Whether a Δ in an admiralty case is entitled to a jury trial of the Δ’s compulsory counterclaims which are premised upon non-admiralty jurisdictional grounds
Rule 38(a) of FRCP provides the right to a jury, whether statutory or constitutional, “shall be preserved inviolate”
Underwriters’ motion to strike Shree’s jury demand is denied

Always want to avoid 2 fact finders in a case
Jury trial argument is probably the most strongest when Δ asserts a compulsory counterclaim that falls outside admiralty jurisdiction

Ghotra v. Bandila Shipping, Inc. (1998)

Captain killed on ship and survivors brought WD action against vessel owner and vessel
Had in rem and in personam claim
In rem action is admiralty and in personam is law question
P were denied a jury trial
Issue: Whether district judge committed constitutional and legal error in denying the P the right to a jury trial for claims brought under the court’s diversity jurisdiction
P bringing two claims himself
Rule: under the 7^th Amendment, the Ghotras were entitled to a jury trial on the claims brought under the court’s diversity jurisdiction
Can bring an in personam and in rem action when claim arises out of single occurrence
Fitzgerald – the 7^th Amendment neither requires jury trials nor forbids
Giving this in rem action to jury is so in teeth with savings with suitors clause

5. Impleader under Rule 14(c)

Δ in an admiralty action may bring into the lawsuit a party “who may be wholly or partly liable, either to the plaintiff or to the Δ”

6. Possessory, petitory, and partition actions, including actions to try title to vessels

Really in rem actions, but not really – they are much more like attachments

7. Limitation of liability proceedings

Exclusive federal jurisdiction

8. Equitable remedies in admiralty cases

Equitable remedies (injunction ordering something other than money damages) – our admiralty courts have no jurisdiction to give equitable relief

9. Personal Jurisdiction

There must be a legislative authorization for the exercise of jurisdiction over the Δ
There must be enough of a relationship b/t the Δ and the forum to justify the conclusion that the Δ can be haled into court there without offending the constitutional guarantees of due process

Authorizations for personal jurisdiction

State long-arm statutes (Rule 4(k)(1))
Jurisdiction over foreign defendants who have significant nationwide contacts while lacking “minimum contacts” with any state (Rule 4(k)(2))
Maritime attachment and garnishment (Rule B)
Actions in rem (Rule C)

United Rope Distributors, Inc. v. Seatriumph Marine Corp. (1991)

Very maritime, lost cargo during voyage - but we need personal jurisdiction
Sued in Federal District Court in Wisconsin
Seatriumph contends they can’t get personal jurisdiction in Wisconsin
Long arm statute was predicated upon minimum contacts with the state
Federal courts acquire personal jurisdiction only to the extent the state law authorizes service of process
Rule 4(e) specifies that service of process may be made under the circumstances prescribed by state law
United Rope lost, can’t bring suit in Wisconsin

Nissho v. M/V Star Sapphire (1995)

Jurisdiction over foreign nations who have significant nationwide contacts while lacking “minimum contacts” with any state (Rule 4(k)(2))
Cargo contamination case – company from Sweden – foreign Δ
Two types of jurisdiction
- Specific: when the cause of action relates to or arises out of the Δ’s contact with the forum
- General: jurisdictions exists where the Δ has such systematic and continuous contacts with the forum that it is not unreasonable to submit to jurisdiction in that forum
There is no specific jurisdiction
Rule 4(k)(2) authorizes personal jurisdiction over foreign Δ for claims arising under federal law when the Δ have sufficient contacts with the US as a whole to justify the application of the US law, but without sufficient contact with any single state to support jurisdiction there
Both charterer and owner maintain significant control of vessel and they brought it to TX
Δ had systematic and continuous contacts with the US therefore, there is jurisdiction over Δ

Blueye Navigation v. Oltenia Navigation (1995)

Concern attachment (to get PJ over Δ and to have a fund if they win on the merits from which judgment can be paid) and garnishment
Garnishment – attachment of personal debt/obligation
Borrowed loan, breach of charter contract and withdrew vessel after most of loan was spent
Bank arrested ship
Δ brought suit in London seek declarations that they had no liability to P
Suit is to seek to attach assets of Δ found in this district
Jurisdiction is obtained only by attaching property – quasi in rem
P had no property to attach to get jurisdiction over Δ
If maritime claim and he is not found in district, then attachment is appropriate
Δ motion to dismiss is granted for lack of jurisdiction

RULE C In rem Action procedure

Problem: when you go in rem, you go after ship and you treat ship as Δ, the owner is not the actual Δ in the in rem action, it’s the property that is the Δ
Under venue rules, you can hit the ship wherever you find it – seizure is really important because ships are very easily moved around the world
In rem exists to execute lien and if successful on the merits to sell it
Strict Personification Theory – doctrines whereby the holder of a maritime lien can use in rem process to force a judicial sale of the vessel regardless of the owner’s personal liability for the debt (treat ship as Δ). Personify the ship and make it a personal Δ
China – famous case where British ship came into New York harbor and US ship rammed it and the owner of the Kentucky sues the British ship in rem and defense is that there can be no in rem jurisdiction without an underlying personal jurisdiction of the owner and this owner was not in any way responsible for this because this was a compulsory pilot – held English ship responsible

10. Constitutional and prudential limitations on admiralty’s broad power to seize ships

Amstar Corp. v. S/S Alexandros T. (1981)

Amstar claimed a cargo of raw sugar was damages
Brought action against vessel in rem and against owner in personam
Rule C – marshal arrested the ship in the in rem proceeding and pursuant to Rule B attached it in the in personam proceeding
Issue: Is Rule C constitutional?
By enforcing maritime liens through the arrest of vessels in rem proceedings, admiralty enables people engaged in maritime commerce to obtain redress for certain kinds of injuries caused by the vessel and its crew without seeking compensation abroad from the vessel’s owner
The arrest of a vessel has an important economic effect on the owner
Notice prior to arrest would in many instances enable the owner to frustrate judicial enforcement of the lien by simply ordering the master to put out to sea
Requirement of due process is the opportunity to be heard at a meaningful time and in a meaningful manner – Rule C provides the shipowner an opportunity to be heard before a maritime lien is ultimately enforced by sale
Holding: a pre-arrest hearing need not be afforded the shipowner
Even though goods are damaged, the consignee is required to accept them from the carrier unless they are completely worthless

11. Removal will get you in trouble:

Savings suitor clause gives P choice where to hold hearing; one of which is state court yet if you can freely remove those actions to federal court you have defeated one of the purposes of saving the suitors clause (letting P make his choice)
General provision for removal of civil actions from state to federal court, 28 U.S.C.A. §1441, applies to maritime actions commenced in a state court, but not such actions may be removed

A Jones Act claim commenced in a state court is not removable, even if there is federal jurisdiction independent of the Jones Act, such as diversity jurisdiction

12. Admiralty Appeals

A final judgment in a suit brought as an admiralty claim in federal court is reviewable in the same fashion as judgments in other cases. 28 U.S.C.A. §1291
A trial judge’s findings of fact “shall not be set aside unless clearly erroneous” – FRCP 52(a)
An interlocutory judgment of a federal court sitting in admiralty may be reviewed under Rule 54(b), which permits the trial court to convert into a final judgment an order disposing of all of the claims of one party in a multiparty suit, or an order disposing of one of several claims between the same parties
Some states apply their own appellate standards in reviewing appeals in maritime matters – this is acceptable in savings to suitor cases, but not in review of Jones Act jury trials, since the right to a jury verdict is an integral part of the seaman’s substantive rights under the act, and the weight of the jury’s verdict should not be diminished by a state appellate review standard

G. The Sources of the Substantive Law Applied in Admiralty and Maritime Cases

Three tribunals:

Admiralty side
Law side
State court

Four bodies of law:

Federal statutes
Federal nonstatutory maritime law
State statutes
State caselaw

No place in the Constitution does it give Congress the power to enact any maritime legislation
Congress is not a source of federal maritime law

Courts have used several constitutional grants from Article I in order to give Congress the power:

Originally thought commerce clause gave Congress power to enact substantive rules in maritime law (Interpret commerce clause narrowly)
Then, the admiralty grant of Article III, §2 (judicial grant, not substantive law making grant) along with sweeping clause (necessary and proper clause) It is necessary and proper for them to carry out their admiralty and maritime jurisdictional grant that the have substantive rules to base their decision on, therefore, it is an implied power – only thing against that is that states could have maintain substantive law making power and federal courts could have been there to interpret enactments

Original thought: substantive rules of GML as found in constitution when it was enacted, plus those decisions of federal courts, were the real rules of decision that the courts should rely on
Courts have always had a great power to mold GML
Real power of admiralty law was in federal judges (particular appeal judges) having power to mold GML and to interpret acts of Congress
In the last 20 years – Miles v. Apex – the Supreme Court has said that Congress has to slavishly follow dictate of federal statute – heavy congressional supremacy
Only bounds on Congress maritime law is if you find an act of Congress unconstitutional
Courts very seldom find the acts of Congress unconstitutional

Problem with State law v. maritime law – Congress will win this fight because of Supremacy Clause of Constitution

1. THE LESSER DIFFICULTY: THE MARITIME AUTHORITY OF CONGRESS

Congress gets its admiralty and maritime authority from Article III, §2 by way of the Necessary and Proper Clause

2. THE GREATER DIFFICULTY: NONSTATUTORY FEDERAL MARITIME LAW VS. STATE LAW

Fight between the general (nonstatutory) maritime law comes into potential conflict with state law

Ballard Shipping Co. v. Beach Shellfish (1994)

Raise question of RI state law and whether it is preempted by Supreme Court decision
Oil tanker ran aground and spilled oil in bay
Is state statute preempted?
Robins decision said you can’t recover for purely economic loss without impact
Shellfishers had only economic loss
Court looks to Jensen – state legislation affecting maritime commerce if it interferes…..look first to congressional legislation to see if state law is out of step, then look to GML to see if state law is out of step
Where did federal maritime law originate?
RI decision is not in conflict with Robins b/c it is not maritime law
Congress did not intend preemption
Rhode Island Compensation Act as reasonably construed and applied is not preempted by admiralty clause of the Constitution

Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen (1917)

Employee of Southern Pacific CO. died
Family sued under NY law for workman’s compensation which was awarded
He was on gangway, vessel equipment, on navigable waters of US therefore maritime tort
Why did she want to invoke state law as opposed to maritime law or some tort provision of state law? This was fresh NY law; she didn’t bring it in maritime b/c he wasn’t a seaman and the LHWCA wasn’t established until 1927
Even if you apply comparative damages, they were going to fully blame this man and take him out of federal and state whereas workman’s compensation is no fault
Maritime law at this time did not have workmen’s compensation (1927 – LHWCA)
To a maritime tort, could the state compensation law be applied? Act conflicted with the constitution and could not apply NY state law to a maritime tort
NY workers compensation statute could not be constitutionally applied
To allow state compensation awards would destroy the very uniformity in respect to maritime matters which the Constitution was designed to establish

There is no federal compensation scheme, no GML compensation – if you jump these two cases, it is an area where uniformity of law is required. If compensation law of different states can be applied, then there would be no uniformity.
But this is a longshoreman, not a seaman that travels from jurisdiction to jurisdiction
Passed amendment to saving to suitors clause, even though this case wasn’t under this clause: saving to suitors the workmen’s compensation of any state…comes up in Supreme Court again, and Congress : excluding masters and members of vessels
Can’t get uniformity by just excluding members – supreme court has found substantive enactment of Congress to be unconstitutional
Court ruled that if a longshoreman’s injury or death occurred on navigable waters, state worker compensation law could not apply. The decision left maritime workers, other than seaman, without an adequate remedy against their employers in work-related injuries occurring on water

1927 – LHWCA gave Congress what it wanted

Jensen 3 part rule (apply state law if it is not inconsistent with policy, or if it is not inconsistent with policy under GML)
In no place does it say you have to apply state law
If you are coming in under savings to suitors clause in state or federal court under diversity jurisdiction, the same law applies as would apply in federal admiralty
Absent Jensen, unless Jensen authorizes application of state law, under savings to suitor cases they are not authorized to apply state law

Savings to Suitors has to be merely with forum, not substantive law to be applied
Chelentis v. Luckenbach decided this in 1918
Today, when state law applies the substantive law does not apply just because it is a savings clause case – it must jump the Jensen case
If you have matters of procedure come up in state court for savings, you can apply state procedural law to maritime case even though you couldn’t apply state substantive law

Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (1938)

PA citizen injured while walking along train track
RR argued he was trespasser and under PA law they aren’t liable to trespassers
Judge applied federal law – there is general federal common law
Erie appealed arguing under opposition to Swift
This only applies to diversity matters
In diversity they must apply state law
Savings clause is the reverse Erie doctrine b/c in Erie they have to apply state law wherein savings cases federal maritime law applies

Reverse Erie Doctrine: case is in state court but maritime law applies except where the controversy or issue falls under the “maritime but local” doctrine, but even there state law is being applied “in admiralty”

Savings suitor: apply federal maritime law

Always have a conflict b/t state and federal law

§34 of the 1789 Judiciary Act is known as the Rules of Decision Act
In 28 U.S.C. §1652 provides: “The laws of the several states, except where the Constitution or treaties of the United States or Acts of Congress otherwise require or provide, shall be regarded as rules of decision in civil actions in the courts of the United States, in cases where they apply

Pope & Talbot v. Hawn (1953)

When you can apply state law to maritime action
Hawn injured on P&T vessel in PA waters
Issue – Whether maritime recognized contributory negligence or to apply PA law
Maritime law has comparative negligence where PA law has contributory negligence as a bar
Court held that maritime law was comparative and they weren’t going to apply PA law because it was a maritime tort
Cause of action is an injury to a seaman aboard a vessel
While states may sometimes supplement federal maritime policies, a state may not deprive a person of any substantial admiralty rights as defined in controlling acts of Congress or by interpretative decisions of this Court
Court extended the duty of seaworthiness to persons who were not members of the crew, but who were aboard the vessel doing work traditionally performed by a member of the crew
Negligent conduct causing loss to others constitutes a traditional maritime tort

1972 the LHWCA was amended to provide that nonseamen can no longer sue on the basis of unseaworthiness

Kossick v. United Fruit (1961)

Hospital case – if anything went wrong the boss would re-pay
What is the source of law – whether alleged contract is maritime
Court held that the maritime contract would upset uniformity of maritime law if they used state law
NY Statute of Frauds disallow oral contracts but maritime contract does not disallow oral contracts
Uniformity is required under maritime law
This is a Jensen case – the notion that if such a limited and essentially local transaction as the contract here in issue were allowed to be governed by a local statute of frauds it would “disturb the uniformity of maritime law”, is too abstract and doctrinaire a view of the true demands of maritime laws

Deals with hardcore maritime commerce: the relationship between the shipowner and the cargo owner

Carriage of goods has been statutized – comprehensively covered by federal statute

Two types of carriage

1. Public
1. Liners that have scheduled routes that you can send cargo on to various places
2. Common carriers
3. What they can put in their contract is covered by Harter and COSGA
4. Bill of lading – very little freedom of contract b/c before statutes came in in 1893, Harter Act and COGSA (Carriage of Goods by Sea Act – 1936), this carriage was under GML – relationship of ship to cargo; when cargo is lost or damaged, who has to pay for the loss?
5. 2. Private
  1. Charter parties leasing vessels
  2. Not as concerned with charters
  3. Freedom of contract

With GML, there was freedom of contract for common carriers – the ship was an insurer of the goods and no matter how or why the goods were damaged or loss, the ship had to pay for it except for a few circumstances
Didn’t have to establish the ship was negligent
Ship interest began to write contracts (bills of lading), they put in exculpatory clauses that ship will not be responsible for a number of things
Ships began to exempt almost everything from liability
England held ships could exempt even their own negligence
US Courts held that this was against GML policy of the US – you couldn’t contract out of your own negligence
English could carry at a lower rate than US, b/c US had to bill responsibility into rate system therefore English would get all of the business
Congress passed in 1893 the Harter Act: compromise between different interests; even though we know ships are responsible for everything, that would destroy shipping industry; for certain causes of loss the ship is/is not responsible
Ships were given negligence in the master and crew of the vessel which cause damage or loss to cargo
Rest of shipping world looked at our experience, and there is International Convention
COGSA is passed in 1936 – essentially a copy of the Harter Act except where in the interim they had found some defects in Harter Act so changed those parts
Did not repeal the Harter Act

HARTER ACT

Act passed by Congress making a statutory allocation of the risks between shipper and carrier

Requires carrier to use due diligence in sending out a seaworthy vessel at the commencement of the voyage and holds the carrier responsible for its negligence in the handling of the cargo during the voyage

COGSA

Congress provided that the Harter Act would remain applicable to the situations not within the reach of this new legislation

COGSA	HARTER ACT
Applies to every bill of lading … which is evidence of a contract for the carriage of goods by sea to or from ports of the US	Applies to all voyages, including those between American ports and between American ports and foreign ports
Applies only to the risks of the voyage between loading at the port of departure and unloading at the port of destination	Allocates the risks from delivery to the carrier until redelivery to the cosignee at a fit and customary wharf
Applies between loading and unloading	On voyage between American port and foreign port, this act applies from delivery to the shipper until loading and from unloading at the port of destination until delivery to the consignee
Carriers failure to use due diligence to send out a seaworthy vessel imposes liability upon the carrier only if the unseaworthiness was a cause of the damages to the goods	On voyage between American ports, absent permissible agreement, this act applies at all times between delivery and redelivery
Prohibits a carrier from limiting its liability to less than $500 per package	When this act applies the parties may stipulate that their rights will be governed by COGSA either: from delivery to loading and from unloading to redelivery, in voyages between American and foreign ports For the entire voyage, in shipments between American ports
	If the vessel owner defaults in its duty to use due diligence to send out a seaworthy vessel, it may not claim the benefit of exculpatory language in Harter or in the Bill of Lading
	Carrier may limit its liability for damage to any amount

Parties may not avoid COGSA and Harter by stipulating to foreign law which imposes less responsibility upon the carrier, or by adopting a forum selection clause which would have the same effect

The Germanic (1905)

Unloading vessel covered with ice and at the same time they are fueling it
Ships rolls from one side to the other
Ships eventually sinks and damages cargo in the ship
Cargo owner wants to recover from ship
Depends on cause of loss – was it the ship or the cargo?
What happened to the ship happened because of the way the cargo was being unloaded
Primary purpose: unload the cargo
Harter Act will be applied to foreign vessels in suits brought in the United States

The Hague Rules of 1921 = COGSA
Visby Amendments – amended the COGSA, but not in the United States
International Community – private organizations of maritime groups from various countries

1921 International Law Association’s Maritime Law Committee: formulate uniform model rules to govern ocean bills of lading

Carrier required to exercise due diligence to make the ship seaworthy
Carrier liable for proper and careful handling, loading, stowage, carriage, custody, care and unloading of the cargo
Carrier not liable for faults or errors in the navigation or management of the ship

Hamburg Rules – comprehensive re-doing of COGSA that is in effect in some places, but not in the United States
US has traditional COGSA
Ship is responsible for cargo damage when ships agents are hands on cargo
Ship is responsible if it fails to use due diligence
Cargo is responsible if ship uses due diligence to be seaworthy

Most controversial and likely to be changed – letting ship off the hook for damage to cargo due to errors in navigation and management of vessel

THE CARGO CLAIMANT’S ACTION UNDER COGSA

1. The Plaintiff’s Prima Facie Case

A lot depends in cargo cases on the burden of proof
Burden of proof – if the cargo demonstrates that it turned the cargo over to the vessel in an undamaged condition and if cargo establishes that the ship turned it out damaged, that makes a prima facie case for the cargo against the ship
The initial burden is with the P (shipper or consignee) who must establish a prima facie case that the goods were damaged or lost while in the possession of the carrier
Shipper can meet the burden by showing the goods were delivered to the carrier in an undamaged condition and were not redelivered, or were redelivered in a damaged condition

Bally, Inc. v. M/V Zim America (1994)

Zim shipping Bally’s leather goods
Goods placed in sealed containers – makes it easier to load/unload
Upon destination, containers were not weighed
Perfect case that burden of proof is going to control this case because the seals on the containers were still in tack
Receiving manager of warehouse noticed one container was short
Did cargo make out its prima facie case?
Arguing the point of outturn – whether it was when containers were unloaded or when trucking company delivered the containers
Satisfied they turned it in in good condition but did not satisfy the second part concerning loss in possession of the ship
P establishes a prima facie case for recovery under COGSA by demonstrating that the goods were damaged while in the carrier’s custody
Burden can be met by proving
- Delivery of the goods to the carrier in good condition and
- Outturn by the carrier in damaged condition
When the consignee proves its prima facie case, the burden shifts to the carrier to show that the loss or damage falls within one of the COGSA exceptions

2. Burdens of Proof

Lekas & Drivas, Inc. v. Goulandris (1962)

Bringing cargo back from Europe and route had to be changed due to war and it took a year to get back
British government made it go around Africa
Soft Cheese and olive oil was the cargo
Ship was damaged and needed to be dry docked; unloaded cheese and covered it with tarps
Ship is not responsible for restrain on princes
Plaintiff has burden of proof
It was not negligent for master to not sell cargo b/c they were overdue on voyage and cheese was small part of the cargo and were responsible to transport other cargo

The Harter/COGSA burden of proof structure has sometimes been analogized to a ping-pong game because the burden moves back and forth between the plaintiff and defendant

EXPECTED PERILS

1. Fire – COGSA § 4(2)(b)

Fire Statute of 1851: vessel owner was not responsible for losses caused by fire on board unless such fire is caused by the design or neglect of such owner

Fire is exemption under COGSA § 4(2)(b)
A carrier seeking exoneration under the “fire” provisions first must prove that the damage was caused by fire
If it meets this burden, the weight of authority is that the shipper then must prove the fire was caused by the “design or neglect” of the shipowner

Westinghouse v. Leslie Lykes (1984)

Westinghouse shipped several electric rotors aboard Lykes which were placed in No. 4 hold
Fire started in No. 3 hold where cotton was stored – cotton is very difficult to extinguish
Crew members heard a clanking noise but did not check it out
12 ½ hours later after the clanking was hear, smoke was observed
Access could not be obtained to No. 3 b/c bags of flour had been stowed over the manhole cover in No. 3 upper tween deck
Cargo brought action against Carrier for damage to its cargo, and Carrier asserted the defense of Fire statute
In a maritime cargo claim, the initial burden is on Cargo to prove good order bad order that he delivered the goods to the carrier in apparent good order and condition that upon return were damaged
Reject court’s conclusion that stowage was brought about by design and neglect of shipowner so as to overcome fire defense
Evidence showed only that the stowage plan called for the manhole to be covered with sacks of flour and that the stowage plan had been prepared in the Lykes cargo layout department in New Orleans
Carrier not liable

Fire is an exemption in favor of ship, which is a quasi exemption; exemption only if you can’t show involvement of owner with it

If this had not happened by fire, then you would have had a completely different case

Once you bring in fire, burden of proof is singular

2. Perils of the Sea – COGSA §4(2)(c)

Thyseen, Inc. v. S/S Eurounity (1994)

Thyseen purchased steel from Europe and made arrangements with Δ to ship it
Vessel owner warranted a good ship
Ship hit a storm and there was discrepancy on how what caused the entry of water
District Court – P had proved a prima facie case by evidence that the cargo was in good order at loading but damaged at outturn; Δ had failed to prove that the damage to the cargo was due to a “peril of the sea”
Peril of the sea occurs when conditions are of an extraordinary nature or arise from irresistible force of overwhelming power, and which cannot be guarded against by the ordinary exertions of human skill and prudence
There was no peril of the sea
Severe storms occur on a regular basis in the Atlantic and that the winds, waves and cross seas experienced by the Vessel were to be expected therefore the Vessel has not proven that it is entitled to exoneration based on a peril of the sea

Peril of the sea is close to an act of god
A storm would be a peril of the sea under certain circumstances, but not here b/c it was foreseeable that this might happen
Peril of sea is movement of sea that such the best skill of the mariner can’t act against it

3. The “Q” Clause – COGSA §4(2)(q) – The Catch-All Exemption

Q Clause itself states that the “burden of proof shall be on the person claiming the benefit of this exception to show that neither the actual fault or privity of the carrier nor the fault or neglect of the agents or servants of the carrier contributed to the loss or damage”

Quaker Oats Co. v. M/V Torvanger (1984)

Quaker purchased 500 tons of tetrahydrofuran and chartered Δ to transport
Analysis of samples showed that the peroxide content was well within commercially acceptable levels
Samples taken upon arrival revealed peroxide contamination in one of the tanks
Quaker sued Δ asserting rights under COGSA for recovery of expenses incurred in purging the peroxide from the tetrahydrofuran
District Court – Quaker had established a prima facie case by producing evidence that the tetra. Was “within purchase order specifications” upon delivery to Δ and that at least a portion of it was no longer in that condition when tendered to P after shipment. Δ rebutted prima facie case and the burden of proof was back on P and Quaker failed to carry burden.
Carrier’s rebuttal was not good enough
Carrier must further prove that the damage was caused by something other than its own negligence

Notes:

“Q” clause only requires the carrier to prove that neither its negligence nor the negligence of its agents or servants caused the loss
“Q” clause will remain substantially unchanged

THE PACKAGE LIMITATION

If the burden of proof has shifted from the cargo claimant to the Δ carrier and back again, the court concludes that the carrier is liable for cargo damage
Once liability is established, it is necessary to calculate damages
Issue is whether the package limitation will apply and if so, how it will apply
COGSA §4(5): carrier is generally entitled to limit liability to $500 per package or customary freight units

What is a package and when can a container itself be a package?

Basic idea – how you can maintain similar break down between right of carrier and right of cargo after container revolution to make is analogous to same situation prior to container revolution

Fishman & Tobin, Inc. v. Tropical Shipping and Construction Co. (1999)

Cargo (Fishman) sues carrier (Tropical Shipping) for damages relating to cargo loss
Tropical Shipping admits liability but asserts CGOSA 4(5) limits its liability to $500 per package
The MacClenny Products Cargo
- 5000 men’s jackets put in 40 foot container; put on the reembarque and commercial invoice to which Tropical Shipping issued a bill of lading
- Bill of lading described the shipment as one forty foot container said to contain 5000 men’s jackets
- Container lost overboard
- MacCLenny asserts that each individually wrapped jacket it a package and Tropical is liable for $241,557.96
- Tropical asserts that the container alone was the package and they are limited to $500
The Fishman & Tobin Cargo
- 27,908 boys pants assorted into bundles not exceeding a dozen pair of pants that was held together by a 3inch wide paper band; placed in 39 cartons which were placed in a 40 foot container that Tropical supplied
- Bill of lading – one 40 foot container said to contain 39 big packs containing 27,908 units of boys pants
- F&T argued that each paper bundle container constitutes a package and Tropical is liable for $190,600.60. Tropical argues that each big pack containing boys pants is a package and that its liability is $19,500 or $500 for each lost big pack
The COGSA and its limitations of Liability Provision
- COGSA 4(5) limits a carrier’s liability to $500 per package, unless the shipper explicitly declares a higher value
- Requires courts to look not at the larger unit of transport into which goods are consolidated, but at the smaller unit, or package, into which goods are prepared
MacClenny Packages
- Follows second Binladen rule: when the bill of lading lists the number of containers as the number of packages, and fails to disclose the number of COGSA packages within each container, the $500 liability limit applies
F&T Packages
- Nowhere in the commercial documents, however, does the shipper describe the cargo as bundles of boys pants
- $19,500

In a container package – what is a package? Standard ship is using to charge the shipment

Application of COGSA’s liability limitations to containerized shipping:

When a bill of lading disclosed the number of COGSA packages in a container, the liability limitation of §4(5) applies to those packages; but
When a bill of lading lists the number of containers as the number of packages, and fails to disclose the number of COGSA packages within each container, the liability limitation of §4(5) applies to the containers themselves

Henley Drilling Co. v. McGee (1994)

Sea Barge (ocean carrier) agreed to transport drilling equipment belonging to Henley from Houston to Puerto Rico and back to Houston
Shipper arranged cargo insurance with McGee
On return shipment to Houston, Sea Barge retained a stevedore to stow the drilling rig aboard the barge but when ship arrived at Houston, the drilling rig was no where to be found
Henley sued Sea Barge, McGee and shipper (shipper and McGee subrogated)
Sea Barge moved for partial summary judgment contending their liabilities could not exceed the $500 per package limit imposed by COGSA
District court granted SJ on ground that the drilling rig constituted a package under COGSA §4(5); McGee appealed
Carrier must provide the shipper some notice of COGSA package/CFU liability limitation
Bill of lading in this case afforded fair opportunity notice sufficient to satisfy whatever essential requirements are imposed by the other courts
Notice was contained in valuation clause
Issue: Whether actual or constructive notice affords the shipper fair opportunity? YES
Follows the 9^th Circuit – decline to expand the fair opportunity requirement
Affirmed – drilling rig was a package

Have to give fair opportunity to cargo to know that they can pay more and stipulate a higher value on their property so they aren’t stuck with $500

A lot of people are willing to take the $500 because as odds go, these things don’t happen often enough

Carrier must give the shipper an opportunity to declare the value of the goods. The carrier bears the initial burden of proving that the shipper was given a fair opportunity to declare the value
If the bill describes the goods as consisting of certain number of packages, and the shipper delivers that number of cargo worthy packages, subsequent action by the carrier should not operate to reduce the shipper’s protection
A provision in a bill of lading limiting the carrier’s liability to less than $500 per package or customary freight until may be valid under the Harter Act but invalid under COGSA

DEVIATION

COGSA §4(4) – concept of reasonable deviation versus unreasonable deviation
It defines unreasonable deviation
COGSA is silent on the issue of whether impermissible deviation makes the carrier liable for damages to the cargo when there is no causal connection between the deviation and the damage
COGSA provides by implication that only an unreasonable deviation is a breach of the contract of carriage
Also makes certain deviations – those for the purpose of attempting to save life or property at se – per se reasonable and makes others – those for the purpose of loading and unloading cargo and passengers – prima facie unreasonable
Bill of lading may contain a clause which sanctions every conceivable kind of deviation by the vessel from the customary routes and ports of call – liberty clause
If the bill of lading specifies stowage above the deck, COGSA does not apply

1. Was there a deviation in the first place?
2. If there was, was it reasonable or unreasonable?
3. If unreasonable, what are its effects?

Carrying cargo on deck when bill of lading calls for under cargo storage – most deviated claim

General Electric v. S.S. Nancy Lykes (1983)

3 locomotive cars shipped by GE were loaded on Lykes to be shipped from New Orleans to Taiwan
Bill of lading allowed them to be stowed on deck due to their size
Bill of lading contained liberties clause which defined the scope of the voyage as usual and customary and allowed the vessel to call any port to take fuel
Decided to add extra port stop, which was not advertised nor communicated with GE – vessel hit rough waters and 2 locomotives went overboard
Pursuant to agreement with Taiwan, GE was required to replace lost cabs
GE brought suit against vessel and owner for unreasonable deviation
District Court held Lykes liable for the loss of the cab based on COGSA §4(4) which implies that any unreasonable deviation is to be treated as a breach of COGSA and the contract of carriage
COGSA §4(4) excuses the carrier from liability for an reasonable deviation

You knock out COGSA and all the protections that ship had (navigation, management) and you knock out bill of lading – so under GML, the ships role was insurer in relation to the cargo (it was responsible)

Does deviation have to cause the loss?

Modern law of marine insurance usually covers the ship under deviation
Today, the one thing that has changed is that they do require causation – deviation must be causally related to your loss

Deviation to save life or property at sea are examples of reasonable deviation

Deviation to load cargo or passengers are examples of unreasonable deviation

NEGLIGENT THIRD PARTIES

•COGSA §3(6) protects the carrier and the ship from suits filed more than one year after delivery of goods
•COGSA §1(a) says only that the term carrier includes the owner of the vessel or the charterer who enters into a contract of carriage with a shipper
•If cargo is damaged at the hands of an independent contractor, the carrier who issued the bill of lading may well be liable for the loss
•3^rd parties performing a carrier’s duties were automatically entitled to the benefit of the carriers exculpatory rights

Robert Herd & Co. v. Krawill Machinery Corp. (1959)

ISSUE: Whether the provisions of §4(5) of the COGSA or the parallel provisions of an ocean bill of lading, limiting the liability of an ocean bill of lading, limiting the liability of an ocean carrier to a shipper to $500 per package of cargo, also apply to and likewise limit the liability of a negligent stevedore

Nothing in COGSA limits liability from anyone but carrier
Stevedore is liable for damages
Only reason why they can’t take carrier is $500 limitation
If Congress wanted to say that independent agents could be a part of limitation, it should have said so
Absence something in contract, then they didn’t have limited liability
Stevedores are liable for damage caused by their negligence

Himalaya Clause: Professor Robinson said what if carrier has to hold agent harmless

Since nothing in contract, couldn’t take advantage of limitation but they can put something in the bill of lading
Favors agents
Gives protection to assist carrier
Independent agent has to be of the carrier – in privity of contract
Not that important if the ship is responsible
Exculpatory provision which seeks to extend non-carriers the protections available to the carrier under COGSA

v Instead of giving it to common carrier with published route, you privately contract with owner of the ship for entire vessel

1. Demise or Bareboat Charter

Charterer takes possession and operates the ship during the period of the charter as though the vessel belonged to the charterer (ex. tenant who rents a home)
Charterer provides the vessel’s master and crew and pays the operating expenses
Permits a shipping company to supplement its fleet, perhaps on a temporary basis
Bareboat charter: permits a company to acquire a vessel without incurring the full rights and obligations of legal ownership
Demise charterer may sublease
If demise charter has been perfected, the owner is relieved of is obligations as owner and operator of the vessel for the term of the charter

2. Voyage and Time Charters

Obtains the use of the ship in a more limited sense while owner continues to operate the vessel
The owner provides the vessel’s master and crew and pays the normal operating expenses, while charterer obtains the commercial benefit of having its cargo carried (taxi or limo service)

a. Voyage
1. i. Specifies amount due for carrying a specified cargo on specified voyage
2. ii. Owner agrees to carry a specified cargo by a named ship on a single voyage from one specified port or range of ports to another specified port or range of ports
3. iii. Freight will be barred on the amount of cargo actually loaded on the vessel, with a penalty for failing to load a full cargo
4. iv. Vessel’s normal operational costs are paid by the owner
5. v. Charterer will be in a position to influence how quickly loading and unloading take place – provisions for demurrage to create an incentive for charterers to load and unload the vessel as quickly as possible
6. vi. Charterer is permitted a certain amount of time, for loading and unloading the vessel. If these operations exceed the allowed time, then charterer must pay the owner “demurrage” at a rate established in the charter party, as a form of liquidated damages for the delay
7. b. Time
  1. i. Specifies the amount due for each day that the vessel is on hire
  2. ii. The owner agrees to employ a named ship as directed by the charterer for the number of voyages that can be completed within a specified time period, with charter hire paid at a specified daily rate
  3. iii. Time charterer is liable for the costs directly connected with the use of the vessel
  4. iv. It is in the charterer’s interest to ensure that every aspect of the operation proceeds expeditiously
  5. v. Typical time charter will include a “cesser of hire” clause specifying the circumstances under which the vessel will be considered
8. 3. The “Slot” or “Space” Charter

SLOTHIRE – enable charterer to obtain a specific number of “slots” on a container vessel
Slot charters enable 2 or more carriers to combine their capacities and offer more frequent service on their routes
Charterer simply hires a part of the owner’s vessel, such as a specified hold or deck, or a specified part of the vessel’s carrying capacity

Most occur because of bad weather (mostly fog which lessen visibility) and when 2 mariners are not on same wave length
Maritime law imposes a duty upon the vessel and its operator to protect the vessel’s seamen and passengers from harm
Crew and passengers injured in a collision of two or more vessels are likely to proceed only against the vessel on which they were serving or being carried
That vessel, if at fault, may be a joint tortfeasor with the other vessels and will be liable to its passengers and crew for the full amount of their damages
When a vessel owner makes his claim for the damages to his vessel against the other vessels involved in the collision, he will join with it his claims for contribution for the damages he has paid to his crew and passengers
While the usual collision case involves collision between two moving ships, the same rules usually regulate accidents in which a moving ship collides with a stationary ship or a fixed object, or a ship runs aground, or a ship’s movement causes damage to another vessel or to other property
The basis of liability in collision cases is fault; there is no recovery unless there has been negligence in the navigation or operation of the vessel
A court may reject a plaintiff’s claim in a collision case by finding that the accident was “inevitable” or was caused by an Act of God
General test of fault is whether the person navigating the vessel acted as a reasonably prudent mariner at the time of the accident
Vessels, because of their size and the lack of friction, may not quickly decrease speed, stop or change course
Collision between them frequently can be avoided only if the mariners in charge of the vessels discover any risk of collision at the earliest possible time and promptly engage in a course of conduct which is designed to avoid collision and with which both mariners are familiar
International Rules called Collision Regulations – COLREGS were adopted by the US
Congress then unified one set of rules, the Inland Rules, which apply to all vessels upon the inland waters of the US, and to vessels of the US on the Canadian waters of the Great Lakes to the extent that there is no conflict with Canadian law
Violation of a custom may constitute fault if the custom is “firmly established by proof” and “well understood” and is not in conflict with the Rules of the Road – Hal Antillen

The Jumna

Jumna collided with flotilla which hit a pier
Trial Court determined the incident was the result of an inevitable accident, in the sense of admiralty law and awarded no damages
Test to use: could the collision have been prevented by the exercise of ordinary care, caution and maritime skill?
If no negligence can be imputed to either vessel there is a presumption that they are navigating in a lawful manner and where no fault can be shown the accident may be said to be inevitable

“Inevitable”: act of God; when all precautions reasonably to be required have been taken, and the accident has occurred notwithstanding

The Pennsylvania

Involved a collision on the high seas between 2 British ships, the Steam Boat Pennsylvania and the bark Mary Troop
Collision took place in a heavy fog
PA was proceeding too fast for the circumstances, and the bark, contrary to the provisions of the British Merchant Shipping Act, was ringing a bell instead of sounding a fog horn
When the look out on the PA was first ported, then put to starboard, but before the steamboat had moved her length, it struck the bark, which was cut in half and sank
There was mutual fault
When a ship violates a statutory rule it contributes to the cause of the collision
Burden rests upon the ship of showing not merely that her fault might not have been one of the causes, or that it probably was not but that it could not have been

The breach by a vessel of its duty to others will not give rise to liability unless it is the cause in fact of the damages
In determining cause in fact, the collision claimant often is aided by the rule in The Pennsylvania and by the Major/Minor Fault rule
Pennsylvania rule is that if a vessel’s negligence is a violation of a statutory duty, the burden shifts to that vessel to prove that its conduct did not and could not have caused the accident
Major/Minor Rule provides that if the fault of a vessel is uncontradicted and sufficient in itself to account for the accident, there is a presumption that the other vessel was not at fault, or that its fault did not contribute to the collision – genesis of the rule was a desire to alleviate the harshness of the former collision rule of divided damages which provided that each vessel at fault was liable for its per capita share of all damages incurred in the collision, regardless of the degrees of fault of the offending vessels

Hal Antillen NV v. Mt. Ymitos MS

Noordam (passenger liner) collided with Mt. Ymitos (cargo ship)
Waters governed by navigation “traffic laws” – COLREGS
Heading toward each other starboard to starboard, Mt. Ymitos made sudden turn and Noordam couldn’t avoid collision
District Court – 90% Mt. Ymitos and 10% fault to Noordam
Can’t sue custom of starboard to starboard passing – COLREG 14 provides that vessels will ordinarily pass port to port
Proximate cause of collision was poor seamanship of Mt. Ymitos and her imprudent turn to starboard moments before the collision
In maritime collision cases, the court must allocate liability proportionate to the comparative degrees of the parties’ fault

Puerto Rico Ports Authority v. M/V Manhattan Prince

Manhattan Prince collided with pier in Puerto Rico
PRPA brought in rem action against vessel for damages caused to facilities
Sujeen (owner of tanker) brought action for damage to blow by Crowley and compulsory pilot (tugboats hired to help tanked dock)
Was PRPA responsible for negligence of pilot?

Gaines Towing and Transportation v. Atlantia Tanker

Gaines towing owned the tug Patricia which was moored at a dock for unload sand. Coast Guard issued a slow bell broadcast to request passing vessels to reduce their speed. The Atlantia, although it reduced its speed, created a 3 to 4 foot wall of water which caused the Patricia to strike the berth causing extensive damages
District Court – Patricia was properly moored and Atlantia proceeded through the channel at the correct speed – BUT Atlantia should have taken additional precautions
Supreme Court affirms an issue of liability but damages were based on errors of law
When a vessel is damaged in a collision or other marine casualty, the amount of recovery depends on whether it is deemed a total or constructive loss or whether its partial damage justifies repair
A vessel is considered a constructive total loss when the damage is repairable but the cost of repairs exceeds the fair market value of the vessel immediately before the casualty
Damages for loss of use may not be awarded when the vessel is a constructive total loss
District Court remarked that the damages may have exceeded the value of the vessel and therefore, loss of income is essentially out of the question
If the vessel was a constructive total loss, the court should have awarded damages in an amount equal to the pre-collision market value of the vessel, and should not have awarded any damages for loss of use of the vessel

United States v. Reliable Transfer CO.

Mary Whalen, a tanker owned by Reliable Transfer, was stranded on a sand bar outside of NY Harbor
There was supposed to be a flashing light maintained by the Coast Guard to mark the breakwater, but there was no light
District Court – 25% fault to vessel 75% fault to Coast Guard – but under admiralty rule of divided damages, the US was liable for ½ damages to vessel
Issue: Should there be comparative fault in vessel collisions or should divided damages remain in effect?
US is the only maritime nation not adhering to the rule of the proportional fault
When two or more parties have contributed by their fault to cause property damage in a maritime collision or stranding, liability for such damage is to be allocated among the parties proportionately to the comparative degree of their fault, and that liability for such damages is to be allocated equally only when the parties are equally at fault or when it is not possible fairly to measure the comparative degree of their fault
That a vessel is primarily negligent does not justify its shouldering all responsibility, nor excuse the slightly negligent vessel from bearing any responsibility at all

Divided Damages Rule: each vessel now is liable to the other offending vessel in contribution for that part of the total damages proportionate to its fault, and is liable for its per capita share only when the respective faults of the vessels are equal, or when proportionate fault cannot be determined

United States v. Atlantic Mutual Insurance Co.

Cargo owners shipped goods on steamship – Nathanial Bacon – owned by the US
Collided with Esso Belgium and cargo was damaged; ships also damaged
Bill of lading contained “Both-to-Blame Clause”: requires cargo owners to indemnify the carrier Bacon for any amounts the Bacon loses because damages recovered by the cargo owners from the Belgium are included in the aggregate damages divided between the two ships
Issue: Is the Both-to-Blame clause valid?
General Rule: common carriers cannot stipulate for immunity from their own or their agents negligence
The Harter Act took away the right of the cargo owner to sue his own carrier for cargo damages caused by the negligent navigation of the carrier’s servants or agents
It did not deprive the cargo owner of his tort action against the noncarrying ship
It would be anomalous to hold a cargo owner, who has an unquestioned right under the law to recover full damages from a noncarrying vessel, can be compelled to give up a portion of that recovery to his carrier because of a stipulation exacted in a bill of lading
Both to Blame clause is invalid – must only chose one
Ship does have to indirectly pay the sum of the damages
If there are 2 ships in collision, then the carrier might have to indirectly pay for cargo damages, if carrier shares the loss with another ship in mutual fault case, then carrier may have to contribute to some of cargo damages
“Both to Blame” was declared to be a violation of Harter Act

INTRODUCTION
- Equitable doctrine in GML
- If the ship is in danger of being destroyed and if destruction is inevitable and the master in charge of ship decides to do something harmful to vessel or to rid itself of cargo, then we shouldn’t let the loss bare the entire loss – we should spread it around to all interests involved
- There must be voluntary sacrifice by the master to move the peril from all interest involved and those whose property is saved must contribute to those whose property was lost

General Average applies only when

There is a danger to which both vessel and cargo are exposed;
The danger is imminent and apparently inevitable, which means that there is no probable escape except by inflicting loss upon one of the interests;
There is a voluntary sacrifice, such as jettisoning cargo or stranding the vessel
The attempt to avoid the common peril is successful, and
The party seeking contribution from the owners of the other interests is free from fault

The Oleron

If a vessel be laden to sail and it happens that a storm overtakes her at sea, so violent, that she cannot escape without casting some of the cargo overboard for lightening the vessel and preserving the rest of the lading, as well as the vessel itself; then the master may do so as he thinks fit

Notes

Average: damage or loss of ship or cargo
General average is restricted to voluntary sacrifices and expenditures for the common benefit
Common justice dictates that where two or more parties are engaged in the same sea risk, and one of them, in a moment of peril, makes a sacrifice to avoid the impending danger or incurs extraordinary expenses to promote the general safety, the loss or expenses so incurred shall be assessed upon all in proportion to the share of each in the adventure
Owner of the property that has been sacrificed is not made whole; instead, the owners of the property saved contribute an amount so that each property owner suffers the same percentage of loss
Law of average is part of the general maritime law

THE SACRIFICE

Need voluntary sacrifice in part of cargo in order to save the rest of the cargo

Barnard v. Adams (1850)

Recovery for loss of ship which ran ashore and cargo was uninjured
Transferred cargo to another ship and sold beached ship because it would have cost more than the ship was worth to get it off the beach
Argument of jury – If the ship was going to be lost by storm anyway, their beaching the ship would not entitle them to recovery – they didn’t sacrifice anything

Three factors for general average

A common danger; a danger in which ship, cargo and crew all participate a danger imminent and apparently inevitable, except by voluntarily incurring the loss of a portion of the whole to save the remainder
There must be a voluntary jettison….or casting away of some portion of the joint concern for the purpose of avoiding this imminent peril…or, in other words, a transfer of the peril from the whole to a particular portion of the whole
This attempt to avoid imminent common peril must be successful

Ship wants contribution from cargo for general compensation loss
If the common peril is directed from the common venture to a certain portion of venture, then that is the sacrifice they want
Ship shouldn’t suffer anymore than it’s proportional loss
Ship has the same right to demand contribution that the owners of the cargo would have had against her, had it been cast into the sea to insure her safety

Notes:

It has long been debated whether a voluntary stranding ought to constitute a general average act

Ralli v. Troop (1895)

Fully loaded vessel was morred at port when fire broke out in cargo hold
Port authorities took direction and put vessel aground
Master removed part of the cargo and wanted to get more, but port authorities wouldn’t let him
Port authorities scuttled the vessel
Rest of cargo was saved in a damaged condition
Vessel owners claimed general average contributions from cargo that was saved
Must meet 3 criteria to meet the general average act
If 3^rd party orders action, then there is no protection under general average, but if master agrees to action, there is protection under general average
Voluntary sacrifice can’t be to save some third party not under the venture
Court comes down on who made the sacrifice
USSC would not allow general average – this was not a voluntary sacrifice
Motive of the port authorities was unclear and in order to constitute a general average, the sole object of the sacrifice must appear to have been to save the vessel and cargo
A sacrifice of vessel or cargo by the act of a stranger to the adventure, although authorized by the municipal law to make the sacrifice for the protection of his own interests or those of the public, gives no right of contribution

THE PERIL

Navigazione Generale Italiana v. Spencer Kellogg & Sons, Inc. (1937)

Mincio was stranded on a muddy river bottom and anchors were run out
When it finally came free, it ventured to New York where it dropped off it’s cargo and was dry docked to assess damages
Owner of Mincio asserted general average lien
If the danger be real and substantial, a sacrifice or expenditure made in good faith for the common interest is justified, even though the advent of any catastrophe may be distant or indeed unlikely
Elements of general average were met
Any time a ship cannot move in its element, the ship is in peril
There must be a fair reason to regard a vessel in peril in order to require a contribution in general average. While the courts in some cases have used expression indicating that both in general average and salvage cases it is essential that the property at risk be subject to an immediately impending danger
When a vessel is stranded she and her cargo are practically always in substantial peril

NOTES

If there is a peril, but the master is mistaken as to its degree and takes more drastic action than necessary, general average can still be allowed

VESSEL FAULT

American law, before the passage of the Harter Act, gave no general average right to the ship through whose fault the peril arose and that clauses which exonerated the ship from liability to the cargo for negligence was invalid

Harter Act §3 exonerated shipowner from liability under certain conditions for cargo damage due to negligence in navigation and management of the ship but at the same time removed the bar against his entitlement to general average contribution where his negligence created the peril
Jason clause: included in a bill of lading a clause providing that where the general average situation arose through negligence of the ship, from the effects of which she would be exonerated by Harter Act, and where her owners exercised due diligence to make her seaworthy, general average was to be payable

The Jason (1912)

Steamship Jason, while on voyage from Cuba to New York with 12,000 bags of Arbuckle sugar was stranded off the Coast of Cuba through negligence of navigators

Jettisoned 2,042 bags of sugar, 1,657 bags of Arbuckle
Sacrifices were necessary to relieve the ship, cargo and freight from common peril
Adjusters determined that Arbuckle owed general average contribution of $5060.24
Arbuckle refused to pay on the ground that the stranding resulted from the ship’s negligence
Bill of lading contained provision for imminent peril
There was a common, imminent peril involving ship and cargo, followed by a voluntary and extraordinary sacrifice of property, necessarily made to avert the peril, and a resulting common benefit to the adventure
Is the Jason Clause valid? YES
Since the Harter Act has relieved the shipowner from responsibility for the negligence of his mater and crew, it is no longer against the policy of the law for him to contract with the cargo owners for a participation in general average contribution growing out of such negligence

Federal legislation (The Harter Act and COGSA) relieves the carrier from liability to the cargo owner for some of the consequences of his fault, such as that incurred in the navigation and management of the vessel
Carriers began inserting clauses in bills of lading providing that general average is payable if it arises through negligence of the carrier for which he is exculpated by the Harter Act – Jason Clauses

RIGHTS OF VESSEL AND CARGO: THE ADJUSTMENT

Zim Isreal Navigation Co. v. 3-D Imports, Inc. (1998)

Zim Isreal owned container ship Zim Montreal
Cargo from Far East was loaded on Montreal to be shipped to North America and Europe
Hatzlachh Supply was owner of cargo to be shipped to the US
Montreal suffered fire damaging some of the cargo, including a portion owned by Hatzlachh
Bill of Lading – General average to be adjusted to any port of place at the Carrier’s option and to be settled according to York-Antwerp Rules of 1974
Zim hired Richards Hogg, Ltd. To conduct General Average Adjustment
Adjustment showed Hatzlachh both owed and was owed money
Zim acted as Trustee, responsible for collecting general average contributions and disburse them
Many cargo owners refused to pay their contribution
Zim commenced this action to collect contributions owed
Hatzlachh asserted counterclaim for its proportionate share of the General Average Fund
Dispute centers on whether a shipowner can he held liable for failure to apportion the loss suffered by cargo owners equally among all of the participants in the adventure
General Average does not require that every partner who suffers a loss be fully compensated, but it does require that all partners to the adventure share the loss equally
Hatzlachh is entitled to same percentage of its claim as all of the other owners whose cargo was lost – since Zim paid all of the other cargo owners 100% of their proportionate share under the Adjustment, it must pay Hatzlachh 100% as well
The one’s who suffered losses get 100% of their loss paid based on adjustment
No one gets 100% made absolutely whole in general average
Hatzlachh claim was time barred and ship wanted to pay it less than 100% of what adjustment said was coming to it

Most of salvage is GML
Response to a need b/c in the ocean you don’t have emergency vessels to come out if you have emergency so there is a need to encourage the private ships to perform salvage services
Whole idea – get as much value back to the owner as you can get b/c if you damage owner too much, it is going to hurt maritime commerce
Give enough of a reward to try to induce salvor’s to get the property back to the owner and not to embezzle property
Salvage 2^nd most important maritime lien – pure marine salvage
Exclusive federal jurisdiction in admiralty
Elements of salvage
- Must be a marine peril – peril that threatens the vessel and cargo with destruction
- Voluntary act on part of salvor – if the other ship is already under legal duty to salvage this ship, then the owner can’t be hit of the ship in trouble (crew cannot participate in the salvage of their own ship)
- Must be successful in whole or in part

Markakis v. S/S Volendam (1980)

S.S. Monarch Sun, now known as Volendam, brought suit to recover a salvage award for services allegedly rendered to the S.S. Monarch Star – both were passenger cruise voyages
Star sustained engine failure while sailing off the northern coast of Cuba and the emergency generator failed
Sun, which was en route from Florida to Puerto Rico, received a TMP radio-telephone message that the Star was disabled and instructed Markakis to change course and render assistance to the Star
Sun altered its course
When it reached the Star, the two captains agreed on procedures for transferring the passengers, some of the crew, baggage, and provisions of the crippled ship to the Sun
Captain Avdelas and other members of the Star remained on board
TMP ordered Markakis to tow the Star farther away from the coast of Cuba and into the Old Bahama Channel
The purpose of the tow was to bring the ship “to a safer place” until a tugboat sent from Miami by the Star’s owners arrived and finished the job
Sun resumed its journey, embarking at destinations on its own route as well as those that would have been on the Star’s itinerary
The Star was close to Cuba during the entire ordeal
In order to prevail upon a claim for salvage award, the plaintiff must prove three essential elements: 1) A marine peril; 2) Service voluntarily rendered when not required as an existing duty or from a special contract; 3) Success in whole or in part, or that the service rendered contributed to such success
Owners of the Star are liable to the captain and crew of the Sun for salvage services performed
Court found that the service was a salvage service of a low grade

Salvage is inherently a property reward
No reward under salvage for pure life salvage – Under GML, you received no reward for saving lives at sea

The Salvage Act includes a 2 year statute of limitations; life salvors had a right to share in the property salvage award if life and property are salvaged on the same occasion

Salvage v. Towage
- Whether a contract is one for towage or for salvage has several consequences. If the fee is not agreed to, salvage service commands a larger award. Under a salvage contract, not only is the vessel liable for payment, but the cargo is as well. A salvage contract, not only is the vessel liable for payment, but the cargo is as well. A salvage contract also creates a “preferred” maritime lien, which has a higher priority than the maritime lien created by a towage contract
Salvage of one’s own ship
- Seaman are generally not entitled to salvage of their own vessel
- Crew members have a pre-existing duty to save their own ship
Statutory duty to stand by
- In case of collision, vessels are required by statute to stand by and render necessary assistance
No cure- no pay
- Under the general rule there can be no reward if nothing is saved
What services count
- Salvor need only contribute to the saving of the property to be entitled to salvage

Margate Shipping Co. v. M/V JA Orgeron (1998)

During tropical storm the Cherry Valley, an oil tanker belonging to Margate Shipping Co., rescued a barge containing a valuable external fuel tank for NASA’s space shuttle
Orgeron’s distress call had been picked up by Cherry Valley
Cherry Valley’s master immediately altered course to rendezvous with the tug
Cherry Valley was able to take the flotilla in tow and her propeller was churning in mud
Margate filed cross claim for salvage against US
Judge Duval stated that Margate was entitled to a salvage award equal to 12.5% of the value of the salved property – he relied on 6 traditional factors first announced in The Blackwall
An award will be altered only if it was based upon incorrect principles of law or misapprehension of the facts or it is either so excessive or so inadequate as to indicate an abuse of discretion
The greater the value of the threatened property, the greater the potential loss, and, the more the salvee would be willing to pay to save the property from destruction
Value of the salved property is one of the most important factors
There is no market of any kind for space shuttle fuel tanks, there can be no market value
The most appropriate measure of value is replacement cost

Usually the cargo on the salving vessel, does not participate in salvage award unless it has been contracted in that he will participate in the contract for carriage

A salvor’s misconduct may reduce or eliminate an award
A salvor’s negligence will reduce the reward
The reasonable care requirement is adjusted in light of the emergency
Refusal of salvage: A vessel owner can decline the assistance of others so long as only the owner’s property interests are at stake; BUT you have to know that others are attempting to salvage the vessel

Sea Hunt, Inc. v. Unidentified Shipwrecked Vessel (2000)

Abandoned Shipwreck Act (ASA) of 1987 asserts the United States’ title to any shipwreck that is abandoned and embedded in the submerged lands of a state and then in the same provision transfers that title to the state
District Court found that the US lacked authority to appear on behalf of Spain and granted Spain 90 days to refile a verified claim

Sea Hunt spent $1 million in conducting searches and claims to have found 2 shipwrecks
La Galga, 50 foot frigate commissioned into the Spanish Navy in 1732 which sank off the coast of MD/VA border; most of the crew and passengers reached land safely
The Juno, 34 frigate entered the service of the Spanish Navy in 1790; 413 sailors, soldiers and civilians perished in the sinking of the Juno; location of the wreck was not discovered until Sea Hunt’s efforts
District Court issued an order directing the arrest of the shipwrecked vessels and granting Sea Hunt exclusive rights of salvage until further notice
Court directed Sea Hunt to send specific notice of the action to both the US and to Spain
US moved to intervene and filed a verified claim on behalf of Spain because of 1902 Treaty of Friendship and General Relations between US and Spain provides that in cases of shipwreck, damages at sea, or forced putting in, each party shall afford to the vessels of the other…the same immunities which would have been granted to its own vessels in similar cases

Spain’s verified claim stated that the Kingdom of Spain was and still is the true and bona fide owner of the vessels Juno and La Galga and that title and ownership interest in said vessels has never been abandoned or relinquished or transferred by the Kingdom of Spain
In order for Virginia to acquire title to the shipwrecks and to issue salvage permits to Sea Hunt, these vessels must have been abandoned by Spain
When an owner comes before the court to assert his rights, relinquishment would be hard, if not impossible to show
Under admiralty law, where an owner comes forward to assert ownership in a shipwreck, abandonment must be shown by express acts
There was no abandonment of either La Galga or Juno

Abandonment – the owner has given up his claim to the vessel without the intention to returning to it and without the hope to salvage it

If property is owned by someone:

May have to get permission to salvage it and owner can refuse which is what Spain did – sovereign has to express in writing the specific abandonment of their vessels, the passage of time alone is not enough to constitute an abandonment – must show some express act that indicates their intention to give up treasure

Contract Salvage

Often happens that a salvor will contract with a vessel owner before saving the vessel
Common for the contract to leave the amount of compensation open to later determination by arbitration
Commonly used form contracts, a Lloyd’s Standard Form of Salvage Agreement (Lloyd’s Open Form) provides for arbitration in London
Several Courts have recently held that this contract is unenforceable in purely domestic context when a US vessel is salvaged by US salvor in US waters
Courts will overturn the K if there is any overbearing

Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. v. Overseas Oil Carriers, Inc. (1977)

Overseas Progress, American tanker traveling in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, en route from Isreal to Baltimore. Ship’s fireman, Turpin, was stricken with severe chest pains and Overseas Progress did not have a doctor aboard. Overseas officers aided Turpin as best they could. Captain Lidwin, sent out radio message calling for responses from all ships in the vicinity with doctors aboard. The Canberra was requested to rendezvous with the Overseas Progress and provide treatment for the ailing seaman. In the course of their radio communications, the masters of the Canberra and the Overseas Progress briefly considered the allocation of the rescue effort’s costs. Canberra’s owner, P&O, may look to the owner of the Overseas Progress for reimbursement of diversion costs, medical and out of pocket expenses. Lidwin did not in any way indicate that such compensation would be refused
Judge granted recovery of $500 for nursing services but denied any reimbursement for the Canberra’s additional fuel expenses – Under traditional admiralty doctrines of salvage, there could be no reward for pure life salvage
Principles of quasi-contract require recovery – performance of another’s duty to a 3^rd person, if rendered by one qualified to provide such services with intent to charge for them, is a ground for recovery in quasi-contract
This is not a case in which good Samaritan volunteered his services without the knowledge or consent of the person whose duty was discharged
P&O is not seeking a reward; it merely requests reimbursement for its expenses
We believe this rule will encourage seaman aboard large vessels to perform their moral obligation to their brethren on smaller ships without fear their benevolence will result in unreasonable expenses to their ship’s owners
But this is not pure life salvage, they are not asking for salvage reward
Pure life salvage does not prevent us from giving a reward in this case – with seaman involved, he may have an out because the employer (Overseas) has a duty when a seaman is injured or falls ill to make sure under the doctrine of M&C that he does everything possible within reason to get him to medical care
M&C is only owed by the employer and is a nondelegable duty
Canberra who carried out the duty of M&C that is imposed on Overseas, invokes equitable contract doctrine of unjust enrichment b/c if we didn’t have reimbursement, then Overseas would be enriched

Raises the issue of life salvage

Under GML of salvage, there is no award for pure life salvage

Problem with life salvage is that there is no fund – you need property for there to be a fund

Liability salvage is the new theory – if these guys had not picked up people from the water and onboard the ship, that ship and it’s owner would have been responsible for wrongful death awards

Three ways to get around life salvage

Unjust enrichment – if you voluntarily carry out an obligation imposed on someone else and you save the other side money, if we don’t even it up, the person who carried out the obligation would be out and the person whom he carried out the obligation for would be unjustly enriched
Giving them property salvage to make up for life salvage
3. Liability salvage

When a party has a maritime lien, the party can sue the vessel in rem

1. PERSONIFICATION THEORY

There is no general rule of separating in rem and in personam liability, and the personification theory of the ship is a legal fiction that fails to explain the basis of the maritime lien

The true nature of the maritime lien is that it is a special security device that accompanies and is not separate from in personam liability
If an in personam action is dismissed, it is ordinarily a bar to a subsequent action in rem; a dismissal in rem is res judicata to a claim in personam
Limited liability (in rem) is proper when the breach of duty is committed by a 3^rd party in control of a vessel
A maritime lien is a secret lien that is not recorded any place
Maritime line does not require possession
In rem action exists solely to execute a maritime lien on a vessel
Allows you to get jurisdiction over the ship where you can’t get personal jurisdiction over the owner
Admiralty court will sell vessel free of lien to pay off debt
Wipes vessel totally clean of any interest
Best place in the world to buy a ship is in maritime lien sale b/c you get it free of all past liens
Lien is so dangerous because when you put secret together with non-possessory, you have ship out there concurring debts all over the world

The China

Ship went into NY waters and NY has compulsory pilot law
Pilot screwed up and ran another vessel down
Seized the China to execute in rem lien that arose against the vessel
Ship owner says he was not at fault because pilot was not his employee
Court imposed liability on the ship which we personify and treat just like a personal Δ
In this case, the real owner is innocent, but it does not render the Court from going in rem to the vessel to satisfy the lien
Admiralty court has exclusive in rem jurisdiction over foreclosure of maritime lien of a vessel

Harmer v. Bell (1852) – The Bold Bucchleugh – Developed the maritime lien

Bold Bucchleugh, steamship, ran down and sank the William in Humber River in England
Suit was brought in rem in England, but the Bold Buccleugh left for Scotland before process could be served on it
Wiliam’s owners sued the owner of the BB in Scottish Court of Sessions
Steamer was attached in Scotland and released on bail and sold to Harmer
When vessel returned to England, it was arrested and Harmer contested the power of the admiralty court to entertain the suit – Harmer said he had no notice of the collision claims
Issue: Whether the bona fide sale of the vessel after the damage, without notice to purchaser, discharged the vessel from liability – NO
Held that a lien for collision damage could be enforced against the offending ship in the hands of an owner who had bought her after the collision and whose good faith and lack of notice the court was willing to assume
Admiralty court had jurisdiction and the sale of the vessel had not released it from responsibility of collision
The claim travels with the thing, into whosesoever possession it may come – in rem action

Personification Theory: under American Law, the ship can be liable in rem even if the owner of the vessel is not liable in personam
Most maritime lines are based on judge made law
One of the advantages of having a maritime lien is that it provides the successful claimant with the ability to have the arrested vessel sold free and clear of all liens, even those not before the court
When a court orders the sale of a vessel pursuant to an attachment in an in personam proceeding, the buyer acquires only the interest of the defendant, subject to all other interests and liens

Cavcar Co. v. M/V Suzdal (1983)

Operator of a vessel entered into contract with Iran to sell Ford Broncos
When ship arrived in Iran, the consignee refused to preclear the cargo (ship would have to pay the import tax)
Ship waited and no one took delivery so the operator ordered the ship back to the US
Cargo was seized and sold in the US
Action by Iranian entity who didn’t receive Broncos for breach of contract of transportation because duty of ship is to carry safely at the appointed time, deliver it safely and they never delivered the Broncos
Claim was that the owner of the vessel had his master on the vessel, but the vessel was really run by operating company
Master didn’t sign the bill of lading
Issue: Whether a vessel may be liable in rem for breach of the contract of carriage by the operator of the vessel when the vessel’s owner is not liable in personam for the breach
There is in rem liability
Although the master of the Finn Amer did not sign the bill of lading for the Broncos, the departure of the ship from Philadelphia with the cargo on board effected an implied ratification of the bill of lading, binding the ship to the obligations therein, including the duty to deliver the goods at the designated port
Vessel is liable in rem even though Amer Sea is not personally liable in contract for the breach
Once the ship begins its voyage with the cargo on board, then the ship personified ratifies what was originally a personal contract of someone else – it is now the ship’s contract

Limitations on the personification theory

Dismissal or settlement of an in rem claim will bar relitigation in an in personam action on the grounds of res judicata

1. CLAIMS THAT GIVE RISE TO MARITIME LIENS

Osaka Shosen Kaishu v. Pacific Export Lumber Co. (1923) – The Saigon Maru

Kaisha, incorporated under the laws of Japan, owned The Saigon Maru which it chartered, including her deck, to Lumber Company to carry full load of lumber from Columbia, OR to Bombay
Cargo was loaded and filled the under deck cargo space and the captain refused to accept more
Lumber Co insisted the vessel was not loaded to capacity and demanded she receive more and libeled her, setting up the charter party and the captain’s refusal and claimed substantial damages
Owner gave bond, the vessel departed and safely delivered her cargo
Kaisha excepted to the libel upon the ground that the facts alleged showed no lien or right to proceed in rem
The theory that partial acceptance of designated cargo under a contract of affreightment creates a privilege of lien upon the ship for damages resulting from failure to take all, is inconsistent with opinions of the court
A ship may not be proceeded against in rem for refusal to receive cargo, though the refusal may be a breach of the maritime contract of carriage
The maritime lien in favor of cargo arises as a result of a default occurring after the cargo is loaded and the physical relation of the ship and cargo is established
No case had actually held a lien in favor of cargo to arise for damages for the nonperformance of the unexecuted portion of a partially executed contract

When cargo is shipped under a voyage or time charter, the shipowner has a lien for its freight on the charterer’s cargo

Krauss Bros. Lumber Co. v. Dimon Steamship Corp. (1933) The Pacific Cedar

Contract of affreightment provided for the shipment of lumber from the Pacific Coast to East Coast ports at the rate of $10 per thousand feet but with a provision that in the event “a regular intercoastal carrier moves similar cargo at a lower rater” the lower rate should be applied
Payment was made at $10 rate , both parties acting in good faith
Subsequently it was discovered that a regular intercoastal carrier had moved lumber at a lower rate and the shipper, in an action to recover overpayment, libeled the ship in rem, joining an in personam libel against the owner

Where vessel agreed to carry cargo at specified rate or such lower rate as should be used for similar cargo by regular intercoastal carrier, and freight at specified rate was paid in ignorance that such lower rate had been so used, shipper was entitled to cargo lien on vessel for excess freight so paid.

A cargo owner with a general average claim has a maritime lien against the vessel

A vessel’s general average claim gives rise to a lien against the cargo

1. THE FEDERAL MARITIME LIEN ACT (FMLA)

SHIPE MORTGAGE ACT: A person providing necessaries to a vessel on the order of the owner or person authorized by the owner

Has a maritime lien on the vessel
May bring a civil action in rem to enforce the lien; and
Is not required to allege or prove in the action that credit was given to the vessel

The following persons are presumed to have authority to procure necessaries from a vessel:

The owner
The master
A person entrusted with the management of the vessel at the port of supply; or
An officer or agent appointed by:
1. The owner
2. The charterer
3. An owner pro hac vice; or
4. An agreed buyer in possession of the vessel

1. Providing necessaries to a vessel

Silver Star Enterprises, Inc. v. Saramacca MV (1996)

SMS operated a shipping container service which owned or chartered 8 different vessels, including Saramacca on which Silver Star had 2 preferred ship mortgages
Trans Ocean began furnishing up to 100 22 cargo containers to SMS fleet pursuant to a Master Container Lease
Silver Star commenced in rem action to enforce ship mortgages against Saramacca
Trans Ocean claimed maritime lien rights arising from the lease of containers
Saramacca was seized and sold
Trans Ocean – 64 container were used aboard the vessel and 10 were aboard the seized vessel
District Court – partial SJ in favor of Trans Ocean acknowledging a maritime lien for past due rentals, etc. for the 10 containers
Silver Star appealed
Silver Star furnished containers to SMS, not the SMS vessels, and it was SMS which dictated upon which vessel the containers were placed
Neither party knew aboard which ship a particular container would be placed at any given time
Silver Star has failed to demonstrate that necessaries were provided to a vessel as required by the FMLA

“Necessaries: include:

Repairs
Supplies
Towage
Use of a dry dock or marine railway
Goods or services that are useful to the vessel, keep her out of danger, and enable her to perform her particular function

2. On the credit of the vessel

Statute creates a rebuttable presumption that the one who provides necessaries to a vessel extended credit to the vessel

3. Presumed authority

Statute lists several persons as having presumed authority to procure necessaries, but this presumption can be rebutted
Owners of vessel under charter have frequently tried to protect themselves by inserting a “no lien” or “prohibition of lien” clause into the charter party

c. PRIORITY AMONG MARITIME LIENS

The John G. Stevens (1898)

Issue: Is the lien for damages by the collision to be preferred to the lien for supplies furnished before the collision?
The collision, as soon as it takes place, creates as security for the damages, a maritime lien or privilege in the offending ship
Issue: Whether a claim by a tow against her tug, for damages coming from collision with a 3^rd vessel b/c of negligent towage, is a claim in tort
A claim of tow against tug for negligent towage outranked claims for supplies furnished to the tug during the 3 months preceeding the damage to the tow
The lien for damages occasioned by the negligent towage must be preferred to the previous liens for supplies

The “beneficial service” rule theorizes that some services contribute more than others to the preservation of the vessel and its continuing operation and consequently are entitled to a superior position in the hierarchy of liens

The William Leishear (1927)

Schooner William Leishear was sold and this proceeding was to determine the rights of the libellants to share in the proceeds from the sale
General rule that maritime liens rank in an order inverse to the order of their creation
General order of priority
- Seaman’s wages
  - 5 sailors with contracts with the ship
  - lien is allowed
- Inverse-order doctrine
  
  Salvage
  - Salvor was son of owner of vessel
  - Didn’t bring claim until 7 months later
  - Court cut down the award
- Tort and collision liens
- Repairs, supplies, towage, wharfage, pilotage, and other necessaries
  - Labor and materials used to repair ship created lien
  - Wharfage for time of domestication
  - Services for watchman not allowed
  - Services for transporting sail is not allowed
- Bottomry bonds
- Nonmaritime claims

d. SHIP MORTGAGES

1920 – Ship Mortgage Act – gave maritime lien status to certain ship mortgages
In order to have lien status, a ship mortgage must qualify as a “preferred ship mortgage”

Requirements for preferred ship mortgage:

It must include the whole of the vessel
5. It must be filed with the Coast Guard in substantial compliance with the requirements of §31321
It must cover a documented vessel or a vessel for which an application is filed that is in substantial compliance with the documentation statute and regulations

Preferred maritime lien means a maritime lien on a vessel

a. Arising before a preferred mortgage was filed [with the Coast Guard];

b. For damage arising out of maritime tort;

c. For wages of a stevedore when employed by a person listed in §31341 [as having presumptive authority to procure necessaries for a vessel];

d. For wages of the crew of the vessel;

e. For general average; or

f. For salvage, including contract salvage

Governor & Company of Bank of Scotland v. Maria S.J. M/V (2000)

Bank of Scotland libeled Maria in rem seeking to enforce preferred ship mortgage and former crew members of the vessel intervened, alleging the Golden Lines Shipping owned the vessel and had failed to pay wages pursuant to settlement agreement between Golden Lines and union for the crewmembers
Bank purchased the Maria using the outstanding amount of mortgage in a credit bid in lieu of cash payment
Bank posted a letter of undertaking for the amount of the purchase to pay any final judgment in relation to any claims against the vessel that are held to have priority over Bank of Scotland’s claims against the vessel
A preferred ship mortgage enjoys priority over all claims against a vessel, with the exception of expenses and preferred maritime liens
Wages of the crew fall within the category of preferred liens
Claims for seamen’s wages enjoy priority status over a preferred ship mortgage
Issue: Whether proceeds from the sale of Maria constitute an interest of the owner or master such that the crewmembers may claim against the sale proceeds for penalty wages?
Owners lack any real interest in the proceeds of sale
Permitting a penalty wage claim against the proceeds would essentially penalize a party other than the owner or master, be it the Bank or some other creditor
Proceeds from the sale of the Maria are available to pay the crewmembers’ claims for unpaid wages
Penalty wages are not payable out of the proceeds from the sale of the vessel

e. BANKRUPTCY

Bankruptcy courts have jurisdiction “over the validity and priority of maritime liens”
The bankruptcy judge has full authority to administer the debtor’s maritime property, including the power to sell a vessel free and clear of all liens
Once the bankruptcy petitioner is filed, in rem action against the debtor’s property must cease
The automatic stay of 11 U.S.C. §362 kicks in, and the bankruptcy court acquires exclusive jurisdiction over the res

United States v. The Chandon (1989)

Tractug obtained loan from the Federal Maritime Administration (MARAD) to finance construction of 3 vessels, one being the Chandon. Tractug executed US Government guaranteed ship financing notes in the amount of $17 million. Tractug defaulted in payments and MARAD had the right to foreclose on its first preferred fleet mortgage, which it did and libeled the vessels
Tractug filed voluntary reorganization under Chapter 11 of Bankruptcy Act and the vessels were released from arrest due to automatic stay provision of 11 U.S.C. §362(a)(4)
Bankruptcy court approved a wage deferral agreement which permitted the vessels to continue to operate and provided that Tractug would pay the crew
US brought this admiralty foreclosure action in rem
Crew members intervened seeking to enforce maritime liens for their wages earned prior to the automatic stay and wages deferred pursuant to the agreement approved by the bankruptcy court
Issue: Whether the rights of a seaman under admiralty law prevails those of debtors under bankruptcy laws
Maritime liens for seaman wages have priority over a preferred ship mortgage and are sacred liens entitled to protection
Automatic stay provisions of Bankruptcy Act did not apply to maritime lien for seamen’s wages earned after filing of vessel owner’s petition for reorganization
Congress’ omission of any reference to maritime law in §362(a)(4) as evidence of its intention to limit the reach of that statute to land-based transactions where (1) recording of a lien interest is required and (2) the creditor first is time is entitled to privity
District Court must distribute the funds received from the foreclosure sale according to the priorities established under maritime law

Citizen of the United States of America vs Citizen of the United states

Larry Ziman — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:14:36 +0000

citizen of the United States of America
vs
citizen of the US

The sovereign is the The United States of America [Articles of Confederation] with 13 sovereign States. The people in reality had only ONE sovereign, being the State of their domicile with LIMITED DELEGATION OF POWER. Then the people [Representatives of the States] decided to divide the LIMITED DELEGATION OF POWER between TWO jurisdictions, being one of the several States AND the United States. For Limited Delegation of Power see Article I section 8 and Amendment 9 and 10 in the Bill of Rights.
Did the United States of America cease to EXIST? Of course not! To exercise a LIMITED DELEGATION OF POWER, you must ALWAYS MAINTAIN THE SOVEREIGN POSITION. The people had the use of succession from the Union to remove their LIMITED DELEGATION OF POWER if the Union didn’t work out and to also keep the Union in check. See the Book Real Lincoln for the exact three states in which this is conclusive:
“As we’ve seen, the Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island state conventions explicitly reserved the right to secede at some future point, and those reservations were accepted by everyone involved. U.S. Senators were elected by state legislatures from 1789 until 1914, during which time the legislatures took for granted their right to instruct their federal representatives how to vote on policy issues.” The Real Lincoln by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Pgs. 110 and 111

A Republican Form of Government is all Contract Law with LIMITED DELEGATION OF POWER.

An “Office” is to enter into the affairs of another without his permission and against his will. Source Gile Jacobs Law Dictionary 1782 [English] and the reprint in America 1810 [Reprint can be purchased from the Law Book exchange.]

Therefore to have limited delegation of power from the sovereign people, there must be a Constitution (Contract), Limited Delegation of Power (Bill of Rights minimum – securing our inalienable rights) any public officer must have at a minimum of a Oath of Office as a public officer under seal in a public forum AND either a Certificate of Election from the people for elections or a Civil Commission [signature is the appointment] for appointment under seal. See Article VI, See 1 Stat 23, See 1 Stat 73 section 8 and see your state constitutions. Beware of employees having the oath not as public officers- American Jurisprudence on ‘public officers’.

Side note. The reason for the seal is that if done by a Notary or other qualified person is that the Notary validates the public officer’s signature and a SEAL validates the signature of the Notary Public and therefore closes the loop under the authority of an Office. See Source a book on Seal of the United States published by the government. One of the games by the officers [‘ illegals’] is that a judge with no SEAL for his purported Office will validate an Oath and use someone else’s seal, like a phony one of the State that can only be used by the Secretary of State.

1.      The “United States of America” is the sovereign, i.e. the people of original States prior to the Constitution of the United States. See Preamble of all of the several States admitted except the later STATES and they all come in as “one of the United States of America.” See the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States, i.e. “Constitution [of the United States] for the United States of America”
2.      Article II of the Constitution of the United States, i.e. “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” He can’t execute upon the Office until he takes the Oath in Article II as the “President of the United States.
3.      Congress assembles as the United States of America to enact the Laws of the United States. See the enacting clause, i.e. “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled.” Congress is bound by Article VI and 1 Stat 23.
The exception to this is the North West Ordinance of 1787 which is styled “Be it ordained by the United States assembled.” Obviously this is not a Law of the United States, but an ordinance ordained after they are already assembled.
4.      The “Citizen of the United States” in say Article II is not the same as a “citizen of the United States” in the 14th. The “Citizen” with the capital “C” is a class of “citizens.” The lower class “c” “citizen” applies to one of the people that has standing, i.e. a party to the Contract if you will, being the a particular Constitution with “Privileges and Immunities.”

Therefore, it being established that there is a United States of America, a President of the United States of America and a Congress of the United States of America, there must be a “citizen of the United States of America”!

This citizen of the United States of America is validated in 1 Stat 477 (1796), all naturalization documents from the beginning to present (I have some), and a current document I (Ralph Winterowd) got by hook and crook from Senator Murkowski’s [now governor of Alaska] office for federal senators and their help.

So who is this NEW citizen of the United States in the 14th amendment?

The Supreme’s tell us no new rights were created.

1       This is a citizen to a National legislature and distinct from a state citizen. See Cook v. Gralike, 531 U.S. 510 (2001).
2.      Does the 14th amendment citizen of the United States have FULL ACCESS TO A CONSTITUTION?   NO!
3.      Does the 14th amendment citizen of the United States have FULL ACCESS TO A BILL OF RIGHTS. NO! See Wolf v. People of the State of Colorado, 338 U.S. 25 (1948) talking about only the Bill of Rights of 1-8 being estopped [Law of collateral estople]- which was over ruled by Mapp v. Ohio 367 U.S. 643, (1961) and this decision has now been limited. Are you impressed that in a State criminal forum you now have limited access to the Bill of Rights 1-8 – and there is no access to Bill of Rights 9 and 10 – by the year 1961 and since limited.

4.      Does the 14th amendment citizen of the United States have LIMITED DELEGATION OF POWERS IN SOME CONSTITUTION AND BILL OF RIGHTS? NO!
5.      Does only a 14th amendment citizen of the United States sit in a STATE or FEDERAL JURY. YES! Then if this citizen is only a citizen of this National Legislature, HOW DOES THIS NATIONAL CITIZEN have any standing in a STATE FORUM, STATE CODES, OR STATE LAW? NO!
Talk about jury nullification in a STATE forum. Is State Law enacted by the National Legislature? Of course not, even though only National citizens vote in state elections! Can a National citizen election State citizens for a public office? I would like to have that one explained to me in law. Can a jury of a National Government sit in any capacity in a State. NO!
6.      Is a standalone “citizen of the United States” sovereign. NO! This is creation by amendment and this particular status is under the control of the National Legislature and not the creator of the National Legislature.
7.      If there is no Bill of Rights and Constitution in a State criminal forum and no limited delegation of power – what is going on here? See the bottom of the 14th, “The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
Notice the word “enforce.” Enforce is to put into execution (executive), to compel obedience to. See Dozier v. City of Gatesville, 51 S.W.2d 1091.
So how can Congress “enforce” this POWER that is UNLIMITED – NOTICE THERE IS NO LIMITED DELEGATION of POWER here. In what forum can congress have UNLIMITED POWER.

The answer is COMMERCE!.

Can it be proven? YES and I will offer just one part of this.

See Cook v. Gralike, 531 U.S. 510 . Pay particular attention to the following:

The principle is that Senators and Representatives in the National Government are responsible to the people who elect them, not to the States in which they reside.

And

The idea of federalism is that a National Legislature enacts laws which bind the people as individuals, not as citizens of a State; and, it follows, freedom is most secure if the people themselves, not the States as intermediaries, hold their federal legislators to account for the conduct of their office.

This National Government has it “citizens.” Every agreement is by contract. In most simple terms, the founding members of this frontier found themselves alone in the frontier lands. And being there any body could state to another “I, am the voice of the one who cries in the wilderness” and ‘I wish to… sell you a horse or borrow your donkey to plough my field, or whatever. Contracts were usually mutually agreed upon by the parties in writing or by verbal agreement and a handshake. Contracts were the beginning elements of our society like those that would build a bridge and keep it up and charge a toll for its’ use. In most simple terms the crux of any civilized world usually involved barter and deals, ergo contracts…having terms and conditions and at times, a date for completion. This was the binding element of any agreement.
To ‘Bind’ is to create an obligation. Is this the purpose of the enacting Laws? Of course not.
How does it bind the people as individuals? By federal created rights (benefits/obligations) and federal created substantive rights (still a benefit/obligation trying to look like a inalienable right for due process).
Who is this individual? This is a taxpayer, being “natural person acting as a business entity.” See Alaska Administrative Code 15.19.900 definitions and Alaska Statute 43.19.110 and the Alaska Income Tax Act
What is the name of this “business entity”? Wouldn’t you like to know? I would.
Entity is a fiction of law. Business is in commerce.
Natural Person is an “entity state” occurring naturally See 23 Va. Cir 352 (1991)

Death By Medicine

Larry Ziman — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:12:20 +0000

MODERN FEUDALISM

Larry Ziman — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:39:04 +0000

Historical Development of Modern Feudalism:

The TRUTH about your status as a slave in America

(by unknowingly volunteering)

(author unknown)

Since 1933 you and all other Americans have been pledged for the debt
of the UNITED STATES owed to international bankers, most of whom are
foreign to our country. Your credit, labor, productivity and
property have been used and is now being used as collateral by the
incorporated UNITED STATES OF AMERICA without your knowledge or
consent. This is legal until you take back your implied consent by a
special, lawful process.

In fact, you are unknowingly volunteering to be chattel for a
mortgage held by financiers from the founding of this nation.
Perhaps you infer that the name on the tax statement is yours and so
you respond as though it were. This is voluntary servitude. To make
this servitude legal it was necessary to “cut a hole in the fence.”
No matter that the escape route is hidden, obscured by legal brambles
to make escape difficult. That it is not used presumes consent. It
is not impossible, just seemingly difficult and even implausible.

Your status as a subject is based upon a presumption that if you did
not wish to be so encumbered you would use the law to do something
about it. As long as you do not use the escape route provided by law
it is presumed that you are content to “remain in the pasture and be
milked and used as chattel.” This word has the same root as the
word, “cattle.” Do you get the picture?

Can such a premise be true? It seems totally out of step with
everything you and I have ever known about our world, our nation, our
government and our relationship to it! Our parents never behaved as
though they we were chattel. They dutifully paid their taxes, voted
in elections, waved an American flag on the 4th of July. Our
teachers taught us about our history, our Declaration of Independence
and Constitution, our Revolutionary War, how we fought the greatest
army and navy the world had ever seen at the time. Nowhere in our
history classes did we encounter any such premise of subjection to a
central government that rules our lives. Our civics teacher never
told us anything about this. Nothing in our world even hinted that
we were subjects to a highly centralized government. Surely this
could be true of other peoples, but not of us! For most people this
cannot be. The truth cannot be heard because it is too discordant
with our entire experience.

And yet we can document that George Washington did not chop down a
cherry tree, Lincoln did not free the slaves (they became subjects of
the Federal District, the District of Columbia), The War with Mexico
was begun by General Zachary Taylor’s provocations along the Nueces
River, the battleship Maine blew up from the inside, Woodrow Wilson
knew that the Lusitania was carrying US munitions to the war in
Europe and would be sunk, Franklin D. Roosevelt had maneuvered the
Japanese into an attack on Pearl Harbor and had cut fuel shipments to
the Pacific fleet to ensure the presence of enough old ships to offer
a tempting target, Truman knew that there were other good
alternatives to an invasion of Japan and did not need to drop the
Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Roosevelt knew about the NAZI
concentration camps, LBJ knew that there was no attack on the Maddox
and Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin when he asked for a
Congressional Resolution to attack North Vietnam, and the US
government had been warned by numerous documented sources that there
would be an attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. All
of this is from documented historical sources. Yet we continue to
believe the myths that are in our histories, our movies, our
mainstream media and our mass consciousness. John F Kennedy warned
us that,

The great enemy of the Truth is very often not the lie – deliberate,
contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and
realistic.

You will probably find it hard to accept that you have been living in
an illusion for your whole life. Much of what you believe is an
illusion and you will only find your freedom when you can allow
yourself to look behind the veils of illusion to see Reality. WHO you
are is far greater than “what” you perceive yourself to be. When you
have the courage to stand face-to-face with the illusion and call it
what it is, you will have stepped through the most difficult task set
before you on your Earth Journey. There IS a way out! But the only
way out is through—through understanding how we came to this
predicament and following a precise formula to obtain your
sovereignty. We have been warned repeatedly throughout our history,
but we weren’t listening very closely. Now we might have one more
chance to take back our power and our sovereignty.

The nature of the conspiracy to defraud can be best understood in
comments by one of the major conspirators in the triumph of
establishing the Federal Reserve, “Colonel” Edward Mandell House, who
is purported to have said this in a private meeting with President
Woodrow Wilson:

“[Very] soon, every American will be required to register their
biological property in a national system designed to keep track of
the people and that will operate under the ancient system of
pledging. By such methodology, we can compel people to submit to our
agenda, which will effect our security as a chargeback for our fiat
paper currency. Every American will be forced to register or suffer
being unable to work and earn a living. They will be our chattel, and
we will hold the security interest over them forever, by operation of
the law merchant under the scheme of secured transactions.

Americans, by unknowingly or unwittingly delivering the bills of
lading to us will be rendered bankrupt and insolvent, forever to
remain economic slaves through taxation, secured by their pledges.
They will be stripped of their rights and given a commercial value
designed to make us a profit and they will be none the wiser, for not
one man in a million could ever figure our plans and, if by accident
one or two should figure it out, we have in our arsenal plausible
deniability. After all, this is the only logical way to fund
government, by floating liens and debt to the registrants in the form
of benefits and privileges. This will inevitably reap to us huge
profits beyond our wildest expectations and leave every American a
contributor to this fraud which we will call `Social Insurance.’
Without realizing it, every American will insure us for any loss we
may incur and in this manner, every American will unknowingly be our
servant, however begrudgingly. The people will become helpless and
without any hope for their redemption and, we will employ the high
office of the President of our dummy corporation to foment this plot
against America.”

We now know how to respond to this treasonous fraud. All my life I’ve
looked for the roots of war, injustice and oppression because if we
can find the basis of the rampant injustice in the world, we could
relieve enormous struggle and suffering. I’ve wondered at how little
the Constitution seemed to affect the courts and how often the truth
was buried in silence. Mostly I saw greed and heartlessness in a
power struggle played out in politics. But I didn’t realize that the
game had been played in secret throughout American history. And
ultimately, it is a game of monetary policy and politics…. with a
spiritual component.

Like you, I’ve watched and participated in the American scene for
many years. I’ve written many letters to the editor, congressmen,
senators, presidents, distributed campaign literature to precincts,
represented my precinct at county conventions, served food at Loaves
and Fishes, planted flowers at the feet of police threatening to
arrest those who had taken over HUD homes designated for the
homeless, worked with Welfare Moms, served as chairman of church
social ministry, fasted, spoke to churches on social justice,
supported the protestors at Honeywell demonstrations against the
manufacture of cluster bombs, arrested for a war toy protest, booked,
finger-printed, arraigned, marched in protest of the Vietnam War, the
Gulf War, and the attacks on Serbia and Kosovo.

A Peak into the Mind of a Tory

In 1999 I watched in utter amazement as the Supreme Court of the
United States overturned the Florida State Supreme Court’s decision
to proceed with a recount of the contested ballots and the Eleventh
District Court decision to uphold the decision of the Florida court.
In Orwellian doublespeak, Antonin Scalia wrote on Saturday, December
9, 1999:

“the counting of the votes that are of questionable legality does in
my view threaten irreparable harm to [Bush], and to the country, by
casting a cloud upon which he claims to be the legitimacy of his
election. Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a
recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance
democratic stability requires.”

It was a brazen and Orwellian declaration. What American who believes
in democracy could claim that something was wrong with counting
votes “first”? What American who believes in democracy could declare
one candidate the winner and protect him from “irreparable harm” if a
vote count showed him not to be the winner, after all? Of course, it
doesn’t make any sense, unless you realize the foundation upon which
Scalia based his transparently partisan remarks. He doesn’t believe
in democracy, he doesn’t even believe in republicanism, he is a
monarchist.

Scalia revealed his true motivations when he spoke on the subject of
capital punishment at the University of Chicago (February 2002).
During his remarks, he stated: “The reaction of people of faith to
this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind
government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to
combat it as effectively as possible.” (“God’s Justice and Ours” at
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0205/articles/scalia.html )

Democracy obscuring divine authority behind government? Perhaps this
helps shed some light on why Scalia and the four other right-
wing “justices” could so easily subvert our election process and,
through an act of divine intervention, usher the son onto the throne
lost some eight years earlier by his father, George I. We are
assuming that we are still independent sovereigns and freemen as
declared by our Declaration of Independence and that the Constitution
is still in effect. Scalia has no such illusion. History supports
his position, sorry to say.

Scalia is an ideologue so accustomed to our willingness to continue
to be subjects that he does not even consider the ideal of a
government of, by, and for the people. That ideal has remained as
useful fiction to be taught in Civics classes and mouthed by the
politicians. HE KNOWS that we are mere chattel by presumption.
Since we have not even discovered that our status as freemen has been
lost through more than two hundred years of our history, much less
withdrawn our implied consent to be subjects, we are presumed to be
subjects before the courts and in the minds of people like Scalia.

Scalia speaks of civil disobedience with contempt and quotes the
Bible, “Ye must needs be subject.” We must, as mere servants of the
ruling class, acquiesce to our divinely guided leaders. For who are
we, as mere subjects, to question those who make (or interpret) the
laws? After all, he says that “government carries the sword as ‘the
minister of God,’ to ‘execute wrath’ upon the evildoer.” No, he has
not reverted to a justice of another time—WE have by our ignorance
and silence, acquiesced to a lower status reminiscent of another
time.

There you have it! In his eyes, we are subjects unworthy of honor,
peace and justice. Somehow Scalia’s statements seem like a long way
from the Declaration of Independence in which Americans stood before
the world as sovereigns invested with certain inalienable rights,
including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
After the American Revolution, the monarchies of Europe saw Democracy
as an unnatural, ungodly, ideological threat, every bit as radical
and dangerous as Communism was regarded by Western nations upon its
inception. Just as the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia spawned
other revolutions around the world, the American Revolution provided
an example and incentive for people all over the world to overthrow
their European monarchies. What has happened? When did we give up
our natural, God-given rights? Our forefathers fought and won that
war didn’t they?

Sovereignty, Revolution, Birth of a New Nation

Yes, our forefathers fought one of the bloodiest wars in history and
won their independence. They understood the historical roots of war,
injustice and oppression, and we’ve lost this knowledge. Our history
books did, indeed, leave out a lot of the truth and lied about much
of the rest. History teachers often teach history in such a way that
young students swear to never again study history! When I attempted
to teach American History from sources outside the history books I
was forced from my 26-year teaching career by my principal. We have
been led and lulled to forget WHO we are. All this has been
engineered by those who would keep us ignorant of the truth.

The primary reason for the War for Independence was not “taxation
without representation”, but the forced payment of taxes to the King
in gold instead of paper money. America was flourishing by using her
own “fiat money” system based only on production, not a gold-based
system that could be manipulated by the King. The King could
not “control” the fiat money system and therefore passed a law
requiring that taxes be paid in gold only. The King had most of the
gold—the colonies had little; so unemployment ensued—and embittered
colonists cried for war. Benjamin Franklin put it this way, “The
colonies would have gladly born the little tax on tea, and other
matters, had it not been that England took away from the colonies
their money.” Prior to the Revolutionary War, The Times of London
said this regarding fiat money in America:

“If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origins in North
America, shall become endurrated down to a fixture, then that
government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off
debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to
carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in
the history of the world. The brains and the wealth of all the
countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed
or it will destroy every Monarchy on the
globe.”

The truth is that the Revolution failed. You might say that we won a
military victory over the most powerful military force on the planet
at the time. However, reading the Treaty of Paris it is clear that we
were not exactly negotiating as equals.

We had won the recall of British troops but not the bankers. Even
though we are taught that we won our independence from England, we
actually were able to remain free from the international bankers for
only a few years at the close of the presidency of Andrew Jackson.
The most visible of the power structure was the East India Company
owned by the bankers and the Crown in London, England. This was an
entirely private enterprise whose flag was adopted by Queen Elizabeth
in 1600—thirteen red and white horizontal stripes with a blue
rectangle in its upper left-hand corner. All debts owed before the
war were to be collected by the foreign creditors.

When the creditors of the new nation found the Articles of
Confederation to be inadequate to exact payment from their young
debtor, the Constitution was written and supported by the bankers
through their associates, for increase their control over the United
States of America. Had the Articles of Confederation been completed
and adopted, instead of the Constitution, the bankers would have had
far less control.

Any constitution must have some prior reference to establish its
foundation. The authority for the American Constitution is based
upon the Bible; the Magna Carta, signed in 1215 by King John; the
Petition of Rights, granted by King Charles I in 1628; the English
Bill of Rights, granted by William and Mary in 1689; the right of
habeas corpus, granted by King Charles II, and the Articles of
Confederation. Any and every constitution thereafter must have an
enabling clause. From this point onward, no constitution may
diminish, in any manner, those rights already established in the
above six documents.

The Declaration of Independence established that all people are
sovereign under God’s Natural Law. Sovereign people of the various
states, created the state governments for the protection of their
rights. They delegated certain authority from the people’s powers by
and through the state constitutions in order that the three branches
of government could properly carry out the dictates outlined in the
State constitutions to protect our rights.

The States then created the United States.

The American Constitution created a new structure of government that
was established on a much higher plane than either the parliamentary
system or the confederation of states. It was a
people’s “constitutional republic,” where a certain amount of power
was delegated to the states and a certain amount was delegated to the
federal government. The United States, by way of the Congress of the
United States, has certain powers delegated by the Constitution. So
far as the several States party to the Constitution are concerned,
the United States may not exercise power not delegated by the
Constitution. All power not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution is reserved to the several States within their
respective territorial borders—or, to the people.
British Subversion, Banks, and Treason

Even though the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in 1783,
the simple fact of our existence threatened the monarchies where it
hurts most: financially. The United States stood as a heroic role
model for other nations, which inspired them to also struggle against
oppressive monarchies. The French Revolution (1789-1799) and the
Polish uprising (1794) were, in part, encouraged by the American
Revolution. Though we stood like a beacon of hope for most of the
world, the monarchies regarded the United States as a political
infection, the principle source of radical democracy that was
destroying monarchies around the world. The monarchies realized that
if the principle source of that infection could be destroyed, the
rest of the world might avoid the contagion and the monarchies would
be saved.

Knowing they couldn’t destroy us militarily, they resorted to more
covert methods of political and financial subversion, employing spies
and secret agents skilled in bribery and legal deception; it was
perhaps the first “cold war.” In the 1794 Jay Treaty, the United
States agreed to pay £600,000 sterling to King George III, as
reparations for the American Revolution. The US Senate ratified the
treaty in secret session and ordered that it not be published. When
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson published it anyway (perhaps our first
whistleblower), the exposure and resulting public up-roar so angered
the Congress that it passed the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) so
federal judges could prosecute editors and publishers for reporting
the truth about the government.

Since we supposedly had won the Revolutionary War, why would our
Senators agree to pay reparations to the loser? And why would they
agree to pay £600,000 sterling, eleven years after the war ended? It
doesn’t make sense, especially in light of the Senate’s secrecy and
later fury over being exposed… unless we assume our Senators had been
bribed to serve the British monarchy and betray the American people!
That is treason!

From the beginning, the United States Bank had been opposed by the
Democratic-Republicans lead by Thomas Jefferson, but the Federalists
(the pro-monarchy party) won the vote. The initial capitalization
was $10,000,000 — 80 % of which would be owned by foreign bankers.
Since the bank was authorized to lend up to $20,000,000 (double its
paid capital), it was a profitable deal for both government and the
bankers, since they could lend, and collect interest on $10,000,000
that didn’t exist.

However, the European bankers outfoxed the U.S. government, and by
1796, the US government owed the bank $6,200,000 and was forced to
sell most of its shares. By 1802, our government owned no stock in
the United States Bank!

Thomas Jefferson had warned,

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue
of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the
banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children
wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…. The
issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the
people, to whom it properly belongs.

Several short-lived attempts to impose the central banking scheme on
the United States were defeated by the patriotic efforts of
Presidents Madison, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren and Lincoln.

Bank Fraud, Bribery, and Corruption

Chief among the international financiers was Amshel Bauer of Germany
who, in 1748 opened a goldsmith shop under the name of Red Shield.
(in German the name is spelled Rothschild and is pronounced Rote-
shilld). In 1787, Amshel (Bauer) Rothschild made the famous
statement: “Let me issue and control a Nation’s money, and I care not
who writes the laws.” He had five Sons Amshel Mayer, Solomon, Jacob,
Nathan, and Carl. In 1798, the five Rothschild brothers expanded by
opening banks in Germany, Vienna, Paris, London, and Naples.

The objective behind this bank was to receive special privilege to
use the unjust fractional reserve banking to print money and loan it
to the government and industry. No money could go into circulation
without interest being paid to the bankers.

Fractional reserve banking is very simple. It is simply a special
privilege given to a man or group of men to create credit out of thin
air; by extending this credit/debt to everyone else in society who
does not have the same privilege, and then collecting from society
the money plus interest, they become very rich without having to
produce anything of value.

The basic mathematics behind this system is very clear. If this
system is left in place long enough, the man or group who controls
this system of debt creation will own all the gold available in the
nation. Once the supply of real money (gold) is in his or their
hands, this man or group of men becomes the master of the entire
nation. Why? Because this man or group of men controls the only
source of operating medium (money) available through which the nation
functions. Only the man who has the privilege of printing the money
and loaning it at interest can determine who gets special funding—his
friends and allies. Everyone else is limited to how much money they
have access to; therefore, after two or three generations, the
friends and allies of this “banker” will own all of the nation—just
as America is now owned by a very small cadre of very wealthy men.

How long this process takes to work its way through the wealth of the
nation depends upon how successful the “banker” is in forcing,
through bribery and corruption, the restriction of the formal
government’s issuance of real money backed by gold or silver. As the
supply of real money shrinks, the people of the nation are forced to
rely on the creation of a fictitious debt by the privileged few to a
greater and greater extent, until finally, the only thing left is a
massive amount of “unpayable debt,” created from nothing and
consisting only of the interest charged upon the fictitious debt, and
collecting interest for every moment of its existence. All for the
benefit of the privileged, who become the de facto (illegally
usurped) government because of the “money power” they wield.

Through the Bank of England, the Rothschilds demanded a private bank
in the United States to hold the securities of the United States as
the pledged assets to the Crown of England in order to secure the
debt to which our government had defaulted. As one of his first acts,
President Washington declared a financial emergency. William Morris
with the help of Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of Treasury, heavily
promoted the creation a private bank to service the debt to the
international bankers. In 1791, Congress chartered the first national
bank for a term of 20 years, to hold the securities of the same
European bankers who had been holding the debts before the war. The
bankers loaned worthless, un-backed, non-secured printed money to
each other to charter this first bank. In December 12, 1791, the Bank
of the United States opened its doors in Philadelphia.

The holder of the securities was the private bank. So under public
international law, the creditor nation forced the United States to
establish a private bank to hold the securities as the collateral for
the national debt. James Madison had warned, “History records that
the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit,
and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments
by controlling money and its issuance.”
British Subversion, Titles of Nobility and Treason

For the early decades of US history, relations between the United
States and Great Britain remained strained. Their relationship
deteriorated sharply with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1803.
Britain imposed a blockade on neutral countries such as the United
States. In addition, the British took American sailors from their
ships and forced them to serve in the British Navy. Concerned about
the many English spies and troublemakers, Congress passed an
amendment to prevent those who had English titles and connections
from obtaining any seat in government. Called the Titles of Nobility
Act (TONA), it reads as follows:

“If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or
retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall without the consent
of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office, or
emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince, or
foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United
States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or
profit under them, or either of them.”

All “titles of nobility” were prohibited in both Article VI of the
Articles of Confederation (1777) and in Article I, Section 9 of the
Constitution of the United States (1778), but there was no penalty.
Although already prohibited by the Constitution, an additional “title
of nobility” amendment was deemed necessary and was proposed in 1789,
again in 1810, and finally ratified in 1819. But the notice of
ratification delivered to the Secretary of State, an attorney with
the title, “Esquire,” disappeared. As a result, there still is no
penalty for accepting titles or emoluments from foreign rulers today,
just the prohibition.

Clearly, the founding fathers saw such a serious threat in “titles of
nobility” and “honours,” that anyone receiving them would be required
to forfeit their citizenship. Obviously the Amendment carried much
more significance for our founding fathers than is readily apparent
today. They knew that our freedom could be subverted from inside our
government and had sought to prevent such a bitter betrayal. Today
most Senators and Congressmen, all Federal judges, and some of our
Presidents are attorneys who carry the title “Esquire” often
abbreviated as “Esq.” The Constitution still forbids this,
nevertheless.

In Colonial America, attorneys trained attorneys, but most held
no “title of nobility” or “honor.” There was no requirement that one
be a lawyer to hold the position of district attorney, attorney
general, or judge; a citizen’s “counsel of choice” was not restricted
to a lawyer and there was no state or national bar associations. The
only organization that certified lawyers was the International Bar
Association (IBA), chartered by the King of England, headquartered in
London. Lawyers admitted to the IBA received the rank “Esquire” -
a “title of British nobility.”

“Esquire” was the principle title of nobility which the 13th
Amendment sought to prohibit from the United States. Why? Because
the loyalty of “Esquire” lawyers was suspect! Lawyers with
an “Esquire” behind their names were agents of the monarchy, members
of an organization whose principle purposes were political and
regarded with the same wariness that some people today reserve for
members of the KGB or the CIA.

The archaic definition of “honor” (as used when the 13th Amendment
was ratified) meant anyone “obtaining or having an advantage or
privilege over another.” A contemporary example of an “honor”
granted to only a few Americans is the privilege of being a judge:
Lawyers can be judges and exercise the attendant privileges and
powers, non-lawyers generally cannot. We address the judge as, “your
Honor.”

By prohibiting “honors,” the missing, but now found, original 13th
amendment prohibits any advantage or privilege that would grant some
citizens an equal opportunity to achieve or exercise political
power. Therefore, the second meaning (intent) of the original 13th
Amendment was to insure political equality among all American
citizens, by prohibiting anyone, even government officials, from
claiming or exercising a special privilege or power (an “honor”) over
other citizens.

Both “esquire” and “honor” would be key targets of the 13th Amendment
even today, because, while “titles of nobility” no longer apply now
precisely as they did back in the early 1800’s, it is clear that
an “esquire” or bar attorney receives far better treatment in and by
the courts as well as by the public at large in general, whereas if
you represent yourself (pro se) or speak as a freeman (pro per), you
are treated as though you were rabble. Your opinions are of little
importance in court and you are often treated similarly by government
officials. Because you are not “esquires” or bar attorneys, you are
considered to be a useless eater, a subject “out of control.” The
concept of “honor” remains relevant, possibly more so today than at
any previous time in U.S. history, for they, the “honors,” are
greatly feared and even revered, even by the esquires who are
considered to be below them. Since the Original 13th Amendment has
never been repealed, all acts of government since 1819 are
technically null and void since most lawmakers, prohibited from
participation in government by the Constitution and who should even
be stripped of their right to be a US Citizen under TONA, have
continued to interject themselves into the political process.

When the people discovered that European banking interests owned most
of the United States Bank they saw the sheer power of the banks and
their ability to influence representative government by economic
manipulation and outright bribery. On February 20, 1811, Congress
therefore refused to renew the Bank’s charter on the grounds that the
Bank was unconstitutional. This led to the withdrawal of $7,000,000
in specie (money in coin) by European investors, which in turn,
precipitated an economic recession, and the War of 1812. This “war”
was punishment for America refusing to do business on the terms of
the International Banking families of the House of Rothschild,
through the first Bank of the United States. Congress refused to let
the National Bank renew its Charter.

Except for Gen. Andrew Jackson’s victory in the Battle of New
Orleans, the War of 1812 produced a string of American military
disasters. The most shocking of these was the British Army’s burning
of the Capitol, the President’s house, and other public buildings in
Washington on August 24 and 25, 1814. (Americans had previously
burned public buildings in Canada.) During the War of 1812 our
national archives and many libraries and document repositories were
burned and some of the evidence of the TONA disappeared.
Nevertheless, the legislature of Virginia ratified the amendment and
it was subsequently printed in many official publications as the 13th
Amendment, even in states which had NOT ratified, such as
Connecticut. But beginning in 1832 it began to disappear from texts,
although official state publications continued to publish it as late
as 1876.

There are undoubtedly other examples of the monarchy’s efforts to
subvert or destroy the United States; some are common knowledge,
others remain to be disclosed to the public. For example, national
archivist David Dodge discovered a book called 2 VA LAW in the
Library of Congress Law Library. According to Dodge, “This is an un-
catalogued book in the rare book section that reveals a plan to
overthrow the Constitutional government by secret agreements
engineered by the lawyers of the time.” That is one of the reasons
why the TONA was ratified by the state of Virginia in the particular
manner in which they did, although the alleged “notification” thereof
was a long time thereafter claimed to have been “lost in the mail.”
You see, there is no public record that this aforementioned book
exists either!

That may sound surprising, but according to the Gazette
(5/10/91), “the Library of Congress has 349,402 un-catalogued rare
books and 13.9 million un-catalogued rare manuscripts.” There may be
secrets buried in that mass of documents even more astonishing than a
missing Constitutional Amendment. Yet this image of documentary
disarray appropriately describes our situation today: we are
inundated with information that we have not had the time or interest
to sort through. As a result we have lost a precious treasure in the
chaos and turmoil of daily life: our sovereignty.

One amazing aspect of the War of 1812 was the existence of a
depression during wartime. War always brings a short-term prosperity,
except in the case of this war. To understand this, it is vital for
you to know that all depressions and recessions are artificially
created through the restriction of a medium of exchange—money. This
restriction keeps money OUT of circulation. Fewer dollars available
to facilitate production and distribution means poverty and
starvation.

The precariousness of government finance during the war and the post
war recession convinced the Republican government under James
Madison, to re-establish a national bank. Thus was created the Second
Bank of the United States in 1816.

In January 9, 1832 The Second National Bank applied for a charter
renewal 4 years early. This time President Andrew Jackson vetoed the
Bank’s recharter on the grounds that the Bank was unconstitutional
and he successfully paid off the national debt leaving the U.S. with
a surplus of $5,000. He said, “If congress has the right under the
Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use
themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.”

On January 30, 1835, President Andrew Jackson attended a
congressional funeral in the Capitol building. As he exited, Richard
Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, pointed a pistol at Jackson
and fired. The percussion cap exploded, but the bullet did not
discharge. The enraged Jackson raised his cane to strike his
attacker, who fired again. The second weapon also misfired and the
sixty-seven-year-old president escaped assassination at close range.
Jackson was convinced that Lawrence was hired by his political
enemies, the Whigs, to stop his plan to destroy the Bank of the
United States.

Andrew Jackson violated public international law because he denied
the creditor his just lien rights on the debtor. However, the
bankers did not lend value (substance), so in actuality they had an
unperfected lien. Therefore the law actually did not apply.

The End of the American Republic: the Shadow Government is Born

In 1860-61, the Southern states walked out of Congress. This created
sine die, a situation in which not enough representatives were
present to carry on legislative business. This was a constitutional
crisis that the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, had to
resolve.

The Introduction to Senate Report 93-549 (93rd Congress, 1st Session,
1973) summarizes the situation as best as possible:

“A majority of the people of the United States have lived all of
their lives under emergency rule. . . And, in the United States,
actions taken by the Government in times of great crises have –from,
at least, the Civil War—in important ways, shaped the present
phenomenon of a permanent state of national emergency.”

From the research information available, it can be reasonably proven
that when the Southern states walked out of Congress on March 27,
1861, the quorum to conduct business under the Constitution for the
united States of America was lost. Thus, the only votes that Congress
could lawfully take, under parliamentary law, were those to set the
time to reconvene, take a vote to get a quorum, vote to adjourn and
set a date, time, and place to reconvene at a later time, but
instead, Congress apparently abandoned the House and Senate without
setting a date to reconvene. Under the parliamentary law of Congress,
when this happened, Congress became sine die (pronounced see-na dee-
a; literally “without day”) and thus when Congress adjourned sine
die, it ceased to exist as a lawful deliberative body, and thus the
only lawful, constitutional power that could declare war was no
longer lawful, or in session.

It can also be reasonably proven that the Southern states, by virtue
of their secession from the Union, also ceased to exist sine die, and
that some state legislatures in the Northern bloc also adjourned sine
die, and thus, all the states which were parties to creating the
Constitution for the united States of America apparently ceased to
exist. On April 15, 1861, President Lincoln executed an executive
order, Lincoln Executive Proclamation 1, and it can also be
reasonably proven that the united States of America have been ruled
ever since by the President under executive powers.

It can also be reasonably proven that when Congress eventually did
reconvene, it was reconvened under the military authority of the
Commander-in-Chief and not by Rules of Order for Parliamentary bodies
or by Constitutional Law, thus placing the American people under
martial rule ever since the “national emergency” declared by
President Lincoln. Thus, the Constitution for the united States of
America has subsequently temporarily ceased being the acknowledged
law of the land in many courts, and the President, Congress, and the
courts have unlawfully presumed that they were free to remake the
Union in a new image, whereas, lawfully, no constitutional provisions
were in place which afforded power to any of the actions which were
taken which presumed to place the Union under the new form of
control.

President Lincoln apparently knew that his executive orders no longer
had any force under Constitutional Law. So he commissioned General
Orders No. 100 (April 24, 1863) apparently as a special code to
govern his actions under martial law and to justify the seizure of
power, which further extended the laws of the District of Columbia
and which also fictionally implemented the provisions of Article I,
Section 8, Clauses 17-18 of the Constitution beyond the boundaries of
Washington, D.C. and into the several states. General Orders No. 100,
also called the Lieber Instructions and the Lieber Code, have
apparently extended the laws of war and private international law
into the American states, and the United States government has become
the presumed military conqueror of the people and the land of the
several American nations.

Martial rule has apparently been kept secret and has never really
ended. Lincoln was assassinated before he could complete the
implementation of his plan to constitutionally and not militarily
reform the Southern national governments and restore Congress. Ever
since the united States of America has been ruled under military law
under the Commander of Chief—the President—and his assumed executive
powers according to the policies of Executive Orders: a military
dictator type function.

Constitutional law under the original Constitution for the American
states is apparently enforced only as a matter of keeping the public
peace under the provisions of General Orders No. 100 under martial
rule. This “peace” is further evidenced in the Preamble of the so-
called Expatriation Act of 1868. Under martial law, title is a mere
fiction, since all property belongs to the military except for that
property which the Commander-in-Chief may, in his benevolence, exempt
from taxation and seizure and upon which he allows the “enemy” to
reside.

In proclaiming the first Trading with the Enemy Act by Executive
Order, President Lincoln set in place the means by which the federal
government could interact with Americans who were not 14th Amendment
citizens. They could technically be designated as enemies. Are you
beginning to understand how We the People could be at odds with
our “government?”

In a message to Congress December 3, 1861, Abraham Lincoln answered
the banker’s argument that the people could not be trusted with their
constitutional power, the political and monetary system of free
enterprise conceived by our Founding Fathers, by saying:

“No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up
from poverty — none less inclined to take or touch aught which they
have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political
power which they already possess, and which if surrendered, will
surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they,
and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of
liberty shall be lost.”

In 1865, just before the close of the Civil War, President Lincoln
declared his new monetary policy:

“The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency
and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government
and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these
principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest.
Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity….
The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme
prerogative of government, but it is the governments’ greatest
opportunity.”

Had it been implemented, it would have ushered in a worldwide
economic renewal. Unfortunately, a few weeks after its introduction,
Lincoln was assassinated because he defied the bankers in proposing
to print interest free money to pay the war debt. Thus, the
government continued to operate fully under the authority of private
law dictated by the creditor.

Since President Lincoln was assassinated before he could complete
plans for reforming constitutional government in the Southern States
and end the martial rule by executive order, the 14th Amendment to
the Constitution has further created a “new citizenship” or “status”
for the expanded jurisdiction. Laws for the District of Columbia were
proposed and passed by Congress in 1871, the District of Columbia
being incorporated as a private, foreign corporation by The District
of Columbia Organic Act of 1871, and all states in the Union were
apparently reformed as franchisees or political subdivisions of the
corporation known as the UNITED STATES, hence creating a new union of
American states. What remained of the government was the private side
under the rule of the bankers.

The first attempt by Congress to define citizenship was in 1866 in
the passage of the Civil Rights Act (Revised Statutes section 1992, 8
United States Code Annotated section 1). The act provided that:

“All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign
power are declared to be citizens of the United States.”

And this in turn was followed in 1868 by the adoption of the
Fourteenth Amendment, United States Code Annotated Amendment 14,
declaring:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to
the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of
the State wherein they reside.”

At this period of time, the only people in the United States who were
under the jurisdiction of the private bifurcated government of the
ten miles square of Washington, D.C., were the government employees,
those within the territories owned by the United States and now the
former slaves. The former citizens of the South, now “captured”
became 14th Amendment citizens. The remainder of the people could
still invoke the power over government through original jurisdiction
of the Republic side of the Constitution.

A new 13th Amendment was enacted December 18, 1865 and the 14th
Amendment was enacted July 28, 1868. It was ratified in Southern
states under martial law. A state could only obtain its freedom from
federal military rule by ratifying this amendment. Any contract
entered under duress is null and void. But then the Constitution was
not even in effect following sine die and the proclamation of martial
law.

The 14th Amendment brought the freed slaves, whose previous owners
were private plantations and transferred those slaves under
subjection of the government, the ten miles square jurisdiction of
Washington, D.C. And it offered its protection to those who would
choose to become its subjects…in exchange for their sovereignty.

The 14th Amendment is a good example of the “give-a-little, take a
lot” strategy that is often used, a sugar coating to a bitter pill.
Sovereign Citizens had created a government to guarantee them their
rights. In contrast, the federal government created fourteenth
amendment citizenship to guarantee its power over its citizens. It
seems to be taking citizens under its protection but at the price of
servitude. Sovereigns may choose to become subjects; free men and
women to become vassals. This amendment has always been
controversial. Many people over the years have questioned the amount
of power it vests in the federal government. Some have even
questioned its validity. On one occasion Judge Ellett of the Utah
Supreme Court remarked:

“I cannot believe that any court, in full possession of its
faculties, could honestly hold that the amendment was properly
approved and adopted. State v. Phillips, Pacific Reporter, 2nd
Series, Vol. 540, Page 941, 942 (1975)

However, the most important fact about this amendment is that,
although it created a new class of citizen, it did not have any
effect on Sovereign Citizens. Both classes still exist: When the
Constitution was adopted the people of the United States were the
citizens of the several States for whom and for whose posterity the
government was established. Each of them was a citizen of the United
States at the adoption of the Constitution, and all free persons
thereafter born within one of the several States became by birth
citizens of the State and of the United States.

Both classes of citizen still exist. It’s your right to be a
Sovereign Citizen, while it’s a privilege to be a fourteenth
amendment citizen, and most importantly, it’s up to you to determine
which one you are, and which one you want to be. Just remember that
you “pay” for a privilege, whereas a right carries no obligation.
This is at the heart of your personal Declaration of Independence.

Two Governments, Two Flags: the Corporate State

Once the smoke settled after the Civil War, European international
bankers arrived in town. In 1871 the default again loomed and
bankruptcy was imminent. So in 1872, the ten miles square District
of Columbia was incorporated in England. A loophole was discovered
in the Constitution by cunning lawyers in league with the
international bankers. They realized that a separate nation by the
same name existed that Congress had created in Article I, Section 8,
Clause 17.

The Congress shall have power:

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such
district (not exceeding ten square miles) as may, by cession of
particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of
government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over
all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state
in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines,
arsenals, dock yards, and other needful buildings; – And

To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying
into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by
this constitution in the government of the United States, or in any
department or officer thereof.

This “United States” is a Legislative “Democracy” within the
Constitutional Republic, and is known as the Federal United States.
It has exclusive, unlimited rule over its Citizenry, the residents of
the District of Colombia, the territories and enclaves (Guam, Midway
Islands, Wake Island, Puerto Rico, etc.), and anyone who is a Citizen
by way of the 14th Amendment (naturalized Citizens).

Both United States have the same Congress that rules in both nations.
One “United States,” the Republic of fifty States, has the “stars and
stripes” as its flag, but without any fringe on it. The Federal
United States’ flag is the stars and stripes with a yellow fringe,
seen in all the courts. The abbreviations of the States of the
Continental United States are, with or without the zip codes, Ala.,
Alas., Ariz., Ark., Cal., etc. The abbreviations of the States under
the jurisdiction of the Federal United States, the Legislative
Democracy, are AL, AK, AZ, AR, CA, etc. (without any periods).

The international bankers and the Congress conjured up this bit of
mischief and passed it into law. But whose law? Congress broke faith
with We the People in 1871 and sold us out when they formed a private
corporation and made it the government of the District of Columbia.
They used the Constitution through the 14th Amendment, as their by-
laws, therefore taking their authority not under the Constitution but
taking their authority over the constitution. They copyrighted not
only the constitution but also many related names such as, THE UNITED
STATES, U.S. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, USA as their own. This is
the final blow to the original constitution. Hence forth, the UNITED
STATES has been governed entirely by private corporate law, dictated
by the banks as creditors.

The “Act to Provide a Government for the District of Columbia,”
Section 34 of the Forty-First Congress of the United States, Session
III, Chapter 61 and 62, enacted February 21, 1871, states that the
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is a corporation, whose jurisdiction is
applicable only in the ten-mile-square parcel of land known as the
District of Columbia and to whatever properties are legally titled to
the UNITED STATES, by its registration in the corporate County,
State, and Federal governments that are under military power of the
UNITED STATES and its creditors. Under this provision, the military
Congress of the UNITED STATES had obtained the power to pass private
international law for application within the federal District of
Columbia. All States of the Union adopted new legislatively
created ‘conditions’ and ‘codified’ their laws under federal
mandate. State ‘codes’ were unlawfully adopted despite their origin
as instruments of sovereign people. However, We the People remained
sovereign.

UNITED STATES CODE, Title 28, 3002(15)(A), basically reiterates that
the UNITED STATES is a corporation. What was not said in 1871, but
was implicit, was what is plainly stated at Title 28, 3002(15)(3):
That all departments of the UNITED STATES CORPORATION are part of the
corporation. Title 28, UNITED STATES CODE, is Copyrighted Private
International Law. Indeed, the UNITED STATES CODE, in its entirety,
is Copyrighted Private International Law, and applicable only in the
District of Columbia.

This incorporation was first reported by Gary W. Phillips, whose
career with the Immigration and Naturalization Service began in 1956.
He was the INS director at Sea Tac Airport for 20 years and began
challenging the income tax in 1985 (The Idaho Observer, March, 2000).
After nearly 40 years of government service, Phillips was forced to
flee his country to protect his life after exposing the facts of the
illegality of the federal government’s criminal income tax collection
scam — facts that are becoming well know among informed people
throughout the country.

Where did the Congress find the authority in the Constitution to
reconstitute any part of the united States as a corporation? Quite
simply, the 1791 Constitution was set aside to make room for the
corporation. Would this Act benefit the Republic? No, the private,
corporate bottom line is profit. The municipal, public bottom line is
service. To replace our service-oriented form of government with a
profit-oriented form of government without our knowledge or consent
can only be described as treason.

A few superficial changes were made to the original Constitution and
it was no longer the real thing. Congress did not change the name of
the document so they could claim to be reading from the Constitution.
They merely changed it from the Constitution for the united States of
America to the CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. They
changed the “for” to “of’” and capitalized all the letters. All of
the sudden we had two Constitutions, the original for show and the
revision for actual use.

The Act of 1871 provided a government for the District of Columbia
and created a corporation entitled the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA whose
jurisdiction extends only over corporate entities created by the
municipal corporation and operative only in the District of Columbia.
Washington, District of Columbia is the capitol of the District of
Columbia, not the United States of America, and all laws passed
within the District of Columbia are applicable and enforceable only
in the District of Columbia and it’s possessions.

The States of the Republic are not possessions of the District of
Columbia. Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Guam are possessions of
the District of Columbia as well as property legally titled to the
UNITED STATES by states and counties.

The UNITED STATES CODE, in totality, was put together in the District
of Columbia as Copyrighted Private International Law and is
applicable only in the District of Columbia. By their own rules of
jurisdiction, the UNITED STATES attorneys have no business
prosecuting anyone outside of the District of Columbia or Federal
territories. The federal court has no venue outside of the District
of Columbia and, therefore, has no jurisdiction outside of the
District of Columbia and its possessions. The Congress cannot pass a
law that is applicable in the several States of the Republic.

If all the laws passed in the District of Columbia are Private
International Law, including all of the UNITED STATES CODE and the
statutes at large passed after 1871, and are applicable and
enforceable only in the District of Columbia, then how could they
have become the law of the land? Because, not knowing better, We the
People allowed it. We have allowed agents of foreign countries to
build an illegal corporation that has systematically corrupted every
state, county and city in this nation and corrupted the status and
standing of most people of the united States of America. The only way
that a UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT can have jurisdiction over a
Sovereign is if the latter volunteers to the jurisdiction or fails to
declare his independence as a Sovereign.

This corporation has created dozens of agencies, the IRS, FBI, DEA,
and the BATF, to name a few, which employ thousands of agents who
receive excellent salaries and benefits for betraying their friends
and families while enforcing the private edicts of the so-called
Congress. The men and women of Congress smile, speak softly, and then
direct their illegal agencies to destroy those who do not fully
conform to their wishes, and strike fear into hearts of those who do.
Kidnapping and conspiracy are involved in every arrest and conviction
by federal authorities outside of the District of Columbia.

The question now leads to whether our duly elected public officials
swear an oath to uphold the Constitution for the united States of
America, the Republic within which our rights are protected by a
service-oriented government, or swear an oath to the CONSTITUTION OF
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, the profit-oriented corporation?

It appears by their actions that most government employees, knowingly
or unknowingly, have sworn an oath to the corporate UNITED STATES. It
is our duty as the People who elected them into office, to demand
accountability from our “public” officials and confront them as to
where their loyalties lie. Is it with the corrupt, treasonous
corporation that is controlled by foreign agents from within and
without, or is it with our constitutional Republic, the united States
of America and her citizens?

An articulate defender of a conservative monetary policy, President
James A. Garfield urged the resumption of specie payments and the
payment of government debts. He said, “Whoever controls the volume
of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and
commerce.” In his Inaugural Address in 1881, Garfield said:

The chief duty of the National Government in connection with the
currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value. Grave
doubts have been entertained whether Congress is authorized by the
Constitution to make any form of paper money legal tender. The
present issue of United States notes has been sustained by the
necessities of war; but such paper should depend for its value and
currency upon its convenience in use and its prompt redemption in
coin at the will of the holder, and not upon its compulsory
circulation. These notes are not money, but promises to pay money. If
the holders demand it, the promise should be kept.

Garfield was assassinated after only two hundred days in office, 80
days after being shot by a lawyer, ostensibly because he was upset
about not receiving an ambassadorial posting to France.

In 1909, default loomed once again. The US government asked the
Crown of England for an extension of time. This extension was
granted for another 20 years on several conditions. One of the
conditions was that the United States permit the creditors to
establish a new national bank. The bankers moved deeper into our
nation by the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, the
IRS to collect the interest on their loans made to the UNITED STATES,
and the 17th Amendment enacted May 31, 1913, was the condition for
the extension of time. The 16th and 17th Amendment further reduced
the states power. The UNITED STATES adopted the mercantile system of
ancient Babylonian.

With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the UNITED
STATES was firmly lashed to the yoke, so that a small number of very
rich men have been able to lay upon the people a yoke little better
than slavery itself. That yoke inevitably grows heavier with ever-
compounding interest, and totals over $20 trillion of debt owed by
the American people today ($80,000 per American). This vast
accumulation of wealth concentrates immense power and despotic
economic domination in the hands of the few central bankers “who are
able to govern credit and its allotment, for this reason supplying,
so to speak, the life-blood to the entire economic body, and
grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of the economy so
that no one dare breathe against their will.” A worldwide tyranny is
gradually being imposed, hidden to most, by the money masters.

First World War

In 1917 we were drafted into the First World War. President Woodrow
Wilson had to find a way to persuade the American public to go along
with an intervention in another of Europe’s wars. Although
restrained to be neutral in the deadly conflict by the Neutrality
Act, he sent our navy to shepherd British convoys across the
Atlantic. German U-boat commanders did not take the bait and avoided
contact with the US destroyers. To force the issue, a US naval ship
sailed into the midst of a battle between British and German naval
fleets and was sunk. But when the truth was learned, Wilson had to
find another way.

The Lusitania was a speedy warship refitted by the British as a
passenger liner. Unknown to its passengers the Lusitania was
carrying a huge cargo of military equipment and munitions in
violation of the US Neutrality Act. The Germans knew that and tried
to warn the passengers by placing advertisements in prominent US
newspapers. The US State Department ordered all of the newspapers to
refuse the ad. Only one newspaper in Des Moines, Iowa, bravely
published the information. To ensure a successful provocation, the
Lusitania was ordered to sail at 75% speed using only three of its
four powerful engines. Then the naval escort was ordered away
leaving the Lusitania vulnerable as it entered the war zone. The
first torpedo hit the explosive cargo and blew the bottom out of the
Lusitania. It sank in only 18 minutes. 126 innocent civilians died.
Wilson now had his provocation to rally Americans behind the “War to
End All Wars.”

The US participation in WWI exacerbated the national debt so that it
became impossible for us to pay it off in 1929. It also enhanced the
War Powers Act that President Lincoln, by Executive Order put in
place during his Presidency. This War Powers Act was re-enforced and
the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 was passed to define,
regulate, and punish those who were trading with enemies, who were
then required by that act to be licensed by the government to do
business. This will become more important later on.

The Great Depression: From Sovereignty to Servitude

We all know what happened in 1929. This was the year of the stock
market crash and the beginning of The Great Depression. The stock
market crash moved billions of dollars from the people to the banks.
This also removed cash from circulation for the people’s use. Those
who still possessed any cash, invested in high interest yielding
Treasury Bonds driven higher by increased demand. As a result, even
more cash was removed from circulation in the general public to the
point where there was not enough cash left in circulation to buy the
goods being produced. Production came to a halt as excess inventory
overwhelmed the market. There were more products on the market than
there was cash to buy them. Prices plummeted and industries plunged
into bankruptcy, throwing millions of people out of work.
Foreclosures on homes, factories, businesses and farms rose to the
highest level in the history of America. A mere dime was literally
salvation to many families now living on the street. Millions of
people lost everything they had, keeping only the clothes on their
backs.

In Europe, the International Bankers in 1930 declared several nations
bankrupt, including the United States. In 1933, immediately after
Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, his first act as President was
to publicly declare the United States bank holiday. He further went
on to issue his Presidential Executive Order on March 5th, 1933 that
all United States Citizens must turn in all their gold in return for
Federal Reserve Notes. This was passed into law by Congress on June
5, 1933.

We the People turned in all our gold at that time. Why? Were we
United States Citizens? No. We were still a sovereign people until
that time. We just thought that we were required to turn in all our
gold. Only those people living in Washington, D.C., and the 14th
Amendment Citizens were so required. As sovereigns, we were not
under the jurisdiction of the United States of America, which
incorporated in 1872.

When we turned in our gold, we just volunteered to be citizens of the
jurisdiction of the ten miles square of Washington D.C. and their
laws. We became 14th Amendment Citizens. Our birth certificates, the
title to our bodies, were registered at the Department of Commercial.
This title to our bodies, all of our property and all of our future
labor, was pledged to the International Bankers as security for the
money owed in bankruptcy. This was done under the authority of
commercial law (Babylonian law) by and through Title. The American
People were not in bankruptcy. Only the Corporate UNITED STATES was
in bankruptcy. But with the US Corporation holding the title to your
body and life, you could be used for collateral to secure the
national debt through the birth certificate given by parents
voluntarily to be entered into the Commercial Registry. This act, in
commerce, gave Title to your body by way of a “constructive”
contract.

Next, the government created an artificial ‘person’ in your name, a
corporation, a fictitious entity to take its place in a virtual
reality of contract law and corporations. By and through an adhesion
contract, the government then made you, the real man or woman,
responsible for that fictional entity, a fiduciary and surety for an
artificial entity. Your artificial entity secured the National debt
and through it, you became a 14th Amendment Citizen of the UNITED
STATES. In other words, they got you to think and act as though you
really were that fictional entity. You agreed by your action or
failure to act. YOU adhered to a contract offer because you thought
or acted as though you were the receiver of the offer. In doing so,
YOU were presumed to have ACCEPTED THE CONTRACT.

All licenses and all existing contracts are made between the UNITED
STATES or THE STATE OF (whatever state you live in) and your
artificial entity. That fictitious entity binds you to the UNITED
STATES and its sub-corporations because they have, through adhesion
contract, made you, the real man or woman, fiduciary and responsible
for that artificial entity. Of course, you voluntarily sign, and
even request, all those contracts, don’t you? It seems to be your
name, although you probably never spell it all in capital letters as
they do. They wish for you to think nothing of the aberration,
perhaps just something they do to be clear and error-free.

All of these contracts you sign carry with it your agreement to obey
and uphold all the laws, rules and regulations passed by the Congress
of the UNITED STATES CORPORATION and THE STATE OF. . . . and will be
enforced against you.

From that day forward, We the People, once upon a time sovereigns who
created government for our convenience and welfare, could never own
property in allodium because the state now had possession of it all.
In 1964, the state obtained title to all private property. You can
only “rent” homes that you believe you own by paying taxes. You only
have a certificate of title to the car you think you own, and you
continue to drive it because of your yearly fee. The state owns the
true title to our homes, our cars, to everything we thought or think
we own. You married the state through your marriage license and your
children became wards of the state. All of this was pledged,
including all the fruits of your future labor, to the bankers as
security against the national debt and was placed in the possession
of the Secretary of State of each state as an agent for the Trustee
of the Bankruptcy, the U.S. Secretary of Treasury. Not knowing the
rules of the game you went directly to jail, you could not pass GO
and you could not collect $200.

Cows in the Pasture or Freedom: the Hidden Choice

The way out of this is dilemma can be very complex. In fact, its
complexity was intentional. Roosevelt had violated the law by
placing us into servitude without our consent. Congressman Louis T.
McFadden brought formal charges against the Federal Reserve and the
Secretary of the Treasury and was coming dangerously close to calling
for impeachment of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Two months AFTER the
Executive Order, on June 5, 1933, the Senate and House of
Representatives, 73d Congress, 1st Session, at 4:30 pm approved House
Joint Resolution (HJR) 192: Joint Resolution To Suspend The Gold
Standard And Abrogate The Gold Clause, Joint Resolution to assure
uniform value to the coins and currencies of the United States, which
formally declared the bankruptcy of the UNITED STATES.

F.D.R. by Executive Order declared the people outside federal
territories to be the enemy by illegally altering the Trading with
the Enemy Act of 1861, revised 1918.

The creation of Federal Zone citizenship further tightened up when
you applied for your Social Security number after 1935. The benefits
offered by this contract were hurriedly and voluntarily entered into
when the Social Security Act was signed into law. Further contracts
were to be entered into and license to be applied for–all voluntary
actions. We unknowingly were entering into lifelong servitude to
receive the benefits of the Lord of the Manor. We had descended into
feudal vassalage without recognizing it.

President Roosevelt then called all the Governors into Washington D.
C. for a conference. This was the beginning of the states losing the
remainder of their sovereignty. It was not until 1944 that the
corporate states lost all their power over the corporate United
States with the Buck Act. With this Act, the states became,
essentially, 14th Amendment Citizens as well. This completed the
destruction of the corporate states having any power to protect
against usurpation by the U.S. Government. The corporate states went
under the jurisdiction of Washington, D.C.

Strangely enough, on October 28, 1977, HJR-192 was quietly repealed
by public law 95-147. The joint resolution entitled “Joint resolution
to assure uniform value to the coins and currencies of the United
States” approved June 5, 1933 (31 U.S.C. 463), shall not apply to
obligations issued on or after the date of enactment of this section.

The reason for the repeal of HJR-192 is somewhat obscure. After 44
years of unchallenged implementation, this public policy is clearly
established by custom, usage and participation in the credit system
by the American public. Those of us operating on the privilege of
limited liability, via the public credit, are still bound.

The adoption of the Uniform Commercial Code by all States in 1964 and
a number of other like laws and Acts were incorporated into this
nation. This made the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), the Supreme Law
of the Land.

Courts Shift from Common Law to Equity and Admiralty Courts

Under the Constitution, based on Common Law, the Republic of the
Continental United States provides for legal cases: at Law, in
Equity, and in Admiralty.

(1) Law is the collective organization of the individual right to
lawful defense. It is the will of the majority, the organization of
the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a
common force for individual forces, to do only what the individual
forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons,
liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to
cause justice to reign over us all. Since an individual cannot
lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of
another individual, then the common force—for the same reason—cannot
lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of
individuals or groups. Law allows you to do anything you want to, as
long as you don’t infringe upon the life, liberty or property of
anyone else. Law does not compel performance.

Today’s so-called laws (ordinances, statutes, acts, regulations,
orders, precepts, etc.) are often erroneously perceived as law, but
just because something is called a “law” does not necessarily make it
a law. [There is a difference between "legal" and "lawful." Anything
the government does is legal, but it may not be lawful.]

(2) Equity is the jurisdiction of compelled performance (for any
contract you are a party to) and is based on what is fair in a
particular situation. The term “equity” denotes the spirit and habit
of fairness, justness, and right dealing which would regulate the
intercourse of men with men. You have no rights other than what is
specified in your contract. Equity has no criminal aspects to it.

(3) Admiralty is compelled performance plus a criminal penalty, a
civil contract with a criminal penalty.

By 1938 the gradual merger procedurally between law and equity
actions (i.e., the same court has jurisdiction over legal, equitable,
and admiralty matters) was recognized. The nation was bankrupt and
was owned by its creditors (the international bankers) who now owned
everything—the Congress, the Executive, the courts, all the States
and their legislatures and executives, all the land, and all the
people. Everything was mortgaged in the national debt. We had gone
from being sovereigns over government to subjects under government,
through the use of negotiable instruments to discharge our debts with
limited liability, instead of paying our debts at common law with
gold or silver coin.

The change in our system of law from public law to private commercial
law was recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States in the
Erie Railroad vs. Thompkins case of 1938, after which case, in the
same year, the procedures of Law were officially blended with the
procedures of Equity. Prior to 1938, all U.S. Supreme Court decisions
were based upon public law—or that system of law that was controlled
by Constitutional limitation. Since 1938, all U.S. Supreme Court
decisions are based upon what is termed public policy.

Public policy concerns commercial transactions made under the
Negotiable Instrument’s Law, which is a branch of the international
Law Merchant. This has been codified into what is now known as the
Uniform Commercial Code, which system of law was made uniform
throughout the fifty States through the cunning of the Congress of
the UNITED STATES.

In offering grants of negotiable paper (Federal Reserve Notes) which
the Congress gave to the fifty States of the Union for education,
highways, health, and other purposes, Congress bound all the States
of the Union into a commercial agreement with the Federal United
States (as distinguished from the Continental United States). The
fifty States accepted the “benefits” offered by the Federal United
States as the consideration of a commercial agreement between the
Federal United States and each of the corporate States. The corporate
States were then obligated to obey the Congress of the Federal United
States and also to assume their portion of the equitable debts of the
Federal United States to the international banking houses, for the
credit loaned. The credit which each State received, in the form of
federal grants, was predicated upon equitable paper.

This system of negotiable paper binds all corporate entities of
government together in a vast system of commercial agreements and is
what has altered our court system from one under the Common Law to a
Legislative Article I Court, or Tribunal, system of commercial law.
Those persons brought before this court are held to the letter of
every statute of government on the federal, state, county, or
municipal levels unless they have exercised the REMEDY provided for
them within that system of Commercial Law whereby, when forced to use
a so-called “benefit” offered, or available, to them, from
government, they may reserve their former right, under the Common Law
guarantee of same, not to be bound by any contract, or commercial
agreement, that they did not enter knowingly, voluntarily, and
intentionally. See Howard Freeman here:

http://www.supremelaw.org/authors/freeman/freeman4.htm

In 1976, Congress took away any semblance of law or justice left
within our court system. All law today is now construed, constructed
and made up by the judge as it happens before your very eyes. Common
law has almost disappeared from the courts. They took away any
control or authority we might have had over the court system. This
has been very well hidden from all of us.

Many of us going into court often wonder why and how the courts can
simply override the laws we put into our paperwork. It’s very simple
now that we know how they do it. They operate on the words `construe
and construct.’

A simple word such as `in’ changed to `at’ as in `at law’ or `in law’
has a totally separate meaning. For example: If you’re in the
river, you are wet, you can swim, etc., but if you’re at the river,
you might enjoy a refreshing picnic, play baseball or run races. See
the difference a simple word can make? And, the attorneys often
change this word when they answer your motions – in addition to many
others.

It will pay you in dividends to read the answers of attorneys to your
paperwork. Compare what they say the case law says to the actual
case law itself. You’ll discover that they have actually changed the
words therein. This is illegal, you might say. No, not, according to
the US Code.

You see, they can now construe and construct any law or statute to
mean whatever they decide it means, for their benefit. You don’t
know any of this. You think they are railroading you in a kangaroo
court. No, they are `legal’ in what they do. They usually follow
the law to the letter; Their law, private law, the law of contract,
that you know nothing about. This law is called contract law.

Uniform Commercial Code: Contract Acceptance and Honor

If you don’t understand contract law or realize what law you are
dealing with when you go into court, you will lose. Even if you have
filed your UCC-1 and have captured your Title and your artificial
entity, this makes no difference in the above courts. Why? They
operate in total fiction, in the land of Oz. They can only recognize
contracts. And you are a real sentient being. (Still with numerous
adhesion contracts attached to you). Whatever you file in that court,
whether it is your UCC-1 or Law from the Judicial and Original
Jurisdiction side, that is real, Lawful, truth. They do not
recognize truth of any sort. They only recognize fiction and contract
law. So, when you go into any court, be aware that it is their law,
that the judge or the prosecutor can `construe’ and `construct’ that
law in any fashion they choose. It will always mean what they choose
it to mean.

So, are the courts bound by the Constitution? Law? Statutes? No,
contracts only and the statutes used to enforce the contracts.

When used in conjunction with one’s signature, a stamp
stating “Without Prejudice U.C.C. 1-207″ is sufficient to indicate to
the magistrate of any of our present Legislative Tribunals
(called “courts”) that the signer of the document has reserved his
Common Law right. He is not to be bound to the statute, or commercial
obligation, of any commercial agreement that he did not enter
knowingly, voluntarily, and intentionally, as would be the case in
any Common Law contract.

Furthermore, pursuant to U.C.C. 1-103, the statute being enforced as
a commercial obligation of a commercial agreement, must now be
construed in harmony with the old Common Law of America, where the
tribunal/court must rule that the statute does not apply to the
individual who is wise enough and informed enough to exercise the
remedy provided in this new system of law. He retains his former
status in the Republic and fully enjoys his unalienable rights,
guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the Republic, while those
about him “curse the darkness” of Commercial Law government, lacking
the truth needed to free themselves from a slave status under the
Federal United States, even while inhabiting territory foreign to its
territorial venue. Howard Freeman

Summary of Historical Development of Modern Feudalism

THE UNITED STATES as a corporation, created in England, came under
the jurisdiction of England. This entitled England to create laws as
England saw fit to do, establish those laws in THE UNITED STATES and
everyone who at that time was a 14th Amendment Citizen were subject
to obey those laws. This also placed the Congress of THE UNITED
STATES above that portion of what we think is the constitution, not
under the authority of the constitution. Copyrighted, remember? The
only Bill of Rights left at this point in time is four Amendments –
13th, 14th 15th, and 16th. That is all the Courts are required to
take cognizance of when you appear in their courts.

The 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed
placed the American people in desperation, homelessness, poverty and
even starvation. The minds of the people were focused on survival.
They were then in a condition to accept any handout given by the
government, no matter what the cost to their
freedoms.

We were drawn in as 14th Amendment Citizens through the registration
of our birth certificates. We were further enticed deeper into that
system by volunteering for many other licenses and privileges given
by the government. We were also made enemies of THE UNITED STATES.
This act gave the UNITED STATES authority, under the laws of war and
as a captured people, to force anything on us they choose to create.

Then, in 1976, Congress removed any semblance of justice in our court
system with Senate bill 94-201 and 94-381. From this point forward,
the ‘officers of the court’ can construe and construct the laws to
mean anything they chose them to mean.

As 14th Amendment Citizens, we are not citizens of the America we
have always thought. We are actually citizens of England, through
the corporation of THE UNITED STATES.

There is no law today except as fiction of copyrighted statutes, to
be interpreted by ‘judges’ who construe and construct whatever they
choose to have those statutes mean.

We, as sovereigns irresponsibly recognized the Crown of England (IMF)
as PRINCIPLE of America. In reality, the IMF was the Creditor of the
UNITED STATES, a corporation, but NEVER you. The Creditor of the
UNITED STATES designed invisible contracts to ensnare the sovereign
people of America as subjects. The Creditor of the UNITED STATES
implemented the invisible contracts through apparent ‘color of law’
and the sovereigns irresponsibly agreed. We, as Sovereigns, through
the invisible contracts, and our irresponsibility to reject the
Creditors (IMF) ideas, have voluntarily given our substance to the
mythical creator of our situation.

You’ll find that there is a common thread woven throughout our entire
history and that thread is commerce, the merchant, the money-changer
(banks), the law merchant, i.e., the law of commerce, civil law and
maritime law. This is not to say that commerce is bad. It does,
however, say that commerce brings with it the laws of commerce.
Wherever commerce goes it brings laws that can bind people into
slavery. This can happen only if the people agree with it.

Banks create “money” today out of thin air; then, they charge, we,
the people, interest on their creation. This can happen only if the
people agree with it. Thereafter, the merchants and the bankers
create laws, through lawmakers whom they control, that protect
commerce and bind the people to obey. This can happen only if the
people agree with it.

The only reason this occurs is that we do not handle our own
affairs.

Me and My Shadow: the Fictional STRAWMAN

The elected and appointed administrators of government United States
government have been filing certified copies of all our birth
certificates in the United States Department of Commerce as
registered securities. These securities, each of which carries an
estimated $1,000,000 value, have been (and still are) circulated
around the world as collateral for loans, entries on the asset side
of ledgers, etc., just like any other security. There’s just one
problem—we didn’t consciously authorize it. Now that you know, you
can choose to let them use you for collateral and pay interest on the
debt or you can take back your power and sovereignty.

The United States is a District of Columbia corporation. In Volume
20: Corpus Juris Sec. 1785 we find “The United States government is a
foreign corporation with respect to a State” (NY re: Merriam 36 N.E.
505 1441 S. 0.1973, 14 L. Ed. 287). Since a corporation is a
fictitious “person” (it cannot speak, see, touch, smell, etc.), it
cannot, by itself, function in the real world. It needs a conduit, a
transmitting utility, a liaison of some sort, to “connect” the
fictitious person, and the fictional world in which it exists, to the
real world. Why is this important?

LIVING people exist in a real world, not a fictional, virtual world.
But government exists in a fictional world, and can only deal
directly with other fictional or virtual persons, agencies, states,
etc. In order for a fictional person to deal with real people there
must be a connection, a liaison, a go-between. This can be something
as simple as a contract. When both “persons”, the real and fictional,
agree to the terms of a contract, there is a connection, intercourse,
dealings, there is communication, an exchange. There is business.

But there is another way for fictional government to deal with the
real man and woman—through the use of a representative, a liaison, a
go-between. Who is this go-between that connects fictional government
to real men and women? It’s a government-created shadow, a fictional
man or woman, a corporation with the same name as yours.

This PERSON was created by using your birth certificate as the
Manufacturer’s Certificate of Origin (MCO) and the state in which you
were born as the “port of entry.” This gave fictional UNITED STATES
government a fictional PERSON with whom to deal directly. This PERSON
is a STRAWMAN.

STRAMINEUS HOMO: Latin – A man of straw, one of no substance, put
forward as bail or surety. This definition comes from Black’s Law
Dictionary, 6th Edition, page 1421. Following the definition of
STRAMINEUS HOMO in Black’s we find the next word, STRAWMAN.

STRAWMAN: A front, a third party who is put up in name only to take
part in a transaction. Nominal party to a transaction, one who acts
as an agent for another for the purpose of taking title to real
property and executing whatever documents and instruments the
principal may direct. Person who purchases property for another to
conceal identity of real purchaser or to accomplish some purpose
otherwise allowed.

Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines the
term “STRAWMAN” as “A weak or imaginary opposition set up only to be
easily confuted; or a person set up to serve as a cover for a usually
questionable transaction”.

The STRAWMAN can be summed up as an imaginary, passive stand-in for
the real participant; a front; a blind; a person regarded as a
nonentity. The STRAWMAN is a “shadow”, a go-between.

For quite some time a rather large number of people in this country
have known that a man or woman’s name, written in ALL CAPS, or last
name first, does not identify real, living people. Taking this one
step further, the rules of grammar for the English language have no
provisions for the abbreviation of people’s names, i.e. initials are
not to be used. As an example, John Adam Smith is correct. ANYTHING
else is not correct. Not Smith, John Adam or Smith, John A. or J.
Smith or J.A. Smith or JOHN ADAM SMITH or SMITH, JOHN or any other
variation. NOTHING, other than John Adam Smith identifies the real,
living man. All other appellations identify either a deceased man or
a fictitious man such as a corporation or a STRAWMAN.

Over the years, government, through its “public” school system, has
managed to pull the wool over our eyes and keep us all ignorant of
some very important facts. Because all facets of the media have an
ever increasing influence in our lives, and because media is
controlled (with the issuance of licenses, etc.) by government and
its agencies, we have slowly and systematically been led to believe
that any form/appellation of our name is, in fact, still us as long
as the spelling is correct. This is not true.

We were never told, with full and open disclosure, what our
government officials were planning to do … and why. We were never
told that government (the United States) was a corporation, a
fictitious “person”. We were never told that government had quietly,
almost secretly, created a shadow corporation, a STRAWMAN for each
and every American … so that government could not only control the
people, but also raise an almost unlimited amount of revenue; so it
could continue, not just to exist, but to GROW.

We were never told that when government deals with the STRAWMAN it is
not dealing with real, living men and women. We were never told,
openly and clearly with full disclosure of all the facts, that since
June 5, 1933, we have been unable to pay our debts. We were never
told that we had been pledged (and our children, and their children,
and their children) as collateral, mere chattel, for the debt created
by government officials who created treason in doing so.

We were never told that they quietly and cleverly changed the rules,
even the game itself, and that the world we perceive as real is in
fact fictional – and its all for their benefit. We were never told
that the STRAWMAN—a fictional person, a creature of THE STATE—is
subject to all the codes, statutes, rules, regulations, ordinances,
etc. decreed by government, but that WE, the real man and woman, are
not. We were never told that we were being treated as property, as
slaves, albeit comfortably for some, while living in the land of the
free—and that we could, easily, walk away from the fraud. We never
realized that we were being abused. By knowing the difference between
our real self and our STRAWMAN and behaving accordingly, we regain
our proper sovereignty over “legal fictions” and the ability to
experience true freedom which is our birthright, for the enjoyment of
the Divine in us all.

There’s something else you should know: Everything, since June 1933,
operates in COMMERCE. Why is this important? Commerce is based on
agreement, on contract. Government has an implied agreement with the
STRAWMAN which they created and the STRAWMAN is subject to government
rule, as we illustrated above. But when we, the real flesh and blood
man and woman, infer that they are trying to communicate with us and
therefore step into their commercial “process” we become the “surety”
for the fictional STRAWMAN. Reality and fiction are reversed. We
then become liable for the debts, liabilities and obligations of the
STRAWMAN, relinquishing our real (protected by the Constitution)
character as we stand in for the fictional STRAWMAN.

So that we can once again place the STRAWMAN in the fictional world
and keep ourselves in the real world (with all our “shields” in place
against the fictional government) we must send a non-negotiable
(private) “Charge Back” and a non-negotiable “Bill of Exchange” to
the United States Secretary of the Treasury, along with a copy of our
birth certificate, the evidence, the Manufacturer’s Certificate of
Origin of the STRAWMAN. By doing this we discharge our portion of the
public debt, releasing us, the real man or woman, from the debts,
liabilities and obligations of the STRAWMAN. Those debts, liabilities
and obligations exist in the fictional commercial world of “book
entries” on computers and/or in paper ledgers. It is a world
of “digits” and “notes”, not of money and substance. Property of the
real man once again becomes tax exempt and free from levy.

Sending the non-negotiable Charge Back and Bill of Exchange accesses
our Treasury Direct Account (TDA). What is our TDA? Title 26 USC
section 163(h)(3)(B)(ii), $1,000,000 limitation: “The aggregate
amount treated as acquisition indebtedness for any period shall not
exceed $1,000,000 ($500,000 in the case of a married individual
filing a separate return).”

This $1,000,000 account is for the STRAWMAN, the fictional “person”
with the name in all caps and/or last name first. It is there for the
purpose of making book entries, to move figures, “digits” from one
side of ledgers to the other. Figures, digits, the entries in ledgers
must move from asset side to debit side and back again, or commerce
dies. No movement, no commerce.

The fictional persona of corporate government can only function in a
functional commercial world, one where there is no real money, only
fictional funds … mere entries, figures, digits.

Corporate, STATE courts only have jurisdiction over the STRAWMAN. A
presentment from fictional government—whether traffic citation or
criminal charges—is a negative, commercial “claim” against the
STRAWMAN. This “claim” takes place in the commercial, fictional world
of government. “Digits” move from one side of your STRAWMAN account
to the other, or to a different account. This is today’s commerce. In
the past we have addressed these “claims” by fighting them in court,
with one “legal process” or another, and failed. We have played the
futile, legalistic, charade—a very clever distraction—while the
commerce game played on. We were playing checkers whereas the rules
were MONOPOLY.

But what if we refused to continue playing the charade, and played
the commerce game instead? What if we learned how to control the flow
and movement of entries, figures and digits, for our own benefit? Is
that possible? And if so, how? How can the real man in the real
world, function in the fictional world in which the commerce game
exists?

When in commerce do as commerce does – use the Uniform Commercial
Code (UCC). The UCC-1 Financing Statement is the one contract in the
world that CANNOT be broken and it’s the foundation of the Accepted
for Value process. The power of this document is awesome.

Since the TDA exists for the STRAWMAN – who, until now, has been
controlled by the government – WE can gain control and ownership of
the STRAWMAN by first activating the TDA and then filing a UCC-1
Financing Statement. This does two things for us.

First, by activating the TDA we gain limited control over the funds
in the account. This allows us to also move entries, figures and
digits … for OUR benefit.

Secondly, by properly filing a UCC-1 Financing Statement we become
the “holder in due course” of the STRAWMAN. A filed UCC-1 is public
notice of a registered lien by a real human being who is the secured
party, upon the STRAWMAN, the government-created, foreign non-
registered corporation. With the STRAWMAN under our control,
government has no access to the TDA and they also lose their go-
between, their liaison, their connection to the real, living man and
woman. No longer a subject, you become a free sovereign once again.
You declare your independence!

From now on, when presented with any “claim” or presentment from
government, you will agree with it. This removes the “controversy.”
And you “accept it for value.” By doing this you remove the negative
claim against your account and become the “holder in due course” of
the presentment. As holder in due course you can require the sworn
testimony of the presenter of the “claim” under penalty of perjury
and request the account be properly adjusted.

You don’t have liability for your STRAWMAN. If you do commercial
assignments, you have an asset called a Bill of Exchange which you
can spend out. The birth certificate represents the body. The SSN
represents the commercial account. Behind every birth certificate is
a $1,000,000 bond which is pre-paid financing on any activity of the
STRAWMAN. Some people have used their TDA to pay off their home or
commercial mortgage, bank or student loans, tax liens, or credit card
debt..

When you own your STRAWMAN and anyone else charges against HIM, then
that is commercial trespassing. If anyone goes after your STRAWMAN
and wins any monetary award against the fiction of your STRAWMAN,
then you (the real person/ secured party) get the first $1,000,000 of
that because you have the first lien.

It’s all business, a commercial undertaking, and the basic procedure
is not complicated. In fact, it’s fairly simple. We just have to
remember a few things, like: this is not a “legal” procedure – we’re
not playing People’s Court. This is commerce, and we play by the
rules of commerce. We accept the “claim”, become the holder in due
course, and challenge whether or not the presenter of the “claim”
had/has the proper authority, the Order, to make the claim (debit our
account) in the first place. When they cannot produce the Order (they
never can, it was never issued) we request the account be properly
adjusted (the charge or claim goes away). Always Accept for Value,
become the holder-in-due-course, and decide not to prosecute
yourself! Are you getting used to this power yet?

If they don’t adjust the account a request is made for the
bookkeeping records showing where the funds in question were
assigned. This is done by requesting the Fiduciary Tax Estimate and
the Fiduciary Tax Return for this claim. Since the claim has been
accepted for value and is pre-paid, and our TDA is exempt from levy,
the request for the Fiduciary Tax Estimate and the Fiduciary Tax
Return is valid because the information is necessary in determining
who is delinquent and/or making claims on the account. If there is no
record of the Fiduciary Tax Estimate and the Fiduciary Tax Return, we
then request the individual tax estimates and individual tax returns
to determine if there is delinquency.

If we receive no favorable response to the above requests, we will
then file a currency report on the amount claimed/ assessed against
our account and begin the commercial process that will force them
either to do what is required or lose everything they own!

This is the power of contracts in commerce. A contract overrides the
Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and any other document other than
another contract. No process of law—”color” of law under present
codes, statutes, rules, regulations, ordinances, etc.—can operate
upon you; no agent and/or agency of government, including courts, can
gain jurisdiction over you, without your consent! You do not exist
within their fictional commercial venue.

The Accepted for Value process gives you the ability to deal
with “them,” through the use of your transmitting utility/go-between,
the STRAWMAN, and to hold them accountable in their own commercial
world for any action(s) they attempt to take against us. Without a
proper Order (and we know they’re not in possession of such a
document) they must leave us alone, or pay the consequences.

In addition to your own freedom reclaimed, you will remove your
collateral and participation from the frauds, manipulations, and
extortion that have been perpetrated in your name. When enough people
have reclaimed their birthright, we can also reclaim our
constitutional republic that was intended to serve us in protecting
our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Michael Donaghy – by Sean O’Brien

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:48:22 +0000

The T S Eliot Lecture delivered by 2007 T S Eliot Prizewinner Sean O’Brien at the Poetry International Festival, South Bank Centre, London, on Sunday 26 October 2008

ON MICHAEL DONAGHY: BLACK ICE, RAIN AND THE CITY OF GOD
Michael Donaghy (1954-2004) was a fastidious poet, slow to write and slow to publish. He was always prepared to endure the frustration of sitting out the time it took for a poem to begin to emerge, in order to have the equally frustrating pleasure of working on it. He once claimed, more or less jokingly, to write only three poems a year. This Collected Poems contains roughly 150, of which about a third were unpublished at his death in September 2004 at the age of 50.

This is not a large corpus, but it is remarkably diverse and exciting, and one turns repeatedly in sorrow and anger to the fact that he was not able to complete his work. W.H. Auden proposed that poets die when their work is finished: Donaghy is clearly an exception. The ‘late’ material in Safest, and some of the uncollected pieces here, indicate that a further stage of development was in progress, albeit inescapably shadowed by the intensifying awareness of mortality which he experienced after his health grew fragile in the last few years of his life. A number of the poems strike a valedictory note, but Donaghy the poet had by no means exhausted his art, and there are signs that he was moving towards the further reconciliation of his wit and learning with greater lyrical economy and directness.

Wit and learning were among the powerful attractions of Donaghy’s first collection, Shibboleth (1988). He didn’t simply have opinions: he knew things – about literature, history, music, science, anthropology, non-Western cultures. The book boldly announced his arrival among other poets of his generation, including Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney. Donaghy was doing something different again from either of these strongly contrasting poets. In his constellation of interests and his delight in the connectedness of things, he most resembles his exact contemporary Ian Duhig, like him a poet of Irish descent.

For those who cared to notice, Donaghy was among other things renovating some features of the scholarly, formalist American poetry of the 1950s, whose leading exponents were Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht. By the 1980s these poets had little readership, especially among the young, on this side of the Atlantic, because they had been eclipsed by (according to taste) Lowell and Plath, the Beats and the New York Poets. What Donaghy shared with Wilbur in particular was a love of the art, and artfulness, on its own account, as a sign of imaginative

plenitude. Those who enjoyed poems of Wilbur’s such as ‘Shame’ and ‘The Undead’ and ‘The Mind-Reader’ could recognize a kindred spirit in Donaghy, one free of the gentility to which Wilbur was sometimes prone. Equally, those who admired Hecht’s ‘More Light! More Light’ or ‘The Dover Bitch’ saw what Donaghy was about while noting the absence of that faint superior coldness which can seem to impede Hecht’s work. An Irish working class upbringing in ethnically diverse and at times dangerous district of the Bronx gave Donaghy’s work a salty vernacular life which in turn lent his forms a packed, excited urgency. And the poems are often talking to someone – a lover, a ghost, the passer-by drawn in to hear the story. This sense of address to the reader recalls Frost, while the simultaneous aspiration to visionary grandeur reveals among other things the depth of Donaghy’s immersion in Yeats.

Such a list risks creating the image of an imaginary monster – the Donaghy – something described but never actually seen or heard. Donaghy was of course far more than the sum of his reading. He was of the academy (until he couldn’t stand it and gave up his graduate studies: he had contemptuously funny things to say about the orthodoxies of theory), but he was not an academic poet. The masters in his pantheon shone with special intensity because their presence proved that art, rather than attitude, or ownership, was at the core of his interests.
…It’s something that we’ve always known:

Though we command the language of desire,
The voice of ecstasy is not our own.
We long to lose ourselves amid the choir
Of the salmon twilight and the mackerel sky,
The very air we take into our lungs,
And the rhododendron’s cry.

Paradox is fundamental to Donaghy’s imagination, and the impassioned and hilarious ‘Pentecost’, an early poem about the cries of lovers, is one of his boldest examples. Language is deployed to evoke a state beyond itself – speaking in tongues, which crosses the division between the self and the world. In effect, consciousness is brought to serve its own renunciation, at the merging of the sacred and profane. Where Marvell’s ‘green thought in a green shade’ is the apotheosis of solitude, this poem imagines an addressee:

And when you lick the sweat along my thigh,
Dearest, we renew the gift of tongues.

It would be a mistake to read these closing lines as a glib or cavalier QED. They offer a joke, issue a challenge, invite the partner to engage in a lovers’ amused conspiracy, and they also pretend to test the partner’s credulity for the purposes of a seduction which has already been accomplished. The amusement is not directed at but enjoyed with the lover. The harmonic range of tones is very rich, the voice made present to us as to the object of desire, a method indebted to Browning but clearly new-made by Donaghy.

‘Pentecost’ begins with the neighbours furiously hammering on the bedroom walls – to which the ultimate riposte is a religious-philosophical defence of selfishness. Its most prominent source is Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow’ – though of course Donne’s transcendent self-assurance is quite different from Donaghy’s proposed shedding of identity. As with many another poet, identity, time and memory are fundamental terms of Donaghy’s imagination. While they are ‘traditional’, they figure in Donaghy’s work not as tropes securely anchoring him to an unthreatening past – but as provocative crises in which the imagination engages anew with its inheritance.

We might say that Donaghy’s ultimate subject was human nature, the question being in what that nature consisted. The poems are full of assumed, discarded, temporary selves (see ‘Smith’, ‘Shibboleth’ and ‘Ramon Fernandez’ among the early work), creations necessary for legitimacy, survival, change of allegiance. They are not the self-creations of existentialism, still less of banal scientism, since they acknowledge the corridors of religion, history and culture down which the speakers have been led to the poems’ eventual declarations. For Donaghy’s characters there is no way out of the labyrinth; for the unbelieving poet the language and imagery of belief are not discredited fetishes to be discarded by atheistic maturity, but crucial means of vision and understanding. ‘City of God’ from Errata (1993) tells of a failed priest returning to the Bronx from the seminary, obsessed with practising a form of memory art:

He needed a perfect cathedral in his head,
he’d whisper, so that by careful scrutiny
the mind inside the cathedral inside the mind
could find the secret order of the world
and remember every drop on every face
in every summer thunderstorm.

The teller offers us both the poignant absurdity of this project and the reverence in which it is conceived. In the kind of joke that Donaghy enjoyed, the deranged psycho-encyclopaedist is independently covering the same ground as Borges’s Funes the Memorious, as well as recalling the ‘authentic’ but uncategorizable labours of Pierre Menard in writing Don Quixote in a form identical to but wholly independent of Cervantes’. More problematically, the character in ‘City of God’ seems to be committing a supreme heresy, even in the attempt to glorify the Creator, by undertaking to comprehend and encompass and thus internally reproduce His works. The poem closes as narrator and madman contemplate ‘a storefront voodoo church beneath the el /…/its window strange with plaster saints and seashells’ – signs of faith, of pilgrimage, and of the ungovernable character of the religious imagination.

It has been suggested that Donaghy’s status might suffer from his lack of interest in politics, but in fact Shibboleth contains a number of poems, adjacently placed, whose material is inescapably political – ‘Auto da Fe’, ‘Ramon Fernandez?’, ‘Partisans’ (which mirrors ‘Shibboleth’) and ‘Majority’ , a bleak series that progresses through the attempt to understand the appeal of Franco’s cause, the nature of allegiance, the banality of political terror, and lastly the horrors of complacent ignorance as (it would seem) embodied in the attitudes of the ‘majority’ of Donaghy’s fellow Americans. (And ‘The Safe House, from Safest, poignantly recounts the imaginary future of American leftists who shared an apartment with a concealed copy of the revolutionary Manual of the Weather Underground.) Throughout this series, the inseparability of religion and politics presents itself in various ways. ‘Auto da Fe’, a sonnet with an intriguing ballad-like feel, as though half-meant for singing, tells of an uncle who fought with the Irish volunteers in the Fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). In the poem’s dream-encounter, the speakers debate this allegiance. Goya’s ‘The Sleep of Reason’ is cited without attributing the reference to either of the participants (the Church always claims the monopoly of Reason) and the poem moves on from discourse to image

The shape his hand made sheltering the flame
Was itself a kind of understanding
But it would never help me to explain
Why my uncle went to fight for Spain,
For Christ, for the Caudillo, for the King.

‘Yet man is born into trouble, as the sparks fly upward’, declares Job 5.7, and the next verse continues: ‘I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause’. The image of the lit match invokes both a Catholic Hell and the obligation of the faithful to protect Holy Mother Church and the inferno which burns encouragingly at the base of her theology. (There is an entire essay to be written about the role of fire in Donaghy’s work.) In the Holy Trinity named in the last line, the uncle’s commitment seems to entail seeing ‘the caudillo’, Franco, as a grim practical embodiment of the working of the Holy Spirit – an act requiring a subjugation of the self unthinkable to a poet such as Donaghy, who remarked that he himself had a lifelong problem with authority, as anyone who tried to get him to meet a deadline or catch a train could testify.

‘Ramon Fernandez?’ is an altogether more complicated piece of work. Any reader of modern poetry will know Wallace’s Stevens’s ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, written in 1934 and published in his collection Ideas of Order (1936). Towards the close of the poem, the speaker asks ‘Ramon Fernandez’ to explain why the lights of the vessels in harbour seem to impose an order on the darkened sea. This rhetorical question enables Stevens to go on and reorganize its materials as a statement of the ‘maker’s’ ‘blessed rage’ for order, rather than undertake an answer which would either be impossible or tautologous. Following the publication of Ideas of Order, Stevens was concerned to formulate a response to the Marxist critic Stanley Burnshaw, who saw him as the poetic representative of a doomed, privileged class soon to be swept aside. In a letter Stevens declared himself, rather implausibly, to be of the Left, by which he may really have meant that while (like most of the major modernist poets) he was a reactionary, he was not a Fascist.

Ramon Fernandez was an invention for the purposes of the poem – a non-speaking companion. The name is by no means unusual, and Stevens declared that he did not intend to refer to anyone particular, although he acknowledged that he had heard of the French critic Ramon Fernandez, a contributor, like Stevens, to the magazine The Dial. In the period 1934-37 the actual Fernandez moved from anti-Fascism to membership of the Fascist Parti Populaire Francais led by the ex-Communist Jacques Doriot, in bitter opposition to the Popular Front government of Leon Blum. Both Doriot and Fernandez became eager collaborators following the fall of France in 1940. Donaghy’s poem is ‘about’ neither the historical Ramon Fernandez, nor Stevens’s ‘Ramon Fernandez’, but both identities are present in the wings, as are Steven’s 1937 poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ (from the 1937 collection of the same name) and, presumptively, Picasso’s 1903 Blue Period painting ‘The Old Guitarist, which was exhibited in Stevens’s home town of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1934 (also the year when ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ was written). It was of course Picasso who delivered one of the most memorable – and artistically uncompromised – responses to the atrocity of the Civil War in his painting ‘Guernica’ (1937). Among the famous facts about Stevens is that despite his taste for the exotic and his extensive imaginative travels, he never left the United States, but in Donaghy’s poem much that, explicitly or otherwise, concerns Stevens, is transported to the Fascist siege of Barcelona, to the sphere of practicality and survival.

I include this fairly complex background in order to suggest the richness of the resources Donaghy could bring to a poem, as well as the double vision he offers in this one. The reader too is likely to bring some literary-cultural knowledge to a poem which also has its own story to tell. That story seems both to criticize the presumption and to underwrite the urgent, inescapable relevance of the artistic questions Stevens raises, by showing that in the dawn of totalitarianism nothing lies outside or above the sphere of the political.

A hero to the Republican troops who sing his songs when going off to battle at the Fascist invasion Catalonia in January 1939, Fernandez is also a composer of choice for the forces of Franco, with ‘A few words changed, not many.’ Eventually ‘he vanished back across the front’, perhaps to suggest that an audience is an audience whatever its political stripe, perhaps that it was the border rather than the musician that moved. In the meantime, the Lenin Barracks clock, beneath which he played at noon, its hands arrested at half past eleven, is struck by a stray round and the hands are blown off, leaving ‘the face / To glare like a phase of the moon across

the burning city.’ The background presence of another reactionary poet, W.B. Yeats, can be felt here. In ‘The Phases of the Moon’ from The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes summarizes the moon’s twenty-eight phases, noting that ‘there’s no human life at the full or the dark’ – for example, at the dark noon of the Fascist triumph, which was assisted by members of Eoin O’Duffy’s blueshirts serving among the Volunteer Brigade, like the uncle in ‘Auto da Fe’ – blueshirts for whom Yeats had at one point written marching songs (though these were apparently too verbose for the purpose).

Donaghy was more aware than most of the ultimate sterility of the poem-as-anecdote which is so heavily represented on the contemporary scene. As ‘Ramon Fernandez’ and many other poems demonstrate, his search was always for a deeper, more extended resonance than that offered by mere sentimental recognition. At the same time, his range of learning was present in the texture of his poems rather than appearing as a prohibition to those less well-informed than himself. We do not find in his work the not uncommon tendency to confuse erudition itself with poetry. One of the reasons he liked living in the UK was that the reading and listening audience for poetry which seemed to him to have gone missing in the United States was still to be found here, and the most complex of his poems will always extend the courtesy of an invitation rather than an admonition or a dressing-down.

Donaghy’s most extended piece of critical writing, Wallflowers, begins by observing a crowd of dancers at a ceilidh – the local dance being perhaps the most democratic of the arts – and derives its discussion of pattern and memorability from the scuff-marks left on the floor by the dancers’ feet. He was always keen to affirm the highest artistic standards while insisting that poetry must live in the wide community of its readers and listeners, and his own public readings were delivered from memory, like the traditional Irish music in which he also excelled as a flute player. Some of his most memorable poems concern music – the haunting ‘The Tuning’, for example, or ‘Remembering Dances Learned Last Night’ (the latter taking place after the returning Ulysses’s massacre of Penelope’s suitors) – and the sequence ‘O’Ryan’s Belt’, from Errata (1993) was central to his work. It seems, too, from the previously unpublished material included here, that although he had published this sequence he had by no means finished with it. The triangular relationship of artist and material and audience is part of these half a dozen poems as it is of ‘Ramon Fernandez?’, and surmounting everything is the idea of what Pound called ‘a live tradition’, in this case sustained by memory and personal transmission, the common property of those who care for it.

Donaghy was neither pious nor sentimental on this topic. The story which perhaps most interested him is told in ‘A Reprieve’, where the Chicago Police Chief Francis O’Neil offers the fiddler Nolan, who has killed a Chinese man in a fight, the chance to leave town on a freight train if he plays his music so that O’Neil can transcribe it. For this night O’Neil has a Medici’s powers of life and death and patronage, while Nolan’s art receives official sanction – the further sting being that Nolan must try against nature and tradition to play the jigs the same way twice in order that they can be recorded on paper, and thus, in a sense, betrayed. The knowledge that the true art is inseparable from everyday contingency and circumstance is given a humorous airing elsewhere, in ‘The Natural and Social Sciences’ from Shibboleth, where a visiting American asks a player what the last tune was and is told, ‘Ask my father’, which he takes for an answer rather than an instruction.

Vanishing, escaping, illusory, unavailable for consultation, many of the characters in Donaghy’s crowded yet often solitary world seem to reflect his own sense of exile. He was from the working class but educated out of it, a scholar who gave up the academy, a leading poet in Britain whose work was little known in the country where he grew up. He recorded that he injured his parents by insisting that he was an American rather than, as they believed, an Irish boy who happened to be living in New York, while the last twenty-odd years of his life were spent in England with only occasional visits to the United States to give readings. To many people of Irish extraction this is a version of a familiar story, part of the complex and continuing diaspora that can lead anywhere except ‘home’ and that can make questions of ‘where your people were from’ of interest mainly to the enquirer. Many of its features held no interest for Donaghy, but the theme of connection and disconnection, separation and reconciliation, was an abiding one, and it emerged most clearly in his last completed book, his third collection, Conjure (2000). The book opens with a series of three poems dealing with near misses and attempted encounters with fathers. The poems share a certain hermeticism in that while the author’s ‘actual circumstances’ (he spoke at times of his father) are somewhere in the offing, the poems take place in an apparently fictionalized context and are all in some way concerned with lies and illusions and attempts to invoke what is not there. The book’s title, with its imperative form – Conjure – leads back to the history of that word, which takes in senses including: plot, conspire, swear an oath, bind together, call upon, appeal to a sacred person or thing, implore, invoke, charm, bewitch, employ magic. This etymology combines the sacred with the profane, illusion with ultimate reality, faith with deception, self with self-invention:

‘My father’s sudden death has shocked us all’
Even me, and I’ve just made it up.’
‘The Excuse’
Do I stand here not knowing the words
When someone walks in?
‘Not Knowing the Words’
This isn’t easy. I’ve only half the spell,
and I won’t be born for twenty years.
‘Caliban’s Books’

The speaker cannot know the father, though he may well turn into him. This is an inheritance he is powerless to evade, and its responsibilities are most strongly felt when the child becomes, literally, the father. In the book’s closing poem, the Coleridgean ‘Haunts’, dedicated to Donaghy’s son Ruairi, the child himself comforts the father by simply existing, able to dispel the fears attendant on the adult night. In a sense, the child frees the man of the question of himself: pass it on, as the saying goes.
In a more sombre sense, transmission is also a significant part of ‘Black Ice and Rain’, perhaps the most brilliant poem among many fine pieces in Conjure. It is the story of a not-quite ménage a trois involving the narrator and a young couple he meets at a party, told retrospectively to a young woman he has followed into her bedroom at another party some time later. The pretext for his narration is that he can see that he and his listener have important things in common. One is, apparently, an unusual sensitivity (something missing in the boring party they have deserted, a party on which the speaker at any rate is dependent for enabling him to draw this perhaps adolescent distinction). Another is a sense of destiny so elaborate as to encompass the actions of chance. A third is the susceptibility to the pull of memory: ‘the past falls open anywhere.’

The poem recalls Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’, with the male and female roles reversed, retaining a sense of sterile erotic futility and manipulation. More than that, it offers the complex riches of a story by Henry James, where apparently cultured society is stalked by cruelty and perversity and we witness the indulgence of a power whose near-intangibility serves to enhance its effect. In ‘Black Ice and Rain’ the speaker’s confession is an act of cruelty towards the listener, whatever moral awareness it shows from line to line. In an earlier time the listener might at least have reasonably complained that she and the speaker had not been introduced, but now, in a period of insistent informality, the ‘truth’ is held to be its own social justification, and this predator of the mind is at liberty to pass on his own torments. The poem is full of shifting depths, and each repeated reading finds it renewed, but one of the most significant features is the balance between the religious background, mocked and discredited by the young couple as they endlessly sketch quote-marks on the air, and the apparent meaninglessness of the suffering that chance has inflicted on the object of the narrator’s former desire by the car accident which has killed her partner. She may have got religion now, but her grief empties into a void. Worse (for the narrator) not only have her looks been destroyed, but now that he could have her to himself it is clear that it was her unavailability that made her attractive.

Then having lain at last all night beside her,
having searched at last that black-walled room,
the last unopened chamber of my heart,
and found there neither pity nor desire
but an assortment of religious kitsch,
I inched my arm from under her and left.

The narration, we remember, is staged in a bedroom at a party, while the rhetoric manages to be both stagey enough for a proscenium theatre and compellingly intimate its disclosure; both melodramatic and self-mocking; and unable or unwilling to credit the original integrity of any of its ‘material’. Its fascinated (and rapturously self-fascinated) coldness recalls a major character from another novelist, the composer Adrian Leverkuhn from Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, who sold his soul to the Devil in order to be able to make music that could escape the confines
of late romanticism. The result was marked by brutal parodies of feelings it had allegedly outgrown. With the characters of ‘Black Ice and Rain’ we are far from high art as practised in early twentieth century Munich, but though the characters have no art of their own to make, only attitudes to strike, the human stakes are the same, and while the narrator makes a performance of his damnation, its psychic reality is not to be denied.
I’ve discussed ‘Black Ice and Rain’ in novelistic terms, through story, plot and character, in order to indicate Donaghy’s artistic confidence. He’s not simply rubbing up against fiction in the familiar timid and affectionate manner of a great many poets. He incorporates its forms and possibilities into the work while retaining the pacing, orchestration and variety of register which are the province of a poem. The poem more than stands its ground. What we have in ‘Black Ice and Rain’ is much more than another honourable addition to the genre of dramatic monologue. The poem offers a compelling renewal of the genre’s possibilities, applied to subjects – belief, value, the confusion of art with the self and the self with the good – which the era of postmodernity has lent new colours and new urgency. The poem is also, slyly, circumstantially, damningly, a critique of postmodernity as a mass cultural movement / product on the grounds of its simultaneous fetishization of ‘creativity’ and denial of artistic authenticity. Donaghy disapproved of the notion of artistic ‘progress’, with its banal suggestion that ‘now’ is somehow better than ‘then’; he would even have disputed the notion that at bottom ‘now’ is even different from then. For him – as it surely should be for us – the poetry that matters, that deserves to live, that engages the imagination and nourishes the memory, emerges in contact with ‘a live tradition’. It offers itself to a general audience as both challenge and invitation, to create a space which can be colonized neither by vulgarity nor remote self-regard. It is, in the teeth of the odds, poetry undertaken as an act of good faith.

Sean O’Brien’s lecture is a version of his introduction to Michael Donaghy’s Collected Poems, which will be published by Picador in March 2009 alongside The Shape of the Dance. This companion volume to the Collected Poems will gather together the best of Donaghy’s writing on poetry and the arts.
12

Poetry & The Aesthetic of Morality – Michael McIrvin

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:47:25 +0000

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Volume 9 Issue 1 (March 2007) Article 14

Michael McIrvin

Poetry and the Aesthetic of Morality

The Myth

The goddess Cantarita, known by some as La Verdad, bathed in coldclear water under a moon so full her breasts ached, her midnight aureoles dripping the deep blue milk of life. As she moved, the inchoate hum-of-being rose from her flesh, for she had left her amulet of syllables on the bank with her gown. A man peered from the bushes, frightened by the voice of creation, but he hungered for Cantarita too, and he felt ashamed. As she washed, he crept forward to touch the perfect hem of her moonlit gown and discovered the string of vocables wrapped in it. He could feel her eyes on him then, her night-black eyes, and her voice rose to a senseless shriek as he dove for theunderbrush, swam through the bramble and hit the road at a dead run. When he stopped to catch his breath, he sat under a tree and used the string of sounds as prayer beads, letting them mumble through his fingers until he could intuit the many possible permutations, could taste them rising in his mouth, erupting on his tongue.

He was now the Master Signifier, but he felt an abiding guilt for his theft, which he answered by singing songs of healing for the infirm, songs of resurrection for the dead. He told histories around every fire pit he encountered as reverent faces stared at him, and he chanted the goddess’s name night and day to atone for his thievery. Sometimes, he was careless, however, and left words lying about, which were stolen, re-spun and used for dark purposes, to label the neighbors furniture or twisted meat or dirt, so that they might be treated accordingly. The Master Signifier disapproved, but what could he do? Common criminals and kings alike ignored his pleas, and he told himself he would redouble his efforts. Chant harder, tell grander histories, sing and sing; and for a time, it worked –but eventually the darkness deepened around him as if the light of the truth were being smothered. One day, he happened to find himself on the same road down whichhe had fled with the string of sacred syllables, near the same riverbank where the goddess had bathed. She was nowhere to be seen, but he could feel just the slightest remnant of her passage in the grass and rising from the water. He fell asleep and dreamt that La Verdad had dissolved in the river, disintegrated in the air, and that her molecules were disseminated from where he slept to beyond the horizon. As the Master Signifier dreamt, a magician-hypnotist who had been following him, waiting for his chance, leapt forward and stole the syllables strung along a golden cord and skulked away. From that day forward, the magician-hypnotist lulled humans with deftly juxtaposed images, and most who heard could not seem to help but do his bidding. They ate what he told them toeat, wore what he told them to wear, thought they saw what he told them was real. His favorite trick was to rename their neighbors — Filth, Less-than-Human, Not-Us — and all who heard behaved accordingly. Now, nearly everyone seemed to hear.

A Fragmentary Exegesis

I was working on a novel and a new and selected poetry collection the day the World Trade Center towers melted to dust. I understood two things almost immediately following: the poetry book now needed a poem added to address this terrible event — and to address what I knew would be the official U.S. response — and the novel would be hard to sell to publishers (the bravery necessary in
the face of an inevitable shift in market forces difficult to locate). The protagonist of the novel is a
former CIA agent who worked in Mesoamerica in the last century, training so-called counterinsurgents
in mayhem, particularly in the finer elements of torture, and the book is an implicit protest against
that role. This intuition was strengthened by the almost immediate media chatter about increasing CIA
powers at the cost of civil liberties, but most definitively confirmed when Alan M. Dershowitz,
renowned former civil rights lawyer and one-time defender of Soviet dissidents (and therefore
emblematic in the extreme, perhaps), suggested that sometimes torture is a valid tool of war and
offered a made-for-TV-movie argument: the ticking-bomb scenario. Importantly, he also suggested
that torture be done openly and include "accountability," which stated the other way around is to
"officialize" torture of course, to declare that there is such a thing as "good torture," presumably
definable as the kind that the U.S. performs.

This shift away from a cultural emphasis on protecting human rights did not happen overnight,
however. The attack in New York was certainly a catalyst, one that the powers-that-be obviously
seized upon in something approaching a state of ecstatic joy, but the diminishment of language to a
tool for dark magicians (politicians premiere among them) has a long inglorious history that merely
seems to be culminating in America at the present moment. Governments have always renamed their
adversaries so that they become something other, something less than human, but the practice
seemed mostly unconscious, the perverse obverse of the atavistic human tendency to refer to
ourselves as the people (i.e., the Dineh, Bantu, and Inuit — which is also rendered "the real people,"
among many others, although there are notable exceptions too: Hopi means "the peaceful people").
At most, the success of modern advertising merely made the manipulation of the masses seem more
overtly possible, which resulted in wars, military assaults, and weapons systems named like romantic
movies — Star Wars and Shock and Awe and Desert Storm — which the news media has mostly
insisted on repeating. This was one of the starting points for the poem to be added to my poetry
collection.

The primary starting point, however, was perhaps the most amazing image ever broadcast:
human beings falling feet first from the upper floors, as if children leaping from a porch, and exploding
when they hit the ground. The image was like those in dreams, too odd to comprehend except
metaphorically, as a cipher for some larger meaning. The images were shown as if by accident, the
camera turned on and no tape delay, and then that footage was not repeated as the others from that
day were, ad nauseam, as if we needed to be convinced these were not scenes from a movie. Perhaps
the images were pulled from the airwaves to protect loved ones and to honor the right of those who
leapt to dignified anonymity, or maybe because what those bodies exploding meant could not be
withstood by those of us watching. For what we witnessed was not merely the upshot of our human
being, evanescence in the extreme as it was acted out before our eyes, as a tide of effluvia spread
over the pavement and washed away on the air, but humans diminished to a trope, in this case, to
anonymous victims. These were not people because our brains would not allow us to see them as
such, but merely one end of a metaphor, however existential and no matter that they had once been
members of our category: the people.

Shock and grief were the dominant responses to this tragedy, but perhaps inevitable as
lightning after thunder, that was soon followed by rage, which was what the poem tried to subvert in
the reader — the tendency to demand vengeance upon those with faces the general shape and hue of
the killers. This was not understood by many who read the poem early on, insisting I had given "the
terrorists" (now too often a catch-all for anyone who dissents, whether they throw a bomb or not, and
thus the quotation marks) too much credit for humanity. After all, "they" had killed a couple thousand
of "us." The fact that the poem offers a context for this act was contested most loudly, but there is
always a context. Towers have long been associated with divinity because they reach for heaven, like
the pyramids in Egypt and Mesoamerica, but these edifices are monuments to something else entirely
in the modern U.S., to our sense of having defeated nature perhaps or to commerce unto its
apotheosis. That fact in combination with the international banking activities that went on in the World
Trade Center, and what those activities portend for the people who live in the third world, the poem
asserts, means these towers represented Western economic oppression and the worship of mammon,
the perceived evil now being pumped via satellite into countries where traditional cultures still hold
sway, and mounds of debt. They represented undue Western influence and the subversion of their
religion, both in the form of temptation and economic leverage. Thus, these pyramids "wave in the sky
as fingers in the face of God, / as accusation and rebuke" and represent America’s "dissonant dream
translated into a thousand / dialects (two-thirds dead in our lifetime) as dominion, / as winner-takeall,
as devourer-of-whatever-gives-you-identity" (McIrvin 147).

This assertion of context was not intended to excuse the killers, however, who murdered not
only those they assume responsible for their economic lot or who represent Western decadence and
work to spread its influence, but janitors and cafeteria workers and those whose job it was to try to
save everybody else. Moslems as well as Christians, atheists, and Jews, and probably a Buddhist, a
Hindu, and a Jain or two. In short, the killers had made all U.S. citizens sufficiently other to withstand
the thought of murdering the innocent, which was of course the official American response too. The
poem was written long before the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, but one need not be an historian of
international relations to predict the death of innocents would be the official reaction of our
government. Not surprisingly, the number of dead in the towers and the number of dead in those
bombing raids, mostly the blameless in both instances, were roughly equivalent. Markers were merely
named something other than what they were, human beings, killed under "the rain of thousand-pound
bombs" — the poem’s initial trope transmogrified — and tallied against a perverse accounts owed
entry in a virtual ledger.

The overarching theme of the poem is that both groups of killers had made the same move as
regards signifier and signified (and one is tempted to term it the same PR move, however traditional
unto biological such a strategy might be), made their victims less than human before assassinating
them. In the poem, the rain trope transmutes once more, to the tears of God that fall now "as
impotent rain," which would be a cliché except for the fact that both sets of killers are branches of the
same Abrahamic tradition, obviously sharing a taste for blood as well as common ancestors. Murder is
despicable, period, but perhaps all the more so when it is brothers who are killing each other, in this
case, taking turns playing the part of Cain. Murder is enough to make a father weep, but fratricide is
more than a double blow, the grief compounded geometrically, for there can be no other from this
perspective, only blood kin gone under by the hand of blood kin.

The President of the United States as Performance Artist

This does not completely explain the current situation in the U.S., however. Many of us were appalled, albeit less than surprised, by the revelations of torture at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Cuba, of possible secret prisons in former Eastern Block countries and kidnappings in the night (so-called "extraordinary renditions," as if the act were merely a virtuoso performance), of spying on U.S. citizens. Most hard to take, however: many Americans were not appalled. In fact, progressives have been utterly naïve, myself included, about the state of the U.S.-American psyche, the capacity for critical thought on the part of the masses. But then we did not expect such a masterly stand-up act by the President of our country: the man who was born in Connecticut and educated at Harvard and Yale speaking in a Texas drawl like an actor in a B-grade movie, telling us these macabre jokes in fractured syntax, but with a straight face because of course he means every debauched word. At first, it was hard not to simply smile and shake your head, perhaps like you did when you first heard Steve Martin in the 1970s speaking in an ersatz Eastern European drawl about liking women with heads (because, he said, he hates necks). But from the beginning the President’s shtick carried an air of fear too, because he is President, because the brain is caught off-guard. We are wondering how an idiot got the most powerful post in the world, when it occurs to us: maybe he is actually a diabolical genius, Buster Keaton or Groucho or Lenny Bruce without the profanity but untoward aims. Or maybe he was simply
born to the job in this age of hive-speak and language as advertiser’s tool, best used for hypnotism and dissembling — an idiot savant born to be king.

He repeated the same joke over and over prior to the election: "We are fighting a war, a war on terrorism, and Saddam walks into a bar, see, and he’s carrying this weapon of mass destruction." The setup was always the same, but then he careened into some other topic before he got to the punch line, only to skip back to the setup again: Saddam, weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaeda. The effect was hypnotic, and when the time to vote rolled around, a poll indicated that 42% of the electorate believed that the Iraqi dictator had something to do with the attack on New York. This in the face of logic, in the face of expert testimony from witnesses with Capitol-cred up the kazoo, conservatives formerly on the inside sufficiently appalled by the sham to speak out. Moreover, anyone who dissented was called a terrorist, or at least a terrorist sympathizer, and sometimes this was just implied, but I swear I could hear strains of "America: love it or leave it" echoing throughout the land from some bygone era.

I doubt Fredric Jameson could have imagined that the President of the United States would eventually offer such ultimate and utterly uncomplicated proof of his assertion that "the anxieties of the absurd … are themselves recaptured and recontained by a new and postmodern cultural logic, which offers them for consumption fully as much as its other seemingly more anodyne exhibits" (150), and in fact, the integration of propaganda in the form of absurd utterance turned out to be a simple formula, really. The President appears in media X times more than his opposition, Y times more than does the truth told by people with infinitely less cachet than the "leader of the free world," and the news media is now merely a medium (with all the passivity the word implies), toothless and slightly insane with all the concentration of power in so few hands — afraid is a better word perhaps — and so does not call him on this nonsense. Or maybe they were hypnotized too. After all, we are at war, or so the President says, over and over; and people are actually dying, some of "us," so it must be true –
the fact that the reasons for mayhem in Iraq were trumped-up not withstanding — and so the whole performance act became a circular argument: Saddam, WMDs, Osama, war that creates an actual insurgency that is backed in part by Osama, and there are continued rumors of WMDs (spread mostly by the performance artist himself), and Saddam’s Baathists are part of the problem now, part of the insurgency. "See, I told you," the performance artist said, having finally reached the punch line, and the citizenry stared in dull-eyed silence for the most part, accepting as misspeak what was really a subliminal policy assertion and linguistic sleight of hand. Then, suddenly, the citizenry was accepting misspeak as the truth.

The Pandemic Public Use of Cell Phones as Metaphor and Sign

Once upon a time, a conversation about your mother’s hemorrhoid operation or an argument with
your significant other was considered a private matter, in part because we are traditionally a wary
culture about putting "our business" out there before people we do not know, but also because
imposing our personal information on others was considered rude. However, the omnipresent
conversation into thin air, while driving or walking around the supermarket, is now an element of the
American landscape. This is obviously partly just a function of technological innovation, because
people can now talk and drive down Main Street or walk about Wal-Mart at the same time, and it is in
part merely symptomatic of the death of our tendency to privacy and public civility. However, it is also
symbolic of both the ascendancy of a hive mentality and the need not to be other, to prove even to
strangers that the speaker is part of some specific community — people with whom they converse –
and that larger community — cell phone users in general. We are connected. We belong, and don’t you
wish you did too?

Of course, this is the gist of all advertising as it has been raised to a primary tenet of market
capitalism: buy to be, to belong, to be considered part of some community however tenuously; do not
buy and be outside this group of lucky consumers, and my, they do all seem so happy, bouncing
about the screen and smiling lasciviously, mocking you out there, on the outside. So to be other
becomes the antithesis of being a citizen of the U.S. (because he/she who does not belong must not
aspire adequately), and to being human (because it is only "natural" to want to be connected to other
humans, to belong to the community). By default, the traditional divisions of race and class and
gender all become subsumed into us-ness and otherness as defined by commodities and what
advertisers purport them to signify, amorphous concepts that might indicate people who wear
particular shoes and like a particular band or who imbibe one brand of beer and not another, who
drive a Toyota and not a Chevy. This is not to say that the traditional divisions of in- and out-groups
no longer obtain (Black men and Hispanic females and older Jewish people of both genders, etc.,
remain significant as target markets if nothing else, as they are sold commodity fetishes tailored to
their group), but rather, that the sense of commodity community supersedes these more concrete
categorizations and substantially ramps up alienation as a mechanism of differentiation in the service
of market capitalism, and by extension, control.

The concept became something substantially more
than merely a marketing ploy with the advent of new technologies like cell phones and, to some degree, the Internet. For now there were actual lines of communication established in the purchase, the product both significant of belonging and an actual tool of connection to said community. The fact that these are virtual associations and so less than fulfilling in any traditionally human sense aside, such nodes of shared experience come to define belonging in extraordinary ways. Not because there is a great amount of meaning in belonging or otherness so defined, but because alienation as both experience-to-be-escaped and as potential experience-to-be-avoided becomes the defining psychological mechanism for so many. Thus, the American public nods its head to affirm whatever assertion is in vogue at the time, perhaps more easily than any other population in history, and given what has happened as a result of other populations being easily led at other times in history, this assertion should give one pause. Sheep by any other name, who can become a pack of proverbial wolves just like that.

Thus, an entire people (definable via religious affiliation, ethnicity, geographic homeland) can be deemed the enemy, and the enemy can be made other, that much more easily — and so tortured and killed. The same move that yielded "gooks" three-plus decades ago yields "towel-heads," but now even such creative neologisms are not necessary because "terrorist" covers it all ("liberal" standing in for those of us who are accused of not going along, thereby relegated to a sub-category of not-us). Thus, the President can mouth certain key elements of what he wants the masses to believe, inserting them almost randomly into any speech he gives, and the masses will not only buy a subliminal policy assertion but do so readily. For by this time we know how those people are, the terrorists, and we sure as hell know what they look like (they have that damned swarthy look about them), what god they pray to, how much they hate the good old U.S.A.; and come to think of it, I would not put it past them to do something big like that again if we do not blow them to hell. And surely we have the right to pull out a few fingernails if that means America will be safe from terrorism, and the President assures us we are not safe now. And the President swears on the Bible he would not eavesdrop on any of us who do not by God deserve it, just those in that sub-category of not-us, the bastards who are only pretending to be one of us, who are perhaps the terrorists next door as depicted in those TV shows.

Otherness becomes easy to ascribe, a sense of pariah-hood made all the more egregious by
one’s fear of being assigned to the category "outsider" too. And so the listeners go along with
whatever the misspeaker says who delivers policy pronouncements in code that border on the surreal
but make so much subliminal sense (the following quotations were collected by Weisberg): "He was a
state sponsor of terror. In other words, the government had declared, you are a state sponsor of
terror" (On Saddam Hussein, Manhattan, Kansas, 23 January 2006). "I mean, there was a serious
international effort to say to Saddam Hussein, you’re a threat. And the 9/11 attacks extenuated that
threat, as far as I-concerned" (Philadelphia, 12 December 2005) (see Weisberg
). It is worth noting that, if the masses were actually listening (as
in critically), they could hear a kernel of the truth in these assertions too. As in much of our exalted
performance artist’s best material, the truth is bobbing along just beneath the surface: "the
government declared … as far as I-concerned [sic]" (Weisberg ). It
is almost as if the truth cannot be kept out of language, however hard the speaker might try, but
increasingly, it is apparently quite a trick for most of our fellow citizens to hear it through the noise.

Poetry: Toward an Aesthetics of Existence

What kind of moronic naïf expects a poem to stand up to such master-hypnotist machinations,
especially given how widely disseminated, consumed like any other product, those messages are, how
shot through the culture the manipulation of our sense of otherness and the anxiety it produces have
become, especially given the fact that poetry is read by so few and perhaps for good reason, because
it has become anemic? Besides, the best poem is too insubstantial a thing to possibly achieve agency.
There is no heft in the palm as when one holds a club or a gun, or a cell phone or a Blackberry for that
matter. The poem is nothing but air clipped, sliced, and twisted by the tongue, slid across its surface,
maybe spanked like a buxom, a broad-shouldered lover as it is spat forth to flap away on the slightest
breeze — the poem’s inarticulate mother/cousin and sea of return at once. The thing tails away into
oblivion as soon as it is spoken, to silence, the poem killer.

Ironically, there is all that noise with which to contend as well, seemingly an insurmountable
wave for such a tiny creature to withstand. Televisions blaring are but one source of static (in bars,
restaurants, Times Square), now joined by cell phones and handheld electronic devices and computers
and deep basso stereo-delivered music like the sound of the sea as migrating birds crossing Kansas
must hear it. But this wave of sound is everywhere and so not a sign by which to navigate:
Laundromats and eateries, exuding from implements carried by strangers and loved ones, drivers and
pedestrians, the same message on all of them in one master-hypnotist’s voice or another — or
mimicked by successfully hypnotized average citizens — until these carriers-of-devices and watchers
of screens must hear it in their sleep, see the electronic print. The wave threatens to subsume the
hearer him/herself, so how can there be even a dime-sized space for the subtle rhythmic shift of the
poem, its alliterative magic, let alone the well-placed caesura? Worse, perhaps Sven Birkerts is right:
"a fundamental cognitive reorganization is underway" (115). Not only is the poem in danger of
disappearing in the noise that is its context or dissolving to nothing before it can be noticed, read,
fathomed, but the human capacity to comprehend the text at any level below its surface is diminishing
anyway, and so poetry’s ephemerality in the face of such odds is only a prelude to utter extinction.
The masses do not fathom the master-hypnotist’s aims, only hear his words as if in a dream, and a
poem that stands in opposition is recognized only as another instance of the same disjointed syntax
like they type into their palms — c u @ home luv u:). In Birkert’s words, "My intuition — and fear — is
that … changes in the way we live are altering our cognitive structure and moving us away, perhaps
irrevocably, from former aptitudes … Our movement into electronic environments has brought us to a
threshold" (112).

I am a poet — which is perhaps a Quixote-esque admission given what precedes it — and thus
I do not take these obstacles lightly, cannot be flippant in my approach to my art (for its own sake, as
it were, is not an option). If Birkerts is right, the ability to decode text, to arrive at a deeper sense of
what words contain, whether it be a poem or the master-hypnotist’s dark incantations, is a muscle
atrophying, but giving up is hardly the answer given what is at stake. Perhaps the poet’s primary job
in our age is, first, to reclaim the role of language in our lives by stealing back the tools with which the
master-hypnotist has absconded, and then to insist that a reader participate in the making of meaning
(that the reader exercise the appropriate muscle, as it were). I am certainly not suggesting that many
will answer the challenge, successfully or otherwise, or that the wall of noise is even penetrable, but
one must try. This is perhaps what Michel Foucault meant by "the search for an aesthetics of
existence," which he said must follow the disappearance of "morality as obedience to a code of rules"
(49). And how else can we explain the fact that arguably the greatest democratic republic in the
history of the world officially sanctions torture (or the other dark arts as practiced by the present
administration) than the utter abandonment of morality-as-obedience-to-a-code-of-rules. If we are to
withstand this onslaught against our humanity, it would seem that just such an aesthetic, a sense of
our shared human being that countermands the diminishment of anyone to furniture and dirt, to notus
and all that portends, is in order.

The most eloquent defense of the role of poetry in this regard is John Berger’s: "Every
authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry. And the task of this unceasing labour is to bring
together what life has separated or violence has torn apart … Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies
the space that separates … Poetry renders everything intimate. This intimacy is the result … of the
bringing together-into-intimacy of every act and noun and event and perspective to which the poem
refers. There is often nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty and indifference of the
world than this caring … To break the silence of events, to speak of experience however bitter or
lacerating, to put into words, is to discover the hope that these words may be heard, and that when
heard, the events will be judged" (450, 451, 452). I would push this assertion further, however: if a
poem is actually received, if indeed the reader does the work to "get it" (however dynamically "getting
it" must be interpreted), the reader must participate not only in the making of sense the poem implies
like a multivalent seed, but also deal with the experience the poem represents relative to an aesthetic
of existence. As William Carlos Williams said a long time ago, "It is the imagination / which cannot be
fathomed. / It is through this hole / we escape // Through this hole / at the bottom of the cavern / of
death, the imagination / escapes intact" (212). In short, the imagination allows us access to all of
human experience, and thereby the poem is the ground whereupon a dance between the poet and the
world takes place, but it is also a dance between the reader and the poet, what he or she engendered
there. And no dance is passive — you are dancing or you are not. The poem represents the experience
it conveys, and thus the reader must deal with that experience, incorporate it into his or her
conception of the world or explain it away. If the experience the poem contains includes torture,
whether it actually portrays the poet’s lived reality or, as is the case in the following poem written for
this essay, it is a radical act of creative empathy, the issue is rendered "intimate" and must be dealt
with as such:

          You do not recognize the voice
          as cinderblock echoes meet precisely
          where you sit, blindfolded and piss-drenched.
          The current flows better now
          and you have almost grown accustomed
          to the smell of boiled urine, singed
          pubic hair, hot flesh….
          Maybe it is not a voice at all, but rabbits
          being slaughtered or hundreds of children weeping
          or a nail driven through glass.
          Strange to be embarrassed your tormenter
          knows you so intimately, sees you this way,
          smells you. Then shame gives way to emptiness
          big as God: the rise and fall of the voice matches
          the waves of pain inevitable as incoming tide.
          And you open outward like a hothouse flower,
          names rising like pollen on the scorched air:
          your priest the vagabond urchins on your street
          the man you met on the bus yesterday a librarian
          you have only admired from afar the checker at the
          market a neighbor’s prepubescent child your dentist….
          All innocent as far as you know, but you
          can hate yourself tomorrow, the rest
          of your life you can dream them screaming
          in the same strained register as the cinderblock echoes.
          Your tormentor removes the blindfold,
          you blink to reveal a pair of bloodstained
          panties, and the God-sized emptiness
          fills with impossibly white sheet lightning.
          You beg to die, but the tormentor asks patience,
          cooperation. Just one more name so he can stop
          hurting you, all this wailing and the mess
          and the dreams he will have too, one
          more name, so your daughter your wife
          your sister can go free.

Admittedly, this poem employs a cheap trick, one of the most rudimentary tools stolen back from the magician-hypnotist. The second person pronoun demands that the reader enter the poem by taking the speaker’s place even as he has taken the prisoner’s place. The reader is now participating in the production of the world, but not "in the classical economic sense of the word, but … the nevercompleted, always-being produced state of experience: the production of the world as reality" (Berger 458). In short, this is not merely a vicarious experience to add to the trove that is one’s life list, but requires subjective participation that yields some small change in the fabric of the universe, first the reader’s personal universe and then the consensual human universe. The poem dares you to scoff, to be unchanged,
to listen to lies that permit such violence without protest.

The poem implies several rhetorical questions: Could you withstand this pain, dear reader?
Are you man enough? Woman enough? At what point would you too give up everyone you know? At
what point beg for death? Can you see the torturer in your mind? A man/woman with dark skin or fair,
light or da0rk eyes, wearing what uniform? Can you imagine the torturer as your neighbor, a guard at
Abu Ghraib perhaps because we may never forget those images of some of us guilty of such offenses?
And why does the torturer claim to wish to end your ordeal — truth or ploy or both — and what of the
mention of dreams in that section of the poem? Is the torturer too a victim of his/her government’s
ability to make other some poor sap, you, who must pay with his/her blood and perhaps a descent to
madness? And what did you do to deserve this fate, this pain, dear reader, this burden that you as the
man/woman in the poem will never outlive? Did you speak too much? Too little? Is your religion the
wrong one? Were you caught in a place you should not have been, like in the street during a
rudimentary round up of people who look like you, talk like you, dress as you do, who are about your
age? Does it matter? Does anyone on earth, regardless of his or her violation, deserve to be in this
heinous chair? And perhaps some questions not immediately within the purview of the poem’s
thematic strategy will also arise for a reader in our bleak present, a further extrapolation from the
poem to the world as it joins the reader’s experience set, as it demands to be dealt with relative to
his/her ever-developing moral aesthetic: Can you accept assertions of the otherness of those your
government tortures? Can you simply accept the dark magician’s claims of the need and efficacy of
this practice? Can Alan Dershowitz read this poem and still offer a scenario from a television show
(one of those designed, consciously or un-, to keep us afraid, to perpetuate the dark magician’s
claims) without breaking out in hives?

Coda

In his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell
describes a model for society-level change that advertisers have known about for decades: ideas (and
products) spread in the same way as viruses (and hence "viral marketing," and indeed, the marketing
industry’s embrace of Gladwell’s book as a training manual). Exposure is followed by contagion, and in
between are a series of incremental changes on the part of individuals that result in critical mass, or
what Gladwell terms the tipping point: that moment when there is a dramatic rise in a given idea’s
presence in the population.

As a poet friend told me once: no one ever stormed the barricades because of a poem. The
call to arms, or even to overt protest, is not the poem’s purview, however. The poem works more
subtly, at the level of human emotions and psychology, by enacting experience. Paradoxically, the
overt aim of any authentic poem is not to change the world precisely because a poem never has, but
then again, that is the aim as well, to change readers in some incremental way by foisting a vision of
the world upon them with which they must interact, that they must subjectively assess relative to
their context and their aesthetic of existence. D.H. Lawrence’s assertion becomes all the more true
within our present shared context, the current historical moment when the odds are so long that a
poem will even get through and the noise is threatening to drown us all: "The essential function of art
is moral. Not aesthetic, nor decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function
of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood,
rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake" (180).

A powerful harlequin-king rules over the present dark age, and poets’ efforts seem so paltry compared to the vast media apparatus he manipulates that we aren’t even on his radar screen. Although the truth resides in nearly every surreal claim (and disclaimer), there in plain view for the American public to decipher, although polls indicate that the masses grow increasingly restless at the rising body count (the tally marks in the "us" column) but more so because of the rising tab, little has changed for the good in the overall tone of U.S.-American discourse since this grand performance began shortly after the attack in New York. I have no illusions that my simple attempts to reincorporate the other in a few poems will awaken readers in sufficient numbers to overthrow the harlequin’s regime or bring about a rebirth of respect for human life, but my aesthetic of existence entails the attempt — and my hope remains that the tipping point is closer than is immediately apparent. What can a poem accomplish in the world? Not much against such odds maybe, but perhaps just enough.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Selected Essays. New York: Vintage, 2003
Birkerts, Sven. Readings. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1999.
Dershowitz, Alan M. Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002.
Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2000.
Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on Postmodernism, 1983-1988. New York: Verso, 1998.
Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. New York: Penguin, 1977.
McIrvin, Michael. Optimism Blues: Poems Selected and New. San Diego: Cedar Hill, 2003.
Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1958.
Weisberg, Jacob. "The Complete Bushisms." Slate (11 Sept. 2007): .

Author’s profile: Michael McIrvin is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Optimism
Blues: Poems Selected and New (Cedar Hill Publications). He has also written a collection of essays,
Whither American Poetry, and a novel, Déjà vu and the Phone Sex Queen. He is currently shopping his
novel manuscript titled The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time, which is partly about the CIA’s actions
in Mesoamerica and mostly about violence as the bleak mechanism of history, and he is finishing a
new poetry collection tentatively entitled Hearing Voices (one section is called "Poet in Wartime" and
will include the poem discussed in this essay). McIrvin taught literature and writing for several years,
most recently at the University of Wyoming, and presently makes his living as a writer and freelance
editor. Email:

TV

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:52:38 +0000

Digital TV – Mind Control
By The Sound Of Silence
From Ken Adachi
Educate Yourself.com
12-22-8

Editor’s Note -
This is an extremely timely and important essay. It overviews a secret Pentagon psychotronics technology known as Silent Sound Spread Spectrum (SSSS) that has been fully operational since the early 1990s. I first found out about the use of this technology from Al Bielek in a 1992 video he made with Vladimir Terziski. This technology was used against battle-hardened Iraqi troops fortified in deep underground bunkers in Kuwait and Iraq in the first Gulf War in January of 1991.

The physical, emotional, and psychological effects of this technology were so severe that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops surrended en masse without firing even a single shot against US-led coalition forces. The numbers reported in the news were staggering: 75,000 and then annother 125,000 (or more) Iraqi troops would come out of their deep desert bunkers waving white flags and falling to their knees before approaching US troops and literally kiss their captor’s boots or hands if given the opportunity.

Why would eight-year veterans of Middle Eastern warfare (with Iran 1980-1988) behave this way? Simple. They were subjected to a technology that was so extreme and incomprehensible that they were suddenly reduced to the level of compliant children and felt grateful to still be alive in the wake of their mind-wrenching experience.

This technology is about to be used, albeit in a more subtle fashion, against American citizens in a highly classified and covert operation to mind control and manipulate the entire population into ‘compliance’ with our New World order overlords. The technology will utilize a combination of HAARP transmitters, GWEN towers, microwave cell phone towers, and the soon-to-be-mandatory High Definition Digital TV that will enter your home via: a) cable, b) satellite, c) HD TVs, or d) those oh-so-easy-to-obtain “digital converter boxes” that the government is so anxious to help you obtain and underwrite most of the cost on your behalf.
But why is the government so anxious to help American citizens experience a clearer and more highly defined television picture? Does that make sense to you? Since when is the government so concerned about the visual quality of our televised entertainment that Congress would pass an undebated statutory proclamation which mandated that the HD conversion take place on Feb. 17, 2009 and then subsidze about 90% of the associated cost?

I’m only guessing, but if there are 200 million “regular” televisions in America to be converted into HD, then that $40 in government subsidy per TV ¥ 200,000,000 = $8 billion. Why is the government so anxious to spend 8 billion dollars on her citizens to improve the clarity of a TV picture? Or is the recently touted “additional bandwidth” cover story that supposedly is to be gained with the HD technology the only and genuine reason for spending so much taxpayer dollars on HD conversion?

The second service that this author performs is to “out” two of our more deceptive CIA/Pentagon ‘assets’ masquerading under the rubric of natural health advocates. Their names are Rima Laibow and her husband, “former” Major General Albert Stubblebine. If your e-mail Inbox has been filling with warnings and articles in recent months about the coming Codex regulations and the “wonderful” job that Rima and her retired Army husband have been doing to try and stem the tide, then you know who I’m talking about.

Folks, is it time to wake up yet? Or should we just resume our slumber and wait for them to take us away in those spiffy Gunderson cattle cars that Phil Schneider warned us about in 1995 (you know, the ones with the built in shackles and manacles)?
Ken Adachi, Educate Yourself.org

The Sound Of Silence -
The Antithesis Of Freedom
By A. True Ott, PhD, ND
12-15-8

The year was 1961, and John Kennedy was soon to become the 35th President. Shortly before Kennedy’s inauguration, President Dwight D. Eisenhower shocked the nation and the world with his televised farewell speech. The speech’s content was shocking because General Eisenhower was a very popular war hero, and American military might was second to none.
Eisenhower, a highly decorated five-star general, was the Supreme Commander of all allied forces during World War II. It was Eisenhower’s leadership during the Normandy invasion that ultimately freed Europe from the Nazi scourge.

Incredibly, in his farewell address, this great American hero did not warn the nation of the budding communist threat or the horrors of nuclear proliferation. No, not at all! Instead, this career military genius poignantly and soberly declared to this great nation:

” We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to recognize its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or our democratic processes.”

Here we have a career military officer, and sitting US President warning the nation in his final farewell speech, that something called “unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex” poses an extremely dangerous threat to our Free Republic society. According to Eisenhower, this threat “exists and will persist.”

To President Eisenhower, in January of 1961, this evil was a much greater threat to America than Castro’s Cuba or Kruschev’s Soviet Union. What exactly could have happened in the “military-industrialist” establishment that would have caused Eisenhower to issue such a strongly worded warning? Improved machine gun production? Nope. Battleship production? Nope. Nuclear submarines? Nope. Proliferation of nuclear warheads? A concern of course, but a concern that most Americans were fully aware of.

No, obviously what caused Eisenhower such deep concern had to be something much more pervasively shadowy, dark and secret. Some new, covert, technology had clearly emerged that had the very real potential to provide certain individuals with the “acquisition of unwarranted influence” that in turn would “endanger our liberties or our democratic processes” (i.e., our free and fair election process). In other words, it had the clear potential to circumvent the voice of the people and completely empower un-elected power mongers.

Eisenhower, I would submit, was warning America about something called the “Sound of Silence”.

Eisenhower was an honest and patriotic American. Like Marine Corp General Smedley Butler, who decades earlier declared to Congress that “War is a Racket,” Ike knew that such absolute power and total covert control over the minds and hearts of individual citizens would corrupt society absolutely. He also knew and understood, as did the German philosopher Goethe: “No man is more hopelessly enslaved, than he who falsely believes that he is free.” Therefore, he issued his strong, concluding warning to America. Today, this author must do no less.

The Sound of Silence is a military-intelligence code word for certain psychotronic weapons of mass mind-control tested in the mid-1950s, perfected during the 70s, and used extensively by the “modern” US military in the early 90s, despite the opposition and warnings issued by men such as Dwight David Eisenhower.

This mind-altering covert weapon is based on something called subliminal carrier technology, or the Silent Sound Spread Spectrum (SSSS) (also nicknamed S-Quad or “Squad” in military jargon). It was developed for military use by Dr. Oliver Lowery of Norcross, Georgia, and is described in US Patent #5,159,703 – “Silent Subliminal Presentation System” for commercial use in 1992. The patent abstract reads:

“A silent communications system in which nonaural carriers, in the very low (ELF) or very high audio-frequency (VHF) range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum, are amplitude- or frequency-modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain, typically through the use of loudspeakers, earphones, or piezoelectric transducers. The modulated carriers may be transmitted directly in real time or may be conveniently recorded and stored on mechanical, magnetic, or optical media for delayed or repeated transmission to the listener.”

In layman’s terms, this device, this “Sound of Silence”simply allows for the unwarranted implantation of specific thoughts, emotions, and even prescribed physical actions into unsuspecting human beings. In short, it has the very real ability to turn human beings into mere puppets in the hands of certain “controllers,” or puppet-masters.

Eisenhower knew full well what such a “weapon” could do in the hands of greedy, conspiring men and women scheming to control the planet. It could easily result in the takeover of American society without a single bullet being fired. This is what he was warning America about, this is the “combination” he feared above all others.

Have the leaders of America ignored Ike’s warning? Have conspiring and evil men and women utilized this diabolical technology on unsuspecting Americans and others outside of our borders? If so, will they continue to utilize the technology through the medium of television and radio? This exposé will attempt to answer these questions, and give the reader a clear picture of exactly who made the decisions to use the “Sound of Silence” in both war and peace.
On March 23, 1991, a news brief was released in the form of an ITV News Bureau Ltd (London) wire service bulletin entitled “High-Tech Psychological Warfare Arrives in the Middle East.” This was during the administration of George Bush Sr., during “Operation Desert Storm,” and describes in remarkable detail a US Psychological Operations (psy-ops) covert operation successfully deployed against Iraqi troops in Kuwait.

Saddam Hussein’s vaunted “Republican Guard” crack troops were promising Bush “the mother of all battles” with many thousands of dead coalition troops. On paper, it looked convincing. Hussein’s Republican Guard troops were battle-hardened veterans of the 10 year war with Iran, while coalition troops were unblooded. The Iraqis had modern weaponry and were well trained in how to use it.

Something very strange happened, however. The “mother of all battles” ended before it began, as literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers surrendered en masse without even firing a shot!

Here is what the British press reported on the incident (while the American press was censored):
” an unbelievable and highly classified psy-ops program utilizing ‘Silent Sound’ techniques was successfully deployed. The opportunity to use this method occurred when Saddam Hussein’s military command-and-control system was destroyed. The Iraqi troops were then forced to use commercial FM radio stations to carry encoded commands, which were broadcast on the 100 MHz frequency. The US psy-ops team set up its own portable FM transmitter, utilizing the same frequency, in the deserted city of Al Khafji. This US transmitter overpowered the local Iraqi station. Along with patriotic and religious music, psy-ops transmitted ‘vague, confusing and contradictory military orders and information.

“Subliminally, a much more powerful technology was at work, however. A sophisticated electronic system designed to ’speak’ directly to the mind of the listener; to alter and entrain his brainwaves, to manipulate his brain’s electroencephalographic (EEG) patterns and thus artificially implant negative emotional states — feelings of intense fear, anxiety, despair and hopelessness were created in the Iraqi troops. This incredibly effective subliminal system doesn’t just tell a person to feel an emotion, it makes them feel it; it implants that emotion in their minds.”

While utilizing such a “non-lethal” covert psy-ops weapon resulted in many lives being saved, both American, Coalition, as well as Iraqi, the question begs to be asked: how can Americans be assured that such a weapon is not being used on them by “Big Brother” on a daily basis?
Moreover, why was the real story behind the mass Iraqi surrenders censored so completely from the American people? Typically, secrecy of this nature is only employed when the subject is morally offensive, or when the powers that be wish to continue to deploy the subject without public scrutiny or oversight, or both. Clearly, if such a device employed covertly on Americans could result in “unwarranted influence” over a society, as Eisenhower warned, I submit the majority of Americans would be completely outraged and incensed, and rightfully so. Therefore, of course the technology would need to remain hidden away.

Officially, the Sound of Silence (S-quad) technology does not exist, just as the US Government officially denies the existence of UFOs and Area 51 (Groom Lake) in the Nevada desert. However, the physical realities cannot be ignored by the rational and logical mind.

For instance, during the first Gulf war, the man who most likely ordered the deployment of the Sound of Silence was Major General Albert (Bert) Stubblebine, who was the Commanding General of the US Army’s Intelligence School and Center, as well as the Army’s Electronic Research and Development Command (ERADCOM) as well as the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). In short, Albert Stubblebine was the Army’s liaison with the CIA and Naval Intelligence operatives (ONI), and as head of ERADCOM, he would of necessity have had complete working knowledge of the Sound of Silence weaponry, if indeed it truly exists.

He was the US Army’s top spy-boss, and of course, was privy to all its secrets. Now retired from active duty following a 32 year career, General Stubblebine has combined with his wife, Rima Laibow to form something called the Natural Solutions Foundation, supposedly dedicated to fighting all health freedom threats to individuals including Codex Alimentarius, vaccinations, and of course the FDA Gestapo.

On their website, www.healthfreedomusa.org one can read this about Albert N. Stubblebine: “Many of the innovations he developed helped the US to conduct the First Gulf W ar effectively and swiftly with a very low casualty rate.”

But of course, such “innovations” are never fully disclosed to Americans and are officially non-existent. With all due respect to General Stubblebine and shadowy power-brokers such as Frank Carlucci and Donald Rumsfeld, this author concurs whole-heartedly with General Eisenhower, and I declare that such posturing and secrecy with weapons of mind-control constitutes indeed an “acquisition of unwarranted power and influence” and has absolutely no place in a free and open society – no matter how many soldier’s lives it may save on the battlefield. The potential for massive misuse and abuse of such immense controlling power is simply too great.

Furthermore, with all due respect Mr. Stubblebine, is he and Rima Laibow using the cover of Natural Health activistism to hide their true agenda? Could this hidden agenda be the covert promotion and testing of Sound of Silence equipment and technology commercially throughout the world?

Immediately after “retiring” from the army, General Stubblebine took a position as the “VP for Intelligence Systems” with Braddock, Dunn, and McDonald (BDM), a major defense contractor owned by the shadowy Carlyle Group and ex-Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci of Iran-Contra infamy

Since the Sound of Silence machine technology was patented for “privatization” commercial applications by Dr. Lowery on October 27, 1992 , it clearly opened the door to private defense contractors such as BDM to develop their own “intelligence systems”. It would then make sense to employ General Stubblebine as a consultant. Of course, what would then stop BDM from quietly marketing and selling the Sound of Silence to large corporations tied to Wall Street?
For example, imagine utilizing the Sound of Silence in a large Wal-Mart store, mixing the ELF waves with background music to subliminally brainwash dishonest shoppers not to engage in shoplifting? Such a device would save Sam Walton many millions of dollars in lost revenue every year.

Suppose also that a young, black man from Illinois was given access to, and was able to utilize the S-quad Sound of Silence technology in his public speeches, radio and 30-minute television”infomercials” – all programmed and designed by “handlers” to illicit strong emotional responses from audience members who then are merely “hearing without listening.”

Moreover, what if televisions across the US and Canada all went 100% digital [to be mandatory in Feb. 2009] implementing their signals use of the Sound of Silence frequencies in (in order to successfully link to GWEN towers) which would allow the unrestricted, complete and massive control of the nation’s mind and consciousness? I am telling you that is exactly what is happening. President Eisenhower was absolutely correct, and his worst fears were indeed well founded!

The military-industrialist complex has quietly completed the takeover of the nation’s consciousness, and thus its very soul.

Keep in mind that taking complete fascist control of America is just one step of the Zionist elites ultimate agenda, of which Stubblebine and Laibow have very likely pledged their true loyalty. The elitist Zionists overall objective is indeed absolute world control, something they refer to as a “New World Order” with them as dictators and overlords.

Again, the absolute secrecy surrounding the development and deployment of the electromagnetic mind-altering technology of the Sound of Silence in a very real way reflects the tremendous power that is inherent in it. This is why Eisenhower knew that he had to warn the nation about it back in 1961. To put it bluntly, whoever controls this technology literally has the power to control the minds of men – all men and women everywhere. [MM: When allowed to control [through the parasitic, Zionist private "Federal Reserve" System] the financial survival of “all men and women everywhere” the puzzle is easily completed!]

Of course, whoever controls the minds of all humans, controls the wealth and destiny of planet Earth. Furthermore, Stubblebine, as commander of Army Intelligence would likely follow the prescribed manual of all covert ops, such as is found in a declassified US manual for the planned subversion and coup of the government of Nicaragua. The manual instructs the CIA “guerilla forces” to engage in different “false front” organizations designed to win the respect, trust, and influence of the enemy. Once complete trust and confidence is achieved by means of the activities of the “false front,” then the destruction of the enemy by means of misdirection and disinformation tactics can more easily be executed.

I would submit there is no better “false front” to infiltrate in America than Natural Health proponents, for they are typically healthier, better informed, and more dedicated to preserving individual freedoms and fighting tyranny than other Americans. Thus, there could be no better “false front” to establish, and there is clearly no more potentially vicious “wolf hiding in sheep’s clothing” than the man who knows more about the Sound of Silence secret deployment than any other human

There is ample evidence that certain elitists in America and Israel plan to definitely extend the capacity of this technology to encompass all people on every continent. A key to this is the HAARP project where ELF and VHF frequencies can indeed be beamed off of the Earth’s ionosphere to various GWEN towers worldwide.

Of course, the US Government officially denies all of this, telling the talking-heads of the [Zionist] controlled news media that the GWEN towers are merely private cell-phone towers with no ulterior agenda, and therefore anybody who thinks otherwise is a lunatic-fringe conspiracy nut.

The evidence to the contrary, however is clear and unequivocal. Dr Michael Persinger is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada. Concerning this subject, Dr Persinger writes:

“Temporal lobe stimulation can evoke the feeling of a presence, disorientation, and perceptual irregularities. It can activate images stored in the subject’s memory, including nightmares and monsters that are normally suppressed. Contemporary neuroscience suggests the existence of fundamental algorithms by which all sensory transduction is translated into an intrinsic, brain-specific code. Direct stimulation of these codes within the human temporal or limbic cortices by applied electromagnetic patterns may require energy levels which are within the range of both geomagnetic activity and contemporary communication networks. A process which is coupled to the narrow band of brain temperature could allow all normal human brains to be affected by a sub-harmonic whose frequency range at about 10 Hz would only vary by 0.1 Hz.”

Dr Persinger concludes the article by writing:

“Within the last two decades a potential has emerged which was improbable, but which is now feasible. This potential is the technical capability to influence directly the major portion of the approximately 6.5 billion brains of the human species, without mediation through classical sensory modalities, by generating neural information within a physical medium within which all members of the species are immersed.

“The historical emergence of such possibilities, which have ranged from gunpowder to atomic fission, have resulted in major changes in the social evolution that occurred inordinately quickly after the implementation. Reduction of the risk of the inappropriate application of these technologies requires the continued and open discussion of their realistic feasibility and implications within the scientific and public domain.”

How can one have an “open discussion” on the subject when government circles continually deny the existence of such technology?

Lyrics to the pop song ‘The Sound of Silence’
By Paul Kane (aka Paul Simon), 1963
Hello, darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains within the Sound of Silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
Beneath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night and touched the Sound of Silence.
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dare disturb the Sound of Silence.

“Fools,” said I, “you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.”
“Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you.”
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed in the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming.
And the signs said: “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls,
And whisper’d in the Sound of Silence.”

Paul Simon/Paul Kane’s musical work in the early 1960s was primarily as a contracted songwriter in the famed “Brill Building machine.” He would write songs for other artists to record. He did try his hand at performing, however. He wrote many ballads and rockabilly tunes which were recorded, both by Paul and his mildly-successful Tico and the Triumphs. Paul also had a famous collaborator, Carole Kane (who changed her name to Carol King).

Paul Simon, whose family was part of the military-industrialist complex, was very likely a product of the early 1960s military experimentation in Silent Sound mind control, which is clearly what the lyrics of “The Sound of Silence” convey to those “in the know”.

http://www.wariscrime.com/2008/12/15/news/digital-

tv-mind-control-by-the-sound-of-silence/

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Whither American Poetry – Part 1

admin — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:34:11 +0000

Essays by Michael McIrvin

For all poets who refuse to give up on the possibility
of renaissance.

Also by Michael McIrvin:
Love and Myth,
Lessons of Radical Finitude,
Dog,
The Book of Allegory

Please see the Preface for acknowledgments.

Cedar Hill Publications is dedicated to the rejuvenation
of American poetry and to that end publishes the very
best poetry and criticism currently being written.

Cedar Hill Publications
3438 Villa Terrace
San Diego, CA 92104-3424

          Bottled up for days, mostly
          in great sweat of being, seeking
          to bind in speed—petere—desire,
          to construct knowing back to image and
          God’s face behind it turned as mine
          now is to blackness image shows
          herself, desire the light
          speed & motion alone are, love’s
          blackness arrived at going backwards the rate
          reason hath—and art her beauty God the truth
                                                                                          Charles Olson, “Maximus of Gloucester”

CONTENTS:

PREFACE

WHITHER AMERICAN POETRY

THE WRONG TURN

THE POET IN A NONSENSICAL AGE:
STEPS IN A HEALING RITUAL

THE TALE OF THE POSTMODERN TRIBE:
NOTES TOWARD CONTEMPORARY VERSE EPIC

WORKS CITED

PREFACE: A FIRST VOLLEY

What passes for poetry criticism these days tends to fall into only a handful of categories, but it ranges from the naively nostalgic to the apocalyptic. On the one hand are those critics who assert that in order for poetry to be poetry we must revert to the forms of old, and hence that most of what presently passes for poetry isn’t; and on the other end of the spectrum are those who maintain that language itself is inevitably hegemonic and must be taken apart, one brick at a time or wholesale in a kind of bricolage of negation, which is meant to explain the disfigured syntax and near absence of subjective assertion in much of contemporary American poetry. This is, of course, the conservative and liberal long and short of the current situation in poetry criticism, but then there is also the voice in the wilderness, from either stage right or stage left (to further convolute the metaphor), decrying without adequately critiquing the loss of poetry’s readership, its purportedly former central location in the culture, and its imminent death (i.e., Joseph Epstein and Dana Gioia).

This last stance may be emblematic of poetry criticism generally in recent years in as much as it derives from a single simplistic binary opposition that seems to be the bottom line for all extant critical stances: poetry or no poetry. That American poetry has severe problems is a given in the critical community. As William Logan, who by temperament tends to the conservative side of the scale, says in All the Rage,

          Most American poetry now consists of tract housing:
          the personal narrative is a trim backyard, a little swimming pool for the household
          Narcissus, and no second story. No poetry can long survive without history,
          without ideas, without a hidden psyche… . [T]he generation of Pound and Eliot
          and Frost and Stevens and Moore was greater than the generation of Auden and
          Lowell and Bishop, which was in turn greater than the generation of Hecht and
          Ashbery and Ginsberg and Merrill, which is a generation greater than ours

Such an assertion of degeneration is in fact the premiere premise underlying the essays contained herein; however, for the critics of the present it is as if the poem’s demise as purveyor of truth happened in a literary/philosophical/cultural vacuum, as if this demise were asymptomatic of some larger cultural malaise. It is also not much of an extrapolation from the underlying despair in their writing to assert that these critics believe the situation beyond repair, except of course for those who would, naively, have us retreat in the direction of the sonnet and the sestina, toward strident iambs and overbearing trochees in our age of chaos theory and existential randomness.

This is not to suggest that poetry has not lost much that must be reachieved if the poem is to be a tool of culture change as well as critique, which is also a major underlying premise of this book: that poetry can and indeed should be a tool, a weapon in the service of our cultural health, which is to say our freedom. This is also not to suggest that concerns regarding the efficacy of language to achieve either critique or change in light of its hegemonic past and present, the language’s capacity to even include the other in civilization’s oeuvre, are groundless either. In fact, one of the primary assertions imbedded throughout this book is that regaining something of what has been traditionally the provenance of poetry must be balanced with the concerns that have grown out of deconstructive theories of language and power. However, this book is also as unabashedly prescriptive in places as it is unapologetically a work of commentary overallin short, balance is not to be construed here as simplistic synthesis or equivocation. These essays are meant to be strident, meant to engender discussion that borders, ideally, (and only borders, of course) on physical violence, because the stakes are so high and the current discourse too genteel when not merely stunted. Which is not to say that I necessarily take specific aim at the icons of the mainstream (although a few will certainly be named and taken to task) or anyone else, but, rather, that this book’s intended purpose is as (inflammatory) heuristic, an opening volley that raises questions that should have been asked long ago, but that also broaches tentative answers that exceed the above sad dialectic to the questions critics have been acknowledging as primary at least implicitly for some time. Such as: How can language be revivified in the face of poststructural revelations of indeterminacy and the consequent problematization of everything from being to truth, in the face of media’s dark intentions for the word and the image, in the face of all the numbing but manipulative noise on the airwaves?

Although critics at present seem to be avoiding (or denying) the larger, more problematic issues of contemporary poetry, some versions of criticism are obviously more helpful than others in any real attempt to understand the current situation, and such critical work has been a touchstone, albeit a limited one, for this collection. Real literary criticism has always been an ongoing argument, of course, an attempt to inflect our pangeneral understanding of the task of the writer and the viable range of the text. The best of criticism as polemic remains true to that traditional desire to clear the ground for the kind of poetry the critic deems “good,” deems the poetry most representative of our age. As opposed to the other forms of criticism discussed below, most of which take as their goals and frames of reference much smaller (nearly incestuous) purviews, this is a frequently unpleasant task in as much as the critic must deal with the dreck as antithesis. If the critic is to offer up something other than a picture of his/her own aesthetic in reverse, however, the poetry in question must be located relative to the overall poetical melange and discussed in terms of its larger tendencies.

Fred Chappell, for example, in his recent A Way of Happening, begins one essay railing at the “sloppy purple” of Alfred Corn’s most recent collection, “the mumble of [his] disjointed abstraction.” He subsequently correlates Corn’s book to another poet’s work he believes shares the same egregious aesthetic (Michael Burkard), then declares them Ashberians, whose poetry he indicts as desiring “above all else to avoid critical stricture. Whatever complaint is brought against it is opted by its partisans as a strength. ‘This stuff is boring,’ you say, and are told that it is meant to be boring; the fact that it is boring says something about poetry in our time. Silliness, lack of logic, disjointedness, sameness of toneall those qualities ordinarily noted as indices to bad poetry are referred to as symptoms of social and spiritual and literary conditions.” As insightful as this observation is, he does not go the next logical step, however, and locate this poetics within the larger enterprise of poetry generally, let alone as a symptom and product of forces in the culture at large. If these poets are consciously enacting the status quo, aren’t they complicitous in its perpetuation? In other words, he too fails to step beyond the impasse these poets map by simply implying that poets must adhere to traditional notions of what a poem is supposed to do.

At least Chappell has the audacity to make value judgments within a dynamic ongoing discussion about what a poem should or should not be. Too much of current criticism is not so much about the shape of the poem and the current situation of poetry generally as it is a shameless act of self perpetuation within the microcosm that is the “poetry biz.” The critical act, so-called, becomes an act of self-aggrandizement-by-association. Only poets of reputation, that is of the mainstream, and books from “reputable” houses, which is to say the powerful ones, are critiquedif the word is still valid in so diminished a usage. The vast majority of the poetry terrain, including the most interesting and vital environs, is either denied existence or dismissed as a wasteland.

At best this criticism, which is never negative, is vapid. Helen Vendler says of Jorie Graham in The Given and the Made for example, in a kind of lit-pop-psycho-babble: “In these knottings and loosenings, slowings and quickenings, ending in, stopping on, a word, Graham finds the only linguistic and imaginative equivalents for the self as she now understands it.” But more often than not such criticism carries an air of promotion, self promotion by/of the critic by virtue of how smart he/she is, which we know because the poet whose work is being explained to us so eloquently is so very smart, which we of course know because the critic, in an act of self serving boosterism, tells us so:

          The real power in the idea of the poetic self conceived as matter emerges in
          Graham’s intense and lavish transcriptions of the material world, in which all her
          formidable energies of description and kinesis are engaged. Graham’s attempt to
          describe the material world with only minimal resort to the usual conceptual and
          philosophical resources of lyric…and to make that description a vehicle for her
          personal struggle into comprehension and expression, is harder even than it would seem.

At worst this brand of criticism dissolves into tabloid assertions about the poet’s life as it is supposedly manifested in the poem. J.D. McClatchy admits in his introduction to Twenty Questions, for example, “I have tried to lay out the terms of a career, the topography of an imagination… .” He is referring to his essays on James Wright, Merwin, Larkin, Heany, Wilbur, and Merrill; but the juxtaposition of the words “career” and “imagination” is telling in terms of his own intentions as they are manifested in the limited scope of these essays and their tenor of mostly uncritical praise. At least McClatchy tends to avoid the most pathetic version of this brand of criticism. In his recent review of Randall Jarrell’s Selected Essays, Alfred Corn resorts to speculations about the dead poet’s “latent homosexuality,” and does so as if it were gossip, never relating that possibility to any larger assertions about the work or the age in which it was produced. In short, when such criticism is not serving merely as a meal for the critic’s own undernourished cachet, it is offered up as titillation of the variety Americans expect as regards their celebrities. Only accidentally does it ever attempt to categorize and explain let alone to navigate the larger issues now facing poetry.

One major exception to such a limited purview is the criticism informed by the work of Foucault and Derrida and Barthes. Although the tenets of poststructural philosophical systems make for a very narrowly programmatic discussion, critics like Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein at least attempt to locate the problems of poetry within the larger cultural milieu, albeit in abstract terms and with too little critical venom in their voices as if the present situation were either inevitable or innocuous. Because the poetry that is informed by the same premises as the criticism is by definition against the grain of the status quo, which is to say of mainstream poetry that still traces its roots to Romanticism, these critics are frequently defensively explanatory, which seems understandable; but their matter-of-fact defensiveness also seems merely a reflex, an automatic acceptance of one’s alterity that is almost precious. As Perloff says of a poem by John Ashbery,

          the opacity of “Europe,” its resolute refusal to relate meanings, is not attributable
          to its excessive disjunctiveness as Harold Bloom, who calls the poem a “fearful
          disaster,” seems to think. I would argue that it is, on the contrary, too one
          dimensional, which is to say that it is not “disjunctive” enough.

Worse, however, too often these critics succumb to the very philosophical tenets that are the basis for their criticism. The result is a linguistic razzle-dazzle that is by turns laced with poignant assertion, that is nevertheless so dense that only a handful of people can understand it, or which refuses to be anything less than indeterminate. To be certain, the situation of poetry is complex, and the collection in your hand is more dense in places than I am comfortable with as a result, but the limitations of subjective assertion should by now be a given and thus dealt with in some active fashion. My expansion of Chapel’s complaint about the Ashberians holds for these critics as well: it is time to transcend the impasse. Charles Bernstein can assert in My Way:

          I am conscious that an ideological poetry, insofar as it may dismantle whatever
          self or group identities we may have already developed, risks making us more
          atomized and so more passive. In this state of “postmodern” paranoia, all
          collective formations—real or imagined—are ironized or aestheticized…debunked
          as arbitrary codes, with fashion and market ascendant as the arbiters of value…

and go on to suggest that a poetry of resistance is possible, only to undercut that assertion by telling the reader it isn’t possible: “poetry is the most necessary form of language practice after the wars: but a different poetry than we have known. The task of creating this poetry is impossible and for that reason takes place.” In other words, the race is caught in a feedback loop of desire and failure to achieve that desire. If the above quotation were not the last sentences of the essay in question, it would be less disturbing; but as it stands critics like Bernstein are obviously caught in their own devices and cannot escape to say the world, let alone escape to help the rest of us say the world via some reactivation of the subjective.

Thus too much of the poetry criticism of the present, like too much of the poetry, is complicitous in the way-things-are. Critics are either caught up within the bases of their own assertions, like so many self-programmed rats in a maze, or using criticism as the vehicle of ascendancy within a poetry establishment madly self-replicating, seeking to steal prestige from the chosen while ignoring the majority of the real poetry being written in America, poetry that at least aspires to be more than present circumstances seem to allow. It is within this malaise that I have attempted a book that is not complicitous. Whither American Poetry seeks to locate poetry as a whole in the culture at large, and to locate the more egregious aspects of the genre in terms of their manifestations as force and product, frequently among the practices of poets and critics as well as in the world-out-there, and to cover some small portion of the poetical ground not currently granted the status of existence by most critics. Although my aim for this collection is to raise questions, it also attempts to answer some as well, to balance the heuristic with the polemical. Presently, it is as if those few critics whose purview is poetry-at-large are stuck and can at best only map the problems poetry faces. Although his analyses are frequently accurate, in his latest collection of criticism Bernstein repeats the phrase “the problem is…” like a mantra, without ever offering any but the most abstract of assertions for solutions, if these. And a writer as in the middle of the conservative/liberal critical scale as McClatchy says in the preface to his latest collection, “this is a book of questions, not of answers.” The questions are important only to the degree that we actively seek to resolve them, only to the degree that they spark vigorous discussion, only to the degree that they incite change, which is the task, now more than ever, that poetry criticism must undertake.

There are a variety of reasons so much of American poetry at present is lamentable, a complex of reasons, all interacting in sundry ways specific to the “brand” of poetry under discussion. I do not pretend in my prescriptive analysis to understand the whole dynamic in our complicated age, but a few egregious tendencies that cross brand categories bear remark precisely because they are pandemic, which suggests a causality larger and deeper than simple aesthetics. A recurring theme in the following essays is pastiche, the making of copies that has become an unconscious replication born of neither a desire to satirize or to pay homage, let alone as a creative extension of a particular vision of the poetic enterprise. This pathetic mimicry is the Xerox version of a feedback loop. Poststructuralism has warned us that nothing is really new, but in the final analysis there are degrees of not newness, and what is being produced now is all too often lifeless, empty, a mere copy of a copy of a copy, the print getting successively lighter and harder to discern, all of the original’s energy rung out of it. Which is to say that poets no longer have a connection to their poetical progenitors except as replicators of what said progenitors did considerably better. The current situation is not what Bloom labeled “misprision” in the seventies, the purposeful misreading of the poetry of the past in order to clear a place for one’s own sense of the poem. Although I argue that the current crop has misread certain major premises of the moderns and the poststructuralists, and thus carry some of those tenets to illogical extremes, contemporary poets in general tend to passively repeat what went before without either understanding or questioning their own poetical impetus, the set of premises out of which one’s art grows. And the phenomenon is visible in all endeavors in our culture, from popular music that sounds like it was made by some previous group before they had practiced much to second rate reproductions of movies from our youth.

Equally egregious is the diminished subject in the current incarnation of the American poem, the poem seemingly intended by its maker to be as innocuous as is possible. Poems rarely say anything at present, either in the largest or most pedestrian sense of the assertion. Not only has the poem as a vehicle of cultural criticism given way to suburban ennui, the effects of the mundane “real” on the egoistic “I,” but even a viable speaker is missing from most poetry, in some cases as if the poem were the random product of a computer program designed to hook up signifiers (in the loosest definition of the word). Consequently, contemporary American poetry lacks referential depth and subjective gumption, any fire, any fight, any desire. At best, contemporary poetry is a snapshot of the current impasse in the culture’s intellectual life generally: the inability to act, to have ideas, to bring one’s subjective desire to bear upon the world, to move forward.

The ultimate result of these tendencies is not so much a dying poetry, that bleak pole of the implicitly dyadic premise underlying most present criticism, but, like all products of the culture whether they be artistic or political or from the marketplace, a somnambulant one. I have no doubt that MFA programs can fill all the seats in the house for some time to come, but in the absence of a more active paradigm, one that allows for subjective assertion and the inclusion of a dynamic meaning beyond the merely egoistic or the stolen as part of the poetical project, the same dreck will be passed from poet to literary magazine to publishing house, boring the reader, and alienating any potential reader outside the loop of this little cottage industry, at every turn. I have no doubt that poetry will “live” in the absence of a revivified sense of what a poem is and what it can be, but in the same diminished guise as at present, without cease but without much verve either.

Although this book refers to the necessity for a reconstructive poetics, the agenda is not nostalgic. Reconstruction is defined as part of a larger dynamic principle that, inevitably, entails more than simply recovering what has been lost in terms of poetry’s traditional role for the race. The previous version of the poetry community as the closed club of what is referred to as the mainstream, the monolith of unscalable walls whose only members were born inside, the bastion of poetical exclusion where the rules are composed in order to keep certain versions of the world out (in spite of Walt Whitman’s injunctions to the contrary) is not to be hungered after as some vision of our innocence before the fall. Although peopled occasionally with poets whose very existence was denied previously, the mainstream still exists, of course. However, these poets are too often tokens of diversity whose realities as they are captured in language are not overly disconcerting, and are sometimes even comforting, to the dominant reading audience. Hence, the mainstream is still a force to be reckoned with: of stasis, which is to say of control and exclusion and death.

But the mainstream vision of what a poem can and cannot be is no longer the only one available. Admittedly, the current decentered version of the poetry community is chock full of bad writing, which only suggests the dark affinities between the outriders and their more sanctioned brothers and sisters, affinities that require a broader critical perspective if we are to get a handle on the present situation. It is true, the current chaotic world of American poetry sometimes seems overwhelming. The side effects, however, are well worth what we have gained: more voices of every hue and orientation and class are heard, reaching out to people who previously did not visit the poetry section at the library because they were not represented in poetry, their experiences having been deemed less than real, perhaps even aberrant. I offer this observation in part to suggest that there is indeed hope to balance the despair over the current literary malaise, albeit a product of picking wheat from chaff. American poetry is at least straining toward polyvocality like no other medium of expression. But I also want to suggest via this observation that any criticism that ignores vast chunks of the poetry landscape is incomplete.

Thus, the eponymous essay offers a broad interpretation of the poetry situation in America by looking at its various strains. Such categorization allowed for generalizations I could not have made otherwise for getting bogged down in the particulars of individual versions of praxis. Given the size of the project, I make no claim to an absolute completeness in my assessment, but I have attempted to be categorically complete, including as many representations of various types of poetry operative in America at present as occurred to me. The picture is not a very cheery one, it is true. The egregious tendencies described above, in concert with others specific to the individual strains under discussion, suggest an art (and a culture) in distress. However, the underlying premise is one of hope nevertheless, given the chaotic breadth of the poetry community and the few excellent examples of poetry magazines currently serving as oases of quality that have risen out of the morass.

As opposed to Logan’s seemingly unidirectional decadence, overall the current situation in poetry is offered as a potentially dynamic decay, as the morass out of which American poetry must be reborn. And rebirth, revivification, renaissance, is put forth as a transcendent third to the vacuous and oversimplified dialectic of present poetry criticism: poetry or no poetry. In fact, throughout the book the journey into the underworld and back is offered up as a relevant metaphor for the process that poetry and the culture generally must undergo if we are to escape the current morass wherein language and meaning and human existence are no longer covalent.

In an early work, Kora in Hell, William Carlos Williams recognized that creativity and decay are, as a wheel, continually cycling:

          When the wheel’s just at the upturn it glimpses horizon, zenith, all in a burst, the
          pull of the earth shaken off, a scatter of fragments, significance in a burst of water
          striking up from a base of a fountain. Then at the sickening turn toward death the
          pieces are joined into a pretty thing, a bouquet frozen in an ice cake.

The image of the ephemerality of art, truth captured only momentarily, until it transubstantiates to a more primary form, is illustrative of a further underlying premise of Whither American Poetry: creativity is inevitably cyclical in as much as decadence follows creation. However, its twin premise is that an upturn toward active creation is not inevitable, relying as it does on the will to action, on subjective gumption. In William’s epic, Paterson, the protagonist imitates the fate of creativity in time through his decline toward decadence and parody and his preoccupation with death. This seems an accurate representation of where we are as a culture presently, poetry but symptomatic and emblematic of our pangeneral downturn. But, at the end of Book Four, the hero ultimately walks away from the sea (symbolically from the morass that threatens to swallow all heroes) “renewed in his creative energies, ready for another descent that will lead to another ascent” (Peter Schmidt). This is the role Whither… encourages poets to be willfully cast in, with emphasis on the necessity of will. The current situation of poetry, its stunted and impotent incarnation, is certainly a reflection of our cultural malaise; but in its traditional role as a function of ritual and translator of experience into values, and in its modern and postmodern role (mostly dormant at present) as vehicle for cultural critique, the trace of all these functions still visible in some poems of the present, poetry can potentially serve as a means to a renewed sense of our generalized being.

The first two essays in the collection chart our current malaise. The initial overview of the American poetry milieu is followed by a further assertion of loss in the second essay, “The Wrong Turn”: the death of what I term subjective gumption. The essay locates that loss not only in the poetry of the present but also in the culture at large as the death of critical consciousness and, worse, in our collective explanation-unto-rationalization of that death and the servitude it entails. The format of the third essay, “The Poet in a Nonsensical Age: Steps in a Healing Ritual,” serves loosely as a model for the structure of the book itself, the descent that will be followed by ascent if we desire and if we act.

After offering a description/definition of our nonsensical age, this essay outlines the first tentative steps in a healing ritual for poetry that is an attempt to reachieve what the culture and poetry have lost and to suggest a reinvention of what poetry is for the culture as well. Broadly, the steps are as follows: First, poets must steal back the image and the word from mass media and politicians and any others who not only demean (all puns intended) our primary poetical tools as vehicles of truth but so inundate us with inane signs that the majority of the populace has shut down against the onslaught. Poets must again use language as a sensual gateway to the imagination, the ground upon which the poet and the reader and language dance together in a dynamic of signification. To signify poignantly is to draw the reader onto that ground, even against his/her will. Second, as the book as a whole attempts to map the situation of poetry, and to map a way out of the current impasse (to move from culture critique, a la deconstruction, to praxis), the poet must be the mapper of our collective terrain, both the inner and outer. Given our tendency as a culture to deny the existence of what James Hillman calls our psychic underworld, our darkness has been perversely projected outward into the everyday. The culture cannot escape a labyrinth it denies exists, cannot escape without a map, and consequently the poet’s job is to chart both the terrain of our psychological malaise and its representation in the world: prisons, poverty, madness, to name but a few of its manifestations. But it is also the poet’s job as mapmaker to chart that in us which transcends the darkness, to sing of love and our children and hope. In spite of the projection of our fear and self loathing outward, that is not the whole of the human condition. Much is to be said for potentiality, for an imagined forward that transcends the labyrinth without denying it. Third, the poet must again seek the mystery at the center of our being and attempt to convey it via the poem as myth. The search in this section of the essay is for a method that does not recreate the old hegemonies in the form of outworn metanarratives, that translates individual human experience relative to history. Poetry-as-myth seeks to integrate consciousness into action, to achieve meaning on the largest of scales: the human relationship to the great what-is as it transmutes before our eyes.

This is the poet’s traditional role as the speaker of the nearly unspeakable, the individual life as it is confronted with the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as it is translated in the panhuman; but poets have always been the tellers of “The Tale of the Tribe” as well, and the last essay explores what such a work would look like in the absence of modernist hieratic claims to high culture and (in the case of Pound and Eliot) a frustrated retreat to authoritative paradigms. The overarching assertion is that this epic would both self consciously locate itself in history and recognize its own failed claim to inclusion, to being encyclopedic in scope and therefore complete. The poet would attempt to give a picture of this time and this place relative to personal experience, as it impinges upon and forms the everyman/woman who is the inevitable postmodern hero. And, by the very nature of a decentered discourse, within which no claim can be made for privileging certain experiences over those of others, the epic would aspire to be polyvocal and multivalent. It would aspire to be a portion of the tale that, along with the other portions and variations, creates a mosaic of the human experience as it evolves, one to stand in opposition to the current leveling and controlling metanarrative that enters our households and our consciousness over the airwaves.

Perhaps the ultimate assertion of this collection is that the healing ritual described in “The Poet in a Nonsensical Age…” must be never ending. At present, poets and the people of the culture generally seem to have abdicated any larger notion of human meaning than the one prescribed by media and the market. Certainly, the deconstructive move that has been the reaction of many poets is ongoing given the continuing assault upon our senses and our sense of self, given the tendency to hegemonic acquisition of all assertion, the inevitability that our weapons, words and imagery, will be turned on us. However, reconstruction is a necessity if we are to again feel human, mysterious and meaningful and dynamically connected to the substrate of our being. This book makes big claims for the possible role of poetry in the rebirth of the culture as well as large claims for the revivification of poetry itself. Throughout I am self conscious of the criticism such assertions will bring. However, I can never forget that Orpheus, that prototypical versifier, failed to bring Eurydice back from the underworld. In Rilke’s most heart rending version of the tale, she cannot come back because she has forgotten, because she has been too long in the dark:

          She was already loosened like long hair,
          poured out like fallen rain,
          shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

          And when, abruptly,
          the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
          with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around—,
          she could not understand, and softly answered
          Who?
                                                                                         (“Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes”)

There are possibly others who would traverse the dark to bring us all back, but if the poet is forgotten, the poet who is the traditional keeper of “the first element of our existence that expresses the disorder of our soul’s song…[and] the breaking down of the modes of harmony” (C.K. Williams), indeed if the poet no longer knows the way out of the chaos, then who?

I would like to acknowledge those without whom this collection would either not exist at all or at least would be something other than it is: Christopher Presfield of Cedar Hill Publications for requesting I write it in the first place based only upon the first essay and book reviews I have written that he has run across in the last few years; Leonard Cirino who publishes Semi-Dwarf Review and requested the eponymous essay for its pages, an essay which garnered much attention for yours truly as well as much critical discussion with poets across America, and the reason Christopher was inspired to publish such a collection at all; Vincent Bator of The Pannus Index who will publish another of these essays in a different form; all the editors of the other magazines who are at this moment considering the essays in spite of the fact that they will appear in book form (many refused on these grounds alone) before credit for publication in those other venues can be given properly here (and I apologize for the short turn around time: Christopher grows impatient); and especially William Doreski of Keene State University and Doug Reitinger of the University of Wyoming for their invaluable comments on early drafts. Thank you all.

WHITHER AMERICAN POETRY

When initially asked to write an assessment of American poetry as we near the millennium, I expected to produce another diatribe against the general creative writing program tendency to poems that make form an end in itself, one more rant against the gentrified mainstream, one more middle finger raised in lugubrious salute to the captains who control what we read (and, therefore, think) as the ship we are all on continues to list hopelessly in the heavy seas at the end of history. However, and in spite of my occasional despair, my notes for this piece revealed something quite unexpected: hope for the future of American poetry…and hope in a certifiable cynic must certainly ¬¬mean somethingand a discussion of meaning, that much maligned and assaulted creature, is precisely where this essay will lead eventually.

My hope, however, is hope in the truest sense of the word, since it is premised upon possibility, potential in our current circumstances that will effloresce or die because of our (poets’) actions or lack thereof. In the words of a recent poem, and at the risk of sounding apocalyptic, as a culture generally we are at that strange point, the dialectical fulcrum/ between renaissance and ruin… (“Prelude,” Dog) where the choice to act is not an option but a necessity if we are to survive. Paradoxically, however, the former must grow out of the latter and hence the pun in the title of this essay and my unanticipated discovery of hope in the situation of American poetryit is probably a discredited archetype in the post-structural milieu, but nothing grows unless fed from the roots by the decaying corpse of what went before it.

The Corpus

Railing against creative writing programs and their generally banal products may be in vogue in some circles, but not merely so. In fact, that content has been sacrificed on the altar of form in the mainstream, period, might almost be a truism now. However, even form has de-evolved in most academic poetry to a mere semblance of its former self. Staunch rhyme and meter have given way to some chimerical, flickering thing that vaguely resembles an archmodel of a poem in its overall rhythm: it does one thing at the beginning, another in the middle, and something to resemble closure at the end, as if it were put together on an assembly line. These products are not the result of a constraint against which the poet must move creatively (not Berrigan’s sonnets or Yeats’ masterful use of rhyme) as a great chef works in the mode “soufflé” or “sauce,” risking failure even as he/she reaches for success, but little squares of pasty nothing. Not ambrosia on the tongue, but not shit either; certainly not fortifying, but not exactly nauseatingjust fast-food-sameness, as Donald Hall has referred to them: McPoems and McStories.

Much has also been made, in those same circles, of the neo-confessional inflection of the bulk of workshop poetrypoems frequently so private, so solipsistic in their imagery that they are virtually meaningless for any reader except, in some poems, the voyeur at the window box with his hand in his pants. At least in this version, however, there is someone breathing under the cardboard printout, some small flavor in its consumption even if the reader gets little more than a slight prurient buzz from the experience.

Although there are probably good programs somewhere, and although there are certainly good teachers/writers struggling in bad ones, by-and-large the fin de siecle version of the creative writing program poem is compost for two further reasons: 1) the format itself has led to program saturation. That is, enough generations have been bred to replace their teachers so that the gene pool now approaches absolute banalityno mutation, no innovation, and too great a remove from real literary lineage, which is by definition multivalent, fecund. And 2) Over the past few decades there has been a decay of English departments generally as places where anything interesting (read creative and/or as regards ideas) happens; which is to say that, not that long ago, to declare your critical/poetical allegiances was to have enemies, however collegial, with whom to argue with conviction over the shape of the discourse. Presently, however, critical decisions are merely menu choices determined by whatever will best serve one’s chances of publication, and those critical decisions are offered as just that to students as wellno commitment, no fire in the belly required.

Likewise, however, those poets who generally consider themselves the creative writing program’s antithesis are also compost, albeit for different reasons. These are the neo-beat/neo-Bukowski-ites who have seized upon much of the masturbatory adolescent rant of the former without either their political and social commentary or the latter’s cynical wit. Although this movement as abreaction is understandable given the new conservatism and its mirror image, political correctness, now loose in the land, which together are more effective at stifling individual assertion than any uniformed protector of the status quo, these poets’ attempts to out-Buk Bukowski (and there are exceptionssome of Ron Androla’s work comes to mind) are usually as self indulgent as the neo-confessional. Worse, their intention seems to be merely to shock in an age when nobody gets shocked by much of anything, and consequently these poems tend to be vignettes of human suffering that are rarely poignant and too often boring, which is a paradox of some import.

This is not to discount the vox populi, the voice of the people, the American idiom as Williams called it, the syntactical beauty of vernacular American English; but when both diction and subject become merely a pose, an ersatz stance toward the world offered up for effect, an affectation, that voice becomes self-parody, pastiche that is neither homage to a way of life or ironic, just ridiculous. So-called spoken word poetry is a premiere example. The best of it is truly a reflection of the emotional life of the speaker as inflected by his/her political and economic reality, and it is shared in a community that uses language nearly as tribals use it, as a way of establishing and maintaining social bonds. Frequently it is also a way of establishing an identity in contradistinction to the larger culture that has marginalized the speaker. However, too often (especially in a slam environment, that strange conception of poetry as competition, which seems truly, and ironically, American), each poet seems merely hell-bent on blowing the audience away, concerned with effect that is only effect. The ultimate result is too often, unwittingly, parody.

Likewise, although the etiological premises that underlie poststructuralism and the poetry it inflects seem valid, the poets who work in this mode may have done as much as any to bring us to our current state of poetical malaise. At the very least the opacity (Ashbery’s term) of much of that work is as meaningless as the neo-confessional and, at its logical extreme, kills communication altogether.

That our language carries the taint of its patriarchal origins and context is probably nearly another truism, and that it at least can be hegemonic certainly is true (and perhaps the best of poets have always existed to counterbalance this tendency). But to so endlessly displace meaning so as to achieve meaninglessness, to reduce language to amorphic cipher (and this pun, in spite of the fact that poststructuralism’s great gift to poetry is the heightened awareness of the multivariate possibilities in every word to subvert the established and generally accepted order, here works against the poststructural agenda), to understand that the subject of the poem is the same entity subjected to power but not that this entity is also potential change agent, has led in its most extreme incarnations (in much L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry) to dead graphemes on the white void of the page and the murder of the subjective speaker.

Such poetry has not only eviscerated meaning and embalmed the subject but is egregiously elitist. The limitations of language to achieve meaning for segments of the population seems valid, but how does anyone who is not steeped in critical and philosophical esoterica, Derrida and Barthes et al, understand the assertions in a poem in which certain premises are presented as a given? The paradox in Barthes is, of course, that the reader seems more subjectively alive than the writer, but if so the writers of such poetry are at least conscious enough to assume a small but “enlightened” readership, as if their work were an inside joke or the answer to a koan shared with a sneer among adepts. Worse, however, is the tendency among these writers, including those poets whose work has been self-consciously inflected by poststructural assertions but who do not fit neatly into the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school, such as the Jorie Graham of The End of Beauty, to use what seem to be canned devices. Although I assume the intended effect, if such non-poststructural language can be excused, of the blanks Graham uses throughout that book is to enact certain of poststructuralism’s premises, such as offering up the possibility of infinite word choices and therefore potentially infinite interpretations in her use of elision/omission, at best such devices are overused; but mostly these poets seem to ride a one trick thematic pony. Even the reader who is steeped sufficiently in esoterica to understand frequently wants to howl, “OK we get it…now what? Please, step beyond these tired assumptions and do something new with words.” Which is of course exactly what those assumptions preclude.

In short, these poets have taken arguably valid philosophical assumptions as regards the relationship of language to power, and control and privilege, and replaced language itself with a silence to equal death. The most thanatos-ridden civilization cannot long stand such dark self-consciousness, such absolute quiet, and these poems are emblematic of the withering-away out of which America’s poetry, if it is to survive, must be reborn.

Renaissance?

     And these tend inward to me and I tend outward to them,
     And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
     And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
                                                  Walt Whitman

     In the imagination we are…
     locked in fraternal embrace,
     the classic caress of author
     and reader. We are one. Whenever
     I say “I” I mean also “you.” And so,
     together, as one, we shall begin.
                                                  William Carlos Williams

So, rather than turning our backs and walking into the nearest wilderness, if one can still be found, to live out our days on trout and snow melt, what must poets do if poetry is to grow again out of its own decayed carcass? How can the dead grapheme give way to the well placed phoneme and, ultimately, flower into loaded morphemes? How can American poetry not only be reborn but transcend its elitist former incarnations, those before it composted so utterly, without losing the best of what that poetry was?

Before these questions can be broached, however, account must be made of that other, much-less-discussed participant in the poem, the reader; and here I must admit we will swerve dangerously toward despair. For one thing, I am a poet and thus open to accusations of sour grapes (and I readily admit to that part of the poet’s condition: whining about not being understood), but this part of the interaction that is a poem is difficult to evaluate more because of the complex psychosocial scope of the exchange than my vested interestbut herein lies what is at stake if poetry is allowed to die away completely.

In the bad old days, the poem’s meaning was assumed to be fixed and only “experts,” critics and professors, knew for sure what the thing meant. Although there was much lively critical discussion among the New Critics themselves, too many of their academic disciples tended to view the poem as equation: tone + figurative language + rhetorical situation + etc. = specific theme. Happily, that exercise in official reality gave way to what conservatives would characterize as idiosyncratic readings that were all somehow relevant, even if many veered toward the irrational, since any “true” reading was of necessity encyclopedic. Obviously, although decentralizing and democratic in the extreme, communication suffered since all but the most psychotic interpretations (and why not these?) were viewed as valid within the constraints of the individual interpreter’s personal experience.

However, synthesis of these dialectical extremes has yielded something far darker than mere convolution of meaning. The suppliant reader who once sat at the foot of the professor or critic for an exegesis now hears only pandemic noisethe poem as noise as well as its interpretation. That is, if those potential interpreters of the poem even bother to speak. Hence teachers who don’t teach poetry except as the strange artifact of an age and the virtual extinction of the contemporary poetry critic, especially as strident interpreter of the poem in relation to the culture at large. Consequently, the reader him/herself is silent before anything that remotely resembles a poem.

To some extent of course poets are to blame. Poetry that is solipsistic and banal and masturbatory (i.e. seems to assume no reader, no other, and speaks to little beyond the poet’s own tiny life) demands at best a voyeuristic reading or, more likely, a completely passive one in which no meaning is achieved for anyone except, maybe, the poet. The words just flow by for the reader like words across a screen.

But in an age in which information is entertainment, in which music is a vehicle of corporate pandering, in which the image especially is omnipresent as an adjunct to advertising, to trap us in that bleak simulacrum, in which all realities are mediated and thus vitiated and consequently our being attenuated, it remains to be seen whether we have merely transcended the limitations of interpretation (i.e. all is, merely, noise) or if our readers have lost the capacity for empathy and critical reason that any real achievement of meaning requires.

Therefore, the first logical objective for a reborn American poetry is to steal back what mass/capitalist culture has stolen from us: namely, music and imagery that enacts meaning for our readers. That is, we do not want to regain the “tyranny of the metronome” or end-rhymed lines for their own sake (mostly because strident form reflects a more ordered universe than we can believe in and thus is inadequate to contain what we must convey), not technical facility of any kind for its own sake. Nor do we wish to canonize any stand toward the world. But poetry needs sound wedded to sense in order to awaken the higher cognitive faculties of readers, to open the doors of perception for them via a sensual engagement with the work. Like the moderns and some of the post-moderns, we need to sing, to paint pictures; but neither for its own sake. Our readers, once awakened, must be inspired, inflamed, saddened, truly sexually aroused, goaded to action…something. Robert Bly laments in a recent essay for the literary magazine Black Moon that “maybe none of us, now that the language has been worked over so incessantly, by advertisers or evangelists, can create something that is consistently brilliant, golden, resonant,” but one thing is certain: art for art’s sake won’t cut it, or art as effluvia of the tiny alienated self, or there will be no art, period. Noise untranscended remains noise.

Which brings us to the purpose for poetry and the promised discussion of meaning. It is conceded that any act of communication is an attempt to control discourse. Writing is, poetry especially (or at least it should beso curse me for being prescriptive), an act of violence, even if the aim is beauty (another discredited concept, ringing as it does of Platonic idealismall puns intended here too). It is an act of violence against the pathetic way-things-are, against exclusion and control, against the average citizen’s complacency as he/she sits vacant eyed before the bizarre remnants of civilizationlong an old bitch gone in the teeth, as Pound said, but now one of the walking dead and “living” off the blood of conscripted others.

In short, American poetry must also be far more than sensation and emotion; it must contain ideas again. When Williams said, “No ideas but in things,” he did not mean that poems were merely to be the containers of objects, but enactments (as in to make active, a la Charles Olson’s assertion in “Proprioception”) of ideas through the constituents of the work, the object being to momentarily reify ideas rather than to wax abstract, to leave room for the reader in this dance to interpret meaning as it is inflected by his/her own reality, their own being, to argue with other readers, to argue with the poet about what his/her poem says or does not say, to achieve some dynamic and provisional consensus, then to re-read the poem and start again.

And the poem must be inclusive, the poet a Whitmanic cannibal swallower of all the speakers he/she meets in order to give them voice, especially the utterly voice-less. The self no diminished oversoul, of course, not the diametrical opposite of the current tiny creatures who only ambivalently occupy our compost, but a real product of human joy and suffering that must be sung, must be shouted, must be enacted to save us all from mechanomorphisis, to save us all from the willing slavery of market place and media that the masses, no longer even suffering in quiet desperation, seem sometimes to have already entered.

Envoi

I can hear the voices of exasperation already: poets once more the unacknowledged legislators of the real? Who do they think they are? Poetry, the salvation of democratic individualism and the rebirth of real discourse? Right, and Grandpa Ezra was a fascist and some Romantics wrote opium-induced paeans and Rimbaud gave up poetry for gun-running (which is part of his celebrity but false) and the author of arguably the most widely read poem of the last half of the twentieth century proudly announced in that very poem his pederastic appetites and old so-and-so got scandalously drunk at his reading in our town and had adulterous sex with the hostess/her daughter/son/pets….

In her essay, “A Leak in History” (What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, 1993), Adrienne Rich diagnosed what America is lacking as sensual vitality and pointed out how that lack leads to amnesia, the forgetting of our past as devastation in our present, and anomie, the personal that exacerbates the societal that deepens and reinforces the personal. Poetry has the potential to arouse all six senses (mind, as in Buddhist thought, being the sixth), and, thereby, to help us in some small way to retain/regain our humanity. Just maybe, if readers feel breath (spiritus) rising from their bellies, through their chests and shining in their vocal chords, feel the buzz of creative attention deep in their brains, perhaps the species can again achieve an active connection to the universe, to life, can again belong here. And if we belong here, perhaps some notion of community, of shared identity, of individual identity that stands in opposition to all that is negative about what the species has wrought (please note the pun ) thus far, renaissance is not so far fetched an idea.

That said, I am no utopian and have few illusions about the future of the culture or about poets as extra-human, which would of course only be an admission that we are extra-flawed (as I said, I am a cynic, certifiably), but a poem is potentially, as Williams said, the ground of the dance, where the poet and the reader can do the reality two step…and, right now, too few are dancing. However, some few poets and their courageous publishers and hungry readers are dancing, which brings us to that assertion of hope I made at the outset.

Although chaotic, and death always isthe final dissolve, absolute decadencethe current poetry scene is at least multivariate, filled with voices of all persuasions. The mainstream remains monolithic, exclusionary and elitist and conservative, but in truth educated, upper-class white males are no longer the only arbiters of what poetry should be in America. In fact, part of our conundrum is precisely that fecundity, that mad complexity, which inevitably yields a widely disparate perception of what good poetry is; but that fecundity also reflects our desire to be inclusiveand not just in that Whitmanic version mentioned above, but in terms of who gets to speak, whose experiences are as valid as anyone’s experience. However, my overall assertion here is that most strains of poetry, however vibrant when initially sprouted, have become static at best, if not destructive, have declined unto being compost, albeit a nutrient rich compost.

And out of this luxurious chaos the first tentative new growth can be witnessed in the form of literary magazines like Black Moon, which promotes a poetry of imagination that rises out of South American and East European Surrealism (as opposed to the mostly frivolous French variety), and Semi-Dwarf Review which offers up a mix of the same in combination with authentic spoken word poetry that reflects the working class reality of the poets who produce it. Likewise, Cedar Hill Review publishes poetry of depth, of ideas, frequently political work that dares to be didactic but that is never simplistically so; the Pannus Index attempts to explore the very difficult terrain of American literature in thematically focused quarterly issues; and a brand new publication, The Raw Seed Review, launched its inaugural issue recently with the most authentic poetry its young editor could solicit.

This is obviously a very short list, but the whole list is, sadly, not much longer. However, that these few exist is indeed cause for celebration. The editors have managed to attract writers, and readers, whose sensibilities have not been numbed by media saturated American life, who have not yet succumbed to meaninglessness, but, on the contrary, who stand in opposition to it. A cause for hope, indeed.