Modeling OPCA Infections

[Burnaby49]

First, a qualifier. This posting is not the result of my sole effort. Much of my work on Quatloos is the result of collaboration, relying on the help of others. Does anyone really think I could pump out this huge volume of high quality material working alone? While I get the credit my postings are often a group effort. This posting is an example of group contribution. Just keep in mind that "I" and "me" is really "us" and "we". And if you disagree with my analysis and conclusions it might lead to a lively debate. So, that said, on to the topic;

I've been watching the rise of the UK contingent on Quatloos, and being increasingly impressed with their efforts and their response to the Goodfy and WeRe idiocy from that jurisdiction. That, has led to me thinking a lot about how very different the OPCA phenomenon has been in various nations. And puzzling as to why this should be so.

First, kind a of brief recap:

United States: OPCA concepts first stewed in far right wing, racist communities. In the 1980's farm crisis they expand from those starting points to a rural anti-debt phenomenon. In the 1990's the first wave collapsed, but spawned two separate but interrelated successors: a guru-driven tax protestor phenomenon, and the first wave of sovereign citizens, who globally rejected US federal authority.

The tax protestor stream continued on its own to the present, and crossed ethnic and wealth lines. It has few geographic nodes, but instead is guru-based, advertising by the Internet.

The Sovereign Citizens also continue but diverged into several branches:

a) the oldest being rural, white, libertarian, anti-government blue collar types who broadly overlap with the extremes of the Tea Party,

b) the Moors, and

c) an emerging younger variant of the Sovereign Citizens who are aligned with the Occupy Movement, are obsessed with modern conspiracy theories, and may include left wing and even 'liberal' beliefs (and paranoia).

The first and third subgroups are a 'headless conspiracy'. There do not seem to be key figures in the modern Sovereign Citizen movement, instead there is a large enough supply of 'stuff' accumulated and circulating in these groups as hidden truths that a lot of Sovereigns use to all but self-educate, buying additional materials from the many different guru/vendors. The main product that is actually sold are debt elimination schemes. The Moors are somewhat more guru-based, and geographically clustered in their various churches but the majority of Moorish recruitment seems to occur in a prison context.

Canada: Canada started with its own indigenous and unique OPCA phenomenon that largely related to income tax and used constitutional arguments: the PreDetaxers. In the late 1990's to early 2000's this hybridized with US Sovereign Citizen concepts and led to the Detaxer movement, an OPCA movement that promised various mechanisms to avoid income tax obligations and was mass marketed on a commercial basis by a number of gurus as 'secret and tricky knowledge'. In my prior incarnation as a federal income tax auditor I was familiar with those. The Detaxers collapsed when their customers found out their ideas did not work. Detaxers promoted primarily via social networks, secondarily via the Internet.

Separately Robert Menard invented the Freemen-on-the-Land movement, marketed to low-income, left wing, anti-government communities in BC and then moving east. Freemanism promised global freedom from government action and free stuff on demand (Belanger - Give me my AISH!). Menard's theoretical basis was pretty weak at best - he grabbed concepts from the US Sovereign Citizens and Detaxers. This did not matter since his customer base was stupid beyond belief and 'goal oriented'.

Freemanism grew steadily in no small part due to its promises, but also because Menard did not do anything with his concepts except promote. Eventually, enough followers tried these concepts and failed, and the followers wondered when Menard would ever deliver. The Freemen began to break up and look for new gurus. Freemanism spread through personal social networks but those were then reinforced by effective Internet marketing/social media tools.

Republic of Ireland: OPCA concepts emerged suddenly and on a broad basis after 2010 and the bursting of the property bubble. There were very few key guru figures who promoted OPCA concepts as politically and legally legitimate alternatives to the mainstream debt response. Attitudes were more anti-bank, less anti-government. The phenomenon was principally commercial and secondarily social: OPCA actors sold debt avoidance schemes, mainly mortgages. There did not seem to be much 'peer to peer' cohesiveness or communication. To those not in the know, this looked like an emerging political party with an unusual conceptual basis - not all that much different from, say, the first-wave Social Credit party in Canada. For those of you who do not know about the Social Credit movement (all of you) here is Wikipedia on it;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Cre ... _of_Canada

We don’t talk a lot about the Irish Freemen, but there’s a very good discussion here (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthre ... 2056353782). The Freeman party, “Direct Democracy Ireland”, is discussed here in detail (http://www.politics.ie/forum/current-af ... eland.html).

United Kingdom: OPCA concepts emerged more gradually in the late 2000's and onward in social outsider communities, and eventually focus principally on debt elimination, and secondarily on freedom from government, a la the Canadian Freeman-on-the-Land phenomenon. While commercial gurus existed and were obviously influential, the OPCA community had a strong, social peer-to-peer aspect. Mass gatherings and personal socialization appear important. This branch is unusually weak on theory, but strong on social activism and drama.

Australia and New Zealand: OPCA activities were small scale and restricted to kook fringes. In a lot of ways it looks like the Canadian PreDetaxers. People who are already nuts, eccentric, and extremists adopt these ideas. They can be left-wing, right-wing, aboriginal - doesn't matter. They are universally viewed by the public as outsiders. Very minor guru activity that leads to small-scale scams, say on the level of the Sovereign Squamish Nation, or CERI.

So what gives? Why do these different jurisdictions have such radically different social applications of the same pseudo legal concepts? I think it's very interesting that a very limited set of toxic beliefs can be adapted for so many different purposes.

So just some thoughts off the top of my head.

1. Social Elements

First, I don't think anyone would dispute that the OPCA phenomenon is a social one. I have seen very, very few true 'lone gunmen' in this world. Sometimes they are the only actor in their geographic area, but if that is the case when you dig deeper it usually becomes obvious the solo OPCA actor is tightly meshed with an online OPCA social community. I think social reinforcement is necessary to hold these beliefs because they diverge so broadly from the norm that an OPCA affiliate's 'day to day' peers are not likely going to buy in and support OPCA belief. That drives association with like-minded peer groups, and increasing isolation from the mainstream population.

This is further perpetuated by the fact that OPCA affiliates see themselves as superior to their social peers because of their secret knowledge. This draws them even further from normal social links, and deeper into their introspective OPCA communities where mutual masturbation is not just an norm, it's a lifestyle.

Now that said, I think an argument can be made that the US may represent an exception to that 'isolated peer group' model because its mass media conspiracy-driven 'hidden secret knowledge' perspective has become so all-pervasive in that nation that, when coupled with their abysmal education system, their sovereign contexts do not seem all that wildly outside the normal range of belief or discussion. "Live Free or Die" and the second amendment set up a social norm that is often already half-way towards sovereign beliefs. That fosters a broader acceptance and spread of these ideas, and less social estrangement with OPCA affiliation. It just doesn't seem that abnormal as it does in Canada. That might explain the estimates of there being about 300-500 thousand OPCA affiliates in the US.

2. Collective Action

In most jurisdictions with OPCA infections, state/institution interactions with OPCA affiliates are distributed and occur on a small scale or with individuals. For example, in Canada I am only rarely aware of significant numbers of OPCA affiliates meeting physically, or taking actions together. Even with my extensive court experience I've seen very few 'packed court rooms'. In Alberta, another OPCA centre, there has not been a single filled courtroom since about 2008, where at one hearing there were maybe about a dozen CERI members in attendance. I think the pattern is similar in the US.

There is, however, a twist. When I talk to the old-timers in this world I'm told that back in the early Detaxer days it was quite common that a Detaxer hearing would see crowds of dozens of supporters, and would include Courtroom Antics. This is reflected in some of the old Detaxer jurisprudence. But now, it just never happens. My limited access to US history indicates something similar. You go to the Posse Comitatus, Militia, Montana Freeman phases, and collective action existed at least occasionally. Now, mass action, like the Bundy Ranch confrontations, is extremely unusual.

But in the UK and Northern Ireland it is the opposite. Not only are collective actions common in courtrooms and social contexts, they are a key element of the process. The drama of these group interpersonal meetings seems to strongly reinforce OPCA identity - look at my peers doing things together. I suppose this is a tangible indication that the OPCA affiliate is not alone, but is a part of the leading edge of a larger phenomenon.

Why the difference? Why did collective action die out in the US and Canada? (And never existed in Australia/NZ?)

My theory is that it has to do with geography. In Canada and (less so) in the US when you spread OPCA affiliates around the land their just aren't that many within a relatively quick commute from one another. Probably the best dataset I am aware of suggests in Alberta there are maybe 600 OPCA affiliates over the past 15 years, and that includes persons whose activity is as limited as witnessing an OPCA document. This isn't a big bunch. When you consider those are then split up into multiple factions, then it becomes quite difficult to gather 30-40 people in one place. This is particularly true for the movements whose social existence is primarily online, like the Freemen.

If you have a large enough population concentration of ordinary joes, then you may also develop a 'critical mass' of random OPCA affiliates. I think that happens in Vancouver, but even here, collective action is not common. When I attend OPCA trials and OPCA based tax evasion hearings there is usually only a small (sometimes only me) contingent of supporters sitting in. Surprisingly the Poriskyite tax evaders draw supporters like Master Gee and Charles Holmes who are obviously on close terms with the accused even though they themselves are not Poriskyites, indicating that there might be underground social links outside my knowledge. I've attended two OPCA seminars here in Vancouver, Chief Rock Sino General's is reported here;

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=9377&start=180#p162842

And Brisson's tax avoidance seminar is reported here;

viewtopic.php?f=50&t=10201#p176388

Both involved groups who seemed to know each other from past interaction and were comfortable as a group. I have no idea how much of that actually goes on but I suspect not a lot. Thirty three million people spread about the world's second largest country means it is hard to gather a critical mass.

Contrast that to Northern Ireland and the UK. In both jurisdictions the entire OPCA community can gather in only a couple of hours of travel time. This is a powerful reinforcement to OPCA affiliation because you can actually see it, in person. You're not alone, and group action provides its own mob identity. (Arguably in the UK you combine the fact the stereotypical affiliate appears to be lower class, dumb as a brick, often on the dole, and perhaps with a bit of hooligan history, and this group identity through action is just that much more powerful.)

I think this also helps explain why the Canadian Freeman-on-the-Land movement has led to so little 'real world' activity. It's had lots of affiliates, and online they are noisy as hell. But in the real world they are socially isolated from one another, and most are simply lazy basement dweller petty criminal types. I notice again and again how much Freeman OPCA activity is defensive: I'm in legal trouble (debt or criminal) - Save Me Guru Menard! It's only when directly threatened that the Freeman goes active.

3. OPCA Affiliation as Disease

I think that the OPCA phenomenon can be viewed as a kind of social disease that can be modeled via epidemiology. An OPCA infection requires OPCA ideas to be introduced to a vulnerable subpopulation where:

a) the ideas are new
b) the ideas are plausible within their pre-existing belief set of that subpopulation
c) the results of OPCA affiliation are desirable to the subpopulation

I do not think a guru is actually necessary to drive the infection, but rather they act as a force multiplier. The same is true for the 'quality' of the pseudo legal scheme. The Three/Five Letters foisted unilateral agreement scheme is powerful because it only uses a small variation from the real law - contracts are not accepted by silence. Beyond that, it's vaguely legal-ish. Worse, Joe Public may not understand that acceptance must be expressed because they will have had experiences with things like parking in parking lots, and they do not understand that the act of parking is an acceptance, not an offer. Similarly software shrink-wrap licences and pre-existing agreements to unilateral variations on utility and banking arrangements also create the impression that the "silence is acquiescence" rule actually exists.

Or an OPCA meme may have general acceptance be because it offers so much, like the utterly ungrounded Strawman theory. I continue to be baffled that anyone buys into the Strawman, but it's bloody well universal. Why? I think it's what the lure promises, and that it provides a rich conspiratorial narrative that must appeal to some subgroups. It's a complex tale, and there are those range of little 'tidbits' that supposedly support the truth, like the Dunn & Bradstreet governments as corporations listings.

So returning to the infection model, that explains much of what we have seen. The Detaxers promised something almost anyone would want - more money! That's a good lure - and it worked. The scheme was modestly successful because it was too good to be true (natural immunity), but where it had a good huckster spreading it the infection could get pretty established (Grande Prairie Alberta, where 1/50 of the entire population at least dabbled with Poriskyism).

Acquired immunity to the OPCA memes came with failure - and that is where it was tough for the Canadian Detaxers. They were very up front on their litigation, shared their materials, and soon unfavorable written decisions accumulated. The host population became immune because they could see they would not get what they wanted. Detaxer type schemes still can work in Canada where you have a naive target population (i.e. the Fiscal Arbitrators), but as a whole the chance of a 'mass infection' in the general Canadian population is very, very low.

So let's look at Freemanism. Here, the host population (lefty, hippy, pothead, criminal scum) are wildly fond of anything that will get them free bucks and The Man off their back. A very vulnerable population. Menard was clever in the sense that he boosted the infection by using social media and he picked and chose among a range of OPCA motifs and schemes created by others. It's pretty remarkable when you look in detail at what Menard says and writes just how incomplete and undeveloped his ideas are. But, he was opportunistic, stole the 'best strains' of OPCA memes that had succeeded at least temporarily elsewhere, and created a substantial infection that transmitted effectively through the Internet medium.

Both the Detaxers and Freemen really scale up in the early 2000's, but by the middle of the decade the Detaxers are in retreat, but the Freemen are going strong. Why? I think it's due to the slow acquisition of acquired immunity in the Freeman population.

That's a result of several factors. First, Menard avoided anything like a test case that could have exposed his ideas as false. Until we started investigating Menard closely he had managed to conceal his failures. It's notable that by the middle of the 2000's Menard is never near a courtroom, either as a participant or directly behind the scenes. He's learned it is important to point vaguely to successes, and blame his followers for their own failures. His recent self-immolation by taunting the Toronto police was a bizarre aberration from his normal caution and indicated even he might have started believing his own propaganda.

Second, Freemanism is defensive - it blocks The Man when he's after you - and the typical Freeman is not worth attacking. Didn't pay your taxes? Probably not worth much and not worth CRA pursuing. Being a total asshole about that parking ticket? Why pursue that - it costs too much. $351.32 in outstanding credit card debts? Banks write it off. A typical Freeman is so marginal economically and socially that they can 'drop out' and purportedly think they won.

That is very different from the Detaxers, where an entire local cohort of Poriskyites would abruptly receive their unfavorable re-assessments, know one another socially, and then say "uh oh..."

Third, Freemanism was broadly distributed geographically, so it was less likely Freemen would be watching one another's failures at close quarters. That slowed 'acquired immunity'. Worse, the typical unsuccessful Freeman hid his failures from his peers. These guys lie as a lifestyle, and have an ego to match.

The net result is that only slowly did it dawn on some (and still not all) of the Freeman community that nothing worked. Menard kept tantalizing them with promises of The Big Thing - and never delivered, but no one seemed to confront him. So we had a slow infection with limited symptoms. The Freeman pathogenic meme was relatively benign to its host population, and so immunity was only slowly acquired. Whenever someone with a real job, substantial assets, or a real legal problem (serious crime, child custody issues etc) tried to use Freemanism it was a disaster, but that was the exception, rather than the norm.

So if I'm correct on this model, it seems to me that we should see an abrupt collapse of the UK and Northern Ireland OPCA phenomena. (Arguably that is already underway in Northern Ireland). Another thing that I think makes a big difference in how an OPCA infection progresses is how the courts respond. I've noticed that it seems to make a big difference whether there are written unfavorable judgments - these are a challenge after all - but it is even more important that those be more than a "wrong, bugger off" response. This is why I place such importance on documentation. It is fact, not opinion, and if published decisions prove they can't win in court this can have a severe negative effect on their beliefs.

In the US there are a host of "wrong, bugger off" judgments. They obviously are a challenge, but it does not seem to strike so effectively at the developed matrix of OPCA beliefs and conspiracy. In Canada and Northern Ireland judges have often provided much more developed, reasoned responses, and I think that has been a real challenge for Freeman followers. I find it fascinating that, as we have released more and more court materials into the OPCA world, we do not see challenges that these are falsified, or a fraud. Instead, court materials are actually accepted and analyzed, in substance. Sure, that means we get lame arguments such as Meads v Meads only applies to family litigation (nope) or less lame arguments that it is a mass of obiter dicta (and it is, but now actually accepted and applied obiter dicta - thus ex-obiter dicta), but it's fascinating that Menard, for example, has not argued that his Ontario court records are faked. His response has been to shut up and hope people forget about that.

The UK is an interesting infection scenario because they don't produce written reported judgments at the lower trial courts where OPCA interactions occur. We have just now seen with the Tom Crawford example when an unfavorable written decision IS released. It's devastating, because it provides a complete are rational narrative.

The media are another method to cause challenge, but sadly as we have observed, they are an erratic support, at best.

Thoughts? Observations? Nobody but us is looking at these people as a social phenomenon (thanks academia!), so I'm very interested in developing models and explanations for what is going on to better explain these lovely, lovely folk.

And crush them, of course.

[vampireLOREN]

That explained the concept to me, I have never really grasped what would drive someone to imagine this would work in an urban environment. If you lived the "simple" rural life based on barter/trade its actually quite appealing. But to reside in a modern city and basically PONCE
( a lovely word ponce ) your way taking as much and putting nothing back is just wrong.
I was very interested in the "moors" , they have yet to find their way into British Society.
We do though have the Hebrew Israelites and in the UK they are heading along the Freeman route.
There is a blog talk radio show called TALKREAL SOLUTIONS run by a Richard TYRONE Thompson
he has built a large following and his plan is to link all the various groups together. While this show is American based it now spends its week end broadcasting from the UK. Where this becomes weak is the fact that they cannot envisage linking up with white people, like the Moors they are apparently based on care for their own folk. What is of concern is they do see violence as a means to an end. I also feel that many of the UK followers (the native English/Scottish etc) are natural fringe group joiners and are right wing....or even racist. What strange people we all are
to live in our little world. I thank you for this thread and will read your thoughts again, I look forward to the thoughts of others too.

[Bones]

In terms of the UK, one thing I have noticed is that all of the Guru's are charging for their knowledge. Some charge for meetings - seen some at £40 per person. Others sell products such as guides and dictionary's they have written themselves. We now have WeRe bank charging members a monthly fee and an additional fee for a cheque book.

There seems no end of people that are willing to part with there money to pay for the latest crack pot ideal that common sense if nothing else tells you won't work.

As for the Guru's, in the UK at least I think they are just in it for the money

[The Observer]

In the 1980's farm crisis they expand from those starting points to a rural anti-debt phenomenon. In the 1990's the first wave collapsed, but spawned two separate but interrelated successors: a guru-driven tax protestor phenomenon...

Unfortunately, this is not correct. The tax protest movement started long before the farm crisis of the '80's. There was a sizeable movement during the 60's and 70's, and was led by gurus who were pushing gibberish similar to what you see now in current tax protest and sovrun circles. The American sovrun movement, I would argue, got its momentum and attracted adherents due to the farm crisis (and the Ruby Ridge and Waco shootouts most certainly helped), although it first appeared in the '70s (Posse Comitatus).

You may want to look up individuals such as Arthur Porth (guru during the 60's), Irwin Schiff (got his start in the '70s), and Gordon Kahl (founder of Posse Comitatus, started protesting taxes in the '60s). There were a number of tax protester cases in the 70's that were in federal court based on these arguments and other ones that the gurus were circulating out there in the public.

There were others and the primary targets of recruitment by the gurus were typically workers and engineers in the aerospace industry, and blue-collar worker in assembly line factories (such as Detroit). Airline pilots started getting attention in the late 70s and early 80's. The gibberish being pushed at that time were many and some of them keep getting recycled and sold again by the next generation of gurus. The 5th and 13th amendment arguments, paper -currency-is-illegal theory, and labor-is-not-taxable nonsense were some of the early ones.

In some case the gurus would provide "helpful" instructions to the marks how they could get around the government; one such tactic was increasing the w-4 withholding claim to 99 exemptions. That worked great until the IRS got a regulation change that required employers to contact the agency whenever an employee took more than 9 exemptions. It also helped that a penalty of $500 was assessed as well for these W-4 shams. After that, the marks started realizing that losing $500 of pay in addition to having to be on a garnishment to repay the income tax was not getting them ahead. And it didn't help the marks when they filed the returns prepared per the instructions the guru had sold them.

The common wisdom is to lump tax protest and sovrun movements together, especially when the issue of inherent racism is present. I think it is fairer to say that the tax movement had some founders who were racist and when their gibberish failed to work, they then decided to escalate their actions in order to beat the system, thus moving into the sovrun arena. Other tax protest gurus have avoided that road and only focus on evading taxes. The sovrun movement has eclipsed the tax protest movement for the time being, and I think that is because most people realize that tax protesting has failed time and time again and that it simply does not pay. The sovrun movement with its silly Denny's trials. pseudo-legal filings and doubletalk has fooled most of the desperate out there (such as those who went under in the subprime market) into believing or wishing that what they are hearing is true. The incident in Nevada where Cliven Bundy stared down the government only adds credibility to these conmen.

[Burnaby49]

Me culpa. I should have recalled the Posse Comitatus, a very nasty group. I'm much more familiar with the Canadian Freemen than I am with your American sovereigns and the Freemen are the spawn of the Detaxers who paved the way for the entire movement. Your movement was started by nutcases, ours was started by tax avoidance.

As far as airline pilots go you sent us Eldon Warman, an American Airlines pilot. Eldon started the Detax movement. Thanks a lot.

[arayder]

The freeman race to the moral bottom occurs when freemen use the very real failures of governments (e.g. unjust wars, burdensome taxation, disregard for human rights, etc.) to dismiss any expectation of good government and ultimately excuse the careless and lawless behavior of all freemen. This hypocrisy ignores the freeman tenant to do no harm and seeks to excuse hurtful, dangerous behavior by citing what freemen see as a more dreadful acts by “the powers that be“.

Sometimes, ironically, this excuse is employed implying that a government action, related or not, somehow caused the otherwise independent freeman to act badly. We are given the childish excuse that the freeman’s scam, deceit or dangerous act is okay simply because this government, or that bank, did something bad too.

Freeman also attempt to make justifiable and perfectly acceptable uses of the police powers of government into an excuse for their bad deeds. Stops and arrests for drunk driving, excessive speeding, public intoxication, illegal fire arm possession and more become the justification for freemen making fake 911 calls, paper terrorism of judges, occupying private businesses, harassing calls to police stations, assaulting cops . . .and in one case killing two police officers!

Like Jessie James who justified robbing banks and trains (passengers included) because he felt he was wronged by northern railroads and banks, some freemen have cut loose committing every fraud, careless act and crime their twisted minds can think of.

Eventually, James ran up against a town in Minnesota that didn’t see his attempt to rob their banks, which held the money local farmers needed for spring planting, as anything other than a criminal act.

Like it did with the James gang, the freeman string is going to run out.

[littleFred]

Peering at anything through the narrow tube of the internet may neglect wider issues, but this is the view as I see it.

The current UK SovCit (for want of a better term) movement has a single focus: getting out of debt without paying anything, with lesser side-issues of not getting into debt in the first place (eg by not paying taxes or fines or motor insurance or utility bills).

The single focus has come about because one site, http://www.getoutofdebtfree.org , promotes a variety of schemes that purport to do what it says on the tin. Discussion of failures, or of wider implications (eg "who will receive state benefits if no-one pays taxes?") are brushed aside or culled.

This focus has become narrow very recently, over the past year or two, as other websites such as John Harris's TPUC have faded away. I think the reason is very simple: getting out of debt, without paying, appeals to a wide segment of the population. Most people in the UK have a perception that their living standards have not improved over the past decade; that wages have not kept pace with basic big-tickets items (housing, taxes, utilities); that banks are responsible for economic hardship while bankers take massive salaries and bonuses; that ordinary people are paying the price of affluence enjoyed by the very few; that ordinary people have no say in matters that concern them; that ordinary people are downtrodden by the political class (which largely overlaps with the affluent class); that ordinary people do not benefit from living in a (comparatively) wealthy country; that justice is available only to the rich.

These perceptions have varying degrees of justification, but that isn't important. Perception is everything.

We don't have to scratch the surface of UK gurus very deeply to discover anti-liberal, anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, racist, anti-government, sentiments. These sentiments do not appeal to the masses. The masses don't want to occupy Wall Street or St Paul's Churchyard or care much about fracking. The masses are concerned with their individual daily grind. The gurus pretend they have easy solutions to daily problems.

Peter of England runs seminars that stress, "This is a political Re-movement that just happens to have a bank attached." But the audience don't care about the politics. They care only about how to get their chequebooks that will magic away their debts. If Peter didn't have his magical chequebooks, he would be exactly where he was a year ago and ten years ago: nowhere. Peter understands this. He explains that he himself went down the "laws do not apply to me, I am not the all-capitals Alan Peter Michael Smith" route years ago, but his customers don't need to. They can just pay him and start writing cheques.

The gurus leapt upon Tom Crawford as the ideal poster-child: a solid hard-working down-to-earth father-figure, down-trodden by an evil government-owned bank that tries to steal his house. This could happen to any of us, all for one and one for all, you are either on Tom's side or on the side of the evil corrupt system that oppresses him ... the narrative is trivially and depressingly simple.

In common with OPCA everywhere (see Meads v Meads) the gurus tout labyrinthine schemes in order to confuse the gullible. Peter's cheques will pay your bills because this law says and that law says and Bretton Wood and 1933 and ... Peter throws so much mud that the audience forget there was ever a wall. Any common sense they might have, or any sneaking desire to examine the veracity of Peter's statements, is blinded by dreams of paying off their mortgage with one stroke of the pen.

Likewise Tom. His troubles were caused by the bank unilaterally changing his contract as proved by flowers and champagne, and paperwork is fraudulent because it lacks wet-ink signatures and wax or at least red seals and ... and when a judge clears away the mud to explain the situation, yes but no but yes but no but the judge didn't really mean that, or he did but he wasn't wearing a wig so it doesn't really count... yes but no but the details don't matter, what matters is that the system is evil and ...

Looking at the wider picture, the UK has little OPCA activity in the courts. I think there is general realisation that it simply won't work, so it's not worth trying. Sure, some people (eg Lee Munro) try it, but it doesn't get far, and doesn't seem to trouble the courts.

I'd say that summarised the reaction of TPTB. We Brits tolerate or are even fond of our eccentrics. If they don't cause much trouble, why bother trying to stop them? If people who want to scam utilities then pay a scammer for cheques that bounce harmlessly, what's the big problem? We don't go in for physical stuff. No Bundy-style stand-offs. Brit SovCits merely occupy traffic islands, while being careful not to actually obstruct traffic.

It's the British way.

[rumpelstilzchen]

I'd say that summarised the reaction of TPTB. We Brits tolerate or are even fond of our eccentrics. If they don't cause much trouble, why bother trying to stop them? If people who want to scam utilities then pay a scammer for cheques that bounce harmlessly, what's the big problem? We don't go in for physical stuff. No Bundy-style stand-offs. Brit SovCits merely occupy traffic islands, while being careful not to actually obstruct traffic.

It's the British way.

Plus, we don't have guns. You are never going to get shot by a Footle. Shouted at, yes. Shot, no.
UK Footles are relatively harmless.

[eric]

The freeman race to the moral bottom occurs when freemen use the very real failures of governments (e.g. unjust wars, burdensome taxation, disregard for human rights, etc.) to dismiss any expectation of good government and ultimately excuse the careless and lawless behavior of all freemen. This hypocrisy ignores the freeman tenant to do no harm and seeks to excuse hurtful, dangerous behavior by citing what freemen see as a more dreadful acts by “the powers that be“.

Although Burnaby touched on it lightly, there is the very real fact that in Canada there are those using Freeman arguments simply as a method to intentionally defraud the naive. We can see this in the Ty Griffiths saga. Originally they were quite open in their arguments, now they only creep in once they have allready appealed to the natural human trait of greed. "We can save you money by not using lawyers" or "You can delay mortgage payments by using Produce the Note" arguments. All of these arguments have as their underlying root that banks and lawyers cannot be trusted. Similarly, they qualify as a special case under the collective action qualifier. Unlike most of the Freeman proponents they try to be clever to keep their believers socially isolated from anyone else. Communication is always upward, never sideways. Even people who have been scammed into peddling their videos or investing in their properties remain in the dark until a collective court action or they are put in touch with other victims through social media research. So far I've probably talked to at least a dozen people who have been in contact with Derek Johnson and the Kevins and the underlying symptom is that they all believe they are alone in their misfortune. IMHO the crew like it this way, since once enough people realize they have been scammed they can lobby advertisers such as kijiji and the news media to put a halt to their actions.

[grixit]

What Burnaby has here is a good solid start to a Masters thesis in Sociology.

And this:

OPCA Affiliation as Disease

Would make a good title for the PHD thesis.

You should start checking out universities now. And their pubs, too, of course.

[LightinDarkness]

Some of my PhD research (in public administration) is in social capital, and I actually think that you might be observing differences in social capital between US/Canada and other countries.

Social capital is the idea that there is some sort of innate utility in the social relationships we form. When we communicate with the people around us and build feelings of mutual trust and reciprocity, the utility of those feelings can be "stored" as capital for later use. There are two main categories of social capital: bridging and bonding. Bridging social capital is when relationships are built ACROSS groups, while bonding social capital is relationship building WITHIN groups.

In the sovereign citizen world, I think we are seeing that the US/Canada fringe groups mainly build bonding capital. They are inward looking and the result of that is that you don't really see collective action. The feeling of trust they have with each other are only within their small groups. Thus, sovereign citizen ideology operates in silos that pretty much seek to stay apart from each other. That is why you would never, for example, see the Moorish flavor of sovereign citizen woo try to help the Canadian Freeman on the Land sovereign citizen woo. In the UK and Australia (and others), you have more of a bridging social capital phenomena going on. In that case sovereign citizens are building trust across groups, and that facilitates collective action.

Why do we see these cross-country differences in an emphasis on bridging vs bonding social capital? The scholarship isn't clear, although Robert Putnam offers his theory in his book American Grace. Putnam is the founder of social capital theory, and thus we give his work a great deal of weight in the academy. American Grace actually speakings to the tendency of religion to be a bonding social capital generator in the US, but I think it applies to sovereign citizens in terms of its mechanism. The cultural identity of American sovereign citizen groups is inherently fractured. Sovereign citizen mythology developed across existing American racial and social class cleavages, and those cleavages remain as artifacts even now. Ideology inspired by such cleavages will only be capable of building bonding social capital.

There is a reinforcing cycle to bonding and bridging social capital. Bonding capital causes more inward looking trust relationships to form, which causes the group members to only trust other members in their groups. Bridging capital causes more outward looking trust relationships to form, which causes group members to be more open to others in different camps. The former dampens collective action, while the later encourages it.