Eddie Jones, sovereign running for county commissioner

[Lambkin]

Jones is a shoo in for the Shelby County Commissioner post, as he won the democratic primary and will run unopposed.
http://insurancenewsnet.com/oarticle/20 ... 08840.html

As reporters dug into his past Thursday, would-be County Commissioner Eddie Jones was on the phone explaining how he was fired by the Memphis Police Department for drug use 18 years ago and how he recently filed a series of legal papers filled with language borrowed from the extremist Sovereign Citizen movement while trying to keep a bank from foreclosing on his home.

Referring to himself as "a living man created in the image of God, with indefeasible title to our land,'' Jones, along with his wife, Martel, declared in papers filed last year that bank trustees and agents "are hereby directed to immediately CEASE and DESIST any further actions ...''

JJ MacNab, a financial and insurance analyst who's studied Sovereign Citizens for years and has written on the movement for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Jones' paperwork contains a lot of common sovereign ideas.

"It looks like he cut and pasted from a variety of places,'' MacNab said.

[LightinDarkness]

The state Democrat party committee really dropped the ball on this one. Letting the nuts win these kinds of small time elections can really hurt your party brand on the local level. They usually do their own background research on candidates and, if needed (as it would be in this case), throw enough support behind the non-crazy guy to ensure he can at least beat the nuts in the primary. Even if you can't win the general election, having a sov'run nut with your party affiliation is arguably much worse than having the opponent win. Someone is going to get a earful from the national DNC on this one.

Of course in this case he won primary by default, and its in a district where a Democrat win is guaranteed in the general:

"I'm kind of glad all of this is out there,'' said Jones, 55, who as the winner of the May 6 Democratic primary in District 11 is expected to take office in September. The district is heavily Democratic and there is no Republican on the ballot. Election officials say even a write-in candidate couldn't beat him because, by law, any such candidate would have to have been certified 50 days before the primaries.

There is *always* someone at the state level for the RNC and DNC that is supposed to ensure the crazies don't get in like this without a fight. Sometimes they win anyways, but this is a case of a default win where someone was clearly asleep at the switch.

Jones said his differences with the bank started when he withheld payment on his mortgage to protest changes the bank kept making on where to send payments. He's owned his home since 1987 and said he has just three years left on his mortgage.

He is also apparently just stupid. Why in the world would anyone be delusional enough to think withholding payments because of a change in mailing addresses would end up in your favor? Three years left and the guy is dumb enough to risk foreclosure to stomp your feet like a child at the bank? Then on top of it all, he makes things worse by trying to go all sov'run on the bank?

[wserra]

Why in the world would anyone be delusional enough to think withholding payments because of a change in mailing addresses would end up in your favor?

It wasn't exactly just a change in mailing address. According to his complaint, Jones' note and mortgage were assigned on various occasions, then he would get notices to send payments to the new payee. He did not allege the ground on which (if supported by the facts) he might actually have won - the now-familiar MERS/robosigner scenario.

Moreover, the complaint doesn't show Jones to be a full-fringed sovrun. As JJ said, it reads as though he took one paragraph from Column A and another from Column B, some of which paragraphs surely contain sovrun myths. The Sovs are hot topics right now, so that's how the news accounts portrayed him. But I read the complaint simply as the work of some greedy SOB trying to get something for nothing.

IOW, just like many candidates for public office.

[Lambkin]

Yeah I don't see any deep commitment to the sovereign ideal in this guy. But he is such an incredibly bone-headed gullible fool to buy into sovereign citizen B.S. for two seconds, let alone long enough to cut and paste something into a legal filing, I wouldn't want him pumping gas in my county much less acting as county commissioner.

[Demosthenes]

There's more to come on his story...

[LightinDarkness]

Thanks for the clarifications. Although, even if its just superficial sov'run gibberish (or maybe not, given Demo's above reply) - it still seems unusual the local party committee let this happen.

[AndyK]

He definitely drank deeply at the well of sovereignorami.

1 - The complaint specifies a lower case natural man as representative / fiduciary / agent for the ALL CAPS ARTIFICIAL PERSON.

2 - BOTH the lower case and ALL CAPS names indicate copyrights.

3 - Multiple UCC filings have been registered against the property at issue.

4 - An "EFT" ( ??? ) was submitted as payment in full for the loan multiple times.

5 - The complaint whines about the absence of 'wet ink' documents.

6 - the Plaintiff calls the action under the laws of the "united States of America" [Lower case 'u' used multiple times in the document.

7 - The complaint also revolves around 'lending credit' versus lending money by the bank.

8 - et cetera.

Truly, the document appears to be cobbled from a plethora of sovereignorami sources. However, it also appears to be a clone of many of the anti-forclosure documents emanating from the fringes of the Internet.

In all likelihood, the Plaintiff engaged the services of one of the Debt Elimination gurus.

[Pottapaug1938]

EFT = Electronic Funds Transfer.

[LightinDarkness]

EFT as its used in the sov'run community has (like many terms!) a very different meaning than it does to those of us operating in reality.

Starting in 2010 or so, sov'runs seeking to get themselves out of their mortgage began opening bank accounts with some trivial ($1) amount in it and then EFTing that to their mortgage service company. Why? Because based on some insanely bizarre reading of bank laws, even EFTing $1 magically made all the debt disappear in their minds. In practice this theory is the same as other sov'run theories about how writing "payment in full" on checks for nominal amounts magically clears other debts.

They were able to give the delusion of success with this because when they didn't pay their mortgages but EFted some small amount to it and notified the bank, the bank would often (for a few days/weeks) take no acting assuming the full payment was coming. Of course, when the bank discovers a trivial amount had been sent they started collection efforts.

This "method" was all the rage after A4V and promissory notes failed, and was promoted big time by sov'run gurus like Kelby Smith in RuSA. So if someone used this, they were more than superficially involved in sov'run gibberish. In fact, given the array of sov'run gibberish used, this is very likely someone who paid Kelby Smith $3k or so for this from his scam HisAdvocates.org website.

[notorial dissent]

To add my two centimes worth, the current sovrun usage of EFT is the equivalent of the old write a check on a closed account, use a BPN, draft on the Treasury nonsense. I don’t know the genesis of it, but I started seeing/hearing about it about three years ago, and I will agree with LiD that 2010 sounds about right. In any event, I think it traces back to the fraudulent belief that if a payment is posted it closes the account, whether it actually pays it off or not. As with bad checks, the payment will post and be considered tentatively good for a period, and then if it isn’t charged back then it is considered good funds. Same works on EFT charges. They are basically nothing but an electronic check, they post when processed. The thing is, that with Fedwire it can be processed and returned within 24-38 hours depending on the bank involved. So they end up with what amounts to a bounced/returned check, and if they had it processed knowing there were no funds in the account, it is fraud, just exactly like passing a bad check. Some sovruns/scam artists amazingly do seem to move with technology, although not very well in the final analysis it seems, and they get caught all the quicker in the end.