Betrayal of capitalismThe scientific and historical precedents for suicide in analogous situations are stated first. Then I lay out the capitalist pattern that was, in my case, designed to promote or compel this assassination.
I am committed, irreversibly, to resist laissez fair capitalism and support cyberspace capital as the preferred democratic strategy for building up civil resources of resistance. The small fund that I have for continuation of my efforts to support CC, is now exhausted leaving me without the necessary popular or private support to sustain this work and meet my very modest financial responsibilities. Under these conditions, I am guided by the wisdom of the early 20th-century American philosopher and polymath, C.S. Peirce, who in 1902, after being rejected for a grant to prepare his treatise on logic found himself at the end of the line. He then observed in a letter to William James, 12 June 1902, "(W)hen the moment arrives at which there seems to be no rational hope of making my life useful, my duty, as I see it, will be to treat my life just as I would an aching tooth that there was no hope of making useful, I will have it out." [Introduction, Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking, The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, 5-6 P.A. Turrisi, editor].
In my own situation not only is reason for continuing dwindling, but there is
now looming the capitalist strategy to render me a slave of
their
Kleptocracy. I will not accept this. Like the
I do not for a moment consider the lack of financial support for CC as any serious measure of the failure of my project. When I was given the opportunity to present the case for CC at a meeting of the Local Area Board of Pacifica Radio, February 13, 2002, the small group of 50 or so mostly minority residents of the Adams Morgan neighborhood, in Washington, DC, expressed great enthusiasm for the idea. A slide show display on Internet Managed Dialogue produced more than 1000 visitors to the CC web site, during the week of March 11! Moreover, the existing situation is marked by "short-term paralysis of wide spread criticism induced by the 'patriotic' response created to act against 'terrorism'" according to one experienced observer, Brian Jenkins, an Internet-based journalist from Western Australia, in an email message Jan 12. Jenkins also suggests, "A lot of normally sceptical colleagues and organisations seem to have ducked below the trench from fear of being labelled terrorists or unpatriots and/or having their incomes threatened (NGOs especially)". (accent added)
These observations of Brian Jenkins are consistent with a summary of the problems of market based "democracy" and their causes, recently published in, The Market System 234 (Yale University Press 2001), written by Charles E. Lindblom, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics and Political Science at Yale University. Any challenge to elite power, Lindblom observed, "is curbed by an assault on the minds of the masses that persuades them to live within the rules of the market system rather than become 'masters of the situation.'" Indeed, fear itself is a corrupting force, explained by the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi.
A critical aspect of my own story starts at the beginning of my career, when I was a fully indoctrinated capitalist living in Washington, DC. This was in 1954, when I was 24 years of age, I had completed high school with a poor showing, a college drop out, but busy with industrial research and looking for adventure. In the spring of 1954, I decided to move to Puerto Rico. At the time "Operation Bootstrap" was just getting under way in that Caribbean paradise and I was persuaded to find my place in that program after a number of inquiries and explorations with a few Puerto Rican business men and bankers, and officials of the Government of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico that I had made some months previously. These contacts crystallized my Puerto Rican plan when they all came to Washington, DC, to attend the annual Bankers Convention held at the Shoreham Hotel (now the Omni Shoreham Hotel).
I went out to Bolling Air Force Base, and within a day or so I was able to hitch a ride South, on my way to Puerto Rico. I arrived on the Island with but a few pennies pocket money and quickly obtained an income by giving swimming and water skiing lessons at a lovely new Hotel, La Rada, which offered me a concession at their lagoon-side pool. From this Hotel concession, I made new contacts with bankers and business people. I also met my beautiful, future Puerto Rican wife there too, who came one day to apply for a job to help out with swimming and water skiing lessons.
In a short time I graduated to the real estate business. I became a consultant and broker, teaching myself the arts of finance and development from examples found in the local "Bootstrap" development library and by inquiry with accomplished professionals. I learned quickly. Contact with one aspiring mortgage lender, Teodoro Fajardo, led to a shopping center project in the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, another contact with a successful home builder, Juan Jose Otero, led to a fine new hotel project at the heart of Santurce, Puerto Rico which I arranged under a long term lease with Roger Sonnabend, CEO of the Hotel Corporation of America. HCA was just getting started as a major hotel developer in 1956. That hotel was so successful when it opened in 1959, that my former client decided to buy out the lease with HCA for $500,000.00. (Mr. Otero was no hotel manager, unfortunately, and his thriving hotel business soon ran into hard times.)
I continued on my successful adventure in Puerto Rico. In 1960 I assembled and purchased for less than half a million dollars, a large ocean front estate, with an investor group from New York, Connecticut, and Chicago that I organized: 750 acres with 2.5 kilometers of ocean frontage with a fair market value that had grown to some $10,000,000.00 as my development continued. This property was to become my own project as builder-developer; Las Colinas (The Hills), it was called, and what a wonderful project it was!
My bankers agreed. Banco Popular published an ad in The San
Juan Star, Saturday May 4, 1963, declaring:
Banco Popular is proud to have taken part in bringing to the Island of Puerto Rico this exciting new development. Conceived and executed by some of the finest men in their fields (e.g., Master Plan by Hideo Sasaki, Dean of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University, Robert Trent Jones Golf Course, award winning architects, etc.), it will stand as a monument to imagination, planning and effort, and will make possible a new kind of living for thousands of people.
It was about this time that I found out what capitalism was all about. One of the bank officers and owners, Jose Luis Carrion (the younger brother in the family that owned control of the bank), evidently became so excited about Las Colinas project that he decided to deprive me of my property by repudiating the Bank's revolving line of credit, which had been orally agreed to, and by prematurely demanding repayment of their loan. This effectively prevented me from completing the project and making repayment as intended. Jose Luis then invited me to sell out for a paltry sum, which I rejected with a pledge to fight back. I taught myself the law and fought the bank in the US Courts. The Puerto Rican bankers and their lawyers and their friends in the Puerto Rican building industry and in US Court in Puerto Rico all laughed my struggle away, "that crazy Schreibman," they called me!
Nevertheless, the bank's intended thievery was so evident that despite their financial power and arrogance, after an eight year litigation, I won the law suit in a series of judgments that established a precedent for a layman appearing in court to defend his corporation in person (see e.g., Las Colinas, Inc. v. Mason, 377 F.2d 99 (1st Cit. 1967), after first remand, sub nom, In Re Las Colinas, Inc., 426 F.2d 1005 (1st Cir. 1970), after second remand, 453 F.2d. 911 (1971); see also In Re Victor Publishers, Inc., 545 F.2d 285, 286, n.* (1st Cir. 1976) (explaining why Vigdor Schreibman was allowed to personally represent his corporations in Federal Court, namely, due to the "extraordinary legal ability" of the corporation's non-lawyer officer). But the critical fact that led to this successful judgment was my extraordinary luck in having Judge Bailey Aldrich, then Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, preside over all of Las Colinas appeals in fair and impartial proceedings. The First Circuit is where appeals from cases originating in Puerto Rico are heard. Judge Aldrich, I was to learn during my experiences with the Federal Judiciary, is a very rare member of the 3d-branch of American Government.
I made the biggest mistake of my life when that law suit was finally decided in my favor. Several people warned me not to try to continue with my project, my investors, and even Judge Hiram Cancio, himself, former Chief Judge of the US District Court who had made the deciding ruling in the case after many years of ruling against me. I was told by Cancio (at a private dinner party that we both attended with friends during the Christmas season of 1972) that Banco Popular would not allow me to continue, but I went ahead anyway, reasoning that an honest Judiciary was always available to support lawful developments. This reasoning was badly mistaken. The Judiciary, I have learned, is designed to support elite power not reason and justice.
I brought in a new lender, Walter Heller & Company of Miami, Florida, to finance reconstruction of Las Colinas. However, in a secret deal (related to me by a bank director after the death, in 1974, of Abner Kalish, a very worthy individual and my primary banker at Banco Popular), the Heller loan was soon under the control of Banco Popular, repayment of my loan was demanded prematurely, overriding the 30-day grace period for interest payments and years before the agreed due date, and we were back in Federal Bankruptcy Court, invoked to protect Las Colinas property while the new finance controversy was litigated. This time, the bank was prepared with super fire power in opposition to my corporate representation. They brought in an outside law firm, Carlton, Fields, Ward, Emanuel, Smith, & Cutler, from Tampa, Florida. William Reece Smith was President of the American Bar Association. Edward I. Cutler was a member (1976-80), later Chairman (1980-83) of the ABA Special Committee on the Coordination of Federal Judicial Improvements. A special appointment was made for the trial judge in my case by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in direct consultation with Attorney Cutler (a court employee with personal knowledge of the facts revealed to me); it was none other than "Mr. Bankruptcy" himself, the late Aza Herzog, also from Tampa, Florida. New panels of judges in Puerto Rico and Boston were also assigned to hear appeals in the case. [One should not be surprised to learn that the current profile published online, of Edward I Cutler, makes an attempt to cover up his atrocious conduct, by omission of all reference to his association with Las Colinas case, his legal practices in San Juan and Boston, and his leadership position on the ABA Special Committee on the Coordination of Federal Judicial Improvements.]
Quite a party was assembled to deprive me of my property in a series of decisions,
the critical element of which was the Courts' persistent arbitrary refusal to
fairly consider any of my arguments at trial or on appeal, In re Las Colinas
Development Corporation, 12 COLLIER BANKR. CAS. 652 (Banr. D.P.R. 1977),
appeal dismissed, 446 F.Supp. 141 (D.P,R. 1978), aff'd, 585 F.2d 7
(1st Cir. 1978). I later reported the whole story in a book that I published,
Judicial Power and Equal Justice (Amicas 1987) ISBN 0-942539-01-X, the second
essay in a 5-volume series of Essays on the Impact of the Constitution and Legal
System on American Life and Government (Amicas 1987-1990) ISBN 0-942539-2.
The
Critical Legal Studies program placed my books on their recommended list, and
University law libraries around the country as well as two state Supreme Courts
(California and Ohio) purchased copies of the book, which was based on the official
record of the case filed with my Petition for Writ of Certiorari in the
Supreme Court of the United States, Vigdor Schreibman and Las Colinas
Development Corporation v. Walter E. Heller & Company, No. 78-5914 (1978).
When I tried to file my petition on behalf of Las Colinas, the clerk refused
to receive it claiming I had no legal authority to act for the corporation in court.
When I filed a motion asking the Court to decide that matter, the clerk again
refused to receive my motion. When I then moved to file the motion with the
appropriate Justice, personally, the clerk relented and submitted the motion to
the Court, which promptly denied the same, 439 US 1063 (1979) (exception noted,
"Mr. Justice Stewart would grant the motion"). The exception is interesting.
Justice Stewart was the Court's expert on matters of self-representation. He
wrote the opinion in the landmark case, Faretta v. California, 422 US 806
(1975).
Las Colinas controversy received special attention of the US Courts because members of the legal profession and the Judiciary insist on monopoly control over corporate representation in the courts, without any public benefit. This restriction was applied even when the corporation was in financial distress unable to obtain the services of a competent attorney at law. This limitation was confirmed by two well qualified expert witnesses at the trial, Jaime Fuster, Dean of the University of Puerto Rico Law School, and Rafael Rivera Cruz, former Bankruptcy Judge in the case, and a former Solicitor General in the Department of Justice of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico . For their efforts to clarify these issues, both witnesses were insulted by the trial judge, and their relevant, impartial, corroborated, and uncontroverted testimony was completely disregarded by the Courts. Las Colinas was able and willing to defend its own interests, personally, by the corporation's non-lawyer officer who possessed "extraordinary legal ability." The decision to prevent this representation is contrary to common law, antitrust law, and constitutional law, as I argue in my book, but the Courts simply refused to provide a fair trial of those issues, which were presented for review. The Court's repudiation of the right of corporate legal speech and access to the Courts, is also paradoxical.
The corporate right to political speech in the form of political campaign donations, was protected by the Supreme Court, in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 US 765, 777 (1978), with the result that big business corporations can use resources amassed in the economic marketplace, under state charter, to obtain an advantage in the political marketplace that is both unfair and debilitating to the sovereign powers of the people in a democracy. Specific instances of unfairness have been addressed by the Court but without considering the broad impact of the rule amid the collective actions by tens of thousands of wealthy corporations to defeat the American democratic system of Government, see e.g., Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 US 652, 659 (1990). At the same time, the corporate right of legal speech has been restricted when the corporation cannot afford to pay a lawyer, as in Las Colinas (1979), overriding the fundamental right of access to the courts protected under the First Amendment, without any public benefit other than protecting the lawyers monopoly, with the result that lawyers and their wealthy clients can simply rob corporations (and their stockholders and creditors) of their property when they are in distressed financial condition. These two schemes were hatched out of Robber Baron minds, the first, in unabashed defiance of the exclusive power of the people under the Republican form of Government to elect their legislative representatives and a President by popular democratic vote rather than by undue corporate political influence, and the second, out of the public policy of unabashed Kleptocracy - The transferring of wealth from commoners to the upper classes.
Banco Polular and their alies in the legal profession and Judiciary did not stop with depriving me of Las Colinas properties. In the years that followed, I have been pursued with undercover surveilance, intrusions into my home and on my phone, and continuing interruptions of my internet communications. I have been placed under a policy of civil death by continuous denial of my fundamental right to protections under the First Amendment: my right to privacy has been continuously under siege; my right to due process has been continuously violated whenever I must appear and defend myself in court; my rights to protection under the free speech and free press clauses have been crushed; leaving me altogether bereft of a basic foundation for civil existence in an environment of oceanic capitalist aggression and corruption including a deliberate policy to undermine my ability to maintain good physical health.
On February 16, 1990, the US Department of Justice informed Gregory Miller, Document Center Manager, Acumenics Research and Technology, Inc., (ART) of his "deep appreciation and thanks to you and your staff," which explicitly named Vigdor Schreibman, "for your diligent work and loyalty to the project of analyzing data and documents and preparing the evidentiary memorandum to support the Government's case in United States Chemical Corp., et al. Effective the same day, Vigdor Schreibman was terminated from his job by ART for his refusal to complete OPM Standard Form 86 (SF86), for purposes of DOJ security clearance. SF86 was an attempt by the Reagan Administration to subject all Federal Employees to National Security clearance, building a dossier on everyone in the Government, without regard for whether or not any National Security information was at issue in their jobs. The form was a blanket violation of the constitutional privacy rights of hundreds of thousands of Federal Employees, demanding private medical records, financial information, the names of associations that a person belonged to, and other such information, while also demanding a blanket release for any damages for violation of those rights.
My job involved no National Security issues. The demands of SF86 were unconstitutional on its face, for an individual not charged with National Security responsibilities, and in 1990, I properly sued ART in Federal District Court, and also included personal actions against the heads of related agencies, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the US Department of Justice (DOJ), for compensatory and punitive damages, a Bivens suit, following the doctrine of Bivens v Six Unknown Named Agents, 403 US 388 (1971);42 USC § 1983. The US Government moved for dismissal, and after a delay of four years, the trial judge agreed, Schreibman v. Newman, Civ 90-1437, April 13, 1994 (D. DC) (JG. Penn, DJ), ruling plaintiff had failed to allege adequately detailed facts of defendants' wrongful conduct, under a heightened pleading standard then in effect by decree of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That new procedural rule was instituted by the Circuit Court, "to shield public officials from the large number of civil rights cases filed by prison inmates." But the revision of Federal Rules by Courts had consistently been rejected by the Supreme Court in prior cases, and there was no warrant for any heightened pleading standard in civil rights cases, as the Supreme Court ultimately determined in Crawford v. Britton, 118 S.Ct. 1584, 1594-1595 (1998). Moreover, the heightened pleading standard was pertinent only for cases that require a showing of improper motive, for example, when an official denies employment because of race, while the violations in my case involved violations of my privacy right and a demand for a blanket waver of my right to sue for damages for such violations. This wrongful conduct was evident from the face of the OPM form, for an individual without National Security responsibilities who could not be required to agree to such demands as a basis for employment. No issue of motive was relevant, and no heightened pleading standard was applicable.
My pleading fully complied with the Rules of Civil Procedure for the United States District Courts. Rule 8(a)(2)-(3) authorizes a pleading that includes "a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief", and "a demand for judgment for the relief the pleader seeks." My complaint was obviously meritorious: the absence of any National Security matters related to my job was undisputed; the demand for information clearly protected by constitutional privacy rights (e.g., associations, medical, and financial records), and the demand that I wave my right of access to the court for relief from wrongful conduct, were all in clear violation of the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, of which defendants charged with the responsibility of administering that process knew or should have known. Certainly the trial judge was aware of these matters but he decided, instead, to deprive me of my damage claim and, thereby, shield federal officials from the likely consequences of their wrongful conduct. Admittedly, this decision might have invited massive suits involving several hundred thousand Federal Employees, but that was the Government's risk in such clearly unlawful conduct, which could not be shifted to the victims by any sane and reasonable judicial system. Immediately subsequent to the dismissal of my suit OPM announced that it would revise all of the Federal employment forms. This would suggest to a reasonable person that the Court and the defendants may have arrived at a secret quid pro quo on the deal, while the plaintiff Vigdor Schreibman, once again, got the proverbial shaft!
A judgment and record of criminal conduct was instituted against me by the Circuit Court of Fairfax, Virginia, on August 27, 1992. This action arose out of a dispute of a domestic nature on May 4, 1992, when I was arrested for violation of section 18.2-51 of the Code of Virginia, for conduct involving a "maliciou[s] cut or wound ... with the intent to maim, disfigure, disable or kill." The weapon used in the case was an iron crowbar but the proceeding was another royal shafting on me.
The weapon was not used to inflict any consequential wound, there was no disfigurement, or any permanent injury. Moreover, the injured party had provoked the incident, I claimed, by a chronic pattern of taunts and insults calculated to inflict psychological injury on me during a period of exceptionally high stress -- I was recovering from an attempted suicide arising out of unemployment and financial pressures imposed by the bogus security clearance caper, and other matters, related above. Criminal action against me was possibly motivated, as well, by illicit considerations bearing upon my work as an internet-based news reporter. My stories about the emerging philosophy of the Global Information Age were having a strong impact; someone, possibly IBM, was getting back at me. IBM was attempting to market a MultiMedia Kiosk for public information, with user fees for information owned by the public, which I criticized in my Essay for EPIN (Oct 1, 1991). They had given a family member who turned against me a lucrative payment out of the blue. I also wrote a critical essay for EPIN about a book on Building Information Infrastructure (Apr 24, 1992), which sought to track "the whole perspective evolution of electronic networks," but disregarded the monopoly threats of the Regional Bell Operating Companies. Ten days later I was in the County jail charged with committing a terrible crime that did not exist.
The prosecutor requested with the approval of the Court, that the charge of feloneous intent be stricken from the indictment, and the lesser offense of "unlawful wounding" be entered instead of the original charge of "malicious wounding," at the trial of this matter on August 26, 1992, based on a plea agreement. The Court (Judge Thomas J. Middleton) entered its Judgment on that basis, dated August 27, 1992. However, criminal intent is the essence of a crime in most civilized societies, and criminal intent is required by the explicit terms of the statute, for the charge of "unlawful wounding" though in this case the charge of feloneous criminal intent was struck from the indictment by explicit request of the prosecutor with the approval of the Court. On the face of the record of the proceedings the Judgment was, therefore, unconstitutional despite the plea agreement, pursuant to settled precedent of the Supreme Court of Virginia, see e.g., Thompkins v. Commonwealth, 177 Va. 858 (1941), 12 S.E.2d 409 (1941), and Williamson v. Commonwealth, 165 Va. 750, 181 S.E. 351 (1935). Moreover, when a Court has no authority or jurisdiction to enter such a judgment, as in this case, the same is absolutely null and void and may be impeached directly or collaterally by all persons, see Barnes v. American Fertilizer Co., 130 S.E. 902 (1925). Nevertheless, despite the utter nulity of the Judgment notice of the same has been spread around by State and Federal authorities, without my knowledge of where and when, as an instrument of political oppression against me, unjustly depriving me of the ability to defend against an accusation that is absolutely bereft of legal substance.
Meanwhile, in 1993 I inaugurated the Federal Information News Syndicate (FINS), writing a biweekly news column, special reports, and occasional papers, dedicated to "Communicating the emerging philosophy of the Global Information Age." An archive of my works was published online at my own web site. This was hosted free of charge, first, by the inforM system of the University of Maryland, and later, by the Sunsite of the University of Tennessee, at Knoxville. In 1993, I sought and was granted press credentials by the US House of Representatives and Senate press galleries. My press credentials were renewed in 1994 and again in 1995. During this period I wrote about the confusing realities that define America. I did my very best to disclosed the duplicity and influence peddling of important legislative leaders. I tracked the critical practices of Congressional staff members, the stupendous waste of corporate subsidies, the narrow interests that drives congressional legislation. And I followed closely the ethical struggle of newspaper publishers in their transition to online news.
As an internet-based news reporter, I was entitled to the protection of the First Amendment, freedom of the press, just as the Supreme Court of the United States stated in a landmark decision, RENO v. American Civil Liberties Union, 117 S.Ct. 2329, 2344 (1997). Anticipating such a decision, in 1996, I became the first person in American history to apply for an internet-based Congressional Press Pass. The New York Times ridiculed my aspirations, in a story published Feb. 26, 1996, at D7, col. 1; but another reporter, Rosalind Resnick, the well regarded editor and publisher of Interactive Publishing Alert, had a different perspective about the "genius of cyberspace." In a message contributed to the transition of online-news, Resnick observed:
To me, the incredible thing about the Net is that now the reader *is* the publisher, and amateurs ... are just as likely to succeed in Internet publishing as The New York Times. Or does the news- paper industry arrogantly believe that it can control content of every kind?"
Without any specific explanation or reason the Executive Committee of Correspondents denied my application for renewal of press credentials on January 29, 1996, and reconsideration was also denied without explanation, March 28, 1996. I prosecuted a law suit and appeal from this decision through the Federal Courts, which went to the Supreme Court of the United States, in my Petition for a writ of certiorari filed Jan 12, 2000, but the denial of my press pass was not reversed. The most salient feature of the legal proceedings, aside from the spectacle of abolishing application of the First Amendment to Press Gallery decisions, was the complete absence of any serious review of the facts and law related to this case. The decision was made solely on the basis of laissez faire ideology, placing a capitalist deadlock over critical news sources at the US Capital, subject to the dictatorial decrees of the American "media aristocracy."
When James Bennett, founder of the New York Herald, was refused access to the Senate floor to report the news while Washington Reporters were accommodated, in 1841, he published this editorial: "We have to record this day one of the most outrageous, high-handed, unconstitutional acts ever perpetrated by any legislative assembly in a free land--an act of despotism, tyranny and usurpation against the liberty of the press." 126 CONG. REC. S14905, S14906 (daily ed. Nov 24, 1980) (statement of Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-WV)). Bennett later got a seat in the first Senate Press Gallery but the "outrageous, high-handed, unconstitutional acts" of the media aristocracy have continued against others ever since, as the record of these matters, which I have published online reveals.
I have previously reported the persistent undue delay by my doctors in providing necessary medical treatment, for my sleep disorders (insomnia, apnea and hypopnea). This wrongful conduct was pursued for a period of about 8-months by four different doctors who I consulted (Jay H. Choi; William R. Wilson; Daniel H. Waterman; and Samuel J. Potolicchio). A lab test was made on 03/13/00 by Greater Washington Sleep Disorder Centers, of Takoma Park MD (certified by Marc Raphaelson, MD, Board Certified in Sleep Medicine), at the request of Dr. Wilson, the consultant selected by Dr. Choi, then my primary care physician. The lab report, confirmed a diagnosis of "Moderate sleep apnea" (ICD-9-CM: 780.51-3), with an overall apnea/hypopnea index (AHI) of 15 incidents per hour, about 66 incidents during the 8-hour test period, with 55% sleep efficiency. This disorder needed treatment, by medical standards. It definitely qualified for Medicare funding. However, I was prevented from obtaining the necessary treatment, a bi-level positive air pressure (BiPAP) machine, until 11/14/00, 8-month's subsequent to the lab test that confirmed my need, because of undue delay by my doctors in providing the required certificate of medical need. My doctors, Jay H. Choi, William R. Wilson, Daniel H. Waterman, Samuel J. Potolicchio, did nothing to secure the treatment required by my lab test.
I next went to see Dr. Susan Haselquist, and she was the physician who finally broke the pattern but not without another undue delay. I visited her office on 10/10/2000 and she advised me of her order for the necessary equipment on that same day to "Home Care", an equipment provider. Three weeks later, on 10/31/2000, when that provider (or any other) failed to deliver the necessary equipment, I sent Dr. Haselquist a fax requesting a copy of her certificate of medical need, so that I could order the equipment, myself. Within a few days Dr. Haselquist sent me her prescription for BiPAP treatment. After reconfirming my qualifications for Medicare funding, through Administar Federal, I ordered the required BiPAP machine from a qualified provider of my choice on November 9, 2000, and on November 14, this equipment was delivered to my apartment. Subsequently, Dr. Haselquist provided the necessary certificate of medical need on the official Government forms.
During the following year, using this BiPAP equipment, I have been able to restore restful sleep needed for a human life. Nevertheless, the idea that a patient must resort to such advocacy for necessary treatment over a period of 8-months, in order to overcome undue delay of one doctor after another, and the undue delay of their equipment providers, to obtain satisfactory medical care, guided by the hidden hand of state police agents, is frightening. Is this the new medical ethics-in-use?
Part of the answer is revealed in the calamitous rising death tole coming out of the medical profession, of which, "Undue Delay of Health Care, & the Unsustainable "Free Market" are principle factors. Another part of the answer lies in the critical role that doctors play in the "survival of the fitest"; a racist prescription for weeding out the dregs of society, social protesters, etc., pursued by police agencies, such as the US Secret Service, who have a deep record of racist conduct. I won't relate here the whole history of undue delay by my doctors in providing necessary treatment for my sleep disorders. One account will suffice to make my point.
Dr. William R. Wilson, was the medical consultant first selected to examine my sleep disorders. During an office visit to consider the lab report on my disorders, he had ordered, Dr. Wilson simply rejected the lab diagnosis with a cynical grin on his face, without a reasoned explanation. Then he refused my request by phone 3/29/00, for a written report of his findings. Dr. Wilson also left his patient without the health care that was needed for a debilitating disorder that had already brought on serious complications, including high blood pressure, hypertension, short-term memory loss, daytime sleepiness, and great discomfort. I expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of health care he was offering.
After a phone discussion between Dr. Willson and Dr. Choi, my primary care physician, a note was added to the latter's medical record 3/30/00, which appears to be from Dr. Wilson's records, which states, "I suggest he see a sleep disorder specialist" which was, of course, the whole point of the lab test that Dr. Wilson had rejected. At that disturbing office visit, in the spring of 2000, Dr. Wilson brought along a medical "student" who wore the name tag, "John Scully"! This individual, with a brutal look in his eye, did not appear to be a student. What was he there to learn? Are they really teaching medical students, these days, how to sabotage a patient's health? We do know the name tag he wore was most appropriate under the circumstances. One of first insidious detectives inducted into the United States Secret Service, in early February of 1862, was called John Scully!
Attacks on connectivity. On January 1, 2001, I published my Manifesto on Cyberspace Capital. Previously, on November 25, 2000, I began making plans for CC's web site, registering the domain names, cyberspacecapital.org, and cyberspacecapital.net, with the DoubleDomains registry. This was an experimental structure for advancement of meaningful dialogue by the people, in the face of serious misgivings that I have raised on numerous occasions about the exercise of control over the medium from the top. Marshall McLuhan's metaphor, "the medium is the message" suggested that the contents of communications are subjected to the control of the medium itself, an idea which follows the systems analysis offered by the renown Hasan Ozbekhan of the Wharton School of Finance. Control over all systems is transmitted downward, Ozbekhan concludes, "both in terms of control and in terms of meaning, it is the highest level in the plan's structure which dictates or determines the information content of the lower levels, whereas the contrary is not true." [H.Ozbekhan, 1971].
Internet firewall security software, such as BlackIce, Zone Labs, Norton, and anti virus software manufactures, which I have used, all include the risk of counter-agency, when the would be protector becomes the covert aggressor. Hardware manufacturers and search engines such as Yahoo, HP and Dell maintain remote access capabilities that allow them to get inside your computer whenever they please, do whatever they please. Microsoft's Windows XP invites their customers to use the remote access attribute of their new operating system to enable wider repair options, also enabling wider controls by Big Brother. Window's FrontPage helps you organize your team development work with SharePoint, HotMetal and Macromedia provide support for HTML web design, and each of those capabilities can also take a big bite out of your sensory aspirations. Phone companies and ISP's exercise direct control over your telecommunications connections. All of these control systems are now used to serve the goals of Federal and State police agencies, together with a host of known (and unknown) surveillance techniques, for example, the "DigitalAngel" that allows one to track human beings, or animals, with Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite, when they have a subdermal implant in their bodies (or an implant placed in their body by covert means), available on Web-enabled devices.
Are citizens in control of their internet communications, or is the medium really the message just as McLuhan, supported by Ozbekhan, argued? This is how it was in my space. I contracted for a fast SDSL Internet connection with Mindspring/Earthlink, subsidiaries of Sprint Telephone Company, in March 2001, but for months I could not get a working connection until I agreed to designate their name servers for my domain. The service remained very unstable for months, nevertheless, adversely impacting upon the user base of my web pages.
When a Yahoo subsidiary showed up at my computer one day, unsolicited, my BlackIce firewall sent them packing and sent a special alert to me. I located the company and sent a message to their security officer demanding that they stop trying to invade my computer. This character wrote back advising me that HP had given them permission to monitor my machine, and that my machine routinely sends them messages soliciting their entry. Well I immediately looked up the code that gave them access and shut it down, and they in turn, just as readily invaded my machine this time with the assistance of BlackIce, who treated them as a trusted program against my instructions, and they reset the code in my machine to permit their uninterrupted entry. On another occasion after installing Zone Labs (my new firewall protection), I got hit with what I later learned was called "Code Red Worm." I was receiving 2500 attack probes per hour for two days running, day and night. Zone Labs went dead, my ISP went dead, no one in virtual space would explain what was happening, until I found quite by accident a patch at Windows for this worm. When I installed it, all was calm again.
When someone attacked and destroyed my operating system and web pages last November, I requested that my ISP, Minbdspring/Earthlink, install a private IP address for my development computer and better security for my public IP address. They installed a private address for both computers, instead, which blocked access to my web pages. During the next month or so, they would do nothing to fix the problem. One technician suggested that I did not own my domain name, cyberspacecapital.org, to which the ISP's name servers had been connected for many months. He refused to repair the problem. When DoubleDomains provided the necessary documentation of my domain name, however, my ISP's technician Tim, then repaired my Internet connection, and assigned an optimum set of IP address, to close the security gap.
More than 11,000 intrusion attempts, and over 200 attempted attackers on my site were reported by Semantec since last December when my OS was reinstalled. The overwhelming majority of these originated from the domains of Earthlink, Inc. The attempted intrusions and attacks from Earthlink domain stopped cold when this article was first published, Feb 6, immediately followed by a surge of attempted intrusions and attacks from other domains! Right on the heals of the successful repairs by my ISP, another virus attack commenced, involving W32.Nimda.E@mm (dr) virus, and with W32.Nimda.A@mm (dll) virus. Semantec advised me to install a slew of security fixes for Code Red Worm which they said was my primary vulnerability but this did not stop the virus attacking my computer. I stopped the virus on my own after discovering that my scripts folder had been opened for "everyone," which was the source of scripts infested virus. Weeks later as I write this item Semantec informed me about tools to remove the threatening virus.
Breakdown of police protection. Meanwhile, I reported the attack on my computer to the FBI, with information describing the name and address of the suspected attacker (Thomas R. Glover, 18-407 Naruko-danchi, 4-56 Naruko-cho, Midon-ku, Nagoya, Aicho- ken, 4580041, Japan; email buddy@goa.com; phone 01181528953422). Tom Glover originally showed up out of the clear blue sky one day, in an email message, which led to an offer of free help with graphic design for my new web site. When the FBI agent assigned to the case (Jonathan Burns, 7799 Leesburg Pike, Suite 200 South, Falls Church, VA 22043, fax 703-762-3447; phone 703-762-3836; email jburns@fbi.gov), called to investigate my reported incident I mentioned that the suspect had been calling me, making "friendly" inquiries and leaving messages on my answering machine. I suggested that he process these messages, which were stored on my digital answering machine, with the use of available technology for Computer Voice Stress Analysis (CVSA). Many law enforcement agencies are using this technology, which would provide a quick assessment of likely deception (or the lack thereof), attempted by those messages. The agent got wired. He recommended "get rid of those telephone messages"!
I did not destroy that evidence, as Agent Burns recommended. Instead, I sent copies of the sound files to an independent consultant for CVSA (William Michael Kemp, 2108 Lookout Street, Gadsden, AL 35904, email minutemn@internetpro.net). I asked Mr. Kemp whether one would "want to rule out an attempted deception in the suspect's communications." Taking no fee for his effort, Mr. Kemp sent me an email February 13, 2002, responding to my inquiry in these words:
Absolutely, I would not rule out deception. In fact, I would say that he shows positive signs of deception-- I just don't know what the foundation of the deception is... but his voice showed spike, spike, spike.
Mr. Kemp's analysis suggests, to me, that my attacker may have been a Federal agent/informant, or a person working under their protection. That Federal agent/informant would explain another extraordinary occurance some months earlier. One evening in mid October 2000 a librarian friend (Bernadine Abbot Hoduski, Helena, MT; email ber@initco.net; phone 1-406-449-9974) came over for dinner. The evening ended up with my expressing exasperation about the "patriotism" of my friend, after her insistant inqiries about the name of my new sleep disorder doctor, raising a risk that this information might get to my enemies and facilitate their renewed attack on my health care, as I explain more in detail above.
I surmized these dangerous inquiries may have been motivated by Bernadine acting as a covert, paid informant for Federal police agencies, to supplement her retirement income. She had many years of contact with these agencies as a high ranking professional staff person in the US Congress, Joint Committee on Printing. When she left that job and moved back home to Montana, Bernadine related to me "I am not going to be poor in retirement"; perhaps not, as a paid informant, betraying her old friends. Well the day following our dinner together, my correspondent in Japan sent me this essay on Patriotism, a Menace to Liberty, written by Emma Goldman (1911). This character in Japan, seemed to have knowledge of the topic of my spirited comment, in my dinning room the night before. Was this simply a wild coincidence or had someone bugged my dinning room, and wired my conversation around the world?
This scenario would make sense if my correspondent in Japan was a Federal agent/informant who had knowledge of my private conversations; a person pretending to help me design my web site, with dirty tricks and sabatage as his real goal. Indeed, my correspondent in Japan was the very person I identified (Thomas R Glover), as the suspect who destroyed my computer operating system, the person who the FBI was now attempting to protect by telling me to destroy pertinent evidence!
We were strolling along a path over in nearby Virginia, one day, Bernadine and I, going for a visit to her nutritionist. I was just keeping company, talking, when I related the fact that the Southeast Branch DC Library had an employee (Francia Baker, 7th & D Street SE, phone 202-698-3377) who I suspected of working for the Federal police to (among other duties) provide reports on comments she was able to elicit from me, and about the books that I read. We discussed this, and then I informed Bernadine that I had been tipped off by a former librarian, who passed a note to me with a book on the topic, warning me to be careful. Bernadine expressed shock, demanded to see the note, she asked for information about the identity of the librarian who gave that tip; flashing deep anger, not that a librarian was working as a police informant, contrary to DC law and library ethics, but that another librarian had tipped me off!
My old friend was defending the illicit machinations of a police agency and their library accomplices. This is another example suggesting that American Government was moving backward in time, to a dangerous era of failure by police to protect citizen rights, a condition that FBI Director Louis J. Freeh pointed out in a press release June 30, 2000, "helped produce the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews, as well as other minorities and political dissidents were murdered by the Nazis."
Image from the collection at WebMuseum, Paris. Nicolas Pioch.
The human being with "A Beautiful Mind" is one who has a vision of the cosmos that overcomes the cultural trance in which ordinary societies are embedded. Genius lies within the very shadow of madness, however.
"Of life madness is an inseparable and sometimes a predominant part," wrote George Santayana, "every living body is mad in so far as it is inwardly disposed to permanence when things about it are unstable, or is inwardly disposed to change when, the circumstances being stable, there is no occasion for changing. That which is virtue in season is madness out of season, as when an old man makes love ..."John F. Nash, Jr., the man with "A Beautiful Mind" who lived 30-years in a state of delusion, came back from his own hell to express similar ideas in his autobiography,
... rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos. For example, a non-Zoroastrian could think of Zarathustra as simply a madman who led millions of naive followers to adopt a cult of ritual fire worship. But without his "madness" Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten.
There are great risks for an individual with a beautiful mind, namely, the risks of self-annihilation exemplified by the Death of Socrates, or of assassination by suicide, revealed in the lives and deaths (among many others) of Michel Foucault, Fredrich Nietzsche, and Vincent van Gogh. The mad genius van Gogh never sold any one of his paintings during his lifetime; the same paintings, which today command great fortunes. Beyond the risks of genius, in the United States such social pressures are now blamed for an epidemic of suicide.
I am an individual standing outside of society by reason of childhood trauma, during the great depression years, now searching for the truth of "A Beautiful Mind," as anyone can discern who reads my web pages carefully, filled with hundreds of articles, which I researched and wrote over the past ten years, which are freely available online. It is paradoxically suggested that my insistence upon viable structures to secure genuine betterment of humankind is "too radical" while the conduct of the elite thieves and assassins who are robbing the global people of their minds and their lives is treated as the acceptable norm. Indeed, the norm that drives the existing situation is leading toward a culture of corporate corruption, which undermines the enterprise system itself, epitomized by the spectacular collapse of energy trader Enron Corporation. In this situation marked by a period of rapid change "the radical individual may be the very instrument of creative evolution itself." [E.Becker, The Structure of Evil 232, (Free Press ed., 1968), quoting H.Bergson, Two Sources of Morality].
In this capitalist civilization of the Information Age, control is exercised from the top. As in no other, the "medium is the message" of the Information Age. However, one must ask, "What kind of reality is created by this Age? Has our world become so distorted that we now find delusion in the pursuit of genuine democratic aspirations, and economic equilibrium in the racist ethic of "Social Darwinism"?
Evolution of the species of plants and animals are locked into a war of nature and genetic inheritance. This was described by the philosopher Herbert Spencer's metaphor, "survival of the fittest," from which the theory of "Social Darwinism" was derived! While this theory may be useful to explain "the excesses of capitalism," as observed by Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London, in his book, Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated 329 (1999), the capitalist philosophy of greed is clearly without a scientific basis for so narrowly confining the fate of humanity. Beyond the competition between plants and animals controlled by genetic structure, whose evolution proceeds by fortuitous events, human beings possess a conscious mind and psychocultural striving, generating the evolution of behavior guided by habits of the mind not merely blind instinct.
Within the dynamics of game theory and equilibrium selection, for which John Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize, "It is our responsibility to design social institutions that reap maximum social benefits from individual instincts...." according to the seminal studies of evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind 430 (Anchor Books ed., 2001). Much the same point is made by Richard Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish Gene (2nd Edition 1989), quoted in Mary Midgley, Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism, published by The Royal Institute of Philosophy,
... if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs (SG, 3). We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth…We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism, something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world (215).Private industry and the elite educational institutions that help design their strategies certainly understand this distinction between evolution by natural selection and guided cultural evolution, but they prefer to guide the evolution of e-culture by a philosophy of greed. There should be no doubt of the essential role of the "radical individual" as an "instrument of creative evolution." Similarly, the power of "the People" and a responsible civil sector is needed to exercise wise leadership where management and design professsionals as well as government and private industry, resist genuine progress.
CyberspaceCapital, the instrumental structure that I have proposed, follows that evolutionary strategy designed to provide support for real democratic leadership exercised by the will of the whole. Support for CC from leadership institutions that are committed to the scientific mission, as well as from the public-at-large whose interests in genuine progress is direct and personal, could lead to genuine betterment of humankind! Nevertheless, such a challenge to elite power, as Lindblom observed, "is curbed by an assault on the minds of the masses."
The dark side of unbridled capitalism (in Africa, another global flash point), is portrayed by John le Carré in his new novel, The Constant Gardener (Scribner 2001). He sounds this alarm, "(I)t’s time educated men and women had some balls to speak out for truth instead of cringing in the shithouse like a bunch of craven cowards." Id., at 365. Except for a few well informed professionals in the field of interactive dialogue and systems design, no one seems to be listening, however, to either the urgent sound of alarm, or to the logic and ethics of genuine progress. Instead of receiving support a dreadful silence eminates from my natural constituents; while my adversaries savagely attack me for my positive democratic philosophy, which directly challenges the capitalist philosophy of greed. Meanwhile, my time is quickly running out and the assassins are waiting at the door.
Federal Information News Syndicate, Vigdor Schreibman, Editor
& Publisher,
18 - 9th Street NE #206, On Capitol Hill, Washington, DC
20002-6042. Copyright 2002 FINS.
Integrated Phone/Fax/Voice Mail: (202) 547-8715; Email:
Vigdor@cyberspacecapital.org
Browse Fins Global Information Age Library at URL:
http://sunsite.utk.edu/FINS/
Browse CyberspaceCapital at URL: http://cyberspacecapital.org
Republication authorized for nonprofit use only, provided message
is kept intact.