ASSASSINATION BY SUICIDE
Wednesday, 6 February 2002; 12:00 PM EST (Revised Thursday 21 March 2002; 3:20 PM EST)

ASSASSINATION BY SUICIDE:
Betrayal of capitalism
By Vigdor Schreibman

Introduction

The 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 Jews of Masada, I take death by suicide as the ultimate weapon of resistance. "Liberty or death" remains a vital principle of democratic life.

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.

GETTING STARTED: 1954-1979

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.]

YEARS OF CONTEMPLATION & WRITING: 1980-1990

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.

BOGUS SECURITY CLEARANCE CAPER: 1990-1994

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

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