Redemption is the latest in a seemingly never-ending series of financial scams to course through the American radical right. Whether or not its promoters believe their own claims, the scam has caught on over the last few years in part because it relies on theories popularized by the antigovernment and racist right. For proponents, it marries up political ideas with good, old-fashioned greed.
Like a whole series of other antigovernment paper schemes, redemption represents "the intersection between the financial interests of con artists and the antigovernment political message of the 'Patriot' movement," says Daniel Levitas, an author who has studied the historical antecedents of this latest ripoff.
Pony Up for Freedom
What redemption promoters sell — through hundreds of pricey books, tapes, CD-ROMs, Web sites and interminably dull seminars saturated with quasi-legalistic mumbo-jumbo — is a cockamamie version of U.S. history in which the federal government has enslaved its citizens by using them as collateral against foreign debt.
The government, they argue, is financially bankrupt, and the Uniform Commercial Code (or UCC, which in real life governs commercial transactions) is actually the supreme law of the land. Importantly, any document to which your name is affixed in all capital letters is not legally binding, the redemptionists say. Corrupt judges and lawyers know all this, but they all have been sworn to secrecy.
Luckily, add the salesmen, there is a way out.
By filing particular government forms in a particular order, and by using precisely the right language (don't worry: the redemptionists will tell you how), you can redeem your stolen assets, reclaiming your God-given freedom and a whole lot of money, too.
Using obscure parts of the UCC, you can "capture" your "strawman," which in redemption-speak is the entity (identifiable as your name written out in all capital letters) that the government created to represent the value of each individual life.
Then you can "accept for value" any problematic government document — a court summons, for instance, or an order to pay child support or back taxes — and "redeem" it by drawing on your strawman account. You can also create sight drafts that draw on this phantom account, and use them to pay electric bills or buy yourself a Cadillac.
And if anyone tries to stop you, you can counterattack with any of a whole toolbox of weapons, ranging from bogus property liens and income reports (sent to the IRS to provoke an audit) to seemingly realistic court orders.
The details can be eye-catching. Some redemptionists say that whenever a person is born in the United States, approximately $630,000 is deposited into a special government account. If only you know the right procedure — and the redemptionists will gladly sell you the details — you will be able to withdraw funds from this account, which was supposedly created by the 1935 Social Security Act.
Redemption is a charade. It is time-consuming, nonsensical, and virtually impossible to understand. That it doesn't work goes without saying — many people now in prison are mute testimony to the scam's many perils. And it costs a small fortune to master. For while redemptionists say they'll make you rich, they almost always want to be paid first, in dollars printed by the government they hate.
