Dear Ken, I do have a working e-mail address for Charles Evans, to which I'll send privately, later today (from another machine elsewhere in the continuum), your request for it. I have it from JP May, and don't have instructions not to pass it along, but I treat it as the property of Mr. Evans, and won't disclose it on a public forum.
> John Wayne Zidar has been indicted for mail fraud and > laundering the proceeds of a ponzi scheme. Interesting. One of the peculiar difficulties of the USA feral gummint is that it fails to indict member banks of the Feral Reserve banking cartel system for their ongoing Ponzi scheme, or members of Congress for the Ponzi scheme which is Socialist Security. (I capitalize the word "Ponzi" because it is the name of an innovative fraud artist.) > The indictment alleges that Mr. Zidar invested > $2.4 million of the stolen money into Gold and Silver > Reserve, parent company of e-gold. An interesting point, and one which certainly begs further clarification from the folks at G&SR. Perhaps a public statement would be forthcoming. > The indictment also states that Mr. Zidar invested > $100,000 of the investors money into Norfed, I have read in private e-mail a vigorous denial of this statement by an officer of NORFED. It is not my practice to copy private e-mails into public fora without permission, but I feel confident that the gist of the statement is public knowledge available on the NORFED.org web site: NORFED is a private, non-profit group, and does not accept investments. It is not a shareholding outfit. It does issue the American Liberty silver-backed specie and paper certificates, so conceivably Zidar owned 10% of the now million dollars of American Liberty money in circulation, either coins or paper certificates. > which shares a common officer, Bernard Von Nothaus, > with 3PGold. I'd like to point out that sharing a common officer does not "pierce the corporate veil." As well, I think there is some confusion on what is 3PGold. I believe 3PGold and 3PPay are services provided by 3PSecure, which is a company emphasizing the three Ps of Privacy, Property, and Profit, or something like that. It is of further interest that 3PSecure is domiciled in Dominica, and uses offshore servers, I think based on Sealand. That makes it much more difficult for USA feral gummint types to subpoena its records or infringe on its activities. I should point out that there is a contrast here to the e-gold and OmniPay services which involve, last I did a look at the IP addresses involved, servers based in the USA. Given that y'all have account histories stored on e-gold.com servers which are within the litigious and prosecutor-favoring jurisdiction of the USA or one of its several states, the matter is of some pitch and moment. > Since the federal government has seized all of Zidar's > assets, I think that is a statement assuming facts not in evidence. The feral gummint may well have ordered the seizure of these assets. It is less clear that they have taken possession of these assets. As many of the assets are alleged to be offshore, that would seem to be a matter of some difficulty. > presumably they have seized his stock in G&SR, Perhaps. > making the US Federal Government roughly 25% owner of G&SR. That presents some interesting points of law. Private property may not be taken for public use without just compensation, per the Fifth Article of the Bill of Rights. A due process of law is necessary to convert these assets, although the civil forfeiture statutes which are approved of by the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) do make it easier than I think it should be for such assets to be converted to government possession. Since e-gold is now based out of Nevis, and is separate in many regards from G&SR, as well as from OmniPay, it is of some interest to ponder the relationships among these entities. In particular, I'm not sure how this difficulty with 25% of the shares outstanding of G&SR affects me as an e-gold user, and invite comments from Messrs. Jackson, Ray, et al. Eric Gaithman writes: > As a 25% shareholder, Again, I don't think the USA feral gummint is yet a shareholder. They certainly weren't at the time of the raid on Parker. > (Would the U.S. Government then favor E-gold, Ltd. > in that patent suit?) The USA has gained significant notoriety in its behavior toward private property. It typically enforces patent rights to encourage patent applications, a small source of revenue for the beast. However, it also uses the ECHELON database to extort funds from major companies by passing on trade secret information to competitors, or selling the secrets gathered from competitors, to USA firms. > Wouldn't it be cool if you could then go into ANY > U.S. Government office to buy e-gold? Well, no. Given the tight relationship between the feral gummint and the Feral Reserve System, I doubt that e-gold would soon displace FRNs. > *grin* Indeed. <grin> Snow Dog comments: > After the trial, the assets will probably be either > returned to the owner, or sold at auction. Keeping possession of assets seized in a criminal case is not easy, even if the criminal charges are found to be without merit. Typically, the owner must respond to a civil asset forfeiture proceeding against his assets, often being required to post a bond of the same value as the assets. Since civil asset forfeitures are "civil" proceedings against assets, rather than criminal proceedings against a person, and since assets don't have constitutionally guaranteed "rights," the private owner is at a serious disadvantage in court. However, it is true that the assets thus seized may be returned to the owner based on a court order dismissing the criminal charges, if that ever happens. It is also true that the federal seizure of assets does not operate as a change of ownership and control of the shares of stock, and G&SR may have bylaws in place which prevent the voting of stock which is in a peculiar situation such as the Zidar shares. (G&SR might adopt such bylaws promptly.) Joyce Marie asks: >So what exactly does this mean to us? I think the correct answer is: e-gold has come to the attention of powerful persons. That can't be good for any of us in the long run. Dmitry Salnikov asks for opinions on his related idea that any thing of value may be used to back a digital currency. Very true. For example, in the 1870s, Lysander Spooner (whose Republic Post competed successfully with the USA Postal Disservice, reducing the cost of a first class postage stamp by more than half, until it was shut down by SCOTUS) proposed a banking system based on land as the underlying item of intrinsic value. In some ways, Feral Reserve Notes are based on labor as the underlying item of intrinsic value, since they are backed by "the full faith and credit" of the USA, which has the power to coerce taxes from the laboring populace of these united States. I use this example in a deliberately specious fashion. Cambist Exchange Service is very interested in adding other items of exchange to our automated exchange service. This Russian link exchange system is an interesting candidate. >and why it does not need gold >when it has simple product. > >Any opinions? Respectfully, the poet is mistaken. Gold has market preference. Just take a look at all the competing metals that e-gold offers: silver, platinum, palladium, and gold. Of these, gold is by far the preferred store of value. Gold has, for centuries if not millennia, been the preferred store of value. In ancient Europe, Celtic tribes were headed by chieftains who wore golden torcs as a symbol of their power, and as a tangible sign of their wealth. In modern Thailand, people buy 24k gold chains, each link of known weight, and use these links in trade. Gold is only one possible item of intrinsic value which may be used in exchange. The power of the computer age is that we can establish systems to convert from one unit of exchange to another very quickly. There is an analogous situation in calendars. I've created a Texas calendar, which I sometimes use for fun. The Islamic calendar is in widespread use, and so is the Jewish calendar. However, worldwide, the calendar with primacy is the one developed by Pope Gregory some centuries ago, known as the Gregorian calendar. Scientists use a Julian calendar which has a starting date many centuries before the birth of Jesus (whose Gregorian birthdate has been established by archeologists as 4 B.C., a rather droll commentary on calendar reform). Any calendar may be used by anyone, and conversion to the aforementioned widely used calendar systems made possible by simple programs, many of which are open source and readily available. So, you could have your own personal calendar system, and I mine, and we would communicate dates to each other in a fashion that allowed for conversion among the various systems. The promise for individual liberty is vast, indeed, since conformity is no longer essential to commerce. Standardizing calendars, standard time zones, and standards like "Daylight Savings Time" operate as conditioning systems, tending to normalize ideas about time, dates, and other items. So, too, do nationalist currencies. Computer technology, or, more generally, information technology, allows for individual variance to the point of absurdity without encumbering anyone with chaos. And that's enough from me, for now. Regards, Jim http://www.GoldBarter.com/ --> c'mon! sell something! --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html lets you observe the e-gold system's activity now!
