Zerzan

Here's an older thread about the same topic. http://www.tuscl.com/discussion/58874 Or just type 58874 over the current digits in the address bar and hit enter.

The primary fraud inherent in US history is that we have, in the Emancipation Proclamation and the XIIIth Amendment to the US Constitution, outlawed human enslavement, when in fact in the USA there has never been, and is not now, any law against slavery. 1.) The Emancipation Proclamation did not actually result in any single named person who ever received the emancipation document which it had promised. 2.) the Emancipation Proclamation, as an action of the executive branch of the federal government, was rendered null and void retroactively by the XIIIth Amendment which placed exclusive powers to regulate slavery in the legislative branch thus denying them to the executive branch. 3.) the XIIIth Amendment was merely an enabling act, empowering the federal congress to outlaw slavery, but then the southern states were allowed back into the federal union before this enabling act was acted upon, and that therefore the federal congress has never in fact actually enacted the envisioned law against slavery which it had in this amendment been empowered to enact. Now there comes a new book, Douglas A. Blackmon's 'Slavery by Another Name,' which has been reviewed by the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/books/10masl.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/index.php?section=15 Mr. Blackmon is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. What he very clearly understands is that despite this historic constitutional amendment, there has never arisen any statute law or body of precedent which would define what human enslavement is, and therefore there has never in the USA arisen any legal way in which actual slavery can be actually interdicted. We keep struggling to contain the situation by enacting various particular laws, such as dysfunctional laws against "peonage," although these various particular laws would be entirely unnecessary -- were we ever to actually do something which we are never actually going to do, which would be, to actually enact here a law against human slavery.

Consider this term "peonage." There is only one reason why this term exists in federal criminal law. It exists because, without an ability to prosecute for a crime of enslavement, there was no way for the feds to deal with local southern sheriffs who were selling black men out of their local jails. They would arrest a black man for public drunkenness, or something like that, and then sell him to the highest bidder among the local white men, to work out his fine at $5 a day minus room and board, on a work crew on a plantation in the Mississippi bottomland. This sort of arrangement could last a lifetime. So, the feds enacted this law about "peonage," in an attempt to create a way to prosecute and prevent this sort of situation. The feds made one attempt to enforce it, and the white plantation owner killed something like eleven black witnesses. The peonage case collapsed, but they were then able to get the man for multiple murder after they had dug up some of the bodies. He was sent to prison for life, and in a prison riot, the black prisoners took his rifle away from him and killed him with it. What, you ask, how did a *life convict* get a rifle? The warden gave it to him! He had been functioning not as a prisoner but as a guard. The 13th Amendment "gave Congress the power of enforcement." Since the federal legislature had never defined what slavery is, however, the courts have been powerless. In the one case that reached the Supreme Court, for instance, a case involving some white seamen, the court refused to consider that they might have been enslaved, on the sole basis that they were not black. The Supremes declared, eight over one, that whatever a freedom *not to be enslaved* might be, it was a freedom that black people might have *maybe* (they couldn't say, because they had no legal idea what it was) -- but it was not any sort of freedom that any sort of white American might claim no matter *what* had been done to them.

I withdraw my previous acknowledgement to NJSCFAN that any American has ever been convicted specifically of "slavery". And notice is now given to AbbieNormal: "...the 13th Amendment granted the power to abolish the institution of human enslavement in the USA to the federal legislative branch --thus forever denying that power to the federal judiciary and executive branches. Subsequent to being granted the power to abolish the institution of human enslavement in the USA, the representatives of the Southern states have been allowed to return to the federal legislature, and therefore the federal legislative branch has deliberately failed to create a definition of enslavement -- with the result being that *no American enslaver has ever been arrested, arraigned, tried, convicted, and punished for the crime of enslaving another American*. Why is it that no American enslaver has ever been arrested, arraigned, tried, convicted, and punished for the crime of enslaving another American? Well, before the Civil War, of course enslavement was no crime. --And then, after the Civil War, enslavement has not been a *defined* crime. Nobody knows what the elements of such a criminal offense might be, because the elements of such an offense have not been specified in criminal legislation. No *state* judge, such as, say, in California or Massachusetts, would ever find you guilty of enslaving anyone, irregardless of what you have been guilty of doing to another human being, because under the 13th Amendment any such state action has been entirely pre-empted by federal jurisdiction. No *federal* judge would every find you guilty of enslaving anyone, irregardless of what you do to another human being, because no federal judge, ever, has been given any idea, any idea at all, just what this offense of "enslavement" might consist in.

Shame on the US! I want to see convictions!!!