Steve,
You offended nobody. As it so happens, I am very familiar with the concept you have discovered on the Internet; you have inadvertently stumbled upon what is colloquially called the “sui juris / Common Law” pro se movement. As an attorney, I have done a great deal of rigorous thought and research on the premises of this Common Law “movement,” which is a kind of disorganized, fluctuating group of individuals who vary by type, ideas and circumstance, but who nonetheless have a common belief in some form of secret law that has usurped the “true law” in today’s legal system. I will post more this evening, but the short answer to your question is definitely not, and even if there were some shadowy agreement among some political and banking elites back in the day, it would be as meaningless, non-binding and nonsensical (with respect to public governance) as an agreement among mafia families on how to rule society.
Bankruptcy has no meaning outside of statute, other than to describe the general state of being unable to pay one’s debts (a synonym of insolvent). A State cannot declare bankruptcy in an formal legal sense, unless pursuant to a treaty or other formal legal document. But even then it would be a legal fiction. The US conventionally went “bankrupt” when it abrogated the gold standard in various steps.
More fundamentally, the entire “Common Law” paradigm implicitly rests on erroneus metaphysical assumptions. I will write further this evening, but until then, a good starting point for insight is to understand that all laws are de facto, as are all governments. Thus, the question as to whether courts somehow all secretly enforce a different kind of “law” due to some de jure private bankruptcy is an invalid question. Only the natural law can be considered metaphysically real and de jure (morality, ethics, Austrian a priori observations on reality).
You may be focusing on the less technical factual side, which is that somehow the same core of elites, and their successors, have had this secret agreement to which they are faithful and have somehow caused, directly or indirectly, the court system to use this secret agreement as the law of the United States (thus the UNITED STATES). Perhaps the best way of dismissing this out of hand is this (other than the sheer unreality of such an endeavor): there is NO need for such an agreement!
All government is de facto (the only “de jure” coercive acts are those justified by consent or by non-consenting authority acting prudently under natural law / Austrian principles / traditional customs tied to the former two). The Courts haven’t started applying a new form of metaphysical law in place of the old metaphysical law. There is no old metaphysical law. The Constitution has no metaphysical status, except for those who consented to be under it in 1776, and then only insofar as it would be interpreted via its original meaning for ordinary persons in ordinary communication (Randy Barnett has done great work in showing how any other theory is bunk). During the rise of the legal realism movement in the 20th century, judges merely began to disregard old theories of interpretation, which were admittedly metaphysical in their premises, and simple apply new, often arbitrary theories, where to even call such theories a form of interpretation would even be a stretch. There was no need to “hoodwink” America and secretly set up some netherworld corporation to replace America with. These are all fictions. It’s just a game.
What does it mean, metaphysically, if a judge violates the Constitution in a ruling? Does he need to operate under some secret law that quietly abrogates the constitution in order to violate the Constitution? Of course not—the Constitution isn’t some magical chain that binds a judiciary to operate in such a manner. Instead, judges decided, in the spirit of John Marshall, that the law is what the Courts say it is.
More on this later if you care to hear it…