|
|
American 'fascism,' IRS, derided in Aaron Russo's new documentary
dallashansen.com, June 2006
Aaron Russo, in his 62 years of life, has done many noteworthy
things: booked Led Zeppelin's first U.S. gig in 1968, managed
Bette Midler's early career, produced the 1983 Eddie Murphy
vehicle Trading Places (co-starring Dan Aykroyd), ran in the
Republican primary during Nevada's 1998 gubernatorial election.
What, however, people are talking about today is Russo's foray
into documentary filmmaking, America: Freedom to Fascism.
While invoking the F-word might strike some as over-the-top, Russo believes the label is apt.
“If you have a bill of rights, you have a constitution, and
they're not being followed—then you've got a police
state,” said Russo when I reached him in Munich, Germany,
where he is undergoing treatment for bladder cancer.
Among the talking heads featured in Russo's film is former LAPD vice
cop-turned-author Michael C. Ruppert, who (naturally) shares
Russo's grim view of American life. “Benito Mussolini,”
he says in the documentary, “had a great quote about Fascism:
he said that 'Fascism' should be called 'Corporatism' more
properly, because it's the perfect merger of power between the
corporation and the State. That's how he defined Fascism! And
that's what we're seeing here.”
To explain the ballooning national debt, vanishing civil liberties
and the dollar's slide in purchasing power, Russo targets two
favourite libertarian bugbears: the IRS and the Federal Reserve.
“I set out to make a film about whether or not there was a law
requiring Americans to pay an income tax,” says Russo at the
beginning of a 14-minute trailer for the film. “I discovered
something much more frightening... and dangerous.”
Apparently the 16th Amendment (“The Congress shall have power
to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived,
without apportionment among the several States, and without regard
to any census or enumeration.”) was never properly ratified,
and even if it were, claims Russo, it was only meant to apply to
corporate income, not to the sale of one's labour.
“There is no law,” says Charlie Beall of the We the
People Foundation (www.givemeliberty.org), a leading tax
protester movement, “that requires the average american worker
in the private sector to pay a direct unapportioned tax on their labor
in compensation for services.”
Russo's film rolls out a number of experts who claim the same,
including Sherry Jackson, a Certified Public Accountant and former
IRS agent.
"We The People Foundation...” says Jackson, “put a
full-page ad in USA Today on July 7, 2000 ... [with a]
$50,000 challenge for anyone that could show the law [authorizing
the IRS to collect income tax]." "Based on the research that I did
throughout the year 2000, and that I'm still doing, I have not
found that law. I've asked Congress. We've asked a lot of people,
in the IRS, the IRS commissioner's helpers. They can't answer,
because if they answer, the American people are gonna know that this
whole thing is a fraud."
Also appearing is noted tax crusader Irwin Schiff, author of the
banned publication The Federal Mafia: How the Government Illegally
Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes, who was convicted in
October, 2005 of tax evasion and sentenced, at age 78, to
13 years in prison.
But in Freedom to Fascism it's the Federal Reserve that's the true
villain. Prior to 1913, the U.S. government issued the
currency, which was backed by gold, but the establishment of the
Federal Reserve created a fiat currency unbacked by fixed assets.
Russo's argument is essentially that the income tax the IRS collects
is used to pay interest on the national debt.
“Why in the world would the federal government borrow money,
and pay fees on it, when it has the authority to make the money
itself, interest-free?” asks Russo.
“The cost of living is to high today because the Federal Reserve
and the federal government have destroyed the purchasing power of the
dollar.”
While Russo's legal and economic arguments seem oversimplified and
unconvincing, his criticisms of the REAL ID act—creating, in
effect, a standard national ID card by 2008—and the
increasing use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips can
be frightening.
“The latest technology for identifying people when they make
purchases,” says Katherine Albrecht, author of Spychips:
How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move
with RFID, “is actually the implantable chip, that you can
imbed directly into human flesh.”
Which is a subject I wrote about here in August, 2005, without
quoting Albrecht, who describes the technology's potential as
“absolutely Orwellian.”
So far, however, despite his seditious rabble-rousing, Russo has
managed to elude the machinations of the oppressive police state.
Neither the IRS, the Secret Service, nor any other authority has
moved to suppress stateside screenings of his film, which opens
across America July 28.d. |
|
|
|
