AMERICA: "FREEDOM TO FASCISM" A MUST SEE MOVIE

F.Y.I Article Lost in the Past!

By Steven Yates
NewsWithViews.com

Imagine this scenario: you call your local Pizza Palace planning to order two large pizzas with meat toppings. A female voice identifies you by your 20-digit national ID number. She mentions where you work. You ask how she knows this. “We just got wired into the system,” she says. Whatever. You place your order. Suddenly she slaps you with a $20 surcharge. Aghast, you demand, “Why?” She tells you: “Your medical records show you have high blood pressure and extremely high cholesterol.” Where’d she get my medical records? Oh, yes. The system. She says she can deliver your meat pizzas anyway because Pizza Palace has a deal with your health care provider, but you must sign a waver absolving Pizza Palace of all liability in case you drop dead (nice of them), and there’s a fee for processing the waver (swell!). Then she adds a $15 fee to deliver to your house: “You live in an orange zone—another hold-up on your street just yesterday.” News to me! You gasp at the total price: $67! “You can afford it,” the girl says, “after all, you could afford to take your wife to Hawaii last year. Those plane tickets weren’t cheap.” You nearly choke. She knows I vacationed with my wife in Hawaii??? She also knows you checked out a book at the library on how to save money vacationing at the beach, though, and can name a magazine your wife subscribes to. You’re hungry, so finally you agree to all the terms and all the fees, just to get your food. “Uh-oh, looks like you’ve maxed out all your credit cards, though. Have cash on hand, okay?”

Is this where we’re heading?

Unless we stop our headlong rush towards a total surveillance / total information awareness society, it could happen within the next few years. Fortunately, there are whistleblowers working as hard as they can to warn us. The above is a (condensed—and embellished, here and there) transcription from a segment in Aaron Russo’s new film America: Freedom to Fascism (AFTF), to be released in five markets on July 28 and five more on August 4. Due to a handful of private screenings, news about AFTF has been circulating on the Internet. Viewers at the Cannes Festival gave it a standing ovation. Through a powerful presentation, told in the language of the man in the street, Russo connects the dots from the super-elite (international bankers, upper echelon politicians, globocrats, globalist intellectuals) all the way down to scenarios like the one above. His film has the best potential of anything I have encountered in ten years to awaken this sleeping nation. One reviewer (Todd David Schwartz, for CBS) has called it “the scariest d*** film you will see this year,” adding that it “makes Fahrenheit 9/11 look like Bambi.”

Russo is more than qualified for the role he’s assumed. An accomplished filmmaker with six Oscar nominations, a Tony, an Emmy, and three Golden Globes to his credit in multiple categories, his best-known films include Trading Places, The Rose, and Wise Guys. His promotional work put Bette Midler over the top. He was the first to book the British rock band Led Zeppelin in an American venue in 1968 when the group was almost unknown here. Having observed throughout the 1980s and 1990s where this country was heading and not liking what he saw, Russo began researching the causes of our headlong rush towards serfdom, and from there to political activity. He was a solid contender for the Libertarian Party’s nomination for President in 2004, and remains active despite an ongoing battle with bladder cancer.

Begin with the IRS—perhaps the most feared entity in the country. AFTF draws on the efforts of We The People, Robert Schulz’s organization, to encourage IRS officials to point to the specific statute that defines income and requires ordinary wage-earners to pay a direct unapportioned tax on their wages based on that definition. We now have comprehensive research casting doubt on the existence of such a statute as well as on the 16th Amendment (the income tax amendment) ever having been ratified Constitutionally. Russo shows how both the IRS and the courts evade questions, and dismiss as “frivolous” honest requests for specifics about the law. He also shows how tax dissidents are starting to be exonerated by juries when judges cannot produce the law. “Show me the law,” demands one interviewee after another, including former IRS employees who have researched the matter thoroughly (e.g., Bill Benson, author of The Law That Never Was). In fact, the progressive income tax comes right out of Marx & Engels’ Communist Manifesto, alongside calls for the confiscation of private property and for central banking.

This is hugely important because of the IRS’s willingness to use terror tactics against citizens not yet accused, much less charged with a crime. One of the film’s scariest segments relates how IRS agents raided the workplace and home of the Miller family of Virginia Beach, Va. The IRS sent heavily armed troops into the Jewish Mother Restaurant which Scotty Miller managed. During the raid, patrons minding their own business had silverware forcibly taken from their hands. The agents confiscated computers, cash registers, receipts, phone records, etc.—anything that wasn’t nailed down. Miller’s son Ricky related how he opened the front door and was slammed down by men with rifles at his head. The elder Miller, showering at the time, found himself staring down a gun barrel before he could cover himself with a towel. His daughter Jennifer and some friends that had slept overnight faced tense moments as IRS goons barged in on them before they could dress.

Another harrowing moment in AFTF occurs as we are shown a film clip of two cops using a Stun-Gun on a screaming woman—for driving with a suspended license. Accounts are circulating of dozens of citizens being Stun-Gunned in police custody, sometimes to death. A Stun-Gun will incapacitate you by sending a 50,000-volt electrical charge through your system. If you have, e.g., an undiagnosed heart problem, a blast like that can kill you.

These are tactics of a police state, not the country of Washington and Jefferson. This is what we mean by going from freedom to fascism. The difference is between rule of law and rule by arbitrary edict. The one works its effects through due process; the latter applies brute force. In the Jewish Mother Restaurant case, no charges were ever filed against Scotty Miller or the owner of the chain, John Colaprete. Later, they learned that an ex-employee fired for embezzlement had made malicious allegations. By that time, the small business was nearly destroyed. The IRS, true to form, never apologized.

The film moves into a discussion of the connections between the IRS and the Federal Reserve. Both came in 1913—arguably a pivotal year in U.S. history. The Fed’s dirty little secret, of course, is that it is not federal and has no reserves. It is not part of the federal government but a private corporation: according to its own literature, “independent within the government” (whatever that means). The full list of its owners/controllers is well-guarded, but includes the City of London’s N.M. Rothschild & Sons. The purpose of the international banking cartel has always been to impose a money system based on debt that would transform unknowing Americans into economic serfs. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Dept. print fiat money—currency backed by nothing except legal tender laws—to finance the functions of government, while our taxes go to pay the interest on the national debt. In other words, these institutions—created by immensely wealthy families (besides Rothschild, the names Morgan, Rockefeller, Schiff and Warburg come to mind)—staged what I elsewhere describe as the biggest swindle in modern times. In 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, the super-elite was able to impose its money system on the country. We’ve been losing our God-given rights and freedoms to this diabolical cabal ever since.

Such a system is bound to operate outside the rule of law. As the infamous remark attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1743–1812, founder of the House of Rothschild) goes: “Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes the laws.”

Those staging this coup have hidden it by controlling the major media. How do you control the major media? Buy them! Aaron Russo missed this remark from the Congressional Record of 1917 by U.S. Congressman Oscar Calloway which is central to the story:

“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press…. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.”

In other words, we don’t read about the super-elite in the mainstream media because the super-elite owns the mainstream media, and has at least since 1915. For the same reason, you probably won’t see Aaron Russo’s film reviewed in many big-city newspapers. Fortunately, today we have the Internet. Google has posted an interview with Russo. I recommend it to your attention.

Still, there is probably no one alive who remembers a time when the present debt system and its encircling protections (governmental, media, academic, etc.) weren’t in place. But the effects of the Swindle of 1913 are all around us. We have, e.g., the inflation monster, which has resulted in the dollar losing 96 percent of its value since 1913—at a rate that has accelerated since Nixon took us completely off the gold standard and is continuing even now. Does reduced supply combined with increased demand explain today’s fuel costs, grocery bills, rent hikes, etc., or is it that our debauched dollars are buying less and less?

Russo observes how the U.S. was transformed from a nation of independent citizens to a nation of employees. Given that there were always more jobseekers than jobs, and given the attachment of benefits to jobs during the FDR era, webs of dependency were woven that led to a distinctively American “road to serfdom” as capitalism became corporatism (another word for which is soft fascism).

As the power elite grew wealthier and more powerful, and with new technology at its disposal, its capacity to destroy financial independence in this country grew steadily. With the loss of financial independence comes the loss of our liberties, and eventually the loss of our standard of living. In the past two decades, and especially since the start of the NAFTA era (1994), our manufacturing base has been decimated, our job market has collapsed (unless you are a technician, bureaucrat, waiter or waitress), and our savings rate has gone negative. Real, inflation-adjusted income for most Americans is dropping—rapidly. Families, now that both parents must work sometimes at two or more jobs to pay their taxes and make ends meet, are increasingly dysfunctional. Human beings, forced (often against their natural abilities and inclinations) into worker-bee status, are being driven to health-damaging levels of stress and exhaustion. Another poignant scene in AFTF shows our Bush-league president listening to a harried woman telling him how she is holding down three jobs to survive, and the most he can say is, “How uniquely American.”

How does this bring us to the scenario above? The answer: technology, and its capacity for surveillance and control. I have long emphasized that there is always a minority in any population that finds power fascinating. As far back as the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (The Republic), there were those who believed some were most fit to rule—or as we would say today, have the necessary knowledge and wisdom for comprehensive social and economic central planning, yielding a place for everybody and everybody in his place. The Hegelian model of society is based on this, and it has no place for individual liberties or private property rights. Comprehensive planning calls for a social philosophy of collectivism. Collectivism subsumes Nazism (hard fascism); socialism (Marxian, Fabian, Gramscian or otherwise)—and the globalist corporate-fascism of the public-private partnership and Anglo-American pseudo-privatization. Most actual movements and organizations consist of whatever blends of the above forms of socialism are deemed necessary given the perceived needs of the moment and what the masses have been conditioned to accept. The power-hungry pursue and subsidize collectivism because it is easier to rule tribes or collectives than individuals. Collectives can’t think; individuals can. Since Hegel, Marx, Ruskin, Comte, Wundt, the British Fabian Society, the Frankfurt School, Strauss, etc. ad nauseam, philosophical and sociological rationalizations for collectivism have been readily available. In our materialist age, the combination of money, power and technology is especially fascinating to those hungering for more power!

Thus AFTF moves swiftly to its frightening conclusion: if we do not stop this juggernaut, our remaining liberties will be extinguished in our lifetimes—possibly within the next few years! Our privacy has already almost disappeared already into government and corporate databases—which as recent news events have shown, are as vulnerable to hackers as they are to official abuse. The combination of legislative power, corporate money, and technology, equals fascism: big government and big business work together and ram policy down our throats. Russo shows how technology is becoming a dangerous enemy of liberty in the hands of government stripped of Constitutional controls and corporations whose CEOs couldn’t care less about liberty.

National ID—portrayed in the Pizza Palace scenario—is scheduled to go into effect May 2008 with the Real ID Act, passed by Congress last year (snuck into a larger bill) and signed into law by our Bush-league president. AFTF goes on to discuss RFID technology—created by private companies such as VeriChip and supported by globalist corporations (Wal-Mart, Proctor & Gamble, etc.). RFID technology—already being implanted in livestock and starting to be introduced into consumer goods such as blue jeans—goes beyond mere surveillance. Advocates of RFID technology would place sand-grain-sized computer chips in animals, goods, dollars—or people. A cashless society where your chip will be scanned with every transaction, and where your every move is monitored by “readers” will soon be technologically feasible!

All for your safety and convenience, of course!

And if your chip is turned off—or is hacked or becomes infected with a virus—you become a non-person—unable even to buy food! This isn’t science fiction. The technology to do this is being bankrolled to the tune of millions by transnational corporations. (Read Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan To Track Your Every Move With RFID, by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre.)

Do I need to say it? No one, anywhere, has any business with this kind of power! Does anyone think this technology won’t be abused, if allowed to proceed unchecked into the mainstream of American life? What we ought to fear is that the sleeping sheeple, products of operant conditioning, will embrace RFID as soon as it is made convenient, and that official policy will move forward to coerce its general acceptance. Ride the public transit system, e.g.—but with the new “reader” installed, you can get on easily if you have been “chipped” (as opposed, say, to having to pay cash otherwise). Need to board a plane? Let us scan and log your chip—for security purposes, of course. Your SSN is practically a national ID number now. It is nearly impossible to drive or work legally or establish a bank account without one. The employment system is a good instrument of control—which is why the super-elite wanted a nation of employees instead of one of independent small business owners. Many employers now pay by direct deposit, which hard-wires employment into central banking. This could evolve easily into your being required to obtain the “Real ID” just to get paid! And given that physical ID cards can be lost, etc., and with RFID technology being developed rapidly, it will be a small step to “encouraging” everyone to be “chipped.” Your chip will enable the tracking not just of your education, medical history, work history, recreational habits, eating habits, etc., but potentially every detail of your life down to how many bowel movements you’ve had in the past 24 hours!

Do you get it?!

What can we do? With elections this fall, yet another opportunity is coming for thinking voters to toss out the useful idiots in the “major” parties and elect individuals who will pull the plug on this power system—by shutting down the Federal Reserve Corporation. Russo zeroes in on this like a laser beam, because this is something Congress has the power to do.

Ah-hah! There’s a catch! Electronic voting machines, which have appeared everywhere and become the subject of allegations that they enable the theft of major elections! In fact, there is now substantial evidence that the 2004 election might have been stolen for our Bush-league president by means of paperless voting machines owned by the politically connected Diebold Corporation. Read this carefully-researched, footnoted article. Accordingly, we also must get rid of paperless electronic voting and return to technology the results of which can be independently validated.

Then, if existing officeholders are unwilling to shut down the Federal Reserve, we send them packing. This probably means ending the reign of the Demopublicans. Viable alternatives may be Libertarians, from the Constitution Party, or entirely Independent but with a platform emphasizing God-given rights, restoring limitations on government, and ending the control over our economy by bankers and globocrats. It is time to end the phobia of “third parties,” and break the they-can’t-win hypnosis. Haven’t we’ve had enough hired Elephants and trained Donkeys, and haven’t we gone back and forth from one to the other enough times? I think it was Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

As a last resort, there is civil disobedience. If nothing has changed when May 2008 gets here, we should simply refuse to get the “Real ID.” If tens of thousands—preferably hundreds of thousands or even millions refuse to allow themselves to be marked like cattle—the power elite will be compelled to back off. I doubt they can find enough goons to taser all of us, or herd all of us into prepared labor camps. I don’t think the elites want to do that. Something that draconian might alert even the TV-addicted crowd that something is massively wrong. And if the so-called “red state” crowd in rural America is roused, watch out! I’m referring here to the Joe Six-Packs in their ball caps who pack rifles on their pickups, often have Confederate flags on their bumpers, and are struggling to feed their families now that the local textile mill has closed and gone to China. They don’t have Ph.D.s but know they are being bullied and are getting sick and tired it. By sheer numbers if they get mad enough they are capable of putting the super-elite out of commission so fast the latter’s heads will swim.

Only we can change things—if we wake up! For the moment (thanks to the Internet) mainstream media corporations do not control the flow of information. Word about America: Freedom to Fascism is spreading. Thanks to a growing network, Americans will have the opportunity to see this film this summer in large numbers. It will open in selected theaters in New York, Chicago, Tampa, Kansas City, and Austin Texas beginning July 28. On August 4, it will open in five more markets: Los Angeles, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Orlando and Miami. Details are on the website. Anyone living within easy driving distance of these locations ought to do it.

Then get your loved ones, friends, neighbors, fellow employees, bosses, bank tellers, those who sell you your groceries, those who sell you your gas, etc., to see it. College and university students should definitely see it, since if nothing changes they will graduate into the emerging brave new world of high-tech controls. Sign up as a volunteer. South Carolina’s coordinator tells me that the website has had 500,000 unique hits. If each of these 500,000 people sees this film and then takes appropriate action, we may just have a fighting chance at taking our country back. But we’d better get our derriers moving. In the early 1990s, with the EU in Europe and NAFTA here, the global power network began to tighten down the screws. Today, there is abundant evidence on official (not “conspiracy theory”) websites of entangling alliances that will gradually erode America’s borders and create a North American Union modeled on the EU (see, e.g., the SPP, or Building a North American Community on the Council on Foreign Relations site).

Wake up, America! Time is running out!

© 2006 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved

Steven Yates earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1987 at the University of Georgia and has taught the subject at a number of colleges and universities around the Southeast. He currently teaches philosophy at the University of South Carolina Upstate and Greenville Technical College, and also does a little e-commerce involving real free trade. He is on the South Carolina Board of The Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA.

He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994), Worldviews: Christian Theism Versus Modern Materialism (2005), around two dozen philosophical articles and reviews in refereed journals and anthologies, and over a hundred articles on the World Wide Web. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where he writes a weekly column for the Times Examiner and is at work on a book length version of his popular series to be entitled The Real Matrix (hopefully!) to be completed this summer.

E-Mail: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.



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