Facts Refute Filmmaker’s Assertions on Income Tax in ‘America’
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
New York Times
Aaron Russo, the producer of films like “Trading Places” and “The Rose,” promotes his new film, “America: From Freedom to Fascism,” which opened Friday, as having had its international premiere before a packed audience “during the Cannes Film Festival.”
The film was not on the program at Cannes, however, not even for screenings made under the festival’s aegis without being in the awards competition. Mr. Russo, the film’s director, writer and producer, just set up an inflatable screen on a beach. Photographs posted at one of Mr. Russo’s Web sites depict an audience of fewer than 50 people spread out on a platform on the sand.
Hyping films with fanciful claims is nothing new in Hollywood. But examination of the assertions in Mr. Russo’s documentary, which purports to expose “two frauds” perpetrated by the federal government, taxing wages and creating the Federal Reserve to coin money, shows that they too collapse under the weight of fact.
Still, at free showings the film has drawn long lines of people eager to watch a documentary that feeds on the estrangement many Americans feel from their government, especially those who believe they played by the rules and yet see their finances strained or broken. Many of the reviews in major newspapers have accepted as having some factual basis the film’s main contention, that the government illegally extracts income taxes, even though every court that has ever ruled on these issues has upheld the constitutionality of the income tax.
The film’s appeal, Mr. Russo said during a phone interview last week, is not left or right, but concentrated among those who see the United States evolving into a police state ruled by an oligarchy that has tricked Americans into paying taxes.
Not mentioned in the film is that Mr. Russo has more than $2 million of tax liens filed against him by the Internal Revenue Service, California and New York for unpaid federal and state taxes. Mr. Russo declined to discuss the liens, saying they were not relevant to his film.
Early in the film Mr. Russo, the narrator, asserts that every president since Woodrow Wilson and every member of Congress has perpetrated a hoax to tax people’s wages and issue them dubious currency. All of the federal income tax revenue, the film says, goes to these bankers to pay interest on the national debt, even though by the broadest measure the federal government’s interest payments are less than 40 percent of the individual income taxes, according to an examination of every federal budget since 1995.
The film opens by calling the 16th Amendment and its subsequent income tax and the Federal Reserve the product of a “silent coup d’état” in 1913 by “international bankers.” In the style of low-budget television documentaries, photographs appear on screen of J. P. Morgan, Paul Warburg and John D. Rockefeller.
(The rest is here.)
New York Times
Aaron Russo, the producer of films like “Trading Places” and “The Rose,” promotes his new film, “America: From Freedom to Fascism,” which opened Friday, as having had its international premiere before a packed audience “during the Cannes Film Festival.”
The film was not on the program at Cannes, however, not even for screenings made under the festival’s aegis without being in the awards competition. Mr. Russo, the film’s director, writer and producer, just set up an inflatable screen on a beach. Photographs posted at one of Mr. Russo’s Web sites depict an audience of fewer than 50 people spread out on a platform on the sand.
Hyping films with fanciful claims is nothing new in Hollywood. But examination of the assertions in Mr. Russo’s documentary, which purports to expose “two frauds” perpetrated by the federal government, taxing wages and creating the Federal Reserve to coin money, shows that they too collapse under the weight of fact.
Still, at free showings the film has drawn long lines of people eager to watch a documentary that feeds on the estrangement many Americans feel from their government, especially those who believe they played by the rules and yet see their finances strained or broken. Many of the reviews in major newspapers have accepted as having some factual basis the film’s main contention, that the government illegally extracts income taxes, even though every court that has ever ruled on these issues has upheld the constitutionality of the income tax.
The film’s appeal, Mr. Russo said during a phone interview last week, is not left or right, but concentrated among those who see the United States evolving into a police state ruled by an oligarchy that has tricked Americans into paying taxes.
Not mentioned in the film is that Mr. Russo has more than $2 million of tax liens filed against him by the Internal Revenue Service, California and New York for unpaid federal and state taxes. Mr. Russo declined to discuss the liens, saying they were not relevant to his film.
Early in the film Mr. Russo, the narrator, asserts that every president since Woodrow Wilson and every member of Congress has perpetrated a hoax to tax people’s wages and issue them dubious currency. All of the federal income tax revenue, the film says, goes to these bankers to pay interest on the national debt, even though by the broadest measure the federal government’s interest payments are less than 40 percent of the individual income taxes, according to an examination of every federal budget since 1995.
The film opens by calling the 16th Amendment and its subsequent income tax and the Federal Reserve the product of a “silent coup d’état” in 1913 by “international bankers.” In the style of low-budget television documentaries, photographs appear on screen of J. P. Morgan, Paul Warburg and John D. Rockefeller.
(The rest is here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home