Attention: Do Not Waste Your Hard-Earned $8.00 on this piece of crap.
I knew it when I saw the trailer claiming the Fed was private. Great.
Then I saw that my man Dr. Ron Paul is in it, as well as personal hero G. Edward Griffin and friend James Bovard. My old friend from high-school was going.
Okay, fine, I’ll go see the damn thing.
Piece of shit. If I may borrow a phrase from Bill Hicks. (At least Basic Instinct had a pussy in it.)
Nearly the whole first hour is wasted on the marginally popular technicalitarian guff that ‘congress never got around to saying that you have to pay any of the taxes they legislate’. In a cutesy ‘gotcha’ moment Russo confronts a former IRS commissioner with Supreme Court cases from the nineteen-teens, then depicts him claiming that the IRS is above the law, when all he is saying is that those USSC decisions no longer apply because they are from the nineteen-teens and were overruled long ago.
Thanks alot for making me defend an IRS commissioner, jerk.
Oh, and the interview with the juror that went on and on and on… and on…
Please give me a break. Better yet, read “The Dead Ends of Technicalitarianism” by Anthony Gregory.
Next is a bunch of crap about how the Fed is private (seems like he’d have read Griffin’s book before making this thing; guess not) and how we ought to do like ol’ Honest Abe Lincoln and have the state just print money backed by nothing all day… while at the same time saying money ought to be redeemable in gold… while at the same time saying Federal Reserve Notes are backed by nothing, which ignores the national government’s promise to tax us to pay their bondholders… while at the same time saying the Fed holds all the bonds and makes pure profit off the interest when in fact the Fed holds a small percentage of them and pays that ‘profit’ back into the Treasury.
The private banks that are members of the Fed make profits on the interest they collect on printing unbacked money, but the regional federal reserve banks do not. Surely corruption of all kinds emerges – drug trafficking and so-forth – but we’re only talking about the structure.
The Fed is evil alright – it is state power, after all. Do the private banks benefit from the arrangement, which is effectively a cartel? Of course. That’s why they created it. The purpose of the Federal Reserve Act was to forever tie the economic life of this land to the national government so the powerful can protect and enrich themselves. For Russo to trot out Michael Ruppert with the ‘no more Federal than FedEx’ garbage is insulting.
Does the president appoint the head of FedEx and the board of directors? Does the Senate confirm them? Does he have police power (other than through his lobbyists and congressmen), or the authority to charge people for packages that were never shipped?
Get it straight, then give it straight. They need it.
What’s the deal? Apparently they couldn’t find any Austrian economists to explain central banking, but turned instead to… Michael Ruppert!? They didn’t give Griffin the spotlight at all and even got the title of his book wrong at the bottom of the screen.
I liked the part that showed IRS SWAT teams terrorizing the hell out of innocent people for fun. Government at its best is a tazer in a woman’s guts. Sometimes they just murder people, or turn them over to the Navy, for refusing to be a snitch.
What they did to Joe Louis was messed up, but all his fault. He gave all his money to the state voluntarily (we all gotta pitch in if we’re to prevent the US from being overrun by the Japanese, ya know) and they taxed him on it anyway. Sucker.
I also thought the part about the national ID card and RFID were okay, though he seems to think congress will soon demand ‘everyone get microchipped or else’. I think they would get the ‘or else’ that day. (The American people have got to have a line somewhere, right?)
“Freedom to Fascism,” and they barely get around to war until nearly the end. Even then it’s all standard patriot movement, UN-takeover conspiracy theory circa 1994 (i.e. no source newer than 1992 and most much older.)
That’s why the US invaded Iraq, don’t you know? It’s empowered the UN so much.
No WWI, no WWII, no Korea, no Vietnam, no Cold War, no Nixon, no nuthin.
Just as I thought it could get no worse and must surely be ending soon, Russo puts up these little one sentence messages like “Go on strike,” “Don’t accept a national ID card,” and so on… for like seven minutes!
And then it’s still not over. More clips of Ruppert. More little messages.
I appreciate the sentiment – government is evil, central banking is evil, government officials deserve contempt – but how are you going to win anyone over when they can refute your whole presentation with fifteen minutes and a Google machine?
I wonder if stuff like this doesn’t do more harm than good. From now on some may dismiss all criticism of central banking as something they’ve heard before but were in no way convinced of.
He doesn’t mention Roosevelt or the New Deal at all. No point bringing that up in a movie about American fascism, I suppose.
If it’s not too late, the producer might consider hiring someone to hack the majority of this movie to the cutting room floor.
This editor should read The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin and The Case Against the Fed by Murray Rothbard. Or at least scan through Mises.org or something.
Update: Oh yeah, and he comes out in favor of a police state on the border, many of the quotes are terribly sourced and there is no common thread or storyline in the movie at all.
I give it three steaming piles of shit.
