The Story of Aaron Russo

Campaign: America: Freedom to Fascism

Video

Aaron Russo is an American entertainment businessman, film maker, and Libertarian political figure. Russo has completed America: Freedom to Fascism, a feature film documentary that is presented as an exposé of the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Reserve System, and the New World Order.

“Freedom to Fascism” – that’s a pretty in-your-face title, and from what I’ve seen already of this documentary, you should be making a lot of waves, it’s been compared in advance to Fahrenheit 9-11. Give us an overview of what you are trying to do in this movie.

What I have been trying to do, obviously, is to wake America up, that’s why I use that title, because that to me is the truth – it’s an honest title. A lot of people said ‘don’t say fascism because it’s going to scare people’. But the truth is that it is fascism what is happening, only people don’t know what fascism really means. Fascism is actually the synergistic effort of big government and big corporations working together to stifle the people. And that’s what we have in America today. If you asked Mussolini what fascism was, he would say it’s really corporatism. I think it was Tolstoy who said ‘fascism is capitalism in decay’. So what’s happened in America is that the corporations have taken over, and the largest corporation of all is the Federal Reserve system. People don’t think of the Federal Reserve system as being a corporation. They think it’s a government agency, and it’s not. It’s a cabal, it’s a partnership between the government and this private bank.

And this private bank is a Delaware corporation who in 1913 was given the authority, the concession, to make money for America. Issue money, issue dollars. Up to that point, it was the government that could do that and local banks that could do that. Money had a gold and silver backing. In 1913, the Fed took that power away from the government – or the government gave it to them. They did a deal with the private bankers, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers and all those people. By doing that, the government, when it needed the money, now had to borrow it from the Fed and pay interest on the money. And they brought the income tax into being then, so the interest to these bankers could be paid. So essentially, because of this corruption, this fraud, the bankers got the right to make money and the American people had to be taxed so the government could pay the bankers the interest. Whereas, if the government made the money there would be no interest to pay. And if it had the gold backing that it is supposed to have, it would limit the amount of money that could be printed. In 1913, the change began to evolve in America. In a way, my movie could be called The Two Frauds of 1913 – the IRS / income tax, and the Federal Reserve.

Most people don’t understand we don’t have a gold backed currency anymore.

The truth is, first of all there probably is no gold in Fort Knox. I say probably, even though I’m sure there isn’t, I say probably because I’ve not been in there to see it for myself. The Treasury that owns the gold on behalf of the American people has given the gold to the Federal Reserve – these private bankers – as collateral for the dollars these bankers print out of thin air. So the bankers are basically swindled with the cooperation of the Congress and the government. The bankers have swindled the American people by taking all our wealth to gold, and giving us a piece of paper that ultimately has no value. It’s just a piece of paper with no backing to it. It’s a situation that the people of America don’t understand, because they believe that gold still backs the dollar, that silver still backs the dollar – and it doesn’t, not in any way. So what you have is what is called a fiat currency, which the Federal Reserve can make out of thin air when they want. Let’s say each dollar printed or each 100 dollar bill printed costs 3 cents; you don’t have to spend the 3 cents, because they now use digits on a computer. So you don’t even need paper anymore, you just have these digits. It’s because of this that the ability of the Federal Reserve to print money out of thin air or to print digits out of thin air, and then call it money, gives them the power to control the government. Because: whoever makes the money makes the rules. That’s the name of the game. So they can own whatever they want.

America has gone from being a nation of people who own their own property, own their own businesses, to a nation in debt. All our money is created by borrowing, and this country has become a nation of people who just live by borrowing – what’s my credit report, how much can I borrow this week, how much can I pay you off this week. People don’t own their own houses anymore for this very reason. In the old days, if you borrowed money, you wanted to pay it off as soon as possible. Now, what people look to do, is to have the lowest monthly payment they can get. Then they’ll think of owning their own house. It’s all based on a credit system because the Federal Reserve system is one that encourages debt. That’s why your credit card is in the mail all the time – ‘borrow money!’, ‘go to college, borrow money!’. They bring you into the system at a very early age. And once you get into debt, you’ll never get out, basically. Between taxes – the income tax, the interest on your debt, and inflation, you can’t get out from under. It’s very difficult for anybody, unless you’re very, very wealthy, to ever survive in this country and own anything because we’re always in debt.

Think of the three I-s. Interest payments – are very high. Income taxes. And inflation. Inflation is the silent tax, people don’t recognize the loss of their purchasing power.

If you look at the dollar bill from the time that the Federal Reserve came into being until today, the dollar is now worth about 4 cents from a dollar. A million dollars means nothing. My father bought his house in 1954 for US$ 27,000, in Long Island, in a very wealthy neighbourhood. We were middle-class. That same house just resold again, I was over to visit it, and the guy just bought the house, paid over a US$ 1 million for it. The value of that house has gone up about 50 times in 50 years. That’s because they print so much money. Inflation, the higher prices of things, arrives because they print so much money.

And we all buy into it.

You have to buy into it, you have no choice anymore. That’s why I made this movie. You really don’t have a choice as long as you have a Federal Reserve system.

This isn’t an accident we found ourselves in.

No, it’s slavery. It’s serfdom. Just take a look at the Democrats and Republicans in Congress. They have allowed this Federal Reserve system to come into being. And now they are letting the banks charge its users huge rates of interest, over 20, sometimes 30 percent on the money you borrow. And yet they change the bankruptcy laws so it’s much more difficult to get out of debt. So they are making you debtors for life. Everything is always on behalf of the banks. It’s always on behalf of the Federal Reserve. You have these high rates of interest, and at the same time you can’t declare bankruptcy anymore. They’re making it very difficult. You’re the hamster on the wheel.

Let’s talk about why, and the entities that have really helped set this up long-term to have people in this little hamster mill.

This has been a fight throughout history. Andrew Jackson fought the fight, Thomas Jefferson fought the fight. The bankers have always tried to control the country because they’re very clever and very smart people. And they knew that if they could ever get the government to give them the right to issue the money, they would control the government. They would control the laws of the nation. That’s why even today, look at the immigration laws, why is it happening? On the one hand, people say, we have had this 9-11 attack and we have to get ID-cards for people, RFID chips, everybody going to the airport has to be identified, they have to be searched, security is far more in everybody’s mind. On the other hand, I know if I were the President and 9-11 came, the first thing I would do was shut off the borders so nobody can come in here. So, on the one hand they’re telling Americans they have to be controlled with ID-cards and RFID chips, and on the other hand they’re letting everybody come through the border – terrorists, you can just walk across the border and come into the country. It’s a lie. It’s not about terrorism, it’s about the banks controlling the country and the world by working together. This is about the bankers wanting a one-world government without borders – that’s why everybody’s able to come through the borders. It’s not about security at all.

The situation we’re facing today is, we have a government that is controlled by the Federal Reserve system. The Federal Reserve system has this appearance of credibility, Alan Greenspan is the greatest guy in the world, now Dan Bernanky. But in reality the Federal Reserve is part of the Communist Manifesto. They talk about America being a capitalistic society, but yet you have a central bank that makes all the decisions. That’s not capitalism. It’s a fraud, it’s a lie. They deceive the people. They put out all this spin, all this press, the Federal Reserve protecting us and making sure there will be no more depressions in this country. What they have done is to destroy the currency of this country. And they have taken all our gold while destroying the currency. At some point, they will probably pull the plug and create a greater depression.

We’re talking about the silent head behind the powers that we see on the news.

Totally. There’s no question that the bankers control George Bush, Hillary Clinton, or whoever it is. It doesn’t matter if they are Democrat or Republican, it’s irrelevant. On the one hand, I enjoyed Michael Moore’s movie and I respected what he did as a film maker, I thought he did a very good job with that although I didn’t agree with everything he said. He got his points across. On the other hand, what he did is play into what the powers-that-be want him to play into. He played into it because it was Democrat vs. Republican. Red state vs Blue state. Liberal vs Conservative. Michael Moore played into the system. They want people to look into Democrats and Republicans and fighting over that, but not looking at the Federal Reserve as the real answer. So they hide behind that. It’s like the Wizard of Oz, the guy behind the curtain. It’s the Federal Reserve, actually the people behind the Federal Reserve. They use the Federal Reserve as a tool so they can control things. Michael Moore increased the tension in America and kept the polarization alive, which is what the people behind the curtain want. I don’t think he did that intentionally, he doesn’t know about the people behind the curtain.

My picture is more about where the real power lies, it’s not Democrats and Republicans – they are just puppets. My movie goes after the system, and how the system is functioning and operating today and what’s really going down. Why the people are so dissatisfied and unhappy in America and around the world. We try to address those issues and how to stop it from happening. It’s not only in America. We have the Federal Reserve system here, but there are central banks all over the world. And they all work together. In most of the industrialized West, it makes no difference: it’s where central banks are controlling the governments. Central banks make secret agreements with each other, for example M3, a measure of the money supply. The bigger the growth of the money supply, the less the dollar is worth. They recently decided not to publish the figures of M3 anymore. They don’t want people to know how much money they are printing. While that’s something we have every right to know.

They hit that magic number in debt recently, the US$ 8.3 trillion. That’s a big point to hit, isn’t it?

We have unfunded liabilities in this country over US$ 70 trillion. The 8.3 is just a portion of that. The real question is: there’s so much debt in this country, they have got to keep things afloat. They have to keep printing trillions and trillions of dollars. It’s getting so massive, they don’t want to let us know how much they are printing. We have no way to measure how fast we are going to lose the purchasing power of our money. On the other hand, if they choose to stop printing money, they can cause the biggest depression that ever happened in this country, or in the world. It’s all in these guys’ power. I don’t want to give them that power. It’s unconstitutional, it’s wrong. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, the Founders of this country, fought against having a central bank. It was one of the main objects they fought against. This central bank is controlling us and the laws of the nation.

Now you see the government talking about these RFID chips going in everything that can track you wherever you go. They are telling us to put these chips in your driver’s license by 2008. In everything. And they are going to chip people; they are going to put it into your bodies. It’s going through stages, and eventually, it’s going to end up in your hand. You’re going to be chipped like a dog. If I don’t want to be chipped, I’m not going to be chipped. But the fact is, you are not going to be able to start your computer, or have a bank account. Now that all money is becoming digitized, if you’re chipped they can take your money from you whenever they want to. You have no say. You have no privacy left. If I don’t want to have a cell phone, I can throw it away. If I don’t want to have GPS in my car, I can get rid of it. Once they implant a chip in you and there is no more cash, and you are in a cashless society, you have to have that chip for buying food.

If you protest like I do, if you fight what they are doing, they can just turn off my chip and I can’t even buy food. I can’t pay my bills. It’s total control. It’s slavery. Slavery. These central bankers are doing that. I’m not prepared to allow them to do that, that’s why I made this movie. I want people to wake up and know what’s really happening in this country. And the world. What happened in Europe recently? They voted down the European Constitution. But they are not stopping, they are going forward with it anyway. First they want to put the world into blocks – the Europeans, the Asians, the Americas, and then they want to bring it all together. It’s a one-world government where even voting doesn’t mean anything anymore. You want to live in a society with a government in which you have a say. That’s why local government is the best government, you have a voice. In America today, in the Federal government you know you have no voice. You have nothing to say. Imagine a world government, what will you be able to say? Nothing! Nobody’s going to listen to you. You’re just a tool for these people. You’re a hamster. They are going to suck you dry and spit you out. They don’t care about you.

And you are a revenue source. Can you talk about the whole fraud of the IRS?

I was friendly with one of the Rockefellers. He said to me one day “Aaron, remember that whole thing with women’s lib, when it was the biggest thing, you saw it in all magazines and on television, ‘Women’s lib! Women have a right to work just as they have a right to vote, and you make sure that they have a right to work.’ We, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve, were promoting that whole thing! Because we wanted to get the women into the work force, we wanted to be able to tax them! That’s why you saw it in all the newspapers all the time. The added plus was: then they had to put their children in child care and to school early. So we could control their minds at a young age. That’s what that was all about. You called it women’s lib, but it was about giving us control. And nobody realized that.”

And now women are as exhausted as men, on the treadmill.

Exactly. We are dealing with very devious, diabolical people, who are incredibly intelligent, who control the money supply. They control the army, they control the government. It’s very hard to stop them. The way to stop them, in my view – and it could be done, even though we’re very close to losing this game – is by shutting down the Federal Reserve system. Congress has the legal authority to shut down the Federal Reserve.

But if they don’t have the courage to do it, why do we?

If we massively protested and tell every politician “you have to listen to the will of the people, not to the will of the Federal Reserve bankers, and we’re going to vote you out of office unless you sign an affidavit saying that you are going to shut down the Federal Reserve system”, that will be the litmus test on who to vote for. Not whether they are Democrats or Republicans, but “will you sign an affidavit saying ‘I will vote to shut down the Federal Reserve system’”. Drop all the other issues, whether it’s gun control, or the environment or whatever. Nothing is going to matter if you don’t get rid of the Federal Reserve. If we can get everybody to focus on the Federal Reserve system like a laser-beam and drop all the other stuff temporarily, and shut this system down, we have a chance of saving the country. That’s what it will take. We can still do it, because Congress has the authority to do it. Congress needs you and me to vote for them to get back into office.

For this to happen, it’s up to you and me and many others to begin educating the public what we’re really up against.

That’s why I made this movie.

Let’s talk about the IRS.

The IRS is part of the Federal Reserve system problem. In actuality, there is no law that requires you to file a 10-40. I will tell you why there is no law. First of all, the Constitution says there are two kinds of taxation: direct taxes and indirect taxes. A direct tax must be apportioned and then by census, which means that a direct tax – which is what a tax on your labor would be – must be apportioned among all people equally. An indirect tax is like an excise tax, a tax you don’t have to pay if you don’t use the service. Like gasoline: if you ride a bicycle, you don’t buy gasoline, you don’t pay the tax. That’s an indirect tax, and it has to be the same in every state, it has to be uniform.

In 1894, they tried to pass an income tax on your labor. The Supreme Court said ‘you can’t do that, it’s unconstitutional’. They stopped. In 1913, to get around that decision of 1894, they passed the 16th Amendment, which says ‘we can tax any income from any place’. Once they passed that Amendment, then people started to pay an income tax on their labor. It became a third form of taxation. You had direct, apportioned tax; you had the indirect tax; and now you had a direct tax that was unapportioned. But firstly, the Amendment was never ratified properly, it was a fraud – it’s been proven. Secondly, even if it wasn’t a fraud and had been ratified properly, the Supreme Court, in eight different decisions, said that the 16th Amendment gave the government no new power of taxation. They can’t tax the labor of the American people. In 1917, they stopped taxing the people. There is no legal tax and no constitutional tax. They have made the IRS code – saying whatever it says, but whatever it says is irrelevant because it is not compliant with the Supreme Court decisions. Even after examining the IRS code, there is still no law that can tax on your labor.

They want to make you feel that if you don’t pay, you’re not a good citizen. That’s part of their propaganda. It’s what allows them to keep spending money.

It’s not just you saying this. In your film, you are talking to former IRS agents and investigators who were put to the task of finding out on behalf of inquiries as to whether or not this was a legal practice, only to find out that it wasn’t legal. In fact, some of the people who were formerly with the IRS have not paid their taxes since they found out about this.

They deserve to be honored for the work they have done. In my opinion, it’s a giant scam. We are up against a police state, because even though there is no law, they have threatened people with harm. I interviewed the ex-IRS Commissioner who wrote the tax code. He was General Counsel to the IRS, he was the Commissioner to the IRS, and he wrote the tax code. I interviewed him for the movie. In the movie, he says “Supreme Court decisions are inapplicable to the IRS”.

What was his justification?

He has no justification. I put him into a corner, he couldn’t answer the questions. In the end he was forced to say that Supreme Court decisions don’t matter – which we all know is a lie. The IRS is not beyond the Supreme Court. There is no law that allows the government to put a direct, unapportioned tax on your labor. An income tax is defined by the Supreme Court as a corporate gain. There is an income tax, but it is not a tax on your labor. An income tax is a tax on gains by corporations. That’s the definition of an income tax.

You have a sound byte in the movie from Judge Emmett Sullivan. It was a shocking statement. Can you tell us how that came about?

We have a right to petition. Under the first Amendment, people have a right to petition their government to get answers to things. The government is the servant of the people, not the other way around. There’s this group called We the People. They submitted a petition to the government, for the government to show the law that they are enforcing. They petitioned the government to get answers. And the government refused to answer the question about where the law is. So they went to court. This judge Sullivan said in his decision that the government does not have to answer the people’s questions about where the law is.

That is beyond chilling.

Yes. We don’t have a Constitution anymore. We don’t have a government run by the people anymore. We live in a totalitarian country today. That’s the bottom line. We live in totalitarianism. If you want to have the country back, we have to get rid of the Federal Reserve system, we have to give people back the control of the government.

Before we are all chipped.

Before we are all chipped. I am not going to take an ID card. Nobody should take an ID card, even if it’s in your driver’s license. Because so many people have a driver’s license, they are going to chip the driver’s license. If you just had a separate ID card, you could say ‘I don’t want that card, I won’t take it. But if it’s in my driver’s license, I better get it because I have to drive’. They are very smart people, they put you into situations where you have to take things from them. Even if it’s in your driver’s license, you shouldn’t take it. Don’t take an ID card.

I am planning a series of nation-wide strikes and revolt against what is happening in the government, to wake people up, to shut down the Federal Reserve system, to stop these chips from being employed. I expect that my movie is going to raise a lot of awareness and activity from people. People start getting awol when they realize what is really happening and how all these central banks of the world are working together. Sometimes when you say the word ‘New World Order’ people go ‘oh you’re a just a conspiracy nut’. The New World Order is all of the central banks working together to control the governments and the laws of the world. We will be forced to listen to these laws. The laws are about controlling us, not giving us freedom. Unless we get back to our idea of individual rights and individual freedoms and be allowed to express yourself any way you want, we will lose this game. Unless people get active and say ‘I’m going to shut down the Federal Reserve system, I’m going to shut down the powers-that-be’ we are doomed.

Is there any means beyond that? What if we are not successful in shutting down the Federal Reserve? What about strengthening the individuals, what if half the country was refusing to pay their income tax?

Half of the country already does not pay it, 67 million people I am told by the IRS themselves. I don’t think it is because these people are all protesting, I think it is by default or they are trying to skip it. Even if we can’t get the Congress to shut down the Federal Reserve system, then we can still shut down the country with massive strikes and get everybody to stop. People will begin to realize, because we are approaching the end-game. Things are starting to accelerate. People looking at George Bush think he’s going to declare martial law. It wouldn’t surprise me.

There are already indications that Homeland Security is going to be involved, in case of a national emergency, in auditing what you can and cannot remove from your own safety deposit boxes from some of the countries largest banks.

There is no question that there are indications that if people want to repossess their gold, you won’t be able to go into a bank vault without somebody from Homeland Security to accompany you to see what you take out. There exist Executive Orders that say the government has the ability to put you on a work detail. In other words, let’s say you’re a teacher in Oregon; they can put you digging ditches in Ohio. That’s an Executive Order. They can relocate whole populations if they want to. These are real Executive Orders. The government is planning a takeover of the American people. I understand there are 800 internment camps.

It’s my understanding that they do not just exist – I went to a conference listening to an engineer on how they build them, how they tunnel that far every day; the technical aspects of building these camps underground. It has been spotted all over the United States. Most people don’t know these exist, and why on earth are they building them for if not for use?

They claim they are building them in the case of too much immigration into the country, if it gets crazy. At this point, it’s hard to know what is in their minds. All I know for a fact is that they are building them. That’s for real. How they are going to use them, is speculation on my part. Any good logical way of thinking let’s you know what they are going to use them for. Thus even if I can’t prove what is in their minds, it’s pretty obvious. It seems to me that what we have to fight for is to restore the very essence of what Thomas Jefferson, James Madison gave us here. We control the government. This is about We the People again, not about the government and these bankers working together to stifle us. The people have to wake up and say ’hey I’m not going to take this anymore, I’m mad as hell, I’m not going to do this’. We have the power. We still have the power. If we resist, there is nothing they can do.

The problem is that we are asleep at the wheel.

You are trying to wake people up, I’m trying to wake people up. There are more people awake now than there have ever been before. I see that happening, and I think a picture like mine can help people wake up to what the truth is and possibly the word will spread. We should all get focused on how to win the game instead of focusing on all these different objectives. You have got to cut off the head of the beast, and the head of the beast is the Federal Reserve and the people behind it. That’s what will save this country. If people understand that, and stop being good Democrats and good Republicans but rather become good Americans, that’s what will save the country.