I watched about ten or fifteen minutes of the film, and checked and cross referenced most of the claims made in the first ten minutes.
Nearly all of them are false or misleading:
Misleading and out of context
Judge Fox of North Carolina
spoke on the basis of a dim recollection of the sorts of arguments we shall deal with below.
This is not a court opinion, simply something he uttered during a hearing.
Fox offered this observation while deliberating a rather crankish lawsuit filed in 2003 by two members of the North Carolina National Guard, who felt that the War Powers act was unconstitutional. Fox argued that the Constitution had, in essence, evolved. He then cited the 16th amendment as an example of this sort of evolution. Here’s the full quote, emphasis added:
Fox cannot cite the source of his impression. He hasn’t studied the matter because it was not germane to the case under discussion. He mentioned the amendment only in passing.
In sum: Russo implies that Fox claimed the Amendment to be unconstitutional; in fact, Fox made exactly the opposite point. Russo implies that Fox ruled on a case involving the 16th Amendment; in fact, the case was about a completely different matter. Russo implies that Fox had studied the facts; Fox could not recall where he got his “facts.”
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2006/12/america-from-freedom-to-fascism.html
-Further,
Some tax protesters, conspiracy investigators, and others opposed to income taxes cite what they contend is evidence that the Sixteenth Amendment was
never "properly ratified." One such argument is that
because the legislatures of various states passed resolutions of ratification with different capitalization, spelling of words, or punctuation marks (e.g., semi-colons instead of commas) from the text proposed by Congress, those states' ratifications were invalid. A related argument is that various states illegally violated procedural requirements of their constitutions when passing their ratification resolutions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixtee...ax_protester_arguments_regarding_ratification
Please.
It was an "invalid" ratification, because of some punctuation variances between the states??? Laughable.
False.
This is a well-known conflation of several quotes, only two of which can actually be attributed to Woodrow Wilson. Russo probably got the conflated statement off some anti-tax site on the internet.
The source of the first two sentences is unknown, and nowhere on record can be found to be said by Wilson. The third sentence (although slightly altered in this version) is found in the eighth chapter of Wilson's book, The New Freedom,[11] and originally reads
A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.
The final sentence (beginning with "We are no longer..."), although again slightly altered from its original version, can also be found in The New Freedom (ninth chapter), and in its original context, reads
We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world--no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America:_From_Freedom_to_Fascism#_note-11
Ridiculous and retarded.
Does anyone think America was free - let alone “more” free - in 1913, than it is NOW??? Women couldn’t VOTE in 1913. Blacks couldn’t vote. There was Jim Crow and Poll taxes. Workers were abused by an unregulated capitalist system that ground them down.
Absolute poppycock
There’s no sane person here who will claim our standard of living has
declined since 1913.
Intentionally misleading and truncated
What Clinton actually said (on March 1 1993 [13]) was:
We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles—it's something I strongly support—we can't be so fixated on that that we are unable to think about the reality of life that millions of Americans face on streets that are unsafe, under conditions that no other nation—no other nations—has permitted to exist.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46264
Baloney
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution begins with the phrase “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes.
Only three limitations are placed on that power,
none of which bars a tax on wages. One limitation, however, was a requirement that taxes be “apportioned among the several states.”
US Constitution, Article I, Section 8
http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#A1Sec8
These false statements were all in the first ten or fifteen minutes. I fast forward to about half way through the film, and he was still blabbing about taxes and the IRS.
This is standard tax conspiracist tripe. Stuff that has been debunked over and over, but is grasped onto by a handful of anti-tax cranks.
This could have been a worthwhile film, if he’d focused on Patriot Act, Enemy combatant statutes, REAL ID act, and warrantless wiretapping, instead of this anti-tax crackpot stuff.
Finally, let’s recall this is the guy who claims to have shown his film at the Cannes Film Festival. A cursory review, shows that it was never shown at the Cannes Festival. He rented a blowup screen, and showed it on the beach at Cannes.
Sorry, beefy. Don’t take offense. This is just my critique of the film. I actually tried to watch it.
