'America: Freedom to Fascism'

Comments (0) By Luke Y. Thompson Tuesday, Jul 18 2006

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America: Freedom to Fascism
Written and directed by Aaron Russo
Cinema Libre, opens July 28, Village East

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It's a little disingenuous for filmmaker Aaron Russo to pose as just an uninformed individual trying to uncover the "truth" about the IRS in this new documentary—he doesn't tell you that he ran in the Libertarian Party's presidential primary in 2004, and his mind was made up a long time ago. Nonetheless, his arguments about the constitutionality of the federal income tax deserve a serious point-by-point response from someone in the know. Even though Russo seems to be arguing a technicality— the Sixteenth Amendment gives Congress the power to tax income, but no law since has explicitly laid out how they should do it—the government ought to answer better than they have. Unfortunately, that's not the whole movie. From the tax debate, the documentary suddenly gets scattershot, going after the Patriot Act, laws against vitamin sales, election fraud, and Hurricane Katrina response (apparently a plot to grab people's guns), building to the standard New World Order line, which discredits any valid points Russo may have.