Wolf explains how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century’s worst dictatorships such as Germany, Russia, China and Chile. Recent history has profound lessons for us in the U.S. today about how fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies. The secret is that these leaders all tend to take very similar, parallel steps. The Founders of this nation were so deeply familiar with tyranny and the habits and practices of tyrants that they set up our checks and balances precisely out of fear of what is unfolding today. We are seeing these same kinds of tactics now closing down freedoms in America. Reviews for the End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf
“You will be shocked and disturbed by this book. Most Americans reject outright any comparison of post 9/11 America with the fascism and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany or Pinochet’s Chile. Sadly, the parallels and similarities, what Wolf calls the ‘echoes’ between those societies and America today, are all too compelling.”
—Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights
"Naomi Wolf sounds the alarm for all American patriots. We must come together as a nation and recommit ourselves to the fundamental American idea that no president, whether Democrat or Republican, will ever be given unchecked power."
—Wes Boyd, co-founder, MoveOn.org
“The framers of our Constitution fully understood that it can happen here. Patriots like Madison, Paine, and Franklin would certainly applaud Naomi Wolf and recognize her as a sister in their struggle.”
—Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again
“Naomi Wolf’s End of America is a vivid, urgent, mandatory wake-up call that addresses momentous issues of tyranny, democracy, and survival.”
—Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of the three-volume Eleanor Roosevelt
The first factor in the Erosion of Freedom is to stifle and control you by controlling your money. This book and many like it represent a new trend in America; people are beginning to think and feel that the American Government is out of control, this is not a mere guess but a FACT. Chapter 3Background and History Michael Moore has made 2 movies about recent issues in America, Fahrenheit 911 and Sicko. I want to start by addressing the issues in Fahrenheit 911 and later I will talk about Sicko. Both of Michael Moore’s observations are pivotal, yet like many he does not go far enough, you can only do and say so much in a movie, not all of the issues are covered and the solutions that would help us resolve them are not clearly and accurately stated. Michael Moore has started the change in thinking, but for it to truly work, it must be laid completely open and the solutions clearly defined for all to see and act upon. I strive to awaken every men and women in America to take action. Every person who calls themselves an American, must understand what is really going on and MUST work with their follow Americans to make things right.Every American that has complained about higher gas prices, higher grocery prices, higher medical expenses, higher utilities, higher housing prices, higher car prices, higher auto repair bills, or higher insurance prices has an interest and an obligation to do something about it. You may think at times that you are at the mercy of unknown forces or unforeseen factors; I will show you and explain to you exactly who and what they are. All I ask is that you read what I have written here and then decide your course of action. I will present facts and opinions and conclusions, many of the facts that I do present are based on personal observations. I lay out the salary from my actual job and the taxes and expenditures that eat it up every month. I use my own Electric bill as an example. One thing must be clear before we start and that is that you have cause to think about your own life and family and apply what I say to your own experiences and make a decision to act in some way. Thinking about change is a good start but you must take action and you must bind yourself with others in taking an action to affect change. Only as a large group can Americans make changes. Change must take place, so read on and keep an open mind. With that in mind let’s start with a brief history of how democracy started in America. The Boston Tea Party was an act of protest by the American colonists against Great Britain in which they destroyed many crates of tea bricks on ships in Boston Harbor. This incident is cited as the turning point that helped to spark the American Revolution. On Thursday, December 16, 1773, the evening before the tea was due to be landed, the Sons of Liberty thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, left the massive protest meeting and headed toward Griffin's Wharf, where lay the ships The Dartmouth and the newly arrived Beaver and Eleanor. Swiftly and efficiently, casks of tea were brought up from the hold to the deck; this was reasonable proof that some of the "Indians" were, in fact, longshoremen. The casks were opened and the tea dumped overboard; the work, lasting well into the night, was quick, thorough, and efficient. By dawn, 90,000 lbs (45 tons) of tea worth an estimated £10,000 had been consigned to the waters of Boston Harbor. Nothing else had been damaged or stolen, except a single padlock accidentally broken and anonymously replaced not long thereafter. Tea washed up on the shores around Boston for weeks. The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 angered colonists regarding British decisions on taxing the colonies despite a lack of representation in the Parliament in England. Shipping Merchant John Hancock, (Yes this is the same man who chaired the committee in the approval of and was the First Signer of the Declaration of Independence), organized a boycott of tea from China sold by the British East India Company, whose sales in the colonies then fell from 320,000 pounds (145,000 kg) to 520 pounds (240 kg). By 1773, the company had large debts, huge stocks of tea in its warehouses and no prospect of selling it. The British government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company (a British Importing Company) to sell tea to the colonies directly and without "payment of any customs or duties whatsoever" in Britain, instead paying the much lower American duty. This tax break allowed the East India Company to sell for lower prices than those offered by the colonial merchants and smugglers. (In other words the British government manipulated both the tax laws and the prices in its own favor).
Excerpts from Wikipedia.
The whole purpose of the American Revolution was to break free from England’s control over everything financial. The Declaration of Independence lists in several places the specific abuses of high pricing controls by the King of England onto the colonies. I use the above example of the Boston Tea Party to show how England used every means it had to not only tax us as much as it could but force the setting of higher prices that the colonials had to pay. The people of the United States of America no longer control their lives or their money. US Corporations control everything now. Rather than tax you directly the government is manipulated into allowing prices to be controlled by Corporations who set prices and reap higher and higher profits each year. The trade off for the US government is that by allowing prices to rise at the will of the Corporations, instead of taxing you more, they collect those additional tax dollars from the profits of the corporations. This tactic makes it appear that the problem is economic when it is not. In other words the Corporations raise prices, and you pay more, but you are not taxed more. The corporations pay the same taxes, the same percentages, not the same amounts, so the Corporations pay higher amounts of taxes but still at the same percentages as they did 10 years ago. All the while making huge profits. Here is an example of this, in the past Company A had sales of $10 million per year and paid 10% in taxes or $1 million. Now Company A has raised its prices 5 times and now makes $50 million yet still sells the same number of units it sold before. So they have $50 million in yearly income but they still pay 10% in taxes or $5 million. Instead of having $9 million in profits they now have $45 million in profit. This is a static example to illustrate what is happening in our country.
On previous pages I mentioned higher gas Prices, grocery bills, car prices, housing, utilities etc. I will give exact examples of all of these in subsequent pages, But for now I think you can start to see my point. Most people would quickly come to the conclusion that the tragedies of 9\11 are where it starts, but it actually starts much earlier than that. For the moment we will discuss the Bush Administration.
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 shows that the Bush Family was actively involved, with other US corporations, a group I have dubbed the Iraq Club, in finding a way into the vast fortunes of the oil wealth in Iraq, and well before the elections of 2000. The Bush Family furnished the candidate and the whole group put a plan together.
With its plans to manipulate an election, if necessary, this group of US corporations, the Iraq Club set out to place their puppet candidate into the Presidency.
At this point I think I should qualify why this man is nothing more than a puppet. He comes from a very wealthy and powerful family of Texas Oil Millionaires, or probably Billionaires. Both oil start ups that his family gave him, he ran into the ground, wasting millions of dollars. The only going business that he had his hands in was also bought for him by his family, that of lead owner of a Texas Baseball Team. As owner of the baseball team he was a figure head only and had no real duties, hence he could not run the baseball franchise into the ground. This very average man was pushed and poised and groomed to become President. As a public official this man cannot keep his mouth shut, insulting African Americans and wishing his presidency was a dictatorship. These are the clear signs of a man of average intelligence behaving like the spoiled rich brat that he is. Things were set into place and the election proceeded seemingly without issue, this is the great deception however, as the fix was already well in place months before the election. The night of the presidential election, although close, showed that Vice President Al Gore had won the Popular Vote and the Electoral College vote, to become the next President. By awarding Florida to Al Gore, this gave him the Presidency. Florida has always gone to the Democratic Candidate; this was the status quo, if you will. By awarding Al Gore Florida, before all the votes had actually been counted, was where the fix kicked in.
Bush campaign officials protested, while the election was still going on, saying their information shows Bush taking Florida. HOW would they know this so early on election night, unless they knew for certain that the results could be changed to show their candidate had won? In an election that would be close Florida was key in making this fix work, it was the only state big enough to effect the election outcome. George Bush’s younger brother was the Governor of Florida, a person born and raised in Texas, was the governor of Florida? Florida’s chief election official was placed in that position by Governor Jeb Bush, and was a long time family friend of the Bushes. This person had also had numerous financial ventures with the Bush Family. Thousands of ballots in Florida could not be counted due to the voting machines leaving bits of the ballot paper hanging from the back of the ballots, what was referred to as chafe. It seems the correct thing to do would be to hand clean these ballots, removing the bits of paper. Instead these ballots were ruled by that Florida election official as invalid. It would not be until after the vote was certified by Congress and George Bush was safely in the White House, that strangely enough, these supposedly invalid ballots showed a majority win in Florida for Al Gore. The votes in Florida were close, so by invalidating a certain number of ballots they were able to shift the results of the election in favor of their candidate, the Governor’s brother. Since these ballots were recorded as invalid and never counted, regardless of what they proved or didn’t prove, they would not be allowable or admissible as court evidence, EVER! The constitution says that the Congress must ratify or certify the election.
This was debated in Congress for many weeks. It was a brave man in Al Gore that stood and followed the Constitution to the letter in these proceedings. House Representative after Representative stood up to question the election, but much to his credit, Al Gore’s great character guided him in doing the right thing. As the Vice President it was Al Gore’s primary job to preside over the Senate, but without the ability to raise an objection. Every time a Representative made an objection to the election, Al Gore repeated that it must be a Senator to make a formal objection, not One Senator ever stood up to object. Why? Did they all feel that this was fair and just? I find it so difficult to believe that not one senator objected, I am very sure that several did, but not one had the character, the guts or the backbone to stand up and say so, this was a terrible shame to America. Added note: On October 12, 2007, Former Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his Academy Award winning film, “An Inconvenient Truth” The film is a documentary on Global Warming. I will save my thoughts on Global Warming for my next book.
Since so many Representatives questioned the election results, yet not one Senator did, I would have to believe that the fix had been set here as well, just in case, either through coercion or bribery. More probably, and just as believable is that maybe these Senators already knew that an objection was pointless, because all those “invalid ballots” could not be used in court to change the rigged election results. Hence why raise an objection to the election, that when all was said and done would not have put Al Gore in the White House. Where was the collective conscious of the Senate to uphold the truth?
This is the second factor in the Erosion of Freedom.(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
