Stairway to Tyranny

Can we believe that there is no danger of 'fascism' or 'totalitarianism' here? That there's no corporate stranglehold on the economy; no collusion between Washington and the bankers/businesses; no creeping laws that take private property away from hard-working families and individuals for the benefit of those at the top?This defeat of the individual and the spirit of enterprise began prior to 1862; it was accelerated under Lincoln, a corporate agent. Wilson allowed the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, Reagan further empowered the corporations, and Bush gave us the Patriot Act. This book reviews the historical precedents that show how we are being set up for an authoritarian take-over and calls for all citizens to work together to stop it in its tracks. US history as we know it has been twisted and distorted to throw us off the trail, so that we misread the signs that indicate the danger we are in. Every major issue has been condensed into an emotional distraction for the purpose of concealing the facts.We have a corporate stranglehold on the economy; collusion between Washington and the bankers/businesses; creeping laws that take private property away from hard-working families and individuals for the benefit of those at the top...Are we walking right into the trap?Authority is being concentrated, our liberties are chipped away, and what little wealth we manage to scrape together is confiscated on more and more flimsy pretexts. The privately-held resource base that was supposed to be the bedrock of this country is being taken away, and the average citizen is turned into a feudal serf, a debt-slave, subservient to a central bank and the corporations it finances.The defeat of individual enterprise began with the de facto central bank of New York, and the corporations that have grown up around it. Lincoln started the War against the South to support that bank and the corporations that had grown up around it. Forty years after World War II, the checks and balances on the corporations were removed in Reagan's plan of deregulation. Twenty years after that, 9/11 provided the excuse for passing the Patriot Act, which removed the checks and balances preventing the president from placing himself in the position of absolute authority.Now, here we stand in our own present day and time on the threshold of the unthinkable, and it has materialized right before our eyes. It's time to see our history in a new light and draw new conclusions.