Yes, there is a clearer-and-presenter danger from corruption than the venality of born-to-be-crooks right-wingers

by Ken

The other evening I went to a screening of Casino Jack and the United States of Money, the new documentary produced and directed by Alex Gibney, whose previous films include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) and the 2007 Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, which works from the murder of the Afghan taxi driver Dilawar while in U.S. custody to the larger issues of torture and interrogation.

It's a really good movie, and you should see it. The two cases it looks at closely, the American Far Right's championing-for-hire of the virtual-slave sweatshops of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI becomes a familiar acronym) and the Abramoff-led ripoffs of every Native American tribe that could be hoodwinked into filling the grifters' coffers for casino influence-peddling, the grand stunt being the unleashing of the religious and family-values Right to shut down casinos that were not paying them off. I'm sure the outlines of these stories are familiar to most DWT readers, but it's good to review them, and there's probably detail here that most of us never knew. There's also ample attention to the curious business dealings, including the suspicious murder of Gus Boulis, the shady figure Abramoff muscled out of ownership of the SunCruz gambling ships.

One of the many "looks" of Casino Jack

Along the way there is excellent background on the cabal of College Republicans, those Future Hoodlums of America, prominent among them such ideological crusaders as Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed (even the collegiate Karl Rove is seen briefly, looking almost human), radical-right young hustlers for whom the ultra-conservative Young Americans for Freedom weren't conservative enough, and who actually did engineer a revolution, overthrowing their elders in the party and, under the mantel of that apostle of imbecility and deception Ronald Reagan actually took over Congress in 1994. There are impressive interviews with some of the good guys, like the Washington Post's Susan Schmidt, who broke the Abramoff story, CREW's Melanie Sloan, who did yeoman's work ferreting out some of Washington's dirtier secrets, and commentator Thomas Franks, who admits to having been a College Republican ("I was in college. There was beer") before his awakening.

What Gibney's reconstruction makes clear is that there doesn't appear to be a shred of honest principle among the whole lot of them there, and what's more, their corruption is inseparable from their bogus political "philosophy." For them, apparently, the insatiable greed is part and parcel of their "conservatism." In their minds, the shameless personal enrichment via enslaving Asian workers or extorting Native American casino operators is actually part of their commitment to their conservative "values."

There are other players in the high-flying Republican Culture of Corruption for whom this was apparently less true, notably Ohio Rep. Bob Ney and his onetime chief of staff, Neil Volz [above], two of the very few people hooked into Abramoff who went to prison for their misdeeds, having glommed onto Abramoff as a potential source for the money that pretty much every member of Congress, in both houses and of both parties, now seeks perpetually. Volz in his interview now sees all the signs that he should have seen at the time, and really did see (he just didn't pay them any mind), that the whole Abramoff operation stunk -- stunk, that is, beyond a level that he and Ney, his then-boss, should have allowed themselves to be associated with.

In Ney's interview there's an almost comical moment when the former congressman recalls inserting some derogatory reference to Gus Boulis into the Congressional Record without having any clear idea who the guy was, let alone why Ney was bad-mouthing him for the record. Volz, the office's contact with Abramoff (for whom he later went to work, via the famous congressional revolving door, lobbyist division), had to explain to him that this was something they were doing for their miraculous new benefactor.

I think you too will have a strong emotional reaction to the stinking corruption of the right-wingers. The odious Tom DeLay, the architect of the modern K Street primacy over Congress, appears in the film more slithery than ever, and utterly unrepentant. Emotionally, as I say, it's very satisfying.

But the film doesn't spare the opposition, noting in particular New York Sen. Chuck Schumer's responsibility for preserving the loophole that keeps hedge-fund managers paying a preposterous 15 percent tax rate. I'm not sure enough was made of this, though, and I'm glad that I was lucky enough to attend a screening of the film followed by a panel on which the ubiquitous Prof. Lawrence Lessig appeared, and I was persuaded, much to my surprise, that the sweatshop and casino looting, emotionally revolting as it is, is actually the lesser story here. Casino Jack is merely an over-the-top case of what is now a toxically standard relationship between Congress and its institutionalized paymasters, the K Street lobbying industry, and the entire structure of pay-to-play congressional financing.

I've had mixed feelings about Lessig's much-trumpeted legal and philosophical expertise, but on this he was dead-on. His argument was that the real terror for the country is the systematic corruption that is now part of the job description of all members of Congress. This, he argued, is what makes Congress intractably useless for any kind of responsible government, and he argued persuasively that given this situation, all the single-issue constituencies that plead the case for their causes, whether it's health care or the environment or immigration, however worthy and important and worthy those causes are, have to understand that until we can do something about the money problem, all the rest is near hopeless.

Which is how he arrived at the concept of an organization called Fix Congress First! The man makes an excellent case. By all means, see Casino Jack. But then check out the Fix Congress First! website.

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