As E. J. Dionne Jr. reminds us (yet again!), it's all about the money

by Ken

I've told you before about my friend Jim Dawson's Back Row Reviews website ("The Movie Guide That Knows Where It Sits"), the only place I know to turn for movie reviews of any usefulness whatsoever. Of course even better are those occasional e-mails in which Jim passes along a hot tip of a picture genuinely worth seeing. With depressing frequency, though, they turn out to be accompanied by a warning that the picture in question is going to be depressing.

Great! That's just what I need! To slap down my $13 (I think that's what I paid for the last movie I saw) to be depressed! Thanks a heap, motion-picture industry.

I bring this up by way of explanation for why I probably won't get around to reading those books of Thom Hartmann's, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People" -- and How You Can Fight Back (2004) and Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture (2009), which Howie has been so enthusiastic about. I don't have the slightest doubt that they're every bit as good as Howie says they are, but I find this whole subject of the near-complete takeover of our electoral system by Big Money ineffably depressing, since I can't help thinking deep down that there isn't a bloody thing we can do about it.

I think we all know that even though we've got some rich people on our side, including people like George Soros who put their money where their mouths are (don't ask me who I mean by "people like George Soros"; I'm just sure there must be somebody), we can never begin to compete with the the Right's dual sources of nearly infinite cash reserves:

* super-rich Righties who give stupdendous amounts out of sheer ideological crackpottery, and

* super-rich Righties who give stupendous sums as an investment on which they expect equally generous financial return.

Of course the categories are by no means mutually exclusive. It's altogether possible to be an ideological zealot who makes that zealotry pay in the most tangible way. Like, say, the billionaire Koch brothers. In the end this is probably why I didn't add anything to what Howie wrote about the billionaire Koch brothers, fascinated though I was by Jane Mayer's gripping New Yorker exploration ("Covert Operations") of their financial reach, through such institutions as the lobbying organization Americans for Prosperity and the Mercatus Center think tank. It's just too depressing.

So I'm relieved that Howie is less squeamish, and am generally happy to cede this beat to him. And I'm not surprised either that the Washington Post's seemingly unflappable E. J. Dionne Jr. is able to keep returning to the subject of the Money Fortress and bash his head against it some more, as he did again yesterday in a column called "Shadowy players in a new class war."

"The 2010 election is turning into a class war," he began. "The wealthy and the powerful started it."

Here I am, having just written about the traditional much-loved right-wing trick of screaming "Class warfare" as a way of diverting discussion from the very real class warfare the Right loves to wage -- again, as a matter of both cuckoo ideology and hard-nosed financial self-interest.

It's a subject that's usually taboo in the infotainment news media, and is generally rigorously shunned by in-the-know Villagers except to point out that the occasional scraggly Democrat is once again attempting to wage --

"Class warfare!"

I was startled to find the Post's arch-Village financial columnist Steven Pearlstein devoting an entire column to "The costs of rising economic inequality," writing crazy stuff -- for a standard-issue Villager -- like:

Political candidates may not be talking about income inequality during this election, but it is the unspoken issue that underlies all the others. Without a sense of shared prosperity, there can be no prosperity. And given the realities of global capitalism, with its booms and busts and winner-take-all dynamic, that will require more government involvement in the economy, not less.

Of course E. J. Dionne is about as far as you can get from a standard-issue Villager. And the 2010 electoral class war, he writes, is "a strange development."

President Obama, after all, has been working overtime to save capitalism. Wall Street is doing just fine, and the rich are getting richer again. The financial reform bill passed by Congress was moderate, not radical.

Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats. One of the biggest political players, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accepts money from foreign sources.

The chamber piously insists that none of the cash from abroad is going into its ad campaigns. But without full disclosure, there's no way of knowing if that's true or simply an accounting trick. [Here E.J. is characteristically being too kind. How often is it necessary to point out that cash is totally fungible? Every dollar devoted to one use frees up a dollar to devote to a different one, so it's lying bullshit for the chamber to claim that so-and-so's bucks didn't go to such-and-such.] And the chamber is just one of many groups engaged in an election-year spending spree.

This extraordinary state of affairs was facilitated by the U.S. Supreme Court's scandalous Citizens United decision, which swept away decades of restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections. The Republicans' success in blocking legislation that would at least have required the big spenders to disclose the sources of their money means voters have to operate in the dark.

Ah yes, Citizens United. Eventually any discussion of how money buys elections has to come around to Citizens United. Rather incredibly, I know bona fide progessives, with hands-on experience of the campaign finance world, who argued from various vantage points that the decision wouldn't have as damaging effect as the worst worry worts were worrying, and for a long while it was pointed out that the donors who had these new doors opened to them seemed to be treading gently. I don't know anybody who says either of those things now, and I think what we're seeing so far is still mere prelude, sort of a tune-up for the presidential sweepstakes in 2012.

The "logic" behind Citizens United is that third-party spending can't possibly be corrupting. The five-justice majority declared that "this Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."

You can decide what's more stunning about this statement, its naivete or its arrogance. [Emphasis added. Sorry, I couldn't resist. Isn't that fantastic?]

If one side in the debate can overwhelm the political system with clandestine cash, which is what's happening, is there any doubt that the side in question will buy itself a lot of influence? If that's not corruption, what exactly is it?

And how can five justices, who purport not to be political, sweep aside what elected officials themselves long ago concluded on the subject and claim to know what will or will not "cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy"? Could anything undermine trust in the system more than secret contributions to shadowy groups spending the money on nasty ads? The good news is that the class war is bringing a certain clarity to politics. It is also another piece of evidence for the radicalism of the current brand of conservatism. This, in turn, is forcing Democrats to defend a proposition they have been committed to since the days of Franklin Roosevelt but are often too timid to proclaim: that government has a legitimate and necessary role in making economic rules to protect individuals from abuse. [Sorry, once again I couldn't help myself.]

And E. J. comes up with an "entertaining and educational" for instance: "watch[ing] Republican Senate candidates in Connecticut, West Virginia, Alaska and Kentucky grapple with the impact of their bad-mouthing minimum-wage laws."

Conservative academics have warred against the minimum wage ever since FDR declared the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 perhaps "the most far-reaching program, the most far-sighted program for the benefit of workers that has ever been adopted here or in any other country."

These critics have never gained traction because most people think it's simple justice that those who work for a living be treated with a modicum of respect. Many voters who express skepticism about government in the abstract nonetheless favor laws that give a fighting chance to individuals with weaker bargaining positions in the marketplace.

The minimum-wage battle underscores the difference between 2010-style conservatism and the conservatism of Dwight Eisenhower or even Ronald Reagan. The 2010 right actually imagines a return to the times prior to the New Deal and Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal, the heady days before there were laws on wages and hours, environmental concerns and undue economic concentration.

Our deceptively slick, Clark Kent-ishly bespectacled columnist understands that the Class War of 2010 isn't just something the country doesn't need now, but is something that's "irrational in any case."

Practically no one, least of all Obama, is questioning the basics of the market system or proposing anything more than somewhat tighter economic regulations -- after the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression -- and rather modest tax increases on the wealthy.

But even these steps are apparently too much for those financing all the television ads, which should lead voters to ask themselves: Who is paying for this? What do they really want? And who gave them the right to buy an election? [Oops, one last time.]

"Who gave them the right to buy an election?" Indeed. It's tempting to answer: John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, and Sammy Alito. But in reality they just piled it on, made it easier, more efficient, harder to fight.

As with the other freedoms protected by the First Amendment, one of the cornerstones of the American republic, the theory is that the best answer to free speech is more free speech. But the whole system goes kaput once money is adjudged officially indistinguishable from speech.

I'm sure Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito wouldn't have it any other way. Aand Justice Kennedy, as he so often is, seems happy enough to go along.

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With "Watchmen" opening, you say you don't know any damn movie reviewer worth the trouble of reading? I've got the guy for you: Jim Dawson

In case you hadn't heard, Watchmen opens today nationwide.

by Ken

Watchmen opens nationwide today, and insulated as I generally keep myself these days from news of the movie world (if I really want to throw $12.50, or whatever they're charging these days in NYC theaters, down the sewer, I'd just as soon skip the middlemen and dump it right down), even I can tell from all the kvelling around me that this is an event of some sort, with mucho moolah being spent. Once upon a time my first thought would have been, what a shame it is that I don't know of a single movie critic I can even turn to for basic information about the picture. The only thing that's changed, really, is that the quality of the stuff being churned out has become so predictably abysmal that I just don't pay any attention.

If I wanted to pay attention, however, I would know now where to turn. It's not one of your high-powered glossy publications, or even one of your lower-powered and vaguely seedy ones. It's a website called Back Room Reviews, and it's the work of Jim Dawson. Actually, Jim's review of Watchmen appears in L.A. City Beat, for which Jim has been doing some writing (for insultingly puny pittances, though not so insulting that he turns them down). However, you still have to turn to the Back Room Reviews note for notes on the LACB presentation of the review.

I suppose I should say that Jim is a friend, but I'm certainly not going to apologize for that fact. I'm proud of it. And I've benefited shamelessly. Even before Back Room Reviews took shape, Jim clued me in to Sam Mendes's hypnotically beautiful -- visually and aurally -- American Beauty , and cautioned me in particular that it's a film that needs to be seen theatrically rather than on TV. And was he ever right! I've watched it, or tried to, a couple of times since on TV, and it isn't remotely the same experience. I wonder whether I would even have liked the film.

Fortunately, Jim had built up enough of a reservoir of credibility that I gave in to his urgent recommendation of the altogether remarkable (three-hour!) German-Austrian-Canadian-Hungarian coproduction Sunshine. There's probably no other way I would have seen it.

(I see that these were both 1999 releases. It probably also helped that back then -- -- we still had a reduced-price movie theater in Manhattan, charging as I recall $3, which grew to a whopping $4 before the enterprise shut down. At that price a person could afford to take a chance on pretty much anything. That's how, for example, I came to see Alexander Payne's little-touted Election, with Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon, which instantly became one of my all-time favorite movies.)

The "back story" of Back Row Reviews is that Jim, by virtue of having married right, has access to screenings of pretty much every movie that comes out. And the fact that he doesn't pay to say these dogs figures in his rating system, as he explains it on the BRR site:

Is this brutally honest, cheap-shots-flinging webpage an altruistic public service, a time-wasting fiasco or the height of arrogant egomania? You decide, o gentle reader. You decide.

I started this freebie featurette on July 16, 2000. All movies are arranged in alphabetical order by title, under headings for year of release.

Why do so many of the movies I review get an "F" grade? If you have to ask, you must not go to the multiplex very often. If I had to pay to see something, but I would have wished that I could get my wasted money back afterward, the offending film gets an "F." Simple, huh?

Also, I'm not one of those dishonest, condescending phonies who grades on a sliding scale as an act of sympathetic solidarity with the stupid. Know how some big-name critics occasionally endorse lousy, lowest-common-denominator pieces of junk that you just know they never would recommend to their personal friends or to anyone they actually respect? Know how those overpaid, insincere hacks sometimes put their critical faculties on hold, in a patronizing attempt to come off like "regular joes?" That won't happen here!

No indeed! What caught my eye glancing over the 2009-to-date review list, was the number of movies rated "D+."

Now "D-" is, I think, a fairly familiar concept. This is the grade given by a grader who has almost unvarnished contempt for the material at hand but finds in it some saving grace that lifts it above out-and-out failure. And I think we all have instant associations for a plain "D" grade.

But "D+"? Think about if for a moment. It says, no, this isn't an enterprise of quite the full-blown awfulness of your standard "D," by virtue of either some incidental grace or perhaps simply an incomplete follow-through on the enterprise's apparent program. I'm not sure I would want to actually see one of the "D+" treasures, but the mere concept tickles me.

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