(2010) What happens when a system or society gets turned over to unfettered market rules? This is what happens … People like Jack Abramoff (on the cover of Time: "The Man Who Bought Washington") and Tom DeLay and their ilk exploit the existing culture until it's ruined for ordinary people.

After Jack, who knew and took advantage of the vulnerabilities of politicians - their willingness to peddle access and influence for campaign contributions - Congress no longer served the public interest, only special interests, because "it was all about the money." What they did to Saipan in the Marianas is another sad example.

"Were we more innocent once," asks director/writer Alex Gibney as narrator, juxtaposing scenes from Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington, "or just more naïve?" You don't know Jack until you've seen this film.

President George W. Bush denied knowing Abramoff, though they were well acquainted. In hearings about Abramoff's double dealings with Indian tribes, Senator John McCain, acting his maverick role, questioned Jack and his partner Michael Scanlon about their "insatiable greed" while he and fellow Republican Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell made sure not to expose fellow Republicans involved in the scandal.

"Why would you want to make a documentary?" disgraced, one-time über-lobbyist Jack Abramoff writes in an e-mail to Gibney. "No one watches documentaries. You should make an action film!"

Jack produced an action film in support of the fiction of Jonas Savimbi as a freedom fighter in Angola and to promote his conservative Republican ideology. After the release of this documentary, a feature film also titled Casino Jack, starring Kevin Spacey and directed by George Hickenlooper, also appeared about Abramoff.

Back in the early 1980s with Ronald Reagan as his idol, in a marriage of religion and politics, Jack formed a supposedly nonpartisan organization of college Republicans called the USA Foundation, which laundered political money through charities. At the same time Grover Norquist and Jack's college buddy Ralph Reed were creating the ideology of the radical new right, combining "paranoid anti-communism" with free-market ideals, that extolled themselves as the good guys while excoriating the Democrats as Nazis.

Then came the Gingrich revolution of 1994 with Reed, having created the Christian Coalition following his own conversion, talking of "God's work" and the anti-tax radical Norquist running the K-Street Project ("Pay to play") associated with DeLay, the former exterminator from Texas intent on eliminating government rules and regulations, attracting Jack's interest.

"Campaign financing is a system of legalized bribery," admits the former Illinois senator Peter Fitzgerald. DeLay (a reborn Christian inspired by James Dobson) distributed the money that Jack raised from his "favor factory" ("all the right people are in his pocket"), taking advantage of legal loopholes with tribal casinos (Jack's pot).

Playing one tribe off another (coordinating with Reed's anti-casino campaign), Jack used the "grossly inflated fees" he received from Native Americans, hoping to use his influence to gain congressional permission for gambling on their reservations, to back Republican campaigns, completing a feedback loop. To his skybox at FedEx Field in Washington, DC, he handed out tickets to politicians to watch the Redskins play while Jack controlled the political football.

In Saipan on the Mariana Islands where garment factories operated Chinese sweatshops, exploiting immigrants like indentured servants, Jack was hired by the governor and wealthy factory owners to block a reformist immigration bill ("lies of the liberals") by lobbying congressional visitors looking into complaints - plying them with five-star hotel accommodations and golfing privileges - convincing them that the commonwealth was actually an isle of economic freedom enjoying pure fruit-of-the-loom capitalism. After elections removed the cooperative governor, costing Jack his lucrative contract, Ed Buckham (Abramoff's former evangelical minister and chief of staff) and Scanlon fixed the next election to reinstate Jack's protection-racket contract until Saipan eventually lost its textile industry to other global locations.

With Scanlon's "Gimmie Five" kickback scheme, using the American International Center (AIC), a phony think tank headed by a lifeguard, to funnel money from Russian gangsters and Malaysian politicians (the latter obtaining a meeting with President Bush), the money spigot gushed forth even more millions. Teaming with Dial-a-Mattress's Adam Kidan, Jack "bought" SunCruz, a floating casino business from Gus Boulis, who was gunned down by suspected Mafia mobsters.

But Jack's taking a group of congressmen, including Bob Ney with his former chief of staff Neil Volz, on a "working" golfing junket to Scotland by corporate jet eventually led to his downfall when Sue Schmidt broke the story in the Washington Post. Although Abramoff is serving time in prison and DeLay has been convicted on charges that he illegally funneled corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002, nevertheless, the US Supreme Court's narrow Citizens United ruling, deciding that corporations have the same rights as citizens and that money is the equivalent of speech, has in effect legitimatized Jack's modus operandi.

During the end credits Gibney includes Tom Delay's appearance on Dancing with the Stars.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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