Casino Jack and the United States of Money

It may well have to do with the fact that the pond scum explored in this doc about ripping off American Indians is so pervasive in the American political system is why we hide in dark theatres getting lost in contrived dreams rather than deal with the reality of these leeches in Armani suits with tentacles capable of getting the ear of some of the most powerful pols in DC. Given the choice of a spike in blood pressure or zoning out on an insipid comedy or unrealistic suspense drama where the good guy triumphs most of us choose (gauged by the miscreants huge take and light sentences) the latter.

Casino Jack and the United States of Money is a mostly sober telling of super lobbyist Jack Abramhoff's rise and fall as he wheels and deals with not only shaking down American Indians with useful idiots for sale such as former Congressmen Bob Ney, Tom Delay and Ralph Reed but also involvement with Asian sweat shop owners and mob tied floating casinos. For Jack and his slimy cohorts Neil Volz and Michael Scanlon it was all about the green and coming up with creative ways to extract it from clients which they did in millions.

Doc film maker Alex Gibney does a fine job of presenting the duplicitous practices of all involved diagramming for the viewer how money is funneled to get around campaign finance laws and keep the powers that be hands clean in the process. He retains his liberal credentials by hammering home the point it is mainly Republicans with their hands out but Congressional minority leader Reid of Nevada as well as Ted Kennedy "dim son" and former Congressman from RI, Patrick Kennedy are noted briefly getting a pretty hefty chunk of change as well.

It is all a very dispiriting to view Casino Jack and the DC crowd gouging rather than serving made even more so by an insider that states these smoke and mirror practices are still in place today and will continue to be as long as money talks and campaign reform is kept at bay and an apathetic public views it as standard operational procedure. Gee, I wonder if they are showing a Laurel and Hardy down at the multiplex today?

"Casino Jack" is about the Jack Abramoff lobbying/influence-peddling/fraud scandal ...and more. It's firmly in the form of a "documentary", but with a much larger team and budget and higher production values than that category label might at first lead you to expect. For example, many scenes that could be nothing more than dry transcript reading are in fact voiced by an actor over an image of a moving reel tape player as well as the printed materials.

The film is not particularly "slanted" or "one-sided" (although it's fairly easy to figure out where the filmmakers sympathies lie), and doesn't try hard to "demonize" any individual (although some subjects do a pretty good job of demonizing themselves). The film's main challenge is to circumscribe the large and somewhat ill-defined subject of money's influence on U.S. politics into a single coherent short story. Using the Jack Abramoff scandal as the framework to do that is inspired, but still barely enough. All the different sorts of scams that even that one individual was connected with can be a bit unwieldy (quick, how are garment sweatshops, Indian casinos, and a fleet of gambling ships related to each other?).

The film's (non)distribution is awful; don't take it as indicative of the quality. As is usual for "Participant" films, this film wants you to think for yourself and avoids "blood boiling". That also seems to mean it hasn't got enough commercial potential to get the full attention of the right people ...but even so I can't figure out why it's so inadequately distributed that it's just plain hard to find in most markets. You have to seek it out - it won't find you.

Lots of psychological background information about what may have made various people tick is presented. I found much of it pretty scary. Several political operatives -including some with a very different public persona- are shown to be driven by a "win at any cost" mentality and to have no sense of fairness nor appropriateness (let alone any discernible personal morals). Quite a few are shown to be driven by a "spy novel mentality", and to have played at being guerrilla soldiers. When the least offensive word to describe people is "paranoid", I quake in my boots. There's at least one case of a Luddite revulsion against modern technology and modern society in general, motivated by a rosy fantasy of small village life. And there's at least one explicit case -and several more implicit ones- of someone so totally engrossed in "doing a good job" that they only think about "the big picture" when reality clubs them over the head once every few years.

The film lays out pretty clearly the tight connections between lobbyists and the administration in power at that time. It quickly moves on after convincing the viewer that lobbyists couldn't bend our government into doing something it didn't already sort of want to do anyway.

In the end, the film tries to make the case that we're not talking about one bad apple, nor even about lots of bad apples, but about something about the barrel that causes apples to go bad. And the film suggests what that might be. The hugely rising and now outrageous cost of political campaigns is mentioned, as are the fact that federal politicians have to spend part of every day raising money, and even that they typically have a _permanent_ campaign organization. One politician whose career was upended by the scandal even explicitly says the words "public funding of campaigns". I was surprised listening to the people around me in the theater that even though the film's projection of this message seemed very plain to me, it could be completely missed by many viewers.

While the film mostly focuses on the Jack Abramoff scandal, it does mention the more recent financial crisis, and how campaign contributions and influence peddling may have contributed it. The film very briefly states its point that scores of nameless participants in the system can -and continue to- do far more damage than one rogue "super" lobbyist ever did.

I don't know why every time I watch movies or documentaries about politics I get ill. Just seeing the lying faces and hearing the corruption makes me want to vomit. I watched this documentary because I saw the funny and entertaining movie "Casino Jack" starring Kevin Spacey and Barry Pepper. The movie was informative, but I knew a documentary would be far more informative.

Jack Abramoff aka Casino Jack was a radical free-market republican who figured out how to tap into hidden revenue sources as a lobbyist. With access to powerful politicians such as Tom DeLay and Bob Ney, he used that access to access the pocketbooks of clients such as the Malaysian government, the Saipan government, and various American Indian tribes. He especially fleeced the tribes.

His dirty dealings took him from simple unethical actions with his clients to outright illegal actions. His lobbying and laundering allowed him to funnel money to over two dozen politicians who were never punished.

If anyone was ever in doubt about whether their government was bought and paid for, this documentary erases that doubt; and it would be naive to believe that the politicians mentioned in this documentary are the only ones guilty of legislating for dollars. "Casino Jack" is sad, disappointing, and disheartening. The only bit of silver lining is that Abramoff was convicted for his crimes, but what did that change? I would venture to say not much at all.

In Fort Lauderdale 2001, Greek tycoon Gus Boulis, who runs SunCruz casino ships, is gunned down. This is the beginning of the end for Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He has built a career coning native groups, corrupted politics, and backslapping all the way to the highest level of Republican officials.

This is an exhaustive look at one of the reasons why American politics is so corrupt and how it has ingrained into the system. It is also a fascinating look at Abramoff's personality. Without a doubt, this is definitely ignored or panned by the political right. The big question for this two hour long documentary is whether the story is understandable and compelling. This is a simple to understand story. The story is eye-opening. It is compelling for anybody who wants to know what is going on.

When mega-lobbyist Jack Abramoff was sentenced to jail in early 2006, he was seen as the personification of corruption, along with Tom DeLay and Bob Ney. But as "Casino Jack and the United States of Money" shows, Abramoff and the individuals associated with him were just the tip of the iceberg. Alex Gibney's documentary takes the same approach to its topic that his previous documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" does, looking at the roots of the main character, and how deregulation led to the culmination.

I had read in Al Franken's book "The Truth with Jokes" about Abramoff's fleecing of the Tigua Indians and DeLay's promotion of the Mariana Islands to hide the garment industry's sweatshops there. The documentary looks at those, and goes a little further into Abramoff's role in the college Republicans, alliance with Angolan autocrat Jonas Savimbi, and more. One of the most important points is how Abramoff and Ralph Reed used religious fundamentalism, specifically how Reed was making large sums of money through links to Indian casinos while pontificating against gambling.

But the most important topic that the documentary brings up is that this is neither "a few bad apples" nor a conspiracy. This happened because the American people let it happen by neglecting to take democracy seriously. Prevention of such events in the future requires the American people to stay vigilant of their government, and of corporations. Everyone should see this documentary.