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?

Jack Abramoff was very good at what he did, which was taking money from people, such as at casinos in Indian reservations or with making deals in the Marianas, as favors. Lots of money was thrown to Jack and his cronies like Michael Scanlon as if they were giving protection, or just acting as lobbyists do, which is often, at best, shady work and at worst downright immoral. But hey, where does morality come into play when you can make millions, have jets and sudden getaways to play golf in Scotland, and/or season tickets to give away as freebies to sweeten up people at football games? It's a story of how a guy like Abramoff, a smooth talker and hardcore conservative, almost got away with his bribery and extortion tactics because, basically, Washington itself would condone most of his actions until he crossed the line. In this D.C., Mr. Smith couldn't get the time of day.

What's intriguing in the film is how it looks at the system of lobbyists in a light not too unlike director Alex Gibney's previous documentary Enron. There's a certain lifestyle to be maintained with these guys like Abramoff and even his buddy in arms Tom Delay, almost a sort of alpha-male process of living through greed. And some of the best parts of the film actually aren't about the Indian Reservation scandal, but the back-story is what really sucks in a viewer. Abramoff was at the top of the crop, a College Republican at a time when Republicans looked to be on top with Regan in office and a fervent anti-Communists streak going through their methodology. Most amusingly we see an anti-Commie propaganda film Abramoff produced called Red Scorpion, featuring Dolph Lundgren and Abramoff's fascination with spies, which would carry over into his career on his own.

Another heartbreaking story shown in the film is that of the Marianas, and what happened with free-reign unregulated capitalism. At this particular place businesses could work without regulation, and so they paid practically slave wages (the workers were at best indentured servants), and because the Marianas were (or still are) apart of the US, they could send off clothes to be sold as "Made in the USA". But when a congressman tried to blow the lid off the corruption going on- not to mention the sex trade- Abramoff was hired by people who wanted everything to be shown as squeaky clean, and reporters and Republican congressmen were flown down, shown everything was honky dory, and then got their R-and-R on at five star hotels. Ultimately the Marianas were left devastated when other treaties came in to regulate, but it was a demonstration of what could be done, rather bafflingly, by an unfettered "free market" - in large part thanks to Abramoff's kick-backs and reports from such free-market people as Delay and Dana Rorbacher.

The testimonies give a lot of juicy and simply insightful information, and we really get to know how this mind of Abramoff's worked in relation to the power dynamic in Washington. He wasn't a politician, but he could do one better by feeding into the kick-backs and campaign contribution frenzy that is often the name of the game in DC. He did, ultimately, go into illegal territory, but the scary thing is that he could have potentially gotten away with all of it, and did for years (the fake corporation, for example, that was run by a surfer-dude and laundered hundreds of thousands that Abramoff didn't want to claim as income). It's a tale that has, at times, a multitude of details, especially when covering the Indian Reservation casino scandal. But in a way I liked how detailed it was; it gets to a point where Gibney keeps giving us these facts and notes of interest, and it just builds up to this: how corrupt and intricate can this get? Apparently, a lot.

"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.

Alex Gibney knows how to make a documentary. Like good documentaries, "Casino Jack and the United States of Money" is educational and informative. Unlike great documentaries, it is neither emotionally-resonating nor interesting.

This film lacked anything to get me invested in it. The opening, introducing me to Jack Abramoff and all the players, was well researched and potentially interesting but very dry. Although I didn't find it enthralling, explosive or hilarious, I thought it could have been important but it doesn't have the timing that the more popular documentaries have.

"Casino Jack and the United States of Money" is good for documentary-lovers, but it doesn't have the staying power that a well told story should have.