At the Sundance Festival, American documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney recounts the descent into hell of the former lobbyist with links to the Republican Party, Jack Abramoff, offering an indictment of the corruption that infects political financing in the United States.
Alex Gibney, a Sundance regular, won an Oscar in 2008 with “Taxi to the Dark Side,” a documentary about the acts of torture Americans practiced in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in the prison at Guantanamo.
His latest film, “Casino Jack and the United States of Money”, is presented in competition at the independent film festival that is taking place in Park City, Utah, until Sunday.
In the film, the director, in a deeply ironic mode, recounts the glory days and decline of Jack Abramoff – presently serving a six-year prison sentence for bribery – who also took several members of the Republican Party who profited from his largesse down along with him when he fell.
“In many respects, Abramoff was simultaneously extremely serious and deeply ridiculous,” Alex Gibney declared to AFP. “And some things were too bizarre and amusing to be treated in a serious way. You had to laugh and cry at once. It’s a comedy, but the joke’s on us,” he says.
Jack Abramoff, a staunch Republican “who saw his life as an action movie” – he was also a movie producer – embodied all the excess of American lobbying, with its millions of dollars spent to attract the good graces of members of Congress.
Alex Gibney hopes his film will open the eyes of his fellow citizens by “showing people how it works. When you go into the back kitchens of a sausage-making factory, it’s rather frightening. Well, then, this film takes you into the (campaign financing) kitchen and it’s not pretty.”
“In what other country in the world, aside from the most deeply corrupted ones such as Indonesia or Nigeria, is money as openly distributed to buy and sell political officials? It’s profoundly shocking,” deplores Alex Gibney.
He considers it was Ronald Reagan’s accession to the presidency in 1981 that saw the United States “change its fundamental principles.” Gibney said, “We made money the sovereign principle through which everything had to be measured: success, failure, and now the political system.
“In the United States, bribery is legal and it’s terrifying,” the film-maker asserts. Election campaign financing, very lightly supervised in the United States, “is a system that legalizes bribery. How can we put up with that?” he wonders.
“Abramoff and people like him are political terrorists,” he deems. “They don’t use a revolver, but they want to destroy the government since, fundamentally, they don’t believe in its principles. They believe in a kind of libertarian law of the jungle.”
The film debuts just as the United States Supreme Court has lifted the limits on corporate financing of national electoral campaigns, a revolution in American electoral law that had limited this right for twenty years.
Alex Gibney makes the case for “a system of public campaign finance. We must achieve that, or else we’re damned,” he says, nonetheless convinced that it is still “possible to change the situation.”
In a certain sense, “Jack Abramoff did us a great service,” the filmmaker observes. “He showed us in a spectacular way how bad (the system) was. We should be profoundly grateful to him for that.”
Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher.
Les Echos is France’s premier business newspaper. Created by the brothers Robert and Emile Servan-Schreiber in 1908, it has been part of the LVMH conglomerate since 2007.
Angry, shocked, overwhelmed? Take action: Support independent media.
We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
As we undertake this life-sustaining work, we appeal for your support. Please, if you find value in what we do, join our community of sustainers by making a monthly or one-time gift.