How ‘Democracy’ works

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... Obama & Afghanistan Socialist Action june 2010 15 “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” a documentary film, written and directed by Alex Gibney. D and the United States of Money,” could be over- irector Alex Gibney’s documentary, “Casino Jack whelming if it weren’t riveting. He incorporates an extensive library of archival film footage and stills, employing actors (or their voice: Stanley Tucci as Abramoff, in some instances), along with interviews.

His film is about former lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s trajectory from high-school heart throb to convicted felon.

“Casino” begins with a shot of Abramoff (playing himself), sporting a black overcoat and Fedora as he is perp-marched to his sentencing in March 2006. When questioned by senators in hearings, he’d respond in the vernacular of a Michael Corleone from “The Godfather.”

Born in New Jersey in 1959 to a wealthy, secular Jewish couple, Abramoff is shown in stills as a cute child with a mop of dark curls. Later, in high school, he starred as a jock. After graduating, inspired by the film “Fiddler on the Roof,” he became an Orthodox Jew.

The film follows him to college where he joined the College Republicans, who were influenced by boyish, conservative Christian Ralph Reed (as himself). Gibney shows that Reed needed Jack to lobby the members of the Reagan administration who could help him with his causes.

Reed’s views on the Contras in Nicaragua were intractable. Archival footage shows the College Repubs in that country. There are clips of Abramoff and his minions hanging with the UNITA guerrilla forces in Jamba, Angola. UNITA was receiving covert aid from the Reagan administration as well as from apartheid South Africa and was known to kidnap children to train as guerrillas.

The film reveals that Jack convinced the organization Citizens for America to contribute funds for guns, but the money stopped when the CFA decided he’d spent unwisely, thus ending his involvement.

Still, Abramoff got the idea from his Angola escapades for the movie he wrote and produced, “Red Scorpion,” which starred strong man Dolph Lundgren as a KGB operative and Al White as a figure based on UNITA warlord Jonas Savimbi. Jack then spent 10 years in Hollywood as a producer of action films.

Reed wrote to his contacts, “abramoff is arguably the most influential and effective gop lobbyist in congress.

i share several clients with him and have yet to see him lose a battle. he also is very close to [Congress(continued from page 16: “Obama’s Afghanistan policy — Incoherent or perverse?”)

“The father’s eyes reddened with tears as he hefted an English textbook that had belonged to his ninth-grade son, Habibuddin. The boy, along with eight other people, was shot dead this month when American special-operations forces swooped down on the family’s remote mud-brick compound in the dead of night.

“’There were no Talibs here—none,’

Rafiuddin Kushkaki, the owner of the sun-yellowed wheat fields ringing the rural compound, declared in a defiant voice that trailed off into a sob. ‘Someone tricked the Americans. They made a mistake.’”

The “special-ops” units are notorious in the military for making “mistakes.” The regular troops hate them because they are convinced that they create messes that have to be cleaned up by the ordinary soldiers. There have been enough atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan by regular troops but increasing use of “special ops” will almost certainly lead to a multiplication of atrocities, with even less accountability than there is for the regular forces. And the direction that the U.S. operations are heading in both Afghanistan and Pakistan is clearly more “special ops,” both by U.S. government forces and the mercenary corporations fed from the U.S. Treasury.

The New York Times obtained a secret order by General Petraeus from last September. It reported: “The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents.”

The article noted that the document did not authorize any specific strikes. But the implication certainly was that it was authorizing and expanding clandestine military action. The Times went on to point out: “Unlike covert actions undertaken by the C.I.A., such clandestine activity does not require the president’s approval or regular reports to Congress....”

In the May 25 Nation, Jeremy Scahill reported: “The United States military is in the process of taking bids from private war contractors to secure and ship massive amounts of US military equipment through sensitive areas of Pakistan into Afghanistan where it will then be distributed to various US Forward Operating Bases and other facilities.”

The terms of the contract being offered stipulate that the companies bidding on it must accept responsibility for defending the shipments, including intelligence operations (which could include allegedly preventative strikes).

Scahill continued: “Perhaps most striking about this US military contract solicitation is the admission by the military that contractors are being used for shipping and guarding military hardware as a run-around to the current official policy of the US and Pakistan governments that the US military does not conduct operations in Pakistan. man Tom] DeLay.” As another Abramoff lackey stated, “He could charm a dog off a meat truck.”

“Casino” gives an exhausting account of how Jack and his pal, Tom DeLay (as himself), manipulated senators, congresspersons, and heads of corporations, duping them into forking over millions, promising to deliver, bribing them with the high life: entertaining in private sports arena sky-boxes, putting them up in luxury hotels, taking them on exotic cruises and golfing junkets to Scotland. Once the requisite payments were made, they would skim off millions for themselves.

The worst of the Abramoff scams were the clothing factories in the Northern Mariana Islands (a U.S. colonial possession) and his ripping off U.S. Indian casino owners. In the Marianas, U.S. labor rules and minimum wage laws don’t apply, yet goods bear the “Made in USA” label. Through videos provided by undercover investigators, Gibney reveals the sweat-shop conditions there.

Gibney narrates that workers paid “recruiters” thousands of dollars for a job, which owners lent them.

“’Due to current limitations on having US military presence in Pakistan and threat levels precluding US Military active involvement with the contractor ‘outside the wire’ in Afghanistan, the contractor must be proactive at identifying appropriate methods for obtaining the necessary in-transit visibility information,’ according to the contract solicitation.”

In all, it is clear that the U.S. government is expanding clandestine military operations over an entire region and intensifying them, and thus that the U.S. is being dragged in an escalating war of an unforeseeable scope. Moreover, it is just as clear that extent of these operations is being concealed from the American public and further and further removed from any possible democratic accountability through the use of private mercenary (Left) Jack Abramoff outside federal courthouse in Washington, Jan. 2, 2006.

Workers were to pay it back out of their dollar a day salaries; they became, in effect, indentured slaves.

Jack and Tom built an upscale resort on the island. Villages became rife with tawdry bars and the sex trade. A newly elected Commonwealth governor closed the factories; production moved to China and Taiwan, leaving a ruined populace in its wake, but Abramoff’s honchos eventually bribed the governor to reopen.

Director Gibney showed footage of Abramoff and DeLay playing the Indian casinos against one another. In e-mails that surfaced, Abramoff refers to Native Americans as “troglodytes” and “monkeys.” They hired Reed’s think-tank Century Strategies to wage a campaign to get anti-gambling laws on local ballots, resulting in shutdowns of the casinos. They’d then advise the tribe to pay them to lobby for their reopening.

In the film, C-Span footage shows the hearings run by Sen. John McCain (R.). A tribal leader states that he paid Abramoff and DeLay $3.2 million (total payoffs would amount to $82 million).

Director Gibney included brief touches on every pie Abramoff and DeLay had their greedy fingers in: A Russian energy company, Internet gambling, the governments of Malaysia and Sudan; an Israeli telecommunications firm in which (convicted) Senator Bob Ney (R.) was involved, and the Bush 2 administration. “W” claimed he’d never met Abramoff, yet there’s a photo of the two of them together.

In 2005, DeLay was indicted by a Texas grand jury on criminal charges. He denied the charges, pleading “not guilty.” Republican Conference rules forced him to resign from his position as Majority Leader. The case never went before a jury.

In early March 2005, word was leaked to the Washington Post’s Susan Schmidt about Abramoff’s rackets. Her article appeared the next day, above the fold, marking his end. He was convicted of conspiracy, tax evasion, and mail fraud. Now in a prison outside of D.C, he is due to be released in December.

Regardless of the hearings, the jail time, nothing will change. If anything, things will most likely get worse now that, in January, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can contribute unlimited funds to political ads for election campaigns.

DeLay was last seen as a contestant on the reality show, “Dancing with the Stars,” but dropped out due to stress fractures on his feet. Gibney ends his film with a clip of DeLay in a brown velvet vest and flared pants dancing the cha cha with partner Cheryl Burke to “Wild Thing.” Indeed. n Tyler Hicks / NY Times (Above) U.S. soldier patrols a road near Marjah.

companies.

The dangers of this process are obvious.

The American public dare not be passive in the face of them. It is essential to expose them as widely as possible and to protest in the streets against them.

And to be effective, mass protests in the United States have to be independent of the Democratic Party, whose administration is not only continuing the war policies of its avowedly neoliberal predecessor but escalating them, just as it is continuing and deepening the turn to mercenary “murder for profit” corporations to do the dirty work of the big corporations, which are the only ones that profit from them. n