Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Dennis G. wrote at Balloon Juice from 2010-14.
Dennis is active with Green America.
I find myself looking for the fella with the heavy thumb on the applause sign.
This was, I think, even sillier than the Bobby Jindal response.
Treat this as yet another open thread.
Cheers
Watching the State of the Confederacy Speech…Post + Comments (125)
2009 was a year of political battles in America. It is a very safe bet that 2010 will be one as well. In fact, almost every year of my life was a year of political battles in America.
The funny thing is that almost all those battles—at their core—have been about the role of Government in American life. When I was a young man almost everybody agreed that Government was important and that it could and should be involved in the solution. In fact on issue after issue Republicans and Democrats competed to be the party offering the voters the best ideas for how Government could help.
That started to change with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan created a new meme/frame to flip the debate on its head when he argues that Government was never the solution and instead that it was always the problem. That transformation took root thirty years ago and today it is taken as common wisdom in American Politics that Government is the problem. In the 1990s and most of the Zeros it was common to find both Parties offering voters ideas on how to keep Government in check and new ways to free the magical Markets from any oversight and/or regulation. As I recall, we were all going to get unicorns, stardust and free money out of the deal, but somehow it didn’t work out that way. (I’m told that some folks even are beginning to think that Markets are not actually magic. Who knew!)
In 2009 this battle about the value of Government went into overdrive for two reasons. One was the fact that the financial meltdown was a direct result of the Government-is-Bad-and-Markets-are-Magic school of thought. That crisis made a lot of folks suddenly turn to the Government for help and Wing-nuts were (and are) very worried about what might happen if Government proves that it can actually be part of the solution.
Yesterday I put up a post about a new film from Academy Award winner Alex Gibney, Casino Jack and the United States of Money. In this clip Alex explains why this subject is important:
Cheers
dengre
Open Thread: Corruption and popcorn (cont.)Post + Comments (35)
Alex Gibney is an accomplished filmmaker. He won an Academy Award in 2008 for his film, Taxi to the Dark Side, examining America’s policy on torture and interrogation in general.
He has a lot of projects in the hopper at any given moment. A few years ago he began to work on a film about Jack Abramoff and the culture of corruption infecting Washington DC. That film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival over the weekend (I’m told that scandal players Bob Ney and Neil Volz were there).
Over the years I’ve shared some information and research with Alex and his team and I can hardly wait to see the film. It should be in wide distribution come May.
From the early reviews of Casino Jack and the United States of Money it looks like this film should be a wake up call for Americans of all stripes about the corrupting influence of money on our politics. This graph from a review completely tracks with what I’ve found in my ten plus years of research into the subject:
His partner was Tom DeLay, the most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives — but, of course, DeLay’s fall from grace, and Abramoff’s conviction in the scandal that brought them both down, is old news. What’s astonishing, and important, about Casino Jack is that it lays out how the system of funneling cash for favors that Abramoff turned into a new kind of government machine, with the money often hidden behind fake nonpartisan organizations, didn’t go away; it took over. It was Jack Abramoff who elevated the lobbyist to the status of shadow legislator. Casino Jack is really a look at how, and why, the government no longer works — how the culture of Washington was effectively rebuilt to sell itself to the highest bidder.
In response to requests in my first post, here is a photo of Ben.
Thanks for the warm welcome.
Cheers
dengre
Since 2004 I have been one of the many bloggers posting Diaries over at Daily Kos (known in some quarters as the Great Orange Satan). I was a bit of a specialist over there and most of my work concerned writing about my research into the Jack Abramoff scandal and corruption in Washington. I wrote under the pen name <a href=”http://www.dengre.dailykos.com”>dengre</a>. Here, I’ll use Dennis G, as is the local custom.