Get the money out of Washington. It's an ongoing refrain now, from the left and even from those in the Tea Party movement. Too much corruption, too little trust. Jack Abramoff, the superstar lobbyist whose spectacular fall brought down then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay, was the very public face of the problem of lobbying when he headed off to jail, and he is the subject of Alex Gibney's newest documentary, Casino Jack and the United States of Money.
Bob Ney was also brought down with Jack Abramoff. The only Congressman to do time over the scandal joins us in studio along with Gibney to discuss the film and the past, present and future of lobbyists and Congress.
Wall Street is the butt of everyone's anger these days, and last week, while Goldman Sachs executives got a grilling in Congress, labor activists brought the fight to the Street here in New York--and GRITtv was there. Our labor correspondent Ed Ott spoke to participants from rank and file union members to AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.
Finally, Ned Sublette, author of The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans and The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, gives us his thoughts on the new HBO series Treme.
Great to talk about this topic. It is the single most evil fix brought into our system in the 1970s, after the Top 1% realized we could shut down their Vietnam War machine, and pass climate bills like Clean Air and Clean Water. Democracy had to be stopped!
But, why no mention of the Supreme Court in this segment? That court allows these ‘laws’ to stay on the books, even though these laws subvert democracy and the Constitution and effectively render this country an Aristocracy.
I hope you’ll get deeper into the legal frameworks and precedence that allow these ‘laws’ to exist. Once we understand the secretive mechanisms used, we can make them known to all, and agitate to have them overturned, just like we got Jim Crow and other unconstitutional ‘laws’ overturned in the past.
Then we can get back to the constitutional intent of the Founders, but also the Enlightenment. This Congress is as bad if not worse than Parliament was when Tom Paine was writing his pamphlets under George III. We can’t let those men and women hide behind their black robes and high benches. Call their names out and tell them history books are not going to be kind to them. They are aiding and abetting Nero burning Rome!
By planck on May 5th, 2010 at 9:21 pm