American Hustle

Friday afternoon, my spouse and I went to see American Hustle, the latest David O. Russell film starring Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and Louisville's Jennifer Lawrence.

If you haven't seen the film, but intend to see it, stop reading this post because it includes spoilers.

The film is based on the  late-1970s and early-1980s Abscam scandal featuring political corruption (mostly bribery), which resulted in the conviction of the mayor of Camden NJ (a story-line emphasized in the film), half a dozen members of the House of Representatives, plus a U.S. Senator. The FBI videotaped many of the politicians accepting cash bribes.

Interestingly -- and this is the primary focus of the movie -- the FBI was aided by a colorful con man they employed to help convince the targeted politicians to accept cash in exchange for political favors. The con man, played in the film by Bale, had a British mistress/partner-in-crime (Adams) and a whistle-blowing spouse (whom he described as cuckoo) (Lawrence).

In the film, just about every character is playing some kind of con, ambitiously trying to get ahead in life by deceiving others, cutting corners, or breaking the law. The movie opens with Bale meticulously performing a sophisticated hair styling operation to hide the fact that he is bald on the top of his head. Later, however, the FBI agent (Cooper) is revealed to use small rollers to produce the natural-looking curls he sports throughout the film. Yet, in one key scene, the FBI agent tussles the criminal's comb-over.

The acting is almost uniformly terrific throughout the film. Adams and Bale are especially good. Lawrence is a talented actress, and does a very good job providing the film's comic relief, but I thought she was too young for the part she plays. Lawrence is Bale's aggrieved spouse and they have a son (roughly age 5 or 6) by one of her prior relationships. I suppose she could have been a teenage bride and mother, but the real con man's spouse was about 40 at the time of Abscam and the couple had been married for almost 20 years.

In any case, despite that minor distraction, I've now seen at least seven of Russell's feature films and American Hustle rates among his very best. For my tastes, it is quite difficult to top Three Kings, a movie I've shown in my class on "Global Politics Through Film." The film works as a synecdoche for the Persian Gulf war and has implications for the second given its particular anti-war message in an oil-state setting.

Russell also directed last year's Silver Linings Playbook, which netted Lawrence an Academy Award for Best Actress, and The Fighter, which earned Bale an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Russell was Oscar-nominated for his direction of those two films. I wouldn't be surprised to see this cast and perhaps Russell himself earn some 2013 nominations. Adams should be a very strong candidate for Best Actress.

Four stars for me.

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Bad Drivers and Political Corruption

Last week, at a reception following the first Department faculty meeting of the new academic term, a few colleagues and I discussed the comparative abilities of automobile drivers from different parts of the country. The discussion may have been sparked by the presence of a new colleague from a part of the U.S. quite distant from Kentucky.

As it happens, one Department faculty member has posted a list of states ranked by the relative (in)abilities of their drivers. One of the group borrowed the list from her bulletin board and we discussed the rankings. In case you have not seen the list somewhere else, the list was compiled from a study by car insurers that uses "data from three sources: the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (driving fatalities), the American Motorists Association (which states hand out the most tickets), and MADD (drunk drivers)."

In the study, Louisiana is said to have the worst drivers, followed by Missouri, Texas. and Florida. Kentucky drivers rated 7th-worst (note: Louisville schools do not provide driver's education). The list of states with the worst drivers is mostly comprised of states located in red (and southern) parts of America as it also includes Oklahoma, Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina. Montana was 9th.

About that same time last week, I read Joshua Hammer's related story about driving in Africa in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. He points out an interesting correlation:

According to Tom Vanderbilt, the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), “Traffic behavior is more or less directly related to levels of government corruption.” Vanderbilt cites a clear correlation between traffic-fatality rates per miles driven and a country’s ranking on Transparency International’s corruption index. (In terms of road safety, the Scandinavian countries fare the best; Nigeria is near the bottom of the list.)

To check the domestic situation, I found a list published in the NY Times in December 2008 that used a decade's worth of federal public corruption convictions to rank U.S. states by political corruption. The study placed Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Montana, and Florida in the top 10 (excluding Guam, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and DC).

So, just eyeballing these results, a U.S. correlation seems to align with a global correlation.
 
While searching around the internet looking into this relationship, I found an interesting tidbit from Anneli Rufus at The Daily Beast (referencing GMAC Insurance Company data): "Kansas is home to the nation’s best-prepared drivers." As a young Kansan, I received my first driver's license at age 14 years and 6 months and participated in driver's education in junior high school (to be fair, today's 9th graders are often educated in high schools).



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Lobbying Power

I do not really study American politics and lobbying, but this tidbit from a year- old Time magazine (June 20, 2011) recently caught my attention:

...the fossil-fuel industries are lobbying Congress hard to block any legislation that would impose federal standards for renewable energy or diminish their special status. This includes $5.5 billion each year in tax breaks and discounted royalty payments as a result of $200 million in lobbying and political contributions. By contrast, the clean-energy lobby, which includes wind and solar, spent $30.7 million in 2010.

Wind energy, which currently makes up just 2.4% of the U.S. energy grid, has received some fairly significant subsidies in recent years.  Indeed, earlier in the article, the journalist pointed out that Spanish energy company "Iberdrola received over $1 billion in cash grants from the U.S. Treasury" as part of the Obama stimulus plan. 

According to the National Journal, the renewable energy industry received in total about $7 billion in "tax credits and grants for energy from solar, wind, geothermal, and ethanol." Those have now mostly expired, I think.

Unfortunately, green energy subsidies have not been popular in the new "tea party" Congress, partly as a result of the half billion lost in the Solyndra deal.  As the NY Times  reported in late January:

As of early this year, the cash-grant program, known as the 1603 program, had awarded $1.76 billion for more than 22,000 solar projects, according to the Treasury Department.

The Obama administration supported an extension of a tax credit plan that would have provided another  $6.8 billion from 2011-2015. Of course, these policies are being framed around jobs more than the environmental or geopolitical implications:

“Because of federal investments, renewable energy use — sources like wind and solar — has nearly doubled,” Mr. Obama said at a stop at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo., where he promoted the increasing use of renewable power by the military and repeated a call for Congress to approve the tax credits. “Thousands of Americans have jobs because of those efforts.”

One-third of the growth in renewable energy in recent years has been in wind power. Solar has also grown quickly, but it is still relatively expensive in the face of cheap coal. In any case, it would appear that even modest lobbying can be effective if the audience is receptive to the requests. Perhaps the fossil fuel industry spends so much because most politicians realize that the subsidies are bad policy. 


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Palin in Iowa

Photo credit: Dave Davidson (2008 campaign)

Who writes Sarah Palin's speeches? Saturday, in Iowa, she spoke out against crony capitalism:

Sarah Palin did not say whether she would seek the Republican presidential nomination, but...in a 40-minute speech before a Tea Party rally here, which was one of her most expansive addresses since she accepted the Republican vice presidential nomination three years ago, she railed against “crony capitalism” in both parties.

“I want all of our GOP candidates to take the opportunity to kill corporate capitalism that is leading to this cronyism that is killing our economy,” Ms. Palin said.

Does she understand the meaning of "crony capitalism"? From Investopedia:

What Does Crony Capitalism Mean?

A description of capitalist society as being based on the close relationships between businessmen and the state. Instead of success being determined by a free market and the rule of law, the success of a business is dependent on the favoritism that is shown to it by the ruling government in the form of tax breaks, government grants and other incentives.

In Iowa Saturday:

[Palin] outlined economic proposals for creating jobs, including the elimination of all federal corporate income taxes. She said the cozy relationship between political contributions and government favors needed to be exposed and eliminated.

And as a reminder, consider Sarah Palin's multi-million dollar job working for Rupert Murdoch at Fox News. From The Nation's Eric Alterman in the September 5 edition:

One key factor must always be kept in mind when discussing Rupert Murdoch: he has a lot of money ($7.6 billion, according to Forbes) and makes even more for other people. Between 1977 and 2001, News Corporation outearned every other blue-chip company save Berkshire Hathaway and Walmart. And while money might not buy you love in America, it does buy a great deal of special favors and improper indulgences from powerful people.

Being a billionaire media mogul is even more fun when it comes to politics. Not only do politicians need your cash; they need your newspapers, magazines and TV networks too. It is this unholy nexus that Murdoch has mastered...

Murdoch regularly uses book deals, television contracts and columnist gigs as bribes to the powerful, just as he uses these same properties to punish those who refuse to go along. Don’t forget that until recently, Murdoch had four potential Republican presidential candidates on the Fox payroll. One of them—Sarah Palin—even got a state-of-the-art studio built in her home, gratis. And each of these powerful people has a pretty strong incentive to look the other way every time one of Murdoch’s properties or employees feels it necessary to break a law here or there in the service of the great man’s power, profits and influence.

Either Sarah Palin is a brilliant ironist, or she represents the dénouement of a horrifying Orwellian nightmare.


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Transparent banking

In The Nation July 13, economist Joseph Stiglitz notes that greater banking transparency could help fight corruption in the developing world.

Developing nations are often criticized for corruption, but secret bank accounts wherever they may be facilitate corruption, providing safe haven for stolen funds. Developing countries want this money returned and want access to information that will allow them to detect secret accounts.

Stiglitz is critical of recent congressional legislation for failing to go far enough to solve this problem.

Paul Collier makes a similar argument in The Bottom Billion and calls explicitly for new international norms -- such as budget transparency -- to make this kind of corruption far more difficult.

Collier also calls for transparency initiatives in natural resources.

The U.S. spent much of the 1990s arguing for a "strategy of openness" -- seeking open markets, especially. However, as Andrew Bacevich outlined, the Clinton administration sweepingly sought to remove "barriers to the movement of goods, capital, people, and ideas."

Perhaps the Obama administration can devote some attention to a slightly different form of openness. The President certainly seems to understand the critique offered by Stiglitz and Collier.


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Grawemeyer talk

Attention locals who might be interested in the 2009 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order:

Michael Johnston of Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. will speak March 5 at 11 a.m. in Chao Auditorium, Ekstrom Library. He won the world order award for his analysis of how corruption develops and how to stop it.

Johnston will also be the guest on the "State of Affairs" radio program, Wednesday, March 4, at 1 pm ET (and rebroadcast again at 9 pm).

In fact, anyone with an internet connection can listen to the show on public radio station WFPL's live stream.


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Hot Rod Blagojevich

I think the best blog post about the Blagojevich case was written by Benjamin Sarlin. Check it out: "Who (Allegedly) Said It?" The post includes a list of 10 quotes and readers have to figure out whether each was from the Rod Blagojevich tapes or the mouth of Tony Soprano.

Some on the right are bound to try to link President-Elect Barack Obama to this scandal. After all, Hot Rod was apparently trying to auction Obama's vacant Senate seat and the indictment claims that Obama had a favorite for that post. However, there's good news for Obama in the indictment. Jeffrey Toobin:

It is Obama’s good fortune that the Governor seems to be pretty irritated with Obama’s lack of attention to Blagojevich’s needs. In a soon-to-be famous observation on the tapes, the Governor on Obama’s team: “They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. F*** them.”

Yes, I cleaned up the Governor's speech and Toobin's quote.

John Dickerson at Slate found a similar quote in the indictment:

The person who looks great in this sordid affair, in fact, is Barack Obama, whom Blagojevich refers to by another name. According to the charges:

ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants ... are telling him that he has to "suck it up" for two years and do nothing and give this "motherf***er [the President-elect] his senator. F*** him. For nothing? F*** him."

Yes, I cleaned up that one too.

Are high profile cases of political corruption as interesting as elections? If the evidence is of this quality, then I think they can be.


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