Alex Gibney is a virtual one-man industry turning out one documentary after another on the abuses of American capitalism, from its imperialist wars abroad (Taxi to the Dark Side) to corruption and white-collar crime at home (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). Two of his most recent movies that fall into the second category are must viewing for anybody trying to get a handle on the terminally ill political/corporate system. Released earlier this year, Casino Jack and the United States of Money is now available from Netflix while Client 9: the Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer opens at the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza theaters in New York on November 5^th. They make for interesting companion pieces since they are both about powerful Jewish-Americans whose political careers serve as paradigms for a system in crisis.

I was introduced into the complexities of Elliot Spitzer in Charles Ferguson’s The Inside Job, in which Spitzer served as one of the talking heads making the case against Goldman-Sachs and the rest of the “banksters”. At one point, in the course of dealing with the cozy relationship between high-priced whorehouses and their investment banking clientele, Spitzer tells Ferguson with a sheepish grin that this was emblematic of the corruption of the times even though he is probably the last person in the world in a position to cast judgment.

Essentially, Client 9 is a full-length treatment of the rise and fall of Elliot Spitzer who started out as an attorney general dedicated to cleaning up Wall Street but who ended up in ignominy after being exposed as buying the services of $2000 per hour call girls. But as Gibney makes clear, his exposure was almost certainly the result of a vendetta by powerful Wall Street interests who resented his challenge to their criminal behavior.

Elliot Spitzer, unlike Barack Obama, came from a socially prominent and wealthy family. His father Bernard was a real estate tycoon worth $500 million in 2008. We learn that the family would sit around dinner table at night discussing current events, often heatedly. From early in life, Elliot Spitzer—to the manor born—aspired to the kind of reform politics that have virtually disappeared from the Democratic Party. As economist Doug Henwood astutely noted during the 2008 primaries, figures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama from more modest backgrounds tend to be deferential to the ruling class while those who emerge from it, like FDR, are more willing to take it on. This has to be understood of course in terms of defending the system against those whose shortsighted behavior goes against its long-term interests. Such is the crisis of bourgeois politics today that no politician is willing to stick his or her neck out in defense of the very system that it rests on.

As Attorney General, Spitzer went after Wall Street abuses with great relish. As a typical former high school athlete and alpha male lawyer, he saw this combat as one conducted to the death—figuratively speaking. In one of his most high-profile cases, he tried to prevent Richard Grasso, the CEO of the NY Stock Exchange, from retiring with a package worth $140 million. Grasso had made lots of friends over the years with men just as powerful as himself, who joined the battle against Spitzer. Twi of them are interviewed throughout the movie and come across as total sleazebags, just as you would expect.

One was Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the former CEO of AIG who had his own beef with Spitzer, after he had conducted an investigation of fraudulent business activities at AIG that led eventually to Greenberg’s resignation. Greenberg, now 85, comes across as a lizard-like gnome who is incapable of telling the truth, stating at one point that if he had remained head of AIG it never would have been bailed out.

Another of Spitzer’s nemeses is Kenneth Langone, co-founder of Home Depot and a former director of the NY Stock Exchange. He was responsible for putting together Grasso’s retirement package. He is even more repulsive than Greenberg, if that is imaginable.

After getting elected governor of NY, largely on the basis of his anti-corruption record, Spitzer was determined to clean up Albany. With his sharp elbows, he came into conflict immediately with Joseph Bruno, the Majority Leader of the NY State Senate who was an amateur boxer and widely viewed as corrupt. Interviewed as well throughout the film, Bruno comes across as the sort of character you would meet on “The Sopranos”. Just as Spitzer butted heads with Grasso and his supporters on Wall Street, he went after Bruno not long after taking office. In one phone conversation with Bruno, Spitzer described himself as a “fucking steamroller”. When Bruno was charged with using helicopters for private use, Spitzer was accused of Richard Nixon dirty tricks for supposedly using state troopers to follow Bruno around—hence the term Troopergate.

Eventually, Roger Stone enters the picture as someone determined to bring Spitzer down. Hired by Bruno, Stone, an amateur body-builder, is arguably one of the most grotesque figures ever to operate from the rightwing fringes of the Republican Party. Referring to himself as a “hitman”, Stone resigned from Robert Dole’s campaign staff in 1996 after it was found out that he and his wife advertised in “adult” magazines looking for other couples to “swing” with. Obviously, he was in a good position to sniff out Spitzer’s secret life. Stone had to stop working for Bruno after leaving a profanity-laced message on Bernard Spitzer’s phone about how he was going to bring his son down.

We also meet the proprietor of the Emperor’s Club that procured call girls for him, including Angelina whose trysts with Spitzer at the Mayflower Hotel became fodder for the tabloids, as well as the NY Times. In total disgrace, Spitzer resigned and went into seclusion until very recently. He has reemerged as a host of a CNN show that I have ignored up till now, but will probably tune in out of curiosity. I have seen Spitzer doing commentary on MSNBC making the same kinds of anti-Wall Street points as other hosts, but he has the distinction of making them during the time that Wall Street was booming.

I should add that nothing I wrote above should be interpreted as an after-the-fact endorsement of Spitzer. Ever since “peace candidate” LBJ escalated the war in Vietnam, I have never voted for a Democrat. In 2006, Marty Goodman, an old friend from my Trotskyist days who is involved with Transit Workers Union reform and adheres to “old school” Trotskyism, asked me to send an article he wrote taking exception to his union’s endorsement of Spitzer. Here is his introduction:

As a TWU Local 100 Executive Board member I cannot contain my rage and will not remain silent about my union’s humiliating endorsement of Democratic Party candidates in this November’s election, particularly the candidacy of Eliot Spitzer for governor. The endorsements were made in time for the Democratic Party primary this Tuesday. [Unlike others, my vote was not sought in an undemocratic Executive Board phone vote on endorsements.]

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Like Roger Stone, Jack Abramoff was into pumping iron. Unlike him, however, he lived the puritanical life of an orthodox Jew, a faith he adopted as a high school after seeing “Fiddler on the Roof” and as a kind of rebellion against his secular parents.

Once he started college, Abramoff became an avid Republican this time as an act of rebellion against the left. In no time at all, he became head of the Young Republicans national organization and a major player in rightwing causes. One of his early partners in the Young Republicans was Grover Nordquist who would become a powerful opponent of an equitable tax system. He also got close to Ralph Reed, another emerging rightwing shit-bag.

These characters adopted the surface style of the New Left but for rightwing causes. They loved to burn leftist enemies of the U.S. effigy and stage publicity stunts of the sort that Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin pioneered. Not long after graduating college, Abramoff organized a kind of counter-revolutionary convention in Angola that had Jihadists from Afghanistan, Nicaraguan contras and Savimbi’s UNITA in attendance.

Growing up in Beverly Hills, Abramoff became a film buff. This would lead him to produce a movie called “Red Scorpion” in 1989 that was close in spirit to the sort of Reaganite junk being turned out by Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris. It stars Dolph Lundgren as a KGB operative who becomes converted to the anti-Communist guerrilla movement led by a Savimbi type figure. The NY Times’s Stephen Holden summed up the movie this way:

As directed by Joseph Zito, ”Red Scorpion” has the logic and pace of an adventure comic. The moment the going gets slow, a helicopter or a tank appears to blow everything in sight to smithereens, often to the musical accompaniment of Little Richard hits. The movie’s reflective moments belong to Mr. Lundgren’s sweaty chest.

Using connections made in the Young Republicans, Abramoff launched a career as a super-lobbyist with particularly close ties to the awful Tom DeLay. Work with two of his clients is examined in grizzly detail in Gibney’s first-rate film.

Abramoff was the “go to” man in Washington for the mostly Chinese sweatshop owners in Saipan, an island in the Northern Marianas, an American Commonwealth. East Asian workers were recruited for jobs that paid below the minimum wage while the commonwealth status allowed the label to say “Made in the USA”. Workers were charged exorbitant sums to get the jobs and often had to work for months without pay in order to meet their debts, a status close to slavery. Women who sought to get off the treadmill often took jobs as prostitutes just so they could get the money to return home. Abramoff took delegations of mostly Republican politicians to Saipan to give their stamp of approval while they stayed at a 5 star hotel and played golf.

In another filthy operation that would eventually land him in prison and lose Tom DeLay his cushy job in Washington, Abramoff became a lobbyist for Indian tribes with gambling casinos, hence the name of the movie. They got some favors from the politicians, but of negligible value to the Indians at the grass roots levels. All of their millions went to line the coffers of politicians like DeLay, to support the life-style of Abramoff and his partners in crime, and to various rightwing causes inimical to Indian interests. All the while Abramoff was writing email to his cohorts describing his clients as “morons” and “monkeys”.

Abramoff served 3 ½ years of a six-year sentence and is now living in a halfway house in Baltimore where he has a job paying $7.50 per hour at a kosher pizzeria. He is one of the most evil people that has been churned up in the 25 year period of reaction we are enduring and Alex Gibney’s documentary reveals every wart on the toad.