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Page 10 The WesTchesTer GuardIaN ThursdaY, JaNuarY 6, 2011 MOVIE REVIEWS Ed Koch Movie Reviews By Edward I. Koch Movie Review: “True Grit” (+) This western, unlike those made in the days of John Wayne, contains some of the qualities of Mel Brooks’ memorable “Blazing saddles.” The humor here is much more low-keyed, it being a spoof, whereas “Blazing saddles” is a burlesque, but nonetheless it is marvelous. The dialogue is Victorian with a western accent, and the acting of most of the principals is first rate, particularly that of Jeff Bridges and hailee steinfeld. she does not get her name in the first screen crawl but deserves to be there right after Bridges and before the others who follow him. The story is straightforward. Fourteen-year-old Mattie ross (hailee steinfeld) is seeking to apprehend Tom chaney (Josh Brolin) who murdered her father. (Brolin’s performance is the weakest of the cast.) Mattie hires the one-eyed Marshall rooster cogburn (Jeff Bridges) who has killed 23 suspects of various crimes. chaney is also wanted in Texas for another crime, and a Texas ranger, LaBoeuf (Matt damon), is on his trail. cogburn, LaBoeuf and Mattie ultimately ride together to track down chaney. Before it all sorts out there is a lot of hi jinx with Mattie clearly the intellectual leader of the pack. The conclusion, 25 years after chaney is captured, is somewhat unique. I haven’t seen many pictures this year as good as this one. Go see it. Movie Review: “Casino Jack” (+) This docudrama, depicting the enormous illegal activities of a former republican Party lobbyist, Jack abramoff, is superbly done. some of it consists of the imaginings of the script writer, since we hear the innermost thoughts of abramoff delivered in monologues when he is alone. some of those thoughts are the ravings of a mad man. By that I mean that he is very taken with his power and sense of himself as a genius. during his rants he also states his belief that he is, in effect, doing God’s work with his charitable endeavors. he sees himself as a pious Jew entitled to the wealth he is amassing. In the film abramoff is played by Kevin spacey who with his own inner demons is able to play any role big enough to have its own demons. I remember many years ago when I was mayor meeting him in the Green room at channel 5. Like a member of his fan club I told him that I thought he was absolutely terrific and a great artist. he modestly replied, “Thank you very much.” Before abramoff was sentenced to six years for his fraudulent lobbying for an Indian tribe that paid him 20 or 30 million dollars in connection with a gambling operation, he was fired by two firms on “K” street in Washington, d.c. where he lobbied. The first time was for lying to his partners; the second for the adverse publicity in the Washington Post for the fraud perpetrated on an Indian tribe. at the end of the film when he is brought before a congressional hearing chaired by senator John Mccain, a very telling point is made by him in a soliloquy imagined by him. he took the Fifth before the committee and actually did not answer any questions. In his fantasy rant, he accuses his accusers, the u.s. senators led by the chairman of the committee John Mccain, of hypocrisy since they helped him achieve his corrupt goals for his clients and in exchange, he says, they received tens of thousand of dollars in campaign contributions from him. Today we call this pay to play. It has players at every level of government and has to be dealt with. actually, there will be a battle next year in the New York state Legislature to deal with the issue. The organization I created – New York uprising – will be out there fighting alongside New York’s newly-elected reform Governor andrew cuomo to eliminate, if possible, that ongoing evil. Lobbyists are protected by the u.s. constitution. They can and do play an important, legitimate role in government in making legislators aware of issues. The problem is that corrupting campaign money in some form to accomplish the lobbyists’ goals is often a major part of the operation. If we had public financing for all elected officials at all levels of government and vastly reduced private citizen contributions to candidates and limited expenditures, the problem would, I believe, be solved, except of course for the corrupt willing to break the new law. Will it happen? regrettably, not in my lifetime. Movie Review: “Carlos” (+) The movie is five-and-one-half hours long. some theaters show the entire film in one sitting, others in two. The cinema Village where I saw it presented the complete film in one showing with a 15-minute intermission. unfortunately, I had to leave halfway through to get to a dinner in Brooklyn, but I hope to return to see the second part very soon. It is a superb and unique The movie is a tour de force, a thriller, and a docudrama that doesn’t pretend to be literally true or accurate. It depicts the terrorist activities of carlos the Jackal (edgar ramirez) over a number of years. his most famous terrorist act was taking OPec oil ministers in Vienna hostage in 1975. OPec represented most of the oil-producing states located in asia, africa, and some of Latin america, e.g., Venezuela. The hostage episode was successful, but it was also botched because carlos did not kill two of the delegates as instructed. It resulted in his being rejected by the terrorist organization with whom he was working and causing him to set up his own operation. carlos was primarily involved with helping the Palestinians against Israel. he believed that many OPec nations, led by saudi arabia, were sellouts to the west – meaning the u.s. The film moves along with incredible speed – it was like watching a combination of two earlier blockbuster films: “Z” and “The Battle of algiers.” It is fascinating, and edgar ramirez’s performance is superb. carlos was betrayed by fellow terrorists, captured in 1994, tried in France, and is now serving a life sentence. Watch ed Koch’s Movie videos of these and other reviews on my website, Mayor at the Movies (www.MayorKoch.com) website. and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter! Let him know your thoughts by directing email to eikoch@bryancave.com. The Honorable Edward Irving Koch served New York City as its 105th Mayor from 1978 to 1989.
ED KOCH OPED Looking back on 2010 and the Great recession, I continue to be enraged by the lack of accountability for those who wrecked our economy and brought the u.s. to its knees. The shocking truth is that those who did the damage are still in charge. Many who ran Wall street before and during the debacle are either still there making millions, if not billions, of dollars, or are in charge of our country’s economic policies which led to the debacle. Yes, in the recent mid-term elections, the american people did replace 63 democrats with a like number of republicans, but will that really change things for the better? Time will tell, but I doubt it. Neither do I see the Obama administration, with all its good intentions, succeeding in the areas where the public has suffered the most: jobs and home values. The stock market has recovered beautifully from a dow low in the Great recession which began in december 2007 and technically ended in June 2009. The current dow hovers around 11,500. But how many millions of people out of fear, lack of market knowledge, or the need to cash in their market holdings simply to survive the years beginning in 2007 when the Great recession began until now, didn’t receive the benefit of the market recovery? The WesTchesTer GuardIaN ThursdaY, JaNuarY 6, 2011 Unfinished Business—The Great Recession CURRENT COMMENTARY If the government wants me to pay for a service – let’s use health care as an example – it can tax me, and then decide how and when I can use the service. I pay a lot of tax money for Medicare and Medicaid, though I do not qualify for those benefits. Maybe this is fine with me; maybe it isn’t. I can express my feelings here or at the ballot box. It would do me no good to attack the system in court, because the courts long ago decided that the government can tax me to provide services, even services that are used only by other people. If the government wants to expand Medicare to cover everyone in the country, it could do that, too. It would We do know that the current unemployment figure is 9.8 percent, which represents 15 million people. But that figure does not include those who are no longer looking for a job, those who are underemployed, or those whose salaries and benefits have been slashed. Worst of all, there are millions of people in their 50s, 60s and 70s who will never be employed again. Then there are those who lost their homes to foreclosure and those who will lose them. Why is it that when congress adopted the current bankruptcy law in 2005, it decided to uphold the principle of moral hazard, which in the housing context means that those who purchased homes they could not afford, lured to do so by banks and the federal government, must not be helped by the federal government to keep those houses when coming out of bankruptcy proceedings. On the other hand, rapacious banks, Wall street investment firms, and automobile industry giants who overextended themselves financially while seeking unconscionable profits or who engaged in poor management practices, were rewarded with astronomical federal government bailouts. The absence of accountability is also evident in state government. state legislators voted for pensions for state and city undoubtedly cost more, so I would undoubtedly pay more. That’s the so-called single-payer option that many democrats hoped would be part of the recent health care overhaul. This idea did not get off the ground, in large measure because american doctors do not wish to work solely for the u.s. government, and private health insurers do not wish to be put out of business. so congress required, instead, that beginning in 2014 virtually all americans who are not otherwise covered must purchase private insurance. Backers of the health care reform did not see this as a problem. congress could have forced all of us into a single, nationalized health employees when they knew or should have known that these pensions were unaffordable. The expectation is that some states will not be able to pay their current bills and the interest on their general obligation bonds. There is now a fear that those states will collapse and become unable to provide basic services including Medicaid and education. Newspaper editorials are commenting and bond holders are beginning to worry about the state and municipal bonds in their portfolios which, according to a New York Times article of december 9, 2010, are valued at $2.8 trillion dollars. Legislators running for office throughout the country were overwhelmingly reelected in the recent state and federal elections. Very few were punished with defeat. I’m aware of no law that can be used to hold them accountable for their poor decisions in administering the affairs of the states and localities they represent. But surely there are laws that could be used to pursue Wall street operators who beggared the country and as a result of federal bailouts – remember too big to fail – are richer today than ever. Millionaires continue to have tax loopholes available to them which allow them to take deductions reducing their tax payments to ludicrously low levels. Let me repeat what I’ve reported several times in prior commentaries: insurance program; instead, it gave us a bit more freedom to choose, by allowing us to select among what are supposed to be multiple plans meeting certain minimum standards. We’ll see soon enough – maybe – how well this works in the real world. But the insurance requirement has emerged as the loose thread that could unravel the entire health care deal. This delights a lot of people who opposed the overhaul in the first place. some want to keep the system we have had until now; others want a new reform package that concentrates more on controlling costs and less on universal coverage. Virtually none of them want the other possible outcome of a successful Page 11 One of the least known tax injustices was revealed by The New York Times when it pointed out that the top 400 taxpayers who earned $250 million on average in 2005 paid income taxes at a 17.2 percent rate. That rate is lower than that of a family making between $50,000 and $75,000 a year, which is 17.4 percent. It is a continuing outrage that under our tax code some of the wealthy pay a lower percentage of taxes on their income than the middle class. as a result of President Obama’s negotiating a deal with the republicans in the lame duck session of the congress following the congressional election of 2010 which will give republicans a majority in the next house of representatives, he gave the republicans what they wanted – a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and to the top one percent of taxpayers, 26.8 percent of the extended tax reductions. Leona helmsley infamously but perceptively said that only the “little people” pay taxes. We know life is unfair, but that doesn’t mean the “little people” have to allow their government to continue to oppress them. Let Mayor Koch know your thoughts by directing email to eikoch@bryancave. com. The Honorable Edward Irving Koch served New York City as its 105th Mayor from 1978 to 1989. Unintended Results: Reviving The Single-Payer Option By Larry M. Elkin challenge, which would be a revival of the single-payer idea. earlier this month, a Virginia federal judge became the first to rule part of the affordable care act unconstitutional: specifically, the mandate that all citizens purchase insurance or face penalties. citing the commerce clause of the u.s. constitution, Judge henry e. hudson ensured that higher courts will have dissenting opinions to consider. and it is virtually certain that, sooner rather than later, the new health care reform law will make it to the supreme court. Two issues are at play here: the constitutionality of the law, and its wider Continued on page 12
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