After President Barack Obama’s reelection, more conservatives are calling for Republicans to attack crony capitalism in Washington, D.C., as shown by the new film “District of Corruption.”
Sarah Palin first railed against crony capitalism on both sides of the aisle during a September 3, 2011 speech in Indianola, Iowa, injecting the issue into the political bloodstream. Republicans, particularly Mitt Romney, were hesitant to fully embrace the issue in 2012, but those like Joel Kotkin, Victor Davis Hanson, and Pat Caddell have said the issue could be a winner for Republicans going forward.
“District of Corruption” examines the culture of corruption that has plagued Washington for decades. And in a one-hour special on FOX News’ “Hannity” that played clips from the movie, director Steve Bannon said he wanted to make the movie to trace the roots of the culture of crony capitalism the Obama administration has put on steroids.
Bannon said Washington has “become an imperial city,” and he wanted to make a film that “showed how that happened” and “culminated in the Obama administration.”
The movie chronicles the culture of corruption and highlights Judicial Watch’s central role in holding Democrats and Republicans to account.
“It didn’t begin with the Obama administration and won’t end with it,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. He did note that the culture of corruption among the permanent political class was “metastasizing” during the Obama administration.
Bannon said Judicial Watch is a “tough-as-nails” organization that is the equivalent of David going up against the Washington establishment Goliath that seeks to protect its own at all costs. He and Fitton said new media organizations and outside institutions can do a better job than politicians in holding establishment politicians to account.
Fitton said the “real villain” in the movie is Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department has fought Congress “tooth and nail” when it came to scandals like Fast and Furious.
“His Justice Department is a locus of evil in this administration when it comes to public policy discussions,” Fitton said.
A Breitbart News/Judicial Watch poll found that 85% of voters said they were concerned corruption in Washington, D.C., and Bannon said politicians on both sides of aisle understand how fed up Americans are.
“Every administration runs to be the most transparent administration,” Bannon said, while noting that they perpetuate the system of crony capitalism once they come into office.
Fitton noted Judicial Watch has filed over a hundred lawsuits, and the “problem” with the Obama administration is “they talk a line on transparency but they fight you to death in the courts on it.”
“This administration is less transparent than the Bush administration, which we can all agree that it wasn’t all that big on transparency,” Fitton said. “They fight us on virtually every document request we’ve made.”
The Obama administration has also used “czars” to go around transparency laws. Many of these “czars,” as Bannon and Fitton noted, are political operatives with no management experience and could not even be confirmed by a Congress Democrats controlled during the first two years of Obama’s presidency.
Fitton noted that conservatives never liked these so-called “czars” because they are not subject to the same Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests as other administration officials, and the Obama administration has just doubled down on everything conservatives did not like during a Republican administration.
Crony capitalism is allowed to flourish because the mainstream media often turns a blind eye to it.
Breitbart editor Mike Flynn was shown in a clip describing how the media refuses to hold Obama — and those in the permanent political class — accountable because the media has become their neighbors and “they don’t want to lose that access.”
Conservative commentator Jedediah Bila capped off the program by blistering the mainstream media’s refusal to hold the Obama administration to account on some of its green energy boondoggles like Solyndra. During the Republican presidential primary, for instance, the mainstream media rarely asked any of the candidates about Solyndra or other Obama administration pay-to-play scandals.
“They don’t want to ask those questions,” Bila said “They don’t want to be reporters, they want to be allies of the administration.”
She also said Republicans like Mitt Romney, for whatever reason, also did not hold Obama accountable as fiercely as they could have during the last election cycle.
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