By Cherryl Dawson
May 27, 2006

This film certainly encourages you to learn more and trust less – and makes you wonder whatever happened to government ‘by the people, for the people.

If the aim of this documentary is to rile people up, then it’s effective. It’s nearly impossible to sit and watch all this footage about the corruption of government and abuse of power and not get stirred up.

The documentary starts with a little background on Tom DeLay’s career in the Texas legislature where he was a small fish in a big pond and goes through his meteoric rise to power after he made it to Washington and on to be the House Majority Leader. Then the focus shifts to “the plan” - first to get Republican control in the Texas House of Representatives, then to redistrict the Texas congressional districts and add 5 more Republican seats in the US Congress – this is when things start to get shady.

Travis Country District Attorney Ronnie Earle begins an investigation into the illegal use of corporate funding for campaign activity and it leads right to Tom DeLay’s doorstop. He goes after the DeLay’s organization, Texans for a Republican Majority, and ends up with 41 grand jury indictments for John Colyandro, the director of this organization, along with several corporations across the country who weren’t afraid to use a little creative money laundering to funnel cash into the right campaigns. It also leads to Tom DeLay stepping down from his office as Majority Leader and eventually resigning from Congress with an indictment of his own.

The ramifications are discussed by the likes of Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins, who know a thing or two about Texas politics (notorious for the ethics of some questionable characters in the past). Is it propaganda designed to make you distrust our whole political system in general and Republicans specifically? There’s no doubt that there’s a definite slant to the film – big money and big government are a dangerous combination. Most of the time they try to stick to the facts of the investigation and leave the conspiracy theories for the audience to glean for themselves (although they provide the fuel for the fire).

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