Gust Avrakotos

Democracy have many similarities such as logrolling, iron triangles and constituencies. Logrolling is "members often enter into an agreement with other members to vote a certain way on one bill in exchange for a favorable vote on another bill."(162) The movie Charlie Wilsons War contains many scenes in which depict logrolling. In one scene, Charlie Wilson agrees to a request to serve on the House Ethics Committee in exchange for being appointed to the Kennedy Centers Board of Directors. In this scene, the speaker believes Wilson will be lenient and with the agreement, Wilson would get free tickets to the Centers performances. This logrolling becomes more advanced when the support of funding comes up. In this scene, Charlie Wilson tells CIA agent Gust Avakotos that he can coax his colleagues to support him in the quest to secure $40 million for the Afghan fighters due to the fact that he had accumulated many IOU's. Wilson had accumulated IOU's by supporting his colleagues with votes towards legislation that are valuable to them. Wilson then offers to get the Black Caucus to support the colleagues own legislation if they will support the Afghan funding…

The Universal Pictures film Charlie Wilson’s War (Nichols, 2007) tells the story of a Congressman from the state of Texas and his involvement with covert actions in the Middle East. Charlie Wilson was not necessarily the most influential man in Washington, D.C. at the time, but throughout the movie his roles in Congress seemed to expand. The film covers the paramilitary covert action of supplying weapons to Afghanistan during their war with the Soviet Union. Charlie Wilson is a key component…

not being reelected. In class we learned about many different ideas on how and why people do not like congress. A man who was talked about in class named Mark Twain had a very strong opinion on congress. Twain would explain how congress is built into our system so it is hard to pass a bill or deal with issues within or outside our country. Twain makes a statement” Congress is our most democratic institution. And people don’t like to watch democracy in action”. This quote explains how people even…