Documentaries like this are being made all the time. And, really, nothing much changes at all. So, what does that tell you about “the system”?
Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andrew Fastow, Arthur Anderson, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney. You tell me: In this tale, where does one end and the others begin? Crony Capitalism.
And just on the horizon: Lehman Brothers, the subprime mortgage crisis and the near collapse of the global economy. And still nothing changes.
Enron was a house of cards. It took them 16 years to become the 7th largest corporation in America…and 24 days to go bankrupt. It embodied a gigantic scandal that [like Bernie Madoff et al] could only have a unfolded in a privileged world where those on the inside pull the strings. Or the most important ones. And without government knowledge – acts of omission, acts of comission – this sort of thing is almost impossible to pull off. Smoke and mirrors? Come on. Enron is hardly just an aberration here.
To regulate or not to regulate is never the question. It is always a question of striking a balance. But when the game is rigged and the deck is stacked, the “balance” will only be calculated to serve the interest of a few. And most of us aren’t them. Government, as Reagan was fond of pointing out, was not the solution to our problems…governemnt was the problem. Well it certainly could be in collusion with folks like Ken Lay. And put him in the same room with Bush 41 Bush 43 and Dick Cheney and…well the rest is history.
Mark to market accounting anyone? And why not? The bottom line can be whatever you say it is. Then when it came time for the “real money” to make an appearance project “pump and dump” was already in full swing.
Then there’s Enron in California: “There would be ample supple available at the right fucking price.” Listen to the tapes of the Enron traders here. The abject misery that so many people endured is just one big fucking joke to these assholes. Then as a result of this phoney “energy crisis” Gray Davis is kicked out and Arnold Schwarzenegger is elected.
Crooks and idiots. More often than not both.
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The … n_the_Room
trailer: youtu.be/0zMakN-EMLg
ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM [2005]
Written in part and directed by Alex Gibney
[b]Congressman [to Skilling at hearing]: In the Titanic the captain went down with the ship. In Enron, it looks to me like the captain first gave himself and some friends a bonus and lowered himself and the top folks down into a lifeboat and then hollored up, “oh by the way, everything is going to be just fine”.
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Narrator: Beyond the financial issue, some suspected a political conspiracy. Enron had been the largest corporate contributor to the first presidential campaign of George W. Bush.
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Narrator: When Jeff Skilling applied to Harvard business school the professor asked him if he was smart. He replied, “I’m fucking smart”. One of his favorite books was The Selfish Gene about the ways human nature is steered by greed and competition in the service of passing on our genes.[/b]
He used to say that money was the only thing that motivated people. Capitalism here is aligned with human nature in other words. Nurture apparently has nothing to do with it.
[b]Trader at Enron [on the the survival of the fittest mentality pervasive there]: If I’m on my way to the boss’s office to talk about my compensation and if I step on somebody’s throat along the way that doubles it, I’ll stomp on the guy’s throat. That’s how people were.
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Narrator: The game was called “pump and dump”. Top execs would push the stock price up and then cash in their mult-million dollar options.
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Analyst: You are the only financial institution that can’t produce a balance sheet or cash flow statement with their earnings…
Skilling: You, you, you… Well, uh… thank you very much. We appreciate it… asshole.
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Calif. Gov. Gray Davis: I’m going to get the $9 billion dollars back that Enron stole from us.[/b]
And we know what happened to him.
Narrator: The year long energy crisis in California would cost the state $30 billion dollars.
And it was all just a fake crisis brought on by Enron in order to make obscene profits. What to do? Turn it into a fucking joke:
[b]Skilling: Oh I can’t help myself. You know what the difference between the state of California and Titanic? And this is being webcast, and I know I’m going to regret this - at least when the Titanic went down, the lights were on.
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Sherron Watkins: August 14th, 2001, Skilling abruptly resigns. Well that made me angry and it made loads of employees angry. It was a real sense of betrayal by the employees. This was Jim Jones feeding us the kool-aid and then deciding not to drink it himself.
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Lay [Q&A session with employees]: All right, we are down to questions. And I got a few that were sent up here.
[he reads a question from the floor]
Lay: ‘I would like to know if you are on crack, if so that would explain a lot. If not, you may want to start because it’s going to be a long time before we trust you again.’
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Commentator: I’ve thought about this and it couldn’t have been just a few executives at Enron that made this happen. If you think of the banks involved…Chase, Morgan, Citi-Bank…the billions in loans…Arthur Anderson…the lawyers…there had to have been complicity across the board.[/b]