Legion

[Preliminary note: A portion of this post appeared in a comment I posted in response to one of Tom's posts. To those who saw the comment, I apologize for the double dose. It was originally written as part of the draft for this post, and it makes more sense here than it did in the comment.]

I finally saw Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. What follows isn't so much a movie review as my personal thoughts about and reactions to the story it tells.

I highly recommend the film. Even if you aren't interested in business or accounting, it's a gripping tale, and it's an eye-opening portrait of the soulless, amoral financial predators who run our country and control our lives. It will show you what kind of cog you are and in what kind of machine. That applies to people who work for large corporations, but it also applies to anyone who owns stock in such corporations. To a lesser extent, it applies to all of us, who, with our day-to-day lives, (perforce) patronize American big business and help to feed the evil weasels.

And they are evil. Make no mistake about it. They wouldn't be where they are if they weren't evil. To be a corporate executive is to be comfortable with (if not motivated by) the process of generating wealth by ruining other people's lives—even if that means nothing more than acquiring other companies and dismissing the people who have spent their careers working for those companies. (Yeah, I know … "that's capitalism." Forgive me, but where capitalism is not tempered with humanity, I have a problem with it—just as I would with any other system not so tempered.) More often than not, it probably means something more sinister than that. One of the points made in the film was that Enron was surely not an isolated case. Given the paradigm of big business today, a company probably couldn't survive if it weren't pulling some sort of shenanigans. They’ve all got a man behind the curtain who will advise us to pay no attention to him. They may not all be up to things as outrageous and dishonest as Enron was, but they're up to something … and some may be up to worse. Corporate America—"competition in the free market"—has become a giant contest to see who can get away with the most evil. The ones who get away with it lead successful corporations; the ones who get caught (or who aren't sufficiently evil) are failures.

The movie discusses Ken Lay's Bush-family/Dubya connection, but not in as much detail as I would have liked. I'd like to learn more about that. (I haven't yet read the book; I'm guessing it has more information.) For now, suffice it to say that the first President Bush, Grinning W. Monkey (then Governor of Texas), and Ken Lay all used each other to promote the deregulation of the natural gas market, which was the beginning of Enron's journey into fiscal fantasyland. It astounds me that anyone (other than the weasels, themselves, of course) could still advocate an unregulated market. How could anyone be that naïve at this point? All it takes is one scoundrel—a single human being—to bring a laissez-faire system crashing down around us. (For that matter, they manage to do some pretty severe damage even with regulations in place, as we Marylanders know all too painfully: check out the demise, in the 1980s, of Maryland's state-chartered savings and loan system and the subsequent sell-out of our state banks—all of which was caused, essentially, by one dishonest, filthily greedy man.) All it takes is one … and we all know that there are more than one of them out there. The world is full of such scoundrels, alas. As someone once said, call them Legion, for they are many … and they're attracted to the free market as maggots to road-kill. To deregulate is to say, "Let the scoundrels come forth and do their damnedest." And they will. Every time. Guaranteed.

And they did, in the case of Enron, they being (principally) Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow. (There was also a lesser-known player named Lou Pai, who walked away from the whole thing early on and escaped—with millions upon millions of dollars.) There were others involved, including Enron's traders, and including other whole companies, but these were the principal players. (As a demonstration of how scoundrels will always rise to the top in business like scum to the top of a pond, Enron experienced its first "little" scandal before Skilling even joined the company. This was the so-called "Valhalla" oil scandal, perpetrated by two executive officers of the company: Louis Borget, who was then President/CEO of Enron Oil, and Thomas Mastroeni, Enron Oil's Treasurer. They stole millions of dollars from the company. Borget went to prison as a result, and that was when Ken Lay hired Jeff Skilling.)

The film shows how Skilling, et al, borrowed a quaint concept from futures trading known as "mark-to-market" accounting and used it, very simply, to lie. What did they lie about? Enron's profits, which did not exist. While quarter after quarter, year after year, every Enron financial report showed soaring profits, the company was actually losing money hand-over-fist. Lay and Skilling and Fastow (and others) knew it, and they lied about it. To whom did they lie? Everyone. They lied to their employees, they lied to the auditors, they lied to the banks, they lied to the stockholders. The entire time, these bastards were being hailed by business pundits everywhere as "brilliant" and "innovative." They were nothing but lyin' sacks o' crap.

One gets the impression that Lay wasn't as proactively evil as the others, but, even as early as the Valhalla scandal, he saw them for who they were, and he saw what they were doing, and he allowed them—nay, encouraged them—to continue doing it. Some believe Lay's claims that he didn't know what was going on. That would make him the most negligent and irresponsible CEO who ever lived; that level of negligence is evil. Some defend the whole bunch on the grounds that they "believed their own lies," that they honestly believed that their business model would work, and that if they kept up the charade long enough, the reality would catch up with the fantasy. Personally, I doubt that they believed that. (They were "brilliant," after all.) Even if they did, to gamble away the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people in such a cavalier way was evil, in itself. They were either racketeers or reckless fools; in either case, they were evil, and they had no business running a corporation.

Some of the most palpable evil at Enron emanated from the traders. (Again, while the film doesn't soft-pedal this, it doesn't present as much of the available material as it might have.) There are audio tapes of the traders talking to each other via their headsets, and they were openly mocking the fact that they were getting rich by hurting people. They laughed about the energy debacle in California and the damage it did; they made jokes about how they were stealing from "Grandma Millie" and "all those poor grandmothers in California" by inflating the price of energy. They deliberately manipulated plant shutdowns and blackouts to artificially boost the cost of electricity. They didn't merely disregard the devastation they were wreaking on the common welfare; they loved it; they reveled in it; they wished for it; they consciously engineered it, because they knew it was making them rich. And they saw nothing wrong with that. They were proud of themselves. This wasn't a gang of hackers or criminals operating out of some secret hideout; these were the paid employees of one of the largest corporations in the world doing their everyday jobs.

This confederacy of schemers was not an aberration. They represent the current model of American business. As Tom said about the Republicans, American business is ideologically corrupt. Post-World-War-II prosperity combined with good ol' Amurrican philistinism to create a generation of Americans who literally had no grasp of the idea that there are things in life to be valued more highly than money. That idea did not compute for them. They didn't get it. To them, the meaning of life was to make a lot of money, period. The genesis of that mindset may not have been as evil as it was shallow. (Philistinism helps to breed avarice: when one has dismissed human thought and human passion—self-expression, creativity, art, intellect, beauty, affections, philosophy—as having no value, then athletics and material possessions are all that are left to which to dedicate oneself.) Then came their offspring, the demon-spawn of the 1980s known as the yuppies. They sailed the nation's ideological ship further into the sewer with some ancillary tenets: the meaning of life was to make a lot of money, and as quickly as possible, and by any means possible, and with no regard for the impact that process has on the rest of the human race. If you have to stomp on other people to get ahead, stomp away. That was Enron. That's America today. That's the Bush administration. That's much else in the establishment that we don't know about yet.

There are now millions of people who openly admit that this is how they view life and the world. They see nothing wrong with it. Jeff Skilling was one of those people. Bethany McLean (one of the co-authors of the book on which the film was based, who is interviewed extensively in the film) said that Skilling was known to have proclaimed that money was the only thing that motivated people. Imagine being that shallow, that empty, that stupid. That brings me to a quirky personal sensibility: I have a real problem with calling guys like Skilling "brilliant." Even people who recognized the Enron culprits as villains referred to them as "brilliant" or as "geniuses." I'm sorry, but I don't think so. I don't care how clever they were at being evil … that just made them extra evil, not "brilliant." To me, the term "evil genius" is, somewhat, an oxymoron. Failing to grasp the fundamental aspects of humanity—kindness, compassion, community, charity, mercy—and failing to see why these are vital in a civilized world—is a form of ignorance, a form of stupidity. If you're brilliant at being evil, then you're just, well, very evil … but not brilliant. Yes, I understand the semantic flaw in this argument, but I can't help expressing it this way. When it came to living on the Earth, these guys weren't the smartest guys in the room, they were the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet.

Enron didn't manufacture these people like Frankenstein monsters; it merely hired them. They already existed. They're already in the world. They walk among us. Their name is Legion, for they are many. They are running lots of other companies that haven't gone bankrupt: companies that we patronize, companies in which we perhaps own stock, companies that perhaps employ us. (*Ahem.* ) They define our culture's business mentality. At the risk of repeating myself, they run our country and control our lives. This sociopathic brain was transplanted into America's skull in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and his followers; they were the Doctors Frankenstein of our time. Their monster now lumbers forward with no sense of ethics or morals, and it threatens the entire world.

The devil, himself, might have been aghast at what was going on at Enron. Lucifer, at least, started out as an angel. Enron was born bad. From the film:

When Enron declared bankruptcy …

20,000 employees lost their jobs and medical insurance.
The average severance pay was $4500.
Top executives were paid bonuses totaling $55 million.
Employees lost $1.2 billion in retirement funds.
Retirees lost $2 billion in pension funds.
Enron's top executives cashed in $116 million in stock.

When it comes to American business, Enron's ad-man was the smartest guy in the room: "Ask why."

WHY … WHY … why … why … why …