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Non-Tech : The ENRON Scandal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Baldur Fjvlnisson who wrote (2005)	1/31/2002 3:05:40 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 5185

'All that this scandal lacks is a decent moll' Christopher Hitchens Wednesday January 30, 2002 The Guardian In order to understand the implications of the Enron connection, all you really need is the psychology of a Mob prosecutor. This is the point where a certain kind of corporate culture takes its tune from organised crime. The main operating principle of the Mob is known as "dirtying up". The thing is to make certain that as many people are implicated as possible. Not only does this remove the incentive or the temptation to squeal, but it also ensures that a number of otherwise respectable people will have an interest in preventing any disclosure. A true corporate godfather will have spent time dirtying up journalists as well as lawyers, politicians and the forces of criminal justice. The corruption must be so widespread that any whistleblower will be accused of spoiling things for everybody. When a friend of mine wrote a "connect the dots" article on Enron for the Los Angeles Times last year, he drew attention to the almost symbiotic relationship between the company and the Texas wing of the Republican party. Very impressive, I told him, but promise me you don't think that Kenneth Lay is such a dunce as to pay off only one party? Sure enough, and within days of Senator Joseph Lieberman announcing that he would hold hearings into the company's affairs, it was disclosed that he, too, had received Enron subventions. And it soon turned out that the Clinton administration, in the person of the president himself as well as his treasury secretary Robert Rubin, had been eager to turn tricks for Enron almost without being asked. Meanwhile, in Houston, there is hardly a lawyer on the government payroll who hasn't had to recuse himself because of conflict of interest. And in the same town, it isn't clear whether Cliff Baxter, a senior Enron figure who killed himself at the weekend, was motivated by conscience or simple guilt. He had been warning people that things were going badly wrong, but he'd also cashed about $30m worth of Enron shares. A perfect illustration of the Mob principle: anyone in a position to develop qualms can also be reminded that he is a profiteer from the conspiracy. As for the accountancy profession, it provides a perfect illustration of the old conundrum about quis custodiet (who shall guard the guardians). Fully implicated in the racket, it discharged its duties of auditing and oversight by turning up the shredder to full blast. Nor was this some bucket-shop firm, but the bluest of the blue-chip; the whitest of the white shoe. To see one of its representatives doggedly pleading the fifth amendment, for all the world like some Teamster's Union heavyweight from the Hoffa days, was to realise how far the rot has spread. Men found dead in their cars, secret accounts in offshore locations, hearings where bought Congressmen pretend to interro gate grim-faced witnesses... all this scandal currently lacks is a decent moll; a Fawn Hall or a Paula Jones. The two heroes are actually both heroines: the chief whistleblower and the journalist who broke the story. The latter, Bethany MacLean of Fortune magazine, is the very model of the bright-eyed girl reporter. And that brings one to another element: the almost complete failure of the press to do its job of investigation and disclosure. MacLean happened to be an expert at figures and the reading of balance sheets: she saw some numbers that didn't add up and asked, just like the child viewing the unclad emperor: "How does Enron make its money?" Up until then, the whole of the business press had been in slack-jawed awe of the company's mighty attainments. And Enron used a lot of muscle to get that little story downplayed. So the current media circus conceals the fact that the journalistic profession is playing catch-up, to compensate for a long period of inertia and incuriosity. The law of omerta, meanwhile, has spread throughout the administration. The vice-president declines to release, to his own general accounting office, the records of meetings where - it seems, prima facie - a bent corporation guided the signatures of government on the formulation of energy policy. There was not even a conflict of interest, by the sound of it. More like an identity of interest: an automatic assumption that what was good for one boardroom was good for America. The president's lame and misleading explanation of how he came to meet "Kenny-boy", as he used to refer to chairman Kenneth Lay, is - when coupled with his defence of Dick Cheney's mulishness - an additional insult to the very idea of the separation of powers. The situation calls for a Galahad among lawyers and investigators, if one can still be found in a system so thoroughly compromised. It also calls for satire and bitterness. My current plan is to open a Washington restaurant called "Enron". On the prix fixe menu the starter would be fish wrapped in newspaper. The main course would be a garnished horse's head. • Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. guardian.co.uk