Enron Execs: White Collar Terrorism

My father-in-law told me about a film he recently saw. It's called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. I read a review of it, which you can read here.

The bottom line: these corporate guys basically hoodwinked consumers with illegal profiteering and accounting practices, and in the process bankrupted the world's 7th largest company and cheated millions of people of millions of dollars.

In his review of the movie, Roger Ebert writes:

We hear Enron traders laughing about "Grandma Millie," a hypothetical victim of the rolling blackouts, and boasting about the millions they made for Enron. As the company goes belly up, 20,000 employees are fired. Their pensions are gone, their stock worthless. The usual widows and orphans are victimized. A power company lineman in Portland, who worked for the same utility all his life, observes that his retirement fund was worth $248,000 before Enron bought the utility and looted it, investing its retirement funds in Enron stock. Now, he says, his retirement fund is worth about $1,200.

Astounding.

Ebert makes the point that people don't seem to be too mad about this scandal. Maybe it's because the stories aren't out there as much. Maybe it's because it doesn't affect too many people, or they think it doesn't affect them directly.

I know that I am affected, if only peripherally. The State of California has this thing called the State Teachers Retirement System, which invests money for my retirement. That STRS account invested heavily in Enron and lost 600 million dollars because of the scandal. They're suing Enron over the money, but the chances that they'll get it back is pretty slim.

In his famous work "The Inferno," Dante talks about the layers of hell. The final circle, the hottest, is Circle 9 called the "Realm of Compound Fraud." It's reserved for people who commit treachery against people who should be able to trust them. Judas is there. So is Brutus.

If I were writing the story, I'd put folks like Kenneth Lay in there pretty deep, too.