Eerie Parallels

TMcD posted on the connections b/w Enron and the Bush presidency last month. I wanted to add a post on the subject, having just seen Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The documentary is excellent, and I highly recommend it, if you haven't already seen it.

The parallels b/w Enron and the Bush presidency are eerie. Uncanny. Enron was a money-making operation, but for many years it was a bit of a mystery how, exactly, they made their money. But if you asked questions, you were fired, shut-out, excluded from doing business with the juggernaut that was. (There's an amusing anecdote in the film in which Skilling called a business reporter an "asshole" at meeting for asking uncomfortable, but perfectly legitimate, questions.) In the end, it became clear that they hadn't actually been making money. Instead, they had been fooling everyone, Wall Street, their own employees, for years with bluster and self-confidence. Amd threats. Skilling and Lay had managed to override every check and balance in the business and financial world--the accountants signed off on bad accounting practices, the stock analysts were cowed or bullied, the regulators were captured. In other words, all the safeguards preventing corrupt behavior had been switched off, and human nature took over.

With Enron, the pressures on the key participants to keep the whole thing rolling grew and grew until they were living in a kind of alternative, or alternating, realities. In one of those realities, they were the biggest players on Wall Street, titans of finance, men admired and respected. In the other reality, they were looking at massive losses, potential criminal charges, and the crash to come. The documentary makes a good case that, up until the end, Skilling and others were able to "compartmentalize" the bad alternative reality and tell themselves that they were still titans of industry.

Sound familiar?

The documentary also makes a good case for the political connections b/w the Enron guys (who were not that smart, really, as it turns out) and the Bush family. We'll never know how things would have turned out, on this front, had 9-11 been prevented.