[1399] in peace2
LA Times: Enron is about what we've become as a nation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Felix F AuYeung)
Fri Jan 25 23:43:19 2002
To: peace-list@mit.edu, hungerfellows2002@yahoogroups.com
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 23:42:53 -0500
Message-ID: <20020125.234305.-197319.4.FelixAuYeung@juno.com>
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From: Felix F AuYeung <felixauyeung@juno.com>
ENRON: A SCANDAL SO GOOD THAT IT HURTS
[IT'S ALL ABOUT WHAT WE'VE LET OUR NATION BECOME.]
By JOHN BALZAR
LA Times B14
18 January 2002
"This just keeps getting better and better," Liisa sputters. By that, my
wife means worse and worse. Which is what we're all thinking, isn't it?
Before dawn, we are up and tearing into the newspapers at my household.
This is terrific, heart-racing stuff.
"Look, Enron paid no income taxes four out of five years!" "Forget Enron,
Andersen is being paid by the Justice Department to reorganize the FBI!"
"Get this: Enron had 881 offshore subsidiaries!" "Wow, a professor who
became a New York Times editorial columnist was paid $50,000 as an Enron
advisor!"
We're trying not to talk over each other. I'm scribbling notes all over
the paper and Liisa is warning me not to make the story illegible. We
subscribe to four newspapers. Suddenly it's not enough. This is the
juiciest scandal of our lifetime.
Why? Because this is not about personal indiscretion, not about sleazy
partisan politics, not about runaway foreign policy, not about "gotcha."
This rotten barrel of apples is all encompassing. Down at the bottom, in
the really contaminated slime, Enron/Andersen/et al. is about what we
have allowed our nation to become.
It's about us. It's about winning at any price--not just winning but
trouncing--about seeing what you can get away with. It's about greed and
the glorification of greed. It's also the football player who
deliberately tries to injure his opponent. It's about parents who beat
each other up at their kids' sports matches. It's about the hand-to-hand
combat of getting your children into the best colleges so they will be
the dog that eats instead of the dog that gets eaten. It's about the ugly
edge that has crept into our language, so that words such as
"intimidation" become virtuous and "honor" a quaint laughingstock. It's
about the blue-ribbon professor-cum-economics columnist who acknowledges
taking $50,000 from Enron for serving on "a panel that had no function
that I was aware of."
Awhile back, we lost sight of the principle that hard work, diligence and
some luck made the man. Inexplicably, we veered from the root ideal of
civil in civilization. We took what we could and called it ours. We
created the lottery for the instant chance at more. We demanded that
every business "grow" rather than serve--which sounds a lot less benign
than it became, as we watched ourselves transformed into jackals feeding
from our own wounds. We watched as our political system was co-opted for
pennies by wheeler-dealers who hollowed out the laws with fancy
regulations and hidden legislative favors until our vaunted democracy
became the instrument of our own oppression.
We saw simple and honest things devalued. Like the passbook savings
account. And employee loyalty--or loyalty of any kind, for that matter.
You could wish you were high-minded in this age, but weren't you looking
for 25% gains on your retirement holdings too? It didn't matter if a
company made something, only if it made something happen. It mattered
less whether a deed was right than whether you were "in" or "out."
Where is the smoking gun? It's in our hands. Yes, George W. Bush is
culpable: This freight train crashed on his watch. These were his
back-slapping buddies. These are the people he entrusted with government.
This is the way-of-life philosophy he championed.
Let's not forget that just a few weeks ago he denounced Democrats for
stalling on a multimillion-dollar, retroactive tax break for Enron and
other giant companies. Let's remember that his top economics advisor, a
former Enron retainer, views the collapse of the company as "a triumph
for capitalism." Let's not overlook that his Treasury secretary sees
Enron as evidence of the "genius of capitalism." Let's not overlook that
his choice to run the GOP has decided to stay on the payroll of a law
firm retained by Enron and reserves the right to moonlight as a strategic
advisor for the company.
But Bush didn't create the scandal. It's been in the works for years.
He's no more guilty than the people who voted for him, or for those many
millions who were suckered into this vision of a cutthroat America where
values--that shopworn word--mean nothing at all when measured against the
bottom line.
Perhaps all boats float on a rising tide. But reach down. Tastes like
sewer water now, doesn't it? I can hardly wait for tomorrow's papers.
This is a terrific time.
Maybe, finally, at long bloody last, things will get bad enough to make
them right.
***
-F: damn this is good... anybody know if that econ prof/ nyt columnist
he is talking about is in fact paul krugman?
