This is a documentary called "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and I have found it posted on Youtube.
For those of you who don't know, Enron was, until its bankruptcy in 2001, the seventh largest corporation in America. The company took about 16 years to go from about 10 billion in assets to 65 billion in assets and then about 24 days to hit bankruptcy.
The Enron story is critically important to understand in light of the current globalized social movements which seek to end income and wealth inequality, most notably the Occupy Wall Street or Occupy movements.
Essentially, Enron was a company which traded and sold electricity and gas utility around the world and in the United States, among other dealings.
The two "smartest guys in the room" or basically the two who ran the company were Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Lay had been a long and good friend of George W. Bush and had also made a lot of friends over time around Washington. Enron was the largest campaign contributor to the republican party in the 2000 federal election.
The rise of Enron is attributed to the systematic deregulation of the energy market in America during the 1980s and 1990s, largely due to the influence of Ken Lay in his earlier years. As politicians allowed deregulation to occur in order to facilitate the market's role as "the invisible hand", Enron slowly but surely monopolized the energy market.
Enron earned profit by creating artificial need in the state of California by inducing rolling blackouts. The "rape of California" rippled across the west. The movie does not reveal that even BC Hydro, a Canadian company, was caught up in this, as it sold energy to California.
In addition, Enron concealed all its debts by placing them in temporary "companies" which Andy Fastow set up in foreign countries. This was necessary because the New York Stock Exchange does not take foreign branches into account when concluding stock value of companies. Subsequently, Enron's stock skyrocked throughout the 1990s.
As long as the stock went up, the company grew and grew and more people invested.
The illusion was also generated through Skilling's "mark to market accounting" technique, which basically allowed the company to manipulate its profits and give the impression to outsiders that the profit could be whatever it said it was.
The reveal that Enron's health was largely the result of systematic and institutionalized corporate fraud was a huge shock to America and the world. But that shock was overshadowed by something else that hit America.
The company went bankrupt toward the end of 2001, just months after 9/11.
Now, the long chain of events which followed after Enron's scandal provide a new perspective. The transfer of income from labour to capital was revealed to the world by the spectacular collapses of Enron in 2001, Worldcom in 2002, and Hollinger Newspaper empire in 2005.
The crimes of white-collar fraud have resulted in money earned by hard working people lining the pockets of wall street in the USA. Some of the largest banks were in on the Enron scandal, including CitiBank, Morgan, and Chase. The largest and most successful accounting firm in the world which used to manage Enron's files, Arthur Anderson, went down with the bankruptcy of Enron.
Today, there are so many other crimes on wall street that have since been revealed, some of which are very recent. The Maddof scandal, the Murdoch scandal, and the very recent Raj scandal all come to mind immediately.
With all this in mind, its very understandable why so many people are so angry. I hope they somehow get the justice they deserve.
