My Corner of the Web
The movie "Enron: The smartest guys in the room" was a shocking and truly disheartening tale of corruption and greed on a massive scale. It is not about the three top guys ... though I hope all those low-lifes rot in jail (and hell). It is disheartening at how many people were complicit in the schemes - the SEC allowing mark-to-market accounting? Banks turning a blind-eye to Fastow's dummy corporations. Stock analysts pumping buy ratings without knowing how the company made money? Arthur Anderson signing off on the crooked books? Traders in the company pillaging california and laughing about it? With so many people "in on it" you have to wonder about the larger environment that spawned such a "lord-of-the-flies-in-suits".
Enron is an expose on human nature. And the report card rates the majority a D. A few shining stars like the whistle-blower Sherron Watkins and the Forbes reporter Bethany McLean give us a shred of dignity.
Believe it or not, it makes me understand how the german people could be so blindly and not so blindly complicit in Hitler's germany. An "authority" figure or a self-professed "wunderkind" tell you this is the right thing to do. So, the lemmings line up.
Maybe the internet, the web, and blogging will raise us to a whole new level of transparency... maybe. But I am confident we still need heroes like Sherron and Bethany.