Posted on 22-1-2002

Enron: A Scandal So Good It Hurts
by John Balzar for LA Times, Friday, Jan 18, 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. [That's
what America has been about since 1492, hasn't it?] 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.