ENRON:  The Smartest Guys in the Room,
a documentary film by Alex Gibney based on the book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind

This is the story of meme creation and how some cunning people turned a mere idea into a financial behemoth. A blend of their incredible hubris - both personal and collective, plus the complicity of enablers who worship privatization and the gods of the marketplace, and the clumsy negligence of those who should have seen that the emperors had no clothes and side-tracked the train before it wrecked, led to a catastrophe for many Americans that stands as the model of E-R (Orange) run amuck. It was a corruption that only reached its zenith with the Bush regime and its obedient lackeys, and which had begun long before their take-over.

The picture of Jeffrey Skilling, arguably "the brains of the outfit" at ENRON (along with front-man and loyalist Bush backer Kenneth Lay) is particularly fascinating. As a former McKinsey consultant, his approach to management included their 'purge the bottom of the class each year' approach. The ENRON gang's ability to create a middle-man market by producing virtually nothing while fabricating profits with "mark-to-market accounting" (a fiscal futures fantasy in which Andersen colluded and which regulators stupidly tolerated) was a pie-in-the-sky recipe for disaster. It was business via hypothetical smoke-and-mirrors from a glass tower in Houston, the usual big talk of integrity without a clue of what the term means and hypocrisy rampant in the name of entrepreneurial spirit. Thus, the ENRON fall stands as a sharp example of the delusional aspect of the extreme fifth level mindset in operation, and why policies given prominence in the Reagan years (and still playing out in the US, UK, and elsewhere) can lead to collapse of America's two and a half century experiment in democracy - if it continues.

That Skilling apparently found Richard Dawkins's book, The Selfish Gene, revelatory and the guide for his strategy says a lot. While we suspect that he put the emphasis on the first word in the title rather than the second, Skilling saw the competition in memetics a model for his idea-guy approach to convincing large numbers of people that there was substance behind the smoke screen. Their ENRON was a dream - a mind virus which became a virtual leech and predator, not a productive thing. It made fortunes from air, and gave an elite few the chance to convert energy into mass which they then reshaped to cars, houses, land, and back into power. The ENRON mind virus caught the fancy of the aspiring E-R masses who wanted to tap the flow of virtual wealth as the entering middle class imagined their American dreams might be fulfilled quickly and the real 'players' grabbed loosely onto a comet. It served the interests of those already-arrived E-R masters of the universe on Wall Street and in Washington. And an idea became a corporate flywheel with momentum and life of its own, an unscrupulous engine that drove the savings of many unsuspecting employees and investors deep into the ground. 

Unfortunately, this is a lesson not well learned as the ENRON follow-on, the War on Terrorism, is lamely pursued for profit without recognition that it's the rampant vMEME which is actually under assault, and concern with the ENRON-like little memes that it draws unto itself under the present view of the all-holy market and limitless corporate globalism promoted by Bush and Blair and their henchmen. Likewise, China and other fast-track developers should heed the lessons of building economy atop sink holes in ethical vacuums. The failure to recognize F-S concerns for human factors, sustainability, and rights of the commons was a factor in ENRON's downfall, a house of cards built upon a pool of oil. 

What "Kenny Boy" Lay, self-serving fiscal magician Andrew Fasto, Skilling, co-conspiring executive colleagues, and unscrupulous pit-bull traders sharing the booty looted from California and elsewhere managed to do was to invent the idea of a market - a meme - and inject it into the minds of everyone from the investment community to a government already immune-challenged and vulnerable to any kind of profiteering, privatizing, elite-favoring, and corporation-enhancing germ possible. Non-believers were excommunicated from investment firms; doubters scourged. The fallout from this financial bomb lands square on the Bush-Cheney administration, though the fault lies not in Republican hands alone. The Clinton regime allowed the monster to grow unchecked; and the course was set in Reagan's years. It includes the toxic and massaged recall of charisma-challenged California Governor Gray Davis (with his coincidental removal from any chance of distracting from a Bush re-election), along with the implanting of Arnold Schwarzenneger to assure the investigative ball would be dropped by the state (and economy) most harmed by ENRON's corrupt practices.

The distraction of 9/11 and the redirection by the administration to international affairs and internal fear meant no tough questions about failings of Pat Wood's (a Bush buddy imported from the Texas Railroad Commission) ball-dropping, 'bidness'-friendly regulatory agency, the FERC, or Halliburton alumnus Dick Cheney's mysterious and well-concealed Energy Task Force. It's now been spun to be about an enemy without - them. When more A'-N' thinking begins to arise in the post-Republican/Democrat era, perhaps the spotlight will turn double-ended and shine inward at us, as well on those who despise some of our policies and the reasons for them. In a couple of years the opportunity will arise for a majority of Americans to wake up and illuminate what's gone on, and to learn from it. Whether that happens or not is a question for Dawkins as much as anyone: has the selfish gene finished its run, or is this just the beginning?