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May 13, 2002
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
May 10, 2002
Lisa Taraki
In Defense
of Sanctions
Against Israel
Jack McCarthy
Snitch Envy: Hitchens, Brock and
Whitaker Chambers
John Jonik
Tobacco
and Teens: Criminalizing the Victiims
Vijay Prashad
Fettered Histories:
Tariq Ali and Ahmed Rashid
on Islam
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Analyst Details
The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United State
Omar Barghouti
Israel's Best Interest
May 9, 2002
Alex Lynch
American
Mainstream Media:
Institutionalized Subjectivity
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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May 13,
2002
Will Darth Vader Do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
by Dean Baker
Enron is the gift that keep on giving. For those
of us who warned of the excesses of corporate power, Enron provides
a vivid example of every abuse imaginable, and more.
In the latest episode, the public got
the details of Enron's strategy to manipulate California's deregulated
electricity market. As one of the economists who had warned that
power companies like Enron could be gaming the system, I was
not surprised to have my suspicions confirmed. But, I must confess
to being impressed by the sophistication of their schemes.
I had assumed that most price manipulations
took relatively mundane forms-- for example, leaving a power
plant offline for extended maintenance during a power shortage.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that this could keep electricity
prices high. And it requires nothing more than not paying the
repair crews to work weekends and evenings.
But Enron was a beacon of the new economy.
Its managers weren't interested in such an old-fashioned simplistic
approach. Instead, they devised sophisticated
trading strategies, with code names like "Get Shorty,"
"Fat Boy," and "Death Star."
The Death Star strategy involved sending
electricity over transmission lines that Enron knew were already
operating at capacity. The agency managing the lines would then
pay Enron to divert its electricity to some other part of the
power grid. After pulling this one off a few times, the Enron
crew realized that they actually didn't even need any electricity
to sell. They just had to threaten to sell it in order to collect
tens of millions of dollars in fees that were ultimately paid
by California's consumers and taxpayers.
This high tech price manipulation is
just the latest in Enron's long-list of corporate crimes. Since
we're now about 8 months into the scandal, it's worth recounting
some of the highlights.
Enron hid billions of dollars of corporate
debt off its balance sheets, by assigning the debt to subsidiaries.
Enron inflated its profits by trading in its own stock. Enron
used offshore tax havens to almost completely avoid paying income
taxes over the last decade. Some top Enron officials made fortunes
by creating companies that profited from their dealings with
Enron. Enron forced its workers to keep their retirement money
in the company stock as Enron was plunging into bankruptcy --
and the top executives were selling their own stock. Enron paid
off officials in developing nations to allow it to carry through
environmentally harmful projects. Enron paid off everyone in
sight in the United States -- politicians, news commentators,
and academics -- to try to win their support.
In addition, Enron showed us what a corporate
board of directors, consisting of highly respected individuals,
does to earn its money (several hundred thousand annually in
pay and stock options): nothing. And Enron showed us that Arthur
Anderson, one of the most highly respected accounting firms in
the world, was perfectly willing to be an accomplice in Enron's
<crimes.When> the deal got exposed, Anderson responded
by putting the shredding machine in high gear.
The Enron scandal displays a level of
corruption and contempt for consumers, shareholders, the general
public and its own workers, that even the most cynical among
us would not have believed. And it is all in broad daylight,
now that the Enron crew's "Death Star" strategy, to
really stick it to California's consumers, has been exposed.
But all this sleaze and crime, which
reveals so much about corporate America, raises a serious question,
"are they going to get off?" This question is troublesome,
because it's not clear that the axis of evil, Kenneth Lay, Andrew
Fastow, and Jeffrey Skilling (Enron's top execs), will ever really
be held accountable for their crimes. Sure, these folks will
face charges and public embarrassment, but will they go to jail
for what they have done?
Remember, this is not a petty burglary
we're talking about. There are tens of billions of dollars at
stake (i.e. millions of petty burglaries or car thefts) -- money
taken from consumers, taxpayers, shareholders, and the retirement
accounts of Enron's loyal employees.
In spite of the enormity of the crimes,
at the end of the day, those most responsible will probably still
be walking the streets. In fact, even if they are forced to pay
large fines, they'll probably still end up far richer than most
of us could ever imagine.
If this proves true, the lesson is quite
disturbing: corporate crime pays, even when you get caught.
Dean Baker
is the Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
He is the author of Social
Security: the Phony Crisis, with Mark Weisbrot.
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