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March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
Resources:
100s of Links
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CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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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
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The
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by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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March 22, 2002
Commercial Sabotage?
Enron's
Attack on Nation's Economic Security
By T.W. Croft
The Enron debacle has major implications for the
labor-capital movement. Not only did Enron's collapse undermine
the retirement security of all workers whose pension funds held
Enron stock, the company's melt-down revealed serious flaws
in our nation's financial system which threaten the security
of the nation's retirement system. Enron has already cost labor's
pensions billions of dollars in assets. Its collapse reminds
us that there is truly something broken in our economic system.
Once Upon an Economy..."Captains
of industry were less interested in economic efficiency than
they were in extracting gains by transferring ownership via
the medium of saleable rights to property (as) managers sought
to enhance intangible assets rather than produce goods...It
seemed obvious that production and output were entirely dependent
on the pecuniary needs of the financiers...(taking) close note
of interlocking directorates, holding companies, and watered
stock. Their price policies...were geared to the maximization
of profit through the enforcement of scarcity. Supply and demand
could not be the genuine foci of attention in economics, so
long as it was possible for business to resort to a 'conscientious
withdrawal of efficiency.'
"...Moreover, credit was pyramided,
one form piled on the other, particularly through capitalized
prospective earning power. The process became quite complex,
so that the distinction between credit and the underlying tangible
goods was obscured. Soon perceptible discrepancies developed
between business values and the equipment they were supposed
to represent. As the economy entered upon its anticipated state
of euphoria, the growth of intangibles soon out-sped the expansion
in real goods. A credit inflation ensued, which eventually turned
into forced liquidation of assets. Creditors feared that the
discrepancy between business and real values had gone too far,
and the demand for debt repayment initiated the economy's downward
movement."
A scathing review of the Enron Scandal?
Off by 75-80 years. These paraphrased words were the indictments
of the Teapot Dome era, the notorious oil scandal of the Warren
G. Harding Presidency over three-quarters of a century ago,
wherein secret insider oil deals allowed illegal drilling of
the Naval Oil Reserves. These words were an indictment of "commercial
sabotage", the process whereby businessmen used the "arcane
skills of bargaining, effrontery, salesmanship and make-believe...to
make gains at the cost of the community".
These were the ideas of a sociologist
named Thorsten B. Veblen (1857-1929), the son of an immigrant
Norwegian farmer in Wisconsin, who went on to teach at the University
of Chicago. He was the author of The Theory of the Leisure
Class, coined the term "conspicuous waste", and pre-figured
the conditions that led to crash of 1929. He could have obviously
been talking about Enron.
The End-Runs...
The white-collar destruction of one of
the largest corporations in America, leading to the largest
bankruptcy on record, is but the icing on the bubble that was
the 1990's New Economy. "Commercial sabotage" seems
an apt description of the Enron legacy, after thousands of
workers and millions of investors and energy consumers have
had their economic security disrupted and in some cases destroyed.
Will the recent official suicide be the last? Probably not.
The End-Run Corporation is a distressing
story of demented de-regulation, politicians on retainer, concocted
off-shore shell corporations, duped investors, an exploited
energy crisis, and obscene short-term profits. According to
recent press investigations, insiders bailed out with illicit
gains, cooking the books and robbing workers' 401-k-plans.
Now that Congress and a few johnny-come lately media watchdogs
are investigating the collapse, it might be a good thing, as
Martha Stewart says, to summarize the innumerable end-runs around
acceptable standards of corporate governance, fiduciary responsibility
and accountability, as the allegations mount:
End-runs around management fiduciary
responsibility as 29 executives received $1.1 billion by selling
17.3 million shares prior to the decline of stock prices early
last year (as $30 billion of shareholder value evaporated).
End-runs around pension system fiduciary responsibility and
integrity as workers' savings were locked down while managers
sold their shares, leading to the loss of $1.2 billion dollars
in life savings at the same time that 4,000 Enron employees
were losing their jobs. End-runs around the fiduciary responsibility
laws of ERISA and rules protecting retirement security as billions
of dollars of pension funds were lost in the melt-down, as investors
relied on inflated stock prices.
End-runs around auditor accountability
as Arthur Anderson destroyed thousands of documents, while engaging
in separate consulting agreements. It is the "third strike"
against Anderson (implicated in the Waste Management and Al
Chainsaw Dunlap's Sunbeam scandals). End-runs around accountability
to democracy as the company ripped off billions of dollars from
California energy consumers. Deregulation allowed the power
industry to overcharge as much as $71 billion from California.
The California energy crisis was orchestrated by a power industry
freed from price regulation -- costing $2,200 for every Californian.
End-runs around political independence as Enron executives held
secret meetings on public energy policies of the American people.
Were there plans for Teapot Dome 2? End-runs around corporate
board governance, independence and responsibility as former
regulators were seated on the board of directors, and looked
the other way as up to $1 billion in profits were overstated.
The Crooked
E...The public
needs to avoid future Enrons:
Pension laws must regulate all workers'
savings, putting limits on investments of workers' 401(k) plans
in terms of their employers. Corporate board governance laws
must guarantee board independence and oversight. Energy providers
need to remain regulated, with proper public oversight. Auditers
need to be reigned in and regulated by public authority, not
peer review. Campaign finance reform must be enacted to minimize
white-collar influence-peddling. The attempts to de-regulate
and privatize social security and set up similar end-runs around
the public trust must be halted.
E.J. Dionne Jr. argued in his syndicated
column of February 19, 2002 that Enron highlights a new kind
of conflict in American capitalism- the conflict between insiders
and outsiders. Both shareholders and workers suffered from the
short-term mentality that led to Enron's collapse, and worker-shareholders
suffered most of all. Dionne suggests that this fact could lead
to a new kind of politics based on a worker-shareholder alliance,
which is the kind of politics that the labor capital movement
is trying to advance. As David Dreyer, a former Treasury Department
official, put it, "It used to be said that because so many
people had 401(k)s, you couldn't do class politics anymore.
Now, with Enron, because so many people have 401(k)s, you can
do class politics."
Time to Ask Questions...A large number
of workers and their families in Houston will never fully recover
from the Enron implosion. The next time an institution appears
to be destroying a workplace, not to mention the public trust
of the nation, maybe its wise to ask why.
The Teapot Dome crooks went to prison.
The same fate should face the smooth-talking insiders at Enron--the
kind of people that Veblen called "predatory business tycoons"--along
with some of their board, legal and auditing accomplices.
T.W. Croft
is the Director of the Heartland
Labor Capital Network
(C) 2002 T.W. Croft
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