Enron - Ideas Have Consequences

Just watched the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, directed by Alex Gibney. I have a number of conclusions, so let's get started.

1. Threaded throughout the piece was the unapologetically, explicit philosophy of Darwinism which was prevalent at Enron, from top management to commodity traders. If you embrace the tenets of evolutionary thought then you are rejecting creationism. You are rejecting the God of creation. If you reject the God of creation, you reject His laws, His ethics. His Law can be summed up with the following: Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Just that simple, yet profound truth, if embraced at all, would have stopped the fraud before it had begun.

2. For the most part, those that documented the sins of Enron are most likely Darwinists themselves - a herd of blind hypocrites. This is not very surprising, but quite typical. Current American culture attempts to retain part of God's law, while wholesale rejecting the Author of it.

3. During the rolling blackout/brownouts of California, conservation radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh were roundly criticizing the liberals of that state for being in lockstep with the wacko environmentalists who were regulating or restricting any corporate industrial effort to build more energy producing refineries/plants. The then Governor Gray Davis and his Democrat buddies were being thorough excoriated while Enron traders were instructing the power plants to shut down from time to time. I don't remember hearing any apologies acknowledging that it was pure corporate and personal greed that caused those blackouts, not failed liberal policies.

4. Among several reasons that liberal policies are failed, a significant one is because they are stupid- both policies and policy makers. Californians haven't quite figured all that out, so eventually, we'll see this history repeat itself.

5. For many, but certainly not all, of the Enron employees, I do not sympathize with their plight of lost pensions and investments. Those that generated the cash flow were complicit with the fraud, enriching themselves at the expense of others. The administrative types and field personel of the different Enron entities are the ones that suffered, and should not be blamed or even painted with the brush as painted Kenneth Lay, Jeff Schilling, and Eddie Fastow, to name a few.

6. The philosophy or mission statement of Enron is not exclusive to Enron. Much of corporate North America (wouldn't want our Canadian friends to feel left out) holds to the same ethic as Enron, except instead of perpetrating fraud, because now there is a real consequence (like jail). They treat their employees like expendable commodities that can be easily replaced. This is especially true of companies listed with Dow Jones or Nasdaq. The stock analyst is now the engine that drives corporate America, and it is impersonal and cold. Corporate execs, whose performance bonuses are now determined by formulas established and monitored by stock analysts, personify Darwin's theory on the survival of the species. Having worked for both privately held companies (large and small) and public companies (always large), I know the difference. Given a choice, working for the private company is much more enjoyable--almost humane.

7. There are enough Darwinian lawyers who will get some of the money back for the empty pension funds from the fortunes that were amassed at Enron.

It's time to take a shower and go to bed. After viewing all that scum, I'm ready for a little cleansing.