For those (like us) who are not financial geniuses, we'll explain the Enron thing in layman's terms. You see Ken Lay is kinda like the Grinch. Basically, he and his buddies ruined Christmas. Only instead of Christmas, read "people's lives." And we really can't welcome him back to Whoville and forgive him, because, unlike the Grinch, he can't give back he stuff he stole. In fact, all we can really do (it being that Enron is based in Texas) is drag him behind a pickup truck. Or maybe have a barbecue. Or maybe drag him and then barbecue him, since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre took place in Texas, too.

Salon.com columnist Arianna Huffington acted really shocked when she wrote about how Lay and other Enron executives "urged employees to invest even more of their hard-earned money in Enron stock. . . even though he knew the company was in deep trouble—and that he and other Enron execs had already cashed in stock and options worth over $1 billion." Why she's shocked, we couldn't tell you: The Enron execs did what corporations do it all the time. Though amorality for the sake of a bottom line might have some justification ("sure, we destroyed the spotted owl's habitat, but look, we saved a nickel!"), the Enron fiasco shows that it's not even the stockholders' interests that are close to management's black little hearts. Employees, of course, never matter, even if the company follows modern conventional wisdom and regurgitates part of its payroll by making the employees stockholders Did the fact that pig-guard critter in Jabba the Hutt's palace was a stockholder keep him from getting fed to the monster in the basement? We think not! The only thing that matters in the modern corporation, as in any other bureaucracy, is for the powers-that-be to perpetrate their own wealth and power, and most importantly, write off really high-priced call girls to their expense accounts.

If the Enron debacle teaches us anything, it should be an abject lesson that egalitarianism in America is a myth. Corporations are like medieval kingdoms, organized in stratified layers based on which old boys you know and which college your daddy could afford to send you to. Lay and the other robber barons at their heads rule, as God and John Calvin intended them to, for the benefit of their own coffers. When the kingdom meets with ill fortune, just as in medieval battles, the common soldiers are slaughtered wholesale, while the wealthy escape the carnage intact, possibly paying a ransom to the FTC. Enron is a perfect example of this; the top executives received $55 million in bonuses even as they covered up the corporation's negative cash flow.

The stockholders want blood, and rightly so. The money they lost was their life savings, which they were persuaded to invest in what they saw as a rock-solid company. They were lied to, swindled, and cheated, and the bandits have already escaped with the loot. It's blatant robbery, but because the thieves didn't commit their crimes with guns, the few scapegoats who will wind up serving prison terms will likely end up with short sentences in country-club prisons. Hell, they probably won't even be anally violated. Blue-collar criminals who knock over liquor stores with sawed-off shotguns may get 25 years in maximum-security lockups, but, if they cared, they might sleep easier in the cold comfort that they've committed a more honest sort of thievery.

Even though Enron offers an extreme case, these abuses are present everywhere. . The strategy of these modern-day Josef Goebbels is to feed the peasants a steady steam of happy-face rhetoric. To underscore this point, we present some excerpts from memos issued by the head of a Fortune 500 company located in the New York metro area. The first one was issued on September 19, a week and a day after the events of the eleventh, and fairly oozes with compassion:

"Thank you for all the work you've done in the past eight days and for returning today to [the office] to continue the job of serving our customers. . . [We] recognize and respect that everyone will deal with the aftermath of this event differently. Expert counselors will be here this week and next week. Additionally, employees may arrange for counseling at any time. . . ."

We're so glad you're back! If you need anything, just ask! But it gets better:

"Finally, we have a responsibility to everyone affected by this tragedy, to our company, and to our nation to move ahead. It will not be easy, but we must press on. The recovery process is just beginning. We must draw strength from each other and remain focused on serving our customers. . . ."

Never mind the fact that some assholes just flew two jets into the World Trade Center: We must carry on! Stiff upper lip, chaps!
Less than a month later, the recession caught up with the company, with predictable results:

"Unfortunately, part of this restructuring involves the painful process of reducing staff. . . [The company is firing roughly] 5 percent of our workforce. . . Severance payments and a range of assistance will be provided to those affected. The decision to eliminate staff is difficult, but the long-term interests of the Corporation are best served by effectively addressing the needs of our businesses."

• The first thing we need is greater government and public oversight of business practices. By this, we mean not greater regulation, but greater enforcement of existing regulations. To begin with, we must no longer allow wealth and prestige to provide immunity from prosecution. Those who act against the public's best interest must be held accountable. Those who seek to purchase political are easily exposed: Campaign contributions are a matter of public record. However, politicians, up to an including the President, must also be held accountable. If they screw up, they should be made to run around the Capitol Building in their underwear, like they used to make us do in camp.
  
  
• Secondly, we must eliminate the stigma that unemployment brings. This is a matter of social attitudes, not anything that can be pushed through Congress. There is no shame in being on the dole; you pay unemployment insurance out of your paycheck every week, and if you're a victim of someone else's stupidity, or the plate tectonics of market forces, blaming yourself is the least productive thing to do. It is much better to sit on the couch and watch Oprah.
  
  
• Finally, white-collar workers must get over their prejudice against unionization. Efforts to organize unions have universally led to failure; if you demand better treatment, there's always a recent grad willing to do your job for less. This has led to American office workers being the worst-treated class of schlubs in the free world, while folks in Europe, historically more class-conscious than we are, get government-regulated work weeks, decent wages (if higher taxes), and twice the vacation we do. Conversely, anyone in this country with a high school diploma and a truck driver's license gets Teamster's Union's health insurance and pension plan. Try to provide for your own future with investments and a 401(K) sponsored by your company, and, well, you see what happened to the Enron employees. Sometimes it seems that the only reason half of us even go to college is because it's the expected thing for middle-class teenagers to do. Oh, yeah, and because there's beer there.

If American workers continue to be apathetic, we will continue to be poorly treated. It's time that we recognize, in spite of the propaganda about the "land of opportunity" that has been fed to us since grade school, that there is indeed a glass ceiling, and that the determining factor is class. We will not be content to eat cake any longer. It's time the executive aristocracy had a good look at a guillotine. Or the trailer hitch of a pickup truck.

Posted January 27, 2002 5:39 AM