Enron Documentary

Just got back from Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Great movie. I'd recommend it to anyone and everyone.

It's simultaneously amazing, depressing, and infuriating to contemplate the catastrophe that was Enron. Skilling somehow gets away with mark to market accounting (essentially counting estimated projected profits as current income). Fastow arranges an intricate web of corporations and partnerships to shovel the company's debt into. Lay sits atop all of it.

What shocks me isn't really that people would do this. It's the complicity that goes along with it. No one ever questioned anything the company was doing from inside Enron or out. The analysts who did pipe up lost their jobs due to pressure from Fastow. Fake profits stacked upon fake profits and when it all collapses, these people have all pulled their money out. They made sure to tell their employees that the stock was stable and that they should continue investing...on tape.

The candor of these people is unconscionable. They joke around about screwing over elderly people in California...taking power plants offline to drive prices up. "[Grandma Millie] wants her fucking money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour."

Reflecting on it all afterward, it makes me think about Bush's current plans to cut "red tape" in order to free up energy markets, not to mention individual accounts for social security. Madness, all of it. I've gotta get to sleep...