Enron: The Smartest Conspirators In The Room

Yet another installment in my "conspiracies happen all the time" series. Last night my wife and I watched Enron: The Smartest Men In The Room, a shocking exposé of the depths to which corporate America will sink. Very disturbing, and well worth a couple hours of your time.

In a nutshell, here's the situation: The top executives at Enron conspired to get rich at the publics expense. Charges have been filed against around 16 people (5 convictions, 1 aquittal, and 10 or 11 awaiting trial at the time the film was made, IIRC. Not sure what the numbers have adjusted to since then). They cooked the books - they faked income and profit that the company wasn't making. They manipulated investors, analysts, banks and regulators to keep a company afloat for years on vapor and stock options. Dozens of 3rd parties were in the position to say "no" (and expected to do so because of their jobs as government servants) but failed to do so, even though the insider deals and conflicts of interest were obvious, and the book-keeping was virtually nonexistant. Instead, despite obvious red flags signaling that unethical and even illegal things were happening in those offices, numerous financial officials not only didn't investigate them, many took gifts from them and/or partnered with the company. When things started to get shaky, the top officers of the company sold their own shares of stock for hundreds of millions while publicly encouraging their employees to buy shares of the stock (because, supposedly, things had never looked better for the future of our company). In the end, thousands of people lost their jobs and their retirement savings, while a few dozen fat cats made millions upon millions.

But that's by no means the height of the conspiracy in this case. There's actual recorded phonecalls of Enron traders calling contacts they had at powerplants in California, and manufacturing the energy crisis that resulted in statewide rolling blackouts. Enron was in the business of trading energy. They would buy kilowatts, and transmit out of the state, then get the plants to shut down for trumped-up reasons so that they could sell the energy back to California at a massive profit. We're talking units of energy bought around $50, and then sold back at $1,000 a unit, inflated because the powerplants were shut down for no sane reason. It would seem that dozens of people were complicit in this scam, knowing full well that they were creating immense hardship for the people of California in the process.

Conspiracies happen. I assure you that right now, this very moment, somewhere in America, some group of people are currently plotting something illegal for their own benefit. We like to think that this is rare, and that most crimes are ill-conceived acts of passion committed by lone-nuts. The truth, however, is that people conspire to defraud, rob, and murder all the damn time. When a lot (of either money or power) stands to be gained by said conspirators, most people don't stand up and blow whistles - the sad truth is most people just take their bribe and look the other way.